When was arianism started

Arius openly triumphed; but as he went about in parade, the evening before this event was to take place, he expired from a sudden disorder, which Catholics could not help regarding as a judgment of heaven , due to the bishop's prayers. His death, however, did not stay the plague. Constantine now favoured none but Arians; he was baptized in his last moments by the shifty prelate of Nicomedia ; and he bequeathed to his three sons an empire torn by dissensions which his ignorance and weakness had aggravated.

Constantius , who nominally governed the East, was himself the puppet of his empress and the palace-ministers. He obeyed the Eusebian faction; his spiritual director , Valens, Bishop of Mursa, did what in him lay to infect Italy and the West with Arian dogmas.

The term "like in substance", Homoiousion , which had been employed merely to get rid of the Nicene formula, became a watchword. But as many as fourteen councils, held between and , in which every shade of heretical subterfuge found expression, bore decisive witness to the need and efficacy of the Catholic touchstone which they all rejected. About , an Alexandrian gathering had defended its archbishop in an epistle to Pope Julius. On the death of Constantine, and by the influence of that emperor's son and namesake, he had been restored to his people.

But the young prince passed away, and in the celebrated Antiochene Council of the Dedication a second time degraded Athanasius , who now took refuge in Rome. There he spent three years. Gibbon quotes and adopts "a judicious observation" of Wetstein which deserves to be kept always in mind. From the fourth century onwards, remarks the German scholar, when the Eastern Churches were almost equally divided in eloquence and ability between contending sections, that party which sought to overcome made its appearance in the Vatican, cultivated the Papal majesty, conquered and established the orthodox creed by the help of the Latin bishops.

Therefore it was that Athanasius repaired to Rome. A stranger, Gregory, usurped his place. The Roman Council proclaimed his innocence. In , Constans, who ruled over the West from Illyria to Britain, summoned the bishops to meet at Sardica in Pannonia.

Ninety-four Latin, seventy Greek or Eastern, prelates began the debates; but they could not come to terms, and the Asiatics withdrew, holding a separate and hostile session at Philippopolis in Thrace. It has been justly said that the Council of Sardica reveals the first symptoms of discord which, later on, produced the unhappy schism of East and West. But to the Latins this meeting, which allowed of appeals to Pope Julius, or the Roman Church , seemed an epilogue which completed the Nicene legislation, and to this effect it was quoted by Innocent I in his correspondence with the bishops of Africa.

Having won over Constans, who warmly took up his cause, the invincible Athanasius received from his Oriental and Semi-Arian sovereign three letters commanding, and at length entreating his return to Alexandria The factious bishops , Ursacius and Valens , retracted their charges against him in the hands of Pope Julius; and as he travelled home, by way of Thrace, Asia Minor , and Syria , the crowd of court-prelates did him abject homage.

These men veered with every wind. Some, like Eusebius of Caesarea , held a Platonizing doctrine which they would not give up, though they declined the Arian blasphemies. But many were time-servers, indifferent to dogma.

And a new party had arisen, the strict and pious Homoiousians, not friends of Athanasius , nor willing to subscribe to the Nicene terms, yet slowly drawing nearer to the true creed and finally accepting it. In the councils which now follow these good men play their part. However, when Constans died , and his Semi-Arian brother was left supreme, the persecution of Athanasius redoubled in violence.

By a series of intrigues the Western bishops were persuaded to cast him off at Arles, Milan , Ariminum. It was concerning this last council that St. Jerome wrote, "the whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian". For the Latin bishops were driven by threats and chicanery to sign concessions which at no time represented their genuine views. Councils were so frequent that their dates are still matter of controversy. Personal issues disguised the dogmatic importance of a struggle which had gone on for thirty years.

The Pope of the day, Liberius , brave at first, undoubtedly orthodox , but torn from his see and banished to the dreary solitude of Thrace, signed a creed, in tone Semi-Arian compiled chiefly from one of Sirmium , renounced Athanasius , but made a stand against the so-called "Homoean" formulae of Ariminum. This new party was led by Acacius of Caesarea , an aspiring churchman who maintained that he, and not St. Cyril of Jerusalem , was metropolitan over Palestine. The Homoeans , a sort of Protestants , would have no terms employed which were not found in Scripture, and thus evaded signing the "Consubstantial".

George of Cappadocia persecuted the Alexandrian Catholics. Athanasius retired into the desert among the solitaries. Hosius had been compelled by torture to subscribe a fashionable creed. When the vacillating Emperor died , Julian , known as the Apostate, suffered all alike to return home who had been exiled on account of religion.

A momentous gathering, over which Athanasius presided, in , at Alexandria, united the orthodox Semi-Arians with himself and the West.

Four years afterwards fifty-nine Macedonian, i. But the Emperor Valens , a fierce heretic , still laid the Church waste. However, the long battle was now turning decidedly in favour of Catholic tradition.

Western bishops , like Hilary of Poitiers and Eusebius of Vercellae banished to Asia for holding the Nicene faith , were acting in unison with St. Basil , the two St. Gregories of Nyssa and Nazianzus -- Ed. As an intellectual movement the heresy had spent its force. Theodosius , a Spaniards and a Catholic , governed the whole Empire. Athanasius died in ; but his cause triumphed at Constantinople, long an Arian city, first by the preaching of St. This saintly man had been estranged from the Nicene champions during a long schism ; but he made peace with Athanasius , and now, in company of St.

Cyril of Jerusalem , represented a moderate influence which won the day. No deputies appeared from the West. Meletius died almost immediately. Gregory Nazianzen , who took his place, very soon resigned. A creed embodying the Nicene was drawn up by St. Gregory of Nyssa , but it is not the one that is chanted at Mass, the latter being due, it is said, to St.

Epiphanius and the Church of Jerusalem. The Council became ecumenical by acceptance of the Pope and the ever-orthodox Westerns. From this moment Arianism in all its forms lost its place within the Empire. Its developments among the barbarians were political rather than doctrinal.

Emperor Constantine and his successors regarded that policy as an honest opportunity for reconciliation and reunion. The refusal of the Catholics to be deceived became, in the eyes of those who thought thus, mere obstinacy; and in the eyes of the Emperor, factious rebellion and inexcusable disobedience. Because you have the popular names behind you, you feel yourselves the masters of your fellows.

Such arrogance is intolerable. By holding out you split society into two camps; you disturb the peace of the Empire, and are as criminal as you are fanatical.

The Catholics answered: "The heretics have accepted our main point. They have subscribed to an Orthodox phrase, but they interpret that phrase in an heretical fashion. They will repeat that Our Lord is of Divine nature, but that he is fully God, for they still say He was created. Therefore we will not allow them to enter our communion.

To do so would be to endanger the vital principle by which the Church exists, the prin ciple of the Incarnation, and the Church is essential to the Empire and Mankind. At this point, there entered the battle that personal force which ultimately won the victory for Catholicism: St. It was the tenacity and single aim of St. He enjoyed a position of advantage, for Alexandria was the second most important town in the Eastern Empire and, as a Bishopric, one of the first four in the world.

He further enjoyed popular backing, which never failed him, and which made his enemies hesitate to take extreme measures against him. But all this would not have sufficed had not the man himself been what he was. He lived to be seventy-six or seventy-seven years of age, dying in A. When the first compromise of Arianism was suggested, Athanasius was already Archbishop of Alexandria. Constantine ordered him to re-admit Arius to Communion.

He refused. It was a step most perilous because all men admitted the full power of the Monarch over Life and Death, and regarded rebellion as the worst of crimes. Athanasius was also felt to be outrageous and extravagant, because opinion in the official world, among men of social influence, and throughout the Army, upon which everything then reposed, was strong that the compromise ought to be accepted.

Athanasius was exiled to Gaul, but Athanasius in exile was even more formidable than Athanasius at Alexandria. His presence in the West had the effect of reinforcing the strong Catholic feeling of all that part of the Empire. He was recalled. Most of all did the Court lean towards Arianism because it disliked the growing power of the organized Catholic Clergy, rival to the lay power of the State. The last and longest lived of Constantine's sons and successors, Constantius, became very definitely Arian.

Athanasius was exiled over and over again but the Cause of which he was champion was growing in strength. When Constantius died in , he was succeeded by a nephew of Constantine's, Julian the Apostate. This Emperor went over to the large surviving Pagan body and came near to reestablishing Paganism; for the power of an individual Emperor was in that day overwhelming. But he was killed in battle against the Persians and his successor, Jovian, was definitely Catholic.

However, the see-saw still went on. In , St. Athanasius, being then an old man of at least seventy years of age, the Emperor Valens exiled him for the fifth time. Finding that the Catholic forces were now too strong he later recalled him. By this time Athanasius had won his battle. He died as the greatest man of the Roman world. Of such value are sincerity and tenacity, combined with genius.

But the Army remained Arian, and what we have to follow in the next generations is the lingering death of Arianism in the Latin-speaking Western part of the Empire; lingering because it was supported by the Chief Generals in command of the Western districts, but doomed because the people as a whole had abandoned it.

How it thus died out I shall now describe. It is often said that all heresies die. This may be true in the very long run but it is not necessarily true within any given period of time. It is not even true that the vital principle of a heresy necessarily loses strength with time. The fate of the various heresies has been most various; and the greatest of them, Mohammedanism, is not only still vigorous but is more vigorous over the districts which it originally occupied than is its Christian rival, and much more vigorous and much more co-extensive with its own society than is the Catholic Church with our Western civilization which is the product of Catholicism.

Arianism, however, was one of those heresies which did die. The same fate has overtaken Calvinism in our own day. This does not mean that the general moral effect or atmosphere of the heresy disappears from among men, but that its creative doctrines are no longer believed in, so that its vitality is lost and must ultimately disappear.

Geneva today, for instance, is morally a Calvinist city, although it has a Catholic minority sometimes very nearly equal to half its total numbers, sometimes actually becoming I believe a slight majority. But there is not one man of a hundred in Geneva today who accepts Calvin's highly defined theology.

The doctrine is dead; its effects on society survive. The Eastern half had Greek for its official language and it was governed from Constantinople, which was also called Byzantium.

It was in this part of the Empire that Arianism had sprung up and proved so powerful that between A. The Imperial Court had wavered between Arianism and Catholicism with one momentary lapse back into paganism. But before the century was over, that is well before the year A. As I explained above, although the Emperor and his surrounding officials which I have called "the Court'' were theoretically all powerful for the constitution was an absolute monarchy and men could not think in any other terms in those days , yet, at least as powerful, and less subject to change, was the army on which the whole of that society reposed.

And the army meant the generals; the generals of the army were for the most part, and permanently, Arian. On this account, because the spirit which had underlain Arianism the doubt on the full divinity of Christ went on, there arose a number of what may be called "derivatives'' from Arianism; or "secondary forms'' of Arianism. Men continued to suggest that there was only one nature in Christ, the end of which suggestion would necessarily have been a popular idea that Christ was only a man.

When that failed to capture the official machine, though it continued to affect millions of people, there was another suggestion made that there was only one Will in Christ, not a human will and a divine will, but a single will.

Before these there had been a revival of the old idea, previous to Arianism and upheld by early heretics in Syria, that the divinity only came into Our Lord during His lifetime. Of course they depended also on the eternal human tendency to rationalize and to reject what is beyond the reach of reason.

But there was another factor in the survival of the secondary effects of Arianism in the East. It was the factor which is called today in European politics "Particularism,'' that is, the tendency of a part of the state to separate itself from the rest and to live its own life. When this feeling becomes so strong that men are willing to suffer and die for it, it takes the form of a Nationalist revolution.

An example of such was the feeling of the southern Slavs against the Austrian Empire which feeling gave rise to the Great War. Now this discontent of provinces and districts with the Central Power by which they had been governed increased as time went on in the Eastern Empire; and a convenient way of expressing it was to favour any kind of criticism against the official religion of the Empire.

That is why great bodies in the East and notably a large proportion of the people in the Egyptian province favoured the Monophysite heresy. Thus the various derivatives from Arianism survived in the Greek Eastern half of the Empire, although the official world had long gone back to Catholicism.

This also explains why you find all over the East today large numbers of schismatic Christians, mainly Monophysite, sometimes Nestorian, sometimes of lesser communities, whom not all these centuries of Mohammedan oppression have been able to unite with the main Christian body.

In the face of that disaster the Christians who remained independent reacted towards orthodoxy as their one chance for survival, and that is how even the secondary effects of Arianism died out in the countries free from subjugation to the Mohammedans in the East.

In the West the fortunes of Arianism are quite different. In the West Arianism died altogether. It ceased to be. It left no derivatives to carry on a lingering life. The story of this death of Arianism in the West is commonly misunderstood because most of our history has been written hitherto on a misconception of what European Christian society was like in Western Europe during the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, that is, between the time when Constantine left Rome and set up the new capital of the Empire, Byzantium, and the date when, in the early seventh century from A.

The official language of all this part was the Latin language. The laws were in Latin, and all the acts of administration were in Latin.

There was no barbarian conquest, but there was a continuation of what had been going on for centuries, an infiltration of people from outside the Empire into the Empire because within the Empire they could get the advantages of civilization.

There was also the fact that the army on which everything depended was at last almost entirely recruited from barbarians. As society gradually got old and it was found difficult to administer distant places, to gather the taxes from far away into the central treasury, or to impose an edict over remote regions, the government of those regions tended to be taken over more and more by the leading officers of the barbarian tribes, who were now Roman soldiers; that is, their chieftains and leaders.

In this way were formed local governments in France and Spain and even Italy itself which, while they still felt themselves to be a part of the Empire, were practically independent. For instance, when it became difficult to govern Italy from so far off as Constantinople, the Emperor sent a general to govern in his place and when this general became too strong he sent another general to supersede him.

This second general Theodoric was also, like all the others, a barbarian chief by birth, though he was the son of one who had been taken into the Roman service and had himself been brought up at the Court of the Emperor. The same thing happened in southern France and in Spain. The local generals took over power. They were barbarian chiefs who handed over this power, that is, the nominating to official posts and the collecting of taxes, to their descendants.

Here the quarrelling factions, all of which were disconnected with direct government from Byzantium, called in a group of Slav soldiers who had migrated into the Roman Empire and had been taken over as a military force. They were called the Vandals; and they took over the government of the province which worked from Carthage.

Now all these local governments of the West the Frankish general and his group of soldiers in northern France, the Visi-gothic one in southern France and Spain, the Burgundian one in southeastern France, the other Gothic one in Italy, the Vandal one in North Africa were at issue with the official government of the Empire on the point of religion. The Frankish one in north-eastern France and what we call today, Belgium, was still pagan.

All the others were Arian. I have explained above what this meant. It was not so much a doctrinal feeling as a social one.

The Gothic general and the Vandal general who were chiefs over their own soldiers felt it was grander to be Arians than to be Catholics like the mass of the populace.

They were the army; and the army was too grand to accept the general popular religion. It was a feeling very much like that which you may see surviving in Ireland still, in places, and which was universal there until quite lately: a feeling that "ascendency'' went properly with anti-Catholicism. Since there is no stronger force in politics than this force of social superiority, it took a very long time for the little local courts to drop their Arianism.

I call them little because, although they collected taxes from very wide areas, it was merely as administrators. The actual numbers were small compared with the mass of the Catholic population.

While the governors and their courts in Italy and Spain and Gaul and Africa still clung with pride to their ancient Arian name and character, two things, one sudden, the other gradual, militated against both their local power and their Arianism. Both armies were absurdly small, each of about 4, men; and it is a very good example of what the times were like that the beaten army, after the battle, at once joined the victors. He took over the great mass of northern France just as his colleagues, with similar forces, took over official action in Spain and Italy and elsewhere.

Now it so happened that this Frankish general whose real name we hardly know, because it has come down to us in various distorted forms, but best known as "Clovis'' was a pagan: something exceptional and even scandalous in the military forces of the day when nearly all important people had become Christians. But this scandal proved a blessing in disguise to the Church, for the man Clovis being a pagan and never having been Arian, it was possible to convert him directly to Catholicism, the popular religion; and when he had accepted Catholicism he at once had behind him the whole force of the millions of citizens and the organized priesthood and Bishoprics of the Church.

He was the one popular general; all the others were at issue with their subjects. He found it easy to levy great bodies of armed men because he had popular feeling with them. He took over the government of the Arian generals in the South, easily defeating them, and his levies became the biggest of the military forces in the Western Latin-speaking Empire.

So much for the sudden blow which was struck against Arianism in the West. The gradual process which hastened the decay of Arianism was of a different kind.

With every year that passed it was becoming, in the decay of society, more and more difficult to collect taxes, to keep up a revenue, and therefore to repair roads and harbours and public buildings and keep order and do all the rest of public work. With this financial decay of government and the social disintegration accompanying it the little groups who were nominally the local governments, lost their prestige.

In, say, the year it was a fine thing to be an Arian in Paris or Toledo or Carthage or Arles or Toulouse or Ravenna; but years later, by say, , the social prestige of Arianism had gone.

It paid everybody who wanted to "get on'' to be a Catholic; and the dwindling little official Arian groups were despised even when they acted savagely in their disappointment, as they did in Africa. They lost ground. Theodosius, the first emperor for many years to strongly oppose Arianism, affirmed the legitimacy and orthodoxy of bishops and priests who supported the Nicene Creed. Under his leadership and imperial authority, the Council of Constantinople reaffirmed and developed the statements made by the Nicene bishops some 56 years earlier.

It truly seemed for a time that it was Athanasius contra mundum. Lewis wrote:. Athanasius did the same. He stood for the Tninitarian doctrine, 'whole and undefiled,' when it looked as if all the civilized world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those 'sensible' synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen.

It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away. Christopher A. Click here for reprint information on Christian History. Sections Home. Bible Coronavirus Prayer.

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