Arianism

"There Was a Time When He Was Not"

All of Arianism is contained in the slogan that the Council of Nicaea anathematized: in Greek ên pote hote ouk ên — "there was a time when he was not"^[4]. Arius had sung it in his most popular work, the Thalia — from the Greek thaleia, "banquet" —, a doctrinal poem composed in the loose metre of Sotades, set to fashionable tunes and meant to be taken up even in harbours and workshops^[5]. Athanasius preserved fragments of it, including this one:

"God has not always been Father; there was a time when God was alone and was not yet Father; later, he became Father. The Son has not always existed." — Arius, Thalia, fragment preserved by Saint Athanasius, Discourses Against the Arians, I, 5–6^[6]

From this first refusal flow three theses, which the Arians repeat like an inverted catechism. First, the Son is drawn from nothing (ex ouk ontôn): he does not proceed from the substance of the Father; he was made like the rest of creatures. Next, he is by nature changeable and capable of progress: Arian texts call him treptos, "liable to change," capable of virtue as of fault — which explains, in their view, the passages of Scripture where Christ is ignorant, is amazed, or suffers^[7]. Finally, the Father is foreign to the Son in essence (xenos kat'ousian): between the Unbegotten and the Begotten there is no community of nature, only a likeness of will — the Son obeys perfectly, and that is all^[8].

Why Arius Believed He Was Defending God

Arius must be taken seriously: he did not see himself as a destroyer, but as the defender of monotheism. His starting point is a simple and seemingly pious idea: God is one, alone, unbegotten, transcendent — so far removed from the world that no intermediary begotten of him can share his essence without dividing the divine monarchy^[9]. To make the Son a second God of the same nature was, in his eyes, to fall back into polytheism or materialism — a God who "divides himself" like a body that begets.

This theology had a long pedigree. Arius had been trained at Antioch, in the circle of Lucian, the great exegete and martyr († 312), whose taste for the letter and for divine transcendence he shared^[10]. Eusebius of Nicomedia, his protector, would claim the same master: opponents spoke of the Arians as sylloukianistai, "those who studied together under Lucian"^[11]. As for Origen, whose Alexandrian school permeated all Eastern theology with its famous hierarchy of Father, Son and Spirit, scholarship still debates his exact share: some see in it the matrix of Arian subordinationism, others recall that Origen also affirms the eternal generation of the Son^[12]. Origen's exact share remains debated among specialists: suffice it here that Arianism could present itself as the faithful heir of the great Eastern theology, and not as an invention out of whole cloth.

What Arianism Is Not

The word sometimes covers, in everyday language, anything touching on the Trinity: four confusions must be cleared up, corresponding to four neighbouring articles.

Above all, Arianism is not a vague "subordinationism" — the idea that the Son would be of lower rank, which many Fathers before Nicaea express clumsily when commenting on Christ's abasements. Arianism is a complete and exclusive system: the Son is a creature, full stop, and all of Scripture must be reread accordingly^[13].

Arius, the Priest of Baucalis

Arius was then a man in his sixties, a priest in charge of the Baucalis district, the harbour of Alexandria — a much-listened-to preacher, an admired ascetic, a formidable dialectician^[14]. For his full biography — his Libyan birthplace, his formation, his years of favour and then his lonely death at Constantinople in 336 — see Arius (c. 256–336). What matters here is the doctrinal clash: around 318, Bishop Alexander preached one day on the co-eternity of Father and Son, and Arius publicly accused him of Sabellianism — of confusing the Persons^[15]. The conflict of the two symmetrical errors was set from the very first day: to avoid Sabellius, Arius fell into the opposite excess.

Alexander Condemns: The Council of Egypt

Alexander proceeded in stages: debates, warnings, then a council of some one hundred bishops of Egypt and Libya, around 318–320, which excommunicated Arius and his supporters — including the two Libyan bishops Secundus of Ptolemais and Theonas of Marmarica^[16]. Alexander notified the sentence to the whole Church by an encyclical letter, preserved by Socrates and Theodoret, in which he expounds the Catholic doctrine with an already Nicene clarity:

"We believe [...] in one Jesus Christ our Lord [...] begotten of the Father before all ages, by whom all things were made, those in heaven and those on earth; who came down, became incarnate, suffered, rose again." — Saint Alexander of Alexandria, encyclical letter, preserved by Socrates, Church History, I, 6^[17]

Arius refused to submit and left Egypt. That is where the local quarrel became an imperial crisis: he wrote to his former fellow students, and the most powerful of them answered.

The Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia: The Lucianist Network

Eusebius of Nicomedia — not to be confused with his namesake of Caesarea, the historian — sat in the Eastern capital, a stone's throw from the palace. A former pupil of Lucian like Arius, he took up his cause, gathered a council of Bithynia which asked Alexander to reinstate the priest, and wrote to the emperor^[18]. Arius's letter to Eusebius, preserved by Theodoret, shows a man sure of his orthodoxy and wounded at being persecuted:

"Bishop Alexander has violently persecuted us [...] because we refuse to say, as he does: 'Always God, always the Son; at once the Father, at once the Son.'" — Arius, letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, preserved by Theodoret of Cyrus, Church History, I, 5^[19]

Alexander's formula — always Father, always Son — is already the whole Catholic answer: if God is eternally Father, the Son is eternal like him, for one is a father only of a son. But Eusebius had the ear of the court: while bishops excommunicated one another by letter — councils against councils, from Alexandria to Antioch —, Constantine, who had just reunified the Empire in 324 and discovered with amazement a Church torn apart over what he took to be a dispute about words, decided to settle the matter himself: he would convene a council of the whole Empire^[20]. For the imperial setting, see Constantine and the Freedom of the Church.

Why Constantine convened the council

Constantine had first sent his adviser Ossius of Cordoba to carry a letter of reconciliation to both parties: the question seemed to him a subtlety for idlers^[21]. Faced with failure, he struck a decisive blow: in the summer of 325, he gathered at Nicaea, near the capital, the first council of the whole Church — tradition retains 318 Fathers, bishops come from throughout the Empire and even from Persia, many of whom bore on their bodies the marks of persecution^[22]. For the full proceedings, see Nicaea I (325); for the condensed account of the whole crisis, The Arian Controversy. Here, the essential point fits in a single word.

Homoousios: the word that decides

The Arians put forward clever formulas, all apparently biblical; each formula was turned against them through insinuations. Eusebius of Nicomedia even proposed a frank exposition of Arian doctrine — and the assembly rejected it with horror^[23]. It was then that the word which is not in Scripture was introduced, the only one that closes off every escape: homoousios — "of the same substance," consubstantial^[24]. The Son is not like the Father, nor close to the Father: He is what the Father is, God from God, with all that true begetting implies — except division, for in God to beget does not divide.

The promulgated symbol, the direct ancestor of the Creed recited every Sunday, ends with nominal anathemas aimed at the Arian slogans one by one:

"We believe [...] in one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, begotten of the Father, only-begotten, that is, of the substance of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father [...]. As for those who say: 'There was a time when he was not' and 'before he was born, he was not,' and 'he was made out of nothing,' the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes them." — Symbol of Nicaea (325), with its anathemas, Denzinger, DH 125-126^[25]

Only two bishops, Secundus and Theonas, refused to sign with Arius: exiled to Illyria with him^[26]. Along the way the council settles the date of Easter and the reintegration of the schismatics of Meletius — a sign that Nicaea intended above all to be a work of peace and unity, not a tribunal.

Eusebius of Caesarea signs "for the sake of peace"

The most instructive case is that of the great historian Eusebius of Caesarea: neither Arian nor Nicene at heart, embarrassed by a word absent from Scripture, he ended up signing — and explained to his Church, in a letter preserved by Socrates and Theodoret, why that word did not betray him:

"[...] we did not refuse the word 'consubstantial,' with a view to the peace which we are eager to keep." — Eusebius of Caesarea, letter to his Church after Nicaea, preserved by Socrates, Ecclesiastical History, I, 8^[27]

Many signed in this way, more out of imperial loyalty than conviction — Eusebius of Nicomedia himself subscribed to the symbol, refusing only the anathemas^[28]. That is the whole fragility of Nicaea: a council unanimous in appearance, half of whose signatories remained to be converted. As soon as Constantine, in his final years, drew closer to the Eusebians, the machine started up again — and this time against the Nicenes.

The three Arian families

Post-Nicaea Arianism is not a bloc: it is a nebula of parties that hate one another almost as much as they hate Nicaea. Three families emerge, distinguished by their answer to a single question — what should be said of the substance of the Son? The details of the middle family belong to its own article, Semi-Arianism; the complete map is given here for orientation.

The Anomoeans are the hardliners: Eunomius pushes the logic so far as to maintain that man can know the essence of God as adequately as God knows Himself, since the name "unbegotten" delivers it in its entirety^[29]. The Homoeans are the skilful ones: their formula of 359-360 — the Son "similar" to the Father, without the word ousia — lets everyone hear what he wishes, and it is this formula that the emperors impose as the state religion^[30]. The Homoeousians, for their part, are almost Catholic: a single iota separates them from Nicaea — homoiousios against homoousios — and many will end up crossing it, as the article Semi-Arianism will recount.

Constantius II and the manufacture of formulas

Upon Constantine's death in 337 — baptized on his deathbed by Eusebius of Nicomedia, according to the tradition reported by the historians^[31] —, the Empire was divided among his sons: Constans, Nicene, in the West; Constantius II, Arian, in the East. When Constans was assassinated in 350, Constantius became sole master — and sole master of theology. Then began a decade of manufactured councils: Sirmium in 351, which deposed Photinus of Sirmium^[32]; Ancyra in 358, which imposed the homoiousios; then the great stroke of 359, the double council of Rimini in the West — some four hundred Latin bishops, penned in and starved until they signed — and of Seleucia in the East, which imposed the "dated" formula of 22 May 359: the Son similar to the Father, with no mention of substance^[33].

It is the darkest hour: Pope Liberius, exiled in 355 for defending Athanasius, ended up signing a formula of Sirmium in 357 — a painful episode over which his defenders and his accusers still debate^[34]; the aged Ossius of Cordoba, a centenarian, who had presided at Nicaea, was dragged to Sirmium and forced to commune with the Eusebians^[35]. Saint Jerome, looking back, would sum up the bewilderment of contemporaries in the most famous sentence of the whole crisis:

"Ingemuit totus orbis, et Arianum se esse miratus est." — Saint Jerome, Dialogue Against the Luciferians, 19^[36]

"The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian." — Saint Jerome, Dialogue Against the Luciferians, 19^[37]

Athanasius against the world: five exiles

Facing the imperial machine, a single man holds firm: Athanasius, deacon at Nicaea, elected bishop of Alexandria in 328, which he would govern for forty-five years — seventeen of them in exile^[38]. Deposed at the conciliabulum of Tyre in 335 on extravagant accusations — he was accused of having murdered Bishop Arsenius and of breaking the chalice of a priest, Ischyras; Arsenius reappeared alive and the chalice never existed^[39] —, he suffered five exiles under four emperors: Trier (335-337), Rome (339-346), the Egyptian desert (356-362), then two brief banishments under Julian and Valens^[40]. Hence the proverbial saying: Athanasius contra mundum — Athanasius against the world^[41].

But the exile writes: Orations Against the Arians, On the Incarnation, History of the Arians, festal letters — a body of work that single-handedly forges the theology of Nicaea into lived doctrine. His decisive argument is not technical; it is soteriological: only God can divinize — and that is why the Saviour must be God:

"For he became man, that we might become gods." — Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54^[42]

The Tome to the Antiochenes (362) crowns the work: in it Athanasius reopens communion to the Homoeousians who confess Nicaea, closing from below the breach that the imperial formulas had opened from above^[43].

Hilary, Basil, the two Gregories: the theological counter-attack

Athanasius is not alone. In Gaul, Hilary of Poitiers — see Saint Hilary of Poitiers —, exiled to Phrygia by Constantius in 356, discovers Greek theology there and writes in exile his De Trinitate in twelve books, then a De synodis explaining the meaning of the Eastern formulas to Westerners: the first theological bridge between the two halves of the Church^[44]. Returning in 360, he hounds the Arian bishops of Italy and Gaul until they are deposed one by one — Saint Jerome would say of him that he was the "Rhône of Latin eloquence" raised against heresy^[45].

In the East, the next generation comes from the Cappadocians. Basil of Caesarea stands up to Valens, organizes the resistance of the faithful bishops and, in 375, publishes his Treatise on the Holy Spirit: against those who demote the third Person to the rank of creature — the Pneumatomachians, treated in Macedonianism —, he establishes that the Spirit receives the same honours as the Father and the Son, and therefore shares their nature^[46]. His friend Gregory of Nazianzus delivers at Constantinople, in 380, the five Theological Orations (27-31), which remain the summit of Trinitarian theology: distinction of the Persons by relations of origin — unbegotten, begotten, proceeding —, absolute unity of nature^[47]. His namesake Gregory of Nyssa completes the demolition of Eunomius in a massive Against Eunomius^[48].

"What is not united to God by adoration cannot unite to God by grace: the Spirit whom we glorify with the Father and the Son is therefore of the same nature as they." — After Saint Basil of Caesarea, Treatise on the Holy Spirit^[49]

At Milan, the young bishop Ambrose — elected in 374 — takes over in the West: his De fide refutes the court Arians, and at the council of Aquileia in 381 he has the last Homoean bishops of Illyricum, Palladius and Secundianus, deposed^[50].

Theodosius and the "all peoples" of 380

The reversal came from a catastrophe: on 9 August 378, at Adrianople, the Arian emperor Valens perished with his army facing the Goths^[51]. His successor in the East, Theodosius, a Nicene Spaniard, reversed religious policy. On 27 February 380, the edict Cunctos populos ordered "all peoples" to follow the faith of Rome and Alexandria — that of Damasus and Peter of Alexandria, named explicitly:

"Let all peoples ruled by the clemency of our administration follow the religion which the divine apostle Peter handed down to the Romans [...], that followed by Pontiff Damasus and Peter, bishop of Alexandria: to believe in one Godhead of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity." — Theodosius I, edict Cunctos populos, 27 February 380^[52]

Theodosius entered Constantinople, expelled the Homoean bishop Demophilus, and installed Gregory of Nazianzus there — then convened for May 381 an ecumenical council: the second in history^[53]. For the full proceedings, see Council of Constantinople I (381).

The one hundred and fifty Fathers and the Creed

One hundred and fifty Eastern bishops assembled — no Latins, Pope Damasus giving his assent by letter^[54]. The presidency passed from Meletius of Antioch, who died during the session, to Gregory of Nazianzus — who resigned in the face of intrigue — then to Nectarius, baptized eight days earlier^[55]. The council promulgated the Creed still sung today, which takes up Nicaea and amplifies it: against the Arians, it hammers home the eternity of the Son; against the Pneumatomachians, it confesses the divinity of the Spirit:

"[...] born of the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father [...]. And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord who gives life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son receives the same worship and the same glory." — Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381), Denzinger, DH 150^[56]

Canon 1: the list of condemned heresies

The council's first canon draws up the balance sheet of fifty-six years of crisis in a single sentence, anathematizing each family by name: the Eunomians (Anomoeans), the Arians or Eudoxians (Homoeans), the Semi-Arians or Pneumatomachians, the Sabellians, the Marcellians, the Photinians, and the Apollinarians^[57]. It is the official death certificate of Arianism in the East — and the reason why Constantinople I is counted as the second ecumenical council, despite the absence of the Latins: its faith is that of the whole Church, afterwards received by Rome without reserve^[58]. Canon 3, which gives Constantinople primacy of honour after Rome, would open another story — that of rivalries between sees — which does not belong in this article^[59].

Ulfilas and the Bible of the Goths

While the Empire was returning to Nicaea, Arianism was conquering a second empire: that of the Germans. The instrument of this conquest was called Ulfilas — Wulfila, "little wolf" in Gothic — born around 311 to a Cappadocian family captive among the Goths, consecrated bishop around 341 by Eusebius of Nicomedia himself^[60]. A Homoean missionary, he gave the Goths what no barbarian people possessed: a Bible in the Gothic language, translated from the Greek, whose most famous witness, the Codex Argenteus with its silver letters on purple parchment, is kept at Uppsala^[61]. With the alphabet he invented to write it, Ulfilas made the Goths the first Germanic Christian people — and Christian Arian.

The link between Arianism and the Germans was sealed in blood: when the Goths, driven by the Huns, asked Valens for asylum in 376, the emperor received them on condition that they accept Arian bishops^[62]. Two years later, those same Goths crushed him at Adrianople. Arianism became the religious mark of the barbarian federates — and would remain so for two centuries after the Empire's conversion.

Five Arian peoples: the table of survival

Genseric and Huneric: the persecution in Africa

The darkest chapter is African. Genseric, the Arian Vandal king, took Carthage in 439 and organized the methodical despoiling of the Catholic Church: bishops exiled, basilicas confiscated and handed over to the Arian clergy^[68]. His son Huneric (477-484) moved to open persecution: on 1 February 484, he convened at Carthage a "conference" between Catholic and Arian bishops — a parody of the 411 colloquy, rigged in advance — then unleashed a repression whose account has come down to us from the historian Victor of Vita, an eyewitness, in his History of the Persecution: bishops exiled to Corsica and the desert, laypeople mutilated, virgins tortured^[69]. The African dossier thus comes full circle: a century after Donatism — see Donatism (311-411) — Carthage suffered again for the Catholic faith, but this time against Germanic Arianism. The reconquest by Belisarius in 533-534 wiped out the Vandal kingdom and, with it, the last great Arianism of the West^[70].

Scripture: what the Arians read differently

The Arians did not reject Scripture: they read it through their system. Every verse of abasement became proof of inferiority of nature; every verse of glory was referred to a dignity conferred as a reward for Christ's virtue. The Catholic answer lies in one principle of reading which the Fathers never ceased to recall: distinguish the two natures — what is said according to the Godhead and what is said according to the assumed humanity^[71]. Then the texts order themselves.

On the side of glory, the testimonies are massive. The Prologue of John identifies the Word with God before all beginning:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." — Gospel according to Saint John, 1:1^[72]

Thomas, falling at the feet of the Risen One, confessed: "My Lord and my God" — and Christ, instead of rebuking him as Peter rebuked Cornelius, confirmed his faith^[73]. Paul wrote that Christ, "being in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped" — which presupposes equality in order to be able to strip Himself of it^[74]. And the Epistle to the Hebrews calls the Son the "radiance of the glory and imprint of the substance" of the Father^[75].

Proverbs 8:22 and John 14:28: Arius's two verses refuted

Two texts carried the whole Arian edifice — and the Fathers refuted them one by one. The first is Wisdom saying in Proverbs: "The Lord created me at the beginning of his works." The Arians saw in it the admission of the creature-Son^[76]. The answer of Athanasius and the Fathers: here Wisdom speaks insofar as she presides over creation, and the Hebrew verb — rendered ektisen in the Septuagint — also means "acquired me, possessed me", as Aquila's revision (ektesato) showed; above all, the context speaks of a Wisdom present before every work, which is the opposite of a creature^[77].

The second is Christ's word: "The Father is greater than I" (John 14:28)^[78]. Gregory of Nazianzus's answer, which has remained classic: the Father is greater according to the humanity which the Son assumed, not according to the Godhead they share — "greater" designates origin, not nature, as one says of a human father that he is "greater" than his son without being of another species^[79]. As for ignorance of the Day (Mark 13:32), the Fathers see in it the economy of the Saviour speaking as man charged with revealing to us, not as God knowing all things — or, with Augustine, a way of saying that He does not know it so as to tell it to us^[80].

"Begotten, not made": the grammar of Nicaea

The Creed opposes two verbs which Arianism confused: to beget and to create. To create is to bring forth from nothing a nature other than one's own; to beget is to communicate one's own nature — a man begets a man, God begets God^[81]. The Son is therefore begotten, not made: He receives all that the Father is, without beginning, without division, without inferiority. That is why the consubstantial is not a philosopher's word pasted onto the faith: it is the only grammar that prevents saying at once "Jesus is Lord" and "Jesus is not God" — which the Arians did all the same, praising Christ as the highest of creatures while refusing Him the worship due to God alone^[82].

The Catechism sums up the faith received: the Son is "true God, born of the Father before all ages", and the Spirit "the Lord who gives life, who proceeds from the Father" — the Trinity one in nature, distinct in Persons, which Nicaea and then Constantinople fixed against Arius, Eunomius, and the Pneumatomachians^[83].

Salvation at stake: God alone saves

There remains the final argument, the one that makes Nicaea something other than a schoolroom victory. If Christ is only a creature, even the highest, He can neither forgive sins nor divinize man: a creature does not redeem creatures, a middleman does not reconcile with God. Gregory of Nazianzus would say it against the Apollinarians, but the principle already holds from Nicaea: God alone saves, therefore the Saviour is God^[84].

"For He became man, that we might become gods; He made Himself visible through His body, that we might receive the idea of the invisible Father." — Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54^[85]

That is why the Church held firm for fifty-six years rather than compromise over an iota: the iota in question — homoousios against homoiousios — carried the salvation of the world^[86].

Modern anti-Trinitarianism: resemblance without descent

Ancient Arianism has no direct descendant: no present movement claims Arius nor traces back to him through an unbroken chain^[87]. But the error returns under other names, whenever the divinity of Christ is denied. In the 16th century, Michael Servetus († 1553) and then Faustus Socinus († 1604) revived a learned anti-Trinitarianism which produced Unitarianism^[88]. In modern times, the Jehovah's Witnesses teach that Christ is a creature — the archangel Michael incarnate — and translate the Prologue of John as "the Word was a god": the doctrinal resemblance to Arius is striking, without any historical filiation^[89]. Faced with these revivals, the Catholic answer has not changed since Athanasius: the verses of abasement are read according to the assumed humanity, and the New Testament adores Christ as God — Thomas, Paul, Hebrews, Revelation^[90].

What Nicaea fixed for ever

From the crisis, the Church kept three definitive gains. First, the Creed: every Sunday, hundreds of millions of Christians confess the Son "consubstantial with the Father" and the Spirit "the Lord who gives life" — the faith of 325 and 381 has become daily prayer^[91]. Next, the method: faced with clever formulas, the Church learned that a non-biblical word may be necessary to protect the meaning of Scripture — a lesson that would serve at Ephesus, Chalcedon, and beyond^[92]. Finally, courage: Athanasius against the world, Hilary in exile, Basil facing Valens showed that a rigged council does not make the faith, and that truth ends by prevailing over extorted signatures^[93].

"Quapropter securus judicat orbis terrarum bonos non esse, qui se dividunt ab orbe terrarum, in quacumque parte orbis terrarum." — Saint Augustine, Against the Letter of Parmenian, III^[94]

"That is why the whole world judges in safety that those who separate themselves from the whole world, in whatever part of the world, are not good." — Saint Augustine, Against the Letter of Parmenian, III^[95]

• Arius (c. 256-336)
• The Arian controversy
• Nicaea I (325)
• Council of Constantinople I (381)
• Semi-Arianism
• Sabellianism
• Modalism
• Adoptionism
• Saint Hilary of Poitiers
• The heresies of the early centuries
• Donatism (311-411)
• Constantine and the freedom of the Church