Asterius of Cappadocia

ASTERIUS OF CAPPADOCIA. - A rhetorician by profession, described by St. Athanasius as a "many-headed sophist and advocate of the Arian heresy," he was born in Cappadocia to a pagan family. Having converted to Christianity, he was a disciple of Lucian of Antioch, but during the last persecution under Maximinus, while his master went to meet martyrdom, he denied the faith; and this stain prevented him, even among the Arians, from being raised to the priesthood. But in the following decades, during the Trinitarian struggles, A. managed to make his mark with his writings and had his hour of fame. Arius himself used his arguments to combat the teaching of Nicaea. Having early adhered to the Arian movement, he defended it in a work entitled Syutagmaton, of which St. Athanasius cites fragments; he was opposed by Marcellus of Ancyra and at the same time undertook a lecture campaign 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); and he also left some commentaries on the Gospels, on the epistle to the Romans and on 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 Philostorgius (Hist. eccl., II, 14-15) accuses him of having falsified 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 A. remained faithful to the teaching of Lucian.

Mario Scaduto