ARIAN AND ARIANISMS
A
heresy which arose in the fourth century, and denied the Divinity of
Jesus Christ.
DOCTRINE
First among
the doctrinal disputes which troubled
Christians after Constantine had recognized the Church in A.D. 313,
and the parent of many more during some three centuries, Arianism
occupies a large place in ecclesiastical history. It is not a modern
form of unbelief, and therefore will appear strange in modern eyes. But
we shall better grasp its meaning if we term it an Eastern attempt to
rationalize the creed by stripping it of mystery so far as the relation
of Christ to
God was concerned. In the New Testament and in Church teaching
Jesus of Nazareth appears as the
Son of God. This name He took to Himself (Matthew 11:27; John
10:36), while the Fourth Gospel declares Him to be the Word (Logos), Who
in the beginning was with
God and was
God, by Whom all things were made. A similar doctrine is laid down
by St. Paul, in his undoubtedly genuine Epistles to the Ephesians,
Colossians, and Philippians. It is reiterated in the Letters of
Ignatius, and accounts for Pliny's observation that
Christians in their assemblies chanted a hymn to Christ as
God. But the question how the Son was related to the Father (Himself
acknowledged on all hands to be the one Supreme Deity), gave rise,
between the years A.D. 60 and 200, to a number of Theosophic systems,
called generally
Gnosticism, and having for their authors Basilides, Valentinus,
Tatian, and other Greek speculators. Though all of these visited Rome,
they had no following in the West, which remained free from
controversies of an abstract nature, and was faithful to the creed of
its baptism. Intellectual centres were chiefly Alexandria and Antioch,
Egyptian or Syrian, and speculation was carried on in Greek. The Roman
Church held steadfastly by tradition. Under these circumstances, when
Gnostic schools had passed away with their "conjugations" of Divine
powers, and "emanations" from the Supreme unknowable
God (the "Deep" and the "Silence") all speculation was thrown into
the form of an inquiry touching the "likeness" of the Son to His Father
and "sameness" of His Essence. Catholics had always maintained that
Christ was truly the Son, and truly
God. They worshipped Him with divine honours; they would never
consent to separate Him, in idea or reality, from the Father, Whose
Word, Reason, Mind, He was, and in Whose Heart He abode from eternity.
But the technical terms of doctrine were not fully defined; and even in
Greek words like essence (ousia), substance (hypostasis),
nature (physis), person (hyposopon) bore a variety of
meanings drawn from the pre-Christian sects of philosophers, which could
not but entail misunderstandings until they were cleared up. The
adaptation of a vocabulary employed by Plato and
Aristotle to
Christian truth was a matter of time; it could not be done in a day;
and when accomplished for the Greek it had to be undertaken for the
Latin, which did not lend itself readily to necessary yet subtle
distinctions. That disputes should spring up even among the orthodox who
all held one faith, was inevitable. And of these wranglings the
rationalist would take advantage in order to substitute for the ancient
creed his own inventions. The drift of all he advanced was this: to deny
that in any true sense
God could have a Son; as
Mohammed tersely said afterwards, "God
neither begets, nor is He begotten" (Koran,
112). We have learned to call that denial Unitarianism. It was the
ultimate scope of Arian opposition to what
Christians had always believed. But the Arian, though he did not
come straight down from the
Gnostic, pursued a line of argument and taught a view which the
speculations of the
Gnostic had made familiar. He described the Son as a second, or
inferior
God, standing midway between the First Cause and creatures; as
Himself made out of nothing, yet as making all things else; as existing
before the worlds of the ages; and as arrayed in all divine perfections
except the one which was their stay and foundation.
God alone was without beginning, unoriginate; the Son was
originated, and once had not existed. For all that has origin must begin
to be.
Such is the
genuine doctrine of Arius. Using Greek terms, it denies that the Son is
of one essence, nature, or substance with
God; He is not consubstantial (homoousios)
with the Father, and therefore not like Him, or equal in dignity, or
co-eternal, or within the real sphere of Deity. The Logos which St. John
exalts is an attribute, Reason, belonging to the Divine nature, not a
person distinct from another, and therefore is a Son merely in figure of
speech. These consequences follow upon the principle which Arius
maintains in his letter to
Eusebius of Nicomedia, that the Son "is no part of the Ingenerate."
Hence the Arian sectaries who reasoned logically were styled Anomoeans:
they said that the Son was "unlike" the Father. And they defined
God as simply the Unoriginate. They are also termed the Exucontians
(ex ouk onton), because they held the creation of the Son to be
out of nothing.
But a view
so unlike tradition found little favour; it required softening or
palliation, even at the cost of logic; and the school which supplanted
Arianism form an early date affirmed the likeness, either without
adjunct, or in all things, or in substance, of the Son to the Father,
while denying His co-equal dignity and co-eternal existence. These men
of the Via Media were named
Semi-Arians. They approached, in strict argument, to the heretical
extreme; but many of them held the orthodox faith, however
inconsistently; their difficulties turned upon language or local
prejudice, and no small number submitted at length to Catholic teaching.
The
Semi-Arians attempted for years to invent a compromise between
irreconcilable views, and their shifting creeds, tumultuous councils,
and worldly devices tell us how mixed and motley a crowd was collected
under their banner. The point to be kept in remembrance is that, while
they affirmed the
Word of God to be everlasting, they imagined Him as having become
the Son to create the worlds and redeem mankind. Among the ante-Nicene
writers, a certain ambiguity of expression may be detected, outside the
school of Alexandria, touching this last head of doctrine. While
Catholic teachers held the Monarchia, viz. that there was only one
God; and the Trinity, that this Absolute One existed in three
distinct subsistences; and the Circuminession, that Father, Word, and
Spirit could not be separated, in fact or in thought, from one another;
yet an opening was left for discussion as regarded the term "Son," and
the period of His "generation" (gennesis). Five ante-Nicene
Fathers are especially quoted: Athenagoras, Tatian, Theophilus of
Antioch, Hippolytus, and Novatian, whose language appears to involve a
peculiar notion of Sonship, as though It did not come into being or were
not perfect until the dawn of creation. To these may be added
Tertullian and Methodius. Cardinal Newman held that their view,
which is found clearly in
Tertullian, of the Son existing after the Word, is connected as an
antecedent with Arianism. Petavius construed the same expressions in a
reprehensible sense; but the
Anglican Bishop Bull defended them as orthodox, not without
difficulty. Even if metaphorical, such language might give shelter to
unfair disputants; but we are not answerable for the slips of teachers
who failed to perceive all the consequences of doctrinal truths really
held by them. >From these doubtful theorizings Rome and Alexandria kept
aloof. Origen himself, whose unadvised speculations were charged with
the guilt of Arianism, and who employed terms like "the second
God," concerning the Logos, which were never adopted by the Church
-- this very Origen taught the eternal Sonship of the Word, and was not
a
Semi-Arian. To him the Logos, the Son, and
Jesus of Nazareth were one ever-subsisting Divine Person, begotten
of the Father, and, in this way, "subordinate" to the source of His
being. He comes forth from
God as the creative Word, and so is a ministering Agent, or, from a
different point of view, is the First-born of creation. Dionysius of
Alexandria (260) was even denounced at Rome for calling the Son a work
or creature of
God; but he explained himself to the pope on orthodox principles,
and confessed the Homoousian Creed.
HISTORY
Paul of
Samosata, who was contemporary with Dionysius, and Bishop of Antioch,
may be judged the true ancestor of those heresies which relegated Christ
beyond the Divine sphere, whatever epithets of deity they allowed Him.
The man
Jesus, said Paul, was distinct from the Logos, and, in Milton's
later language, by merit was made the
Son of God. The Supreme is one in Person as in Essence. Three
councils held at Antioch (264-268, or 269) condemned and
excommunicated the Samosatene. But these Fathers would not accept
the Homoousian formula, dreading lest it be taken to signify one
material or abstract substance, according to the usage of the heathen
philosophies. Associated with Paul, and for years cut off from the
Catholic communion, we find the well-known Lucian, who edited the
Septuagint and became at last a martyr. From this learned man the school
of Antioch drew its inspiration.
Eusebius the historian,
Eusebius of Nicomedia, and Arius himself, all came under Lucian's
influence. Not, therefore, to Egypt and its mystical teaching, but to
Syria, where
Aristotle flourished with his logic and its tendency to Rationalism,
should we look for the home of an aberration which had it finally
triumphed, would have anticipated
Islam, reducing the
Eternal Son to the rank of a prophet, and thus undoing the
Christian revelation.
Arius, a
Libyan by descent, brought up at Antioch and a school-fellow of
Eusebius, afterwards Bishop of Nicomedia, took part (306) in the
obscure Meletian schism, was made presbyter of the church called "Baucalis,"
at Alexandria, and opposed the Sabellians, themselves committed to a
view of the Trinity which denied all real distinctions in the Supreme.
Epiphanius describes the heresiarch as tall, grave, and winning; no
aspersion on his moral character has been sustained; but there is some
possibility of personal differences having led to his quarrel with the
patriarch Alexander whom, in public synod, he accused of teaching that
the Son was identical with the Father (319). The actual circumstances of
this dispute are obscure; but Alexander condemned Arius in a great
assembly, and the latter found a refuge with
Eusebius, the Church historian, at Caesarea. Political or party
motives embittered the strife. Many bishops of Asia Minor and Syria took
up the defence of their "fellow-Lucianist," as Arius did not hesitate to
call himself. Synods in Palestine and Bithynia were opposed to synods in
Egypt. During several years the argument raged; but when, by his defeat
of Licinius (324), Constantine became master of the Roman world, he
determined on restoring ecclesiastical order in the East, as already in
the West he had undertaken to put down the Donatists at the Council of
Arles. Arius, in a letter to the Nicomedian prelate, had boldly rejected
the Catholic faith. But Constantine, tutored by this worldly-minded man,
sent from Nicomedia to Alexander a famous letter, in which he treated
the controversy as an idle dispute about words and enlarged on the
blessings of peace. The emperor, we should call to mind, was only a
catechumen, imperfectly acquainted with Greek, much more incompetent in
theology, and yet ambitious to exercise over the Catholic Church a
dominion resembling that which, as Pontifex Maximus, he wielded over the
pagan worship. From this Byzantine conception (labelled in modern terms
Erastianism) we must derive the calamities which during many hundreds of
years set their mark on the development of
Christian dogma. Alexander could not give way in a matter so vitally
important. Arius and his supporters would not yield. A council was,
therefore, assembled in Nicaea, in Bithynia, which has ever been counted
the first ecumenical, and which held its sittings from the middle of
June, 325. (See
FIRST COUNCIL OF NICAEA). It is commonly said that Hosius of Cordova
presided. The Pope, St. Silvester, was represented by his legates, and
318 Fathers attended, almost all from the East. Unfortunately, the acts
of the Council are not preserved. The emperor, who was present, paid
religious deference to a gathering which displayed the authority of
Christian teaching in a manner so remarkable. From the first it was
evident that Arius could not reckon upon a large number of patrons among
the bishops. Alexander was accompanied by his youthful deacon, the
ever-memorable
Athanasius who engaged in discussion with the heresiarch himself,
and from that moment became the leader of the Catholics during well-nigh
fifty years. The Fathers appealed to tradition against the innovators,
and were passionately orthodox; while a letter was received from
Eusebius of Nicomedia, declaring openly that he would never allow
Christ to be of one substance with
God. This avowal suggested a means of discriminating between true
believers and all those who, under that pretext, did not hold the Faith
handed down. A creed was drawn up on behalf of the Arian party by
Eusebius of Caesarea in which every term of honour and dignity,
except the oneness of substance, was attributed to
Our Lord. Clearly, then, no other test save the Homoousion would
prove a match for the subtle ambiguities of language that, then as
always, were eagerly adopted by dissidents from the mind of the Church.
A formula had been discovered which would serve as a test, though not
simply to be found in Scripture, yet summing up the doctrine of St.
John, St. Paul, and Christ Himself, "I and the Father are one". Heresy,
as St. Ambrose remarks, had furnished from its own scabbard a weapon to
cut off its head. The "consubstantial" was accepted, only thirteen
bishops dissenting, and these were speedily reduced to seven. Hosius
drew out the conciliar statements, to which
anathemas were subjoined against those who should affirm that the
Son once did not exist, or that before He was begotten He was not, or
that He was made out of nothing, or that He was of a different substance
or essence from the Father, or was created or changeable. Every bishop
made this declaration except six, of whom four at length gave way.
Eusebius of Nicomedia withdrew his opposition to the Nicene term,
but would not sign the condemnation of Arius. By the emperor, who
considered heresy as rebellion, the alternative proposed was
subscription or banishment; and, on political grounds, the Bishop of
Nicomedia was exiled not long after the council, involving Arius in his
ruin. The heresiarch and his followers underwent their sentence in
Illyria. But these incidents, which might seem to close the chapter,
proved a beginning of strife, and led on to the most complicated
proceedings of which we read in the fourth century. While the plain
Arian creed was defended by few, those political prelates who sided with
Eusebius carried on a double warfare against the term
"consubstantial", and its champion,
Athanasius. This greatest of the Eastern Fathers had succeeded
Alexander in the Egyptian patriarchate (326). He was not more than
thirty years of age; but his published writings, antecedent to the
Council, display, in thought and precision, a mastery of the issues
involved which no Catholic teacher could surpass. His unblemished life,
considerate temper, and loyalty to his friends made him by no means easy
to attack. But the wiles of
Eusebius, who in 328 recovered Constantine's favour, were seconded
by Asiatic intrigues, and a period of Arian reaction set in. Eustathius
of Antioch was deposed on a charge of Sabellianism (331), and the
Emperor sent his command that Athanasius should receive Arius back into
communion. The saint firmly declined. In 325 the heresiarch was absolved
by two councils, at Tyre and Jerusalem, the former of which deposed
Athanasius on false and shameful grounds of personal misconduct. He was
banished to Trier, and his sojourn of eighteen months in those parts
cemented Alexandria more closely to Rome and the Catholic West.
Meanwhile, Constantia, the Emperor's sister, had recommended Arius, whom
she thought an injured man, to Constantine's leniency. Her dying words
affected him, and he recalled the Lybian, extracted from him a solemn
adhesion to the Nicene faith, and ordered Alexander, Bishop of the
Imperial City, to give him Communion in his own church (336). Arius
openly triumphed; but as he went about in parade, the evening before
this event was to take place, he expired from a sudden disorder, which
Catholics could not help regarding as a judgment of heaven, due to the
bishop's prayers. His death, however, did not stay the plague.
Constantine now favoured none but Arians; he was baptized in his last
moments by the shifty prelate of Nicomedia; and he bequeathed to his
three sons (337) an empire torn by dissensions which his ignorance and
weakness had aggravated.
Constantius,
who nominally governed the East, was himself the puppet of his empress
and the palace-ministers. He obeyed the Eusebian faction; his spiritual
director, Valens, Bishop of Mursa, did what in him lay to infect Italy
and the West with Arian dogmas. The term "like in substance",
Homoiousion, which had been employed merely to get rid of the Nicene
formula, became a watchword. But as many as fourteen councils, held
between 341 and 360, in which every shade of heretical subterfuge found
expression, bore decisive witness to the need and efficacy of the
Catholic touchstone which they all rejected. About 340, an Alexandrian
gathering had defended its archbishop in an epistle to Pope Julius. On
the death of Constantine, and by the influence of that emperor's son and
namesake, he had been restored to his people. But the young prince
passed away, and in 341 the celebrated Antiochene Council of the
Dedication a second time degraded Athanasius, who now took refuge in
Rome. There he spent three years. Gibbon quotes and adopts "a judicious
observation" of Wetstein which deserves to be kept always in mind. From
the fourth century onwards, remarks the German scholar, when the Eastern
Churches were almost equally divided in eloquence and ability between
contending sections, that party which sought to overcome made its
appearance in the Vatican, cultivated the Papal majesty, conquered and
established the orthodox creed by the help of the Latin bishops.
Therefore it was that Athanasius repaired to Rome. A stranger, Gregory,
usurped his place. The Roman Council proclaimed his innocence. In 343,
Constans, who ruled over the West from Illyria to Britain, summoned the
bishops to meet at Sardica in Pannonia. Ninety-four Latin, seventy Greek
or Eastern, prelates began the debates; but they could not come to
terms, and the Asiatics withdrew, holding a separate and hostile session
at Philippopolis in Thrace. It has been justly said that the Council of
Sardica reveals the first symptoms of discord which, later on, produced
the unhappy schism of East and West. But to the Latins this meeting,
which allowed of appeals to Pope Julius, or the Roman Church, seemed an
epilogue which completed the Nicene legislation, and to this effect it
was quoted by
Innocent I in his correspondence with the bishops of Africa.
Having won
over Constans, who warmly took up his cause, the invincible Athanasius
received from his Oriental and
Semi-Arian sovereign three letters commanding, and at length
entreating his return to Alexandria (349). The factious bishops,
Ursacius and Valens, retracted their charges against him in the hands of
Pope Julius; and as he travelled home, by way of Thrace, Asia Minor, and
Syria, the crowd of court-prelates did him abject homage. These men
veered with every wind. Some, like
Eusebius of Caesarea, held a Platonizing doctrine which they would
not give up, though they declined the Arian blasphemies. But many were
time-servers, indifferent to dogma. And a new party had arisen, the
strict and pious Homoiousians, not friends of Athanasius, nor willing to
subscribe to the Nicene terms, yet slowly drawing nearer to the true
creed and finally accepting it. In the councils which now follow these
good men play their part. However, when Constans died (350), and his
Semi-Arian brother was left supreme, the persecution of Athanasius
redoubled in violence. By a series of intrigues the Western bishops were
persuaded to cast him off at Arles, Milan, Ariminum. It was concerning
this last council (359) that St. Jerome wrote, "the whole world groaned
and marvelled to find itself Arian". For the Latin bishops were driven
by threats and chicanery to sign concessions which at no time
represented their genuine views. Councils were so frequent that their
dates are still matter of controversy. Personal issues disguised the
dogmatic importance of a struggle which had gone on for thirty years.
The Pope of the day, Liberius, brave at first, undoubtedly orthodox, but
torn from his see and banished to the dreary solitude of Thrace, signed
a creed, in tone
Semi-Arian (compiled chiefly from one of Sirmium), renounced
Athanasius, but made a stand against the so-called "Homoean" formulae of
Ariminum. This new party was led by Acacius of Caesarea, an aspiring
churchman who maintained that he, and not St. Cyril of Jerusalem, was
metropolitan over Palestine. The Homoeans, a sort of
Protestants, would have no terms employed which were not found in
Scripture, and thus evaded signing the "Consubstantial". A more extreme
set, the "Anomoeans", followed Aetius, were directed by Eunomius, held
meetings at Antioch and Sirmium, declared the Son to be "unlike" the
Father, and made themselves powerful in the last years of Constantius
within the palace. George of Cappadocia persecuted the Alexandrian
Catholics. Athanasius retired into the desert among the solitaries.
Hosius had been compelled by torture to subscribe a fashionable creed.
When the vacillating Emperor died (361), Julian, known as the Apostate,
suffered all alike to return home who had been exiled on account of
religion. A momentous gathering, over which Athanasius presided, in 362,
at Alexandria, united the orthodox
Semi-Arians with himself and the West. Four years afterwards
fifty-nine Macedonian, i.e., hitherto anti-Nicene, prelates gave in
their submission to Pope Liberius. But the Emperor Valens, a fierce
heretic, still laid the Church waste.
However, the
long battle was now turning decidedly in favour of Catholic tradition.
Western bishops, like Hilary of Poitiers and
Eusebius of Vercellae banished to Asia for holding the Nicene faith,
were acting in unison with St. Basil, the two St. Gregories [of
Nyssa and
Nazianzus --Ed.], and the reconciled
Semi-Arians. As an intellectual movement the heresy had spent its
force. Theodosius, a Spaniard and a Catholic, governed the whole Empire.
Athanasius died in 373; but his cause triumphed at Constantinople, long
an Arian city, first by the preaching of
St. Gregory Nazianzen, then in the Second General Council (381), at
the opening of which Meletius of Antioch presided. This saintly man had
been estranged from the Nicene champions during a long schism; but he
made peace with Athanasius, and now, in company of St. Cyril of
Jerusalem, represented a moderate influence which won the day. No
deputies appeared from the West. Meletius died almost immediately.
St. Gregory Nazianzen, who took his place, very soon resigned. A
creed embodying the Nicene was drawn up by
St. Gregory of Nyssa, but it is not the one that is chanted at Mass,
the latter being due, it is said, to St. Epiphanius and the Church of
Jerusalem. The Council became ecumenical by acceptance of the Pope and
the ever-orthodox Westerns. From this moment Arianism in all its forms
lost its place within the Empire. Its developments among the barbarians
were political rather than doctrinal. Ulphilas (311-388), who translated
the Scriptures into Maeso-Gothic, taught the Goths across the Danube an
Homoean theology; Arian kingdoms arose in Spain, Africa, Italy. The
Gepidae, Heruli,
Vandals, Alans, and Lombards received a system which they were as
little capable of understanding as they were of defending, and the
Catholic bishops, the monks, the sword of Clovis, the action of the
Papacy, made an end of it before the eighth century. In the form which
it took under Arius,
Eusebius of Caesarea, and Eunomius, it has never been revived.
Individuals, among them are Milton and Sir Isasc Newton, were perhaps
tainted with it. But the Socinian tendency out of which Unitarian
doctrines have grown owes nothing to the school of Antioch or the
councils which opposed Nicaea. Neither has any Arian leader stood forth
in history with a character of heroic proportions. In the whole story
there is but one single hero -- the undaunted Athanasius -- whose mind
was equal to the problems, as his great spirit to the vicissitudes, a
question on which the future of
Christianity depended.
Culled from
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA
