From what I know, Arius spread his so-called heresy to many tribes, such as the visigoths, who converted to his non-catholic version of Christianity. This created cleavages between the new followers of Christinianty.
Eventually the Catholic church stamped Arianism out in the west. But it was quite powerful for some time. This puzzles me.
My questions are:
How did Arius manage to spread his heresy so successfully? Clearly he and his few followers would be outnumbered and outmanned by the Catholic missionaires. Why did the powerful tribes accept what is essentially heretical?
And how did Arius justify his belief – the articles I’ve seen simply state that he came up with his heresy, but never seemed to go into detail about his reasoning.
My understanding of this is that Arius believed that the concept of Jesus as the “begotten Son” of God implied that there was a time when there was God, but no Jesus. God had to exist, and Jesus not to exist, for Jesus to have been begotten. I have no idea how widespread this belief was.
Did people really worry about this stuff? It is like the “dual” nature of Christ-unanswerable, (unless you can talk directly with JC). Aren’t there more important things (like obeying the ten commandments)?
Complete and total Wagering of A Guess here, but maybe Arian Christology feels more in-line with the ideas then generally extant about how gods work. In other words, maybe in such circles, gods aren’t concieved of as getting themselves into odd situations involving hypostases and substances and persons and all that. Maybe they birth/create each other and exist in time and interact in terms easily phyiscally metaphorized and so on.
But like I said, that’s a complete WAG. I don’t know anything about the theologies of the tribes surrounding the Roman Empire.
Wasn’t it just a question of which sect’s missionaries made it to the right Ostrogoths first? And then having an Arian as Emperor for a while couldn’t have hurt. And what’s heretical, anyway? Perhaps the dominance of the Catholic sect wasn’t quite so entrenched/default/inevitable as we would think in hindsight.
This is just a guess on my part, but if I’m a king of a barbarian tribe that wants to convert to Christianity, but wants to remain politically independent of the large, millitarily and economically dominant Roman Empire, I wouldn’t want to convert to the sect that’s controlled by the imperial government.
The mass conversion of the Goths was the biggest boost for Arianism. Some attribute this to Ulfilas, a missionary bishop who was a Goth himself, others to the Gothic chief Fritigern and politics.
You bet they did. One way of looking at the first five hundred years of Christianity is as a series of vehement arguments about who and what Jesus was, what happened to him, and what it all meant. The winners got to burn the losers’ books, and the losers are now remembered as heretics.
I call it heresy in the academic sense, that it lost out – it is heretical from today’s Catholic position. I don’t imply the belief is ‘wrong’. But the pope ain’t preachin’ it from the vatican today either.
Arianism is easy to understand- God the Father comes first in time & begets/creates a Son who did not exist before then. Together, Father & Son (& maybe Holy Spirit) work together to create everything else. Son & Spirit are Divine & Creators, but are neither Eternal, Deity nor Uncreated themselves. They are “God” in relative position to us, Their creations, but they are not “equally God” in relation to The Father, Who is Their Creator God.
The trouble is, the Bible clearly shows The Son & The Spirit as being worshipped with The Father, and also spoken of with the same Divine Titles as The Father, plus there is that pesky insistence that there is only One God Who Has not created any other gods to share His glory with (Isaiah), while Arianism posits One God and one or two gods who do share The Father’s glory.
I don’t know about Arianism off-hand, but I’ve heard of later questions over the nature of God having political implications having to do with the nature of political power. I.e. how the heavens are ordered reflects how the earth is ordered. Perhaps there is something about what Arianism’s ordering that appealed to people.
From what I understand, that’s absolutely the case. If you don’t want people causing trouble, you make sure you know what they’re preaching about. All it takes is one guy saying the Invisible Unicorn is Purple and not Pink and you’ve got Lutherans. Constantine (and later emperors) were very serious about consolidating the theology of the early church. I’d suggest a great book I’m currently devouring called The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman. It discusses this in some detail and is very readable.
It is this point that has never ceased to amaze me in reading history that involves Christianity. During the mid-Byzantine period people were rioting over distinctions between the nature of Christ that I can’t even remember, let alone think of as important.
This was very important, for political as well as financial and of course spiritual reasons. Made the Church what it is today by way of its response to internal “threats”, i.e. infallible.
