ASTERIO DI CAPPADOCIA

ASTERIUS of CAPPADOCIA. - A rhetorician by profession, described by St Athanasius as “a many-headed beast and advocate of the Arian heresy,” he was born in Cappadocia of a pagan family. After converting to Christianity, he became a disciple of Lucian of Antioch, but in the final persecution under Maximinus, while his master went to meet martyrdom, he apostatised; and this stain prevented him from being raised to the priesthood even among the Arians. In the decades that followed, however, during the Trinitarian controversies, Asterius made his mark with his writings and enjoyed his moment of fame. Arius himself drew on his arguments to attack the teaching of Nicaea. Early on he had adhered to the Arian movement and defended it in a work entitled *Symatagion*, fragments of which are cited by St Athanasius; he was opposed by Marcellus of Ancyra and at the same time launched a campaign of lectures in Syria to defend his theories. After Nicaea he composed a new work against Marcellus 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, when he took part in the Synod of Antioch. The Arian historian Philostorgius (*Hist. eccl.*, II, 14–15) accuses him of distorting true Arianism by teaching that the Word is an image without difference from the substance of the Father; but the fragments that remain to us seem to indicate that Asterius remained faithful to the teaching of Lucian.