The Arian Controversy

by Henry Melvill Gwatkin

The tolerance of Theodosius was a little, though only a little, wider than it seems. Though the Novatians were not in communion with Nectarius, they were during the next half century a recognised exception to the persecuting laws. They had always been sound as against Arianism, and their bishop Agelius had suffered exile under Valens. His confession was approved by Theodosius, and several of his successors lived on friendly terms with liberal or worldly patriarchs like Nectarius and Atticus. They suffered something from the bigotry of Chrysostom, something also from the greed of Cyril, but for them the age of persecution only began with Nestorius in 428.

Decay of Arianism.

So far as numbers went, the cause of Arianism was not even yet hopeless. It was still fairly strong in Syria and Asia, and counted adherents as far west as the banks of the Danube. At Constantinople it could raise dangerous riots (in one of them Nectarius had his house burnt), and even at the court of Milan it had a powerful supporter in Valentinian's widow, the Empress Justina. Yet its fate was none the less a mere question of time. Its cold logic generated no such fiery enthusiasm as sustained the African Donatists; the newness of its origin allowed no venerable traditions to grow up round it like those of heathenism, while its imperial claims and past successes cut it off from the appeal of later heresies to provincial separatism. When, therefore, the last overtures of Theodosius fell through in 383, the heresy was quite unable to bear the strain of steady persecution.

Teutonic Arianism: (1.) In the East.

But if Arianism soon ceased to be a power inside the Empire, it remained the faith of the barbarian invaders. The work of Ulfilas was not in vain. Not the Goths only, but all the earlier Teutonic converts were Arians. And the Goths had a narrow miss of empire. The victories of Theodosius were won by Gothic strength. It was the Goths who scattered the mutineers of Britain, and triumphantly scaled the impregnable walls of Aquileia; (388) the Goths who won the hardest battle of the century, and saw the Franks themselves go down before them on the Frigidus. (394) The Goths of Alaric plundered Rome itself; the Goths of Gaïnas entered Constantinople, though only to be overwhelmed and slaughtered round the vain asylum of their burning church.

(2.) In the West.

In the next century the Teutonic conquest of the West gave Arianism another lease of power. Once more the heresy was supreme in Italy, and Spain, and Africa. Once more it held and lost the future of the world. To the barbarian as well as to the heathen it was a half-way halt upon the road to Christianity; and to the barbarian also it was nothing but a source of weakness. It lived on and in its turn perpetuated the feud between the Roman and the Teuton which caused the destruction of the earlier Teutonic kingdoms in Western Europe. The provincials or their children might forget the wrongs of conquest, but heresy was a standing insult to the Roman world. Theodoric the Ostrogoth may rank with the greatest statesmen of the Empire, yet even Theodoric found his Arianism a fatal disadvantage. And if the isolation of heresy fostered the beginnings of a native literature, it also blighted every hope of future growth. The Goths were not inferior to the English, but there is nothing in Gothic history like the wonderful burst of power which followed the conversion of the English. There is no Gothic writer to compare with Bede or Cædmon. Jordanis is not much to set against them, and even Jordanis was not an Arian.

Fall of Teutonic Arianism.

The sword of Belisarius did but lay open the internal disunion of Italy and Africa. A single blow destroyed the kingdom of the Vandals, and all the valour of the Ostrogoths could only win for theirs a downfall of heroic grandeur. Sooner or later every Arian nation had to purge itself of heresy or vanish from the earth. Even the distant Visigoths (589) were forced to see that Arians could not hold Spain. The Lombards in Italy were the last defenders of the hopeless cause, and they too yielded a few years later to the efforts of Pope Gregory and Queen Theudelinda. (599) Of Continental Teutons, the Franks alone escaped the divisions of Arianism. In the strength of orthodoxy they drove the Goths before them on the field of Vouglé (507), and brought the green standard of the Prophet to a halt upon the Loire (732). The Franks were no better than their neighbours—rather worse—so that it was nothing but their orthodoxy which won for them the prize which the Lombard and the Goth had missed, and brought them through a long career of victory to that proud day of universal reconciliation (800) when the strife of ages was forgotten, and Arianism with it—when, after more than three hundred years of desolating anarchy, the Latin and the Teuton joined to vindicate for Old Rome her just inheritance of empire, and to set its holy diadem upon the head of Karl the Frank.