Saint Lucifer: The Bishop Who Was Right About Everything and Punished for It Anyway

Saint Lucifer: The Bishop Who Was Right About Everything and Punished for It AnywayHis name became the Devil's. His bones rest in a cathedral crypt in Sardinia. History forgot him for twelve hundred years, and got him completely wrong.Saint Luciferi was a fourth-century Christian bishop who defied an emperor, endured seven years of exile, and wrote the most ferocious theological invective in early Christian Latin, all in defence of a faith whose central claim, the Nicene Creed, he refused to compromise by a single word. He was right about the theology. He was punished for being right. And when the tradition finally vindicated his position at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD, it did so without crediting the man whose uncompromising refusal had demonstrated that the principle was worth defending.Saint Luciferi is the first full popular account of Lucifer of Cagliari's extraordinary life and stranger afterlife: the relic wars of Baroque Sardinia that dug him from the ground, the Jesuit scholars who invented a second Lucifer to avoid the awkwardness of the first, the papal silence that managed what Rome could not resolve, and the modern occultists who claimed him as their own. Revisionist, rigorous, and compulsively readable, this is the story of a man swallowed by his name, and what we lose when history forgets the people who told it the truth.