The Arian Crisis

The controversy that forced the first general council began in Alexandria around 318, when the presbyter Arius taught that the Son of God, though the first and highest of creatures, was a creature and not truly God — “there was when he was not.” His bishop Alexander condemned him; the dispute spread across the East; and Constantine, newly master of a united empire, summoned the bishops to Nicaea to end it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Alexandria on the Eve

The Arian crisis broke out in the most theologically sophisticated city of the Christian East. Alexandria in the early fourth century was heir to a long tradition of speculation on the relation of the Word (Logos) to the Father, running through Origen, whose legacy could be pulled in more than one direction: Origen had insisted on the eternal generation of the Son, but also, in his subordinationist moments, on the Son’s mediating rank between the unbegotten Father and the created order (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed., 1977, on the Alexandrian background and the ambiguity of the Origenist inheritance; Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 2004, on the diversity of pre-Nicene theologies). Into this setting came the teaching of Arius, a presbyter in charge of the church of Baucalis, an ascetic and popular preacher, probably a pupil of the martyr-theologian Lucian of Antioch (Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, rev. ed., 2001, on Arius’s formation and the Lucianist connection).

The traditional date for the outbreak is around 318–320, when Arius came into open conflict with his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria (Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990, ch. 2). The occasion, on the ancient accounts, was Alexander’s own teaching on the eternity of the Son, which Arius attacked as verging on the error of Sabellius — the collapse of Father and Son into one — so that Arius presented himself, at least at first, as the defender of the distinctness of the divine persons against a modalist confusion (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.5; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 2).

What Arius Taught

The heart of Arius’s teaching can be stated in a few propositions, which he himself set out in letters and in a popular verse-work, the Thalia (“Banquet”), fragments of which survive because Athanasius quoted them to refute them (Athanasius, Orationes contra Arianos 1.5–6, quoting the Thalia; De Synodis 15, giving Arius’s letter to Alexander; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4):

  • The Son is a creature. However exalted — the first-born of all creation, the instrument through whom God made the ages — the Son belongs on the side of the made, not the Maker. He was brought into being by the will of the Father.
  • “There was when he was not” (ēn pote hote ouk ēn). The Son has a beginning; there was a “then,” before his generation, when he did not exist. He is therefore not co-eternal with the Father.
  • The Son is of a different essence from the Father and does not perfectly know or comprehend the Father; he is not “true God” by nature but is called God by grace and participation, as the perfect creature.

The religious logic driving Arius was a fierce insistence on the absolute transcendence, uniqueness, and unbegottenness of God the Father: if God alone is agenetos (uncreated, without origin), then the Son, who is begotten, cannot share that unoriginate deity, and must fall on the side of the creatures (Williams, Arius, 2001, on the coherence of Arius’s monotheism; Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 2004). The cost, as Alexander and then Athanasius saw at once, was fatal: a creature-Son cannot save, for only God can deify, and a mediator who is himself made cannot bridge the gulf between the Maker and the made. What is at stake in a word like homoousios is therefore not metaphysical curiosity but the reality of salvation (Athanasius, De Incarnatione 54, “he became man that we might become god”; Contra Arianos 2, on the soteriological argument; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4).

The Local Condemnation and the Spreading Fire

Alexander convened a synod of the Egyptian and Libyan bishops — about a hundred — which condemned and deposed Arius and his supporters, probably around 320–321 (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.6; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). But Arius did not submit. He appealed to sympathetic bishops abroad, above all to the powerful and learned Eusebius of Nicomedia, a fellow “Lucianist” and a man with access to the imperial court, and to Eusebius of Caesarea, the church historian. Synods and counter-synods followed in Palestine, Bithynia, and Syria; letters flew across the East; the dispute, carried by Arius’s memorable slogans and even his set-to-music verses, spilled out of the schools and into the streets of Alexandria and Antioch (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.6; Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 1977). What had begun as a quarrel between a bishop and his presbyter had become, within a few years, a fault line running through the whole Eastern Church.

Constantine Intervenes

Constantine had defeated Licinius and become sole emperor of a reunited Roman world in 324. He inherited, along with the East, a Church convulsed by the Arian dispute — precisely when he had hoped to make the Church a bond of imperial unity. He first sent his ecclesiastical adviser Ossius (Hosius) of Cordova to Alexandria with a letter urging Alexander and Arius to reconcile over what the emperor, misjudging its gravity, called a “trifling and foolish” question of words (Constantine’s letter, in Eusebius, Vita Constantini 2.64–72; trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 1). When that failed, Constantine did what no emperor had done: he summoned the bishops of the whole oikoumenē to a general council, offering the imperial post to bring them, and convened it at Nicaea in Bithynia — close to his residence at Nicomedia — in the summer of 325 (Eusebius, Vita Constantini 3.6–7; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990).

The traditional number of Fathers who assembled is 318 — a figure with a scriptural resonance (the 318 servants of Abraham, Genesis 14:14) that was cherished in later tradition; the contemporary counts vary, and Eusebius says “more than 250,” so the round 318 is best treated as the received traditional figure rather than a precise headcount (Eusebius, Vita Constantini 3.8; Athanasius later cites 318, Ad Afros 2; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990, on the numbers). Among them was the aged Alexander of Alexandria, and in his retinue a young deacon whose name would become synonymous with the council’s faith: Athanasius (see St. Athanasius). The council opened, most probably, on 20 May 325 and concluded its main business by 19 June, with Constantine himself present at the opening — a layman and not yet baptized, presiding over the assembled episcopate of the Church in a scene that fixed the pattern of the imperial council for centuries (Eusebius, Vita Constantini 3.10–13; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). What the council did with the crisis — the Creed, the word homoousios, the canons, and the Paschal settlement — is the subject of the next file.

See Also

References

  • Athanasius of Alexandria. Orationes contra Arianos; De Synodis; De Decretis Nicaenae Synodi; De Incarnatione; Ad Afros. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4.
  • Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325–787): Their History and Theology. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.
  • Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine (Vita Constantini) 2–3. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 1.
  • Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. 5th ed. London: A&C Black, 1977.
  • Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History 1.5–8. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 2.
  • Williams, Rowan. Arius: Heresy and Tradition. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.