The Second Sunday of the Year - 18.01.2015

FATHER LIAM SAYS: There have always been controversies in the Church.  It could not have been otherwise.  One of the earliest was about the date of Easter.  Most local Churches, including Rome, had by the end of the second century been celebrating Easter on the Sunday after the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan.  Other Churches celebrated Easter on the fourteenth day of Nisan whether that day fell on a Sunday or not.  In 154 AD the Pope Anicetus tried to win over the other Churches to the Roman practice because of the complications – sometimes within the same family – which the different dates were causing.  He thought that if he could get the Bishop of Smyrna to agree with him all the others would follow suit.  Because the Bishop of Smyrna was Polycarp – a disciple of the Apostle John – he was a man of great prestige.  But Polycarp would not be persuaded.  He said that the Apostle John was the source of the tradition he followed so he would adhere to that.  But, over twelve years later, the matter was raised again.  Pope Victor I wrote to the Bishop of Ephesus, Polycrates, telling him to call together the Bishops of Asia and get them to consent to follow the Roman usage, reminding Polycrates of the apostolic origin of the See of Rome.  But the Bishops of Asia would not agree to the proposed change.  Polycrates told the Pope that their decision was also on the grounds of apostolic tradition.  St. John was Bishop of Ephesus, the city of Polycrates, and is buried there.  St Philip is buried nearby in Hierapolis and so they did not feel justified in changing their apostolic tradition.

So there were two traditions, equally apostolic.  Pope Victor had written to other bishops at the same time as he wrote to Polycrates and on the same subject.  The letters of several Councils of Bishops, written in reply, have survived, expressing their agreement with Rome.  It seems that nothing is known about the circumstances that led Pope Victor to raise this controversial issue.  Now the Pope took the step of declaring Polycrates and his associates cut off and separated from the Church.  It is the first recorded occasion of such an action on the part of the Roman Church.  A number of Churches felt that Rome had treated the Asiatics harshly and appeals began to flow in to Pope Victor.  Among those who pleaded was St Iranaeus of Lyons.  He urged that the different practices were not of prime importance and he reminded Victor of how his predecessor Pope Anicetus had acted towards Bishop Polycarp.  Iranaeus also wrote to other bishops to rally support for a more lenient outcome.  The Pope wisely withdrew his excommunication and the Asiatic Churches continued to celebrate Easter in the tradition of St Philip and St John.

But Pope Victor had to deal with controversies of a much more serious nature – which were to continue intermittently for hundreds of years.  They concerned the divinity of Jesus.  A wealthy leather merchant called Theodotius from Byzantium came to Rome around the year 190 AD.  He had apostatised in a recent persecution and thought he would not be recognised in the great city.  But when he was accused he replied that in denying Jesus Christ he had not denied God – for Jesus, though he was the holiest of men, was not God.  St. Victor excommunicated him but Theodotius gathered a number of followers and was soon the leader of a sect that included some very learned people.  They became known as the Monarchians because they professed to uphold at all costs the oneness of the divinity ‘the Monarchy’ as they liked to express it.  The Monarchists were at great pains to safeguard the Unity of God but also the real divinity of Jesus Christ but in doing so they identified the Father and the Son concluding that the Father and the Son were not really distinct.

The new leader of the Monarchists, Epigonus, set up his School of Theology in Rome.  The Pope was now St Zephyrinus (199-217 AD) who was a good administrator but not a great theologian.  There was, however, a very able theologian, Hippolytus, who locked horns with Epigonus.  Unfortunately Hippolytus was not a reliable ally of the Pope or of orthodoxy and he attacked the Pope as well as attacking Epigonus.  Pope Zephyrinus kept re-affirming what had always been believed ‘I only know one God who suffered and died, Jesus Christ and beyond him no other.  It is not the Father who died but the Son.’  Incidentally our Eucharistic Prayer Two owes its origins to Hippolytus!

When Zephyrinus died in 217 AD he was succeeded by Calixtus whom Hippolytus also hated.  He left the Church and became the first anti-Pope.  But in the persecution of the Emperor Maximin he was made to work in the mines of Sardinia where he found himself sharing the same fate as the lawful Pope Pontianus.  He was reconciled to the Church and he is numbered among our martyred Saints.  St Hippolytus, pray for us.

(I am indebted to Philip Hughes – A History of the Church)