The Heresy of Arius

If theology is the task of thinking about God and all things in relation to God, dogmatics is the Church's disciplined attempt to articulate what it believes, teaches, and confesses about God on the basis of Scripture.

It begins with the posture of faith — a faith seeking understanding — not in isolation, but within the communion of the saints: receiving with gratitude the theology that has been handed down, and seeking to speak the truth of the Scriptures in the present moment.

In this way, dogmatics follows, guides, and accompanies the Church's witness.

It follows, because dogmatics, properly speaking, flows out of the confession of the Church. It guides, because it concretely reminds the Church that all its teaching remains accountable to God and must be enriched through the act of reflection. And it accompanies, because the dogmatician stands not apart from the Church, but with the Church under God's instruction.

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"Faith turns into wonder, and knowledge terminates in adoration."

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Herman Bavinck adds that when this work is rightly done, it does not remain cold or technical. It becomes doxology — a hymn of adoration to all God's virtues and perfections. Faith turns into wonder, knowledge terminates in adoration, and confession becomes a song of praise.

Shortly after the Great Persecution ended and Constantine legalized Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, a controversy arose in the eastern city of Alexandria that would shape the course of subsequent Christian theology. The presbyter Arius came into conflict with his bishop Alexander over the nature of the Word of God, the Logos. In what sense could Jesus be considered God? In what sense was the Son one with God the Father, and how, in turn, does he save? Over the last forty years, scholarship on Arius has shifted from viewing him as a stand-alone heresiarch who founded a movement to seeing him as the catalyst for a theological conflagration that spread far beyond the boundaries of his own thought.¹ Lewis Ayres summarizes this shift well by describing “Arius as a catalyst for a controversy.”² Arius’s error spurred forth-century theologians to articulate the essential unity of the Father and Son securing both the Christian view of the divine and human salvation.

Arius centrally taught a fundamental difference between the Father and the Son. Only the Father is unoriginated. The Son exists before all things and is the instrument through whom the Father created the cosmos. Nevertheless, the Son has a beginning: he was made from nothing by the Father, just as the whole cosmos was. In a letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia (c. 321–323), Arius explains his position:

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“Before he was begotten, or created, or defined, or established, he did not exist. For he was not unbegotten. But we are persecuted because we have said the Son has a beginning but God has no beginning. We are persecuted because of that and for saying he came from non-being. But we said this since he is not a portion of God nor of anything in existence.”³

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In one sense, the Son can be described as eternal and unchanging, but not by nature; rather, he is so by the Father’s will. Fundamentally, the Son is to be distinguished from the Father not only temporally but also with respect to origin, nature, authority, and transcendence over the cosmos. This is captured in the Thalia, a poetic statement of Arius’s theology: “There was when the Son was not” and “once when he was not.”⁴

Arius draws on a line of reasoning widespread in the ancient world: the singular origin of reality and the cosmos it created are fundamentally incompatible. Proper engagement between the cosmos and Theos therefore requires intermediaries. As Hanson summarizes, “The first point to notice is that Arianism in its characteristic form always assumed that revelation and redemption on the part of God necessitated a reduction or lowering so that they had to be undertaken by a being who, though divine, was less than fully divine.”⁵ God, in and of himself, is distant from the world and ultimately stands in a competitive relationship to it, such that he cannot be known within creation without ceasing to be God. Arius, therefore, posits the Logos as an intermediary who can bridge this gap, placing him on the creaturely side of an infinite divide. To support this position exegetically, Arius and later allies cite texts such as “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28) and the statement in Proverbs 8:22 that Wisdom is the first of God’s works. The precise motives behind Arius’s concerns remain debated among scholars. Whether he sought to uphold a particular aspect of Origen’s theology or to make Christianity more palatable to the philosophical preferences of the imperial elite, Arius advanced a bold new synthesis that challenged the very heart of Christian theology and piety.

In times such as ours it can be easy to lose our Christian faith amidst the polarization of civil society. It is not at all obvious how the tenets of the catholic and apostolic faith bear upon the place of the Christian in contemporary society. Rather than commending a particular political theology for our present cultural moment in early 21st-century North America, I would like to draw attention to the important role played by pride and humility in the political theology at work in part of one of the most influential works of Christian late antiquity, namely, Augustine of Hippo’s City of God.

In the first half of City of God (Books 1-10) Augustine undertakes to expose the false theology underlying the politics of the Roman empire. The second half (11-22) promotes the kind of society that arises from a true embrace of the apostolic faith. There is a powerful convergence of these critical and constructive tasks within the tenth book, which functions as a joint between the two halves. In making his apologetic case that Christ’s Church and its sacrifices of worship offer the universal way of salvation, Augustine at once exposes the unsavory politics implicit in Platonic philosophy and promotes his vision of the politics enjoined by the true faith and worship of the catholic Church². In short, Augustine lifts up the cruciform Christian community over against the political upshot of Platonism, which still attracted many of his contemporaries. Ingredient to Augustine’s argument is the contrast between the pride (superbia) of the Platonists and Christian humility (humilitas).³

Augustine presents the Church as the locus of true worship that forms and commends the humility necessary for aspiring to genuine human community, a community that prepares pilgrims (peregrini) in this life for the formation of the true res publica in eternal union with God.⁴ In contrast, alongside his strong affirmation of the shared commitments of Platonism and Christianity, he subtly traces the pervasive presence of pride and its effects on even the most superior form of Roman philosophy. It promotes at best a collection of individuals pursuing their own honor, station, and glory in competition with one another as well as the gods to whom they commend worship.

In book ten of his City of God, Augustine provides a compelling political-theological, apologetic argument for Christ’s provision of the universal way of salvation Porphyry believes must exist as a gift of divine providence despite never finding it in the philosophies and religions with which he was familiar. Augustine’s apology for Christianity as the true religion that offers proper worship is itself an exercise in political theology inasmuch as it “is the explicit attempt to relate discourse about God to the organization of bodies in space and time.”⁵ Augustine suggests that the Church forms its members to become exemplary participants in civil society. The sacrificial mediation of Christ (which lies at the heart of what Porphyry would consider divine providence and what Augustine would often spell out in terms of the “economy of salvation”) commends an alternative form of human community to the “community that is no community” in the Roman Empire insofar as it is a manifestation of the “earthly city” (ciuitas terrena).⁶ In the course of his argument, Augustine exposes the false worship, theology, and politics of the prevailing Platonism of his day and promotes the true worship, theology, and political vision intrinsic to Christianity.⁷

Augustine grants that as a Platonist, Porphyry is in a position to discover Christ and his grace, but rejects both. Porphyry understands that the initiatory rites of the gods do not purify the mind of ignorance or the faults to which it leads. This can “only be done through the ‘fatherly mind’ (πατρικός νοῦς), that is, the Mind or Intellect” whom Augustine identifies with the Wisdom or Word of God, the second Person of the Trinity.⁸ Unfortunately, Porphyry does not recognize “Christ, the Power of God and the Wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24), but “[shies] away from his saving humility, inflated with the swollen pride of useless learning.”⁹ He despises Christ “on account of the body which he received from a woman, and because of the shame of the cross.”¹⁰ Porphyry could not assent to the Wisdom of God‘s undergoing physical embodiment and tangible suffering being anything more than “folly and weakness.”¹¹ What he fails to recognize is that the crucified Christ he considers to be shameful and foolish is the “grace, which heals the weakness of those who do not proudly boast of their delusive happiness, but instead make a humble admission of their genuine misery.”¹² On the subject of grace, Augustine implores his reader in the wake of the now deceased Porphyry to see the Word’s incarnation as “the supreme instance of grace” that should elicit deep gratitude and bestows on Christ’s members “the spirit of [the Son of God’s] love by the mediation of a man.”¹³ While “humility was the necessary condition for submission to this truth,” Augustine suggests, the philosophers are simply too proud to be persuaded that “God has assumed a human soul and body.”¹⁴ Augustine expresses astonishment at their incredulity, however, for although Platonists uphold a consubstantial relationship between corporeal and incorporeal realities in the body-soul composition of human persons (and the world, for that matter), they reject such a relationship between two incorporeal realities: the Word and the soul assumed in the incarnation.