Marcellus of Ancyra

MARCELLUS OF ANCYRA. - Bishop of Ancyra (Ankara), d. c. 374, known in the history of the 4th century for having, in the struggle against Arianism and in the attempt to safeguard the consubstantiality of the divine Persons, insisted so greatly on the unity of God as to stray into modalism (v.), denying the real distinction of the Persons themselves.

In 314 he attended as bishop the Council of Ancyra (Mansi, II, p. 534). In 325 he was present at the Council of Nicaea, where he sided with Athanasius, opposing the Arians (Athanasius, Apol. c. ar., 23: PG 25, 288). In 335 at Tyre and Jerusalem he opposed the deposition of Athanasius and the readmission of Arius. Around the same time he wrote against the semi-Arian Asterius his major work (original title uncertain), of which Eusebius of Caesarea preserved several fragments in the refutation he made of it (Contra Marcellum: De ecclesiastica theologia). In 336 a Synod of Constantinople, composed for the most part of Arianizing members, condemned M.'s work as heretical, anathematized M. himself and, probably already then, deposed him; he was reproached with being infected with Sabellianism, with teaching that the Son of God had his beginning with the birth of Mary and that his kingdom would end with the end of the world (Sozomen, Hist. eccl., II, 33: PG 67, 1028 ff.). After the death of Constantine (337) he returned for a short time to Ancyra, where disturbances took place (Athanasius, Apol. c. ar., 33: PG 25, 304). In 338-39 he was again condemned by a Synod of Constantinople and accused at Rome (ibid., 32, 301). He wrote a letter to Pope Julius I (Epiphanius, Haer., 72, 2: ibid., 42, 384-88); in the summer of 339 he was at Rome, where he obtained absolution from a Roman synod (Athanasius, Apol. c. ar., 20, 32: PG, 25, 280; 301). In 342-43 he was present at the Synod of Sardica and was again condemned by the Arian faction (Hilary, frg. 2: PL 10, 658 ff.), but absolved by the Westerners (ibid. 2, 636-38). In the following years he suffered new, repeated condemnations from the Easterners, especially at the Synod of Antioch of 345, in the formula called macrostic or long (L. Hahn, Bibliothek der Symbolen, Breslau 1879, § 159 n. 6, p. 194), in which he was condemned together with Paul of Samosata, to whom he was likened, and with his own disciple Photinus, bishop of Sirmium and frankly Sabellian. Athanasius himself, instructed by the case of Photinus as to the dangers of M.'s theology, abandoned him, though always with a certain reticence toward his old friend (Hilary, frg. 2, 21: PL 10, 650 f.; Epiphanius, Haer., 72, 4: PG 42, 388). The Westerners do not yet seem to have occupied themselves with M. (Hilary, frg. 2, 22: PL 10, 651), which gave rise to the complaints of St. Basil (Ep. 69, 2: PG 32, 432). Epiphanius (Haer., 72, 1: ibid., 42, 381) has M. live until c. 374; but it is not known how he spent the last decades of his life. Only around 380 did Pope Damasus, without naming him, condemn his doctrines (Anathematism, 8: Mansi, III, p. 483 A; Theodoret, Hist. eccl., V, 11, 5: PG 82, 1221), while the Council of Constantinople (381) condemned him by name in its first canon (Mansi, III, p. 560 A).

If Jerome's notice is accurate (De viris ill., 86: PL 23, 729), M. wrote several works, especially against the Arians. None of them, however, has come down to us; but Martin (op. cit. in bibl.) has recently attributed to him the work De ecclesia that passes under the name of Anthimus of Antioch (ed. G. Mercati [Studi e testi, 5], Rome 1905, pp. 87-98). M.'s theory, expressed in complicated and subtle formulas, is a certain modalism (v.) or monarchian trinitarianism, with Adoptionist tinges, in which the persons of the Trinity are only different manifestations of a single person according to the different phases of the economy of salvation, and there is a tendency to make of Christ a mere man in whom the divine power dwells. Against the danger of an Arianism of polytheistic hue, M. insists first of all on the concept of God as absolute unity (μονάς), the single prosopon, the Father; who indeed has eternally within himself a Logos, but this is not a distinct person, but only the active force (ἐνέργεια) of the single prosopon; and in this sense M. understands the homoousios between the Father and the Word. At the moment of the creation of the world this Logos proceeds (προέρχεται) from the Father, externalizing itself as ἐνέργεια δραστικὴ of the single prosopon, through a certain dilation (πλατυσμός, ἔκτασις) which, however, introduces into God no distinction of persons. In the Incarnation this Logos becomes Son; not that a true generation in God then takes place, but only because the flesh of Christ is generated by the Virgin, and in that flesh the divine ἐνέργεια, which is always δυνάμει in the Father, is the principle of all operations. And as the Logos was in God before creation, so the spirit was in the Logos before Christ, after the Resurrection (Io. 20, 22), communicated it to the Apostles, and only from this moment, proceeding from the Father and the Son, did it externalize itself as an active force in the Church of the single divine prosopon. Thus: «the Monad has extended itself into a Triad» (frg. 67: ed. E. Klostermann, p. 197, 32 f.). At the end of the world that operative force which has extended from the single Monad will be reabsorbed again into it, and thus the kingdom will come to an end, not of the Logos, but of Christ (I Cor. 15, 28) and of the Spirit. It is against this last point of doctrine that the anti-Marcellan professions of faith and the creeds explicitly added the concept of Lc. 1, 33: cuius regni non erit finis.

Loofs attempted at one time, and not without subsequent variations and uncertainties, to make of M., together with Paul of Samosata, a representative of what would have been the primitive genuine Christian doctrine, a kind of modalist and Adoptionist monarchianism. Loofs's essential methodological fallacy lies in regarding as «Christian» doctrine opinions uttered at some point by «Christians», without taking into account either their relations with the overall data of Scripture, or the reactions of the spheres responsible for doctrine in the Church, bishops and Roman pontiffs, even though these expressly condemned such opinions as deviations. M.'s doctrine is essentially, although with nuances of its own, the old modalist error, so many times already condemned by the Church before. This shows that if, in M.'s case, the Westerners hesitated for a long time, the reason for it must be sought not in a secret connivance of doctrines, but in their not having immediately understood its true meaning, and this both because of the skilful oral defense that M. was able to make of it with complex and subtle formulas, with protests that these were only hypothetical opinions and not absolute affirmations (v. Hilary, frg. 2: PL 10, 636), and because of the benevolence which his person long enjoyed among his old companions in the struggle against Arianism.

Cipriano Vagaggini