Position · 318

Arianism

The teaching that the Son of God was created by the Father, so that he is not eternal and not God in the same sense as the Father.

History

Roots

The question Arianism answered was older than Arius. Christians worshipped Jesus and also confessed one God, and the second- and third-century writers who tried to hold these together often described the Son as a subordinate, derived divinity: the Father’s Word, sent out for creation and revelation. Origen of Alexandria taught that the Son was eternally generated, yet he also ranked him below the Father. By 300 the church in Alexandria had inherited both ideas, and they could be pulled apart: one side stressing the Son’s eternity, the other his derivation and rank.

Philosophy added pressure. Educated Christians shared the Platonist belief that the highest God is one, simple, unchanging and without origin. If being “unbegotten” is what makes God God, then a begotten Son looks like something less. Arius pressed that logic to its end.

Causes

Arius, a Libyan-born presbyter in charge of the Baucalis church in Alexandria, clashed with his bishop Alexander around 318 (the exact year is disputed; some scholars place it nearer 321). Alexander taught “always a God, always a Son.” Arius answered that this made the Son a second unbegotten being. In a letter to his ally Eusebius of Nicomedia, he complained that “we are persecuted because we have said the Son has a beginning but God has no beginning,” and added that the Son “came from non-being” (Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, Thompson trans.). His letter to Alexander called the Son “the perfect creature of God, but not as one of the creatures,” made “at the will of God, before time and before the ages” (Letter to Alexander, preserved in Athanasius, De Synodis 16).

An Alexandrian synod deposed Arius around 320. He found support among bishops in Palestine and Asia Minor, many of them fellow students of Lucian of Antioch, and Alexander circulated a letter condemning him to the whole church (Henos sōmatos). Arius set his teaching to verse in the Thalia, now known only from hostile quotations in Athanasius (fragments and introduction). The dispute spilled into the streets and the eastern episcopate split.

Nicaea and after

Constantine, newly master of the East, wanted one church. He summoned the Council of Nicaea in 325. Its creed called the Son “begotten, not made, being of one substance (homoousios) with the Father” and anathematized anyone who said “there was a time when the Son of God was not,” that he was made “of things that were not,” or that he is “a creature, or subject to change” (creed and synodal letter). Of the bishops who first objected, only Secundus of Ptolemais and Theonas of Marmarica refused to the end; they and Arius were exiled (Socrates, Church History I.8).

Nicaea settled less than it seemed. Many signatories were uneasy with homoousios, a non-biblical word that had earlier been tied to Sabellian ideas. Within a few years Eusebius of Nicomedia was back in favour, Arius was nearly readmitted to communion (he died in Constantinople in 336 before it happened), and Athanasius, Alexander’s successor from 328, was deposed at the Council of Tyre in 335. He would be exiled five times.

Under Constantius II (337–361) the anti-Nicene side held imperial favour. A run of councils produced new creeds that avoided “substance” language. The parties sorted themselves out: Homoians said only that the Son is “like” the Father; Heterousians such as Aetius and Eunomius said he is unlike the Father in essence; Homoiousians led by Basil of Ancyra said he is “like in substance.” The councils of Ariminum and Seleucia (359) and Constantinople (360) imposed a Homoian creed. Jerome later wrote that “the whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian” (Dialogue Against the Luciferians).

Resolution

The turn came through theology and politics together. Athanasius reached out to the Homoiousians, arguing that their meaning was close to Nicaea’s (De Synodis 41). The Cappadocian fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, supplied the distinction between one divine essence (ousia) and three persons (hypostaseis) that let former opponents accept homoousios without fearing it erased the Son as a distinct person. The Homoian emperor Valens died at Adrianople in 378, and his successor Theodosius I made Nicene faith the law of the empire in 380. The Council of Constantinople (381) reaffirmed Nicaea and anathematized “the Eunomians or Anomoeans, the Arians or Eudoxians, and … the Semi-Arians or Pneumatomachi” (canon 1).

Influence

Arian Christianity outlived its defeat inside the empire. Ulfilas, consecrated bishop to the Goths around 341, translated the Bible into Gothic and taught Homoian faith; Socrates says many Goths took that form of Christianity under Valens (Church History IV.33). Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and Lombards carried it into the western kingdoms. The Vandals persecuted Catholics in North Africa; Augustine debated the Arian bishop Maximinus at Hippo around 427. Clovis’s Catholic baptism set the Franks apart from their Arian neighbours, the Visigoths of Spain converted at the Third Council of Toledo (589), and the Lombards drifted into Catholicism during the seventh century.

The controversy’s lasting effect was on orthodoxy itself. It forced the church to state that the Son is God in the same sense as the Father, and it fixed the vocabulary that later debates about Christ and the Spirit would use. It also set the pattern of creedal councils backed by imperial power that shaped the Early Church.

Key ideas and contributors

God alone is unbegotten. For Arius, the defining mark of God is to have no origin. His letter to Alexander describes the Father alone as unbegotten, eternal and without beginning, and as “alone true” (Letter to Alexander). A Son who is begotten therefore has a beginning, however exalted.

The Son is the first and highest creature. The Son was made by the Father’s will before time, and through him the Father made everything else. He is unique and incomparable among creatures, but still a creature. Arians read Proverbs 8:22 in its Greek form, “the Lord created me as the beginning of his ways,” as Wisdom speaking of the Son, and called him “firstborn of all creation” from Colossians 1:15.

There was when he was not. The slogan Athanasius attributes to the Thalia (Orations Against the Arians I, Discourse I) does not say the Son came into being in time. Arians placed his origin before time. It says only that the Father existed without the Son, so that “God was not always a Father.”

The Son’s divinity is derived. Arians called the Son “God,” but by the Father’s gift. Texts about his limits, such as “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), his ignorance of the day (Mark 13:32), his growth, suffering and prayer, showed a being who is not the unchangeable God.

The Nicene answer. Athanasius became the chief opponent. In the Orations Against the Arians (Discourses) he argued that the Father has always been Father, so the Son has always been; that a creature cannot reveal God or save; and that worshipping a creature is idolatry. De Decretis (text) defended Nicaea’s word homoousios. Hilary of Poitiers carried the case to the Latin West in On the Trinity (text). Gregory of Nazianzus answered Eunomius’s refined Arianism in his Theological Orations, taking the “lowly” texts one by one and assigning them to the Son’s human nature (Oration 30).

Other contributors: Eusebius of Nicomedia, Arius’s patron and later the baptizer of Constantine; Asterius “the Sophist,” who wrote the first systematic Arian theology; and Eunomius of Cyzicus, who argued that “unbegotten” names God’s very essence and so the Son must differ from the Father in essence.

Key controversies

Scripture or philosophy. Each side accused the other of leaving the Bible. Anti-Nicenes said homoousios is not in Scripture and smells of materialist or Sabellian thinking. Athanasius replied that Arians began their “war against God with words not in Scripture” (“from nothing,” “there was when he was not”) and that Nicaea used a non-biblical word only to fix the Bible’s meaning (De Decretis). Nicenes, for their part, pointed to John 1:1–3 and John 10:30. The argument over how far a creed may go beyond biblical wording still runs through debates about Scripture and tradition.

Who can save. Athanasius’s deepest objection was soteriological. In On the Incarnation he wrote that the Word “was made man that we might be made God” (ch. 54). Only one who is truly God can unite humanity to God; a creature, however high, cannot give what it does not have. This argument fed the Eastern doctrine of Theosis. Arians answered that a Son who suffers and grows cannot be the impassible God, so their Christ was better fitted to save: a perfect creature who shared our condition.

Worship. Arians prayed to Christ and worshipped him. Nicenes asked how worship of a creature differs from paganism. Arians replied that the Son receives honour as the Father’s appointed image. The question exposed that the dispute was about liturgy as much as metaphysics.

Imperial power. Emperors called councils, exiled bishops on both sides, and finally made one creed law. Critics then and since, Athanasius’s own History of the Arians among them, complained of state interference whenever it ran against their party. Whether the Nicene victory was won by argument or by Theodosius remains a live question for historians.

Was there an “Arianism”? Modern scholarship has questioned the category. R. P. C. Hanson’s The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (1988) and Rowan Williams’s Arius: Heresy and Tradition (1987) argued that Arius had few direct followers and that “Arian” was a polemical label Athanasius used to lump together quite different theologies. Robert Gregg and Dennis Groh’s Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (1981) read Arius as driven by a picture of Christ as the model creature advancing in virtue. Lewis Ayres’s Nicaea and Its Legacy (2004) describes the fourth century as a long search for terms, not a fight between a fixed orthodoxy and one heresy. These works are cited by title; the claims summarized are their well-known theses.

Modern echoes. Views close to Arius’s resurfaced after the Reformation. Isaac Newton privately rejected the Trinity, Samuel Clarke’s Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1712) was attacked as Arian, and Jehovah’s Witnesses today teach that the Son is God’s first creation. Defenders of Classical Theism and Nicene orthodoxy in every major tradition, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant, still treat Arianism as the textbook case of a Christology that falls short.

What remains unresolved

Arianism is settled as a matter of church teaching: every major church confesses the Nicene Creed. What historians still argue over is how to tell the story: how much Arius himself mattered, how far Athanasius’s account can be trusted, and whether the fourth century was a defence of an existing faith or the slow discovery of a new precision. The theological question it raised, how a Son who is begotten can be fully God, is answered by the Nicene distinction between begetting and making, and every later Trinitarian debate starts from it.