Arianism

Arianism is the heresy, named for the Alexandrian priest Arius, that the Son of God is a creature — the first and highest thing God ever made, but not eternal and not truly God. Condemned at the First Ecumenical Council (325), which confessed the Son "of one essence" with the Father.

For Inquirers

Picture the greatest work of art a master craftsman ever made — so beautiful, so far beyond anything else in the workshop, that people start calling it "priceless" and treating it almost like the craftsman himself. Arianism is what happens when someone applies that picture to Jesus. It says Jesus is God's greatest work: made before anything else, wiser and more powerful than every angel, the one through whom everything else was made — but still, in the end, made. A masterpiece is never the same thing as its maker, no matter how magnificent it is.

The trouble is that Christians have always said something much stranger and much more wonderful than "Jesus is God's masterpiece." They have said Jesus simply is God — not God's finest product, but God Himself, come to live a human life. Arius, the priest who gave this heresy its name, could not accept that; it seemed to him to threaten the truth that there is only one true, uncaused, eternal God. So he taught that the Son must have had a beginning, must be a creature however exalted, must be like God without quite being God.

The Church's answer changed nothing less than what Christmas means. If the baby in the manger is only God's masterpiece and not God Himself, then no matter how wonderful the story, God never actually came all the way down to us — a very impressive messenger arrived, but not the King. So the Church spent decades, at great cost, insisting on something that sounds almost too good to be true: that when you see Jesus, you are not looking at God's greatest creation. You are looking at God.

Overview

• Arianism, named for the priest Arius of Alexandria (early 4th century), taught that the Son was created by the Father out of nothing before the ages — the first and highest of creatures, but not eternal and not truly God.
• Its slogan was "there was a time when he was not": the Son had a beginning, and so is of a different, lesser substance than the Father.
• The First Ecumenical Council (325) condemned it, confessing the Son to be "of one essence" (homoousios) with the Father — the heart of the Nicene Creed.
• Arius was a skilled writer who spread his teaching in verse as well as prose, including a poem called the Thalia meant to popularize his doctrine among ordinary believers.[^ow]

What it teaches

Arianism begins from a real and serious concern, and deserves to be met on those terms: that God's oneness and utter transcendence must never be compromised. Arius's own reasoning survives in outline through the church historian Socrates Scholasticus: "If the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence. From this it is evident that there was a time when the Son was not. It therefore necessarily follows that he had his substance from nothing."[^syllogism] Only the Father, on this logic, is unbegotten, self-existent, and without beginning; anything that has a source outside itself — even the Son — must belong to a lower order of being. The Son is not eternal but the very first of God's creative acts, exalted above every other creature and used by the Father to make everything else, yet still fundamentally made rather than eternally begotten. Nicaea's own account of the controversy names the teaching precisely: Arius was condemned for "blaspheming the Son of God, and saying that he is from things that are not, and that before he was begotten he was not, and that there was a time when he was not… saying also that he is a creature."[^nicaea-report] Scripture's exalted titles for the Son — Word, Wisdom, Image, even "God" — are, on this reading, honours bestowed on the highest of creatures, not descriptions of what He simply is.

Where it came from

Arius was a priest in Alexandria in the early fourth century, a pupil of the celebrated teacher Lucian of Antioch.[^ow] When his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, taught the Son's full and eternal divinity, Arius broke with him publicly, and the dispute spread quickly through the Egyptian and Syrian churches. He was a proficient writer and used that gift to popularize his teaching well beyond the clergy, composing "many compositions in both prose and verse defending his belief, including a poem that he called the Thalia."[^ow] The controversy grew serious enough that the Emperor Constantine, wanting peace restored to the Church he had just legalized, summoned bishops from across the Empire to a council at Nicaea in 325 to settle it.

Why the Church rejected it

If the Son is a creature, however exalted, then everything the Incarnation was meant to accomplish comes apart. St. Athanasius pressed this point relentlessly against the Arians: salvation means that God Himself has united human nature to His own, so that "He was made man that we might be made God."[^athdeif] A creature cannot unite us to God — it can only unite us to another creature, leaving the gulf between Creator and creation exactly where it was. Worship compounds the problem: the Church has always worshipped Christ, and to worship a creature, however magnificent, is idolatry. Arianism could not have both its Christ and its monotheism; something had to give, and it was the very thing the Gospel exists to proclaim.

How it was condemned

The First Ecumenical Council met at Nicaea in 325 under Constantine's patronage and answered Arius point by point. Where he taught the Son came "from things that are not" and had a beginning, the Council confessed the Son "of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten (γεννηθέντα), not made, being of one substance (ὁμοούσιον, consubstantialem) with the Father." And it named the error explicitly in its anathema, condemning any who say "there was a time when the Son of God was not (ἤν ποτε ὅτε οὐκ ἦν)… or that he is of a different substance or essence from the Father, or that he is a creature."[^creed] The controversy did not end that day — the debate over homoousios continued for decades after Nicaea, and the Church's confession of the Son's full divinity had to be defended again later in the century (see Homoousios for that history) — but the word Nicaea chose never moved.

The Orthodox correction

The Church confesses the Son as "true God from true God," sharing the Father's own being rather than merely resembling it however closely — the doctrine worked out fully under Homoousios and The Trinity. What Arianism could not accept is exactly what the Gospel proclaims: not that God sent His finest creation to rescue the world, but that He came Himself.

Sources

[^nicaea-report]: First Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), synodal report on the condemnation of Arius — he was anathematized for "blaspheming the Son of God, and saying that he is from things that are not, and that before he was begotten he was not, and that there was a time when he was not… saying also that he is a creature.". [^creed]: First Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), the Nicene Creed — the Son "of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten (γεννηθέντα), not made, being of one substance (ὁμοούσιον, consubstantialem) with the Father," and the anathema against those who say "there was a time when the Son of God was not (ἤν ποτε ὅτε οὐκ ἦν)… or that he is of a different substance or essence… or that he is a creature.". [^athdeif]: St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, §54 — "For He was made man that we might be made God.". [^syllogism]: OrthodoxWiki, Arius, quoting the church historian Socrates Scholasticus — Arius's own syllogism: "If the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence. From this it is evident that there was a time when the Son was not. It therefore necessarily follows that he had his substance from nothing.". [^ow]: OrthodoxWiki, Arius / Arianism — Arius as "a pupil of Lucian of Antioch, a celebrated Christian teacher and martyr"; Arius "a proficient writer," who "produced many compositions in both prose and verse defending his belief, including a poem that he called the Thalia.".