The Arian Crisis of the 4th Century
/Christianity became a favored religion in the Roman Empire, endowed with great patronage, after Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, thus legalizing Christianity. Constantine came to his decision after receiving a vision in a dream that he would conquer his enemies if he fought them under the sign of the Cross. Acting on that dream led to a decisive victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on October 12, 312.1
After suffering through centuries of persecution, the Church suddenly found herself confronted with a new set of problems which revolved around the role which the emperor played in the life of Church governance. Undue political interference on the part of the sovereign in Church affairs has come to be known as Caesaro-Papism because whenever a “Catholic prince” arrogates to himself the office of pope, “princely benevolence threatens to transform the mystical body of Christ into a department of State.”2 Not content with interfering in the administrative details of Church life which would seem pertinent to imperial rule, Constantine, who remained a catechumen after his conversion and did not receive baptism until he was on his death bed, weighed in on one of the thorniest theological issues in the history of the Church.
In late November 311, Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria, noticed a boy on the beach playing at being bishop with his friends on the anniversary of the martyrdom of Peter, Alexander’s immediate predecessor. Taking the coincidence as a sign, Alexander decided to adopt and educate the boys and their leader, Athanasius, who, after showing exceptional promise, “became a deacon and Alexander’s trusted assistant.”3 Archibald Robertson claims that Athanasius came from a wealthy family and got a classical education which allowed him to cite Plato and Aristotle, as well as developments in Neo-Platonism.4 Timothy D. Barnes maintains the opposite, claiming that Athanasius was a “man of the people,” who did not come from wealth or position. The education Athanasius received was “primarily religious,” not classical, and “he studied non-Christian matters only enough to avoid seeming either to be totally unacquainted with them or to have decided to despise them out of sheer ignorance!”5
Either way, the crisis which Athanasius was destined to resolve required a knowledge of both Scripture and philosophy. Athanasius never doubted that Christian theology had “triumphed over pagan philosophy,”6 or that the wisdom of the Greeks had been found wanting and that the demons who infested the practice of Neo-Platonism in his age had lost their former power. But he also understood that the theologians of his age could not make sense of the relationship between the persons of the Trinity without making use of Greek concepts like ousia and hypostasis if they wanted to explain how Christ was both truly God and truly man.
The orthodox were reluctant to make sacred mysteries a matter of public debate, but the heretics forced their hand. In 318 a Libyan priest by the name of Arius arrived in Alexandria and within a year he had acquired a following among that city’s faithful as a charismatic preacher and a theological trouble maker who made a name for himself among that city’s new converts and consecrated virgins by accusing Bishop Alexander of Sabellianism, a heresy which maintained that the Father and the Son were different modes of the same being rather than distinct persons. Arius argued that “if the Son were truly a Son He must have had a beginning, and that there had been therefore a time when He did not exist.”7 This meant that the Son was a creature, albeit an exalted creature high above anything else in creation, but not God, an idea congenial to that city’s Jews and new converts, who either struggled in vain to understand the Trinity or were actively hostile to the very idea. Challenged publicly, Alexander was “at first conciliatory” and tried to give Arius a fair hearing, but after it became clear that Arius was more interested in creating a political movement than clarifying a theological issue, he handed management of the crisis to his deacon Athanasius, who brought about the condemnation of Arianism in 325.
The theological problem at the heart of the Church’s understanding of this issue began with the prologue to the Gospel of St. John, when the evangelist stated first that Logos was with God and then that Logos was God. How can something or someone be both God and with God? The answer to that question was a theological concept, based on Scripture but derived with the help of Greek philosophy, known as the Trinity. When St. John referred to God as the Logos, he was claiming that the Deity was simultaneously the rational order of the universe and a person. Logos expressed the first characteristic; the second characteristic found better expression in the term “Son.” By calling him His Son, God the Father signifies that the Logos is real, which is to say He is a person with the power to act, rather than simply an intellectual concept which needs to be put into effect. “The Son,” says Athanasius:
is the Word and Wisdom of the Father: from which titles we infer His spiritual and indivisible derivation from the Father, inasmuch as the word (or reason) of a man is not part of him, nor when exercised, implies any change in the immaterial principle; much less, therefore, is it so with the Word of God. On the other hand, the Father calls Him His Son, lest, from hearing only that He was the Word, we should fail to consider Him as real, whereas the title of Son, designates Him as an existing Word, and a substantial Wisdom.8
St. Paul underscores the same point when he claims that “the Word of God is alive and active and keener than a two-edged sword.” To deny the divinity of the Son is to deny the power of the Word, but, since St. John also claimed that the Son is the Logos in a special way, to deny the divinity of the Son is also to say that God is “alogos,” without reason. The irrationality of God became a serious problem in Islam because it derived its understanding of the Son from Nestorian heretics, who denied that Christ was God. By claiming that Logos existed from the beginning and that Logos was God, John was saying that there was never a time when there wasn’t a plan in the mind of a Being who had the power to carry that plan to completion in human history. Athenagoras says that the Son is “the first offspring of the Father; not as made, for God being Mind Eternal, had from the beginning reason (τὸν λόγον) in Himself, being eternally intellectual (λογικός); but that He is so, as issuing forth.” Taken together, “Son” and “Logos” are the data of revelation out of which philosophical reason constructs the doctrine of the Trinity. According to Cardinal Newman, “Of the two titles ascribed in Scripture to our Lord, that of the Logos expresses, with peculiar force, His co-eternity in the One Almighty Father. On the other hand, the word Son has more reference to His derivation and ministrative office.”9
Jesus Christ was both the Logos Incarnate and the Son of God, which made him simultaneously imminent and transcendent in a way that resolved the dichotomy which had plagued Greek philosophy for even longer than the Trinitarian mystery puzzled Christianity. Aristotle’s god, known as the uncaused cause and the unmoved mover, was an eminently transcendent principle, but it was not a person in any recognizable sense and as a result the unmoved mover had no clear relationship to the world of immanence in which men lived and moved and had their being. Plato’s demiurge, or worker of the people, on the other hand, was intimately involved in the affairs of men, but because of that the demiurge lacked God’s transcendence. Gnosticism was an early attempt to link the two attributes of God by way of intermediary beings or emanations, which were associated with the spheres, in which the stars and planets were embedded:
The oriental doctrine of Emanations was at a very early period combined with the Christian theology. According to the system of Valentinus, a Gnostic heresiarch, who flourished in the early part of the second century, the Supreme Intelligence of the world gave existence to a line of Spirits or Eons; who were all more or less partakers of His nature, i.e. of a nature specifically the same, and included in His glory (πλήρωµα), though individually separate from the true and sovereign Deity. It is obvious, that such a doctrine as this abandons the great revealed principle above described, the incommunicable character and individuality of the Divine Essence.10
The Gnostics felt that “the emanations from the Deity were eternal with Himself, and were considered as the result, not of His will and moral energy, but of the necessary laws to which He was subjected; a doctrine which was but fatalism in another shape.”11 Like Hegel at a later date, the Manichees said that the Son and Spirit were a “necessary emanation” from the Father. In doing this they introduced “a sort of materialism into their notion of the Deity”12 and made God the slave of fate. When Christian Neo-Platonists adopted the concept of emanations as a way of closing the gap between a transcendent God and an immanent world, they infringed upon the roles of Christ as the Son and Word. Sensing that this was leading back to pantheism, the orthodox chose the Greek term προβολὴ as providing a better explanation of the relationship of the Son to the Father. Based on a definition which described “anything which proceeds, or is sent forth from the substance of another, as the fruit of a tree, or the rays of the sun,” προβολὴ eventually got incorporated into the Nicene Creed when it described the relationship of the Son to the Father as “light from light, true God from true God,” meaning that “the radiance is not the sun, and yet not foreign to it.”13 The fact that the term προβολὴ had been used by heretics did not disqualify its use by the orthodox, who saw it as the best explication of the term ὁµοούσιον, which had also been misappropriated by heretics. According to St. Athanasius, “The substance (οὐσία) of the Son is not external to the Father, or created; but it is by natural derivation from that of the Father, as the radiance comes from light. For as the radiance is not the sun, and yet not foreign to it, so is there an effluence, (ἀπόῤῥοια, Wisd. 7:25) from the Father’s substance (οὐσία) though it be indivisible. For as the sun remains the same without infringement of its nature, though it pour forth its radiance, so the Father’s substance is unchangeable, though the Son be its Image.”14 Rather than let the heretics control the narrative in a process which led inexorably to pantheism by imposing some sort of material necessity on God, the Alexandrians appropriated the term προβολὴ and all that it entailed as a way of articulating the relationship between the Father and the Son, as well as the Son’s influence in creation.
For the two centuries which followed the publication of the Gospel of St. John, theologians struggled to reconcile the relationship between the old philosophical conundrum of immanence and transcendence, by using terms from revelation like “Logos” and “son.” Hughes sees the Arian heresy as an attempt to “reconcile rationally the truths that there is but one God, that the Logos incarnate in Jesus Christ is God, and that the Logos is yet admittedly distinct from the Father,” but this caused problems for a group of people who had been schooled in Greek philosophical concepts but were newcomers to Hebrew revelation. “If the Father is God,” they reasoned, “and if God is one only, and if the Logos is not the Father, how is the Logos God?”15 The third century heretic Paul of Samosata tried to resolve the issue by denying that the Logos was God. His views were adopted by Lucian, a theology professor who taught both Arius and his classmate Eusebius of Nicomedia, the prelate who protected Arius from his opponents and turned what began as a theological dispute into a political movement.
The Arian crisis was a tale of two cities: Alexandria and Antioch. Although originally from Antioch, Arius was a trouble-maker, skilled in the sophistical perversion of Aristotelian dialectic, who launched his career in Alexandria by calling the local bishop a Sabellian tritheist. If Judaizing was the Achilles heel of the Church in Antioch, sophistry played a similar role in Alexandria, which prized its reputation for orthodoxy in an otherwise compromised eastern Church.
But the dispute was not simply doctrinal. As Christianity became the favored religion in the Roman Empire, theological disputation became a way of attracting the attention of the emperor and thereby gaining political power. The personality of Arius played a role as well. Newman calls him “turbulent by character” and a notorious “offender against ecclesiastical order,” who saw an attack on the bishop of Alexandria as a way of currying favor with the Antioch faction.16
Arius’s skill in “the art of disputation”17 recommended him to the Alexandrians, who took Paul’s speech at the Areopagus as their model and were careful not to scorn the contributions which pagan philosophy had made as a guide to a deeper understanding of the truths of revelation. Once Paul sailed to Greece after having been expelled from the synagogues of Asia Minor, philosophy became the lingua franca which allowed him to discuss Christianity with people unfamiliar with the Hebrew scriptures. Philosophy was not only necessary to proclaim the Faith, it was necessary to understand it as well for it was impossible to come to a creed based on an understanding of the Trinity without the use of philosophical concepts. “Even Athanasius,” according to Newman:
whose very gift it was, above all other Fathers, to possess a clear and accurate knowledge of the Catholic doctrine, so that all succeeding antagonists of Arianism may be truly said to have derived their powers and their arguments from him; even this keen and vigilant champion of orthodoxy, in arguing with the Gentiles for the divinity and incarnation of the Word, urges them with considerations drawn from their own philosophical notions concerning Him. Not that he was ignorant how unlike orthodoxy, and how like Arianism, such notions were, but he bore in mind the necessity of favourably disposing the minds of the Gentiles to listen to his teaching; and he was aware that it was one thing to lay the rudiments of the faith in an ignorant or heathen mind, and another to defend the faith against heretics, or to teach it dogmatically.18
Schooled in Greek philosophy, the Alexandrians understood that there is something true in every religion, but they also understood that heathen philosophers were innocent in a way that apostates and heretics were not and that to the latter, no accommodation could be made. Origen and the Church Fathers of his day “were not unwilling to be on a footing of intercourse with the heathen philosophers of their day, in order, if it were possible, to lead them into the truth; but deliberate heretics and apostates, those who had known the truth, and rejected it, were objects of their abhorrence, and were avoided from the truest charity to them.”19 Ever since St. John the Evangelist made the decision to write his gospel in Greek and employ the philosophical terminology which existed in that language, Christians understood that:
The philosophy of the Greeks, limited and particular as it is, contains the rudiments of that really perfect knowledge which is beyond this world, conversant in intellectual objects, and those still more spiritual, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, before they were made clear to us by our Great Teacher, who reveals the holy of holies, and still holier truths in an ascending scale, to those who are genuine heirs of the Lord’s adoption.20
Because God had placed what the Greeks called “logoi spermatikoi” at the heart of creation itself, even pagan philosophers could attain not only an understanding of the existence of God, as Paul pointed out in his letter to the Romans, but an inchoate understanding of the Trinity as well. In fact, Newman claims that:
It is unquestionable that, from very early times, traditions have been afloat through the world, attaching the notion of a Trinity, in some sense or other, to the First Cause. Not to mention the traces of this doctrine in the classical and the Indian mythologies, we detect it in the Magian hypothesis of a supreme and two subordinate antagonist deities, in Plutarch’s Trinity of God, matter, and the evil spirit, and in certain heresies in the early Church, which, to the Divine Being and the Demiurgus, added a third original principle, sometimes the evil spirit, and sometimes matter.21
Philosophy was not false but, given the fallen nature of the intellect, it could and often did descend into sophistry in the hands of Jews and heretics, who had already turned their backs on whatever Logos they already possessed and engaged in theological discussions, as a result, “not with any definite ecclesiastical object, but as a mere trial of skill, or as a literary recreation; regardless of the mischief thus done to the simplicity of Christian morals, and the evil encouragement given to fallacious reasonings.”22 Abandoning the understanding that they were dealing with a mystery, the heretics ignored “the incomprehensibility of the Divine Essence” and tried to catch the Trinity in the net of science by using the “analogy of sense,” supposing that “they steered in a safe course, when they avoided every contradiction of a mathematical and material nature.”23
In the hands of sophists, analogical terms like “son” were taken literally in a way that distorted their meaning when applied to ineffable mystery. Arguments based on physics “were made the basis of discussions upon possibilities and impossibilities in a spiritual substance”24 and led to conclusions which, no matter how false they were in reality, sounded plausible to an audience which had been raised to respect Greek philosophy, paving the way for the Arian heresy. The logic seemed impeccable, but the result was heresy, or as Epiphanius put it describing the Anomæans: “Aiming to exhibit the Divine Nature by means of Aristotelic syllogisms and geometrical data, they are naturally led on to declare that Christ is not the very Son of God.”25
An early example of the unfortunate combination of Judaism and Neoplatonism can be found in the writing of Philo of Alexandria (born 25 BC), a Jew who had attempted a synthesis of Greek Philosophy and Judaism in a way which could have proven prophetic but ended up as paradigmatic of later attempts at avoiding the radical implications which the Trinity would pose for both schools of thought. Armed with both the Books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, Philo was ideally situated to create the synthesis that would later undergird Christianity. The material was already there implicitly in the λόγος of Plato, who:
postulated a demiurge, which “denoted the divine energy in forming the world, (δηµιουργός,) or the previous all-perfect incommunicable design of it, (hence called µονογενής,) [and] was arrayed in the attributes of personality, made the instrument of creation, and the revealed image of the incomprehensible God.”26
Crippled by an obsolete understanding of monotheism, Alexandria’s Jews were unable to discern the “logoi spermatikoi” adumbrating the Trinity in the logos of Plato, and thwarted the emerging sense of God the Son as one in being with the Father by demoting the Son to the status of a creature. In doing this they prepared the way for Arianism’s emergence among the Christian population of Alexandria. As Newman points out, this verdict applies a fortiori to Philo, who prepared the way for Arianism by associating his understanding of God “with Platonic notions” which “separated the idea of the Λόγος from that of the eternal God.”27 Following in Philo’s footsteps, Antioch’s heretical bishop, Paul of Samosata, “denied that the Logos is truly divine.”28 In addition to being bishop, Paul had political connections as well, and owed his fame to Zenobia, Queen of the East, “who is said to have been a Jewess by birth or creed”29 and as such “little solicitous for the credit or influence of the Christian Church within her dominions.”30
Before her involvement with Paul, Zenobia had been on good terms with Emperor Alexander Severus (222-235), who made Syria the center of Imperial syncretism by erecting a chapel in honor of Abraham, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Christ as “fit emblem of that system.”31 Zenobia’s instructor in the Eclectic Philosophy was “the celebrated Longinus,” who got his ideas from Plotinus’s student Porphyry, who in turn became the inspiration of both Iamblichus and Libanius, as the Eclectic Philosophy which took Plato as its inspiration degenerated into magic under the avid patronage of Julian the Apostate.32
Between 263 and 268, Paul had been condemned by three Church councils held in Antioch, but his friendship with Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, to whom Antioch was then subject, prevented the sentence of deposition from being carried out until 272, when Emperor Aurelian defeated Zenobia and brought Antioch under Roman imperial rule again.33
Arianism arose in Antioch because the Jews were strong there, and because the Jews were interested in denying the honor due to Christ as the Son of God by thwarting the emerging understanding of the Trinity, which they perceived as an affront to monotheism and, therefore, as weakening their hold over the mind of Judaizing Christians. No matter what their motivation, the Jews were heavily involved in promoting heresy and reaping the political benefits which flowed from Christian disunity. Newman describes Paul of Samosata’s early manifestation of the Arian heresy as “a kind of Judaism in doctrine, adopted to please [Zenobia] his Jewish patroness.”34 The heresy of Paul was “not likely to be very systematic or profound” because it was based on “the use of those disputations, and sceptical inquiries, which belonged to the heathen academies . . . scattering up and down the seeds of errors, which sprang up and bore fruit in the generation after him.”35 That very lack of profundity, however, made heretical arguments more plausible than sacred mysteries, which the orthodox would have preferred not to discuss in public. Paul denied the divinity of Christ, not so much out of theological motives, but because he had fallen under the spell of “a judaizing princess,” who was “the most illustrious personage of her times,” possessing as a result “influence enough among the Christians, to seduce the Metropolitan himself from the orthodox faith.”36 Antioch became the spiritual home of Arianism because Jewish influence led to the relaxation of morals, and that led to a coldness of faith which in turn led to the corrupted state of the Church there.37 The form which linked the various manifestations of spiritual corruption was Judaism, and the first manifestation of heresy among the Christian population was Judaizing. Even after the intensity of the Arian struggle had abated, St. John Chrysostom’s concern about the lingering effect of Judaizing on the Christians of Antioch led him to write Adversos Judaeos because, even then, the Jews of Antioch “manifested a rancorous malevolence towards the zealous champions of the Church” and
courted the Christian populace by arts adapted to captivate and corrupt the instable and worldly-minded. Their pretensions to magical power gained them credit with the superstitious, to whom they sold amulets for the cure of diseases; their noisy spectacles attracted the curiosity of the idle, who weakened their faith, while they disgraced their profession, by attending the worship of the synagogue.38
[…] This is just an excerpt from the March 2021 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!
Footnotes:
Available by request.
