Chapter 19: Arianism and the Church of Rome

The Council of Nicaea, convened on the orders of Constantine in 325, marks the birth of orthodoxy and, consequently, heresy. The tortuous line of the dogma that would take centuries to make its immutable truths precise arrogated for itself the privilege of a rectitude that people like Eusebius, Epiphanius, Augustine, Jerome and their cohorts would extend back into the past and to Jesus, the chosen founder of the Catholic invariance.

The Church would push cynicism to the point of claiming for itself a Christianity that would condemn the following manifestations as heresies: Nazarenism, Elchasaitism, Marcionism, anti-Marcionism, Christian Gnosticism and the New Prophecy.

In the Third Century, the notion of hairesis — questionable choices, subject to polemic — became a weapon, thanks to which the bishops could defend their privileges against all contestation. In the hands of emperors, then popes, heresy would be juridically assimilated as a crime of high treason. When the popes uprooted from the declining empire the ecclesiastical authority that they had arrogated for themselves, they perpetuated in law the old Roman legislation that had once been used against the Jews and the Christians, who had been deemed “rebels” against the State and “perverts” contravening the moral order.

By imposing himself as emperor by divine right, Constantine led a political enterprise in which his predecessors had only succeeded mediocrely. The party of collaborators that the Christian lapsi constitued encountered the aims of Constantine, who — having vanquished Maximin and Licinius — wanted to consolidate the unity of the Empire. Nourished by the conception of an ecclesiastical monarchism that erected the New Jerusalem in Rome, national security [la raison d’Etat] presided over the birth of Catholicism, the triumph of which would always remain burdened by the memory of the Christianities that founded it and that it would treat as bastards and abortions.

The polemics of the first three centuries entered into the freedom of options. The Council of Nicaea defined religious truth and, from then on, inaugurated the permanence of the lie: the forgery of gospels, the falsification of writings, the destruction of heterodox works, and the fabrication of an official history to which the majority of erudite people and historians still subscribe to this day.

Constantine touched by grace? Here we go. I borrow the following lines from the Catholic, Henri Guillemin: “Constantine did not believe in ‘Jesus-Christ’ in any fashion; he was a pagan and he would only convert (if he ever did so) upon his death in 337. When he ordered the meeting at Nicaea in 325, he was only being prudent, a realist, a ‘pragmatic’ and, when faced with the growing numerical importance in his empire of the sectarians of ‘Krestos,’ he drew from this fact the consequences that imposed themselves concerning the well-being of his government.”[285]

On his death-bed, the Emperor found the true father of Catholicism: Eusebius of Cesarea.

Eusebius Of Cesarea

In his commentary on the Life of Constantine, written by Eusebius of Cesarea, Jacob Burkhardt qualifies him as the “first totally dishonest and unjust historian of ancient times.”[286]

To understand the necessity in which Eusebius fabricated an Ecclesiatical History, canonical texts and an apostolic filiation with the scattered pieces of a puzzle of three centuries, it is fitting to recall that he was, above all, the first theorist to “introduce a rational conception of imperial power into the interior of a coherent ideology and metaphysics.”[287]

For Eusebius, “the terrestrial kingdom is in the image of the celestial kingdom.” The task of the sovereign is that of the Logos: to make the law rule over the here-below. “Carrying the image of the celestial kingdom, eyes fixed on heaven, he led and governed mortals on the model of the archetype through imitation of the monarchal power (of the Logos).”[288]

Eusebius’s history of the Church logically leads to the theology that he developed and that is nothing other than the justification of the power of Constantine, the incarnation of the Logos through the grace of God, whom he is duty-bound to serve:

God the Father, whom he called the Supreme Emperor, had certainly created the world. Having created it, he enclosed it in the reins of divine wisdom, making the constraints of time and the cycle of the years submit to him. But he trusted this world, once created, to his unique son, the Word [Verbe]. Eusebius of Cesarea made of him ‘the emminent moderator of the world,’ the ‘common conserver of all things’; the Cosmos produced him so that he could govern it; ‘God entrusted him with the reins of this universe.’ ‘He received from the infinitely good Father a hereditary role’; ‘he rules what is in the interior as well as in the exterior of the vault of heaven,’ and imposes harmonization on all things.

The Logos is thus the governor of the Cosmos, the one who maintains order in creation. It produces harmony among all things, much later, added Eusebius of Cesarea. He [the Son] was not a viceroy totally exterior to the ensemble that he governed. He was the soul and spirit of the world. Indeed, Eusebius of Cesarea described his function in a characteristic passage: ‘The Divine Word [Verbe],’ he said, ‘is not composed of parts and is not constituted from contraries, but is simple and indivisible. In the same way, in a body, the parts and members, the viscera and the intestines are multiple in their assemblage, but a unique soul, a unique spirit, indivisible and incorporeal, is spread throughout the ensemble; likewise, in the universe, the world itself is one, all being combined from multiple parts, but the Divine Word, endowed with an immense and all-powerful force, unique to it, deployed in the universe, does not stray from the adventure but spreads through all things and the cause of all that is made among them.’[289]

Thenceforth, theology would furnish its privileged framework to the risks of ecclesiastical politics and imperial power, still in solidarity despite violent rivalries. Theology thus seized the two doctrines that offered neither novelty nor anything religiously shocking: Donatism and Arianism. The first inscribed itself in the line of the New Prophecy and Novatian; the second revived Gnostico-Christian speculations and the relations between God and his messiah.

Arius

Although his name was invested with a glory propagated by the artifice of an alleged Arian party, neither Arius’ life nor his works justified the celebrity with which he was gratified. Born in Libya or Alexandria in 260, he studied with Lucien of Antioch and lived in Alexandria, where he was mentioned for the first time by Peter, bishop of the city, executed in 311. He belonged to the category of priests lying in wait for honors and preeminences. The partisan of Melititius of Lycopolis, a rival of the deceased Peter, Arius acceded to the priesthood under the bisphoric of someone named Alexander. Extolling asceticism, his popularity grew among the faithful who were always receptive to the old influence of Montanism, renewed by Novatian.

In 318, Arius opposed himself to this bishop, reproaching him with having attributed an equal eternity to the Father and the Son in a sermon. For Arius, the Son was neither eternal nor equal to the Father; created according to the principle of all things, he only received his divine nature once invested with his mission as savior on earth. The first opinion was related to Jewish, Essene and Nazarene Gnosticism, according to which Adam, or the new Adam erected as the redeemer messiah, was the co-creator of the world. The second picked up from Montanism [the following]: the messiah was a man, sharing in the vicissitudes of common human existence, but the Divine Spirit was incarnated in him from birth, since he was the son of Sophia or Mary. The two [opinions] inscribed themselves in the evolution of the Christianity of the first [few] centuries.

A synod of a hundred bishops, convened around 318 or 319, excluded Arius and his partisans from the Christian community and refused him communion, which marked belonging to the congregation. He left Alexandria and went to Nicodemia, where he enjoyed the support of Bishop Eusebius, not without having written a pamphlet called Thalia (the Banquet) in verse and prose, which knew a great popular success. Alexander retorted through a detailed report on the quarrel. The hostility of Licinius to the Christians and his war against Constantine relegated the debates to the second plane of preoccupations, but once Constantine was master of the Empire (after the defeat of Licinius), he invested himself triumphantly in Constantine’s double sovereignty, spiritual and temporal, and — at the request of Arius’ friends — convened a council at Nicaea, not far from Nicomedia.

In 325, Constantine — circumvented by his councilor Hosius of Cordoue, who won Alexander over to the party of the bishop — convinced three hundred bishops to take up positions against Arius.

The credo of Nicaea resulted from an imperial opinion that was hostile to Arius’ theory, according to which “God is when the Son is not,” and “he didn’t exist before birth.” He made the Son a “true God issued from the true God and forming the same substance with the Father,” which translates the Greek term homoiousios.

Arius obeyed and renounced his doctrine. In 328, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicaea, exiled with their friend Arius, regained their world [siecle]. In 335, the synod of Tyr rehabilitated Arius. Constantine, whose sole desire in excluding them was to assure the unity of the young universal Church, was preparing to reintegrate him into the clergy of Alexandria when the unfortunate protester died in 336. (The official Christian version of his death wanted to let fly at him the last arrow of polemical elegance by propagating the rumor that he had unexpectedly trespassed by satisfying an urgent need. Abbey Pluquet, following other heresiologues, rejoiced in such a brilliant proof of divine wrath.[290])

From an inconsistent quarrel — in which only the authority of the emperor, elevated to the dignity of pontifex maximus (pontifical sovereignty), was important — the theologians drew an enormous jumble of implications that were as thunderous as they were empty. Underneath the quibbles of this Arian party, artificially swelled so as to give importance to the negligible, there raged a power struggle between Rome and the Eastern churches, and an unceasing combat between the West and Byzantium.

From a speculative point of view, it was easy to brandish the reproach of dualism, nay, Marcion’s “two Gods” against Bishop Alexander and his thesis of the “Eternal God, the Eternal Son.” The credo of Nicaea implied a unique God so as to parry Marcionism, which the Manichean religion would claim for itself.

Upon the death of Constantine I, reconciliation seemed to rule. Nevertheless, quite soon his successor, Constant, supported the party of Nicaea, while in the East Constantine II gave his support to the Arians. After the death of Constant in 350, Constantine II, maneuvering through many councils, attempted to Arianize the West and hunt down Arius’ enemies.

Nevertheless, dissent was born from the sudden victory of Arianism. Three factions emerged: the Anomeans affirmed that the Son was not similar (anomoios) to the Father; the semi-Arians or homoiousians affirmed that the Son participated in the same substance (homoiousios) as the Father; and the homoeians that the Son was like (homoios) the Father.

In fact, doctrinal positions were only pawns on the chessboard of rival influences: Valens, emperor from 364 to 378, inclined in favor of the homoeians. Gratian and Theodose the First (*) defended Nicaea. The decrees of 380 and 381 condemned Arianism, chased its partisans from the Church and foreshadowed many executions, the first victims of orthodoxy before Priscillian. In 381, the Council of Constantinople reaffirmed the credo of Nicaea and condemned the semi-Arians, the homoiousians.

(*) Theodose imposed on all the Christians an orthodox faith to which he gave the repressive firmness that would thenceforth prevent deviation from national security [la raison d’Etat]. In the strict sense, he was the founder of Catholic orthodoxy.

With the emergence of a State religion, the episcopatus aemulatio, the path to episcopal honors (which Tertullian mocked and labeled the “mother of all schisms”), freed itself much more easily because the destiny of the martyr was no longer dreaded.

A rhetorician in Antioch and born in Sicily around 300, Aetius was a disciple of Arius before he founded the Anomean party and assured his own doctrine by discerning a dissimilarity between the Father and the Son, a dissimilarity in which the Logos or Holy Spirit was incarnated. A friend of Emperor Gallus, Aetius used certain opportunities to make his views triumph, but his fate was the opposite. Condemned to exile upon the fall of Gallus (354), he aroused the reprobation of the Council of Ancyre (358) and Constantinople (360). Summoned by Emperor Julian and named bishop, he canceled his functions upon the death of the last tolerant emperor (the one whom the Church named the Apostate because he wanted to restore religious freedom). Aetius participated in the revolt of Procope, cousin of Julian, and barely escaped capital punishment, and died soon thereafter in Constantinople, where his secretary, Eunome, would develop a doctrine according to which the Father and the Son, dissimilar in essence, were united by the same will.

Athanase, Alexander’s successor, combated the theses of Arius and Aetius, reinforced the Nicaean party and invented the Arian party in his Discourse Against the Arians; he dressed Arianism up as a power that threatened faith and made Arius the very spirit of heresy.

From theological hyperbole — in which banal power rivalries between the notables of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople were played out — burst forth an Arian missionary vocation that failed to carry off the palm of orthodoxy by winning the sympathy of the new rival powers in Rome.

Constantine only condemned Arius with an eye on guaranteeing the unity of the Church and the unity of the Empire. Arius threatened stability and order to the limited extent that his influence gathered the adhesion of a great number of people. Constantine was not unacquainted with the one who, exiling Arius, condemned Athanase, his principal enemey, to the same fate. Likewise, Constantine II — in the uncertainty in which orthodoxy was still situated — also put Athanase and Aetius aside. Anyone could capsize at any moment. Weakened by the edict of tolerance issued by Emperor Julian (361–363), the two parties would each know a manner of victory. The Nicaeans carried off the West; the Anomean missionaries converted the Goths, who, invading Spain and North Africa, imposed Arianism on them. As far as Byzantium, whose hostility with respect to Rome did not cease to grow, it gave its schism a theological pretext by rejecting a post-Nicaea formula that was born in Spain during the Seventh Century: “The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son,” a quarrel that was called Filioque (and of the Son).

The rivalries between Arian, anti-Arian and pseudo-Arian factions rallied a good number of individuals in search of social promotion or animated by simple opportunism. (Thus the schismatic Lucifer, the Bishop of Cagliari in Sardinia, laid the bases for an anti-Arian Church for his own profit.) Was not Acace, bishop and successor of Eusebius of Cesarea, successively Arian under Constance, Nicaean under Jovian, and Anomean under Valens? Such was the case with many.

More interesting was Aerius, priest of Pontus, ordained by Eustathe, Bishop of Sebaste, against whom he entered into conflict, reproaching him for abandoning the ascetic conduct to which he subscribed before attaining dignity.

Aerius inscribed himself in the counter-current of Nicaea and religious State-ification by advancing the opinion that no difference in rank between priest and bishop should exist. He condemned the pomp of the ceremonies multiplied by the Church and judged useless the prayers for the dead, which was a source of revenue for the clergy. According to him, Easter did away with Jewish superstition. Epiphanius of Salamis — who used a procedure that would be popular among the inquisitors of the Middle Ages, that is to say, confusion — assimilated him with the Arians, to whom he thus imputed hostile feelings for the [Church] hierarchy.