Arius and the Council of Nicaea

A question that would not go away

Christians worshiped Jesus as Lord. They prayed to him, sang hymns to him and baptized in his name. Yet they also insisted, with the Jews, that there is only one God. How do these fit together? For three centuries Christians had lived with the tension without fully resolving it. Writers used various images: the Son is like a ray from the sun, or a word from a mind. Some, like Origen, seemed to rank the Son below the Father. In the 300s the question exploded.

Arius

Around 318, Arius, a popular and ascetic priest in Alexandria, began teaching that the Son of God, though divine in some sense and greater than any other creature, was not eternal. God the Father alone is without beginning. The Son was created (or "begotten," which Arius treated as meaning the same thing) by the Father before all ages. His slogan was "There was [a time] when he was not."

Arius was trying to protect the oneness and the absolute greatness of God. To a mind shaped by Platonism, the supreme God must be unique, unchanging and beyond suffering. Surely the Son, who became human, suffered and died, could not be equal to that God? Arius set his ideas to catchy songs that sailors, millers and travelers sang. The theologian Gregory of Nyssa later joked that if you asked a baker the price of bread in Constantinople, he would tell you the Father is greater and the Son is subordinate.

His bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, condemned him. Arius found supporters elsewhere, especially another Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia. Soon the eastern churches were at war with each other.

The Council of Nicaea, 325

The emperor Constantine the Great, who had just won control of the East, was dismayed. He summoned bishops to Nicaea, a town near his residence in northwest Turkey. About 250–300 attended (later tradition says 318), almost all from the East. The bishop of Rome sent two priests as representatives. Many bishops bore the scars of the recent persecution. One had lost an eye, and another had his hands crippled by torture.

The council rejected Arius' views. To rule them out clearly, it adopted a creed declaring that the Son is:

"God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance (homoousios) with the Father."

The crucial word was Homoousios, "of the same substance" or "of one being." It meant that whatever the Father is as God, the Son is too. He is not a lesser, created god. Ironically, this was not a biblical word, and many bishops were uneasy about it. Some suspected it blurred the distinction between Father and Son. But it was the one word Arius could not accept. All but two bishops signed. Arius and his two loyal supporters were exiled.

Nicaea also settled the method of calculating the date of Easter and issued canons (rules) on church discipline. It recognized the special authority of the bishops of Alexandria, Antioch and Rome over their regions.

The seven ecumenical councils

#	Council	Called by	Main issue	Outcome	Who accepts it
1	Nicaea I, 325	Constantine	Arius: is the Son created?	Son is homoousios, "of one substance" with the Father; Nicene Creed	Almost all churches
2	Constantinople I, 381	Theodosius I	Arianism again; the Holy Spirit; Apollinarius	Creed expanded (Spirit is Lord and life-giver); Trinity affirmed	Almost all churches
3	Ephesus, 431	Theodosius II	Nestorius: is Mary "Mother of God"?	Mary is Theotokos; Nestorius deposed	All except the Church of the East
4	Chalcedon, 451	Marcian & Pulcheria	Eutyches: one nature or two?	Christ is one person "in two natures"	Catholic, Orthodox, most Protestants; not Oriental Orthodox
5	Constantinople II, 553	Justinian	Winning back the Miaphysites	Condemns "Three Chapters" (Antiochene writings); Origenism	Catholic & Orthodox
6	Constantinople III, 680–81	Constantine IV	Monothelitism: does Christ have one will or two?	Two wills, human and divine, in harmony	Catholic & Orthodox
7	Nicaea II, 787	Empress Irene	Iconoclasm: are icons idols?	Icons may be venerated (honored), not worshiped	Catholic & Orthodox; most Protestants reject

Iota: one letter's difference

Nicaea did not end the controversy. It started a fifty-year struggle. Many eastern bishops, though not Arians, disliked homoousios. They preferred homoiousios, "of similar substance." The two Greek words differ by a single letter, the iota (ι). The skeptical historian Edward Gibbon mocked Christians for fighting over a diphthong. But the difference was real: is the Son the same God as the Father, or merely like God?

The politics were bewildering. Constantine himself softened toward Arius and recalled him from exile. Constantine's son Constantius II II, emperor of the East and later of the whole empire, favored Arian-leaning bishops. Councils met, made creeds, and unmade them. In 359, councils at Rimini and Seleucia accepted a vague creed saying the Son was "like" the Father. Jerome later wrote that the world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian.

Athanasius against the world

The great champion of Nicaea was Athanasius of Alexandria. As a young deacon he attended the council. In 328 he became bishop of Alexandria, and he spent the next 45 years defending homoousios. He was tough, uncompromising and politically skilled. He was exiled five times by four emperors, once hiding among the desert monks, who adored him. His enemies accused him of violence and corruption. His supporters called him a pillar of orthodoxy. The phrase Athanasius contra mundum, "Athanasius against the world," sums up his reputation.

His central argument was about salvation. Only God can save. If the Son is a creature, however exalted, he cannot unite us to God. "God became human so that humans might become divine," he wrote in On the Incarnation, meaning that we might share in God's life. Moreover, Christians worship Christ. If he is a creature, they are idolaters.

The Cappadocians and the Trinity

The final resolution came from three brilliant theologians from Cappadocia in central Turkey. They were Basil of Caesarea (the Great) of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus. Behind them stood Basil and Gregory's remarkable elder sister, Macrina the Younger, an ascetic leader whom Gregory of Nyssa called "the Teacher."

The Cappadocians made a key distinction in vocabulary. God is:

• one ousia (being, essence, "what" God is), and
• three hypostases ("persons," "who" God is): Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

This allowed them to affirm both the full divinity of the Son (against Arius) and real distinctions between Father, Son and Spirit (against the opposite error of treating them as mere masks or modes of one person, called modalism or Sabellianism). They also argued that the Holy Spirit is fully God, not a created force, which some were denying.

The Trinity: one God, three persons

Constantinople, 381

When the strongly pro-Nicene emperor Theodosius I came to power, he called a council at Constantinople in 381. It reaffirmed Nicaea, condemned the various Arian groups, and expanded the creed, especially its section on the Holy Spirit: "the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." The resulting text, properly called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, is what Christians usually mean by the Nicene Creed. It is recited every Sunday by Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran and many other churches, more widely shared than any other Christian statement.

Gregory of Nazianzus presided for a while, then resigned in disgust at the bishops' squabbling, remarking that he had never seen a council come to a good end.

The Arian legacy

Arianism did not vanish. In the 340s a missionary named Ulfilas (Wulfila) ("Little Wolf") converted the Goths to Christianity in its Arian-leaning form, and translated the Bible into Gothic, inventing an alphabet to do so. As a result, many of the Germanic peoples who later invaded the Western empire, such as the Goths and Vandals, were Arian Christians. That set them apart from their Catholic Roman subjects until the 500s and 600s (see Rome Falls, the Papacy Rises).