St. Eustathius of Antioch

Eustathius was born around the year 270 in Side in Pamphylia. He was a Confessor in the last of the persecutions: under Licinius, before the peace of the Church, he was imprisoned and bore torture for the Faith. He became bishop of Beroea (modern Aleppo) and then, around the year 324, was translated to the great see of Antioch.

In the year of his elevation the Arian controversy reached its open phase. At the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, Eustathius gave the opening address to the assembled Fathers, in the role the Eastern tradition assigns him as senior bishop of the Eastern half of the empire. He subscribed the Creed without reservation and led the anti-Arian party in the Antiochene patriarchate in the years immediately after.

Around 330, the resurgent Arian party gathered a council of bishops at Antioch on a pretext (Eustathius was accused, falsely, of Sabellianism and of insulting the Emperor's mother Helena), deposed him, and obtained his exile from the Emperor Constantine. He was sent to Trajanopolis in Thrace, where he died, perhaps in 360, after some thirty years of exile.

He wrote many works in defense of Nicaea, of which only one is preserved in full (a treatise against Origen on the Witch of Endor) and a number of fragments. The Antiochene tradition counted him among its three or four great Fathers, alongside Babylas and Ignatius before him and Meletius after.

Half a century after his exile, the great schism at Antioch over his rightful successor (the so-called Meletian Schism) was finally healed at the Second Ecumenical Council under Meletius and Flavian, whom he had effectively prepared the way for. The Church keeps his memory as the Confessor whose long exile preserved the apostolic faith of Antioch through its hardest decades.