Alexander Schmemann

2. The Triumph Of Christianity (27 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 15

End of Arianism.

This apparent final victory of Arianism turned out to be fatal to it. The Sirmium statement was so obviously Arian that it inevitably produced a reaction among all the sane elements in the Church. The coalition they had been able to knit together against Athanasius, Marcellus, and Rome now fell apart, and the Eastern Church, which had not hitherto been aware of the full extent of the danger, began to come to its senses.

The healing process was gradual, and the whole weight of the state, a load on Church life which was never again lifted, was even more apparent. Bishops began to split into theological parties; new creedal statements were composed. There were struggles, mutual excommunications, councils, and congresses. The Church historian Socrates later compared this period to a night skirmish in which no one knows who is his enemy or his friend.

Arianism led to the denial in fact of the very essence of Christianity. This was demonstrated with particular force by the extreme Arians, the so-called Anomoeans, who affirmed that Christ was absolutely distinct from God. The Church had never recognized so clearly the need for a precise theological answer, a firm confession of faith. Everyone understood the inadequacy of mere reference to previous creeds; the figurative expressions used in them were interpreted by the Arians in their own way. Yet the Nicene term homoousion still seemed suspicious. The first theological reaction to Arianism therefore united the majority of the Eastern bishops around the term homoiousion. The Son was “of like substance” with the Father, of the same nature as the Father; this was the first step. By taking it, the Easterners acknowledged the need for philosophical terms to express their faith; they themselves took the road for which they had previously condemned the defenders of Nicaea.

The Arians once again kept the upper hand, however. On the commission ordered by Constantius to prepare for the new ecumenical council, they managed to convince the confused bishops that all harm came from the use of the term “substance,” which it would be best simply to forbid, calling the Son “like the Father in all.” With this came new divisions, new disputes. The weary Constantius decided to unite them all in a compromise with a theological minimum, since a precise creed seemed a constant source of difficulty. At the council convened in Constantinople in 360 to dedicate the Church of St. Sophia, it was proclaimed that the Son is “like the Father” — the qualification “in all” was discarded. Such a definition might be acceptable to anyone except, of course, extreme Arians, but it deprived the faith of the Church of its vital content, its joyous certainty in the Incarnation “for our salvation” of God Himself. At the same time, for various imaginary crimes, all the bishops who disagreed were deposed and exiled. The Church was ruled by a new state religion.

Constantius might think he had completed his father’s work and achieved the longed-for peace in the Church, but since it was based on a meaningless compromise, the peace was bound sooner or later to end.
A year and a half after the triumph of the Homoian party (as the new Church-state coalition was called), Constantius died. A reaction now took place, not against any particular theology this time, but against Christianity itself: for two and a half years (361-63) the mysterious and tragic shadow of the Emperor Julian the Apostate lay across the empire. His first act was to establish complete religious freedom. He is reported to have hoped that the Christians would dispute so bitterly among themselves that they would discredit their faith in all eyes. Actually the brief reign of Julian demonstrated that the Church when left to itself might solve its difficulties independently.

 

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