him, and he recalled the Lybian, extracted from him a solemn adhesion to the
Nicene faith, and ordered Alexander, Bishop of the Imperial City, to give him
Communion in his own church (336). Arius openly triumphed; but as he went about
in parade, the evening before this event was to take place, he expired from a
sudden disorder, which Catholics could not help regarding as a judgment of
heaven, due to the bishop’s prayers. His death, however, did not stay the plague.
Constantine now favoured none but Arians; he was baptized in his last moments by
the shifty prelate of Nicomedia; and he bequeathed to his three sons (337) an
empire torn by dissensions which his ignorance and weakness had aggravated.
Constantius, who nominally governed the East, was himself the puppet of his
empress and the palace-ministers. He obeyed the Eusebian faction; his spiritual
director, Valens, Bishop of Mursa, did what in him lay to infect Italy and the
West with Arian dogmas. The term “like in substance”, Homoiousion, which had
been employed merely to get rid of the Nicene formula, became a watchword. But
as many as fourteen councils, held between 341 and 360, in which every shade of
heretical subterfuge found expression, bore decisive witness to the need and
efficacy of the Catholic touchstone which they all rejected. About 340, an
Alexandrian gathering had defended its archbishop in an epistle to Pope Julius.
On the death of Constantine, and by the influence of that emperor’s son and
namesake, he had been restored to his people. But the young prince passed away,
and in 341 the celebrated Antiochene Council of the Dedication a second time
degraded Athanasius, who now took refuge in Rome. There he spent three years.
Gibbon quotes and adopts “a judicious observation” of Wetstein which deserves to
be kept always in mind. From the fourth century onwards, remarks the German
scholar, when the Eastern Churches were almost equally divided in eloquence and
ability between contending sections, that party which sought to overcome made
its appearance in the Vatican, cultivated the Papal majesty, conquered and
established the orthodox creed by the help of the Latin bishops. Therefore it
was that Athanasius repaired to Rome. A stranger, Gregory, usurped his place.
The Roman Council proclaimed his innocence. In 343, Constans, who ruled over the
West from Illyria to Britain, summoned the bishops to meet at Sardica in
Pannonia. Ninety-four Latin, seventy Greek or Eastern, prelates began the
debates; but they could not come to terms, and the Asiatics withdrew, holding a
separate and hostile session at Philippopolis in Thrace. It has been justly said
that the Council of Sardica reveals the first symptoms of discord which, later
on, produced the unhappy schism of East and West. But to the Latins this meeting,
which allowed of appeals to Pope Julius, or the Roman Church, seemed an epilogue
which completed the Nicene legislation, and to this effect it was quoted by
Innocent I in his correspondence with the bishops of Africa.
Having won over Constans, who warmly took up his cause, the invincible
Athanasius received from his Oriental and Semi-Arian sovereign three letters
commanding, and at length entreating his return to Alexandria (349). The
factious bishops, Ursacius and Valens, retracted their charges against him in
the hands of Pope Julius; and as he travelled home, by way of Thrace, Asia Minor,
and Syria, the crowd of court-prelates did him abject homage. These men veered
with every wind. Some, like Eusebius of Caesarea, held a Platonizing doctrine
which they would not give up, though they declined the Arian blasphemies. But
many were time-servers, indifferent to dogma. And a new party had arisen, the
strict and pious Homoiousians, not friends of Athanasius, nor willing to
subscribe to the Nicene terms, yet slowly drawing nearer to the true creed and
finally accepting it. In the councils which now follow these good men play their
part. However, when Constans died (350), and his Semi-Arian brother was left
supreme, the persecution of Athanasius redoubled in violence. By a series of
intrigues the Western bishops were persuaded to cast him off at Arles, Milan,
Ariminum. It was concerning this last council (359) that St. Jerome wrote, “the
whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian”. For the Latin bishops
were driven by threats and chicanery to sign concessions which at no time
represented their genuine views. Councils were so frequent that their dates are
still matter of controversy. Personal issues disguised the dogmatic importance
of a struggle which had gone on for thirty years. The Pope of the day, Liberius,
brave at first, undoubtedly orthodox, but torn from his see and banished to the
dreary solitude of Thrace, signed a creed, in tone Semi-Arian (compiled chiefly
from one of Sirmium), renounced Athanasius, but made a stand against the so-
called “Homoean” formulae of Ariminum. This new party was led by Acacius of
Caesarea, an aspiring churchman who maintained that he, and not St. Cyril of
Jerusalem, was metropolitan over Palestine. The Homoeans, a sort of Protestants,
would have no terms employed which were not found in Scripture, and thus evaded
signing the “Consubstantial”. A more extreme set, the “Anomoeans”, followed
Aetius, were directed by Eunomius, held meetings at Antioch and Sirmium,
declared the Son to be “unlike” the Father, and made themselves powerful in the
last years of Constantius within the palace. George of Cappadocia persecuted the
Alexandrian Catholics. Athanasius retired into the desert among the solitaries.
Hosius had been compelled by torture to subscribe a fashionable creed. When the
vacillating Emperor died (361), Julian, known as the Apostate, suffered all
alike to return home who had been exiled on account of religion. A momentous
gathering, over which Athanasius presided, in 362, at Alexandria, united the
orthodox Semi-Arians with himself and the West. Four years afterwards fifty-nine
Macedonian, i.e., hitherto anti-Nicene, prelates gave in their submission to
Pope Liberius. But the Emperor Valens, a fierce heretic, still laid the Church
waste.
However, the long battle was now turning decidedly in favour of Catholic
tradition. Western bishops, like Hilary of Poitiers and Eusebius of Vercellae
banished to Asia for holding the Nicene faith, were acting in unison with St.
Basil, the two St. Gregories, and the reconciled Semi-Arians. As an intellectual
movement the heresy had spent its force. Theodosius, a Spaniard and a Catholic,
governed the whole Empire. Athanasius died in 373; but his cause triumphed at
Constantinople, long an Arian city, first by the preaching of St. Gregory
Nazianzen, then in the Second General Council (381), at the opening of which
Meletius of Antioch presided. This saintly man had been estranged from the
Nicene champions during a long schism; but he made peace with Athanasius, and
now, in company of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, represented a moderate influence
which won the day. No deputies appeared from the West. Meletius died almost
immediately. St. Gregory Nazianzen (q. v.), who took his place, very soon
resigned. A creed embodying the Nicene was drawn up by St. Gregory of Nyssa, but
it is not the one that is chanted at Mass, the latter being due, it is said, to
St. Epiphanius and the Church of Jerusalem. The Council became ecumenical by
acceptance of the Pope and the ever-orthodox Westerns. From this moment Arianism
in all its forms lost its place within the Empire. Its developments among the
barbarians were political rather than doctrinal. Ulphilas (311-388), who
translated the Scriptures into Maeso-Gothic, taught the Goths across the Danube
an Homoean theology; Arian kingdoms arose in Spain, Africa, Italy. The Gepidae,
Heruli, Vandals, Alans, and Lombards received a system which they were as little
capable of understanding as they were of defending, and the Catholic bishops,
the monks, the sword of Clovis, the action of the Papacy, made an end of it
before the eighth century. In the form which it took under Arius, Eusebius of
Caesarea, and Eunomius, it has never been revived. Individuals, among them are
Milton and Sir Isasc Newton, were perhaps tainted with it. But the Socinian
tendency out of which Unitarian doctrines have grown owes nothing to the school
of Antioch or the councils which opposed Nicaea. Neither has any Arian leader
stood forth in history with a character of heroic proportions. In the whole
story there is but one single hero – the undaunted Athanasius – whose mind was
equal to the problems, as his great spirit to the vicissitudes, a question on
which the future of Christianity depended.