Arianism
ARIANISM is the heretical doctrine promulgated by the Christian Alexandrian priest Arius (c. 250–336) that asserted the radical primacy of the Father over the Son. Three distinct streams of influence merged in the sea of doctrinal upheaval of Christianity in the fourth century: (1) the theological system developed by Arius himself, which was his private and pastoral accomplishment; (2) the moderate and conservative Origenism of the majority of Eastern bishops who found themselves in consonance with Arius's own Origenian background; and (3) the political initiatives of these bishops against Alexander of Alexandria. The complex state of church affairs arising from the confluence of these three streams has become known as the Arian controversy.
Without Arius the controversy would never have existed. Paradoxically, however, the Alexandrian priest contributed more to the name of the crisis than to the shaping of its doctrinal issues. In Arius's thought, certain trends of Alexandrian theology, formulated by Origen a few generations earlier, reached their ultimate consequences. Arius's concept of the Christian godhead was monarchic, that is, it held that the first and unique absolute principle of divinity is the Father. Consequently, any other divine reality was considered by him as secondary to the Father. He applied this view first of all to the Logos, the Word of God, the Son who becomes the instrument of the divine plan of creation and salvation. The Son, being bound to the decision of the Father in the very process of his own generation as the Son, is not eternal in the same sense as the Father is eternal; more important, he is not eternal because only the Father is ungenerated. On the other hand, being the instrument of the fulfillment of the Father's will, the Son is by nature linked with the divine creation. He is, so to speak, the first transcendent creature, the principle of all things. Arius developed several Origenian insights in a way that led him finally to contradict Origen's notion of the godhead. In the course of his systematic inquiry, he not only urges traditional forms of trinitarian subordinationism, he pleads also for a radical dissimilarity among the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
It is not easy to garner an authentic picture of Arius's teachings on the incarnation of the Word and his interpretation of the gospel narratives. His main opponents, Alexander of Alexandria and Athanasius, have transmitted no direct evidence from Arius on these points; one must deduce Arius's conceptions from what his opponents denounce and refute in their anti-Arian writings. Arius's teachings on incarnation were probably traditional and reflective of Origen's christological legacy. Arius, like Origen, advocated that Christians should imitate the Son's asceticism and contemplate the mystery of his kenosis, which involved the Son even in the experience of death. The final glorification means that the risen Christ earned the right to be recognized in his divine rank as the Son of God. It has been suggested that Arius conceived of Jesus as being without a human soul, the Logos himself taking its place, but there is no support for this thesis in Arius's own writings.
Underlying the whole of Arius's thought is a philosophical perspective that guarantees the uniqueness of his system among the Origenian-type theologies current in the Greek-speaking churches of the first half of the fourth century. Arius's writings show a passionate concern for the radical transcendency of the first principle in the godhead, and he interprets the Christian notion of the Son in light of a rigorous, metaphysical deduction about the nature of the Son as proceeding from the first principle, his Father. Sharing the metaphysical concerns of Plotinus in Ennead 5 but using the Christian categories of Father and Son, Arius develops his view of God and the world only in regard to the origination of the second principle of the godhead, without regard to the teaching of the New Testament on the full divinity of Christ.
This underlying point of view seems to have shaped Arius's thought more than anything else. It was for this reason that he remained relatively isolated in the theological scene of his time, before as well as after his condemnation in Nicaea in 325. The misunderstandings to which his system led are best exemplified by the public statements against him by Alexander of Alexandria and Athanasius. Even the Eastern bishops, who for a time became his main supporters, ignored the merits of his rigorous logic and rejected his conclusions concerning the nature of the Son.
The Eastern bishops contributed in their own way to the controversy by their conservative politics. What Athanasius and other supporters of the Nicene Creed denounced as Arianism in the thought and the writings of certain Eastern bishops basically amounted to the Eastern bishops' opposition to the term homoousios ("same substance"), which had been canonized at Nicaea, and their preference for more biblical, more traditional, and often more or less subordinationist formulations, in the tradition of Origen.
The main party of bishops was called Homoeans, from homoios, meaning "similar" rather than "same," because they stressed the similitude of the Son to the Father in biblical terms, without dogmatic precision. The most prominent figures among the so-called Semi-Arians actually reverted to Nicene orthodoxy after the death of Emperor Constantius II (337–361). A true Arianism, which radicalized the rationalistic theology of Arius, recurred only once, in Alexandria, from about 355 to 366, with Aetios and Eunomios as its leaders.
Not only bishops, clerics, and church communities but emperors also may be called Arians during the struggles of the fourth century. Constantine, however, was never called Arian, even though he allowed the pro-Arian bishops to protect Arius during his lifetime. His son and successor, Constantius II, following in his father's footsteps, became an Arian in the eyes of the pro-Nicene bishops who were persecuted under his reign; it is difficult, however, to discern a precise theological motivation in the religious concerns of Constantius's complex personality. The emperor Valens (364–378) supported the pro-Arian majority of bishops in the East without true personal conviction. Arianism, transmitted to the Teutonic tribes, survived in the West until the sixth century.
Bibliography
A general survey on the nature and origins of Arianism can be found in Jaroslav Pelikan's The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 100–600, vol. 1 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago, 1971). Thomas A. Kopecek's A History of Neo-Arianism, 2 vols., "Patristic Monograph Series," no. 8 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), as well as Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh's Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (Philadelphia, 1981), are useful introductions to specific aspects of Arianism. A survey of current research is provided in Arianism: Historical and Theological Reassessments, edited by Robert C. Gregg (Philadelphia, 1985).
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