Arianism

“ If the Reformation decided the supremacy of revelation over church authority, it was the contest with Arianism which cleared the way, by settling for ages the deeper and still more momentous question, which is once more coming to the surface as the gravest doubt of our time, whether a revelation is possible at all. ”

“ For how many long centuries had not the world believed in demi-gods as it had believed in gods? Arianism, on one side of its character, enabled men to cast a lingering look behind on an outworn creed which had not been wholly gross and which had not been too exacting for human frailty. Moreover, there were many texts in Holy Scripture which seemed in the most explicit language to corroborate the truth of Arius’s teaching. ”

“ The Emperor's Court did indeed at last - after many variations - abandon it, but a tradition survived till long after (and in many places) that Arianism stood for the "wealthy" and "respectable" in life.
Moreover, of those barbarians who had taken service as auxiliaries in the Roman armies, the greater part (the "Goths," for instance, as the generic term went, though that term had no longer any national meaning) had received their baptism into civilized Europe from Arian sources, and this in the old time of the fourth century when Arianism was "the thing." ”

“ To guard against the worship of a being created and temporal, and to avoid the assertion of two eternal existences, the anti-Arian or Athanasian position, already formulated by Alexander, made the personal Logos of one essence or substance with the Father, eternal as the Father, and thereby distinguishing between begetting, or the imparting of subsistence, and creating, or the calling into being from nothing, a distinction which Arianism failed to make ”

“ That the dispute with Arianism was no mere verbal dispute—that it involved a capital article of faith—a question of life or death for Christianity—a question whether the real Foundation—the essential Corner-stone—and Beginning of our faith were really, truly, and in very deed divine, and from God, and equal with God, or merely in a certain sense like to God— (an opinion which the Platonic, or any other [Pg 69] system of philosophy might have included among its tenets) —that the dispute with Arianism was no mere verbal dispute, must be evident to every upright, ingenuous, and unprejudiced mind. ”

“ The Arians affect Scripture language, but their doctrine new, as well as unscriptural. Statement of the Catholic doctrine, that the Son is proper to the Father’s substance, and eternal. Restatement of Arianism in contrast, that He is a creature with a beginning: the controversy comes to this issue, whether one whom we are to believe in as God, can be so in name only, and is merely a creature. What pretence then for being indifferent in the controversy? The Arians rely on state patronage, and dare not avow their tenets. ”

“ Again, the genius of Arianism, as a party and a doctrine, was to discard antiquity and mystery; that is, to resist and expose what is commonly called priestcraft. In proportion, then, as Cyril and Eusebius partook of that spirit, so far would they be in their own cast of mind indisposed to the Catholic system, both considered in itself and as being imposed on them.
Now, have the writers in question any leaning or tenderness for the theology of Luther and Calvin? rather they are as unconscious of its existence as of modern chemistry or astronomy. ”

“ Many of the Arians no doubt honestly thought that their position was a tenable one, and held their offices with a good conscience; but we cannot wonder that men like Athanasius and Hilary, aware of the sophistical nature of many of the arguments used, and knowing that some, at least, of the leaders were unscrupulous adventurers, should have regarded all Arianism and all Arians as deliberately dishonest. ”

“ Athanasius was restored to his see upon the death of the Arian bishop, who had been placed in it. Arianism, however, being in favour at court, he was condemned by a council convened at Arles, and by another at Milan, and was obliged to fly into the deserts. He returned with the other bishops whom Julian the apostate recalled from banishment, and in A. D. 362, held a council at Alexandria, where the belief of a consubstantial Trinity was openly professed. Many now were recovered from Arianism, and brought to subscribe the Nicene Creed. ”

“ Arianism is extinct only in the sense that it has long ceased to furnish party names. It sprang from permanent tendencies of human nature, and raised questions whose interest can never perish. As long as the Agnostic and the Evolutionist are with us, the old battlefields of Athanasius will not be left to silence. Moreover, no writer more directly joins the new world of Teutonic Christianity with the old of Greek and Roman heathenism. Arianism began its career partly as a theory of Christianity, partly as an Eastern reaction of philosophy against a gospel of the Son of God. ”

“ For while those branches of the race who moved in the vanguard of the great migration, the Vandals, the Burgundians and the Goths, readily embraced Christianity, it was Christianity in its Arian form. Arianism, which elsewhere had been branded as heresy and well-nigh stamped out, suddenly revived among the Germans; all the branches of the race who came into direct contact with peoples of civilized Latinity readily embraced it. Now one of the distinguishing features of Arian belief was its hatred of monasticism [11] . ”

“ And the political elimination of nominal Arianism in the West served to prove afresh that orthodoxy finally triumphed in that regard by enlisting on its side not only the instincts of polytheism but the interests of monarchy. It is significant that, driven from the empire, Arianism flourished best in the barbarian world, where for a time some mental freedom might be supposed to subsist. ”

“ The truly religious have been content to lapse quietly into the comparative sanity of an unformulated Arianism, they have left it to the scoffing Atheist to mock at the patent absurdities of the official creed. ”

“ Now however grossly unjust it might be to think of Arianism as if it ever meant, or held, Jesus Christ to be merely a man; yet it is true that in respect of the one great question which is at the root {241} of Christian faith,—is He God, or is He not?—it stands as offering alternatives and expedients, by which the plain answer 'yes' may be avoided ”

“ As it was from the Goths that the missionaries generally went forth to convert the other northern nations, these nations, too, for the most part, became Arians; while some of them, after having been converted by Catholics, afterwards fell into Arianism. It is curious to observe how opposite the course of conversion was among these nations to what it had been in earlier times. In the Roman empire, the Gospel worked its way up from the poor and simple people who were the first to believe it, until the emperor himself became at length a convert. ”

“ The opinions of Arianism might satisfy a cold and speculative mind: but the doctrine of the Nicene creed, most powerfully recommended by the merits of faith and devotion, was much better adapted to become popular and successful in a believing age. ”

“ One thing is clear, namely that given the actual conditions, nothing short of the test adopted would have availed to exclude the Arian doctrine. It is also I think clear, that not only was the current theology of the Eastern Church unable to cope with Arianism, but that it was itself a danger to the Church and in need of the corrective check of the Nicene definition. Hellenic as was the system of Origen, it was in its spirit Christian, and saturated with the influence of Scripture. ”

“ To minds, therefore, still insensibly thinking in terms of polytheism one can understand the attraction of the leading 198thought of Arianism, viz., one supreme, eternal, omnipotent God, God the Father, and a secondary God, God the Son, God and creature in one, and therefore the better fitted to be intermediary between the unapproachable God and fallen humanity. ”

“ But yet Arians worshipped Christ; although not very God, He is God to us. Here we have the exact difficulty with which the Church started in her conflict with heathenism presented again unsolved. The desperate struggle, the hardly earned triumph of the Christians, had been for the sake of the essential principle of heathenism! The One God was, after all, the God of the philosophers; the idea of pagan polytheism was realised and justified in Christ [19] ! To this Athanasius returns again and again (see esp. p. 360) ; it is the doom of Arianism as a Christian theology. ”

“ The text, of course, is subject to another—if more recondite—interpretation, but the history of religion has shewn that the origin of most sects has been due to people fastening upon individual texts and founding upon them doctrines both great and small.
Again,—and perhaps this was the strongest claim that Arianism could put forward,—it appealed to men’s pride and belief in the adequacy of their reason. Mankind has always hungered after a religious system based on reason, founded in reason ”

“ Bishop Bull has suggested a very ingenious interpretation of it, which is not obvious, but which, when stated, has much plausibility, as going to explain, or rather to sanction, certain modes of speech in some early Fathers of venerable authority, which have been urged by heterodox writers, and given up by Catholics of the Roman School, as savouring of Arianism. The foregoing pages have made it abundantly evident that the point of controversy between Catholics and Arians was, not whether our Lord was God, but whether He was Son of God ”

“ Here Arius is in direct antagonism to Sabellianism. Extreme opponents of Arius—Marcellus, Photius, etc.—went over the knife-edge of orthodoxy on the other side and became Sabellian. Every system of thought that has enlisted the sympathies of earnest men has its merits, and one of the merits of Arianism is that it tended to rescue the idea of a Mediator, of an actual personal Redeemer of the world revealed in the gospel, au idea that was becoming swamped in metaphysical conceptions of the Godhead. ”

“ The Son of God is infinitely holy, he says, the holiest of all the creations of the Father and far above them all. Very, very close to the Father Himself, so close that He is very nearly God. As a matter of fact, he declares, the Arians believe all that the Church teaches.
A letter is produced and read by one of the prelates; it was written by Eusebius himself to a friend. Full of heresy, it shows most clearly the double-dealing of the Arian Bishop and his party. The indignation breaks out afresh, and the letter is torn to shreds in the presence of the Council. ”

“ And in the first instance we examined the very beginning of the question which had arisen, and we thought fit to hear recited the letter of Arius, who is found to be the author of the Arian heresy, from whom also the heresy received its name, the arrangement being thus far even favourable to them, that since they had been in the habit of denying that they were Arians they might either by censure condemn the blasphemies of Arius, or by argument maintain them, or at least not refuse the name of the person, whose impiety and perfidy they followed. ”

“ Modern Arians are distinguished by the titles High and Low ; the former, like the Semi-Arians, raising the character of Christ as nearly as possible to the divinity; and the latter sinking it very nearly to mere humanity. The term Arian is now indiscriminately applied to those who consider Jesus simply subordinate to the Father. Some of them believe Christ to have been the Creator of the world ”

“ Even the monks in their distant monasteries received inspiring letters from their Patriarch, stirring them up to realize the ideals of the spiritual life and to pray for the peace of the Church. For in the midst of all his labors Athanasius still found time to write—letters against the Arians, treatises in defense of the Faith and on the religious life, brilliant, strong and convincing. It was necessary to be vigilant, for the Arians were everywhere trying to seduce men by their false doctrines, teaching that Christ was not God. ”

“ The opinion of the Arians concerning Christ, differs from the Gnostics chiefly in two respects,— (1.) The Gnostics supposed the pre-existent spirit which was in Jesus to have been an emanation from the supreme Being', according to the principles of the philosophy of that age, which made creation out of nothing, to be an impossibility. But the Arians supposed the pre-existent spirit to have been properly created, and to have animated the body of Christ instead of the human soul.— (2.) The Gnostics supposed that the pre-existent spirit was not the maker of the world ”

“ No man of the ninth century could really add anything to the arguments touching the former set forth in the works of Augustine and his Pelagian adversaries. And the substance of the discussion as to the eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ had permeated countless tomes, both Greek and Latin, from the time of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (d. 202) ; and yet neither as to the impossible topic of Predestination, nor as to the distinctly Christian mystery of the Eucharist, had the Latin Church authoritatively and finally fixed doctrine in dogma or put together the arguments. ”

“ The Arian is no less dogmatic than the Catholic. A dogmatic faith is only a definite faith; and that upon questions upon which it has become irrational to remain indefinite, after I have once been brought to a certain point of acquaintance with them. The question between the Catholic and the Arian is, not whose doctrine evades definiteness of determination, but whose dogma is in accord with the truth and its evidence. ”