MARCELLO of ANCIRA. – Bishop of Ancira (Ankara), d. ca. 374, known in the history of the fourth century for having, in the struggle against Arianism and with the intention of safeguarding the consubstantiality of the divine Persons, so strongly insisted on the unity of God modalism (v.), denying the real distinction of the Persons themselves.
In 314 he attended as bishop the Council of Ancira (Mansi, II, p. 534). In 325 he was present at the Council of Nicaea, where he took the side of 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 composed of it (Contra Marcellum: De ecclesiastica theologia). In 336 a Synod of Constantinople, composed chiefly of Arians, condemned the work of M. as heretical, anathematized M. himself and, probably already at that time, deposed him; he was reproached with being infected by Sabellianism, with teaching that the Son of God began to exist with Mary’s birth 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 Ancira, 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 before 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 in 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 acquitted by the Westerners (ibid. 2, 636–38). In the following years he suffered further repeated condemnations from the Easterners, especially at the Synod of Antioch in 345, in the formula called macrostich or long formula (L. Hahn, Bibliothek der Symbolen, Breslavia 1879, § 159 n. 6, p. 194), in which he was condemned together with Paul of Samosata, with whom he was associated, and with his own disciple Photinus, bishop of Sirmium and openly Sabellian. Athanasius himself, made aware by the case of Photinus of the dangers of M.’s theology, abandoned him, though he continued to show a certain reserve toward his former friend (Hilary, frg. 2, 21: PL 10, 650 ff.; Epiphanius, Haer., 72, 4: PG 42, 388). The Westerners do not yet seem to have concerned themselves with M. (Hilary, frg. 2, 22: PL 10, 651), which elicited the complaints of St. Basil (Ep. 69, 2: PG 32, 432). Epiphanius (Haer., 72, 1: ibid., 42, 381) has M. living until ca. 374; but it is not known how he spent the final 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 report is accurate (De viris ill., 86: PL 23, 729), M. wrote several works, especially against the Arians. None, however, has come down to us; but Martin (op. cit. in bibl.) has recently attributed to him the work De ecclesia, which 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, modalism (v.) or monarchian Trinitarianism, with adoptionist overtones, in which the persons of the Trinity are merely different manifestations of a single person according to the different phases of the economy of salvation, and there is a tendency to make Christ a mere man in whom divine power dwells. Against the danger of a polytheistically tinged Arianism, M. insists above all on the concept of God as absolute unity (μονάς), the one prosopon, the Father; he indeed eternally possesses within himself a Logos, but this is not a distinct person, only the active power (ἐνέργεια) of the one 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 the ἐνέργεια δραστικὴ of the one prosopon, through a certain expansion (πλατυσμός, ἔκτασις) that nevertheless introduces no distinction of persons into God. In the Incarnation this Logos becomes the Son; not because a true generation then takes place in God, but only because Christ’s flesh is generated from the Virgin, and in this flesh the divine ἐνέργεια, which is always δυνάμει in the Father, is the principle of all operations. Just 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 that moment, proceeding from the Father and the Son, did it externalize itself as an active power in the Church of the one divine prosopon. Thus: «the Monad has extended itself into a Triad» (frg. 67: ed. E. Klostermann, p. 197, 32 ff.). At the end of the world, that operative power which has extended itself from the one Monad will be reabsorbed into it, and thus the kingdom will come to an end—not the kingdom of the Logos, but that of Christ (I Cor. 15, 28) and of the Spirit. It is against this last point of doctrine that the anti-Marcellian professions of faith and symbols explicitly added the concept of Lc. 1, 33: cuius regni non erit finis.
For a certain period, and not without subsequent changes and uncertainties, Loofs attempted to make 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 considering as «Christian» a doctrine consisting of opinions expressed at some point by «Christians», without taking into account either their relationship to the total data of Scripture or the reactions of the authoritative spheres of doctrine in the Church, bishops and Roman pontiffs, even when these expressly condemned such opinions as deviations. M.’s doctrine is essentially, although with its own nuances, the old modalist error, already condemned many times before by the Church. This demonstrates that if, in M.’s case, the Westerners hesitated for a long time, the reason must be sought not in a secret connivance in doctrine, but in their failure immediately to understand its true meaning, both because of the skillful oral defense M. was able to make of it through complex and subtle formulas, with protests that these were merely hypothetical opinions and not absolute affirmations (v. Hilary, frg. 2: PL 10, 636), and because of the benevolence from which his person long benefited among his former companions in the struggle against Arianism.