The Arian Controversy

How do we know whether one thing is the same as another thing?

Are all of these things the same or different? Explain your answer.

Background

In the third and fourth centuries, the early Christian church was trying to work out what it was and what it meant to be a Christian. Part of that involved working out what God is.

The question at the centre of the Arian Controversy was this: was (or is) Jesus the same kind of thing as God?

For those who are not religious, this might appear to be a debate that doesn’t really apply to much outside the Catholic church, but the issues that they were arguing about - those of identity: What does it mean for something to be a particular thing? - still dog our public discussions today. Consider the debates that we currently have over what it means to be Spanish or Catalan, or British or European, or Irish or British, or an unborn child or a foetus, a man or a woman, a refugee, an expat or an immigrant. Issues of identity are central to our public life and the debates surrounding identity are often some of our most heated.

Arius’ argument

Arius thought that the answer to the question, ‘is Jesus the same kind of thing as God?’ was clearly no. If God and Jesus were the same kind of thing, then they’d share the same essential properties, but they don’t. God is eternal and Jesus isn’t:

‘If the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence: and from this it is evident, that there was a time when the Son was not. It therefore necessarily follows, that he had his substance from nothing.’

—Arius, As quoted in Church History, by Socrates of Constantinople, Book I, Ch. 5

(A property is essential if something can’t be that thing without it — e.g. a gas can’t be Oxygen if it’s not largely made up of Oxygen molecules. A property is accidental if it isn’t essential —e.g. A horse can be brown or white and still a horse.)

We can formalise his argument like this:

God the Father brought the Son (Jesus) into existence.
If God the Father brought the Son into existence, then the Son began to exist.
If the Son began to exist, then his substance comes from nothing.
The substance of the Son (Jesus) comes from nothing.

The reason this was so controversial was that being eternal was an essential property of the substance of God. So, if Jesus wasn’t eternal, then Jesus can’t be the same substance as God:

If his substance comes from nothing, then the substance of the Son is not eternal.
The substance of the Son is not eternal
But God is eternal.
∴ God the Father and the Son cannot be of the same substance.

Arius’ argument caused a lot of disturbance throughout the Roman Empire. Lots of other Christians, namely the Bishops Alexander and Athanasius, thought that Jesus was the same kind of thing as God, and therefore Arius’ conclusion was blasphemous (speaking rudely about God). Emperor Constantine had only just made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire (having converted himself) and he decided that the issue needed to be sorted out. So, he organised a special meeting (or Council) to be held in the city of Nicaea.

The Council of Nicaea

Alexander and Athanasius couldn’t really deny premise 1 as such, because obviously a) God created everything and b) he was ‘God the Father’, and Jesus was ‘the Son’. These seemed to be essential properties of God and Jesus because they were written in the Bible. Neither could they deny that God was eternal – as mentioned above, this was one of the essential properties of God.

Instead, they attacked premise 2, the idea that the fact that Jesus began to exist, necessarily follows from the fact that God brought him into existence.

Alexander argued that Jesus was eternally generated from the same essence as the Father, and so it didn’t necessarily follow that Jesus began to exist. Thus, they argued, Jesus was eternal after all and could therefore be of the same substance as God the Father. They decided that Jesus and God were consubstantial.

The majority of those at the Council of Nicaea agreed with Alexander and Arius was exiled. The Council, wanting to avoid further controversies, wrote down the basic beliefs of the newly powerful Christian church in what is known as the Nicene Creed, which is read out at Mass every Sunday around the world. It contains the following lines:

… We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,

the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made, consubstantial

of one Being with the Father….

—the Nicene Creed

Tasks

Explain the distinction between essential and accidental properties in your own words.
Explain Arius’ argument.
Explain Alexander and Athanasius’ response.
Evaluate the positions. Which side do you support?

Page updated

Report abuse