HERESY
A Novel
By Frank Spinella
Heresy
A Novel
Copyright © 2014 Frank Spinella. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth—
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world’s first bits of soil.”
—Proverbs 8:22–26
Preface
For all that has been written about him, Arius remains a rather obscure figure in history. Few people today know anything more of him than that he was a fourth century Christian heretic, and perhaps that his heresy was the moving force behind the adoption of the Nicene Creed that, in a slightly modified form adopted a half-century later in Constantinople, nearly a billion worshippers still recite in church on a regular basis. Precisely because they are deemed heretical, Arius’s teachings are presumed by most Christians—at least by most trinitarian Christians—to be unworthy of consideration. That his views must have been accepted by or at least attractive to a great many in the church of his time (would the Council of Nicaea have been convened otherwise?) likely never occurs to them. The harsh judgment of history has effectively squelched his antitrinitarian theology, and that is enough for the average believer; no need to consider how that theology came to be branded as heresy, or how what now passes for orthodoxy triumphed. Indeed, many are content simply to assign the Trinity to the category of unfathomable mystery. As Sir Isaac Newton once commented, “It is the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, and for that reason to like best what they understand least.”
As one of those billion regular creed reciters, first as a Roman Catholic and later as an Episcopalian, I have always found the phrase “true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being (homoousion) with the Father” to be a rather vague expression of the nature of the Son of God, yet one whose meaning ought to be understood if it is to be recited as part of a profession of faith. Questions such as what “begotten” means in this context, and whether the Father and the pre-incarnate Son are two separate beings or two expressions of a single undivided being, strike me as important ones to answer.
This novel was written on the premise that I am not alone in this view, that professions of faith are, for all of us, meaningful and valuable. Of what value is a profession of faith if its meaning is not understood by those professing it? I learned to recite a pledge of allegiance to the American flag by rote at the age of five, and could be forgiven for not appreciating its meaning then. But I am not five years old today.
At any age, memorizing a mantra inevitably shifts significance from the meaning of the words to the bare fact of their expression. Creeds can easily become mantras, which may explain why it is rare for Christians today to reflect on their beliefs about the nature of Jesus Christ and his relationship to the Father, even as they pledge them aloud. How far we have come from the state of affairs described by Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who wrote of Constantinople on the eve of that city’s Council in 381 CE:
Throughout the city everything is taken up by such discussions: the alleyways, the marketplaces, the broad avenues and city streets; the hawkers of clothing, the money-changers, those selling us food. If you ask about small change, someone would philosophize to you about the Begotten and Unbegotten. If you inquire about the price of bread, the reply comes: “The Father is greater and the Son is a dependent.” If you should ask: “Is the bath prepared?” someone would reply, “The Son was created from not-being.”
Indeed, such Arian notions had so permeated Christianity by this time that Saint Jerome lamented, with only mild exaggeration, that “the world awoke to find itself Arian.” This was an era when people wore their religion on their sleeves and talked with each other about their beliefs regularly, to an extent nearly unfathomable today.
Burning issue it may have been then; but history is written by the winners, and the winners in the Arian controversy did their best to ensure that Arius’s own writings, at least in their original imprint, would not survive to re-stir the controversy for future generations. Reliance on his detractors’ accounts of what he taught necessarily makes researching Arius somewhat difficult and uncertain—but not impossible. What emerged from my own research was a man whose doctrine was essentially a conservative reaction to a liberal group of Alexandrian church fathers whose Platonist sentiments and allegorizing tendencies were getting the better of them.
Placing Arius as a conservative voice in a liberal era requires abandoning our modern notions of what is theologically conservative or liberal, notions colored by centuries of evolution in Christian theology, which in the West got something of a complete overhaul by Augustine just as the Arian controversy was dying down. The march of Christianity outward from Palestine into the Greek world inevitably resulted in a cultural and philosophical disconnect, as tales told and texts written from a Jewish/messianic perspective were being interpreted by men imbued in a Greek philosophical tradition. Those few scattered passages in the emerging New Testament canon that could arguably be deemed binitarian or (far less frequently) trinitarian yielded no coherent picture of the Son’s participation in the Godhead, and two centuries of patristic thinking were occupied by the effort to weave that idea into a doctrine that was consistent with Scripture. It was thus natural that Greek philosophy, which had long sought to locate an ontological bridge between the One and the Many, between the realm of soul/spirit and the material world, would provide the looms for this tapestry. Particularly in Alexandria, Christianity was discovering its affinity with middle-Platonism and using it as a lens through which to view Christian concepts, furnishing the early church fathers with a template for reworking Jewish monotheism into a trinitarianism that could successfully resist devolving into tritheism.
If this seems somewhat foreign to us, it is because we are so far removed, theologically as well as temporally, from the early church fathers. For them, the conundrum of a melding of divine and human natures overshadowed the Incarnation’s status as a necessary step in the plan of salvation. In Arius’s time the manger rather than the cross was at the center of the theological roundtable; today that focus is reversed, due in no small part to the Reformation’s hoisting of Paul’s epistles, which point almost exclusively to Christ’s death rather than his birth, up the masthead. By the time of the Reformation, the “problem” of Christ’s dual nature was long since taken as solved. We cannot appreciate Arius in context today without sloughing off sixteen centuries of rather thick bark, and that is not easy to do.
It is even harder to put aside modern notions of “equality” and “identity,” concepts that today have a mathematical tinge (if F = G and S = G, then S = F), and adopt third-century Greek understandings of these concepts