Nicholas and Arianism

Whatever becomes of the slap of Arius and even of the attendance at Nicaea, the Church venerates Nicholas as a saint of the Nicene faith — a great hierarch numbered among the defenders of orthodoxy against the Arian denial of the Son’s full divinity. This file sets out his place in the anti-Arian tradition independent of the famous anecdote: the theological stakes of the Arian crisis, the meaning of the homoousion he is venerated for defending, and the way the cult reads his zeal as the complement of his mercy.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Wonderworker; Great Hierarch)

The Anti-Arian Standing Without the Slap

The companion file showed that Nicholas’s presence at Nicaea is historically unestablished and that the slap of Arius is a late accretion (see The Nicaea Tradition). It does not follow that his association with the anti-Arian cause is a mere by-product of that one legend. The Church’s veneration of Nicholas as a defender of the Nicene faith rests on something broader and firmer than the anecdote: his place in the cult and liturgical memory as a great hierarch of the orthodox party, set against Arius as the type of the heretic. His hymnography hails him as a “rule of faith” — the very phrase the Church applies to the great teaching hierarchs — and ranks him among the pillars of orthodoxy (the apolytikion and kontakion of the saint, Byzantine liturgical tradition; English 2012). Even readers who regard the slap as legend recognize that the meaning the legend carries — Nicholas as the uncompromising confessor of Christ’s divinity — is woven through his whole cult, not dependent on the single scene.

This is the proper order of things. The slap is the tradition’s vivid illustration of Nicholas’s orthodoxy; his orthodoxy is not an inference from the slap. The illustration may be late and unhistorical while the thing illustrated — his standing among the Nicene faithful — is secure in the Church’s memory.

It is worth being precise about what this hymnographic standing does and does not establish, since the same source-critical discipline applies here as elsewhere. The liturgical texts that hail Nicholas as a “rule of faith” and rank him among the pillars of orthodoxy are not contemporary documents and cannot, by themselves, prove that the historical bishop of Myra took any part in the Arian controversy; they are the cult’s confession of how it remembers him, not a record of his acts (English 2012; METHODOLOGY §3.5). What they establish securely is the shape of the veneration — that the Church received Nicholas as an orthodox hierarch of the Nicene type and never as a doubtful or compromised figure — which is itself a real and stable historical fact about the cult across the centuries. The distinction matters because it is exactly the distinction this whole collection turns on: the cult’s testimony to his orthodoxy is firm and ancient, while the biographical claim that he personally confronted Arius is late and unestablished. To honor the first without asserting the second is not a grudging concession but the honest and the Orthodox position together (see Reading the Nicholas Tradition).

The Theological Stakes of Arianism

To grasp why the Church should remember Nicholas as a foe of Arius, one must grasp what was at stake. Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, taught that the Son of God was not eternal and not of the same essence as the Father, but a creature — the first and highest of creatures, but made out of nothing, so that “there was when he was not.” On this teaching the Son is not truly God but a lesser, mediating being. The whole gospel of salvation hung on the answer, for if the Son who became incarnate and died for the world is not himself fully God, then in Christ it is not God who has saved and deified humanity, and the Christian hope collapses. Against Arius the Council of Nicaea in 325 confessed the Son to be “begotten, not made, of one essence (homoousios) with the Father” — the dogmatic heart of the Nicene Creed and the watchword of orthodoxy for the rest of the century (see The Ecumenical Councils).

The Arian crisis did not end at Nicaea; it convulsed the Church for more than half a century, through imperial reversals, exiles, and rival councils, until the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381 reaffirmed and completed the Nicene faith. The great documented champion of the homoousion through these decades was Athanasius of Alexandria, whose securely attested life of struggle and exile is the historical backbone of the anti-Arian cause (see St. Athanasius the Great). Nicholas belongs, in the Church’s veneration, to the same front — a Lycian bishop of the Nicene generation ranged on the side of Athanasius and the orthodox against the Arian denial.

The depth of those stakes is set out in Athanasius’s own writings, and they are the proper theological commentary on what Nicholas is venerated for defending. In On the Incarnation Athanasius argues that only the very Word of God, by whom all things were made, could remake a creation fallen into corruption; a creature, however exalted, could not recreate creatures, and so a merely created Son could not save (Athanasius, On the Incarnation; NPNF II/4). In the Orations Against the Arians he presses the same logic against the Arian slogan “there was when he was not”: if the Son had a beginning and is of a different essence from the Father, then he is not the eternal Word in whom we are made sons of God, the worship the Church renders him is misdirected, and the deification of humanity in Christ is undone (Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians; NPNF II/4). This is why the single word homoousios — “of one essence” — bore the whole weight of the controversy: it was the one term the Arians could not affirm and the one that secured that the Son who saves is fully and eternally God.

The Course of the Crisis to 381

The half-century after Nicaea shows why a bishop’s standing “on the Nicene side” was a costly allegiance and not a formality. The council’s condemnation of Arius did not settle the matter; under successive emperors the imperial court swung repeatedly toward Arian or compromising parties, Nicene bishops were deposed and exiled and recalled and exiled again, and a profusion of rival councils issued creeds designed to avoid or dilute the homoousion, many of them preferring vaguer formulas that the Son was “like” the Father (English 2012; Jones 1978). Athanasius himself was driven from his see five times across these decades, and the period saw moments when, as the Western father Jerome would later put it, the world groaned to find itself Arian. The resolution came only at the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381, which reaffirmed the Nicene confession, expanded it into the creed the Church recites to this day, and secured the full divinity of the Holy Spirit alongside that of the Son (Council of Constantinople 381; see The Ecumenical Councils). Into this long and dangerous struggle the cult places Nicholas — not as a documented actor in its councils and exiles, of which no record names him, but as a hierarch of the Nicene generation whom the Church remembers as having held the orthodox line.

Zeal as the Complement of Mercy

The deepest reason the anti-Arian image attaches so firmly to Nicholas is that it completes the portrait. The Nicholas of the charity traditions is gentleness itself — the secret giver of gold, the rescuer of the condemned, the father of the poor (see The Three Daughters). Left alone, that image could collapse into mere sentiment, a kindly figure with nothing hard in him. The anti-Arian tradition supplies the iron. The same bishop who wept over the poor would not tolerate a word against the divinity of the Christ who saves them; his mercy and his zeal are two faces of one love for God and neighbor. This is why the tradition, even in its late and legendary slap, was reaching for something true: it intuited that Nicholas’s charity and his orthodoxy must be of a piece, and it dramatized the union in the most direct way it could imagine.

The Orthodox reading of the saint thus holds both together without strain. Zeal for the truth of Christ is not opposed to mercy but is its guardian; a charity indifferent to who Christ is would be a charity cut loose from its source. Nicholas is venerated as the hierarch in whom the two are perfectly joined — and this theological portrait stands whether or not he ever raised his hand at Nicaea.

There is a further depth here that the Athanasian theology of the homoousion makes explicit. The charity for which Nicholas is most loved — the secret gold, the rescue of the condemned, the feeding of the poor — is in Orthodox understanding not mere humanitarian kindness but a participation in the love of the God who became man to save. If, with Arius, the Son who took flesh were a creature and not the eternal Word, then the saving descent of God to the lowest and the poorest, which Nicholas’s almsgiving imitates and extends, would itself be emptied of its content; the very condescension of God that grounds Christian mercy depends on the full divinity of the One who condescended (Athanasius, On the Incarnation; NPNF II/4). The anti-Arian Nicholas and the merciful Nicholas are therefore not two themes awkwardly joined but one: his refusal to suffer the divinity of Christ to be diminished is the same love, defending at the level of doctrine what his charity enacts at the level of the street. The cult’s instinct to bind the two together is, in this light, theologically exact.

The Honest Position

The position this collection takes, then, is twofold and consistent with the methodology. Historically, Nicholas’s attendance at Nicaea is unestablished and the slap is a late legend, reported as such and not certified as fact (see The Nicaea Tradition; METHODOLOGY §3.5). Ecclesially and theologically, Nicholas is venerated as a saint of the Nicene faith, a great hierarch of the orthodox party against Arius, and this standing rests on his cult and hymnography rather than on the contested anecdote. The two statements do not conflict. The Church may rightly honor Nicholas as a defender of orthodoxy while the historian rightly reports that the most famous proof of that defense is a story the early sources do not tell. To recover the actual Orthodox Nicholas behind both the slap legend and the later Santa Claus is precisely the task of this collection (see The Saint the Church Venerates).

References

English, Adam C. The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus: The True Life and Trials of Nicholas of Myra. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012. (Nicholas’s anti-Arian image and its relation to the slap legend; his hymnographic standing as a defender of orthodoxy.)
Jones, Charles W. Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. (The Nicene context of the cult.)
Athanasius of Alexandria. Orations Against the Arians and On the Incarnation. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 4. 1892. (The classic statement of the anti-Arian, Nicene theology of the homoousion.)
METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, this repository.