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This chapter presents Marcellus as the ambitious and capable young canon law-maker responsible for the 314 Synod of Ancyra, with its 25 canons on penance, the recent persecution, and other subjects. He emerges as a compassionate and level-headed pastor, even-handed in his treatment of women and men, in contrast to the makers of the Canons of Iliberris (Elvira). The theology of his major work, Against Asterius, is also briefly sketched.

This chapter argues that Eustathius of Antioch’s deposition took place in autumn 327 as a result of real or faked evidence of sexual misdemeanour, triggering a reversal by Constantine of his previous ecclesiastical policy. It is suggested that Marcellus wrote his Against Asterius partly in response to this event and to the subsequent return of Eusebius of Nicomedia. It is argued that Marcellus, like Athanasius, was trapped by a summons to the Synod of Tyre in 335 when he refused to accept Arius’ reception back into communion at Jerusalem, despite Constantine’s orders. Marcellus’ trial is examined from the accounts of Sozomen and Eusebius of Caesarea, and his innocence established of the theological charges brought.

This chapter begins with an analysis of the phrase hoi peri Eusebion and the implications of Athanasius’ presentation of his opponents as a ‘church party’. It then assesses the various passages in which Athanasius actually names the men whom he regards as ‘Eusebians’, and demonstrates the degree to which these catalogues of names vary between Athanasius’ different works as the polemic develops over time. The chapter ends with a survey of the fragmentary evidence for the known careers and writings of the most prominent individuals whom Athanasius identifies as ‘Eusebians’, particularly Eusebius of Nicomedia himself and Asterius ‘the Sophist’.

This chapter assesses Athanasius’ presentation of the ‘Eusebians’ as ‘Arian’. After a brief introduction to Athanasius’ highly polarized heresiological polemic, it traces Athanasius’ construction of the ‘Arianism’ which he imposes upon his opponents. A comparison between this ‘Athanasian Arianism’, the doctrines of Arius himself, and the known doctrines of Eusebius of Nicomedia and Asterius ‘the Sophist’ reveals that these two alleged ‘Eusebians’ differ theologically both from Arius’ and from Athanasius’ definition of ‘Arianism’. Indeed, Eusebius and Asterius appear to have been representative of a widespread theological position held by a significant number of eastern bishops in the first half of the 4th century, a theology expressed above all by the ‘Dedication Creed’ of the Council of Antioch in 341. The chapter then turns to the methodology through which Athanasius created his distorted polarized construct of the ‘Arian Controversy’, and concludes with a brief assessment of how this construct influences Athanasius’ interpretation of the Council of Nicaea and the Nicene Creed.

Five major interpretations of Arianism are considered. According to the Hanson-Wiles interpretation, the Arians used psilanthropic argument to emphasize that God suffered in Christ. The author shows that this interpretation is one sided, partly because other parties involved in the christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries also used the psilanthropic argument. The Arians emphasized the impassibility of the High God in order to exclude him from any participation in human suffering. The pro-Nicene theologians succeeded in sustaining the vital tension between the transcendence of God and his involvement in suffering in the incarnation.

This chapter explores the rhetoric of strict renunciation advanced by Asterius Ansedunensis in his Liber ad Renatum monachum in the context of late antique ascetic identities. Asterius employed the ascetic exegesis/translation of certain Scriptural terms and passages to advocate the holistic renunciation of interpersonal relations as a prerequisite for ascetic life. Starting from Genesis 2:18, Asterius maintained, in a peculiar twist on the creation and fall narratives in Genesis 2–4, that God created Adam to be an ascetic. Conversely, the premises of sin were sown when the first woman privileged her relationship with Adam over the commandments of God. Asterius thus extended the traditional ascetic exegesis of Genesis 4:1 (sexual renunciation) to include all interpersonal relations, since sinfulness flows from human relational conduct. Two conclusions emerge from this exposé: asceticism is the natural state of the human being; and the only legitimate way to retrieve the Adamic state is heremitism.