of my receiving Athanasius, much more may I complain of your asking me to acknowledge Pistus, a man alleged by the envoys of Athanasius to have been condemned as an Arian at Nice and admitted by your own representatives to have been ordained by one Secundus, who had been so condemned. It must have been from chagrin at being so utterly refuted in his advocacy of Pistus that your emissary Macarius fled by night, though in weak health, from Rome." He next refers sarcastically to an allegation of his correspondents as to the equality of all bishops, made either in justification of their having judged a bp. of Alexandria or in deprecation of the case being referred to Rome. "If, as you write, you hold the honour of all bishops to be equal, and unaffected by the greatness of their sees, this view comes ill from those who have shewn themselves so anxious to get translated from their own small sees to greater ones." He here alludes to Eusebius himself, who had passed from Berytus to Nicomedia, and thence to Constantinople. Having treated as frivolous their plea of the short time allowed them to get to the Roman council, he meets their further complaint that his letter of summons had been addressed only to Eusebius and his party, instead of the whole Eastern episcopate. "I naturally wrote to those who had written to me." He adds emphatically, "Though I alone wrote, I did so in the name of, and as expressing the sentiments of, all the Italian bishops." He then justifies at length his action and that of the Roman council. The letters of accusation against Athanasius had been from strangers living at a distance, and contradicted one another: the testimonies in his favour from his own people, who knew him well, had been clear and consistent. He exposes the false charges about the murder of Arsenius and the broken chalice, and the unfairness of the Mareotic inquiry. He contrasts the conduct of Athanasius, who had come of his own accord to Rome to court investigation, with the unwillingness of his accusers to appear against him. He dwells on the uncanonical intrusion of Gregory the Cappadocian by military force into the Alexandrian see, and on the atrocities committed to enforce acceptance of him. "It is you," he adds, "who have set at nought the canons, and disturbed the church's peace; not we, as you allege, who have entertained a just appeal, and acquitted the innocent." After briefly justifying the acquittal of Marcellus from the charge of heresy, he calls upon those to whom he writes to repudiate the base conspiracy of a few and so remedy the wrong done. He points out what would have been the proper course of procedure in case of any just cause of suspicion against the bishops. This part of his letter is important, as shewing his own view of his position in relation to the church at large. "If," he says, "they were guilty, as you say they were, they ought to have been judged canonically, not after your method. All of us [i.e. the whole episcopate] ought to have been written to, that so justice might be done by all. For they were bishops who suffered these things, and bishops of no ordinary sees, but of such as were founded by apostles personally. Why, then, were you unwilling to write to us [i.e. to the Roman church] especially about the Alexandrian see? Can you be ignorant that this is the custom; that we should be written to in the first place, so that hence [i.e. from this church] what is just may be defined? Wherefore, if a suspicion against the bishop had arisen there [i.e. in Alexandria], it ought to have been referred hither to our church. But now, having never informed us of the case, they wish us to accept their condemnation, in which we had no part. Not so do the ordinances of St. Paul direct; not so do the Fathers teach: this is pride, and a new ambition. I beseech you, hear me gladly. I write this for the public good: for what we have received from the blessed Peter I signify to you." This language will hardly bear the inferences of Socrates (ii. 8, 17) and of Sozomen (iii. 10), that, according to church law, enactments made without the consent of the bp. of Rome were held invalid. It certainly implies no claim to exclusive jurisdiction over all churches. All that Julius insists on is that charges against the bishops of great sees ought, according to apostolic tradition and canonical rule, to be referred to the whole episcopate; and that, in the case of a bp. of Alexandria at least, custom gave the initiative of proceedings to the bp. of Rome. In this reference to custom he probably has in view the case of Dionysius of Alexandria, the charges against whom had been laid before Dionysius of Rome. The allegation in the earlier part of his letter of the fathers of Nice having sanctioned the reconsideration of the decisions of synods is more difficult to account for. He may be alluding to the action of the Nicene council[1] in entertaining the case of Arius after he had been synodically condemned at Alexandria. The action of pope Julius appears open to no exception, for if the synod consisted of Westerns only, that was because the Easterns refused to attend it, though Julius had convened it at the suggestion of their own emissaries; and, after all, the Roman synod only confirmed the continuance of communion with Eastern prelates whom it deemed unjustly condemned. It had no power to do more. Still, the action of Julius may have served as a step towards subsequent papal claims of a more advanced kind; and it probably suggested the canons of Sardica, pregnant with results, which will be noticed presently.
Athanasius remained still in Rome, till, in his fourth year of residence there—probably in the summer of 343—he received a summons from Constans, now sole emperor of the West, to meet him at Milan (Athan. Apol. ad Imp. Constantium, 4), about the holding of a new council, at which both East and West should be fully represented. With the concurrence of the Eastern emperor Constantius, this council was summoned at the Moesian town of Sardica on the confines of their empires, probably towards the end of 343. The scheme of united action failed, the Eastern bishops holding a separate synod at Philippopolis. The rest met at Sardica under the
- ↑ This indeed was one of the purposes which the emperor had at heart in convening it. Just as the synod of Arles had also met by his orders to reconsider the acquittal of St. Caecilian, decreed in the previous synod of Rome under Melchiades.—E.S.FF.
