Arius and Nicaea

The origin of the Arian controversy: the actual teaching of Arius (reconstructed mostly from fragments preserved by his opponents), Bishop Alexander’s response, the Council of Nicaea (325) and its decisive term homoousios, the creed’s anathemas, and the reasons the controversy continued — indeed intensified — after the council closed. This file presents the source-critical caveats honestly, because so much of what we know of Arius comes from the pen of the man who spent his life refuting him.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A Note on the Sources

Before describing what Arius taught, a caveat that governs the whole reconstruction: very little of Arius’ own writing survives. We possess a small number of letters and scattered fragments, and his one known theological work — a popularizing poem called the Thalia (“Banquet”) — survives only in extracts quoted by his opponents, chiefly Athanasius (in De Synodis and the Orations Against the Arians). The longest continuous fragment is the one Athanasius preserves in De Synodis 15 (PG 26; trans. NPNF II/4). This means that our access to Arius runs almost entirely through hostile witnesses who quoted him in order to refute him, and modern scholarship reads these fragments with corresponding care, distinguishing what is likely a fair (if pointed) citation from what is polemical paraphrase (Anatolios, Athanasius, Routledge ECF, 2004; Behr, The Nicene Faith, SVS, 2004). The teaching reconstructed below is therefore the teaching of Arius as the tradition received and contested it — which is also, for the history of doctrine, the teaching that mattered.

The Teaching of Arius

Arius was a presbyter of the church of Alexandria, attached to the church of Baucalis, who came into open conflict with his bishop around 318–321. His concern was to safeguard the absolute oneness, transcendence, and unbegottenness of God the Father. From that concern he drew conclusions that the Church would judge fatal.

The core of his position, as preserved in the fragments, can be stated in a few propositions:

The Father alone is unoriginate, eternal, and truly God. To be God is to be unbegotten and without source.
The Son is therefore not eternal in the way the Father is. He is a creature (ktisma) and a “work” (poiēma) — the first, highest, and unique creature, through whom God made all other things, but a creature nonetheless, brought into being out of nothing (ex ouk ontōn) by the Father’s will.
Hence the controversy’s most notorious slogan, which Athanasius reports as the watchword of the Arians: “there was once when he was not” (ēn pote hote ouk ēn). The Son had a beginning; before that beginning he did not exist.
The Son is consequently of a different essence from the Father (heteroousios), changeable in his own nature, and does not have exhaustive knowledge of the Father.

The motive was a kind of rigorous monotheism: anything truly begotten or sharing the Father’s own being would, Arius feared, compromise the Father’s unique and indivisible deity. The cost was that the Mediator — the Word who saves — was placed on the creaturely side of the absolute divide between Creator and creation.

Alexander’s Response

Bishop Alexander of Alexandria recognized at once what was at stake and condemned Arius’ teaching, deposing him at a local synod of Egyptian bishops (c. 318–321). Alexander circulated encyclical letters warning the wider Church against the doctrine and insisting on the Son’s true and eternal generation from the Father — that the Son is from the Father’s own being, “always” with him, not a creature summoned from nothing. Arius, for his part, was not without support: he appealed to sympathetic bishops abroad, above all to the powerful Eusebius of Nicomedia, and the dispute rapidly outgrew Egypt to become an empire-wide crisis — which is why it landed before the emperor. Athanasius, then Alexander’s deacon and secretary, was formed in the very midst of this conflict (see Early Life and Alexandria).

The Council of Nicaea (325)

To settle the dispute Constantine summoned the first ecumenical council to Nicaea in 325. The council overwhelmingly rejected Arius’ teaching and produced a creed designed to exclude it.

The decisive word was ὁμοούσιος (homoousios), “of one essence/substance”: the Son is “of the same essence as the Father.” The creed confessed the Son as “begotten, not made” (gennēthenta ou poiēthenta) — directly negating Arius’ “work” and “creature” — and as “true God from true God.”

[Disputed: who introduced and pressed homoousios. Eusebius of Caesarea, in his letter to his church explaining his signature, presents the term as effectively imposed by the emperor Constantine; many scholars assign a leading role to Constantine’s Western adviser, Hosius (Ossius) of Cordova, who presided at the council, and credit the theological substance to the strongly anti-Arian party of Alexander, Eustathius of Antioch, and Marcellus of Ancyra. The sources do not allow a single, certain answer; what is clear is that the term was chosen precisely because the Arians could not accept it (Behr, The Nicene Faith, SVS, 2004).]

The creed closed with explicit anathemas against the Arian slogans, condemning those who say “there was once when he was not,” and “before he was begotten he was not,” and that he came to be “out of nothing” (ex ouk ontōn), or that the Son is “of another hypostasis or ousia” than the Father, or that he is a creature or changeable. The council thus did not merely affirm the Son’s divinity in the abstract; it named and outlawed Arius’ specific formulas.

Why the Controversy Continued

If Nicaea had settled the matter, Athanasius would have had a quiet episcopate. Instead the half-century after the council was more turbulent than the years before it, for several reasons.

The ambiguity of the key term. Homoousios was not a self-evidently safe word. It had no clear conciliar pedigree; it had in fact been associated with the condemned Paul of Samosata, and it could be heard in a “Sabellian” sense — as collapsing Father and Son into one undifferentiated subject. Many bishops who were genuinely not Arian were nonetheless uneasy with the term, fearing it erased the real distinction of Father and Son. The further ambiguity of ousia and hypostasis — words that could be treated as synonyms (as the Nicene anathema did) or as distinct (as later orthodoxy required) — guaranteed years of cross-purposes.
The Eusebian reaction. The signatures at Nicaea masked a wide range of conviction. Eusebius of Nicomedia signed the creed but refused the anathema against Arius and within months was working to reverse the council’s outcome; he and his allies (the “Eusebians”) were soon ascendant at the imperial court. Their strategy was less to rehabilitate Arius’ barest formulas than to dislodge the Nicene leaders and to replace homoousios with vaguer or more subordinationist formulae. Over the following decades a bewildering series of councils produced a series of alternative creeds (Antioch 341, Sirmium, and others), and the empire’s bishops fragmented into parties — strict Nicenes, outright Arians, and a large middle that preferred homoiousios (“of like essence”) or simply “like” (homoios).
The political stakes. Because the emperor now enforced ecclesiastical settlements, every theological turn was also a turn of court politics, and control of the great sees — Alexandria above all — was contested by force of exile and recall. Athanasius’ five banishments are the personal index of this instability (see Exiles and Councils).

The result was that “the faith of Nicaea” had to be won — interpreted, defended, and finally reconciled with the legitimate concerns of the homoiousian middle — over the next two generations. That work of defense and interpretation is exactly what Athanasius devoted his life to, above all in the Orations Against the Arians (see Orations Against the Arians), and it culminated for him in the reconciling Council of Alexandria of 362.

References

Athanasius. De Synodis (preserving the Thalia fragment at §15) and De Decretis Nicaenae Synodi. PG 25–26; trans. NPNF II/4.
The First Council of Nicaea (325): the Creed of Nicaea and its anathemas. In NPNF II/14.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Letter to his Church on the Council of Nicaea (preserved in Athanasius, De Decretis, appendix; and Socrates, Ecclesiastical History I.8). Trans. NPNF II/4.
Anatolios, Khaled. Athanasius. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2004.
Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.
Barnes, Timothy D. Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.