Meletius of Antioch

Meletius of Antioch was a fourth-century bishop of the church of Antioch and a principal figure in the Meletian schism, a decades-long division among Christians in that city who rejected Arianism. He was born at Melitene in Lesser Armenia to a family of wealth and rank; ancient historians do not record the year of his birth. He first appears in the ecclesiastical controversies of the 350s as a man acceptable to the Acacian party, which sought a middle way between the Nicene homoousios and more radical Arian positions. He attended the Council of Seleucia in 359 and was associated with its decisions. About that time he was appointed bishop of Sebaste in Armenia in place of Eustathius, but the local church would not receive him, and he withdrew to Beroea in Syria.

In 360, after Eudoxius of Antioch had been transferred to Constantinople, a synod at Antioch elected Meletius bishop of the city. The choice was intended as a compromise among competing theological groups. His tenure lasted only a short time. In an early public instruction, later remembered in connection with Proverbs 8:22, he set forth a doctrine of the Son that his hearers took as a rejection of Arianism and as an affirmation of the Son's true divinity. Emperor Constantius II thereupon banished him, after perhaps a month in the see, and the Arian Euzoius was installed in his place. Meletius was sent back toward his native Armenia. Those in Antioch who refused Arian communion then split. One party remained faithful to Meletius. Another, the old Eustathian congregation that had never accepted the bishops who followed the deposition of Eustathius of Antioch in the 330s, had Paulinus consecrated as their bishop by Lucifer of Cagliari around 362. Thus began the Meletian schism, in which two non-Arian hierarchies claimed the same ancient see.

Julian's edict recalling exiled bishops allowed Meletius to return, but under Valens, who favored the Arians, he was exiled once more and spent long years in Armenia. Basil of Caesarea consistently treated him as the canonical bishop of Antioch and tried to persuade Rome and Alexandria to abandon Paulinus in his favor. Pope Damasus I and Athanasius of Alexandria, however, continued to recognize Paulinus, so that the question of which Nicene bishop was the legitimate occupant of Antioch became a matter of communion between East and West. Meletius's reported teaching, preserved by later writers such as Theodoret, used the language of one ousia and three hypostases, the terminology that the Greek church would adopt as orthodox. Contemporaries praised his gentleness. In his community at Antioch he baptized John, afterwards famous as Chrysostom, and in 381 he ordained him deacon; Theodore, later bishop of Mopsuestia, also belonged to this circle.

After Valens fell at Adrianople in 378, Gratian and then Theodosius I restored Nicene bishops. Meletius came back to Antioch and in 379 presided over a synod of many Eastern bishops that confessed the Nicene faith and sought, without success, to end the local schism. In 381 Theodosius summoned a council at Constantinople, later received as the Second Ecumenical Council. As the senior bishop of the East, Meletius presided at its opening. He died in Constantinople while the council was still sitting. Gregory of Nyssa preached the funeral oration. The body was afterwards taken to Antioch and buried there. The bishops remaining at the council elected Flavian to succeed him. Rome and the Paulinian party did not at once accept Flavian, and the schism therefore continued after Meletius's death until it was finally healed in the early fifth century.

Meletius is venerated as a saint in both Eastern and Western calendars, with his principal feast on 12 February. His career illustrates the tangled relations among imperial policy, episcopal legitimacy, and Trinitarian doctrine in the generation after Nicaea. Although he had once been acceptable to those who avoided the Nicene watchword, the later tradition of the church regarded him as a defender of the divinity of the Son and as a predecessor of the settlement associated with the Council of Constantinople.