Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/69

Rh technical sense of the term; that is to say, lie advocated private opinions that were at variance with the general trend of Church teaching.

Although Arianism sprang up in Alexandria, its roots have been traced back to Antioch. Origen had taught a strong subordination doctrine; but he had affirmed the eternal generation of the Son, and the tone and temper of his thought were alien to what we see in Arianism. The great Alexandrian theology was intensely Platonic, and the development of the orthodox faith during the fourth century was largely controlled by an infusion of Platonism; but the dry, hard, logical method of Arius was Aristotelian, and so was that of the school of Antioch. Harnack says, "This school is the parent of Arian doctrine and Lucian its head is the Arius before Arius." Nevertheless, Professor Gwatkin traces it to Alexandrian heathenism.

The gravamen of Arius' objection to Alexander's teaching was the doctrine of the eternity of the Son of God, which, he maintained, involved Sabellianism. On the other hand, the non-eternity of the Second Person of the Trinity was the starting-point of Arianism. Pressed into a corner, Arius will not say that "there was a time when He was not," because time itself did not then exist, since it began with creation, and He was before all other things; but he affirms that "there was when He was not." As he develops his system the following features emerge:—

1. The unity of God. He alone is neither generated nor created—eternal, essential being,, Deity apart from all else. Arius is in sympathy with the heathen and later Jewish conception of the transcendence of God.

2. The independent personality of Christ. Here Arius is in direct antagonism to Sabellianism. Extreme opponents of Arius—Marcellus, Photius, etc.—went over the knife-edge of orthodoxy on the other side and became Sabellian. Every system of thought that has enlisted the sympathies of earnest men has its merits, and one of the merits of Arianism is that it tended to rescue the