Asterius of Cappadocia

ASTERIO of CAPPADOCIA. – A rhetorician by profession, described by St. Athanasius as “the many-headed sophist and advocate of the Arian heresy,” he was born in Cappadocia to a pagan family. Having converted to Christianity, he became a disciple of Luciano of Antioch; but during the last persecution under Maximinus, while his master was going to his martyrdom, he denied the faith. This stain prevented him, even among the Arians, from being raised to the priesthood. In the following decades, however, during the Trinitarian controversies, A. succeeded in asserting himself through his writings and enjoyed his hour of celebrity. Arius himself used his arguments to combat the teaching of Nicaea. Having joined the Arian movement at an early date, he defended it in a work entitled Syutagmaton, from which St. Athanasius cites fragments; he was opposed by Marcello of Ancyra and at the same time undertook a campaign of lectures in Syria to defend his theories. After Nicaea he composed a new work against Marcello of Ancyra, to which St. Jerome alludes (De viris illustribus, 86); he also left some commentaries on the Gospels, the Epistle to the Romans, and the Psalms (ibid., 94). He was still alive in 341, the year in which he took part in the Synod of Antioch. The Arian historian Filostorgio (Hist. eccl., II, 14-15) accuses him of falsifying true Arianism by teaching that the Word is an image without difference from the substance of the Father; but the fragments that remain seem to indicate that A. remained faithful to the teaching of Luciano.