the living. In our own day Spiritualism has 1, ranched
I naively that it w ill he treat) d at parately un- der that heading, id. II.W'j
Pneumatomachi, i. e. adversaries <>f th, Holy a name properly applied to all those who en- tertain heretical opinion- as to the Scripture .1.. .trine ofthe Holy Ghost, e. g. the Sabellians (q. v.). The
PNEUMATOMACHI
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PNEUMATOMACHI
name originated after the subsidence of the Arian con- troversy, and was applied to that party, distinguished by the "denial of the catholic faith regarding the Third Person of the Holy Trinity; some denying his divinity, others his personality also. The name is, however, more specially used to designate the Macedonians, so called after Macedonius, who, after the death of Eusebius of Nicomedia, was called by the Arian faction to the see of Constantinople, in opposition to the catholic bishop Paul. This led to bloody strife, inasmuch as a majority of the citizens were for Paul. The Arians got the better of their catholic adversaries with the help of the emperor Constantine, who took the part of Macedo- nius, and established him in the disputed see by force of arms : three thousand persons perished on that occa- sion. Macedonius, although called to the bishopric of Constantinople by strict Arians, seems not to have been very much of an Arian himself, but persecuted the cath- olics after the fashion of other Semi-Arian bishops, and became, with Basilius of Ancyra, one of the chiefs of the Semi-Arians. As a natural consequence of the rest of their doctrine, the Arians declared the Holy Ghost, who was little spoken of explicitly at the beginning of the Arian difficulties, to be a mere creature, and most of them held him to be an inferior creature to the Son. Not only the strict Arians, but also the Semi-Arians, who called the Son "God" and o/jqioiktioq, questioned the divinity of the Holy Ghost. Macedonius made him- self the leader of this increasing and strengthening pneu- matomatical party, teaching emphatically that the Holy Ghost was a creature subservient to the Father and Son, and wholly different in nature from them (comp. Socra- tes. Hist. Eccles. ii, 46 ; Sozomen, iv, 27 ; Theodoret, Hist. Eccles. ii, 6; Hmret. Fab. v, 11; Epiphanius, Hcer. 7.! mid 74). He then invented the artifice of the " Ho- moion," and connecting himself closely with the Semi- Arian party, gave them his name (Theodoret, Hcer. Full, iv, 5). At first therefore the term Macedonian was simply equivalent to Semi-Arian, and Socrates calls the reply of Liberius to the Semi-Arian legates a letter to the bishops of the Macedonians (Socrates, Hist. Eccles. iv, 12). The name of Macedonius appears in this reply. The good faith of this transaction is (to say the least) very doubtful (see the notes on the chapter of Socrates in Variorum Aniwtatiimis in Heading's edition of Vale- sius). and we are in uncertainty as to the opinions which Macedonius really held at the close of his life. But there is no uncertainty as to the course of the heresy. The letters of Liberius were exhibited at the Council of Tyana, and the deputies who presented them were acknowledged as members of the catholic body. This was probably in A.D. 368. But just as among the Ari- ans there never was any unity of views as to the Son, there was none among the Pneumatomachi and Mace- donians as to the Holy Ghost. Some contented them- selves with holding the divinity of the Holy Ghost du- bious, others denied it outright; some called him a creature, but most seem to have fallen in with the ideas of Macedonius. Among the most active partisans of this heresy were Marathonius and Eleusius, whom Mac- edonius called respectively to the sees of Cyzicum and Nicomedia. The influence of Marathonius is shown by the fact that the Macedonians are sometimes called Marathonians. Macedonius was deposed by the strict Arians at the Synod of Constantinople in 3G0 : he spent the remainder of his life obscurely in the vicinity of Constantinople. The exact date of Macedonius's death is not known, but it appears to have been soon after the Council of Tarsus (see Tillemont, Hist. vol. ix).
The appearance of the Pneumatomachi, as such, is to be dated from A.D. 360, when Athanasius wrote against them, giving them the name here adopted. Athanasius was then in the deserts of Egypt, and Sera- pion, bishop of Thmuis, in Lower Egypt, requested his interposition. The heresies themselves were no novel- ties. It was a part of the Arian creed that the Holy Spirit was a created being, superior it might be in dig-
nity, but nowise different in nature from the angels; and in the Gnostic systems we meet with Christ and the Holy Ghost as aeons [see Valextinians], the latter being held, in some cases at least, to be not a distinct person, but a divine energy diffused through the uni- verse. But there was a great difference in the mode in which these heresies were held. They then appeared, not as proceeding from a special opposition to the great- ness of the Holy Spirit, but as deductions from some other leading heresy to which they were subordinate.- Thus in the case of the Arians, with which our present subject is concerned, the denial of the divinity of the Holy Spirit follows upon the denial of the divinity of the Son. For as it is impossible to advance the Third Person of the Trinity above the Second Person, the controversy turned therefore on the divinity of the Second. Dealing with this, the Council of Nicsea did not touch specifically upon the subordinate heresy, but left it to stand or fall with the leading one. But when the leading heresy was abandoned, and yet the subordi- nate heresy retained, then the latter not only became prominent, but was seen to be adopted on its own inde- pendent grounds, for its own sake. The Arian half con- verted to catholicity was properly a Pneumatomachist. Such were those whom Athanasius dealt with in his letter to Serapion. They were seceders from the Ari- ans who had embraced the true faith regarding the Son, but retained their error regarding the Holy Spirit. They were consequently opposed both by catholics and Arians, but their true controversy was with the former: their contest with the latter (Athanasius urges) could only be pretended, inasmuch as both agreed in opposing the" doctrine of the Trinity (Ad Strap, i, 1, 2. :K 32). This class, then, differed from the later Macedonian class : it held Homoousian doctrine regarding the Son, whereas the Macedonians were Homoiousians. Atha- nasius calls them also Tropici, from their figurative in- terpretations of Scripture ; but this is rather an epithet than a proper name.