Arius revisited

[Thomas]

In 2001, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Willians, published "Arius, Heresy & Tradition", in which he said that Arius is assumed to have held "some hopelessly defective form of belief", whereas the author argues he was "a thinker and exegete of resourcefulness, sharpness and originality".

He goes on to say:
"A great deal of recent work seeking to understand Arian spirituality has, not surprisingly, helped to demolish the notion of Arius and his supporters as deliberate radicals, attacking a time-honoured tradition." Furthermore, he presents Arius as "a committed theological conservative; more specifically, a conservative Alexandrian."

These insights have gone some way to redress the balance, but outside of theological and scholarly cirlces there is the prevalent view that Arius was some kind of radical, the lone man fighting against the might of the institution, whereas the more accurate picture is quite the reverse.

Arius was, in fact, a theological conservative, perhaps closer to the Antiochene school than the Alexandrian, but nevertheless one who saw himself as defending the ancient and traditional doctrine of the church against the rather novel statements of his bishop, Alexander.

Moreover, Arius was never the founder of the doctrine that bears his name, even though later condemned as 'Arianism'. Nor was he really a major player.

 

[Thomas]

In his own day, Arius was neither a reactionary nor a rebel. Rather, he was something of an inflexible, conservative theologian.

He was a faithful representative of an ancient, venerable and respectable school of Trinitarian speculation. Admired as he was, he nevertheless seems to have lacked imagination or insight into the expression of that tradition. It would seem that it was precisely because he was such an austere traditionalist that he was unable to grasp the new currents in theological inquiry and the new questions being asked of the tradition.

A hierarchical and subordinationist metaphysics rested on long-standing Jewish and Hellenic speculation, indeed it was scripturally plausible as long as one emphasised this New Testament declaration over that, as a means of uniting the divine and created realms in a continuous succession of powers while nevertheless asserting the absolute transcendence of God the Father.

Such a metaphysics had long been the common property of pagans, Jews, and Christians. It was generally assumed that the highest divine principle never came into direct contact with the world of finite and mutable things, but expressed itself in some 'reduced' form through which it creates and governs the world. Thus thought Plotinus and Porphyry. Thus thought Philo of Alexandria (c. 20BCE-50CE), who believed that God was mediated through the divine theophanies of Hebrew scripture. And thus on, through the early Fathers, even when the likes of Origen spoke of 'eternal generation', they still upheld the absolute distinction between God the Father and God the Son.

This was the metaphysics that the, in our day, 'fundamentalist', Arius was defending.