United States or Faroe Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Semiarian horror was not diminished when an extract was read from an obscene sermon preached by Eudoxius at Antioch. At last Eleusius broke in upon Acacius 'Any hole-and-corner doings of yours at Sirmium are no concern of ours. Your creed is not the Lucianic, and that is quite enough to condemn it. This was decisive.
Having cleared themselves from the charge of heresy by laying the foundation of a permanent schism, the Homoeans could proceed to the expulsion of the Semiarian leaders. As men who had signed the creed of Nicé could not well be accused of heresy, they were deposed for various irregularities. The Homoean supremacy established at Constantinople was limited to the East.
The Eusebian phase of conservatism, which emphasised the Lord's personal distinction from the Father, was giving way to the Semiarian, where stress was rather laid on his essential likeness to the Father. The word could not be withdrawn, but it might be put forward less conspicuously, and explained rather as a safe and emphatic form of the Semiarian 'of like essence' than as a rival doctrine.
The chief clause however is, 'But we say that the Son is like the Father in all things, as the Scriptures say and teach. Though the phrase here is Homoean, the doctrine seems at first sight Semiarian, not to say Nicene. In point of fact, the clause is quite ambiguous.
The Acacians and Anomoeans were only forty, but they had a clear plan and the court in their favour. As the Semiarian leaders had put themselves in a false position by signing the dated creed, the conservative defence was taken up by men of the second rank, like Silvanus of Tarsus and the old soldier Eleusius of Cyzicus.
One schism was healed by the reception of the Marcellians; and if Apollinarius was forming another, he was at least a resolute enemy of Arianism. The submission of the Lycian bishops in 375 helped to isolate the Semiarian phalanx in Asia, and the Illyrian council held in the same year by Ambrose was the first effective help from the West.
Now in the fourth century Asia was a stronghold of conservatism. There was a good deal of Arianism in Cappadocia, but we hear little of it in Asia. The group of Lucianists at Nicæa left neither Arian nor Nicene successors. The ten provinces of Asia 'verily knew not God' in Hilary's time; and even the later Nicene doctrine of Cappadocia was almost as much Semiarian as Athanasian.
Pontus indeed was devoted to conservatism, and the decided Arianizers were hardly more than a busy clique even in Asia and Syria. Its decisions show the awkwardness to be expected from men who have had to make a sudden change of front, and exhibit well the transition from Eusebian to Semiarian conservatism.
A new creed was also to be drawn up before their meeting and laid before them for acceptance. The 'Dated Creed' was drawn up at Sirmium on Pentecost Eve 359, by a small meeting of Homoean and Semiarian leaders.
Peace was made before long on Semiarian terms. A collection was made of the decisions against Photinus and Paul of Samosata, together with the Lucianic creed, and signed by Liberius of Rome, by Ursacius and Valens, and by all the Easterns present. Liberius had not borne exile well.
Word Of The Day