St. Meletius of Antioch

Meletius was born around the year 310 in Melitene in Lesser Armenia. He was made bishop of Sebaste in 357, in a difficult period of the Arianizing settlements; finding his see unworkable, he withdrew to Beroea. In 360 the emperor Constantius II, attempting to find a candidate acceptable to both the Nicene and the moderate Arian parties at Antioch, had Meletius translated to the great see of Antioch.

Within a month of his enthronement, Meletius preached a public sermon in the cathedral on Proverbs 8:22 in which he confessed the Nicene Faith without ambiguity. The Arianizing party that had elected him in the hope of compromise had him deposed and exiled within weeks. The Nicene community of Antioch, who had hoped for him from the first, gathered around him as their true bishop.

He was three times exiled and three times restored, his see changing hands as the emperor changed: deposed under Constantius II in 360, restored under Julian in 362, deposed again under Valens in 365, restored under the western Valentinian briefly in 367, deposed again under Valens, and finally restored under St. Theodosius the Great in 378 with the change of imperial policy after Adrianople.

When Theodosius summoned the Second Ecumenical Council to Constantinople in 381, Meletius presided over its opening sessions as the senior bishop of the Nicene Patriarchate of Antioch. He had been at the Council only a short time when he was struck by his last illness and reposed. The emperor honoured him with a public funeral; his body was taken back to Antioch in solemn procession; and St. John Chrysostom, then a young presbyter who had been baptized by Meletius as a youth, preached the funeral oration on his return to the city.

The schism in the Antiochene Church that had arisen during his long absences (the so-called Meletian Schism, between his own followers and those of the rigorist Paulinus) was not finally healed until the next bishop, St. Flavian, who is named in the Synodical Letter of the Council. The Church keeps Meletius's memory on February 12, and remembers him as the patriarch whose long suffering kept the Nicene Faith at Antioch through the worst of the fourth century.