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.
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.”
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.