One Alexandrian priest's theology split the Roman Empire for centuries
Arius, a presbyter in Alexandria around 300 AD, taught that God the Father created the Son and that the Son had a beginning. His dispute with Bishop Alexander sparked the Arian controversy. The First Council of Nicaea in 325 condemned him, yet Arian churches persisted for centuries.
Historians dispute whether Arius founded Arianism or merely ignited an existing conflict. Rowan Williams argues he was not the sect's founder but the spark of a gathering crisis. Arius was a conservative Alexandrian theologian influenced partly by Origen, yet he maintained the Son had substance from nothing—a position Origen rejected.
In 318 Arius publicly criticized Alexander for blurring Father-Son distinctions. Alexander excommunicated him; Arius appealed east and found support from Eusebius of Nicomedia, who baptized Constantine the Great. Constantine convened Nicaea in 325 to settle the dispute. The resulting Nicene Creed was deliberately anti-Arian.
Almost none of his writing survives: three letters, a few scraps, and extracts of his only theological book, the Thalia, quoted by Athanasius, his most hostile opponent. Constantine ordered the texts burned in Arius's lifetime, yet Richard Hanson thinks they vanished mainly because contemporaries did not rate him as a writer, while Williams calls him a sharp and original exegete. A friendly portrait describes a very tall ascetic in a short cloak who spoke gently and persuaded easily. Born in 250 or 256 to a Berber family—his father is named as Ammonius—he became presbyter of Alexandria's Baucalis district in 313. The quarrel was subtler than it looks, because in the fourth century the word God could cover several grades of divinity; the argument was less over whether Christ was divine than over what sort of divinity he held. Arian churches outlived him by centuries in Germanic kingdoms, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Source: Arius
