Arius and What He Actually Taught

Arius is the most caricatured figure in Christian doctrinal history, and the caricature does the Orthodox case no favours: a position that was obviously stupid would not have taken sixty years and four emperors to defeat. This file sets out the transmission problem honestly — almost everything we have of Arius comes through hostile quotation — then reports what he taught, why he taught it, and what the Church found intolerable in it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Transmission Problem, Stated First

No complete work of Arius survives. What we possess is the following, and a reader should know the provenance of each item:

  • Arius’ letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia (c. 318–321), preserved by Theodoret (Ecclesiastical History I.5) and Epiphanius (Panarion 69.6). A short, sharp statement of his position to a sympathizer; the least mediated text we have.
  • Arius’ letter to Alexander of Alexandria (the “Confession of Arius and his fellows”), preserved by Athanasius (De synodis 16) and Epiphanius (Panarion 69.7–8). A formal creedal statement submitted to his bishop.
  • The creed presented by Arius and Euzoius to Constantine (c. 327), preserved by Socrates (Ecclesiastical History I.26). Studiedly moderate and unhelpfully vague.
  • The Thalia (“Banquet”), a popular work in prose and verse — Athanasius says in the metre of the Alexandrian poet Sotades, which is part of the insult. It survives in two excerpts, both in Athanasius: a prose paraphrase at Orations against the Arians I.5–6, and a verse extract at De synodis 15. The two differ in tone and vocabulary, and scholarship generally regards the De synodis extract as the closer to Arius’ words and the Orations passage as Athanasius’ polemical restatement (Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, rev. ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001, ch. on the Thalia; Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988, 10–15).

Everything else — the biographical details, the famous story of the tall ascetic priest with the dockworkers singing his hymns, the death in a Constantinople latrine — comes from opponents or from later church historians dependent on them.

This matters for how the material is used. Where the letters and the De synodis verses agree with the Orations paraphrase, the report is secure. Where they do not, the Church’s condemnation rests on what the letters and the verses say, and this file cites those. Saying so is not a softening of the judgment against Arius; it is the only way the judgment can be shown to be about him rather than about a construction.

A second and larger caution. Modern scholarship has largely abandoned the picture of a coherent “Arian party” following a master’s system. The bishops who resisted Nicaea for the next half-century mostly did not hold Arius’ distinctive theses; they were a loose and quarrelling coalition, and the label “Arian” was a polemical weapon of their opponents. Hanson and Ayres both organize their histories around this correction, and it is now standard (Hanson 1988; Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pt. 1). The Orthodox account loses nothing by accepting it: the Church did not condemn a party, she condemned a set of propositions.

What He Taught

Arius was a presbyter of the Baucalis church in Alexandria, in dispute with his bishop Alexander from about 318. His theology has a single controlling axiom, and everything follows from it.

God alone is unoriginate. To be God is to be agennētos — ungenerated, without source, underived. This is not one attribute among others; for Arius it is what divinity is. And it cannot be shared, because to share it would either divide God (making him composite and material) or produce a second unoriginate, which is two gods.

From this the rest follows with real rigour:

The Son is therefore not unoriginate, and so is not God in the strict sense. He has a beginning of existence. Arius’ slogan states it exactly: ἦν ποτε ὅτε οὐκ ἦν — “there was when he was not.” The formulation is careful; Arius does not say “there was a time when he was not,” because time itself is a creature and the Son precedes it. He means an ontological, not a chronological, priority of the Father.

The Son came to be out of nothing (ex ouk ontōn), by the Father’s will, as the first and unique product through whom all else was made. He is not from the Father’s substance, since substance cannot be divided or emitted; he is the Father’s creature — but not one of the creatures, being made before all ages and being the agent of everything else (Arius, Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History I.5; Letter to Alexander, in Athanasius, De synodis 16).

The Son does not comprehend the Father. Since the Father is unoriginate and the Son is not, the Son cannot know the Father as the Father knows himself, nor even know his own essence perfectly (Athanasius, De synodis 15, quoting the Thalia).

The Son is by nature mutable (treptos), as every creature is; he remained good by his own free choice, and God, foreknowing that choice, gave him in advance the glory he would earn (Thalia, in Athanasius, Orations against the Arians I.5).

The names are honorific. The Son is called Word, Wisdom, and Power of God, but the Father has his own proper Word and Wisdom which are eternal and unbegotten in him; the Son bears the titles by participation and by grace, not by nature (Letter to Alexander; Thalia).

Arius did insist that the Son is “full God” and “unchangeable” in the honorific sense he had defined, and he denied that he had made the Son a creature “like one of the creatures.” His opponents did not accept this as a real qualification, and the exchange is a fair sample of the whole controversy: Arius could sign almost any scriptural formula, and did.

The Case for It, at Its Strongest

Three things gave the position force.

Its account of divine transcendence. If God is simple, indivisible, and unoriginate, then any doctrine of an eternal generation from his substance looks like an emanation — the Gnostic error the Church had spent a century rejecting — or like a division of the divine being. Arius’ whole edifice is an attempt to say that God is not the kind of thing that can be shared out. That is not a stupid concern; it is the concern of the Old Testament, and the pro-Nicene answer had to be constructed to meet it.

Its exegesis. The scriptural case was substantial and had to be answered verse by verse. Proverbs 8:22 LXX: “The Lord created me the beginning of his ways for his works.” Colossians 1:15: “the firstborn of every creature.” Acts 2:36: “God hath made that same Jesus… both Lord and Christ.” John 14:28: “my Father is greater than I.” Mark 13:32: the Son does not know the day or the hour. Hebrews 3:2: “faithful to him that made him.” Luke 2:52: Jesus increased in wisdom. Athanasius’ Orations against the Arians is essentially a commentary on this list, and it takes him three books.

Its soteriology and its moral seriousness. For Arius the Son is the pattern of a created will that chose the good and was rewarded — the model and forerunner of the Christian’s own moral struggle. Williams argues that behind Arius stands a conservative Alexandrian academic tradition and a genuine spiritual programme, not merely a logic-chopping heresy (Williams, Arius, 2001, esp. the concluding assessment). Whether or not one accepts Williams’ reconstruction in detail, the point that Arianism was a religion and not only an error is sound and is worth conceding.

Why the Church Could Not Have It

The Church’s objections were not primarily about the metaphysics. They were about worship and salvation, and they are stated most forcefully by St. Athanasius.

It makes the Church idolatrous. The Arians worshipped Christ; they did not cease to. But on their own account they were worshipping a creature, and Athanasius drives the point home relentlessly: either the Son is God and is rightly adored, or he is a creature and the whole Church, in adoring him, is doing what the martyrs died rather than do (Athanasius, Orations against the Arians II.14–15; III.16; trans. NPNF II/4).

It makes salvation impossible. The entire logic of the Incarnation, as Athanasius states it, is that God became man so that man might become god — that what is joined to God is deified. A creature cannot deify, because it does not have divinity to give; it can only pass on what it has received, and what it has received is itself created. If the Son is a creature, the Christian’s union with him unites him to a creature (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54; Orations against the Arians II.67–70; and the same argument applied to the Holy Spirit at Letters to Serapion I.24). This is the argument that eventually won, and its ground is not philosophical but soteriological (see Theosis in Athanasius).

It severs the revelation. If the Son does not know the Father fully, then what he reveals is not the Father as he is, and “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” is false. The Arian mediator is neither God nor man on either side of the gap he was invented to bridge.

The Council’s Answer

Nicaea’s response was to define the Son as “of the essence of the Father… true God of true God, begotten not made, of one essence (homoousion) with the Father,” and to append an anathema aimed with unusual precision at Arius’ own formulations:

“But those who say, ‘There was when he was not,’ and ‘Before being begotten he was not,’ and that ‘He came into existence out of nothing,’ or who assert that the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or ousia, or is created, or alterable, or mutable — these the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes.”
(Council of Nicaea I, 325, anathemas appended to the Creed; trans. NPNF II/14.)

Each clause corresponds to a documented Arian thesis. Note also, for what follows, that the anathema uses hypostasis and ousia as equivalents — which is exactly the terminological problem the Cappadocians would have to solve (see Ousia and Hypostasis).

The Death of Arius

Arius was exiled after the council, later partly rehabilitated, and died at Constantinople in 336 on the eve of his intended restoration to communion. The account of his death — a sudden haemorrhage and evisceration in a public latrine, read by the Nicene party as a judgment on the model of Judas in Acts 1:18 — comes from a letter of St. Athanasius written some years later on the report of the priest Macarius, and is repeated by Socrates and Sozomen from it (Athanasius, Letter to Serapion concerning the Death of Arius; Socrates, Ecclesiastical History I.38). It is pinned here to its attestation. It is the testimony of a determined opponent, written after the fact and with an evident moral, and this collection reports it as such rather than as established fact.

See Also

References

  • Council of Nicaea I (325). Creed and anathemas. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; Greek and Latin in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990.
  • Arius. Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History I.5; Letter to Alexander of Alexandria, in Athanasius, De synodis 16; Thalia fragments in Athanasius, De synodis 15 and Orations against the Arians I.5–6. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vols. 3 and 4.
  • Athanasius of Alexandria. Orations against the Arians I–III; On the Incarnation 54; Letters to Serapion I; Letter to Serapion concerning the Death of Arius. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4; On the Incarnation trans. John Behr, Popular Patristics 44a. Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2011.
  • Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History I.26, 38. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 2.
  • Williams, Rowan. Arius: Heresy and Tradition. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.
  • Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988.
  • Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. 2 vols. Formation of Christian Theology 2. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004.