THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY
If Constantine beheld with impatience the irreconcilable fury of the
Donatists, who refused either to respect his wishes for Christian unity
or to obey the bishops of the Western Church; if he angrily washed his
hands of their stubborn factiousness and committed them in despair to
the judgment of God, we may imagine with what bitterness of soul he
beheld the gathering of the storm of violent controversy which is
associated with the two great names of Arius and Athanasius. This was a
controversy, and Arianism was a heresy, which, unlike the Donatist
schism, were confined to no single province of the Empire, but spread
like a flood over the Eastern Church, raising issues of tremendous
importance, vital to the very existence of Christianity. It started in
Alexandria. No birthplace could have been more appropriate to a system
of theology which was professedly based upon pure reason than the great
university city where East and West met, the home of Neo-Platonism, the
inheritor of the Hellenic tradition, and the chief exponent of
Hellenism, as understood and professed by Greeks who for centuries had
been subject to and profoundly modified by Oriental ideas and thought.
We must deal very briefly with its origin. Arius was born in the third
quarter of the third century, according to some accounts in Libya,
according to others in Alexandria. He was ordained deacon by the
Patriarch Peter and presbyter by Achillas, who appointed him to the
church called Baucalis, the oldest and one of the most important of the
city churches of Alexandria. Arius had been in schism in his earlier
years. He had joined the party of Meletius, Bishop of Lycopolis, who was
condemned by a synod of Egyptian bishops in 306 for insubordination and
irregularity of conduct; but he had made submission to Achillas, and
during the latter’s short tenure of the see, Arius became a power in
Alexandria. We are told, indeed, that on the death of Achillas in 312 or
313 Arius was a candidate for the vacant throne, and Theodoretus states
that he was greatly mortified at being passed over in favour of
Alexander. But there is no indication of personal animosity or quarrel
between the bishop and the parish priest until five or six years later.
On the contrary, Alexander is said to have held Arius in high esteem,
and the fame of the priest of Baucalis spread abroad through the city as
that of an earnest worker, a strict and ascetic liver, and a powerful
preacher who dealt boldly and frankly with the great principles of the
faith. In person, Arius was of tall and striking presence, conspicuous
wherever he moved by his sleeveless tunic and narrow cloak, and gifted
with great conversational powers and charm of manner. He was also
capable of infecting others with the enthusiasm which he felt himself.
Arius has been described for us mainly by his enemies, who considered
him a very anti-Christ, and attributed his remarkable success to the
direct help of the Evil One. We may be sure that, like all the great
religious leaders of the world,—among whom, heretic though he was, he
deserves a place,—he was fanatically sincere and the doctrine which he
preached was vital and fecund, even though the vitality and fecundity
were those of error.
It was not, apparently, until the year 319 that serious disturbance
began in the Christian circles of Alexandria. There would first of all
be whispers that Arius was preaching strange doctrine and handling the
great mysteries somewhat boldly and dogmatically. Many would doubt the
wisdom of such outspokenness, quite apart from the question whether the
doctrine taught was sound; others would exhibit the ordinary distrust of
innovation; others would welcome this new kindling of theological
interest from the mere pleasure of debate and controversy. We do not
suppose that any one, not even Arius himself, foresaw—at any rate, at
first—the extraordinary and lamentable consequences that were to follow
from his teaching. The Patriarch Alexander has been blamed for not
crushing the infant heresy at its birth, for not stopping the mouth of
Arius before the mischief was done. It is easy to be wise after the
event. Doubtless Alexander did not appreciate the danger; possibly also
he thought that if he waited, the movement would subside of itself. He
may very well have believed that this popular preacher would lose his
hold, that some one else would take his place as the fashionable
clergyman of the hour, that the extravagance of his doctrines would
speedily be forgotten. Moreover, Arius was a zealous priest, doing good
work in his own way, and long experience has shewn that it is wise for
ecclesiastical superiors to give able men of marked power and
originality considerable latitude in the expression of their views.
As time went on, however, it became clear that Alexander must intervene.
Arius was now the enthusiastic advocate of theories which aimed at the
very root of the Christian religion, inasmuch as they denied the
essential Godhead of Christ. It was no longer a case of a daring thinker
tentatively hinting at doctrines which were hardly in accord with
established belief. Arius was devoting himself just to those points
where he was at variance with his fellows, was insisting upon them in
season and out of season, and was treating them as the very essence of
Christianity. He had issued his challenge; Alexander was compelled to
take it up. The Patriarch sent for him privately. He wished either to
convince him of his error or to induce him to be silent. But the
interview was of no avail. Arius simply preached the more. Alexander
then summoned a meeting of the clergy of Alexandria, and brought forward
for discussion the accepted doctrine of the Holy Trinity which Arius had
challenged. Arius and his sympathisers were present and the controversy
was so prolonged that the meeting had to be adjourned; when it
reassembled, the Patriarch endeavoured to bring the debate to a close by
restating the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in a form which he hoped
would be unanimously approved. But this merely precipitated an open
rupture. For Arius immediately rose and denounced Alexander for falling
into the heresy of Sabellianism and reducing the Second Person in the
Trinity to a mere manifestation of the First.
It is to be remembered that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity—difficult
as it is even now, after centuries of discussion, to state in terms that
are free from all equivocation—must have been far more difficult to
state then, before the Arian controversy had, so to speak, crystallised
the exact meaning of the terms employed. It seems quite clear, moreover,
from what subsequently took place, that Alexander was no match for Arius
in dialectical subtlety and that Arius found it easy to twist his
chief’s unskilful arguments and expressions into bearing an
interpretation which Alexander had not intended. At any rate the
inevitable result of the conference was that both sides parted in anger,
and Arius continued as before to preach the doctrine that the Son of God
was a creature. For this was the leading tenet of Arianism and the basis
of the whole heresy, that the Son of God was a creature, the first of
all creatures, it is true, and created before the angels and archangels,
ineffably superior to all other creatures, yet still a creature and, as
such, ineffably inferior to the Creator, God the Father Himself.
It does not fall within the scope of this book to discuss in detail the
theological conceptions of Arius and the mysteries of the Holy Trinity.
But it is necessary to say a few words about this new doctrine which was
to shake the world, and to shew how it came into being. Arius started
from the Sonship of Christ, and argued thus: If Christ be really, and
not simply metaphorically, the Son of God, and if the Divine Sonship is
to be interpreted in the same way as the relationship between human
father and son, then the Divine Father must have existed before the
Divine Son. Therefore, there must have been a time when the Son did not
exist. Therefore, the Son was a creature composed of an essence or being
which had previously not been existent. And inasmuch as the Father was
in essence eternal and ever existent, the Son could not be of the same
essence as the Father. Such was the Arian theory stated in the fewest
possible words. “Its essential propositions,” as Canon Bright has
said,[88] “were these two, that the Son had not existed from eternity
and that he differed from other creatures in degree and not in kind.”
There can be nothing more misleading than to represent the Arian
controversy as a futile logomachy, a mere quarrel about words, about a
single vowel even, as Gibbon has done in a famous passage. It was a
vital controversy upon a vital dogma of the Christian Church.
-----
Footnote 88:
_The Age of the Fathers_, chap. v.
-----
Two years seem to have passed before Bishop Alexander, finding that
Arius was growing bolder in declared opposition, felt compelled to make
an attempt to enforce discipline within his diocese. The insubordinate
priest of Baucalis had rejected the personal appeal of his bishop and
disregarded the wishes of a majority of the Alexandrian clergy, and we
may reasonably suppose that his polemics would grow all the more bitter
as he became aware of the rapidly deepening estrangement. He would
sharpen the edge of his sarcasm upon the logical obtuseness of his
nominal superiors, for his appeal was always to reason and to logic.
Given my premises, he would say, where is the flaw in my deductions, and
wherein do my syllogisms break down? By the year 321 Arius was the
typical rebellious priest, profoundly self-confident, rejoicing in
controversy, dealing hard blows all around him, and prepared to stoop to
any artifice in order to gain adherents. To win over the mob, he was
ready to degrade his principles to the mob’s understanding.
Alexander summoned a provincial synod of a hundred Egyptian and Libyan
bishops to pronounce judgment upon the doctrines and the person of
Arius. Attended by his principal supporters, Arius appeared before the
synod and boldly stood to his guns. He maintained, that is to say, that
God had not always been Father; that the Word was the creature and
handiwork of the Father; that the Son was not like the Father according
to substance and was neither the true Word nor the true Wisdom, having
been created by the Word and Wisdom which are in God; that by His nature
He was subject to change like all other rational creatures; that the Son
does not perfectly know either the Father or His own essence, and that
Jesus Christ is not true God. The majority of the bishops listened with
horror as Arius thus unfolded his daring and, in their ears, blasphemous
creed. One of them at length put a searching test question. “If,” he
asked, “the Word of God is subject to change, would it have been
possible for the Word to change, as Satan had changed, from goodness to
wickedness?” “Yes,” came the answer. Thereupon the synod promptly
excommunicated Arius and his friends, including two bishops, Secundus of
Ptolemais in the Pentapolis and Theonas of Marmorica, together with six
priests and six deacons. The synod also anathematised his doctrines. The
Arian heresy had formally begun.
Arius quitted Alexandria and betook himself to Palestine, where he and
his companions received hospitable treatment at the hands of some of the
bishops, notably Eusebius of Cæsarea and Paulinus of Tyre. He bore
himself very modestly, assuming the rôle not of a rebel against
authority, but of one who had been deeply wronged, because he had been
grievously misunderstood. He was no longer the turbulent priest, strong
in the knowledge of his intellectual superiority over his bishop, but a
minister of the Church who had been cast out from among the faithful and
whose one absorbing desire was to be restored to communion. He did not
ask his kindly hosts to associate themselves with him. He merely begged
that they should use their good offices with Alexander to effect a
reconciliation, and that they should not refuse to treat him as a true
member of the Church. A few, like Macarius of Jerusalem, rejected his
overtures, but a large number of bishops in the Province—if we may so
term it—of the Patriarch Antioch acceded to his wishes. No doubt Arius
presented his case, when he was suing for recognition and favour, in a
very different form from that in which he had presented it from the
rostrum of his church at Baucalis. He was as subtle in his knowledge of
the ways of the world as in his knowledge of the processes of logic.
Nevertheless, he cannot possibly have disguised the main doctrine which
he had preached for years—the doctrine, that is to say, that the Son was
inferior to the Father and had been created by the Father out of a
substance other than His own—and the fact that the champion of such a
doctrine received recognition at the hands of so many bishops seems to
prove that the Church had not yet formulated her belief in respect of
this mystery with anything like precision; that theories similar to
those advocated by Arius were rife throughout the East and were by no
means repugnant to the general tendency of its thought.
Arianism would naturally, and did actually, make a most potent appeal to
minds of very varying quality and calibre. It appealed, for example, to
those Christians who had not quite succeeded in throwing off the
influences of the paganism around them, a class obviously large and
comprising within it alike the educated who were under the spell of the
religious philosophy of the Neo-Platonists, and the uneducated and
illiterate who believed, or at any rate spoke as if they believed, in a
multiplicity of gods. To minds, therefore, still insensibly thinking in
terms of polytheism one can understand the attraction of the leading
thought of Arianism, viz., one supreme, eternal, omnipotent God, God the
Father, and a secondary God, God the Son, God and creature in one, and
therefore the better fitted to be intermediary between the
unapproachable God and fallen humanity. For how many long centuries had
not the world believed in demi-gods as it had believed in gods?
Arianism, on one side of its character, enabled men to cast a lingering
look behind on an outworn creed which had not been wholly gross and
which had not been too exacting for human frailty. Moreover, there were
many texts in Holy Scripture which seemed in the most explicit language
to corroborate the truth of Arius’s teaching. “My Father is greater than
I,” so Christ had Himself said, and the obvious and literal meaning of
the words seemed entirely inconsistent with any essential co-equality of
Son and Father. The text, of course, is subject to another—if more
recondite—interpretation, but the history of religion has shewn that the
origin of most sects has been due to people fastening upon individual
texts and founding upon them doctrines both great and small.
Again,—and perhaps this was the strongest claim that Arianism could put
forward,—it appealed to men’s pride and belief in the adequacy of their
reason. Mankind has always hungered after a religious system based on
reason, founded in reason; secure against all objectors, something
four-square and solid against all possible assailants. Arianism claimed
to provide such a system, and it unquestionably had the greater
appearance—at any rate to a superficial view—of being based upon
irrefutable argument. Canon Bright put the case very well where he
wrote[89]:
“Arianism would appeal to not a few minds by adopting a position
virtually rationalistic, and by promising to secure a Christianity
which should stand clear of philosophical objections, and Catholics
would answer by insisting that the truths pertaining to the Divine
Nature must be pre-eminently matter of adoring faith, that it was rash
to speculate beyond the limit of revelation, and that the Arian
position was itself open to criticism from reason’s own point of view.
Arians would call on Catholics to ‘be logical’; to admit the prior
existence of the Father as involved in the very primary notion of
fatherhood; to halt no more between a premiss and a conclusion, to
exchange their sentimental pietism for convictions sustainable by
argument. And Catholics would bid them in turn remember the inevitably
limited scope of human logic in regard to things divine and would
point out the sublime uniqueness of the divine relation called
Fatherhood.”
-----
Footnote 89:
_The Age of the Fathers_, chap. vi.
-----
If we consider the subsequent history of the Arian doctrine, its
continual rebirth, the permanent appeal which, in at least some of its
phases, it makes to certain types of intellect including some of the
loftiest and shrewdest, there can be no reason for surprise that Arius
met with so much recognition and sympathy, even among those who refused
him their active and definite support. Alexander was both troubled and
annoyed to find that so many of the Eastern bishops took Arius’s part,
and he sent round a circular letter of remonstrance which had the effect
of arousing some of these kindly ecclesiastics to a sense of the danger
which lurked in the Arian doctrine. But Arius was soon to find his
ablest and most influential champion in the person of another Eusebius,
Bishop of Nicomedia in Bithynia. This Eusebius had been Bishop of
Berytus (Beyrout), and it has been thought that he owed his translation
from that see to the more important one of Nicomedia to the influence of
Constantia, sister of Constantine and wife of Licinius. He had, at any
rate, been sufficiently astute to obtain the good-will of Constantine on
the fall of his old patron and he stood well with the court circle.
He and Arius were old friends, for they had been fellow-pupils of the
famous Lucian of Antioch. It has been suggested that Eusebius was rather
the teacher than the pupil of Arius, but probably neither word expresses
the true relationship. They were simply old friends who thought very
much alike. Arius’s letter to Eusebius asking for his help is one of the
most interesting documents of the period. Arius writes with hot
indignation of the persecution to which he has been subjected by
Alexander, who, he says, had expelled him and his friends from
Alexandria as impious atheists because they had refused to subscribe to
the outrageous doctrines which the Bishop professed. He then gives in
brief his version of Alexander’s teaching and of his own, which he
declares is that of Eusebius of Cæsarea and all the Eastern bishops,
with the exception of a few. “We are persecuted,” he continues, “because
we have said, ‘the Son has a beginning, but God is without a beginning,’
and ‘the Son is made of that which is not,’ and ‘the Son is not part of
God nor is he of any substance.’” It is the letter of a man angry at
what he conceives to be the harsh treatment meted out to him, and it has
the ring of honesty about it, for even though it distorts the views put
forward by Alexander, there never yet was a convinced theologian who
stated his opponent’s case precisely as that opponent would state it for
himself.
We have not Eusebius’s answer to this letter, the closing sentence of
which begged him as “a true fellow-pupil of Lucian” not to fail him. But
we know at least that it was favourable, for we next find Arius at
Nicomedia itself, under the wing of the popular and powerful Bishop, who
vigorously stood up for his friend. Eusebius wrote more than once to
Alexander pleading the cause of the banished presbyter, and Arius
himself also wrote to his old Bishop, restating his convictions and
reopening the entire question in a temperate form. The tone of that
letter certainly compares most favourably with that of the famous
document which Alexander addressed to his namesake at Byzantium, warning
him to be on guard against Arius and his friends. He can find no
epithets strong enough in which to describe them. They are possessed of
the Devil, who dwells in them and goads them to fury; they are jugglers
and tricksters, clever conjurors with seductive words; they are brigands
who have built lairs for themselves wherein day and night they curse
Christ and the faithful; they are no better than the Jews or Greeks or
pagans, whose good opinion they eagerly covet, joining them in scoffing
at the Catholic doctrine and stirring up faction and persecution. The
Bishop in his fury even declares that the Arians are threatening
lawsuits against the Church at the instance of disorderly women whom
they have led astray, and accuses them of seeking to make proselytes
through the agency of the loose young women of the town. In short, they
have torn the unbroken tunic of Christ. And so on throughout the letter.
The historians of the Church have done the cause of truth a poor service
in concealing or glossing over the outrageous language employed by the
Patriarch, whose violence raises the suspicion that he must have been
conscious of the weakness of his own dialectical power in thus
disqualifying his opponents and ruling them out of court as a set of
frantic madmen. “What impious arrogance,” he exclaims. “What measureless
madness! What vainglorious melancholy! What a devilish spirit it is that
indurates their unholy souls!” Even when every allowance is made, this
method of conducting a controversy creates prejudice against the person
employing it. It is, moreover, in the very sharpest contrast with the
method employed by Arius, and with the tenor of the letter written by
Eusebius of Nicomedia to Paulinus of Tyre, praying him to write to “My
lord, Alexander.” Eusebius hotly resented the tone of the Patriarch’s
letter, and, summoning a synod of Bithynian bishops, laid the whole
matter before them for discussion. Sympathising with Arius, these
bishops addressed a circular letter “to all the bishops throughout the
Empire,” begging them not to deny communion to the Arians and also to
seek to induce Alexander to do the same. Alexander, however, stood out
for unconditional surrender.
Arius returned to Palestine, where three bishops permitted him to hold
services for his followers, and the wordy war continued. Alexander drew
up a long encyclical which he addressed “to all his fellow-workers of
the universal Catholic Church,” couched in language not quite so violent
as that which he had employed in writing to the Bishop of Byzantium, yet
denouncing the Arians in no measured terms as “lawless men and fighters
against Christ, teaching an apostasy which one may rightly describe as
preparing the way for anti-Christ.” In it he attacks Eusebius of
Nicomedia by name, accusing him of “believing that the welfare of the
Church depended upon his nod,” and of championing the cause of Arius not
because he sincerely believed the Arian doctrine so much as in order to
further his own ambitious interests. Evidently, this was not the first
time that the two prelates had been at variance, and private animosities
accentuated their doctrinal differences. The more closely the original
authorities are studied, the more evident is the need for caution in
accepting the traditional character sketches of Arius and Eusebius of
Nicomedia. Alexander declares that he is prostrated with sorrow at the
thought that Arius and his friends are eternally lost, after having once
known the truth and denied it. But he adds, “I am not surprised. Did not
Judas betray his Master after being a disciple?” We are sceptical of
Alexander’s sorrow. He closes his letter with a plea for the absolute
excommunication of the Arians. Christians must have nothing to do with
the enemies of Christ and the destroyers of souls. They must not even
offer them the compliment of a morning salutation. To say “Good-morning”
to an Arian was to hold communication with the lost. Such a manifesto
merely added fuel to the fire, and the two parties drew farther and
farther apart.
Nor was Arius idle. It must have been about this time that he composed
the notorious poem, _Thalia_, in which he embodied his doctrines. He
selected the metre of a pagan poet, Sotades of Crete, of whom we know
nothing save that his verses had the reputation of being exceedingly
licentious. Arius did this of deliberate purpose. His object was to
popularise his doctrines. Sotades had a vogue; Arius desired one. What
he did was precisely similar to what in our own time the Salvation Army
has done in setting its hymns to the popular tunes and music-hall
ditties of the day. This was at first a cause of scandal to many worthy
people, who now admit the cleverness and admire the shrewdness of the
idea. Similarly, Arius got people to sing his doctrines to the very
tunes to which they had previously sung the indecencies of Sotades. He
wrote ballads, so we are told by Philostorgius—the one Arian historian
who has survived—for sailors, millers, and travellers. But it is
certainly difficult to understand their popularity, judging from the
isolated fragments which are quoted by Athanasius in his _First
Discourse Against the Arians_ (chap. xi.). According to Athanasius, the
_Thalia_ opened as follows:
“According to faith of God’s elect, God’s prudent ones,
Holy children, rightly dividing, God’s Holy Spirit receiving,
Have I learned this from the partakers of wisdom,
Accomplished, divinely taught, and wise in all things.
Along their track have I been walking, with like opinions.
I am very famous, the much suffering for God’s glory,
And taught of God, I have acquired wisdom and knowledge.”
It is rather the unspeakable tediousness and frigidity of this exordium
than its arrogant impiety that strike the modern reader. Athanasius then
proceeds to quote examples of Arius’s “repulsive and most impious
mockeries.” For example, “God was not always a Father; there was once a
time when God was alone and was not yet a Father. But afterwards He
became a Father.” Or, “the Son was not always,” or “the Word is not very
God, but by participation in Grace, He, as all others, is God only in
name.” If these are good specimens of what Athanasius calls “the fables
to be found in Arius’s jocose composition,” the standard of the jocose
or the ridiculous must have altered greatly. Why such a poem should have
been called the _Thalia_ or “Merrymaking,” it is hard to conceive.
Yet, one can understand how the ribald wits of Alexandria gladly seized
upon this portentous controversy and twisted its prominent phrases into
the catch-words of the day. There is a passage in Gregory of Nyssa
bearing on this subject which has frequently been quoted.
“Every corner of Constantinople,” he says, “was full of their
discussions, the streets, the market-place, the shops of the
money-changers and the victuallers. Ask a tradesman how many obols he
wants for some article in his shop, and he replies with a disquisition
on generated and ungenerated being. Ask the price of bread to-day, and
the baker tells you, ‘The Son is subordinate to the Father.’ Ask your
servant if the bath is ready and he makes answer, ‘The Son arose out
of nothing.’ ‘Great is the only Begotten,’ declared the Catholics, and
the Arians rejoined, ‘But greater is He that begot.’”
It was a subject that lent itself to irreverent jesting and cheap
profanity. The baser sort of Arians appealed to boys to tell them
whether there were one or two Ingenerates, and to women to say whether a
son could exist before he was born. Even in the present day, any
theological doctrine which has the misfortune to become the subject of
excited popular debate is inevitably dragged through the mire by the
ignorant partisanship and gross scurrilities of the contending factions.
We may be sure that the “Ariomaniacs”—as they are called—were neither
worse nor better than the champions of the Catholic side, and the result
was tumult and disorder. In fact, says Eusebius of Cæsarea,
“in every city bishops were engaged in obstinate conflict with
bishops, people rose against people, and almost, like the fabled
Symplegades, came into violent collision with each other. Nay, some
were so far transported beyond the bounds of reason as to be guilty of
reckless and outrageous conduct and even to insult the statues of the
Emperor.”
Constantine felt obliged to intervene and addressed a long letter to
Alexander and Arius, which he confided to the care of his spiritual
adviser, Hosius, Bishop of Cordova, bidding him go to Alexandria in
person and do what he could to mediate between the disputants. We need
not give the text in full. Constantine began with his usual exordium.
His consuming passion, he said, was for unity of religious opinion, as
the precursor and best guarantee of peace. Deeply disappointed by
Africa, he had hoped for better things from “the bosom of the East,”
whence had arisen the dawn of divine light. Then he continues:
“But Ah! glorious and Divine Providence, what a wound was inflicted
not alone on my ears but on my heart, when I heard that divisions
existed among yourselves, even more grievous than those of Africa, so
that you, through whose agency I hoped to bring healing to others,
need a remedy worse than they. And yet, after making careful enquiry
into the origin of these discussions, I find that the cause is quite
insignificant and entirely disproportionate to such a quarrel.[90]...
I gather then that the present controversy originated as follows. For
when you, Alexander, asked each of the presbyters what he thought
about a certain passage in the Scriptures, or rather what he thought
about a certain aspect of a foolish question, and you, Arius, without
due consideration laid down propositions which never ought to have
been conceived at all, or, if conceived, ought to have been buried in
silence, dissension arose between you; communion was forbidden; and
the most holy people, torn in twain, no longer preserved the unity of
a common body.”
-----
Footnote 90:
ἄγαν εὐτελὴς καὶ οὐδαμῶς ἀξία της τοιαύτης φιλονεικίας ἡ πρόφασις.
-----
The Emperor then exhorts them to let both the unguarded question and the
inconsiderate answer be forgotten and forgiven. The subject, he says,
never ought to have been broached, but there is always mischief found
for idle hands to do and idle brains to think. The difference between
you, he insists, has not arisen on any cardinal doctrine laid down in
the Scriptures, nor has any new doctrine been introduced. “You hold one
and the same view”;[91] reunion, therefore, is easily possible. So
little does the Emperor appreciate the importance of the questions at
issue, that he goes on to quote the example of the pagan philosophers
who agree to disagree on details, while holding the same general
principles. How then, he asks, can it be right for brethren to behave
towards one another like enemies because of mere trifling and verbal
differences?[92] “Such conduct is vulgar, childish, and petulant,
ill-befitting priests of God and men of sense. It is a wile and
temptation of the Devil. Let us have done with it. If we cannot all
think alike on all topics, we can at least all be united on the great
essentials. As far as regards divine Providence, let there be one faith
and one understanding, one united opinion in reference to God.” And then
the letter concludes with the passionate outburst:
“Restore me then my quiet days and untroubled nights, that I may
retain my joy in the pure light and, for the rest of my days, enjoy
the gladness of a peaceful life. Else I needs must groan and be
diffused wholly in tears, and know no comfort of mind till I die. For
while the people of God, my fellow-servants, are thus torn asunder in
unlawful and pernicious controversy, how can I be of tranquil mind?”
-----
Footnote 91:
άλλ’ ἕνα καὶ τὸν αὐτὸν ἕχετε λογισμὸν.
Footnote 92:
δι’ ολίγας καὶ ματαίας ῥημάτων ἐν ἡμῖν φιλονεικίας.
-----
Some have seen in this letter proof of the Emperor’s consummate wisdom,
and have described its language as golden and the triumph of common
sense. It seems to us a complete exposure of his profound ignorance of
the subject in which he had interfered. It was easy to say that the
question should not have been raised. “_Quieta non movere_” is an
excellent motto in theology as in politics. But this was precisely one
of those questions which, when once raised, are bound to go forward to
an issue. The time was ripe for it. It suited the taste and temper of
the age, and the resultant storm of controversy, so easily stirred up,
was not easily allayed. For Constantine to tell Alexander and Arius that
theirs was merely a verbal quarrel on an insignificant and non-essential
point, or that they were really of one and the same mind, and held one
and the same view on all essentials, was grotesquely absurd. The
question at issue was none other than the Divine Nature of the Son of
God. If theology is of any value or importance at all, it is impossible
to conceive a more essential problem.
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