The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 by John Julius Norwich Page A

dialectician than his master. In the years to come, he was to show himself to be something more: the leading churchman of his time, one of the towering figures in the whole history of the Christian Church, and a canonized saint. (He was long erroneously believed to have been the author of the Athanasian Creed, which still bears his name.) Arius and his adherents were to have no more redoubtable adversary.
    For the moment, however, their star was once again in the ascendant. Even after Nicaea, Arius had never lost the support of the Emperor's family - in particular that of his mother and his half-sister Constantia -while the Asian bishops (as opposed to those of Europe and North Africa) were also overwhelmingly pro-Arian in their sympathies and took full advantage of their proximity to the imperial court to further their cause. Already in 327 they had persuaded Constantine to recall Arius from exile and to receive him in audience; the Emperor, impressed as much by the brilliance and obvious sincerity of the man as by his assurance that he willingly accepted all the points of faith approved at Nicaea, had gone so far as to write at least two personal letters to Archbishop Alexander urging (though taking care not to command) that he should be allowed to return to Egypt. He seems to have been genuinely surprised when the archbishop proved reluctant to comply - and was probably still more so in the following year when Alexander's flock, by their election of the firebrand Athanasius, showed themselves equally obdurate.
    Not that Athanasius, even on home ground, was universally popular; firebrands seldom are. For internal political reasons unconnected with the Arian controversy, the local Meletian Church under its own Bishop John Arkaph was bent on his destruction, and over the next few years unleashed against him, in quick succession, accusations of fraud, bribery and even sacrilege. When all three charges failed to stick, they tried one of murder, claiming that a Meletian bishop had been flogged to death and dismembered at his instigation. According to one version of the story, Athanasius was actually able to produce the missing bishop, all in one piece, before the examining magistrate; in any event he had no difficulty in establishing that his alleged victim was alive and well, and the case collapsed. Arkaph and his followers now had one last try: rape. They found a young woman whom they managed to bribe or frighten into claiming that she had been violated by the archbishop - an experience which, she added, was made the more regrettable by the fact that she had vowed herself to perpetual virginity. Unfortunately, she failed to recognize her ravisher in court; and once again Athanasius was found to have no case to answer.
    Whether Constantine was, as he maintained, genuinely troubled by these continuing accusations - groundless as they invariably proved to be - or whether he was simply falling ever more under the influence of the pro-Arians around him, he seems gradually to have come to the conclusion that Athanasius, rather than Arius, was now the chief impediment to that Church unity for which he strove. By this time, too, he was making plans for celebrating, in 335, the thirtieth year of his reign by the formal consecration of the rebuilt Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Here he proposed to summon a vast convocation of bishops, drawn from every corner of the Empire; and he was determined that doctrinal harmony should prevail among them. He accordingly gave orders that the bishops on their way to Jerusalem should hold a synod at Tyre, in the presence of a high imperial official, in order - as he rather disarmingly put it - 'to free the Church from blasphemy and to lighten my cares'.
    The synod was called for July. It was, as soon became clear, to be attended almost exclusively by bishops of the Arian persuasion, and consequently to be less a gathering of distinguished churchmen than a trial of Athanasius; and the