AERIO e AERIANI. – A., a fourth-century priest, a native of Pontus, was placed in charge of the charitable institutions of the city of Sebaste, and particularly of the great hospice for beggars (ptochotrophium), by Bishop Eustathius, who had shared the ascetic life with him. He was not, however, faithful to his bishop’s friendship: after nursing bitterness and resentment against him for some time in the depths of his heart, because he had been preferred to him in the episcopate, he began publicly to reproach him for having abandoned asceticism; then, hurling serious calumnies at him, especially accusations of avarice, he withdrew from the direction of the charitable works and, by dogmatizing, attracted a group of followers (called precisely a.) who professed particular doctrines on certain points. St. Epiphanius, in a chapter devoted entirely to combating the a., attributes to them chiefly the following five errors (Haer. 75):
1) they did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ: they were semi-Arians, or rather, according to other authors, Arians in an extreme sense; 2) they denied any distinction between bishop and priest, confusing the meaning of the word « presbyteri », used by St. Paul when he exhorts Timothy not to neglect the gift received through the laying on of the hands of the presbytery (I Tim. 4, 14); 3) they asserted the uselessness of prayers for the dead; 4) they rejected the obligatory fasts imposed on certain days, since one could fast every day, even on Sunday, but they held that fasts
ought to be voluntary; 5) they condemned the celebration of Easter as a Jewish survival, inappropriately citing the text: « Christ, our Pasch, has been sacrificed » (I Cor. 5, 7).
The a. encountered opposition not only from Catholics but also from the Arians. In any case, they were few in number: driven out of all the churches and forced to meet in the countryside and in the forests, they soon disappeared. The Protestants partly renewed their heresies.