318 - Arianism
Arianism is a heresy, named from its most prominent representative, Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria (d.336). It denied that the Son was of the same substance (Gk. homoousios) with the Father and reduced him to the rank of a creature, though preexistent before the world. No Christological heresy of ancient Christianity was more widely accepted or tenacious. During a part of the fourth century it was the ruling creed in the Eastern Church, though there were constant and vigorous protests by the orthodox party. It was also the form of Christianity to which most of the barbarian Teutonic races were at first converted.
From the age of Constantine to that of Clovis and Theodoric, the temporal interests both of the Romans and Barbarians were deeply involved in the theological disputes of Arianism. The historian may therefore be permitted respectfully to withdraw the veil of the sanctuary; and to deduce the progress of reason and faith, of error and passion, from the school of Plato to the decline and fall of the empire.
Arianism had its rise in an attempt to express with philosophical precision the relation of the three members of the Holy Trinity; God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. About 318 A.D., Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, taught that God was from eternity but that the Son and the Spirit were his creations. Over the teaching of Arius, a controversy arose which threatened the unity of the church. Accordingly, Constantine intervened and summoned the ecumenical council of Nicaea to decide upon the orthodoxy of Arius. In 325 the council accepted the formula of Athanasius that the Son was of the same substance (homo-ousion) as the Father, which was the doctrine of the West. Arius was exiled.
The creed of Arianism held that the Father alone is God; he alone is unbegotten, eternal, wise, good, unchangeable. He is separated by an infinite chasm from man. God can not communicate his essence. The Son of God is preexistent, "before time and before the world," and "before all creatures." He is a middle being between God and the world. But, on the other hand, Christ is himself a "creature," the first creature of God, through whom the Father called other creatures into existence. He is "made," not of "the essence" of the Father, but "out of nothing," by "the will" of the Father, before all conceivable time, yet in time. He is not eternal, and there was a time when he was not." Neither was he unchangeable by creation, but subject to the vicissitudes of a created being. By following the good uninterruptedly, he became unchangeable. It was expressly asserted by the Arians that the Son does not perfectly know the Father, and therefore can not perfectly reveal him. He is essentially different from the Father (heteroousios, in opposition to the orthodox formula, homoousios, "coequal," and the semi-Arian homoiousios, "similar in essence"). Aetius and Eunomius afterward more strongly expressed this by calling him unlike the Father (anomoios). As to the humanity of Christ, Arius ascribed to him only a human body with an animal soul, not a rational soul.
Not long after the Nicene Council an Arian and semi-Arian reaction took place, and acquired for a time the ascendancy in the empire. Arianism entered the stage of its political power. This was a period of the greatest excitement in Church and State: Council was held against council; creed was set up against creed; anathema was hurled against anathema. "The highways," says the impartial heathen historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, "were covered with galloping bishops." The churches, the theaters, the hippodromes, the feasts, the markets, the streets, the baths, and the shops of Constantinople and other large cities were filled with dogmatic disputes.
The Nicene creed found many opponents among the eastern bishops who did not wish to exclude the Arians from the church. The leader of this party was Eusebius of Caesarea. In 335 they brought about the deposition of Athanasius, who had been bishop of Alexandria since 328. After the death of Constantine, Athanasius was permitted to return to his see, only to be expelled again in 339 by Constantius, who was under the influence of Eusebius. He took refuge in the West, where the Pope Julius gave him his support. At a general council of the church held at Serdica (Sofia) in 343 there was a sharp division between East and West, but the supporters of Athanasius were in the majority, and he and the other orthodox eastern bishops were reinstated in their sees (345 AD).
When Constantius became sole ruler of the empire (353 AD) the enemies of Athanasius once more gained the upper hand. The emperor forced a general council convoked at Milan in 353 to condemn and depose Athanasius, while the Pope Liberius, who supported him, was exiled to Macedonia. A new council held at Sirmium in 357 tried to secure religious peace by forbidding the use of the word "substance" in defining the relation of the Father and the Son, and sanctioned only the term homoios (like). The adherents of this creed were called Homoeans. Although they were not Arians, their solution was rejected by the conservatives in both East and West. In 359 a double council was held, the western bishops meeting at Ariminum, the eastern at Seleucia. The result was the acceptance of the Sirmian creed, although the western council had to be almost starved before it yielded. Under Julian and Jovian the Arians enjoyed full toleration, and while Valentinian I pursued a similar policy, Valens went further and gave Arianism his support.
In the meantime, however, the labors of the three great Cappadocians - Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa - had already done much to reconcile the eastern bishops to the Nicaean confession and, with the accession of Theododius I, the fate of Arianism was sealed. A council of the eastern church met at Constantinople in 381 and accepted the Nicene creed. The Arian bishops were deposed and assemblies of the heretics forbidden by imperial edicts. Among the subjects of the empire Arianism rapidly died out, although it existed for a century and a half as the faith of several Germanic peoples.
How marvelous was the spread of the Arian heresy! For more than 300 years (nearly the age of modern Protestantism) it devastated the faith of thousands, and it has been resuscitated in modern Socinianism. The Imperial Russians, Olga and Wladimir I., received their baptism from Constantinople when that church was in communion with Rome ; for the schism of Photius had, for the time, been healed. In the year 368, the Latin Emperor Valens was baptized, also, at Constantinople; but it was by Eudoxius, the Arch-Arian Bishop of that See, who, at the same time, imposed on the Emperor a solemn oath, never to renounce the Arian impiety, and to drive away all its opponents. He kept the vow too well.
The church legislation of Theodosius was confined, of course, to the limits of the Roman Empire. Beyond it, among the barbarians of the West, who had received Christianity in the form of Arianism during the reign of the Emperor Valens, it maintained itself for two centuries longer, though more as a matter of accident than choice and conviction. Through Valens the heresy was conveyed to the Goths. It spread through their various tribes, and envenomed them with so fierce a hatred of Catholics, that their cruelties rivaled those of the ancient Pagans.
It was in one of these persecutions (A.D. 586) that the martyr St. Hermeuegild, who had been converted from Arianism by his wife, met his death at the command of his own father, Leovigild, in consequence of his refusal to receive communion from an Arian prelate. Yet in some respects the virtues of these Arian Goths put to shame the evil lives of too many Catholics, whose immorality, Salvian tells us, was such as to shock the very barbarians ; and he asks of what use it is for such persons to reproach the Goths and Vandals with heresy.
The Ostrogoths remained Arin until 553; the Visigoths, till the Synod of Toledo in 589; the Suevi in Spam, till 560; the Vandals, who conquered North Africa in 429, and furiously persecuted the catholics, till 530, when they were expelled by Belisarius; the Burgundians, till their incorporation in the Frank Empire in 534; the Lombards in Italy, till the middle of the seventh century. Alaric, the first conqueror of Rome, Genseric, the conqueror of North Africa, Theodoric the Great, King of Italy, were Arians; and the first Teutonic translation of the Scriptures of which important fragments remain came from the Arian or semi-Arian missionary Ulfilas.
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