ASTERIUS, Bishop of Amasea. - He lived between the 4th and 5th centuries, and we have no information about his life, except that, before becoming bishop of Amasea, he was a rhetor and lawyer in Pontus toward the end of the 4th century. One of his sermons (Against the Feast of the Kalends; PG 40, 224-25) was delivered in the year 400. The Seventh Ecumenical Council (Second of Nicaea) appeals to his testimony to prove the antiquity of the cult of images (Mansi, XIII, coll. 16-17, 305, 308-309).
There remain to us from him 21 complete sermons and discourses, published by various authors between the years 1615-81 and gathered in PG 40, 163-478. Long extracts of 6 other sermons, which have been lost, are given to us by Photius (Bibliotheca, cod. 271; PG 104, 204-16, 221-24; cf. Quaestio 312 ad Amphilochium; PG 101, 1161). The authenticity of the discourse on St. Stephen the protomartyr is disputed: it perhaps belongs to St. Proclus. On the contrary, sermons 13 and 14 are truly his, which have sometimes been printed under the name of St. Gregory of Nyssa (cf. PG 46, 539).
The brief discourse on the martyr St. Euphemia of Chalcedon is, more than a sermon, a rhetorical exercise. From this passage, the Second Council of Nicaea draws a good testimony on the cult of images. The Acta SS. Aprilis, III, Paris 1866, pp. 420-27, have published under the name of A. a life of St. Basil of Amasea. A. appears in the calendar on 30 Oct. (cf. V. de Buck, De sancto A. in Acta SS. Octobris, XIII, Paris 1883, pp. 330-34). In his sermons, with their pure language and most careful style, he proposed Demosthenes as his model (Oratio XI; PG, 40, 333). A. aims above all at the instruction of the faithful. He deals little with dogma and does not polemicize at all against heretics.
Bibliography4 works
Martino Jugie