The Church has confronted a dazzling and depressing number of heresies in her long history – Gnosticism, Pelagianism, Jansenism, to name just a few – and one that for a time seemed on the verge of establishing its dark ascendancy over Christianity was Arianism.
At its heart, Arianism proposed that the Son of God was not eternal but was created by the Father from nothing. Christ was thus a changeable creature, His dignity bestowed upon Him as Son of God.
The heresy was condemned at the Council of Nicaea in 325 thanks in large measure to the heroic stand by St. Athanasius of Alexandria. But by the cunning of its supporters, it was rehabilitated and forced upon the common faithful by heretical Roman emperors and their ecclesiastical minions. As St. Jerome wrote during the crisis, the world “awoke with a groan to find itself Arian.”
Arianism was finally defeated in 381 at the Council of Constantinople through the unflagging labors of several Fathers and Doctors of the Church, including St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and St. Gregory of Nyssa.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that heresy – especially the Arian heresy – is a relic of the past that cannot happen again. In fact, we are seeing a resurgence of it today. The great historian and Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc once observed, “As all heresies necessarily breathe the air of the time in which they arise, and are necessarily a reflection of the philosophy of whatever non-Catholic ideas are prevalent at that moment they arise, Arianism spoke in the terms of its day.”
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Dr. Matthew Bunson is a senior fellow of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and one of the United States’ leading authorities on the papacy and the Church. This commentary is reprinted with permission from Legatus Magazine, online at www.legatus.org.