The Church of Aquileia

Aquileia stood where the roads from Italy, the Danube and the Balkans met at the head of the Adriatic, and in the fourth century it was among the largest cities of the empire and among the more consequential churches of the West; its basilica floor mosaics from the 310s are still there. In the 370s a group of young ascetics gathered in the city whom Jerome afterwards remembered as a chorus of the blessed. He was one of them. So was Rufinus of Concordia, and the friendship between those two ended thirty years later in the bitterest literary quarrel the Latin church produced. In 381 Ambrose came up from Milan and presided over a council at Aquileia that deposed the last two Homoian bishops of the Danube provinces. And around 404 Rufinus, home in Italy after decades in Egypt and Palestine, sat down and wrote out the creed his own church used at baptism, explaining it line by line for people about to say it. That is why anyone knows that the Aquileian creed called the Father invisible and impassible where Rome's did not, and that it already contained the clause about the descent into hell, which Rufinus points out - a little pointedly - that the Roman creed does not have. It is the earliest evidence that the Western churches did not all say the same words at the font.