Alexander Schmemann

2. The Triumph Of Christianity (27 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 7

Thought had not yet caught up with faith, and words were helpless to express experience. Faith comes before theology, and only for that reason may we speak of theological development as the gradual acceptance, discovery, and refinement of faith, which has been complete from the start. From the examples of Origen and Tertullian we may see that the first attempts at this discovery were incomplete, even heretical. It was difficult to find words to express the faith, and centuries would be required to remake thought itself in the spirit of Christianity.

Such was the situation at the beginning of the fourth century, when Arianism first appeared. For lack of words, thought broke away, drawing faith after it and distorting the most basic and vital truths of the New Testament revelation. In this sense Arianism, as it slowly and painfully worked itself out, marked the end of all these confusions, for it was to enable the Church at last to express its faith in the Trinity in words “proper to God.”

Arius was mistaken in his view, for he approached the solution to the theological problem of the Trinity solely as a philosopher and weighed the whole problem by logic. He interpreted two basic and particularly vital truths of Christianity, that of the One God and that of the salvation of the world by the Son of God, as abstract principles. He was a convinced monotheist, not in the Old Testament sense, but in the spirit of the philosophical monotheism, which predominated at that period in the Hellenistic world. This meant recognition of some abstract One or Entity, which lay at the base of all that existed, as its source and as the unifying principle of all multiplicity.
God was One, and there could not be any multiplicity in him; if He had a Son, then the Son was already distinct from Him. The Son was not He and not God. The Son was born, and birth is the appearance of something which has not been before. The Son was born for creation, for salvation, but He was not God in that unique and absolute sense which we use when we call the Father God.

Arianism was a rationalization of Christianity.
Here living religious experience was no longer fertilizing thought, forcing it to see and understand what it had not previously understood. On the contrary, here faith was dried out by logical analysis and distorted into an abstract construction.
Arianism was in tune with the times in its strict monotheism and desire to prune out everything irrational and incomprehensible. It was more accessible to the average mind seeking a “rational” faith than were the biblical images and expressions of Church tradition. As one historian has noted, it deprived Christianity of its living religious content and distorted it into an abstract theism of cosmology and morality.

The first reaction to Arianism was that of active believers who were horrified by this distortion of the sacred principles of the Church. Arius was censured by his own bishop, Alexander of Alexandria; but this was only a censure, not an answer. In his rebuke Alexander himself went astray, unable to find adequate words. Arius appealed for support to his former friends from the school of the famous Antiochene theologian, Lucian. As educated theologians, many of them occupied episcopal chairs. Especially noteworthy were Eusebius of Caesarea, whose Ecclesiastical History is a chief source of our knowledge of the early Church, and Eusebius of Nicomedia, who was to baptize the Emperor Constantine at the time of his death.

These friends supported Arius, and not only for personal reasons. In these years there arose within the Church an intellectual class eager for rational explanations of the faith, which was beginning to be somewhat embarrassed by the insufficiently philosophical nature of Church doctrine. The Arian heresy seemed to them completely suitable as a “modern” interpretation of it, one, which would be acceptable to broad circles of educated people. In this way the local Alexandrian dispute gradually spread throughout the East.

At this point the Emperor Constantine intervened. We must imagine what the conversion of the emperor himself meant for the Church after three centuries of persecution, if we are to understand why his court had immediately become a center of attraction, not only for opportunists and careerists, but for those genuinely inspired by the victory of Christ who dreamed of extending it throughout the world. Emperor and empire were becoming providential instruments for the kingdom of Christ. Around Constantine there sprang up a group of Christian counselors, a sort of unofficial staff. A prominent place among them was taken very early, as soon as Constantine came to the East, by Eusebius of Nicomedia, first of an unfortunate series of court bishops. Constantine himself could not, of course, understand the essence of the theological dispute, but he was disturbed by this new dissension within the Church.

 

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