Note to foregoing Chapter.
It may excite surprise that men so young as Chrysostom and Basil, the former at least being not more than twenty-five or twenty-six, and not as yet ordained deacon, should have been designated to the highest office in the Church. The Council of Neocæsarea (about A.D. 320—vide Hefele, vol. i., Clark’s transl. p. 222) fixed thirty as the age at which men became eligible for the priesthood. The same age, then, at least, must have been required for a bishop.
The Constitutions called Apostolical fix the age at fifty, but add a clause which really lets in all the exceptions, “unless he be a man of singular merit and worth, which may compensate for the want of years.” And, in fact, there are numerous instances of men, both before and after the time of Chrysostom, who were consecrated as bishops under the age of thirty. The Council of Nice was held not more than twenty years after the persecution of Maximian, which Athanasius (Epist. ad Solitar., p. 382, Paris edition) says he had only heard of from his father, yet in five months after that Council he was ordained Archbishop of Alexandria. Remigius of Rheims was only twenty-two when he was made bishop, in A.D. 471. In like manner, though it was enacted by the Council of Sardica, A.D. 343-344, that none should rise to the Episcopal throne per saltum, yet there are not a few examples of this rule being transgressed.
Augustine, when he created a See at Fassula, presented Antonius, a reader (the very position Chrysostom now filled) to the Primate, who ordained him without scruple on Augustine’s recommendation (Aug. Ep. 261, ad Cælest.). Cyprian, Ambrose, and Nestorius are celebrated instances of the consecration of laymen to bishoprics.