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Arianism
(The Link to Jehovah's Witnesses Beliefs About
The Deity of Jesus)
A heresy which
arose in the fourth century, and denied the Divinity of Jesus Christ.
DOCTRINE
First among the
doctrinal disputes which troubled Christians after Constantine had
recognized the Church in A.D. 313, and the parent of many more
during some three centuries, Arianism occupies a large place in
ecclesiastical history. It is not a modern form of unbelief, and
therefore will appear strange in modern eyes. But we shall better
grasp its meaning if we term it an Eastern attempt to rationalize
the creed by stripping it of mystery so far as the relation of
Christ to God was concerned. In the New Testament and in Church
teaching Jesus of Nazareth appears as the Son of God. This name He
took to Himself (Matthew 11:27; John 10:36), while the Fourth Gospel
declares Him to be the Word (Logos), Who in the beginning was with
God and was God, by Whom all things were made.
A similar doctrine is laid down by St. Paul, in his undoubtedly
genuine Epistles to the Ephesians, Colossians, and Philippians. It
is reiterated in the Letters of Ignatius, and accounts for Pliny's
observation that Christians in their assemblies chanted a hymn to
Christ as God. But the question how the Son was related to the
Father (Himself acknowledged on all hands to be the one Supreme
Deity), gave rise, between the years A.D. 60 and 200, to a number of
Theosophic systems, called generally Gnosticism, and having for
their authors Basilides, Valentinus, Tatian, and other Greek
speculators. Though all of these visited Rome, they had no following
in the West, which remained free from controversies of an abstract
nature, and was faithful to the creed of its baptism.
Intellectual centers were chiefly Alexandria and Antioch, Egyptian
or Syrian, and speculation was carried on in Greek. The Roman Church
held steadfastly by tradition. Under these circumstances, when
Gnostic schools had passed away with their "conjugations" of Divine
powers, and "emanations" from the Supreme unknowable God (the "Deep"
and the "Silence") all speculation was thrown into the form of an
inquiry touching the "likeness" of the Son to His Father and
"sameness" of His Essence. Catholics had always maintained that
Christ was truly the Son, and truly God. They worshipped Him with
divine honours; they would never consent to separate Him, in idea or
reality, from the Father, Whose Word, Reason, Mind, He was, and in
Whose Heart He abode from eternity.
But the technical terms of doctrine were not fully defined; and even
in Greek words like essence (ousia), substance (hypostasis),
nature (physis), person (hyposopon) bore a variety of
meanings drawn from the pre-Christian sects of philosophers, which
could not but entail misunderstandings until they were cleared up.
The adaptation of a vocabulary employed by Plato and Aristotle to
Christian truth was a matter of time; it could not be done in a day;
and when accomplished for the Greek it had to be undertaken for the
Latin, which did not lend itself readily to necessary yet subtle
distinctions. That disputes should spring up even among the orthodox
who all held one faith, was inevitable. And of these wranglings the
rationalist would take advantage in order to substitute for the
ancient creed his own inventions. The drift of all he advanced was
this: to deny that in any true sense God could have a Son; as
Mohammed tersely said afterwards, "God neither begets, nor is He
begotten" (Quran, 112). We have learned to call that denial
Unitarianism. It was the ultimate scope of Arian opposition to what
Christians had always believed. But the Arian, though he did not
come straight down from the Gnostic, pursued a line of argument and
taught a view which the speculations of the Gnostic had made
familiar. He described the Son as a second, or inferior God,
standing midway between the First Cause and creatures; as Himself
made out of nothing, yet as making all things else; as existing
before the worlds of the ages; and as arrayed in all divine
perfections except the one which was their stay and foundation. God
alone was without beginning, unoriginate; the Son was originated,
and once had not existed. For all that has origin must begin to be.
Such is the
genuine doctrine of Arius. Using Greek terms, it denies that the Son
is of one essence, nature, or substance with God; He is not
consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father, and therefore
not like Him, or equal in dignity, or co-eternal, or within the real
sphere of Deity. The Logos which St. John exalts is an attribute,
Reason, belonging to the Divine nature, not a person distinct from
another, and therefore is a Son merely in figure of speech. These
consequences follow upon the principle which Arius maintains in his
letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, that the Son "is no part of the
Ingenerate." Hence the Arian sectaries who reasoned logically were
styled Anomoeans: they said that the Son was "unlike" the Father.
And they defined
God as simply the Unoriginate. They are also termed the
Exucontians (ex ouk onton), because they held the creation of
the Son to be out of nothing.
But a view so
unlike tradition found little favour; it required softening or
palliation, even at the cost of logic; and the school which
supplanted Arianism from an early date affirmed the likeness, either
without adjunct, or in all things, or in substance, of the Son to
the Father, while denying His co-equal dignity and co-eternal
existence. These men of the Via Media were named Semi-Arians. They
approached, in strict argument, to the heretical extreme; but many
of them held the orthodox faith, however inconsistently; their
difficulties turned upon language or local prejudice, and no small
number submitted at length to Catholic teaching.
The Semi-Arians attempted for years to invent a compromise between
irreconcilable views, and their shifting creeds, tumultuous
councils, and worldly devices tell us how mixed and motley a crowd
was collected under their banner. The point to be kept in
remembrance is that, while they affirmed the Word of God to be
everlasting, they imagined Him as having become the Son to create
the worlds and redeem mankind. Among the ante-Nicene writers, a
certain ambiguity of expression may be detected, outside the school
of Alexandria, touching this last head of doctrine. While Catholic
teachers held the Monarchia, viz. that there was only one God; and
the Trinity, that this Absolute One existed in three distinct
subsistences; and the Circuminession, that Father, Word, and Spirit
could not be separated, in fact or in thought, from one another; yet
an opening was left for discussion as regarded the term "Son," and
the period of His "generation" (gennesis).
Five ante-Nicene Fathers are especially quoted: Athenagoras, Tatian,
Theophilus of Antioch, Hippolytus, and Novatian, whose language
appears to involve a peculiar notion of Sonship, as though It did
not come into being or were not perfect until the dawn of creation.
To these may be added Tertullian and Methodius. Cardinal Newman held
that their view, which is found clearly in Tertullian, of the Son
existing after the Word, is connected as an antecedent with Arianism.
Petavius construed the same expressions in a reprehensible sense;
but the Anglican Bishop Bull defended them as orthodox, not without
difficulty. Even if metaphorical, such language might give shelter
to unfair disputants; but we are not answerable for the slips of
teachers who failed to perceive all the consequences of doctrinal
truths really held by them. From these doubtful theorizings Rome and
Alexandria kept aloof. Origen himself, whose unadvised speculations
were charged with the guilt of Arianism, and who employed terms like
"the second God," concerning the Logos, which were never adopted by
the Church -- this very Origen taught the eternal Sonship of the
Word, and was not a Semi-Arian. To him the Logos, the Son, and Jesus
of Nazareth were one ever-subsisting Divine Person, begotten of the
Father, and, in this way, "subordinate" to the source of His being.
He comes forth from God as the creative Word, and so is a
ministering Agent, or, from a different point of view, is the
First-born of creation. Dionysius of Alexandria (260) was even
denounced at Rome for calling the Son a work or creature of God; but
he explained himself to the pope on orthodox principles, and
confessed the Homoousian Creed.
HISTORY
Paul of Samosata,
who was contemporary with Dionysius, and Bishop of Antioch, may be
judged the true ancestor of those heresies which relegated Christ
beyond the Divine sphere, whatever epithets of deity they allowed
Him. The man Jesus, said Paul, was distinct from the Logos, and, in
Milton's later language, by merit was made the Son of God. The
Supreme is one in Person as in Essence. Three councils held at
Antioch (264-268, or 269) condemned and excommunicated the
Samosatene. But these Fathers would not accept the Homoousian
formula, dreading lest it be taken to signify one material or
abstract substance, according to the usage of the heathen
philosophies. Associated with Paul, and for years cut off from the
Catholic communion, we find the well-known Lucian, who edited the
Septuagint and became at last a martyr. From this learned man the
school of Antioch drew its inspiration. Eusebius the historian,
Eusebius of Nicomedia, and Arius himself, all came under Lucian's
influence. Not, therefore, to Egypt and its mystical teaching, but
to Syria, where Aristotle flourished with his logic and its tendency
to Rationalism, should we look for the home of an aberration which
had it finally triumphed, would have anticipated Islam, reducing the
Eternal Son to the rank of a prophet, and thus undoing the Christian
revelation.
Arius, a Libyan
by descent, brought up at Antioch and a school-fellow of Eusebius,
afterwards Bishop of Nicomedia, took part (306) in the obscure
Meletian schism, was made presbyter of the church called "Baucalis,"
at Alexandria, and opposed the Sabellians, themselves committed to a
view of the Trinity which denied all real distinctions in the
Supreme. Epiphanius describes the heresiarch as tall, grave, and
winning; no aspersion on his moral character has been sustained; but
there is some possibility of personal differences having led to his
quarrel with the patriarch Alexander whom, in public synod, he
accused of teaching that the Son was identical with the Father
(319). The actual circumstances of this dispute are obscure; but
Alexander condemned Arius in a great assembly, and the latter found
a refuge with Eusebius, the Church historian, at Caesarea. Political
or party motives embittered the strife. Many bishops of Asia Minor
and Syria took up the defence of their "fellow-Lucianist," as Arius
did not hesitate to call himself. Synods in Palestine and Bithynia
were opposed to synods in Egypt. During several years the argument
raged; but when, by his defeat of Licinius (324),
Constantine became master of the Roman world, he determined on
restoring ecclesiastical order in the East, as already in the West
he had undertaken to put down the Donatists at the Council of Arles.
Arius, in a letter to the Nicomedian prelate, had boldly rejected
the Catholic faith. But Constantine, tutored by this worldly-minded
man, sent from Nicomedia to Alexander a famous letter, in which he
treated the controversy as an idle dispute about words and enlarged
on the blessings of peace. The emperor, we should call to mind, was
only a catechumen, imperfectly acquainted with Greek, much more
incompetent in theology, and yet ambitious to exercise over the
Catholic Church a dominion resembling that which, as Pontifex
Maximus, he wielded over the pagan worship. From this Byzantine
conception (labelled in modern terms Erastianism) we must derive the
calamities which during many hundreds of years set their mark on the
development of Christian dogma. Alexander could not give way in a
matter so vitally important. Arius and his supporters would not
yield. A council was, therefore, assembled in Nicaea, in Bithynia,
which has ever been counted the first ecumenical, and which held its
sittings from the middle of June, 325. (See FIRST COUNCIL OF
NICAEA). It is commonly said that Hosius of Cordova presided.
The Pope, St. Silvester, was represented by his legates, and 318
Fathers attended, almost all from the East. Unfortunately, the acts
of the Council are not preserved. The emperor, who was present, paid
religious deference to a gathering which displayed the authority of
Christian teaching in a manner so remarkable. From the first it was
evident that Arius could not reckon upon a large number of patrons
among the bishops. Alexander was accompanied by his youthful deacon,
the ever-memorable Athanasius who engaged in discussion with the
heresiarch himself, and from that moment became the leader of the
Catholics during well-nigh fifty years.
The Fathers appealed to tradition against the innovators, and were
passionately orthodox; while a letter was received from Eusebius of
Nicomedia, declaring openly that he would never allow Christ to be
of one substance with God. This avowal suggested a means of
discriminating between true believers and all those who, under that
pretext, did not hold the Faith handed down. A creed was drawn up on
behalf of the Arian party by Eusebius of Caesarea in which every
term of honour and dignity, except the oneness of substance, was
attributed to Our Lord. Clearly, then, no other test save the
Homoousion would prove a match for the subtle ambiguities of
language that, then as always, were eagerly adopted by dissidents
from the mind of the Church.
A formula had been discovered which would serve as a test, though
not simply to be found in Scripture, yet summing up the doctrine of
St. John, St. Paul, and Christ Himself, "I and the Father are one".
Heresy, as St. Ambrose remarks, had furnished from its own scabbard
a weapon to cut off its head. The "consubstantial" was accepted,
only thirteen bishops dissenting, and these were speedily reduced to
seven. Hosius drew out the conciliar statements, to which anathemas
were subjoined against those who should affirm that the Son once did
not exist, or that before He was begotten He was not, or that He was
made out of nothing, or that He was of a different substance or
essence from the Father, or was created or changeable. Every bishop
made this declaration except six, of whom four at length gave way.
Eusebius of Nicomedia withdrew his opposition to the Nicene term,
but would not sign the condemnation of Arius. But the emperor, who
considered heresy as rebellion, the alternative proposed was
subscription or banishment; and, on political grounds, the Bishop of
Nicomedia was exiled not long after the council, involving Arius in
his ruin. The heresiarch and his followers underwent their sentence
in Illyria. But these incidents, which might seem to close the
chapter, proved a beginning of strife, and led on to the most
complicated proceedings of which we read in the fourth century.
While the plain Arian creed was defended by few, those political
prelates who sided with Eusebius carried on a double warfare against
the term "consubstantial", and its champion, Athanasius. This
greatest of the Eastern Fathers had succeeded Alexander in the
Egyptian patriarchate (326). He was not more than thirty years of
age; but his published writings, antecedent to the Council, display,
in thought and precision, a mastery of the issues involved which no
Catholic teacher could surpass. His unblemished life, considerate
temper, and loyalty to his friends made him by no means easy to
attack. But the wiles of Eusebius, who in 328 recovered
Constantine's favour, were seconded by Asiatic intrigues, and a
period of Arian reaction set in. Eustathius of Antioch was deposed
on a charge of Sabellianism (331), and the Emperor sent his command
that Athanasius should receive Arius back into communion. The saint
firmly declined. In 325 the heresiarch was absolved by two councils,
at Tyre and Jerusalem, the former of which deposed Athanasius on
false and shameful grounds of personal misconduct. He was banished
to Trier, and his sojourn of eighteen months in those parts cemented
Alexandria more closely to Rome and the Catholic West.
Meanwhile, Constantia, the Emperor's sister, had recommended Arius,
whom she thought an injured man, to Constantine's leniency. Her
dying words affected him, and he recalled the Lybian, extracted from
him a solemn adhesion to the Nicene faith, and ordered Alexander,
Bishop of the Imperial City, to give him Communion in his own church
(336). Arius openly triumphed; but as he went about in parade, the
evening before this event was to take place, he expired from a
sudden disorder, which Catholics could not help regarding as a
judgment of heaven, due to the bishop's prayers. His death, however,
did not stay the plague. Constantine now favoured none but Arians;
he was baptized in his last moments by the shifty prelate of
Nicomedia; and he bequeathed to his three sons (337) an empire torn
by dissensions which his ignorance and weakness had aggravated.
Constantius, who
nominally governed the East, was himself the puppet of his empress
and the palace-ministers. He obeyed the Eusebian faction; his
spiritual director, Valens, Bishop of Mursa, did what in him lay to
infect Italy and the West with Arian dogmas. The term "like in
substance", Homoiousion, which had been employed merely to
get rid of the Nicene formula, became a watchword. But as many as
fourteen councils, held between 341 and 360, in which every shade of
heretical subterfuge found expression, bore decisive witness to the
need and efficacy of the Catholic touchstone which they all
rejected. About 340, an Alexandrian gathering had defended its
archbishop in an epistle to Pope Julius.
On the death of Constantine, and by the influence of that emperor's
son and namesake, he had been restored to his people. But the young
prince passed away, and in 341 the celebrated Antiochene Council of
the Dedication a second time degraded Athanasius, who now took
refuge in Rome. There he spent three years. Gibbon quotes and adopts
"a judicious observation" of Wetstein which deserves to be kept
always in mind. From the fourth century onwards, remarks the German
scholar, when the Eastern Churches were almost equally divided in
eloquence and ability between contending sections, that party which
sought to overcome made its appearance in the Vatican, cultivated
the Papal majesty, conquered and established the orthodox creed by
the help of the Latin bishops. Therefore it was that Athanasius
repaired to Rome. A stranger, Gregory, usurped his place. The Roman
Council proclaimed his innocence. In 343, Constans, who ruled over
the West from Illyria to Britain, summoned the bishops to meet at
Sardica in Pannonia. Ninety-four Latin, seventy Greek or Eastern,
prelates began the debates; but they could not come to terms, and
the Asiatics withdrew, holding a separate and hostile session at
Philippopolis in Thrace. It has been justly said that the Council of
Sardica reveals the first symptoms of discord which, later on,
produced the unhappy schism of East and West. But to the Latins this
meeting, which allowed of appeals to Pope Julius, or the Roman
Church, seemed an epilogue which completed the Nicene legislation,
and to this effect it was quoted by Innocent I in his correspondence
with the bishops of Africa.
Having won over
Constans, who warmly took up his cause, the invincible Athanasius
received from his Oriental and Semi-Arian sovereign three letters
commanding, and at length entreating his return to Alexandria (349).
The factious bishops, Ursacius and Valens, retracted their charges
against him in the hands of Pope Julius; and as he travelled home,
by way of Thrace, Asia Minor, and Syria, the crowd of court-prelates
did him abject homage. These men veered with every wind. Some, like
Eusebius of Caesarea, held a Platonizing doctrine which they would
not give up, though they declined the Arian blasphemies. But many
were time-servers, indifferent to dogma. And a new party had arisen,
the strict and pious Homoiousians, not friends of Athanasius, nor
willing to subscribe to the Nicene terms, yet slowly drawing nearer
to the true creed and finally accepting it.
In the councils which now follow these good men play their part.
However, when Constans died (350), and his Semi-Arian brother was
left supreme, the persecution of Athanasius redoubled in violence.
By a series of intrigues the Western bishops were persuaded to cast
him off at Arles, Milan, Ariminum. It was concerning this last
council (359) that St. Jerome wrote, "the whole world groaned and
marvelled to find itself Arian". For the Latin bishops were driven
by threats and chicanery to sign concessions which at no time
represented their genuine views. Councils were so frequent that
their dates are still matter of controversy.
Personal issues disguised the dogmatic importance of a struggle
which had gone on for thirty years. The Pope of the day, Liberius,
brave at first, undoubtedly orthodox, but torn from his see and
banished to the dreary solitude of Thrace, signed a creed, in tone
Semi-Arian (compiled chiefly from one of Sirmium), renounced
Athanasius, but made a stand against the so-called "Homoean"
formulae of Ariminum. This new party was led by Acacius of Caesarea,
an aspiring churchman who maintained that he, and not St. Cyril of
Jerusalem, was metropolitan over Palestine. The Homoeans, a sort of
Protestants, would have no terms employed which were not found in
Scripture, and thus evaded signing the "Consubstantial". A more
extreme set, the "Anomoeans", followed Aetius, were directed by
Eunomius, held meetings at Antioch and Sirmium, declared the Son to
be "unlike" the Father, and made themselves powerful in the last
years of Constantius within the palace. George of Cappadocia
persecuted the Alexandrian Catholics. Athanasius retired into the
desert among the solitaries. Hosius had been compelled by torture to
subscribe a fashionable creed. When the vacillating Emperor died
(361), Julian, known as the Apostate, suffered all alike to return
home who had been exiled on account of religion. A momentous
gathering, over which Athanasius presided, in 362, at Alexandria,
united the orthodox Semi-Arians with himself and the West. Four
years afterwards fifty-nine Macedonian, i.e., hitherto anti-Nicene,
prelates gave in their submission to Pope Liberius. But the Emperor
Valens, a fierce heretic, still laid the Church waste.
However, the long
battle was now turning decidedly in favour of Catholic tradition.
Western bishops, like Hilary of Poitiers and Eusebius of Vercellae
banished to Asia for holding the Nicene faith, were acting in unison
with St. Basil, the two St. Gregories [of Nyssa and Nazianzus --Ed.],
and the reconciled Semi-Arians. As an intellectual movement the
heresy had spent its force. Theodosius, a Spaniard and a Catholic,
governed the whole Empire. Athanasius died in 373; but his cause
triumphed at Constantinople, long an Arian city, first by the
preaching of St. Gregory Nazianzen, then in the Second General
Council (381), at the opening of which Meletius of Antioch presided.
This saintly man had been estranged from the Nicene champions during
a long schism; but he made peace with Athanasius, and now, in
company of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, represented a moderate influence
which won the day. No deputies appeared from the West. Meletius died
almost immediately. St. Gregory Nazianzen, who took his place, very
soon resigned.
A creed embodying the Nicene was drawn up by St. Gregory of Nyssa,
but it is not the one that is chanted at Mass, the latter being due,
it is said, to St. Epiphanius and the Church of Jerusalem. The
Council became ecumenical by acceptance of the Pope and the
ever-orthodox Westerns. From this moment Arianism in all its forms
lost its place within the Empire. Its developments among the
barbarians were political rather than doctrinal. Ulphilas (311-388),
who translated the Scriptures into Maeso-Gothic, taught the Goths
across the Danube an Homoean theology; Arian kingdoms arose in
Spain, Africa, Italy. The Gepidae, Heruli, Vandals, Alans, and
Lombards received a system which they were as little capable of
understanding as they were of defending, and the Catholic bishops,
the monks, the sword of Clovis, the action of the Papacy, made an
end of it before the eighth century. In the form which it took under
Arius, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Eunomius, it has never been
revived. Individuals, among them are Milton and Sir Isasc Newton,
were perhaps tainted with it. But the Socinian tendency out of which
Unitarian doctrines have grown owes nothing to the school of Antioch
or the councils which opposed Nicaea. Neither has any Arian leader
stood forth in history with a character of heroic proportions. In
the whole story there is but one single hero -- the undaunted
Athanasius -- whose mind was equal to the problems, as his great
spirit to the vicissitudes, a question on which the future of
Christianity depended.
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