Arsacius of Tarsus

Arsacius of Tarsus was Archbishop of Constantinople in the early fifth century, holding the see for little more than a year after the second and final expulsion of John Chrysostom. He came from Tarsus in Cilicia and was the brother of Nectarius, who had occupied the same see from 381 until 397. Almost nothing is recorded of his youth, education, or early career. By the time of his elevation he was already an aged presbyter of the church of Constantinople. Contemporary ecclesiastical historians describe him as a man of advanced years; no reliable source preserves a year of birth, and later guesses based on remarks about his age cannot be treated as fact. No writings by Arsacius survive, and he is known almost entirely through narratives of the Chrysostom controversy rather than through any independent body of acts or correspondence.

His appointment belonged to the violent aftermath of Chrysostom’s conflict with the imperial court. After the Synod of the Oak in 403, engineered in large part by Theophilus of Alexandria, Chrysostom was deposed, briefly restored, and then definitively exiled in 404 under the emperor Arcadius and the empress Eudoxia. The palace required a successor who would not revive Chrysostom’s public preaching or defy court policy. Arsacius, as brother of a previous archbishop and as an elderly cleric of unassertive reputation, was consecrated in June 404. Many bishops in East and West, including Pope Innocent I of Rome, refused to accept Chrysostom’s deposition as canonical and therefore regarded Arsacius as an intruder. The Western church continued to treat Chrysostom as the legitimate bishop of Constantinople throughout Arsacius’s brief tenure.

The so-called Johannites—clergy and laity loyal to the exiled Chrysostom—declined communion with the new archbishop, and a schism opened in the capital. Sources hostile to the court, above all the Dialogue of Palladius, present Arsacius as weak and as an instrument of imperial policy; they also associate his episcopate with coercive measures against those who would not recognize him. Socrates Scholasticus, writing in the next generation, allowed that Arsacius was of mild disposition but recorded that a large part of the Christian population avoided his communion. His authority in the city was therefore never securely established. Because he replaced a bishop later universally honored as a saint, and because his election was widely judged uncanonical, Arsacius himself was not commemorated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic traditions, and no feast day, patronage, canonization, or beatification is attached to his name in the major calendars.

Arsacius died in 405, after only about a year in office, and was succeeded by Atticus of Constantinople. The Johannite schism outlasted him. It began to ease only after Chrysostom’s death in exile in 407 and after the gradual rehabilitation of Chrysostom’s memory in subsequent decades. No contemporary source records a spouse, children, membership in a monastic order, or a securely attested place of burial. Later historians remember Arsacius less as an independent churchman than as a short-lived figure in the larger story of John Chrysostom’s fall, the assertion of court power over the see of Constantinople, and the strained relations between the churches of Rome and the East in the first years of the fifth century.