Chapter 23 — Arius and the Nature of the Son

Where Chapter 21's Marcion and Chapter 22's Montanus both belong to the second and third centuries — the period this book's Part One already covered in its account of the church's gradually converging New Testament list — Arius belongs to the fourth century, and his controversy runs directly alongside, and directly through the life of, the very man who finally closes that list.

The Claim

Arius was a presbyter in Alexandria in the early fourth century. He taught that the Son of God, while exalted far above ordinary creation, was nonetheless a created being. On his view the Son was not eternal in the way the Father is eternal. He was brought into existence by the Father's will, rather than sharing the Father's own uncreated nature. Arius's own account of the matter was direct: there was a time when the Son was not. On this view, the Son is the highest of creatures, the agent through whom the rest of creation came to be, and yet a creature still — subordinate to the Father not merely in role, as orthodox Trinitarian theology also affirms in its own way, but in essential being.

The controversy this sparked was not a quiet, academic disagreement contained within Alexandria. It spread fast enough and divided the church seriously enough that the emperor Constantine convened the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD specifically to resolve it — the first ecumenical council in Christian history, called into being by exactly this dispute. The council's answer, preserved in the Nicene Creed, was decisive: the Son shares the very same substance as the Father, not merely something similar to it — homoousios, in the Greek word the creed uses — begotten, not made, true God from true God. John's Gospel had already said essentially the same thing, in narrative rather than technical vocabulary, nearly three centuries earlier:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was fully God." — John 1:1 (NET)

The Man Who Closes the Canon Is the Man Who Fought This Fight

Here is the connection worth making precisely, because it is stronger and better documented than the more speculative suggestion, raised in passing in Chapter 12, that Hermas's own confused Christology owes something directly to the Arian controversy. The real connection runs through a single life: Athanasius, the bishop whose 39th Festal Letter this book's Chapter 4 already identified as the first document in Christian history to name the New Testament's twenty-seven books exactly as received today, was the chief and most tireless defender of Nicene orthodoxy against Arianism for the whole of his episcopate. He attended the Council of Nicaea itself in 325, before he was even bishop, and became bishop of Alexandria three years later — and for the next four decades, as Arian-sympathizing emperors alternately favored and persecuted him, he was exiled from his own see and restored to it repeatedly, by the standard count five separate times, spending just over seventeen years total in exile across his forty-five years as bishop. The phrase later generations coined for him — Athanasius contra mundum, Athanasius against the world — describes a man who spent most of his working life as a fugitive from his own congregation specifically because he would not soften his defense of who Christ actually is.

The 39th Festal Letter, in other words, was not written by a theologian working in some quiet, settled season, calmly cataloging a list that had simply arrived at consensus on its own. It was written in 367, near the end of a life spent almost entirely inside the Arian controversy, by the single person most responsible for the fact that the church did not, in the end, settle for a diminished, created Christ. A settled, examined, defended Christology and a settled New Testament canon arrive, in Athanasius's own biography, as close to the same moment as any two events in this whole history get — not because the canon list required a specific answer to the Arian question in order to be drawn up, but because the man who finally drew it stood, at that exact moment in his life, as the church's foremost living proof that the identity of Christ was worth every year of exile it had cost him to defend.