Arius the Libyan: A Romance of the Primitive Church

by Nathan C. Kouns

"After the matter shall have been accomplished," said Constantine, "many others shall also see it, but not just yet; for it is the business of him who is fit to rule not only to see, but to foresee, whatever may concern his empire!"

"Thou alone hast seen it yet," replied the bishop. "But what other political significance can the controversy possibly possess?"

"Ah! bishop," said the emperor, "it is the great question of our age. It involves in itself the whole field of controversy between the old civilizations and the new; between paganism and Christianity; between Jesus Christ and the rulers of mankind. The doctrines of Arius are the utterances of that primitive Christianity which proclaimed the fraternity of all men, condemned war, slavery, and private-property rights. It maintaineth Jesus as the king of a kingdom established in the world; a real and actual government among the Christian communities, which may yield obedience to laws that do not fetter conscience, but does not acknowledge allegiance to any human emperor or king. Its universal prevalence would speedily render all government over the people ridiculous and unnecessary; for Christ would be the only king, and all men brethren, free and equal, as was the case in Moasia, under the apostolical Ulfilas, until I was constrained to send an army thither and force the Goths to give up their communal organization, and adopt the Roman laws and customs. The system of Arius, primitive Christianity, dear bishop, would leave no room for Constantine on earth. But the doctrine of Hosius, by elevating Jesus to actual Godhead, leaveth his earthly career a mere manifestation, or appearance, of the divine in human flesh; and, since the God hath returned to his former ineffable condition, it leaveth his kingdom to be only a pure and lofty spiritual phantasm--and leaves mankind for Constantine to govern. Thou seest that there can be no rivalry between the Christianity of Hosius and the sovereigns of this world, while the faith of Arius would soon subvert all human governments, and dethrone every prince on earth. Beyond any question, the emperors, from Nero to my own times, sought only to preserve the empire by persecuting the Christians, and properly described Christianity as 'a baleful and malignant superstition,' 'a criminal association,' 'a new society that departed from the laws and ceremonies of our fathers, inventing a new government for itself inconsistent with the imperial laws and rights.' They understood that Roman sovereignty could not maintain itself against a rapidly increasing association that proposed to abolish war, slavery, private rights of property, offices, rank, and prerogative; and they tried to stamp it out of existence. These emperors strove to defend the empire by exterminating the Christians; if they had been greater men, they would have adopted the new religion, pruned it of all doctrines that might menace the imperial authority, translating Jesus to the highest heaven, and taking for themselves his place upon the earth--as I have done. I am, therefore, the champion of the Holy Trinity, as Hosius hath defined it; and at the right time Arius must be condemned as a heretic. For I will no more suffer him to build up the churches of the East upon this basis of primitive Christianity than I would suffer Ulfilas to accomplish a similar purpose among the Gothic tribes. Dost thou now perceive the political significancy of this Arian heresy, my dear bishop?"

But Eusebius stood before the emperor pale and trembling, the cold perspiration standing in great drops upon his pallid brow. For a moment an awful mist of horror enveloped his struggling soul. Had he, then, made a terrible mistake in using his own large abilities and influence to place the persecuted saints under the protection of the grand and humane emperor? Had he betrayed the Church of Christ, and lost his own soul, in bringing about that union of ecclesiastical and imperial authority which made the kingdom of heaven an appanage of the Roman emperor, and had secured safety, peace, and glory, for the Christians by giving to Constantine the place that should belong only to Jesus Christ? Had he indeed been overreached and manipulated by this most able of mankind for his own political purposes, even while he thought himself to be using Constantine for the glory of God and for the edification of the Church? Sick, doubtful, terrified, he faintly answered: "But the things which thou sayest the doctrines of Arius would accomplish are precisely the triumph which our Lord did promise to the Church, and which he pledged his divinity to achieve! Surely Arius must be right! War, slavery, and mammon-worship, must be banished out of the world! Mankind must become brethren in the Lord! The Church must triumph, and Christ must be the only king!"

"Not in my time!" said Constantine, with the calmness and firmness of mature and deliberate conviction; "not while I live! The empire shall be mine own. I will yield my right to no man, human or divine! Let the Church grow and prepare for future triumph over earthly sovereignty when the scepter shall be held by some more weak and nerveless hand than mine. I will govern while I live, both church and state, in spite of gods or demons!"

The bishop made no answer. A terrible error into which he had gone with glad heart and exuberant hope seemed palpably revealed to him. He was utterly cowed and humbled. With a crushing sense of self-abasement, shame, mortification, repentance, almost crime, he realized the fact that, compared with that colossal man, who amused himself by playing with the loftiest emotions of the human soul as he did with his ever-victorious legions--a man who, under his calm, grand bearing, concealed a devil of ambition that was ready to mock at all that men hold sacred, and even to hurl his phalanx against Christ himself--he felt like a child, a pygmy.

With ashy lips he murmured: "Almost thou hast defied the Son of God! Beware!"

Then, with a singular smile that had in its beauty and light something of lofty mournfulness, the emperor answered: "And if I should do so, dear bishop, what then? Jesus hath no power against me except through thaumaturgy, and thou dost know that thaumaturgy faded out when the Church abandoned that communal system upon which Arius insisteth yet so manfully. I have made my choice, and will abide the issue, bishop. Thou knowest that I never was baptized. I might have been a Christian, but I preferred to reign over the Roman Empire; and I will reign until the end."

Ah! for him, then, with all the glad assurance born of utter ignorance that such a being could exist among mankind, the bishop had carefully freighted "the old ship Zion" with the godless furniture of Roman law and custom, its statutes of slavery, its laws and usages of war and conquest, its idolatrous system of private-property rights, titles, prerogatives, political and social class distinctions between those whom God made to be brethren, out of which idolatry the sorrow of the world had grown, from all of which Jesus had died to ransom a fallen race. He had unwittingly launched the freighted ship upon the troubled sea of earthly politics. Thinking that he would win the Roman Empire for the Church, he had betrayed and sold the cause of Christ to Constantine. Thinking that he guided and controlled the emperor, he had labored with all diligence to make himself the master's slave. He knew it now only too well--he knew that Constantine had always known it; and, appalled by the vast resources of that greatest of mankind, crushed by the sense of his amazing genius, he seemed unto himself to grow small, contemptible, and weak.

And the ship of the Church? Would she go down forever in the troubled waters, amid the stormy strife for worldly gains and power? Or would she yet, somehow, sometime, somewhere, outride the tempests, and in some unknown and distant clime reach into a safe haven? "Not in my time," said Constantine; "not while I live!" When, then?