St. Eustathius of Antioch
The Confessor of Antioch
A short Life and the surviving anti-Arian fragments
Contents5 sections
The Confessor before Licinius
Eustathius was born around the year 270 in Side in Pamphylia, of a Christian family. In the last of the great persecutions, under Licinius before the peace of the Church, he was imprisoned and tortured for the Faith. He survived to become bishop of Beroea (modern Aleppo in Syria), and around 324, in the year before the First Ecumenical Council, was translated to the great see of Antioch on the eve of the open phase of the Arian controversy.
The opening of the First Ecumenical Council
Editor's note
The Eastern tradition assigns the opening oration of the Council of Nicaea to Eustathius as senior bishop of the Eastern half of the empire. The Western tradition gives the same office to Hosius of Cordova. Both are right that the Council was opened in the presence of the Emperor by the eldest of its bishops.
When the Council convened in the principal hall of the imperial palace at Nicaea in May of 325, the Emperor entered and seated himself in modesty on a low golden chair, and the bishops were given the signal to be seated. Then Eustathius, as senior bishop of the Eastern see, rose to address him with the formal speech of welcome and of thanks to God on his behalf. He subscribed the Symbol of the Faith without reservation, and led the anti-Arian party in the Antiochene patriarchate in the years immediately after Nicaea.
Deposition and thirty years of exile
Around 330, the resurgent Arian party gathered a council of bishops at Antioch on a series of false charges (Eustathius was accused of Sabellianism, and of insulting the Emperor's mother Helena), deposed him, and obtained his exile from Constantine. He was sent to Trajanopolis in Thrace, where he lived in exile for approximately the next thirty years and reposed around the year 360.
His many writings against the Arians have largely been lost, surviving only in fragments preserved by St. Athanasius and Theodoret. One treatise, On the Witch of Endor against Origen, has come down to us complete. The Antiochene tradition counted Eustathius among its principal Fathers, alongside Ignatius and Babylas before him and Meletius after.
Surviving fragments
Editor's note
Two short passages from the anti-Arian writings, preserved by St. Athanasius in his De Synodis 11 and used to demonstrate the orthodoxy of the Antiochene tradition.
Eustathius of Antioch, fragments preserved in Athanasius, De Synodis 11
If we say that the Son is from another substance than the Father, and was made of things that are not, we make Him a creature like the heavens and the earth, the angels and the powers. But the Son is not from these. He is from the Father, and from the Father alone, begotten in a manner that is not the manner of any creature; for who could utter how He came from the Father, who is from the Father before all ages and yet is with the Father from all eternity, having neither beginning nor end?
I will not for any worldly fear or honour assent to the unjust doctrine that the Lord, who made all that is, is Himself among the things made. The honour that is given to a creature is robbery; the honour that is given to the Creator is the worship He has commanded us to render Him.
Apolytikion of St. Eustathius (Tone 4)
The Church's hymnSung by the Church about St. Eustathius of Antioch, not written by him.
Having been an unswerving canon of the Faith, an exact image of meekness, and a teacher of self-control, you stood firm to the end, O Father Eustathius. By your humility you gained exaltation, and by your poverty, riches. Intercede with Christ our God for the salvation of our souls.