Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries

Archetypal Heresy Arianism through the Centuries

William Whistson (Photo: James Austin)

Archetypal Heresy Arianism through the Centuries

Maurice Wiles

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Maurice Wiles 1996 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographcs rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Archetypal heresy: Arianism through the centuries Maurice Wiles. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Arianism—History. I. Title. BT1350.W55 1996 273'.4—dc20 95–52481 ISBN 0–19–826927–7

Preface William Whiston made a bigger contribution to the origins of this book than his role in the final form of it might suggest. In the course of the years between 1959 and 1967, when I was Dean of Clare College Cambridge, I spent many hours in the Senior Combination Room, surrounded by portraits of former distinguished fellows of the College. Most of those portraits depicted men whose florid faces and corpulent figures suggested a deep contentment with their lot, more likely to be disturbed by shortcomings in the College port than by the challenge of new ideas. Whether or not that impression was justified, there was one face that stood out from all the others. The lean and angular face of William Whiston revealed a man who would never rest content with any established orthodoxy. Whiston's name was familiar to me as the translator of Josephus and Eunomius, but I knew no more about him. When I discovered that he was not only Newton's successor as Lucasian Professor but had been dismissed from that post for Arian heresy, the interest first aroused by his portrait was greatly enhanced. For Arianism was then, as it has remained, the focus of my own patristic studies. So I read the two volumes of Whiston's Memoirs; but their quirkiness and the querulousness of their tone, as well as the pressure of other commitments, discouraged me from pursuing the matter further at the time. Nevertheless, the interest to which his portrait and his disastrous career had given birth did not entirely die away. And when, some years later, I looked at a wider range of Whiston's writings, it was rekindled. Although he objected to the description of his beliefs as ‘Arian’, as had many of those who were so designated in the fourth century, he was wholly unrepentant about the substance of those beliefs. The five-volume work in which he set out his own distinctive understanding of the faith of the early church and which led to his condemnation for Arian heresy was entitled Primitive Christianity Revived. Nor was his concern a merely historical or theoretical one. He acted on his scholarly judgement by forming the ‘Society for Promoting Primitive Christianity’. It would be hard to conceive a more forthright challenge to the traditional evaluation of Arianism as the archetypal heresy.

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Meanwhile the 1970s had seen a marked growth of interest in Arian studies. New approaches to the subject were developed, which raised some of the same issues that were implicit in the Whiston affair. The traditional character and positive religious intentions of the early Arian movement were emphasized. The varied forms that Arianism took in the later years of the fourth century received increased attention. Furthermore, ambiguities in the concept of ‘Arianism’ itself became the subject of scholarly discussion. So broader questions began to form in my mind: if ‘Arianism’ was so amorphous a concept, with religiously positive as well as negative features, how had it come to be regarded throughout Christian history as the prince of heresies? How often had men like William Whiston reversed that judgement and found in Arianism a living religious truth? What sort of reasoning had led them to a judgement so sharply at variance with the almost universal judgement of the church? In the book which has grown out of these reflections which Whiston's portrait helped to set in motion, I have not stayed exclusively with Whiston and the revival of Arianism in the eighteenth century to which he was a major contributor. That has remained my central interest, but I have tried to look at the way in which Arianism has been perceived in the intervening centuries also. The study has taken me well outside the periods of history in which I can claim any specialist expertise. I am particularly grateful to various friends and colleagues who read and commented on parts of the manuscript. Peter Heather, Tom Kopecek, John Matthews, Alister McGrath, John Walsh, David Pailin, and Jane Shaw have all made helpful comments and suggestions for which I am most grateful. The errors and imperfections that remain are entirely my own responsibility. For many readers also the book invites a crossing of frontiers that too often stay closed. I hope that patristic scholars will be interested to see how the ‘Arianism’ that is so central a feature of their period of study has manifested itself in subsequent moments of the church's history. In scholarship devoted to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the antitrinitarian and deist controversies of the period, and Newton's theological ideas in particular, have received considerable attention during recent years. But the distinctively Arian component in those movements has been relatively neglected. I hope that my examination of that theme in the context of a broad historical treatment of Arianism will prove of interest to specialists in the period. In trying to make the work accessible to people with different

PREFACE

vii

scholarly backgrounds, I have avoided quotations in the classical languages and have included a translation of Greek phrases where they have been used. The Bibliography of patristic works is designed to help those who want to consult the original texts and those who want to turn to an English translation where one exists. I have also modernized the spelling in citations from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts. Finally, no worthwhile historical study is without contemporary implications. The significance of the history surveyed here for the continuing work of Christian doctrine has been one aspect of my own interest in pursuing this study. The closing sections of the book deal with the time after the collapse of the Arian revival at the end of the eighteenth century. In them I have tried to do two things: first, to see how far dogmatic convictions have continued to affect British Arian scholarship during that period; and, secondly, to reflect very briefly on the implications of the study for our own understanding of the doctrinal task today. The Bodleian Library has, as usual, been the primary setting for my researches, and the availability of the microfilm of the Newton manuscripts in the Rhodes Science Library has been an invaluable help. Christ Church library has provided me with an excellent collection of eighteenth-century material in an ideal architectural setting, and John Wing has, as always, been unfailingly helpful. Manchester College Library has also been a valuable additional resource for the beginnings of Unitarianism. I have enjoyed the hospitality of the Princeton Seminary Library on a number of occasions, where Bill Harris and Kate Skrebutenas have been most welcoming and generous with their assistance. I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of Clare College, Cambridge, for allowing me to use Whiston's portrait as a frontispiece to the book. M.F.W.

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Contents Abbreviations 1. What is Arianism? A Question of Definition A Polemical Construction A Sympathetic Reconstruction 2. The End of Arianism The Greek East The Latin West Gothic Christianity 3. Maimbourg's Millennium and the Second Death of Arianism 4. The Rise and Fall of British Arianism Seventeenth-Century Origins The Secret Arianism of Isaac Newton The Public Arianism of William Whiston The Moderate Arianism of Samuel Clarke English Presbyterianism's ‘Insidious Tendency to Arianism’ The Third Death of Arianism 5. Faith and Historical Judgement in British Arian Scholarship The Nineteenth Century: Newman and Gwatkin The Twentieth Century: Williams and Hanson 6. Epilogue Bibliography Index of Biblical References General Index

x 1 1 5 9 27 27 35 40 52 62 62 77 93 110 134 157 165 165 176 182 187 199 200

Abbreviations Ad Ep. Aeg. ANCL ANF CCL C-H Con. Ar. Con. Cel. CSEL De Or. De Princ. DNB DTC FC GCS JEH JHI JTS LCC NPNF PG PL PSt RHE SC SJT SP ZKG

Athanasius, Ad Episcopos Aegypti Ante-Nicene Christian Library Ante-Nicene Fathers Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina Chadwick-Healey Reel Athanasius, Contra Arianos Origen, Contra Celsum Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Origen, De Oratione Origen, De Principiis Dictionary of National Biography Dictionnaire de théologie catholique Fathers of the Church Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahr-hunderte Journal of Ecclesiastical History Journal of the History of Ideas Journal of Theological Studies Library of Christian Classics Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Patrologia Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne Patristic Studies Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique Sources chrétiennes Scottish Journal of Theology Studia Patristica Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte

1 What Is Arianism? A Question of Denition For centuries the Nicene Creed has been a distinctive feature of baptismal liturgies in the East and of eucharistic liturgies in the West. Fuller than the Apostles' Creed and less contentious than the Athanasian, it, more than any other set of words, has come to be seen as the primary symbol of Christian orthodoxy. The Lambeth Quadrilateral described it as ‘the sufficient statement of the Christian Faith’. Yet its fulfilment of such a role is inevitably problematic. The form in which we express our beliefs is necessarily rooted in the linguistic and cultural assumptions of the time. No statement from the past can be more than an indirect determinant of present faith, for it can only fulfil that role through the medium of a complex interpretative process. These general difficulties apply in a particularly acute form to the Nicene Creed. For whether we use that phrase to refer to the creed accepted at the Council of Nicaea itself in AD 325 or to the later, allied creed of the Council of Constantinople of AD 381, which is the form used in contemporary eucharistic worship, the creed is a very direct outcome of a theological controversy of the fourth century. The Council of Nicaea was called to deal with a dispute arising out of a conflict between the Alexandrian presbyter, Arius, and his bishop, Alexander; and the Council of Constantinople was intended to put an end to a style of teaching, generally known to its opponents as ‘Arianism’. The Creed has an explicit polemical thrust. There is nothing particularly surprising in that. The same could be said of much of the New Testament. Conflict with ‘the Pharisees’ or with ‘the Jews’ is a major determining characteristic of St Matthew's and of St John's gospels, and the polemical intentions of Galatians and of 1 John against Judaizing and gnosticizing Christians are unmistakable. But so too is the difficulty stemming from that fact. For it means that re-evaluations of the Judaism contemporary with the emergence of Christianity are bound to have far-reaching implications for our understanding of the New

2

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

Testament. Yet the role of the New Testament in Christian faith as a whole, and long-established traditions of how it should be understood, have proved a serious hindrance to the emergence and the acceptance of such re-evaluations. Difficulties of the same kind apply in the case of the Nicene Creed also. There is a tension between its role as symbol of normative Christian truth and its close links with a fourth-century controversy, open to historical reinterpretation. And that tension affects not only the Creed's contemporary role. It operates in the reverse direction as well; it complicates the attempts of historical study to achieve a proper understanding of Arius and Arianism. The study of early Christian doctrine has been transformed by a change in attitude towards heresy and the heresiarchs. Gone is the picture of the gradual flowering of a single, consistent vision of Christian truth, developing only in the sense of receiving an increasing precision of expression, something forced on the church by the need to combat perversions of that truth deliberately introduced by malevolent heretics. In its place has come a picture of the Christian church seeking to discover what the truth might be in the context of always-changing conditions and new problems. In that revised picture the roles of ‘father’ and ‘heretic’ are much less sharply contrasted. Pelagius and Nestorius are not seen as men of evil will; they are seen rather as Christians determined to defend some aspect of Christan truth that was genuinely at risk in the teaching of St Augustine or of St Cyril. Even if their overall presentation of the faith be judged less satisfactory than that of their ultimately canonized opponents, they were standing out for important Christian insights to which their orthodox Christian opponents did not do full justice. And where such conflicts gave rise to ecclesiastical division, such as the Nestorian and Monophysite churches, it was to the impoverishment of the Catholic Church which defined itself over against them. Such an attitude does not involve denying the reality of the issues that divided them. It only involves saying that true insight was not the exclusive prerogative of one side. As many Catholics and Protestants would claim today in the light of the changes in attitude to their divisions, it is possible for both sides in such a case to be enriched theologically and religiously, through a more sympathetic apprehension of the issues involved in the origins of the dispute between them. The fruitfulness of such an approach to the history of doctrine cries out for its pursuit in relation to Arius and Arianism also. But can that be done if the Nicene Creed is both an explicit repudiation of Arius

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

3

and the primary norm of Christian orthodoxy? The inherent difficulty of the project is well illustrated by a document arising out of a Lutheran–Catholic dialogue, devoted to the status of the Nicene Creed as Dogma of the Church. The Catholic spokesman asserts that ‘Arius . . . felt it necessary to appeal to [the] norm [of the Word of God in the Scriptures], though his doctrinal scheme owed nothing to Scripture’, and the Lutheran spokesman claims that the Arian use of the New Testament subordinationist and adoptionist concepts and images was heretical, because ‘it was opposed, so to speak, to the intention of the New Testament usage which was to exalt Christ rather than to lower Him’.1 The ecumenical helpfulness of such traditionally negative evaluations of Arius' motives and methods is obvious enough. And that fact can hardly avoid proving a disincentive to reviewing and revising them. Nevertheless, once we have acknowledged that doctrinal norms can function only indirectly, through an interpretative prism, the project will no longer appear an impossible one. Indeed it has already begun. Robert Gregg and Dennis Groh's book Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (1981) and Thomas Kopocek's article ‘Neo-Arian Religion: The Evidence of the Apostolic Constitutions’ (1985) have forced scholars to take serious account of the positive religious intentions of the Arian movement in its earlier and later manifestations in the fourth century. Rowan Williams's more recent book, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (1987), also gives a highly sympathetic historical interpretation of Arius and of his teaching, and does so in full awareness of the issues I have been raising. It opens with the words: ‘ “Arianism” has often been regarded as the archetypal Christian deviation, something aimed at the very heart of the Christian confession.’2 One of the great merits of the book is to show that it is perfectly possible to seek out the positive Christian insights in the teaching of Arius without prejudging the overall evaluation to be given to it. Whatever that final evaluation, the process can hardly fail to deepen our understanding of what was involved in that influential determination of the content of Christian faith that took place at the Council of Nicaea and in the half-century that followed it. But even if the psychological barriers that stand in the way of a changed appreciation of Arius and the controversy that bears his name

1

Paul C. Empie and T. Austin Murphy (eds.), Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue 1 (Minneapolis, n.d.), 19 and 14. The date of the meeting at which the document was agreed was 1965.

2

R. D. Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (London, 1987 ), 1.

4

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

can be got out of the way, there remains another serious difficulty in the path of the quest of the historical Arius. The paucity of the available sources and the complex problems involved in their interpretation make progress extremely difficult. The critical reconstruction of those sources has been the subject of intensive study in recent years, but the picture to be drawn from them remains far from clear.3 It may be that, in view of the nature of those sources, the historical Arius will always remain as elusive a figure as the historical Jesus. But though that would be a serious handicap in relation to a better understanding of the Council of Nicaea itself, which was very specifically directed against Arius, the later Council of Constantinople (from which our Nicene Creed derives) had in view a whole range of subsequent ‘Arian’ writings. Here the available sources are far more abundant. But once again there are serious difficulties to contend with. Richard Hanson, whose The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God stands towards the study of Arianism as Rowan Williams's book does towards the study of Arius, explains why the phrase ‘Arian Controversy’ does not figure in his main title. It is, he says, ‘a serious misnomer. . . . The epithet “Arian” . . . is scarcely justified to describe the movement of thought in the fourth century which culminated in the Nicene–Constantinopolitan Creed’.4 Williams, indeed, in a lengthy review of Hanson's book, argues that Hanson has seriously under-estimated the unsatisfactory character of the ‘Arian’ label as applied to these later fourth-century debates. ‘The time’, Williams concludes, ‘has probably come to relegate the term “Arianism” at best to inverted commas and preferably to oblivion. . . . the sheer uselessness and inaccuracy of the word becomes clearer with every new piece of research in the period’.5 Here too, then, extensive research goes on, seeking to clarify not only the detail of the story but the basic categories in terms of which the story needs to be told. It is not my intention in this book to contribute directly to either of these important areas of research. ‘Arianism’, however unsatisfactory a category it may be for the understanding of the fourth century, has certainly existed as a powerful concept throughout Christian history.

3

See R. Lorenz, Arius Judaizans ? (Göttingen, 1978 ) and G. C. Stead, ‘Arius in Modern Research’, JTS

4

R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh, 1988 ), pp. xvii–xviii.

5

SJT 45 (1992 ), 102. See also Daniel Williams, who issues a similar warning, speaking of Arianism as a ‘misnomer’ (Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene–Arian Conflicts (Oxford, 1995 ), 1).

NS

45 (1994 ), 24–36.

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

5

That is something which cannot be relegated to oblivion, and that is the ‘Arianism’ whose history I shall be attempting to recount.6 It has been seen, with a fair degree of consistency, as, in Williams's words, ‘the archetypal Christian deviation’. But there have been exceptions. Most notably there was a short period at the beginning of the eighteenth century when it found widespread support in Britain. Nor did that support come from people of no standing, on the margins of society. It was the creed espoused by many of the leading scientists of the day—by Sir Isaac Newton secretly, by William Whiston vociferously, and by Samuel Clarke discreetly. For them the archetypal heresy was Athanasian orthodoxy, and what the fourth-century Fathers called ‘Arianism’ was the true embodiment of ‘primitive Christianity’. My aim has been to trace the ways in which Arianism has been conceived down the ages, with special attention to its brief revival in the early eighteenth century. But before embarking on that historical story, we need to consider a little more fully what that original ‘Arianism’ was understood to be by those who denounced it with such vehemence, and how those who were, or were said to be, ‘Arians’ understood themselves.

A Polemical Construction Arian, like Christian, was not a self-chosen designation. It was one bestowed by hostile opponents. But, unlike Christian, it was never accepted by those on whom it had been imposed. Christ was at the heart of the faith and devotion of the early church. But when Athanasius says that with the Arians ‘Arius takes the place of Christ’,7 his rhetoric distorts the truth beyond even the normal standards of fourth-century controversy. Arius was in fact never very central to the concerns of those who came to be called after his name. The application of the term ‘Arian’ to cover a range of theological views of a broadly similar kind seems to have developed through two stages. When Athanasius first uses the term it is to refer to those in Alexandria who were excommunicated with Arius and who in their turn sought to exclude Athanasius and his followers from the church. It was

6

Williams's recommendation that ‘Arianism’, if used at all, should be put in inverted commas has much to commend it. But it would be tedious to adopt it as a universal practice in a book with the particular concerns of this one, and I shall follow it only when the inappropriateness of the designation calls for special emphasis.

7

Con. Ar . 1. 2.

6

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

a term of local significance where support for and identification with the cause of Arius was the basic issue. Those who supported their cause from outside were not called Arians but ‘the Eusebian circle’ (ōἰ περὶ Ἐυσέβιōν), associates of the Arians and tarred with the same heresy. As the conflict got fiercer and Athanasius suffered the severe reverse of being sent into exile, it was not a large step to extend the use of the term ‘Arian’ to the wider body of his opponents. The issue at stake was not solely, or at that stage perhaps even primarily, theological. Many of the charges levelled against Athanasius were directed at what was regarded as his oppressive and sometimes violent exercise of ecclesiastical authority. Nevertheless, his opponents did share a general approach to theological issues which, though by no means identical with that of Arius, was somewhat nearer to his than to that of Athanasius. And if the name ‘Arian’ could be made to stick, it would serve Athanasius' purposes admirably in the bitter controversy. For Arius had been officially excommunicated at the Council of Nicaea. The name ‘Arian’ carried guilt by association. It was an invaluable polemical tool. His opponents, not unnaturally, were equally anxious to repudiate the name. Most of them could do so with a good conscience. Few had had any close contact with Arius; few had been directly influenced by his teaching. Every attempt had to be made to undermine the damaging link insinuated by the imposition of this unjustified title—even the pulling of rank when the bishops at the Council of Antioch in AD 341 wrote to assure Pope Julius that they ‘could not be followers of Arius, for how could we who are bishops follow a presbyter?’8 But all such protestations were of no avail. Athanasius was victor in the battle of the name. The designation stuck, and it remains to be seen whether Hanson's claim that ‘Arian Controversy’ is a misleading designation of those fourth-century debates will do anything to change that fact.9 Athanasius is not only responsible for creating the concept of Arianism; he is also responsible for determining how the concept has been understood in the subsequent history of the church. That understanding has been affected far more by the polemical account given by Athanasius than by the precise teaching either of Arius himself or of the so-called Arians. It is Athanasius' account, rather than any necessarily

8

Athanasius, De Synodis 22.

9

For a fuller discussion of the argument of this paragraph, see my ‘Attitudes to Arius in the Arian Controversy’, in M. R. Barnes and D. H. Williams (eds.), Arianism after Arius (Edinburgh, 1993 ), 31–43.

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

7

tentative reconstruction of the teaching of Arius or later Arians, that is most important for our consideration of attitudes to Arianism down the ages. The description that Athanasius gives of Arianism is remarkably consistent throughout his various writings. The great bulk of these, including his most sustained account in the three Orations against the Arians, were written after the death of Arius. Athanasius does not quote at length from specific Arian writers. He is more inclined to summarize views or beliefs that he attributes to Arius or to the Arians. There does not seem to be any significant difference between those two ascriptions. Interchange between the two is part of his overall strategy of associating his opponents of the moment as closely as possible with the officially discredited figure of Arius. For our present purpose it is not necessary to undertake the difficult task of evaluating the accuracy of these accounts. Together they constitute the picture of Arianism that has dominated the church's understanding of that phenomenon throughout its history. The primary feature of Arianism, as Athanasius presents it, is that the status of the Son is not one of essential Godhead. The Son is not eternal or immutable; he has no exact vision, understanding, or knowledge of the Father. Put more positively, he is a creature brought into being from nothing. From this it follows that the Father himself has not always been Father. Athanasius recognizes that Arians do speak of the Son as god—as god by participation—and that they qualify their account of him as creature by insisting that he is unique, utterly unlike any other creature. But these he regards as mere sophisms.10 There are only the two utterly distinct categories of God and the created order; there is no midway category between them. Arius' attempts to ameliorate his position by language which suggests that there is, is so much equivocation. It cannot relate to any reality, and can simply be ignored in practice. God by participation is a possible way of speaking of that ultimate goal for human life which Athanasius' Alexandrian tradition spoke of as ‘divinization’; but if that were the status of the Son, he would be in no position to communicate salvation to us.11 If the Son is not essentially God, then the only alternative is that he is a creature. And that both precludes him from fulfilling any saving role, and also means that the worship which Arians offer to him is a form of

10

Con. Ar . 1. 9; Festal Letters 10. 9; 11. 10; Con. Ar . 2. 19.

11

De Synodis 51.

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WHAT IS ARIANISM?

blasphemous idolatry.12 In Athanasius' view there are two underlying causes behind these Arian errors. The Arians cannot square the ascription to the Son of essential Godhead either with monotheism's insistence on a single uncreated being or with the Son's incarnation in time and human birth.13 But their failure to do so has serious implications in relation to both the Father and the Son. If the mediatorial function of the Son requires him to be of some mediatorial ontological status between God and creation, that can only be because the Father is too high and mighty, too proud—or perhaps too idle—to undertake the work of creation himself.14 And in the case of the Son it implies that he was brought into existence only in order to be the agent of our creation; he was created for our sake, rather than we for his.15 At the root of all these errors is the Arians' inability to grasp what is specifically new in Christian faith. The account of God that they put forward is incoherent as it stands; but on one interpretation it is identical with the radical monotheism of Judaism, while the only other conceivable interpretation of it (one that stresses that the Son is god in some secondary sense) amounts to a form of polytheism. Accusations that Arians are no better than Jews alternate with descriptions of them as indistinguishable from pagans. And at times the two charges stand incongruously together.16 Arians did not of course outwardly resemble either Jews or pagans. The majority of their leaders were Christian bishops, and their writings and their preaching were ostensibly based on Scripture. But that, in Athanasius' view, was a sham. Quoting Scripture to his own ends is a characteristic part of the devil's strategy of deception.17 The Arians' false beliefs constituted a canon of interpretation—or, rather of misinterpretation—which vitiated their appeal to Scripture.18 When the Arians appealed to the authority of one of Athanasius' predecessors, Dionysius of Alexandria, Athanasius begins his reply by pointing out the utter wrongness of their theological method. Their heresy has no ground in reason and no clear proof in Holy Scripture, so they are always resorting to shameless subterfuges and plausible fallacies. And now they have ventured to slander the Fathers.19

12

Con. Ar . 1. 8; 2. 43; 3. 16; Ad Ep. Aeg . 13; Ad Adelphium 6.

13

Con. Ar . 1. 30–4; 3. 16; 3. 27; Festal Letters 10. 9.

14

Con. Ar . 2. 24.

15

Ad Ep. Aeg . 12.

16

e.g. Con. Ar . 3. 67.

17

Con. Ar . 1. 8.

18

Con. Ar . 1. 52.

19

De Sententia Dionysii 1.

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

9

The Arian appeal to reason is sophistic, their appeal to Scripture a pretence, and their appeal to tradition an insult. Such is the understanding of Arian theology that Athanasius sought to convey. The success of his attempt can be seen from the fact that as late as the end of the nineteenth century we still find the same analysis coming from the pen of one of the foremost British scholars on Arianism, H. M. Gwatkin. He concludes his major study of the subject with this judgement: On the one side their doctrine was a mass of presumptuous theorizing, supported by alternate scraps of obsolete traditionalism and uncritical text-mongering, on the other it was a lifeless system of unspiritual pride and hard unlovingness. And therefore Arianism perished.20 Once again the appeal to reason, tradition, and Scripture is acknowledged, and once again it is dismissed as wholly spurious.

A Sympathetic Reconstruction Athanasius' root-and-branch denunciation of Arianism has so dominated all later reflection on the subject that it is a matter of particular importance to try to view the initial impetus of Arianism in a more positive light. The appeal of Arians to Scripture, tradition, and reason, whether ultimately successful or not, was certainly no sham, no deliberate cloak for other, sinister aims. In their eyes it was a sincere and straightforward account of the grounding of their teaching. It offers, therefore, a good framework for attempting to grasp Arianism's own self-understanding. The difficulty of the task lies, as we have seen, in the paucity of the sources relating to Arius and those most closely associated with him, and in the variety of beliefs to be found among those who came to be designated ‘Arian’. The account that I shall give is bound, therefore, to be somewhat broadly and impressionistically conceived. I shall draw particularly on the very limited writings of Arius himself, as the one with the clearest right to the name of Arian. But I shall draw evidence also from later Arians, whose views were at least reasonably close to those of Arius himself. The resultant picture will probably not represent the precise view of any individual thinker. Nor, of course, does the picture offered by Athanasius. But the evidence does, I believe, enable us to build up, with a fair measure of confidence, a general view of how those whom Athanasius was

20

H. M. Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism (Cambridge, 1882 ), 266.

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WHAT IS ARIANISM?

denouncing as Arians understood their faith to be based on Scripture, tradition, and reason.

The Arian Appeal to Scripture Arius begins his letter of defence to his bishop, Alexander, with a strong affirmation of the transcendence of God. We acknowledge one God, alone unbegotten, alone everlasting, alone unbegun, alone true, alone having immortality, alone wise, alone sovereign.21 Eight attributes are said to characterize God exclusively. The first three come from the language of Greek reflective thought rather than from Scripture. All have the characteristic negative form of an initial α-privative: ἀγέννητōς, ἀίδιōς, ἄναρχōς. All were already widely used in Christian theological writing. There is nothing surprising or distinctive in Arius' use of them. What is more noteworthy is that all the remaining five are direct citations from or clear allusions to Scripture. The first is taken from the high-priestly prayer of Jesus with its reference to the ‘only true’ God in John 17: 3. The second and the fifth both come from the description of God in 1 Tim. 6: 15–16 as ‘the blessed and only sovereign, the King of kings, the Lord of lords, who alone has immortality’; Arius' use of the longer scriptural phrase, rather than the single word ‘immortal’, which the rhetorical form of the passage would more naturally suggest, is clear evidence of the strong influence of the biblical text. The third comes from a similar doxological passage, the ascription of glory to the ‘only wise’ God in the last verse of the epistle to the Romans (Rom. 16: 27). Finally, the description of God as ‘alone good’ derives from the words of Jesus to the rich young ruler that ‘no one is good but God alone’ (Mark 10: 18). The God to whom Arius ascribes these attributes in exclusive fashion is clearly the Father. Arius does not so name him, but his text goes on to speak of God so described as begetting an only-begotten Son. In applying these attributes exclusively to the Father, Arius could reasonably have claimed that he was being faithful to the original context of the scriptural passages from which the phrases have been drawn. In every case the God of whom the passage speaks is explicitly differentiated from Jesus Christ. The high-priestly prayer speaks of a knowledge of ‘thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent’. The King of kings of 1 Timothy is the one who will determine the proper time for the final appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.

21

In Athanasius, De Synodis 16.

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

11

In the Romans doxology it is through Jesus Christ that glory is given to the only wise God. And it is Jesus himself who refuses to be called ‘good’ on the ground that that appellation belongs only to God—indeed, only to God the Father, to give the form in which the text is regularly cited by Arius' Alexandrian predecessor, Origen. It was no unnatural or forced reading of Scripture to refer these transcendent attributes directly and exclusively to the Father. Arius goes on to describe this transcendent God as ‘God of law and prophets and New Testament’. It is not simply that Scripture provides the language for talking about God. Transcendent as he is, he is still a God who directs the history of his people in providential ways. That is not a theme that appears very much in early Arian sources. But there is no suggestion that in general terms the issue was a matter of dispute. Athanasius cites as Arian teaching the statement that God led the people out of Egypt and gave them the law through Moses, a man.22 His objection is to the analogous use of that teaching to suggest that God might similarly in the case of Christ have acted through one who was less than fully divine. There is no suggestion that there is anything defective in general Arian understanding of God as active in history. Indeed, the logic of the argument implies that there was not. But if Arians were as ready as other Christians to ascribe to the transcendent God the providential guidance of Israel's history of which the Bible speaks, that is not to say that there is no problem about how the unchangeable God acts in the changing scene of historical events. The problem emerges within Scripture itself and was felt by every reflective Christian theologian. Scripture depicts God as active through his angels, or through his word or wisdom. It was those latter concepts that supplied the primary medium for subsequent Christian reflection. But how were such concepts to be understood? If we follow Scripture in speaking of the heavens as made by the word of the Lord and ordered by his spirit (Ps. 33: 6), are we simply describing the quality of God's creative activity or are we speaking of distinct divine entities who are the immediate agents of creation? Not all Christians interpreted their scriptures in the same manner at this point. But the division was not one that stood between the Arians and Athanasius; it was a division that separated the opponents of Arius from one another. Marcellus of Ancyra, another vigorous opponent of Arius, did not regard God's pre-existent word or wisdom as an entity distinct from the Father. But Athanasius and Arius were at one in doing so. Both

22

Con. Ar . 2. 27.

12

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

read the Old Testament in the light of the New. The use of ‘word’ by St John and of ‘wisdom’ by St Paul (1 Cor. 1: 24) as titles of Christ helped to convince them that the terms referred not just to a divine attribute but to a distinguishable divine entity, who was the agent both of creation and of God's direction of the affairs of history. If Marcellus did not read the text that way, it was, Eusebius suggests, because he was too dominated by the Old Testament and had failed to do justice to the newness of the New.23 So if anyone was to be accused of being a Judaizer, failing to reflect in his teaching a distinctively Christian conception of God, it could be argued that it was Marcellus and not Arius who merited the accusation. This same word or wisdom of God, the agent of creation and lord of history, had been fully embodied as the person, Jesus Christ. That was the central message of the gospel. But what was the essential nature of this personal word or wisdom who had become incarnate as Jesus? In Arius' letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, a second early letter of his, he speaks of the pre-existent Son as πλήρης θεὸς μōνōγενής.24 The phrase is not easy to translate. Literally it means ‘full god only-begotten’. There can be little doubt that the form of words has been determined by the Johannine prologue. In v. 1 the Word is said to be θεός (god), in v. 14 he is described as only-begotten (μōνōγενής) and full (πλήρης) of grace and truth; in v. 18 only-begotten recurs as part of a fuller title, some texts reading only-begotten son (υἱός) and some only-begotten god (θεός). Whether ‘only-begotten god’ was the reading of v. 18 known to Arius or whether it was a composite formation from verses 1 and 18, it is a designation chosen here by Arius himself and widely used by other Arian writers. The text of St John's gospel left Arius in no doubt that the Word or Son was a divine entity; he was θεός. But the same passage equally clearly implied that there was a differentiation between the application of that term to the Father and to the Word; the latter was μōνōγενής θεός. A later text in St John's gospel, to which we have already seen Arius alluding, provides a more specific clue to the nature of that differentiation. John 17: 3 speaks of ‘the only true God and Jesus Christ’. Christ is undoubtedly θεός where he is to be distinguished from the Father is precisely that the Father alone is true God (ἀληθινὸς θεός). The distinction is the same as that which is present in the prologue, but it is made more specific. So there is no case for suggesting that the distinction in John 17: 3

23

Eusebius, De Ecclesiastica Theologica 2. 18.

24

In Theodoret, Church History 1. 5.

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

13

applies only to Christ as human. That would be to wrench the saying away from its context in the gospel, since the parallel distinction in the prologue must refer to the pre-existent Word. What then is the relationship between the Word and the Father, between god and true God? Is the question, we may be inclined to ask, one for which Scripture provides any material that might enable us to deal with it? If we are tempted to give the answer ‘No’, Arius and Athanasius were at one in returning a positive answer; and they were equally at one in agreeing where that material was primarily to be found. The eighth chapter of the book of Proverbs speaks explicitly of the origination of Wisdom: The Lord created me the beginning of his ways for his works, long ago before all else that he made. I was formed in earliest times, at the beginning, before earth itself. I was born when there was yet no ocean, when there were no springs brimming with water. Wisdom is spoken of as created (κτίζω), as formed ( ), and as born (γεννάω). Wisdom derives its being from God, and the languages of creation and begetting are alternative designations for the same reality. The interchangeability of the two in speaking of God's relation to the world is evident from other pasages of Scripture. As Eusebius of Nicomedia points out, God is said to have begotten Israel as his son (Isa. 1: 2; Deut. 32: 18)—and even to have begotten the drops of dew (Job 38: 28).25 Of the two terms, creation would naturally appear as the more basic and also as less open to crude anthropomorphic interpretation—an important consideration in a pagan milieu with its unedifying tales of gods begetting sons. The language of begetting admittedly is the more prominent in the New Testament. It coheres not only with the regular use of the title ‘Son’ in relation to Christ, but also with the designation of him as ‘only-begotten god’ which we have just been considering. But the language of creation is not without some very limited support there too. The epistle to the Hebrews, for example, speaks of Christ as being ‘faithful to the one who made (πōιέω) him’. Creation could thus be seen as the appropriate generic term, with begetting as a way of indicating the unique and intimate nature of this primary act of divine creation—the bringing into being of a distinct divine Word or Wisdom or Son.

25

Ibid.

14

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

If the New Testament does not speak with the same degree of precision about the origination of this second divine being, there are many passages which carry implications for our understanding of the continuing relation between the Father and the Son or between God and his Word. One such passage is Paul's confessional statement in 1 Cor. 8: 6: For us there is one God, the Father from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. The text is much used by Arian writers, and in particular provides the basic framework for Eunomius' Apology later in the century. Basil of Caesarea reports that such a usage of the text is said to go back to Arius' own confession in his original dispute with Alexander.26 The text poses a problem about the status of the ‘one Lord’ in relation to the ‘all things’ of which the passage speaks. If he stands outside the ‘all things’ that come from the one God, then we seem to have another reality alongside the one God and not coming from him. It is not unnatural therefore, though admittedly not without its own difficulties, to understand the one Lord as included among the ‘all things’ that come from God, but unique as the medium through whom ‘all things’ (i.e. all other than himself) have their existence from God. Such a view fits well with the description in Proverbs of Wisdom as created as ‘the beginning of his ways for his works’, and the Johannine prologue's designation of the Word as the one ‘through whom all things came into existence’. The emphasis in the Arian appeal to the New Testament, as we have surveyed it so far, has been on the distinct and secondary sense in which the Word is to be understood as θεός. The Father is the source of the Son's being; the Son is the medium through whom God's creative and providential agency is carried out. Did their appeal to Scripture offer any more fundamental, and less purely functional, understanding of the relation between the Father and the Son, which would justify the designation of the latter as θεός? The outwardly simple wording of the Johannine saying ‘I and my Father are one’ is not one which caused any embarrassment to the Arians. In Athanasius' Orations it is not a text that Athanasius introduces into the discussion himself; it is one of the texts where he has to come up with his own exegesis in order to counter its use by the Arians.27 For them the unity

26

Basil, Adversus Eunomium 1. 4.

27

Con. Ar . 3. 10.

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

15

of which the text speaks could not conceivably be a unity of fundamental being; the Father is the one God ‘alone true, alone having immortality, alone wise, alone good, alone sovereign’; and the Son derives his being from the Father. But another passage in the Johannine gospel shows that that could not in any event be the intended meaning of the text. In the high-priestly prayer Jesus prays to the Father that his followers ‘may be one as we are one’. The unity envisaged for Christ's disciples at the end of time can only be a moral unity, a perfect harmony of will. And the logic of the argument implies that the same must therefore be true of the unity of Father and Son also. In the case of human persons a harmony of wills can arise in one of two ways. It can exist in a free and open way between equals; or it can function hierarchically, the two wills being in harmony because one of the two is invariably obedient to the will of the other. The concept of obedience figures significantly in Scripture in the context of the relation between Father and Son. In the high-priestly prayer Jesus speaks of accomplishing the work which the Father has given him to do (John 17: 4), and earlier in the gospel Jesus has spoken more generally of seeking not his own will but the will of him who sent him (John 5: 30). In the synoptic gospels that latter sentiment is embodied in the Gethsemane prayer, which corresponds in those gospels to the high-priestly prayer in the Johannine gospel. And the language of obedience is used uninhibitedly of the Son in the epistle to the Hebrews, as something that he actually learns through suffering (Heb. 5: 8). But the understanding of the unity of Father and Son as constituted by a harmony of wills raised a problem, on which Arian teaching is difficult to determine with clarity and about which there is room for dispute. The problem can be posed in the form of a dilemma: is he Son because he is obedient? Or is he obedient because he is Son? If we give the first, broadly adoptionist, answer, what sense is to be made of the Arian insistence on the unique, pretemporal creation of the Son? If we give the second answer, do we not render the story of Christ's incarnate life and passion a mere façade, something unreal in moral terms? Two important passages of the New Testament appear to imply that the Son's supreme titles as Lord and as God were conferred on him as a direct result of his moral faithfulness. Phil. 2: 5–11 states that the title ‘Lord’ was bestowed on Jesus as a consequence of his faithful obedience to the way of the cross. And Heb. 1: 8–9 applies to the Son the

16

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

words of Psalm 45 in which one who is addressed as ‘god’ is said to be the recipient of his God's special favour because of his love of righteousness. The forceful ‘therefore’ in each passage cries out for the first of our two lines of interpretation. The incomparably lofty status of the Son is the result of obedience. It is the harmony of wills that constitutes the unity of θεότης (godhead), which justifies the designation of the Son as θεός. But is not such an adoptionist account of the Son's divine titles in conflict with the strong Arian insistence on the unique, pretemporal creation of the Son as the perfect offspring of God? The tension between the two is, of course, inherent in the sources with which the Arians were working. But in stressing both aspects, they were not simply maintaining two sides of a self-contradiction. Arius affirms the unalterable and unchangeable nature of the Son; unalterability and unchangeableness are the only two attributes in Arius' letter to Alexander that are explicitly affirmed of both Father and Son. Other attributes that are said to belong exclusively to the Father, such as goodness and wisdom, would, of course, not be denied to the Son. He is, after all, wisdom personified. But they would be applied to the Son in a distinct sense; they would be seen as derivative rather than fully intrinsic. So we should expect some comparable distinction between the senses in which the Father and the Son are each said to be unalterable and unchangeable. The former must be so in a fully intrinsic way, the latter in a derived and secondary sense. Alexander indeed complains that under pressure Arius and his friends had been led to admit that the Word of God was susceptible of change. He sees this as evidence that their original claim that he was unchangeable was not sincerely meant.28 But the concept of unchangeability can be understood in more than one way. It can be intended in a sense in which any change is absolutely and necessarily excluded. But it can also be used, especially with reference to moral beings, in a sense in which change is not logically excluded, but is excluded de facto because the person in question is utterly committed morally to a particular way of acting or style of life. There is, that is to say, a form of unchangeability that is fully compatible with a radical moral freedom. Such a way of thinking, which Alexander's intended criticism suggests was characteristic of Arius, goes a long way towards overcoming the dilemma we have been considering. The Son is a perfect creation of God; but a perfect moral being must be capable of turning away from the good. Yet in fact the

28

See Theodoret, Church History 1. 6.

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

17

Son does not turn away; he reveals moral consistency of a kind that leads us to say that he cannot. The perfection of his creation is the ground, but not the sufficient cause, of his moral unchangeability; and his moral unchangeability is what justifies his designation as divine Son, but it is not a temporal cause of that designation. The discussion in which we have been involved has led on from more narrowly exegetical questions to more philosophical issues. We will be considering these more directly a little later on. No exegesis can avoid moving in such a direction, for any attempt to give a consistent exegesis of the scriptural witness as a whole is bound to seek ways of resolving apparent antinomies. And any such attempt requires the use of critical reasoning. But enough has been said to rebut the charge that the Arian appeal to Scripture was mere uncritical textmongering.

The Arian Appeal to Tradition I have argued that the way in which Arius affirms the unique transcendence of God in the opening words of his letter to Alexander provides strong evidence for a scriptural inspiration to that aspect of his thought. But the introductory words that precede them point to a second important source of Arius' teaching. What he is insisting on is, he tells Alexander, ‘our faith from our forefathers, which we have learnt from you’. Such an appeal to traditional teaching is a common phenomenon among religious teachers of all sorts. How well can Arius' claim be substantiated? The appeal to tradition is not, of course, something clearly distinct from the appeal to Scripture. As the debate with the Gnostics had made clear, the range of exegetical possibility (especially where allegorical interpretation is a well-accepted method of exegesis) is endless. If arguments based on the teaching of Scripture are not to prove sterile, there needs to be some agreement about how Scripture is to be interpreted. And one of the functions of tradition was to supply such guidance. So the two are closely intertwined; as Hanson puts it in writing about Origen: The Church's rule of faith was in fact the Church's handling and interpretation of Scripture, and its content must therefore be identical with and derive its support from Scripture.29 Appeals to tradition frequently claim too much. They tend to imply a greater uniformity and a greater specificity about past teaching than

29

R. P. C. Hanson, Origen's Doctrine of Tradition (London, 1954 ), 100–1.

18

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

can properly be ascribed to it. The teaching of the church has always varied in respect of both time and place. In the earliest days of the church, communication between different centres was inevitably slow and restricted. Such limitations could only serve to reinforce the natural sense of local loyalty. It is to the teaching and practice of the founding fathers or local heroes of a person's own particular church community that the earliest appeals to tradition are especially directed. In the second-century Quartodeciman controversy, Polycrates of Ephesus recognizes a difference of practice in the timing of the paschal celebration between his own church and that of Rome. But however central and prestigious the church of Rome might be, it is loyalty to his own local tradition that in his view must take precedence.30 The special significance of appeal to local tradition is particularly evident in the Donatist controversy of the fourth and early fifth centuries in North Africa. Both sides see it as of the utmost importance to be able to claim the support of Cyprian's teaching. The appeal to tradition in that debate is essentially an appeal to the outstanding figure, both bishop and martyr, in the history of their own North African church. So, in considering the form of tradition to which it would be natural for Arius to appeal, it is appropriate to concentrate on the tradition within Alexandria itself. That is not an easy task. We have substantial remains from the two outstanding Alexandrian writers, Clement and Origen. But their very outstandingness, as teachers rather than as bishops, raises questions about how representative they were of the main tradition of the Alexandrian church. The period before them, from the first emergence of a Christian church in Alexandria until the closing years of the second century, is clouded in obscurity. And the years between their time and that of Arius is also an era of scanty records and confusing evidence. Yet it contained the nearest Alexandrian equivalent to Cyprian in North Africa: Dionysius—in the language of Eusebius, Dionysius the Great. Clement, Origen, and Dionysius (despite the fragmentary nature of Dionysius' literary remains) are thus the authors to whom it is most appropriate to turn with a view to assessing what force there might be in Arius' claim to be doing no more than continuing the faith as he had received it in the traditional teaching of Alexandrian Christianity. In order to carry the tradition back a little nearer to the first century, I shall add to those three the person of Justin Martyr, who has been described by Henry

30

Eusebius, Church History 5. 24. 1–7.

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

19

Chadwick as the one who ‘more than anyone else . . . constructs the platform upon which Clement and Origen will stand’.31 Justin Martyr is in any event an appropriate starting-point for a general review of the shape of the emerging Christian tradition. For he is the earliest writer, of those whose writings have come down to us in any appreciable quantity, who is self-consciously seeking to relate his Christian faith to the surrounding Hellenistic culture. He is not a specialist philosopher trying to force his faith into a predetermined philosophical mould; he is rather a man of wide learning who is trying to make sense of his faith in terms of the surrounding culture, which in large measure he shares with his pagan contemporaries. In his two Apologies, Christian worship is shown to be an important factor in structuring the basic shape of that faith. In denying the charge of atheism Justin insists that Christians worship and adore ‘the most true God, the Father of righteousness . . . and the Son, who came forth from him and taught us these things, and the army of the other good angels who follow him and are made like him, and the prophetic spirit.’32 Or again, he speaks of Christians as people who ‘next to God, worship and love the Word who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God’.33 And in the account that he gives of Christian baptism, he spells out its threefold form as being ‘in the name of God the Father and Lord of the universe . . . and in the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and in the name of the Holy Spirit, who through the prophets foretold all the things about Jesus’.34 The structure of the faith that he practises leads him to speak of a second divine reality, in addition to the supreme God, who is distinct from him but a proper object of Christian worship. This second divine reality is called by many different titles, especially Word and Son. In defending his position against Jewish objections, Justin draws extensively on the Old Testament scriptures. The passage from Proverbs 8 about the creation or begetting of Wisdom is cited at length on more than one occasion.35 His strongest appeal is to the theophanies of the

31

H. Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1966 ), 10.

32

Justin Martyr, 1 Apol 6. The surprising inclusion of ‘the army of other good angels’ as recipients of Christian worship led several older commentators to propose other translations of the passage, but these have now rightly been abandoned. Even some more modern commentators, who fully accept the natural rendering of the words, still tend to gloss over the oddity of its order. Thus E. F. Osborn writes (with sole reference to this passage): ‘Angels are divine beings who are worshipped and honoured after, but with, the Father, Son and Spirit’ (Justin Martyr (Tübingen, 1973 ), 56).

33

2 Apol . 13.

34

1 Apol . 61.

35

Dial. with Trypho 61; 129.

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WHAT IS ARIANISM?

Old Testament, especially the story of the visitation to Abraham under the oaks of Mamre in Gen. 18.36 In that story the primary figure appearing to Abraham is described as a man, as an angel, and as the Lord. The logic of the story, and of others like it, is clear to Justin. The one who appears in such a fashion in a particular place cannot conceivably be the transcendent God. Yet the text speaks of him as divine. It points therefore to a distinct, second divine reality who can appear in this more specific and restricted form. The text must refer to the divine Word or Son, who was later to come to the world embodied in the person of Jesus Christ and who is now the focal recipient of Christian worship. For Justin that distinction cannot be a merely nominal one. If it is to fulfil the role that both Scripture and Christian worship require of it, it must be a real distinction. The Son, as he repeatedly puts it, must be numerically distinct.37 But this numerically distinct reality is unquestionably a divine reality. Θεός is one of the many names by which he is known.38 So how can Justin maintain the monotheistic faith that is so important to him? His answer is clear. There is a numerical distinction between the Son and the Father, but there is no difference at the level of will.39 The concept of will is significant in two ways. In the first place it is the ground of the existence of the Word or Son as a distinct entity. As on the human analogy the speaking of a word or the begetting of a son comes about as the result of a chosen act of speaker or begetter, so it is by God's will that he begets a son. The supreme God remains the supreme and only source of all that is. But the unity of the Father and his Word or Son is also to be understood in terms of will. A word (λόγōς) spoken is one in intention and meaning with the thought or reason (λόγōς) that gave rise to it; and a son who is perfectly obedient to his father is one with him at the fundamental level of moral unity. Thus it is the willed action of the Father in bringing into being a second divine reality, the Son, and the willed conformity of that Son with the intentions of the Father that preserve the unity of God as the source of all, and also the unity of the two divine beings of Christian piety. The unity of God that matters to faith is preserved in the face of all competing dualistic or polytheistic systems, with their admission of real division and conflict at the level of ultimate reality. If Clement stands on the platform that Justin has constructed, he builds on it in ways that are highly enigmatic. The ineffability that Justin regularly ascribes to God is taken with great seriousness. God's

36

Dial. with Trypho 57–8; 126–8.

37

Ibid. 61; 62; 128; 129.

38

1 Apol . 63; Dial. with Trypho 59; 61.

39

Ibid. 56

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

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transcendence of all that is means that he eludes all forms of thought and speech. These function by means of comparison and differentiation, and there is literally nothing with which God can be compared. But this apophatic emphasis leads Clement, the Christian, to stress the vital role of ‘the Word that proceeds from him’ as the absolutely necessary source of any knowledge of God.40 If God is so emphatically outside the range of human speech, the Word that proceeds from him can be described in the most exalted language without modification of his secondary status. Clement describes him as the ‘timeless and beginningless beginning and first-fruit of all that is’ ( ).41 But the terms in which he speaks of the transcendent God (for all theologians, however much they stress God's ineffability, do in fact speak about him) are an even more exalted version of the same theme. God is the ‘absolute beginningless beginning of everything, creative of beginning’ ( ).42 God is the source of that timeless beginning which is his Word, his Son, or first-created Wisdom (σōφία πρωτόκτιστō;ς).43 For all the attribution to the Word of what sounds like the highest evocation of deity, God himself is greater; and his relation to the Son can be spoken of with the use of the language of making or creating ( ). It is this combination in Clement's language that makes him so difficult to place in terms of later theological distinctions. But the characteristic thrust of his thought is not hard to detect. With Origen the depth of engagement with both Scripture and contemporary philosophical ideas is intensified. They are not experienced as pulling in opposite directions. A tension between them there may be, but it is a tension that Origen felt able to hold together. The Father is the underived (ἀγένητōς44) and unchangeable (ἀγένητōς45) source of all things. That fundamental truth can be expressed in the vocabulary of Greek philosophy, but the same truth is also to be found in Scripture. There God declares his name to be ‘being’ or ‘he who is’ ( or ὁ —the LXX rendering of Exod. 3: 14, more familiar in the haunting phrase: ‘I am who I am’);46 or again God solemnly affirms: ‘I am the Lord, I change not’ (Mal. 3: 18).47 As such the Father is that pure unity from which multiplicity derives. ‘The Father’, says Origen, ‘is altogether one and simple; the Son has many attributes.’48 The Son's

40

Stromateis 5. 78–82.

41

Ibid. 7. 2.

42

Ibid. 4. 2.

43

Ibid. 5. 89.

44

Com. John 20: 22.

45

De Or . 24. 2; Con. Cel . 1. 21.

46

De Or . 24. 2.

47

Con. Cel . 1. 21.

48

Com. John 1: 20.

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WHAT IS ARIANISM?

attributes are like a refraction of the undivided light of the sun, by which that light is made accessible to the observer.49 So the Son is one with, but distinct from the Father. He derives from him, as the will does from the mind.50 And the essential changelessness of the Father means that the Son's derivation or generation from him cannot be an event in time; it must be an eternal and continuing process.51 The Son shares the divinity (θεότης) of the Father, but does so derivatively. This conception of unity and distinctness Origen finds reflected in and filled out by the picture given in Scripture. Contrasts that we have already seeen to be crucial in Arian thought figure prominently in Origen's teaching. The Father alone is ‘true God’ (John 17: 3) or ‘the God’ or ‘God’ (ὁ θεός) in contrast to the Son as god (θεός) without the article: John 1: 1).52 Jesus' words, ‘the Father is greater than I’ (John 14: 28), are true in all respects.53 Whatever the Father is, the Son is in a secondary sense. The Father alone is good (Mark 10: 18);54 the Son is the image of the Father's goodness. The concept of image enables Origen to give a highly positive expression to the secondariness of the Son. It is what enables him to be the revelation of God and of his goodness to humankind. And he is the medium not only of God's approach to humankind, but also of the response of human worship and obedience. For he is the one through whom (but not to whom) true worship is to be offered.55 Dionysius is both the most significant of these Alexandrian predecessors and the most difficult to summarize with confidence. As a highly esteemed bishop rather than just a teacher, he was the Cyprian of the Alexandrian church, the one whom both sides needed to be able to call as a supporting witness in any appeal to tradition. But the evidence for determining Dionysius' views is far from straightforward. His extant works are few, and mostly in fragmentary form. The crucial ones for our purpose survive only in passages cited during the debate about his teaching occasioned by rival claims to his authority in the Arian controversy itself. With passages selected to serve that polemical purpose, their originally intended meaning is often open to dispute, but the general thrust of Dionysius' teaching can be determined with reasonable confidence. Dionysius was concerned about some people within his own area of jurisdiction who did not allow for any real distinction between the

49

De Princ . 1. 2. 7.

50

De Princ . 1. 2. 6 and 9.

51

Com. Jer . 9: 4.

52

Com. John 2: 2.

53

De Princ . 4. 4. 8.

54

Com. John 13: 36.

55

De Or . 15.

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

23

Father and the Son. Like his predecessors he wanted to do justice both to the unity and to the distinctions within the Godhead. His style of reasoning is less philosophical than theirs, his approach more imagistic in character. He uses a range of differing analogies to illustrate the nature of the unity he wants to affirm. It is like that of parent and child, of vine and vine-dresser, of boat and boat-builder, and of word and speaker. The analogies can be understood to point in different directions. Dionysius regards the Son as eternal, since ‘Father’ logically implies the existence of a son. But he also speaks of the Son as a πōίημα or ‘thing made’, a term suggested not only by the rather loose analogy of boat and boat-builder, but also by the more scriptural and traditional analogy of word and speaker (as our word ‘poem’ can remind us). Wherever the balance of his own emphasis may have been intended to fall, it is not surprising that both sides could (and did) appeal with a measure of plausibility to his authority.56 If the appeal of Arius to tradition had been meant to imply that he was simply repeating the old tradition exactly as it was, it would be false. But such direct repetition is as uncommon as it is undesirable. Had that been what Arius was doing, he would have been neither interesting nor meeting the needs of the moment. It was no more true of him than it was of his opponents, who were similarly claiming to be true to the past tradition of the church while at the same time rightly adapting that tradition to the changing conditions of their time. But this brief survey of the rich tradition of Alexandrian thought is, I believe, sufficient to show that Arius' appeal to tradition had a broad enough base to warrant a rejection of the description of it as nothing more than ‘obsolete traditionalism’.

The Arian Appeal to Reason If the appeal to tradition cannot be properly separated from the appeal to Scripture, still less can the appeal to reason be separated from either. For reason is never a distinct source of knowledge. It is rather a way of using the sources available to us. But reason is not a straightforward concept. There are many different ways of handling sources of knowledge, all of which can make a plausible claim to be using reason. Rival philosophical schools are, in effect, ways of systematizing different styles of the appeal to reason. A positivist, an existentialist, and a

56

For Dionysius, see The Letters and Other Remains of Dionysius of Alexandria , ed. C. L. Feltoe (Cambridge, 1904 ).

24

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

Marxist may draw radically different conclusions from the same evidence without any of them forfeiting the right to lay claim to be being reasonable. So when Arius is described as a highly acute reasoner (διαλεκτικώτατōς57), we need to ask what that involved in his particular case. In the past it has often been interpreted to imply that Arius was a skilled practitioner of Aristotelian logic. But the evidence does little to support such a view. It is in part perhaps the product of a general theory (going back to Hippolytus) that behind every heresy there lies the distorting influence of a specific philosophical school. Such an account does not in any event fit the particular circumstances of Arius' time very well. Although there were different philosophical schools, there was also much cross-influence between them. Any attempt to trace the precise emphasis in the philosophical tradition of the time at Alexandria is even more precarious than in the case of the theological tradition. A. C. Lloyd speaks of the Platonic school there as ‘cloaked in obscurity from the time Plotinus was there [i.e. mid-third century] till about 400’.58 But the dominant character of the Alexandrian tradition in that period does seem to have been of a broadly Platonist kind, with varying degrees of Aristotelian and Stoic influence. One of the most fundamental issues of debate in the Platonism of the time was the relation of this transient realm of sensible experience to the transcendent realm of the ideal forms, in which it was in some way grounded. Was an actual person or thing a copy of its ideal counterpart or did it somehow participate in the eternal and changeless order of the ideal forms? Where an Aristotelian influence predominated, the emphasis fell on the transcendence of mind ( ). The suggestion of any participation in it by the sensible world was rejected; the relation of the world of our experience to the highest reality was conceived in essentially negative terms. Religiously this led in the direction of an apophatic or mystical approach to God. But for others, especially where a Stoic influence was at work, the stress was placed on the immanence of reason (λόγōς). That allowed for a more positive relation between the physical and spiritual worlds; there was a continuum of being, allowing for participation in the changeless realm of being by the particulars of the phenomenal world. Religiously that offered the possibility of a more analogical understanding of God, and

57

Sozomen, Church History 1. 15.

58

In A. H. Armstrong (ed.), The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1970 ), 272–3.

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

25

of a more immanentist or incarnational view of God's relation to the world. The same kind of issue can be illustrated by a more specific debate. When Plato spoke in Timaeus 28c of God as ‘Father and creator of all’, was he speaking of one being or of two? Atticus, a second-century philosopher, argued that both terms referred to a single deity. But his contemporary, Numenius, interpreted the phrase of two gods, a first god who is the supreme Father and a distinct second god who is creator or demiurge. The two different interpretations represent two different understandings of the measure and directness of God's relation to the world. These and other similar philosophical questions were closely related to issues concerning the relation of the Father and the Son that were so central to the Alexandrian tradition we have been tracing. Was there an understanding of the Logos/Son which would overcome this problematic divide in the Platonic ontology that provided the framework for contemporary Christian reflection? For Christians at the beginning of the fourth century the form of that basic division was, admittedly, not identical with that postulated by Platonist philosophy. The most fundamental division was not seen as one between the mental and the physical realms; it was rather one between the uncreated God and the created order, both physical and mental. But the difficulties to be met were closely similar, and the reasoning of the philosophical schools (even if acquaintance with them was sometimes relatively indirect) was the natural currency for coming to terms with them. The tradition which stressed the unchanging transcendence of the Father seemed to Arius to fit well the emphasis in Christian thought on an eternal, changeless God, whose Word (rather than his essential self) was the creative and immanent power of our universe. Philosophical reasoning played its part in determining the accounts that the Arians gave, but those accounts were ones they felt able to present with a good conscience as embodying the teaching of Scripture. Their opponents for whom a more realist participation in the divine life was seen as the goal of Christian piety reasoned along different lines, but drew on intellectual resources developed in the same philosophical debates. On each side of the controversy there were those with whom a virtuosity of reasoning skill may seem to have got out of hand (Aetius among the Arians and Marius Victorinus among the pro-Nicenes), but for the most part reason was the proper

26

WHAT IS ARIANISM?

handmaid of a broadly based theological reflection. There are no good grounds for distinguishing ‘Arianism’ as exclusively characterized by ‘presumptuous theorizing’.59

59

For a fuller account of the issue discussed in this section, see my ‘The Philosophy in Christianity: Arius and Athanasius’, in G. Vesey (ed.), The Philosophy in Christianity (Cambridge, 1989 ), 41–52.

2 The End of Arianism The Greek East The aim of this study is not to extend our knowledge of the history of Arianism as it arose and flourished in the course of the fourth century, but to trace how it has been understood in later history, after that initial phase was over. But we need first to determine the moment of transition. When did the initial phase of Arianism as an active form of Christian thought and practice come to an end? That question has not been the subject of such detailed research as the origins of the movement or its main developments in the middle years of the fourth century. In the words of Heather and Matthews: ‘The full history of the “end of Arianism” remains to be written.’60 It will not be written here. But since the question has received relatively little discussion, a brief review of the evidence is called for. The end of Arianism to which Heather and Matthews were referring was its end within the Greek-speaking empire, which was its place of origin and its natural habitat. The increasing complexity of political, ecclesiastical, and theological division that marked the 350s and the 360s made it increasingly difficult to sustain Athanasius' strategy of grouping all opponents of Nicene orthodoxy under the single title of ‘Arian’. Opponents of Nicene orthodoxy proved not infrequently to be as hostile to one another as they were to the Nicenes. The term ‘Arian’ itself continued to be used to refer to the main body of those opponents, generally known in scholarly discussion as ‘Homoians’. Conservative in temper, they sought to eschew the language of philosophical debate and to keep as far as possible to the language of Scripture. They were content to define the Son as ‘like’ (ἕμōιōς) the Father. It was with reference to this group that the noun-form ‘Arianism’ was first used. In his panegyric On the Great Athanasius,

60

P. Heather and J. Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century (Liverpool, 1991 ), 141 n. 14.

28

THE END OF ARIANISM

Gregory of Nazianzus speaks of the assembled bishops at the Council of Constantinople in 360 using as their pretext, their reverence for Scripture and for the use of approved terms, but really introducing unscriptural Arianism. For the phrase ‘like, according to the Scriptures’, was a . . . figure seeming to look in the direction of all who passed by, a boot fitting either foot, a winnowing with every wind.61 Later scholarship has generally followed the same line and taken the use of the broad category of ‘likeness’ as evidence of a lack of theological conviction; Gwatkin describes their policies as characterized by ‘specious charity and colourless indefiniteness’.62 One of the distinctive features of Hanson's recent work has been to treat Homoians with greater theological seriousness.63 Though abjuring any significant links with Arius, they would have been happy to see themselves described as exponents of Scripture and continuers of tradition of the kind that I have already sketched.64 When the need to use distinguishing titles for other bodies, also opposed to Nicene orthodoxy but at the same time in conflict as well with these mainline Homoians (or ‘Arians’ as their opponents described them), became inescapable, the Nicenes were keen to keep the Arian link as clearly in the forefront as they could. So within less than a decade of Athanasius' death we find two different groups being described as ‘semi-Arians’, a term which, as Amann says in the opening words of his article on the subject, ‘est un vocable qui prête a confusion’.65 It was Epiphanius who in the mid-370s coined the title to refer to the group around Basil of Ancyra, more generally known as ‘Homoiousians’, which had played a significant role in the confused struggles of the late 350s. Basil and his associates thought (as Arius had done) that the term homoousios (of one substance), which had been introduced at the Council of Nicaea to define the relation between the Father and the Son, had undesirable material implications and was inappropriate for use with reference to spiritual beings; moreover, it did not seem to allow room for a clearly distinct identity of the Son, as its development at the hands of Marcellus had shown. But they were even more strongly opposed to those who emphasized the aspect of Arius' teaching

61

Greg. Naz, Orations 21. 22.

62

Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism , 163–4.

63

See esp. his ch. 18, ‘Homoian Arianism’, 557–97.

64

See pp. 10–23 above.

65

É. Amann, ‘Semi-Ariens’, DTC vol. xiv (2), 1790.

THE END OF ARIANISM

29

that ascribed a created status to the Son. Indeed, alarm about the radical development of such ideas by Aetius and his pupil Eunomius was the initial impetus which gave rise to the emergence of the Homoiousians as a distinct group with a distinct theological approach. For them the relation of Father and Son was emphatically one of begetting and not of creation; Father and Son shared the nature of deity, but the difference between them showed in their differing forms of activity, the Father acting absolutely ( ), the Son in a ministerial capacity ( ).66 It would not have been surprising if from the standpoint of Nicene orthodoxy the Homoiousians should have appeared to be standing half-way between the truth and Arian error, even though that seriously misrepresents their intentions. But in this case Athanasius did not try to tar them with the Arian brush. He spoke of them as ‘brothers’ who were in agreement about essential meaning but in dispute about the appropriate use of words.67 Epiphanius, on the other hand, was made of sterner stuff. In attaching the title ‘semi-Arian’ to them, he did not justify it in the moderate terms I have just suggested. For him their ‘homoiousian’ language was a tactical smokescreen to cover up their Arian beliefs. In his eyes it was the Arians, not Athanasius, with whom they were in agreement about essential meaning.68 For Epiphanius their ‘half ’ Arianism was not a matter of being half-way between Arianism and orthodoxy, but of only allowing half their Arianism to show. However unjust the appellation, the title stuck and has been widely used by later writers until very recent times. Only in the last few decades has its use as a way of designating them been generally discarded in scholarly discussion. In fact they were more theologically than politically astute. They did bring an interesting and independent approach to the intractable problems of the dispute. But with hostility from the emperor, and under fire from both sides, even if from one side it was more friendly fire than was generally characteristic of the debates, they did not survive more than a few years as a distinct group.

66

See J. N. Steenson, ‘Basil of Ancyra and the Course of Nicene Orthodoxy’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1983 ), 195–208.

67

Athanasius, De Synodis 41. There is no extant example of the use of the word ὁμōιōύσιōς by the Homoiousians themselves. In addition to his own use of it, Athanasius cites homoian attacks on it from the formal pronouncements of the councils of Sirmium 2 and of Seleucia (ibid. 28 and 29). Whether the Homoiousians themselves used it or not, it seems a fair equivalent for their own term ὃμōιōς κατ' ōὐσίαν (like in substance). But the evidence does suggest that ὁμōιōὺσιōς was never used as a party cry or watchword.

68

Epiphanius, Panarion 73. 1.

30

THE END OF ARIANISM

But the Homoiousians were not the only group to be described as ‘semi-Arians’. The term was also used of another group, more generally known as ‘Pneumatomachians’ or ‘Macedonians', which was active in the 360s and 370s after the dissolution of the Homoiousians. Indeed there was probably some overlap of membership between the two, some of those who had been associated with the earlier short-lived enterprise being also involved in the later movement. Macedonius, by whose name this newer group was sometimes known, had certainly belonged to the Homoiousian party; but his real involvement in the group called after him is less certain. In any case the raison d’être and distinctive concerns of the later group were quite different. Their more usual name means ‘fighters against the Spirit’ and was a polemical designation for people who affirmed a full divine status for the Son but were unwilling to make a similar affirmation in the case of the Spirit. There is no evidence that the nature of the Holy Spirit played any distinctive role in the teaching of Arius or in the debates associated with him personally. But in terms of the broader, polemical use of the word ‘Arian’, the teaching of this later group could reasonably be described as Arian in relation to the third person of the Trinity, while not being so in relation to the second. Gregory of Nazianzus is credited with having introduced the term in this context,69 and the neatness of the qualifier ‘semi-’ in this particular application fits well with his rhetorical turn of mind. More significantly, the term is used in this sense in the list of heretics condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381, over which Gregory of Nazianzus briefly presided. This time the title did not catch on widely. It does appear in the West in the fifth century in Augustine's De Haeresibus as a third possible title ‘which some people prefer’;70 but in Dionysius Exiguus' sixth-century Latin translation of the Canons of Constantinople it is rendered, or rather replaced, by the more common designation, Macedonians71. Though soon to disappear from general use, this second application of the title is of interest as a further example of the desire of the orthodox to associate opposition to the Nicene position in all its forms with the discredited name of Arius. Strangely, the one group regularly described by modern scholars with a qualified Arian label is the only one of these rival opponents of the emerging Nicene orthodoxy not to be so labelled at the time. The

69

Gregory the Presbyter, Life of St Gregory (PG 35. 276A).

70

Augustine, De Haeresibus ad Quodvultdeum 1. 52 (PL 42. 39).

71

See N. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London, 1990 ), i. 30.

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31

followers of Eunomius, generally known in the fourth century as Eunomians or Anhomoians, are today most commonly referred to as neo-Arians. But the title seems to have originated only in the twentieth century. A closely equivalent designation was used by Albertz at the beginning of the century in the title of an article, ‘Zur geschichte der jung-arianischen Kirchengemeinschaft’.72 Much later Henri Marrou spoke of ‘une sorte de néo-arianisme plus radical que n'avait jamais été celui d'Arius’.73 But it was Thomas Kopecek's adoption of Marrou's phrase in a more definite form in the title of his book A History of Neo-Arianism that secured its present wide currency.74 Hanson argues that it is a marked improvement on either of the other two earlier names.75 The name ‘anhomoian’ (from άνóμōιōς meaning ‘unlike’) makes it sound as if they must have stood for a position diametrically opposed to that of the Homoians. But ‘unlikeness’ does not stand in direct opposition to ‘likeness’. That which is like, but not identical with, something else must also be unlike it in some respects. The Anhomoians, not unsurprisingly, made it quite clear that they did not regard the Son as unqualifiedly unlike the Father. Their basic premiss was the unlikeness of fundamental nature and status between the Father and the Son. The Son did not share the divine nature of the one God; for a monotheist with a proper understanding of godhead nothing could do that. The Son must, therefore, be a creature. But having made that point clear, they were as ready and as keen as anyone else to use the biblical and traditional language of the Son as the image of the Father. Their clear-cut insistence on the created status of the Son and their uncompromising style of debate made them the prime target of the animosities of all the other groups. In calling them ‘neo-Arians’ modern scholarship has emphasized the way in which they carried forward in sharper and more elaborated form the combination of acute philosophical reasoning together with scriptural and traditional themes that had been characteristic of Arius. But they were not deliberately picking up the teaching of Arius or a theology that

72

Theologische Studien und Kritiken , 82 (1909 ), 205–78. Albertz regarded the title ‘Anhomoian’ as unsatisfactory because it did not distinguish the movement from that initiated by Arius, and ‘Eunomian’ because the movement goes back before Eunomius (p. 209).

73

J. Daniélou and H. Marrou, Nouvelle histoire de l'Église , i. Des origines à Saint Grégoire le Grand (Paris, 1963), 301. (Eng. trans.: The Christian Centuries , i. The First Six Hundred Years (London, 1964), 259).

74

T. Kopecek, A History of Neo-Arianism (Philadelphia, 1979 ), i. 1.

75

Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God , 598.

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THE END OF ARIANISM

they consciously recognized as Arian, and then refining it in new ways of their own. They did not look back to or claim to be being loyal to an earlier Arianism, as the Neoplatonists did to the teaching of Plato. To that degree the new designation needs to be used with caution, even though it may no longer carry with it the stigma that was intended when qualified Arian labels were given to the Homoiousians and the Pneumatomachians in the fourth century. But it was not long before all these groups and their varied forms of ‘Arian’ thought would disappear from the Eastern empire. The decisive moments in that process can be dated with some precision. The death of the emperor Valens, a supporter of the homoian cause, in 378, leading to the accession of Theodosius 1 as emperor in the East in 379, was the beginning of the end. In the words of B. J. Kidd, when Valens fell on the field of Adrianople, ‘Arianism fell with him’.76 And in 381, at the Council of Constantinople, summoned by Theodosius, the heresies ‘of the Eunomians or Anomoeans, of the Arians or Eudoxians, of the Semi-Arians or Pneumatomachoi’ were all anathematized.77 Even before the Council met, Theodosius had embarked on a series of laws against heresy in January of the same year by forbidding Arians or Eunomians to use churches or to assemble in the towns, and a further edict after the Council in July of the same year extended the ban to country areas also.78 With the gift of hindsight we know that these enactments were the beginning of the end for Arian Christianity. It was not so obvious at the time that that was so. The preceding decades had seen many such reversals of fortune, usually resulting from changes of imperial favour. In 360, when a homoian creed received official sanction at the Council of Constantinople, ‘the whole world’ had, in Jerome's phrase, ‘groaned in astonishment to find itself Arian’.79 Only two years later, with the accession of Julian, the world appeared to be about to revert to paganism. Each of these changes was experienced as a dire threat at the moment. Neither in fact lasted very long. Arian Christians in 381 could very reasonably have hoped that the same would prove to be the case again this time. Not only had the leadership of the church in Constantinople been in Arian hands for forty years, but the majority of Christians in the city were still Arian rather than Nicene in sympathy.80

76

B. J. Kidd, A History of the Church to

77

See Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils , i. 30.

78

Kopecek, A History of Neo-Arianism , ii. 510–15.

79

Jerome, Dialogus contra Luciferum , 19 (PL 23. 172C).

80

See J. H. G. W. Liebeschutz, Barbarians and Bishops (Oxford, 1991 ), 158.

AD

461 (Oxford, 1922 ), ii. 242.

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33

The years immediately following Theodosius' hostile actions in 381 offered some grounds for reinforcing those hopes. In 383, reacting to the disturbances that followed the exclusion of the Arians from the city churches, Theodosius proposed a conference of spokesmen from the Nicene side and from the heresies that had come under his ban. In the end, bowing perhaps to Nicene pressure, the idea of a conference was abandoned and was replaced by an invitation to all the competing groups to submit an account of their beliefs to him. The prospects of this proposal leading to any betterment of the Arian position were probably never very great, but Eunomius' submission, the only one to survive, ensured that any prospect there might have been would not come to fruition. He did not treat it as an olive branch, requiring a diplomatic answer; he saw it rather as an opportunity to reaffirm as sharply as ever his conviction that right belief was essential to salvation—and right belief meant his own strongly hierarchical understanding of the Trinity. Whatever hopes may have been raised by Theodosius' initiative, the final outcome was in fact not an abatement but an intensification of the new laws. The year 383 saw the ban on church-building by Eunomians or Arians extended to a prohibition of meetings even in private houses.81 385 saw another glimmer of hope, not so much for the Eunomians as for the less radical Arians. In seeking closer accord with Valentinian II in the West, Theodosius seems to have relaxed the laws against those Arians who based their faith on the earlier creeds of Ariminum and Constantinople. But the apparent change of direction was short-lived and seems to have had little effect in the East. For the Eunomians certainly the pressure continued, with a law in 389 disbarring them from the making of wills.82 In spite of all this legislation against them, Arians did not simply lie down and die. By no means all of the legislation was rigorously enforced. Considerable numbers of Arians continued to live and worship, even in Constantinople itself.83 The legislation against the making of wills was actually rescinded in 394, though reinstated in 410.84 And at Antioch the Eunomians were active enough to provoke a series of sermons by John Chrysostom against them in 386.85 When John was translated to Constantinople in 397, he still had Arian

81

Theodosian Code 16. 5. 12 (see Kopecek, A History of Neo-Arianism , 516–19).

82

Theodosian Code 16. 5. 17.

83

See Liebeschutz, Barbarians and Bishops , 152.

84

Theodosian Code 16. 5. 23; 16. 5. 49.

85

Kopecek, A History of Neo-Arianism , 529–39.

34

THE END OF ARIANISM

opposition to contend with. Though having no churches within the city in which to meet, the Arians used to foregather in the open air and organize colourful, hymn-singing processions, which were liable to end in serious clashes with rival Catholic demonstrations. The result was further legislation against such Arian processions.86 The Eunomians also were apparently still active enough in the years following the death of Eunomius himself in 394 to provoke new laws imposing exile on their clerics and teachers in 396, and a subsequent ban on the holding of meetings outside the city in 398.87 Yet further edicts against them were issued in 413 and 415.88 And when Nestorius arrived as bishop in the city in 428, his militant reforming zeal took less than a week to discover a chapel used by Arians for private devotion within the city and to instigate its destruction.89 Meanwhile, as they sought to survive in the face of so much hostile legislation, neither the Eunomians nor the Arians abandoned their characteristic concern for precision of theological truth. Sozomen records schisms within both communities in the years after 381. In the case of the Eunomians the divisive issue was whether, in spite of Mark 13: 32, the Son shared the complete knowledge of the Father; in the case of the Arians the point of conflict was whether the Father was Father even before the existence of the Son.90 But these were, in fact, the death throes of the Arian movement in the Greek-speaking East. The bans imposed, even if not always enforced with full rigour, were a severe deterrent. Christian groups excluded from the use of public buildings were accustomed to continue with private meeting-places. It was on his private estate in the country that Eunomius had nourished and developed the movement that bore his name, ever since his deposition from the see of Cyzicus in 360. But with bases in town and country alike declared illegal, and their leaders at odds with one another on matters of doctrine, opponents of the Catholic orthodoxy whose triumph Theodosius had done so much to secure had no comparable staying power. The ‘Arianism’ which had been so prominent and so powerful a feature of the Eastern empire throughout the fourth century had by the early years of the fifth century virtually disappeared from view.

86

Socrates, Church History 6. 8 (Sozomen, Church History 8. 8).

87

Theodosian Code 16. 5. 31–2 and 34 (see Liebeschutz, Barbarians and Bishops , 167).

88

Theodosian Code 16. 6. 7; 16. 5. 58.

89

Socrates, Church History 7. 29

90

Sozomen, Church History 7. 17.

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35

The Latin West Arianism in the Latin-speaking West has been much less intensively studied. That is not surprising. It is less well documented and less intrinsically interesting. But there is documentation and the story does have interest. The writings of Meslin,91, Simonetti,92 and Gryson,93 and more recently of Daniel Williams,94 have begun to provide a clearer picture of the material on which any interpretation of Latin Arianism needs to be based. At the end of his book Meslin summarizes the beginnings of Latin Arianism in these words: Au départ, ces Ariens étaient des chrétiens fidèles, que rien ne différenciait de la masse commune de leurs frères. C'est dans une tradition théologique conservatrice qu'ils ont elaboré leur doctrine; c'est par un constant recours à l'Ecriture qu'ils l'ont sans cesse etayée et justifiée95 Arius and the Council of Nicaea were distant phenomena, whose impact on the West was both delayed and indirect. There was no sharp break with earlier tradition, which was scriptural and unphilosophical in character. That tradition spoke readily of the Son as God. The same word, deus, was used of both Father and Son. But was it being used in precisely the same sense when used of the two persons? Since Latin has no definite article, there was no way of making the distinction that Greek could make between ὁ θεóς and θεóς (God and god). There was scope for widely discrepant understandings. Hilary of Poitiers, even before his exile to the East which initiated him into a thorough knowledge of the Arian controversy, shows serious anxiety on the issue. Where earlier Western tradition had insisted that Father and Son were unum (the neuter form), as the text of John 10: 30 has it, to prevent any monarchian denial of the distinction between the two,96 Hilary in his Commentary on Matthew, written in the first half of the decade of the 350s, speaks of them as unus (masculine). Against anyone who wants to ascribe a lower level of divinity to the Son, he insists that the unity of Father and Son is that of an identical divinity, characterized by a shared aeternitas.97

91

M. Meslin, Les Ariens de l'Occident 335–430 (Paris, 1967 ).

92

M. Simonetti, ‘Arinesimo latino’, Studi Medievali , 8: 2 (1967 ), 663–744.

93

See nn. 43 and 44 below.

94

D. Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene–Arian Conflicts (Oxford, 1995 ).

95

Les Ariens , 434.

96

See esp. Tertullian, Adversus Praxean 10.

97

Hilary, Comm. Matt . 16: 4. See P. C. Burns, The Christology in Hilary of Poitiers' Commentary on Matthew (Rome, 1981 ), 21–2 and 78–9.

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THE END OF ARIANISM

Later in that same decade we meet with the first clear Western contribution to the protracted debates and many councils of the Eastern controversy in the persons of Valens and Ursacius, bishops of Mursa and Singidunum in Illyria. Athanasius claims that they learnt their Arianism very early from Arius himself, who was exiled to Illyria after the Council of Nicaea.98 While this is admittedly possible, it may well be just one more example of Athanasius trying to link those he dubs ‘Arian’ as closely as possible with the figure of Arius. In any event their approach certainly seems nearer to that of the older Western tradition than to that of Arius. We know them primarily as the chief architects of a creed emanating from the Council of Sirmium in 357, nicknamed by Hilary ‘the Blasphemy of Sirmium’ and known to history by that designation ever after. The creed outlaws all forms of ousia language and makes lavish use of scriptural quotation to set out its own position. Its main thrust is unequivocally expressed by the statement: ‘There is no question that the Father is greater.’99 Affirmation of the radically secondary status of the Son's divinity, demonstrated not by philosophical argument but by the exegesis of scriptural texts, was the hallmark of Western Arianism throughout. And Illyria was always its main stronghold. The position in Italy itself is not easy to interpret. As Athanasius has tended to determine the way in which subsequent generations have come to see the form and progress of the controversy in the East, so we are accustomed to see the Western church through the equally partial eyes of Ambrose. His own position at the start of his episcopate at Milan in 374 was neither as popular nor as secure as he would like us to believe. If the majority of Christians in Constantinople were of ‘Arian’ sympathy at the time of the Council of Constantinople, the same may well have been true in Milan also, when Ambrose succeeded the ‘Arian’ Auxentius, who had held the office for the previous twenty years. But whatever the balance of allegiance may have been then, the death of Valens in 378 was once again a turning-point. As in the East, this political change was put to ecclesiastical advantage at a church council in 381. In this case the council was held at Aquileia, and Ambrose scored a decisive triumph over the ‘Arian’ leaders, whose chief spokesman was Palladius of Ratiaria (in Illyria). Ambrose's

98

Athanasius, Ad Ep. Aeg . 7.

99

For the text of ‘the Blasphemy’, see Hilary, De Synodis 11 (Eng. trans. in J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (London, 1950 ), 285–6 and Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God , 344–5.)

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37

strategy was to link his opponents and their views as closely as possible with the already condemned figure of Arius himself. This tactic, so vigorously followed by Athanasius in the East, was common practice in the West also. Nor was too careful a regard always given to what precisely Arius had taught. Thus Ambrose himself asserts elsewhere that Arius had described the Son as unlike (dissimilis) the Father,100 while his contemporary, Filastrius of Brescia, asserts that Arius had taught the homoian doctrine that the Son is like (similis) the Father.101 On this occasion, however, Ambrose pursued his goal more methodically and sought to make the original letter of Arius to Alexander before the Council of Nicaea the basis of debate. But Palladius refused to be drawn into such a discussion, insisting that not only had he never seen Arius but that he did not even know who he was.102 Palladius for his part wanted to challenge Ambrose's view that Father and Son are equal (aequales) in divinity.103 But no serious discussion took place. It was Ambrose who was in command of the proceedings and therefore Palladius who was condemned. Like the Arians after Constantinople, Palladius was not without hope of getting the judgement of the Council reversed, either at the hands of the court or even by means of a hearing before the Roman Senate. But the political tide was running against him and those who believed with him.104 The occurrence of the two councils of Constantinople and Aquileia in the same year makes it tempting to class them together as ‘mark[ing] the end of Arianism in the Roman Empire’.105 But the two were not as closely parallel as that way of putting it suggests. While the Council of Constantinople did aim to outlaw Arianism in all its known forms and to establish the Nicene faith as the religion of the empire, the Council of Aquileia was more local in character and more narrowly directed at the deposition of particular Arian bishops.106 In the long run the adverse impact of Valens' death was just as fatal for the Western Arians as it was for those in the East, but its immediate effects were less drastic. As long as the empress Justina was alive, Arians had a

100

Ambrose, De Fide 1. 7. 8.

101

Filastrius, De Haeresibus 66 (PL 12. 1179A).

102

Acts of the Council of Aquileia, 14 (ed. R. Gryson, Scolies Ariennes (SC 267) (1980), 338). See ibid. 66 (p. 376) for a similar denial by Palladius' colleague, Secundianus.

103

Fragmenta Arriana 17 (ed. R. Gryson, Scripta Arriana Latina (CCL 87), 1. 255). See also ibid. 6, 7, and 9 (pp. 238, 239, and 242–3).

104

See N. McLynn, ‘The “Apology” of Palladius’, JTS

105

W. H. C. Frend, The Early Church (London, 1965 ), 189.

106

See Williams, Ambrose of Milan , 181–4.

NS

42 (1991 ), 71–6.

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friend at court. The edicts of Theodosius were not at first enforced as strongly in the West as in the East. Daniel Williams can even speak of ‘a Homoian Revival in Milan’ after the Council of Aquileia.107 But by 387, with the death of Justina and the weak political position of Valentinian II which made him increasingly dependent on the support and good will of Theodosius, the difference between the two halves of the empire had been substantially lessened. The growing presence of Gothic Arians was no help to the cause of the Latin-speaking Arians of the Western empire. In the eyes of their fellow Romans it made them look like not merely heretics, but perhaps traitors as well. Ambrose indeed seems to have included responsibility for the barbarian invasions among the charges to be laid at the door of Palladius' Arianism.108 But in fact Latin Arians seem to have shared the prejudices of their orthodox compatriots against the ‘barbarian’ Goths despite the kinship of the Goths' religious beliefs to their own.109 So in the Western empire as well as in the Eastern, the Arian churches virtually disappeared from public view. But the Arians did not disappear altogether. In the years of their conflict with Ambrose in Milan, they had learnt how to survive for a time, meeting in private houses rather than in public places of worship.110 Some interesting insights into the ethos of these continuing Arian communities are to be found in another commentary on St Matthew's gospel, known as the Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum. It was preserved among the writings of John Chrysostom and enjoyed considerable popularity in the Middle Ages, its Arian source unrecognized and made harder to spot by orthodox ‘corrections’ to the original text. A critical text is still in preparation, but its most probable provenance is Illyria in the early years of the fifth century.111 Enough work has already been done on it to enable us to gain some understanding of what it felt like to be a displaced Arian at the time when Arianism was coming, or had already come, to an end as a form of public life in the Roman empire.

107

The title of ch. 7 of his book already cited (pp. 185–217).

108

Commentary of Maximinus 13 (ed. R. Gryson, Scolies Ariennes , 214).

109

M. Meslin, ‘Nationalisme, État et religions à la fin du IVe siècle’, Archives de sociologie des religions , 18 (1964 ), 6–7.

110

See H. O. Maier, ‘Private Space as the Social Context of Arianism in Ambrose's Milan’, JTS

111

See J. H. A. Van Banning, ‘The Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum ’ (unpublished D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1983 ) and his ‘The Critical Edition of the Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum : An Arian Source’ in SP (Oxford, 1982 ), xvii. 1. 382–6.

NS

45 (1994 ), 72–93.

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39

The fundamental conviction of the author of the Opus Imperfectum is that his community is comprised of ‘true Christians’, and stands in sharp contrast to the ‘false Christians’ of the persecuting Catholic Church. And the primary distinguishing characteristic that marks out his community as the true church is faithfulness to Scripture.112 Numbers are not a significant guide, because the elect are always few in number.113 Nor is possession of the material church buildings a measure of who constitutes the true church in the eyes of God.114 Despite its lack of such buildings, the author's community appears to be carrying on with the usual complement not only of clergy, but also of widows and virgins.115 There is no evident difference in the pattern of the church's life, apart no doubt from such differences as the lack of public places of meeting may have forced on it. The difference is in the realm of belief. The author lists four points of fundamental criticism of orthodox belief.116 The complaints that Palladius had levelled against Ambrose are still the basic ones: Father and Son are not unus deus, and they are not aequales.117 This seems to have been the underlying refrain of Western Arianism all along and it keeps its prominence to the end. Two further points elaborate the heretical character of the Catholic or Nicene understanding of God. Both bear an uncanny resemblance to standard criticisms brought by pro-Nicenes against Arianism. In the first place, the heretics (to use the term our author regularly uses to describe the Catholics) have too anthropomorphic a view of divine generation; it is because they think of the relation between the Father and the Son within the Godhead with too close an analogy to human paternity that they have been led to their unacceptable insistence that Father and Son share an equal divine nature. Secondly, their understanding of Christ not as God inhabiting a human body but as God joined to a full human nature implies that they do not believe in a death of God on our behalf; their understanding of Christ's person means that it is the human nature alone (purus homo) that died on the cross. And that is so far from the saving reality conveyed by baptism,

112

Opus Imperfectum , Hom. 19 on Matt. 7: 15–16 (PG 56. 738–9).

113

Ibid. Hom. 20 on Matt. 7: 24 (p. 744).

114

Ibid. Hom. 46 on Matt. 23: 37 (p. 896).

115

See Van Banning, ‘The Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum ’, 159–65.

116

Opus Imperfectum , Hom. 45 on Matt. 23: 32 (p. 889). For a more accurate text, see Van Banning, ‘The Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum ’, 565–8.

117

Opus Imperfectum , Hom. 22 on Matt. 8: 9 (p. 753): Haereticus volens ostendere Patrem et Filium unum et aequalem . See also Hom. 50 on Matt. 24: 36–9 (p. 921). For a more accurate text, see Van Banning, ‘The Critical Edition of the Opus Imperfectum ’, 387, and ‘The Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum ’, 568–70.

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which is essentially baptism according to the death of Christ crucified, that Catholic baptism is rendered invalid and converts from the Catholic Church need to be rebaptized, or rather receive true baptism for the first time, if they are to join the Arian community.118 Meslin described the earliest Arians in the Latin West as hardly distinguishable from the main body of Christian believers. The author of the Opus Imperfectum stands in that same tradition, with Scripture still his essential court of appeal. But in less than a century, what had looked like a divergence of emphasis has hardened into implacable opposition. The Arians had been isolated into separate and unrecognized communities. The author reveals the characteristic mentality of those who have been relegated to a ghetto and compensate for their social misfortune by seeing themselves as the faithful remnant in a faithless and hostile world. How long they survived in that private world we have no way of telling. They were not destined to re-emerge from it into the more public scene where earlier Arians had made a mark on the history of their time whose effects were to last for many centuries.

Gothic Christianity The story of the third main group to be dubbed ‘Arian’ in the fourth century follows a very different course. The Goths being outside the Roman empire, Christianity came to them much later; nor were they affected to the same degree by Theodosius' zeal for orthodoxy. One thing they do have in common with the other two groups is that, although their designation as Arians was of great political significance, the appropriateness of that designation is open to question in their case also. We need to ask what ‘Arianism’ meant in relation to the Goths. Popular conceptions of the Christianization of the Goths have tended to ascribe it to the unique and almost singlehanded missionary activity of Ulfila—a man greatly to be admired despite the unfortunate fact that he was an Arian. But this somewhat romantic picture calls for considerable modification. Ulfila's contribution was certainly a remarkable one, worthy of the highest admiration, but other important factors were also at work. In the first place there was a Christian presence among the Goths before Ulfila's time. Moreover, the decisive moment in the Christianization of the Goths did not come until a

118

Opus Imperfectum , Hom. 3 on Matt. 3: 11 (p. 653).

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good many years after Ulfila's missionary activities. And when it did come, political issues played a significant role in the process. A bishop of Gothia, named Theophilus, figures among the signatories at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. Nothing more is known of him, but the Crimea has been suggested as the most likely area for his see.119 The church at that time seems to have had little sense of any missionary call to convert the barbarian world outside the Roman empire, and it is likely that Theophilus' role was to minister to citizens of the empire in Gothic regions. The Goths had taken prisoners during raids on Asia Minor, certainly since the time of their incursion into Cappadocia in AD 257. Those prisoners had included not only Christians, but Christian priests.120 So the Christianity with which the Goths would first have become acquainted was neither Nicene nor Arian, since it would be anachronistic to apply either term to the Christianity of the third century. That earlier Christianity was, as we have already seen, open to development in either direction. Ulfila himself was a descendant of those early Roman prisoners. His name is Gothic, meaning ‘little wolf’, which suggests a degree of assimilation by his family to their Gothic environment, and the likelihood that his father may have been a Goth. He must have had a foot in both worlds, as he had a good knowledge of both Greek and Latin. He was consecrated by Eusebius of Nicomedia in either 336 or 341.121 Seven years of missionary work were brought to an end when he was thrown out of the Gothic territory in which he had been working. The persecution of the Gothic Christians and the expulsion of their bishop was almost certainly politically motivated. To the Goths Ulfila's missionary activity is likely to have appeared as a form of Roman infiltration. Nor were such fears unfounded. Paulinus of Nola, for example, writing at the beginning of the fifth century, regards the prospect of a less hostile attitude on the part of the barbarians as an important aspect of missionary work among them.122 How far, if at all, there was a

119

P. Heather, Goths and Romans 332–489 (Oxford, 1991 ), 93.

120

Philostorgius, Church History 2. 5. The record of Philostorgius and a letter of Auxentius provide the main evidence for the life of Ulfila. They are conveniently accessible in translation, with useful introductions in Heather and Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century , 141–53. See also E. A. Thompson, ‘Christianity and the Northern Barbarians’, in A. Momigliano (ed.), The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1963 ), 63.

121

For 336, see K. Schaferdiek, ‘Wulfila. Vom Bischof von Gothien zum Gotenbischof’, ZKG 90 (1979 ), 254–6, and T. D. Barnes, ‘The Consecration of Ulfila’, JTS (1990 ), 541–5. For a recent defense of the more customary date of 341, see Heather, Goths and Romans , 142.

122

Thompson, ‘Christianity and the Northern Barbarians’, 65.

NS

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political element in the initial impetus to Ulfila's work at the time of his consecration is difficult to determine. It is possible that the original intention was simply to continue the same style of ministry as his predecessor. It would not be surprising if someone with Ulfila's unique background should have gone on subsequently to develop a different view of missionary work among the Goths from that of the main body of the church within the empire. But there may well have been a political aspect to his mission from the outset. Eusebius was Bishop of the imperial see, which suggests the possibility that Constantius may have had some role in relation to Ulfila's mission all along. Moreover, Philostorgius' account of visits to Arabia and India by Theophilus, another protégé of Eusebius of Nicomedia, certainly presents Constantius as directly involved and implies that Constantius initiated a general policy of encouraging the spread of Christianity, more specifically of Arian or homoian Christianity, to peoples on the fringes of the empire.123 Whether or not such a policy was already operative and played a part in the origination of Ulfila's mission, there can be no doubt about the attitude of the emperor at the time of Ulfila's expulsion. Ulfila was welcomed with great honour by Constantius, who spoke of him as a ‘second Moses’ and helped him and his Christian flock settle within the empire in Moesia.124 It is highly unlikely that Constantius' interest in Ulfila at that stage would have been purely religious in motivation. Ulfila's expulsion from the scene of his missionary activities, whatever the precise reasons for it may have been, gave rise in practice (as with many subsequent missionaries) to the most important aspect of his life's work. He spent the years of his exile reducing the Gothic language to writing and producing an almost complete version of the Scriptures in it. The contribution of those labours to the long-term Christianization of the Goths can hardly be overestimated. But its first-fruit on any significant scale had to await the right political moment. The accounts of the first large-scale conversion of a Gothic group are not easy to sort out. But most probably a section of the Tervingi situated in Transylvania came under pressure from the Huns and sought accord with the emperor Valens; this took the form of an

123

See Philostorgius, Church History 3. 4 and 5; A. Dihle, ‘Die Sendung des Inders Theophilus’ in P. Steinmetz (ed.), Palingenesia , 4. Politeia und Respublica (Weisbaden, 1969 ), 330–6. See also the letter of Constantius to the princes of Ethiopia in Athanasius, Apology to the Emperor Constantine 31.

124

See Philostorgius and the letter of Auxentius in Heather and Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century , 144–5, 151–2.

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agreement drawn up in 376 allowing them to cross the Danube into the territory of the empire but including the provision that they should embrace Christianity.125 If that is a right reading of the event, it would not be surprising that the form of Christianity they adopted should have proved to be that favoured by Valens. And that, like Ulfila's, was, in the broad sense of the term, Arian rather than Nicene. There were thus at least three important contributory factors to the Christianization of the Goths in the third and fourth centuries: Christian prisoners living among them, the missionary work of Ulfila, and the political rapport with Valens. The first antedates Arius' impingement on the history of the church by some fifty years and cannot therefore be described as Arian. The other two were both so described, by opponents. Yet a number of early writers were anxious to play down the charge as much as they could in the case of so successful a missionary as Ulfila. Socrates, though unable to deny Ulfila's adherence to the homoian creed of Constantinople in 360, describes him as having been an adherent of the creed of Nicaea up to that time.126 But Heather and Matthews are right to suggest that attempts to place him on one side or the other of a Nicene–Arian divide in the early period of his career are anachronistic.127 What is clear is his allegiance to the homoian creed of 360 with its rejection of substance language and its attempt to stay as close as possible to Scripture. That same position finds forceful expression in Ulfila's own confession of faith, recorded by his disciple Auxentius, at the end of his life.128 And by that time it certainly had a strongly anti-Nicene character. At least as Auxentius reports him in the covering letter which precedes Ulfila's confession, he is as vehement in his opposition to what he sees as heretical alternatives to his own form of belief as most other participants in the controversies of the time. Heretics are not Christians but antichrists. Homoousians, Homoiousians, and Macedonians are all included in this blanket condemnation. But it is ‘the odious and execrable, depraved and perverse profession of the Homoousians’ which is picked out as the primary object of his denunciation; they deserve to be ‘destroyed’

125

Socrates, Church History 4. 33 (Sozomen, Church History 6. 37). See P. Heather, ‘The Crossing of the Danube and the Gothic Conversion’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies , 27 (1986 ), 289–318.

126

Socrates, Church History 2. 41.

127

Heather and Matthews, The Goths in the fourth Century , 140.

128

‘Scolia Arriana in Concilium Aquilense’, 40, in Scripta Arriana Latina , i. 166 (Scolies Ariennes , 63, p. 250; Eng. trans. Heather and Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century , 153).

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and ‘trampled under foot as the invention of the devil and the doctrine of demons’.129 This violent hostility to the Nicene faith may have grown with the years and may also owe something to the pen of Auxentius, but as far as the positive nature of Ulfila's own faith is concerned there is no reason to doubt that throughout his career it was of a homoian character. Jordanes, the sixth-century historian of the Goths, is another orthodox writer who evades the issue of Ulfila's unorthodoxy—in his case by the simple expedient of making no mention of it at all. He describes Ulfila simply as faithful bishop of the Lesser Goths in Moesia, and lays all the responsibility for the fact that the Visigoths became ‘Arian rather than Christian’ at the door of Valens, whose death was a clear judgement of God, as he was ‘burned with fire by the very men whom he had perfidiously led astray when they had sought the true faith, turning them aside from the flame of love into the fire of hell’.130 The ‘Arianism’ of Valens was of a similar character to that of Ulfila. It was the same homoian creed that had his imperial backing.131 And if this homoian position is, as we have suggested, better seen as a conservative opposition to Nicene theology than as a positive form of Arian doctrine, it may not have been so very different in ethos from the Christianity of Cappadocia in the late third century. This fourth-century conversion of a Gothic group to an Arian form of Christianity was to have enormous repercussions. The Christianization of other Gothic groups followed quickly, and through their extensive migrations in the years after the death of Valens, the Arian Christianity of the Goths was soon a widespread phenomenon. Judith Herrin brings out well the significance of this late fourth-century acceptance of Christianity in her emphasis on the fact that ‘both the East (Ostro-) and West (Visi-) Goths, as well as the Vandals, had embraced Arianism in the Danube region before they set out on their long wanderings into Gaul, Spain, Italy and Africa.’132 Not all the peoples outside the Roman empire, whose political importance was growing so rapidly, were to move in the same direction. It was Catholic Christianity into which Clovis, king of the Franks, was baptized around the beginning of the sixth century, under the influence of his

129

‘Scolia Arriana in Concilium Aquilense’, 26–9, in Scripta Arriana Latina , i. 161–2 (Scolies Ariennes , 44–9, pp. 236–40; Eng. trans. Heather and Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century , 147–9).

130

Jordanes, Getica 51. 267; 25. 132; 26. 138.

131

See Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God , 588.

132

J. Herrin, The Formation of Chistendom (Oxford, 1987 ), 221.

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wife and in search of political and military advantage, and it was Catholic Christianity therefore into which he took his people with him.133 Indeed, Clovis's option for Catholic Christianity has been picked out by one recent writer as the moment that sealed ‘the defeat of Arianism’.134 And even among the Goths there were exceptions; Catholic Christians are to be found there too. In the first decade of the fifth century, for example, John Chrysostom allowed the use of a church in Constantinople for such a group to celebrate the liturgy in their own language.135 But for the overwhelming majority of the Goths the Christianity to which they were converted was an ‘Arian’ Christianity. What did this division between Arian and Catholic mean to those on each side of the divide? The attitude of Catholics to Arians within the empire was clear-cut. Arians had rejected a divinely authorized gospel, which was fully accessible to them; thereby they were disrupting the religiously and socially important unity of both church and empire. Their heresy had no rights, and ought not to be allowed to exist. And with the help of Theodosius, it was at last possible, as we have seen, to turn that desired state of affairs into a reality. So the first canon of the Council of Constantinople anathematized all forms of Arianism under the various names by which its differing manifestations were then known. But the attitude to Arians outside the empire was altogether different. The second canon of the same Council includes the provision that ‘the churches of God among the barbarian peoples are to be governed in the manner that already existed among their forefathers’.136 As far as the Goths were concerned, that implied acceptance of their Arianism. To Catholics within the empire the remarkable thing was not that these barbarians should be misguided Arians, but that they should be Christian at all. In preaching to his Gothic congregation in Constantinople, Chrysostom acknowledges that some Greek Christians will regard it as disgraceful that such extreme barbarians should have a place alongside them as full members of the church, and even be

133

It is not clear whether Clovis was converted directly from paganism to Catholic Christianity, as Gregory of Tours states and as historians have generally assumed, or whether he had embraced the prevailing Arianism first. On this, and other complexities surrounding the date and circumstances of Clovis's baptism, see I. N. Wood, ‘Gregory of Tours and Clovis’, Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire 63 (1985 ), 249–72, esp. p. 267.

134

See Heikki Raisanen, ‘The Effective “History” of the Bible’, SJT 45: 3 (1992 ), 304.

135

See J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome (London, 1975 ), 285 n. 11.

136

See Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils , i. 30–2. Tanner translates the phrase sense ‘their forefathers’ (cf. H. Wolfram, History of the Goths (Berkeley, 1988 ), 85).

as ‘in the time of the fathers’, but the context seems to require the

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allowed to read the Scriptures and to preach at public worship.137 But, by and large, the Christianization of the Goths was something to be grateful for, especially with the hope that it carried of more peaceful and neighbourly behaviour. And there might indeed be something to be said for the fact that their Christianity was of a distinct, Arian nature. It constituted just that admixture of affinity and difference that suited the increasing degree to which Goths and Romans were beginning to inhabit a common world. Certainly there does not seem to have been any sustained attempt to win the Goths away from their Arian allegiance. In course of time more theoretical reasons began to appear for the difference of attitude towards the Arianism of the Goths as compared with that adopted towards Arians within the empire. Salvian in the fifth century was puzzled by Gothic victories over the Christian empire. That God might use pagans, who could not be expected to live by God's laws, as a scourge of a corrupt Christendom was understandable. But was it conceivable that he would use Arian heretics for that purpose? Salvian's answer to that dilemma was that the Gothic Scriptures were so badly translated and so interpolated that they were no longer the same Scriptures, and therefore the Goths had no way of knowing true Christianity. ‘They are therefore’, he wrote, ‘heretics, but unknowingly.’138 It was an attitude that had its attractions in the context of the collapse of the Western empire. For in many places Catholics had to learn to live alongside Arian churches, under the authority of Arian Gothic kings. Caesarius of Arles, for example, is said to have stressed the need to follow the Pauline injunction of obedience to the lawful commands of one's ruler. Caesarius himself, being less inclined than Salvian to play down the reprehensible character of the Arianism with which he had to deal, insists that such obedience must go hand in hand with disapproval of the ruler's false Arian beliefs.139 But in general, however much Catholics emphasized the distinctness and heretical character of Gothic Arianism, they had to recognize the Arianism of the Goths as another co-existent form of ostensibly Christian life. If coexistence with a sharp emphasis on distinctness characterized the Catholic attitude to Gothic Christianity, once that had become

137

Chrysostom, Hom . 8. 1 (PG 63. 501–2).

138

Salvian, De Gubernatione Dei 5. 2. 5–9.

139

Life of Caesarius of Arles (by his disciples) 1. 23 in Caesarius, Opera Omnia , ed. G. Morin (Maretioli, 1942 ), ii. 305.

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firmly established in its Arian form, it was an even more dominating characteristic of Gothic Christianity's attitude to the Catholic Church. If their ever-increasing involvement in the life of the long-established empire was not to lead to wholesale assimilation, the Goths needed ways of emphasizing their distinct identity within that close relationship. For them too Christianity, but a distinct form of Christianity, played an important role in achieving that goal, with an even greater emphasis in their case on the aspect of distinctness. That undoubtedly was a major motive underlying their firm adherence to the Arianism that they had initially adopted. The language which they used to differentiate the two forms of Christianity recognizes the crucial role of ethnicity. In Spain they spoke of Catholics as ‘the Roman religion’, using the term ‘Catholic faith’ to refer to themselves.140 And they showed little inclination either to proselytize or to persecute, when they found themselves with the authority that would have enabled them to do so. The Arian Christianity of the Goths was clearly a faith of a strongly social character. In Liebeschutz's terse phrase, ‘Arianism became a part of their ethnic identity.’141 But did it also have a distinctive doctrinal or theological emphasis—and if so, in what sense was that emphasis ‘Arian’? The paucity of the available evidence makes the question difficult to answer. Records of Gothic Christianity for the period are far fewer than those for its contemporary Catholic counter-part. But the a priori likelihood of a vigorous theological life is not very high. While the strongly corporate nature of Gothic religion does not rule out such a possibility, it does render it less probable; where religious faith sustains the identity of a people under pressure, divisive theological argument is unlikely to flourish. Moreover, Arianism was the product of a long period of theological reflection in a highly sophisticated Greek philosophical culture. Even in the Latin West it flourished only in a much less precisely articulated form. The world of the Goths does not seem a very likely setting for the continuation of any serious engagement with the issues at the heart of the Arian controversy. And the homoian tradition which they had inherited from Ulfila and Valens, though bearing the name of Arian, was, as we have seen, one that abjured the use of ousia language, without which any more detailed development of distinctively Arian, or Nicene, ideas is seriously hampered.

140

E. A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain (Oxford, 1969 ), 40 n. 1.

141

Liebeschutz, Barbarians and Bishops , 153.

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That does not, of course, rule out genuine theological commitment or concern. Homoian Christianity was not just a name for theological indifferentism. Occasional glimpses of theological activity on the part of Gothic Christians are to be observed. In the earlier period, our knowledge is mainly of people having close links with the Greek- or Latinspeaking empire. Thus Selenas, Ulfila's successor as bishops, is said to have been involved in inter-Arian disputes in the difficult days in Constantinople following the Council of 381. He is described as siding with the less radical group, known as Psathyrians, who affirmed that God was always Father, even when there was no Son. Moreover it was a Gothic general, Plintha, who is credited with having reconciled the two groups thirty-five years later.142 But although Goths played a significant part in it, the dispute was primarily one between Greek-speaking Christians within the empire. Maximinus, the Arian bishop who disputed with Augustine on the Trinity in North Africa and through whom Auxentius' account of Ulfila has been preserved for us, had close links with Gothic Christians and it has even been suggested that he may himself have been a Goth.143 That is unlikely, and even if he was, the sources on which he drew and the character of his work are indistinguishable from those of any Latin writer of the time. Formal debates between Arians and Catholics continued to occur from time to time. They were encouraged by Gundobad, Burgundian king from 480 to 516, whose own approach was of a straightforward biblical nature.144 At about the same time in North Africa Fulgentius of Ruspe engaged in debate with an Arian bishop in the presence of king Thrasamund, who was himself an Arian.145 But we have no evidence as to the theological character or content of the Arian contributions to these debates. In late sixth-century Spain the Arian king, Leovigild, asserted that the Son was equal with the Father, though denying the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. But the move seems to have been due more to a desire for closer relations with the Catholics, than to any theologically motivated urge for the correction of doctrinal error.146 Perhaps the most significant evidence for our quest comes from the time a few years later when Leovigild's son, Reccared, converted to Catholic Christianity and took his Visigothic kingdom with him. The

142

Socrates, Church History 5. 23 (Sozomen, Church History 7. 17).

143

E. A. Thompson, The Visigoths in the Time of Ulfila (Oxford, 1966), 119–25.

144

Ibid. 125–6.

145

R. Collins, Early Mediaeval Spain (London, 1983 ), 59–60.

146

Thompson, The Goths in Spain , 85.

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third Council of Toledo (AD 589), which gave executive effect to that conversion, affirms the series of Catholic ecumenical councils up to Chalcedon, but its repudiation of Arianism involves an anathematization simply of the creed of Ariminum (AD 359), the Western forerunner of the homoian creed of Constantinople (AD 360) subscribed to by Ulfila at a time before any Gothic church with a distinctive mind or character of its own had come into existence.147 Greek Christianity in the Eastern empire had continued a vigorous life of theological debate, whose achievements had become a necessary feature of all subsequent Catholic Christianity. The absence of any comparable later norms for the Arian Christianity being renounced suggests that the Gothic church had not been the setting for any similarly lively or sustained theological activity in that same period. This should not be taken to imply the absence of any scholarly dimension within Gothic Christianity. Since it was a faith that emphasized not merely the basic role of the Bible in the definition of Christian faith but its essential sufficiency for that task, it would not be surprising if it was to specifically biblical issues that any intellectual energies among Gothic Christians should have been primarily directed. And that is what the scanty evidence suggests. Two Goths, Sunnias and Fretela, wrote to Jerome asking him about the relative faithfulness to the Hebrew original of the Greek and Latin translations of the Psalms. Jerome replied at great length.148 Before embarking on his lengthy answer he expresses his amazement that ‘the barbarous Gothic tongue should be in search of Hebraic truth’ and that ‘hands made callous by wielding the sword and fingers skilled at drawing the bow should have been softened for the use of the pen’.149 Friedrichsen, writing fifteen hundred years later, expresses the same amazement that ‘those uncultured denizens of the inhospitable North . . . should have had among their number such as followed the profession of textual critics’.150 But that is what his meticulous studies of the Gothic version of both the gospels and the epistles had shown him. Ulfila's original translation of the Greek text had frequently been modified under the influence of the Latin texts and commentaries in use by the Catholics among whom the majority of Goths lived. The questions raised by Sunnias and Fretela were no idle ones; they represent an early stage in a concern that was a continuing feature of Gothic Christian life.

147

Ibid. 39. For the text of the Council, see PL 84. 348B and 347D.

148

Jerome, Ep . 106 (CSEL 55, pp. 247–89).

149

Ibid. 1.

150

G. W. S. Friedrichsen, The Gothic Version of the Epistles (Oxford, 1939 ), 283.

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The Gothic Bible, together with a very incomplete Gothic commentary on St John's gospel (known as the Skeireins), also offer some evidence that the language of ‘likeness’ inherited from Ulfila and the homoian tradition remained a key category for Gothic understanding of the faith. The paraphrase of John 5: 23 (‘that all may honour the Son, even as they honour the Father’) makes clear that this implies a similar, not an identical honour.151 This stands in sharp contrast to the Nicene insistence that the ‘as’ in that text must be understood to imply equality.152 Even more strikingly, the Gothic Bible translates the Greek word U σōς in Phil. 2: 6 (‘equality with God’) with the Gothic word meaning ‘likeness’.153 The choice of translation has clearly been guided by the basic theological conviction that it is likeness to God rather than equality with God which characterizes the Son's fundamental and preincarnate relation to the Father. None of the evidence we have looked at points to any distinctive Gothic contribution to Arian thought. The Gothic church seems to have lived content with the distinctive form of Christian teaching it had initially embraced, one in which the secondariness of a divine Son, ‘like’ the Father, was assumed but was not felt to be an issue requiring much stress or much debate. It is probably best described as non-Nicene rather than anti-Nicene, biblical and traditional in character. Thompson's description of German Arianism as ‘characterized by a ponderous and earthbound reliance on the text of the Bible’ may be unnecessarily pejorative in tone, but not too far from the mark in substance154. If, as the evidence certainly seems to suggest, distinctiveness of doctrine was not a matter of primary importance for the Gothic church, it is not surprising that the transition to Catholic Christianity at the instigation of a ruler such as Reccared did not prove too difficult a process. Doctrinal purity was not as central as the social role of a shared faith. Doctrinal change was, of course, involved, and it was marked in a way which was a highly significant pointer to the future. To ensure familiarity with the newly established Nicene teaching, the third Council of Toledo ordered the recitation of the Nicene Creed at every Sunday eucharist. It was an innovation in the Western church, and one with far-reaching consequences.155 After 589 Arianism in that

151

Friedrichsen, The Gothic Commentary on the Gospel of John (New York, 1960 ), 70.

152

Athanasius, De Synodis 49.

153

Friedrichsen, The Gothic Version of the Epistles , 200.

154

Thompson, The Visigoths in the Time of Ulfila , 123.

155

J. N. Hilgarth, ‘Popular Religion in Visigothic Spain’ in E. James (ed.), Visigothic Spain: New Approaches (Oxford, 1980), 26–7. For the text of the Council, see PL 84. 351D.

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region seems to have died out quickly. Arian books were burned and the existing Arian church organization suppressed. Some leading bishops, whether out of conviction or because their politically powerful positions were clearly under threat, rebelled and suffered death or banishment. But many local clergy were reordained on relatively easy terms. For the church as a whole the transition from Arian to Catholic does not appear to have been very traumatic.156 There were other conversions of a similar kind, both before and after that of Reccared and the Visigothic kingdom in Spain, sometimes arising primarily from the personal conviction of the ruler and sometimes from changing political circumstances. In course of time they would lead to the demise of even this residual attenuated form of Arianism.

156

Thompson, The Goths in Spain , 104; R. Collins, Early Medieval Spain , 54–8.

3 Maimbourg's Millennium and the Second Death of Arianism A concern to identify the ‘end of Arianism’ is not new. When the seventeenth-century Jesuit historian, Louis Maimbourg, wrote his lengthy history of Arianism, he chose to do so in the form of an obituary. The story as he tells it can be briefly summarized. The Arian heresy had unmercifully exercised its tyranny, for about three hundred and forty years, almost throughout the world, by . . . wickedness, deceit, treachery, violence, and cruelty . . . and by all the most abominable crimes that Hell itself could inspire in the most impious of men.157 Its evil course did gradually diminish, and Maimbourg dates its final disappearance by the conversion of the Lombard kingdom under its king, Bertaridus (or Perctarit), around 662.158 Then, just under nine centuries later, Arianism had revived in the wake of the Reformation. It had taken root for a short while in Poland, but even there it was soon to disappear again around the year 1660, swallowed up this time by its own offspring, Socinianism.159 It had not, he acknowledges, totally disappeared. Yet now it [Arianism], with difficulty, finds shelter in a corner of Transylvania, there hiding the wretched remains of it, attended with the hatred and curses of all mankind.160 But effectively Arianism had died a second death almost exactly a millennium after its first death. Any attempt to date the final end of Arianism in the ancient world is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. Transylvania, for example, which was to shelter the unhappy remnant of Arianism's ‘second death’, had in earlier times continued to be the home of Arians in considerable

157

L. Maimbourg, The History of Arianism (London, 1728–9 ) ii. 356. (Original French edition 1985.)

158

Ibid. 325–30.

159

Ibid. 355–6.

160

Ibid., preface, vol. i., pp. vi-vii.

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numbers until the final adoption of Catholic Christianity there under King Stephen early in the eleventh century.161 But Maimbourg's schematic reading of a providentially ordered pattern of events gave him firm guidance in his selection of a date to mark the demise of Arianism. Most subsequent historians have given an account of the changes in the Lombard kingdom in the later years of the seventh century not unlike that given by Maimbourg.162 But the uncertainty that clouds all our knowledge of the period is well illustrated by the fact that that standard orthodox account is still open to radical challenge. In a detailed and carefully argued article, S. C. Fanning has claimed that the Lombards were never an Arian society like the Visigoths. He acknowledges that there were some Arians among them in the early seventh century, including on occasion the king, but argues that overall, the conversion of the Lombards is best seen as the story of ‘a largely heathen people who slowly and almost imperceptibly adopted the Catholic faith by individual acts of conversion’.163 Whatever the truth about the conversion of the Lombards may turn out to be, it was not unreasonable to speak of a disappearance of Arianism as a continuing form of religious practice around that time. If we seek now to trace a history of Arianism over that same millennium, how similar is the picture we are led to paint? Medieval writers themselves do not speak as if Arianism were extinct for those nine hundred years. The term is frequently used to designate some contemporary heresy under attack. The earliest example occurs in the middle of the eleventh century.164 It is most often used with reference to the Cathars, where it is usually joined with the less inappropriate designation of Manichee.165 It has been suggested that the latter title is particularly used of the more radical dualists, Arian of the more moderate.166 But

161

E. M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism (Cambridge, Mass., 1945–52 ), ii. 16.

162

See e.g. J. Zeiller, ‘Étude sur l'Arianisme en Italie’, Mélanges d'archaeologie et d'histoire , 25 (1905 ), 127–46 (‘A cette date [680] on peut dire que l'arianisme n'existait plus en Italie’, p. 146); L. M. Hartmann, ‘Italy under the Lombards’, in Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge, 1926 ) ii. 204–6. For a fuller list of proponents of this view, see S. C. Fanning, ‘Lombard Arianism Reconsidered’, Speculum , 56 (1981 ), 241 n. 2.

163

Ibid. 258.

164

See W. Wakefield and A. P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York, 1969 ), 91 and 670 n. 9.

165

See R. Manselli, ‘Una designazione dell'eresia catara: “Arriana Heresis” ’, Bulletino dell'Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano , 48 (1956 ), 233–46 and Y. Congar, ‘ “Arriana Haeresis” comme designation du Néomanichéisme au xiii siecle’, Revue de sciences philosophiques et théologiques , 43 (1959 ), 449–61.

166

C. Thouzellier, ‘La Profession trinitaire de Durand de Huesea’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médievale , 27 (1960 ), 280–1.

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there is no real correlation between the heresies under attack and the particular teaching either of Arius or of those described as Arians in the fourth century. Arianism is a generic name for any heresy touching even indirectly on the divinity of Christ. Throughout the period it is not the teaching of Arianism that is in mind when the word is used in the polemical literature, but its representative character. It is the archetypal heresy, and Arius the archetypal heretic. His evil character and his evil fate are summed up in this eleventh-century verse: Arius immundus, contra Dominum furibundus Ecclesiae nocuit per mala quae docuit Grassans in vanum, nam fundens exta per anum Turpiter occubuit quem nihili puduit.167 This widespread use of the word ‘Arian’ as a term of theological abuse did not cease with the Reformation. The charge was levelled against Luther by Catholics and against Calvin by fellow Protestants. Although the charges are manifestly false, there are aspects, particularly of their early teaching, which helped to give rise to them. Luther disliked the traditional terminology of Trinitarian orthodoxy, such as homoousios and Trinitas. These terms had a cold sound compared with the language of Scripture. He preferred to speak of ‘oneness’ and of ‘God’. Calvin, in his exegetical work on the gospels, emphasized the human limitations of Jesus and often rejected interpretations that had been traditionally used in support of the doctrine of the Trinity. He described the Nicene Creed as more suitable for singing than for use as a confession of belief.168 Even when charged with Arianism by Peter Caroli, Calvin refused to defend himself by a formal act of subscription to the three creeds on the grounds that he ‘had pledged his faith to the one God not to Athanasius, whose creed had never been approved by any true church’.169 None of this, of course, begins to justify a charge of Arianism. But it does indicate a readiness to question traditional Trinitarian doctrine in a more thoroughgoing way than in fact materialized within the mainstream Protestant churches. Radical reformation of that doctrine might well have jeopardized

167

Garnier de Bale, Paraclitus 473 f. (cited by Congar, ‘ “Ariana Haeresis” ’, 455). A free verse rendering might read: ‘Arius, the filthy bawd, | Railed in fury at the Lord, | And on the church great evils brought | By the wicked things he taught. | But vain his rage against the Lord, | For through his arse his guts outpoured; | Shameful was the death that came | To him who had no sense of shame.’

168

For detailed references see Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism , i. 15–16.

169

Calvin, Opera , ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss (Brunswick, 1863 ), x. 82–3.

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the reformation already achieved but still needing the support and sympathy of the German Protestant princes. Moreover, any inclination towards reformation of Trinitarian doctrine often went hand in hand with what were perceived as the socially dangerous tendencies of Anabaptist groups. So a cautious, conservative approach to Trinitarian teaching prevailed in the churches that followed in the wake of Luther and Calvin. Maimbourg sees Michael Servetus as the original reviver of Arianism.170 Servetus' publication of his De Trinitatis Erroribus in 1530 was undoubtedly an important impetus in the growth of a strongly antitrinitarian movement—even though the publication of the work may in the long run have contributed, by way of reaction, to the preservation of Trinitarian orthodoxy within the Protestant churches as a whole. But Maimbourg was clearly wrong in describing Servetus as Arian in any more precise meaning of that term. Servetus was certainly anti-Nicene. But his opposition was to any understanding of the Godhead that involved three beings. His animosity was not unnaturally directed in the main against the ‘three-headed Cerberus’171 of Nicene Trinitarian faith as embodied in the orthodoxy of his day. But it was Arius and the ‘Arian philosophers’ who were primarily to blame. It was their introduction of metaphysical speculations about the consubstantiality or nonconsubstantiality of the Father and the Son which had meant that from that time on ‘the way for investigating the truth had been closed’.172 More specifically, the responsibility for introducing the idea of an inequality within the one being of God is ascribed in the case of the Word to Aetius, and in the case of the Spirit to Eunomius.173 And so Servetus is keen to distinguish his own objections from those of Arius. For though he may be appealing to such established ‘Arian’ texts as John 17: 3, Matt. 19: 17, and John 14: 28, his use of them is totally opposed to that of Arius with his ‘very foolish view that the Son was of different substance from the Father’, which shows ‘no appreciation at all of the glory of Christ’. His own theory, on the other hand, allows him, he claims, to do proper justice to those texts, while still affirming that ‘Jesus Christ is the great God’.174 The patristic writers to whom he does relate positively are

170

Maimbourg, The History of Arianism , 331.

171

Servetus, Christianismi Restitutio (1553 ), 700.

172

Ibid. 22; On the Errors of the Trinity , vii. 16 (in E. M. Wilbur, The Two Treatises of Servetus on the Trinity , Harvard Theological Studies, 16 (Cambridge, Mass., 1932 ), 184).

173

Ibid. iv. 3 (Wilbur, 134).

174

Ibid. i. 18 (Wilbur, 22).

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ante-Nicenes, such as Irenaeus and Tertullian, especially the latter. From Tertullian he takes the idea of divine ōἰκōνōμία, or dispensations, and develops it in a strongly monarchian way. The Word is not a philosophical being; it is an ōἰκōνōμία, it is God himself speaking.175 It is essential to understand the title ‘Word’, and such cognate designations as ‘the wisdom of God’ and ‘the power of God’, in Hebraic rather than Aristotelian terms.176 The Word can properly be spoken of as a ‘person’. But a ‘person’ is not a being; it is an appearance or an ōἰκōνōμία, as the derivation of the term from the Greek word πρόσωπōν, meaning ‘mask’, clearly indicates.177 The person only becomes a being at the incarnation. For the Word changed into flesh,178 and it is only then that one can speak of a second being or of a begetting; until that time the Word has been spoken, not begotten.179 So ‘the expression “Son” does not properly stand for the “Word”, but always for a “Man”.’180 And this Son Servetus is prepared to acknowledge to be of one substance with the Father; for the Word that has become flesh was none other than God himself speaking. But in making that acknowledgement it is vital to be clear that it is ‘this man’, it is ‘Christ's flesh’, that is of one substance with the Father.181 Of the ancient writers he stands closest to Marcellus or Photinus; certainly far closer to them than to Arius, though he is an original thinker and no mere replica of any earlier writer. The complexities of Servetus' theology need not concern us further, since it is clear that he belongs to a history of Arianism only in so far as he hastened the process of antitrinitarian reflection and publication. Once the possibility of a radical reconstruction of Trinitarian doctrine had been aired, it was highly likely that other, different, proposals would be forthcoming and that some of these might move in the Arian direction to which Servetus himself was so antagonistic. Indeed, within no more than two years of Servetus' publication of De Trinitatis Erroribus, just such a work did appear. In 1532 John Campanus, who had recently identified himself with the Anabaptists, published a work entitled Restitution und Besserung. It was an abridgement of an earlier, apparently unpublished work, whose title ‘Contra Totum Post Apostolos Mundum’ suggests that it sought to base itself on Scripture

175

Ibid. ii. 4–5 (Wilbur, 75 ff.).

176

Ibid. iii. 13 (Wilbur, 120).

177

Ibid. ii. 31, iv. 1, iv. 4 (Wilbur, 100, 132, 134).

178

Ibid. ii. 5, iv. 8 (Wilbur, 78, 143).

179

Ibid. ii. 8 (Wilbur, 81).

180

Restitutio , p. 90.

181

Dialogues on the Trinity , ii. 4 and 11 (Wilbur, 210 and 218).

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alone. The doctrine of God was only one issue among many with which Campanus dealt, but his account of it was binitarian in character. On the basis of Gen. 1: 26, where God says ‘Let us make man in our own image’ and then creates them male and female, Campanus took man and wife as a model for the duality of the God-head. The resultant picture is of a Father and Son, who are distinct beings of the same nature existing from eternity. But the Son is subordinate to the Father, eternal but not coeternal, born from him within eternity before the creation of the world, which was created by the Father through the Son.182 It was clear that the process of rethinking Trinitarian doctrine on the basis of Scripture alone could lead people in very different directions. Campanus, however, was not an influential figure. It was in Poland that a somewhat more lasting movement of this broadly Arian kind was to emerge. An important factor in that emergence was reaction to the strongly modalist teaching of Francis Stancaro, who won from the German historian, Theodor Wotschke, the title (for which one can think, alas, of other competitors) of ‘most disagreeable theologian known to history’183. Stancaro certainly made free with accusations of Arianism, dubbing Melanchthon ‘the Arian of the North’ and describing the orthodox Calvinists in Poland as ‘Arians’ who taught ‘three gods, three substances, three wills and three operations’.184 But perhaps his most significant contribution was his insistence that the fully divine, and therefore impassible, nature of Christ could not be the subject of the sufferings of Christ; Christ's human nature alone fulfilled the role of mediator and won forgiveness of our sins on the cross. After all, does not 1 Tim. 2: 5 explicitly state that ‘there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus’?185 Those who felt the force of his argument against a fully divine Christ as the subject of the redemptive suffering on the cross, but who were still convinced that a divine mediator was essential for our forgiveness, were led to speak of a secondary divine Son who could fulfil that vital mediatorial role. Concern for a divine atoning figure contributed to the growth of a form of belief with a recognizable kinship to that of Arius.186

182

G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962 ), 324; Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism , i. 34–6.

183

Cited by Wilbur, ibid. 297.

184

Ibid. 298–301. See Calvin, Opera , ix. 260.

185

See William Toth, ‘Trinitarianism versus Anti-Trinitarianism in the Hungarian Reformation’, Church History , 13 (1944 ), 256.

186

Williams, The Radical Reformation , 655–6.

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It is not easy to determine either the precise course or the precise content of this Arian-like theology. The antitrinitarian leaders were clear enough about what they objected to, but less clear about what should be put in its place. Their thought was in a state of continuous flux and many of the leading figures altered their views substantially in the course of their public careers. The first public attack on Trinitarian doctrine was by Peter Gonesius at the synod of Secemin in 1556. After studies in Cracow he had been influenced by the writings of Servetus while in Switzerland, and the views he propagated at the synod are close to those of Servetus. The Father is the one true God, greater than the Son. But the Son is also God, because ‘he is the Word, which was in the beginning, entered into the virgin's womb and converted into flesh’.187 Gonesius is not explicit about the status of the pre-existent Word, but the evidence suggests that, at that time at least, he did not envisage the existence of a distinct divine Son before the incarnation any more than Servetus did. Valentine Gentile, an Italian exile who had to flee Geneva in 1558 to escape suffering the same fate that had befallen Servetus there, only to be executed for his beliefs at Berne in 1567, was present at a synod at Pinczow in 1562, where he affirmed the belief that ‘God in the breadth of eternity had created a certain most excellent spirit, which afterwards in the fullness of time became incarnate’. The language is once again not entirely explicit, but from our knowledge of Gentile's earlier teaching it seems likely that he is envisaging, as Gonesius had not done in 1556, the existence of a second, distinct but subordinate, pre-existent divine being. Moreover, he himself sees his position on that issue as in agreement with the ante-Nicene writers, particularly Justin and Lactantius. They, he recognized, had been a source of the teaching of Arius. But the fault with Arius lay not in his kinship with them but in his construction of a dogmatic superstructure on that basis which went far beyond anything that could be justified by Scripture.188 Despite Gentile's explicit differentiation of his own position from that of Arius, Aretius, one of those involved in his execution, argues for a significant similarity between the two. He acknowledges that Gentile asserts that ‘the Word was begotten of the substance of the Father, and is consubstantial with him’, whereas Arius describes the Son as ‘made out of nothing’. But

187

S. Lubienecki, Historia Reformationis Polonicae (Warsaw, 1771 ), 115. Cf. R. Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography (London, 1850 ), vol. ii, art. 44, pp. 169–76.

188

Lubienecki, Historia Reformationis Polonicae , 107–8. Cf. Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography , vol. ii, art. 20, pp. 103–12.

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both, he argues, are agreed that ‘as to his substance the Son is numerically distinct from the Father’. In this respect, and also in their understanding of the Son's generation as belonging to the temporal order, the two can, he claims, be said to share the same, wholly unacceptable view.189 Protestant orthodoxy shared with its Catholic counterpart a strong urge to associate any heretic in the area of Trinitarian doctrine with the name of Arius. Emphasis on the pre-existence of the Son became an explicit issue at the synods of Lancut and Skrzymo in 1567. The debate centred on the interpretation of the Johannine prologue. Gonesius and Stanislas Farnovius argued strongly for the pre-existence of Christ against the dominant antitrinitarian view which by that time had begun to take a more consistently adoptionist approach.190 The change in Gonesius' views since the time of the synod of Secemin is clearly evidenced by the title of a work published by him in 1570: ‘On the Son of God: intended to prove, in opposition to the opinions of the Ebionites, that he existed before the creation of the world, and that all things were made by him’.191 Farnovius is described as teaching a pre-existence of the Son ‘almost exactly in accord with the principles of Arius’.192 Their leading opponent was Gregory Pauli, who had once been close to Gonesius but whose thought had moved in the opposite direction. Like Gonesius he saw the ante-Nicenes as the effective precursors of Arius; those whom he names as primary influences are Origen, Theophilus of Antioch, Dionysius of Alexandria, and Lactantius. But for him it is not just the excesses of Arius but the whole movement of thought that has to be abjured. That ante-Nicene tradition had affirmed ‘the Son of God as existing before the ages or before the world, who was God but other than the Father in number and in substance. There is no earlier example of serious deviation from the truth than that view’.193 To the orthodox both sides of this debate between two groups of antitrinitarians seemed equally heretical and

189

B. Aretius, A Short History of Valentinus Gentilis the Tritheist (London, 1696 ), 58–63. This work was originally published in Geneva in 1567 under the title Valentini Gentilis justo capitis supplicio Bernae affecti brevis historia, et contra eiusdam blasphemias orthodoxa defensio articuli de S. Trinitate . The production of an English translation and the choice of its title were part of a campaign against William Sherlock in the ‘tritheist’ controversy in England at the end of the 17th century.

190

Lubienecki, Historia Reformationis Polonicae , 217.

191

See Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography , ii. 176.

192

Praeexistentiam fere secundum Arii placitum (Christopher Sandius, Bibliotheca Anti-Trinitariorum (Freistadt, 1684 ), 52).

193

Lubienecki, Historia Reformationis Polonicae , 203.

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equally worthy of denunciation as ‘Arian’. Indeed, the title of one orthodox attack on Gregory Pauli charges him with being no more different from Arius than one egg from another.194 But the differences between the two antitrinitarian groups were real and were certainly felt by them to be such. The failure to find agreement at the 1567 conference led to the withdrawal of the followers of Farnovius and their formation as a distinct church body, commonly known as Farnovians, which continued to exist as a separate entity until about 1620, shortly after Farnovius' death. It was by no means the only major split within the antitrinitarian movement. The more strictly unitarian or adoptionist opponents of Farnovius were themselves to be sharply divided between a dominant Socinianism (which while denying Christ's preexistence approved the worship of him as ascended Lord) and the ‘non-adorants’ for whom any such worship of God's human agent in the world was wholly unacceptable.195 Although all these divergent antitrinitarian bodies were generally described as ‘Arian’ then and subsequently,196 it was only with the small and comparatively short-lived Farnovian group that anything at all resembling an early Arian understanding of Christ had any lasting institutional existence. At no point were the resemblances to early Arian ideas very close. Nor did any of the main body of antitrinitarians ever regard Arius himself as other than a highly reprehensible and dangerous heretic. The Racovian Catechism of 1609, for example, perhaps the most broadly representative Socinian document, treats Arianism as an obviously unacceptable view that can be used in a reductio ad absurdum argument against Trinitarians. The concept of Christ as ‘the first-born of all creation’ (Col. 1: 15), it declares, has to be interpreted of the new creation, without therefore involving any implication of pre-existence, since ‘that the Lord Jesus was the first of the old creation, even our opponents cannot admit, unless they would become Arians’.197 Maimbourg took the year 1660 as marking the effective second death of Arianism. 10 July of that year was the date by which members of ‘the Arian or Anabaptist sect’, who had not converted to the Catholic Church, had to go into exile or be subject to the death

194

Sarnicki, Collatio in qua aperte demonstratur blasphemias Gregorii Bresinensis, quondam Cracoviensis ministri, adeo conformes esse in triginta nempe articulis doctrinae Arii, ut ovum ovo non sit similius (1565). See Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism , i. 321 n. 63.

195

Ibid., i. 346–9; Williams, The Radical Reformation , 747.

196

Wilbur describes it as the ‘title most widely current in Poland today’ (A History of Unitarianism , i. 3 n. 1). It is still so used today, fifty years after Wilbur wrote.

197

Racovian Catechism , iv. i, ed. T. Rees (London, 1818 ), 136.

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penalty.198 ‘Arian’, as we have seen, refers here to the Unitarian brethren generally, who were Socinian in belief. Even amongst those who suffered the fate of exile, however, affirmations of a remarkably high-sounding Christology, including the language of pre-existence, are to be found. In his Confessions of Christian Faith (1642) Jonas Szlichtyng speaks of the Son as having ‘existed in the beginning’, and in his reaffirmation of belief from the miseries of exile (1661) he affirms that ‘he is truly the proper and only-begotten Son of God the Father, and thus in the fullest degree shares his nature and divinity’. But the pre-existence is a matter of foreknowledge, like that of our election in grace according to Eph. 1: 4 and 2 Tim. 1: 9, and the equality of God-head is not the Son's by birth but by the Father's gift.199 Even in such cases the conformation of belief is clearly Socinian rather than Arian in character. Maimbourg may have exaggerated the degree to which the antitrinitarianism of the Reformation period was a revival of the old Arian heresy, but he was right to suggest in his final epitaph that whatever Arian character it may have had was before long subsumed within the Socinian movement.

198

See the two edicts of John Casimir in G. H. Williams, The Polish Brethren , Harvard Theological Studies, 30 (Missoula, Mont., 1980 ), i. 39 and ii. 645–6.

199

Ibid. ii. 408–9 (416–17), 651.

4 The Rise and Fall of British Arianism Seventeenth-Century Origins As Maimbourg was writing his obituary of Arianism after its brief sixteenth- and seventeenth-century revival on the Continent, a more substantial resurgence was about to break out in England. Maimbourg can certainly be forgiven for not having foreseen it. Antitrinitarianism had not taken any strong hold in Britain at the time of the Reformation. Those who did express such views were vigorously dealt with in word and action. They were sometimes condemned as ‘Arians’, but in Britain as on the Continent the term was used as a general name for any form of antitrinitarian belief and cannot be taken to imply any close link with the specific beliefs associated with that name in the fourth century. As early as 1549 John Proctor wrote a book entitled The Fall of the Late Arrian in which he first lambasts his fellow countrymen generally, complaining that, although the ‘noble Henry, King of Kings’ had unyoked them from ‘the Pope's bulls’, many of them have ‘proved Anabaptists, Libertines, Ebionites, Arrians, Seleutians, Saducees, Pelagians, foul and blasphemous heretics’.200 He then goes on to set out the case against ‘a certain man who lately denied Christ's divinity and equality with God the father, affirming that he was but a mere creature, and a passible man only not God’. He does seek to justify the title he has given to the book by stating that ‘this was Arrius's opinion . . . and as many as do hold that opinion are called of ancient writers, Arrians’.201 But that attempted justification does little to suggest either genuine knowledge of or concern about the real teaching of Arius or early Arianism. Even sharing the risk of martyrdom in Mary's reign a few years later did nothing to mollify the hostility of orthodox Protestants towards the antitrinitarians. In 1556 there appeared a tract arising out of an

200

J. Proctor, The Fall of the Late Arrian (London, 1549 ), preface B, ii–v.

201

Ibid. D, v.

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incident involving two inmates of a Marian prison, entitled: An Apology of John Philpot, written for spitting upon an Arian; with an invective against Arians, the very natural children of Antichrist, with an admonition to all that be faithful in Christ to beware of them, and of other late-sprung heresies as the worst enemies of the gospel. In the tract the Arian is described as ‘making himself equal with Christ, saying that God was none otherwise in Christ than God was in him’, and also as worshipping Christ while regarding him as a creature like himself.202 A number of people were martyred for beliefs of the kind that John Philpot denounces with such vehemence. It is not always easy to determine the precise nature of their beliefs, but there is no reason to believe that they were ever ‘Arian’ in a strict rather than a generic sense. The last person to be burnt for his beliefs in Britain, Edward Wightman in 1612, is described as condemned for being an Arian. But the more detailed indictment speaks of him as charged with ten heresies (three more than the demons possessing Mary Magdalene): those of ‘Ebion, Cerinthus, Valentinian, Arius, Macedonius, Simon Magus, Manes, Manichaeus, Photinus and the Anabaptists’.203 Such a list hardly suggests any very serious concern over the precise form of his theological views. The general identification of ‘Arian’ with the broader concept of ‘antitrinitarian’ is well exemplified by a comprehensive list of forty-six contemporary heretical groups, compiled towards the middle of the seventeenth century. One of those forty-six groups is entitled ‘Antitrinitarians and new Arians’. (Socinians are listed as a distinct group.) The original Arian heresy is said to have arisen from Arius' pique at not having been elected bishop of Alexandria when Alexander was. Its new version is said to have originated in Poland in 1593. The heresy is described as guilty of five major errors: denial of the Trinity, of the divinity of the Son, of the eternal generation of the Son, of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, together with the affirmation that Christ is to be called God not with reference to his essence, but by reason of his dominion.204 ‘Arianism’ continued also to serve as the prime exemplar of heresy in general. Peter Heylyn, a chaplain to charles I and later to Charles II, entitled his account of Presbyterianism Aerius Redivivus or the History of the Presbyterians.205 In his preface he claims that the Presbyterians exceed

202

Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography , i. 22–8.

203

Ibid. i. 45; ii. 536.

204

Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography, or A Description of the Heretics and Sectaries of These Latter Times (2nd edn.; London, 1645 ), 124–6.

205

P. Heylyn, Aerius Redivivus or The History of the Presbyterians (Oxford, 1670 ).

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all early heresies in the arts of mischief. Those early heresies he ‘reduce[s] under four heads’ of Novatians (in the North), Arians (in the East), Donatists (in the South), and Priscillianists (in the West). He draws no particular parallels between Arians and Presbyterians, and his choice of Arius' name for the overall title of the book appears to be based simply on the archetypal status of the heresy called after him. But heresy-hunting was not the seventeenth century's most distinctive feature. More significant was the marked, if gradual, increase in the readiness to bring reason to bear on issues of theology. William Chillingworth is a well-known example of the beginnings of this trend. In a letter responding to an enquiry about Arianism, he argues that any Arian would be happy to be judged by the evidence of the ante-Nicene Fathers, such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen. And anyone who undertakes a free and impartial investigation of the issue, he concludes, ‘shall not choose but confess, or at least be very inclinable to believe, that the doctrine of Arius is either a truth, or at least no damnable heresy’.206 Reasoned reflection can take many forms. It is metaphysical reasoning that relates most closely to the differences between Arianism and orthodoxy—where the issue is understood at a deeper level than that of mutual invective. The Cambridge Platonists, who have been described as motivated by a feeling ‘that the life of the spirit was perishing in the spent air of polemic’,207 are an attractive example of the new concern with reason that was beginning to emerge. On the Trinitarian question they remained within the bounds of accepted orthodoxy. Their distinctive emphasis was on the congruity of the Platonic Trinity with that of Christian orthodoxy.208 In true Platonism, Cudworth argued, there is no created hypostasis.209 The suggestion that there is may arise from a number of causes. In the first place, allowance must be made for the fact that the word creare did not necessarily carry then (as it does now) the sense of creation in time.210 Secondly, there are occasions in the writings of Plotinus and Porphyry when the world soul does appear to be of the same order as other souls, but these are not representative of their true thought; they are passages ‘heedlessly and inadvertently written by Plotinus; he as it were drowsily nodding

206

P. des Maizeux, The Life of William Chillingworth , ed. J. Nichols (London, 1863 ), 45–59 (citation from p. 59). The letter is undated, but Nichols dates it to the mid–1630s.

207

Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (London, 1934 ), 133–4.

208

See R. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678 ), Pt. 1, 546–632.

209

Ibid. 551, 570–4.

210

Ibid. 576.

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all the while, as it was also but supinely taken up by Porphyrius after him’.211 And finally, where the concept of a created divine hypostasis is inescapable, as in Numenius, it is an adulterated form of Platonism with which we are dealing.212 Cudworth does not for a moment deny that the three hypostases of the Platonic Trinity are graded, the second and third being subordinate to the first. But these gradations are gradations within divinity. Post-Nicene Fathers, like Cyril of Alexandria, were wrong, he argues, to equate that sense of gradation and subordination with Arianism.213 It is the characteristic teaching of the ante-Nicene Fathers generally, of ‘Justin Martyr, Tatian, Irenaeus, the Author of the Recognitions, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Dionysius, Lactantius and many others’.214 In Athanasius too, with his comparison of Father and Son, there is a dependence and subordination not only of order (τάξις) but also of dignity (ἀξίωμα).215 The equality of the three relates only to nature or essence; homoousios is ‘not a sameness of singular and numerical, but of common or universal essence only’.216 Such a style of interpretation might seem to open the way to a relatively positive evaluation of Arianism. But Cudworth does not go that way. Arianism is a ‘kind of paganic and idolatrous Christianity’.217 The Arian Trinity is ‘a jumbled confusion of God and creature’,218 allowing the creature-worship which it had been the express purpose of Christianity to extirpate.219 No generosity of interpretation of the concept of ‘creation’, such as he employed in the case of Platonism, is allowed in the case of Arianism. Indeed, even the qualifications that Arius himself had expressed are overlooked. Arians, Cudworth says, view Christ as ‘a mere creature, made in time, mutable and defectible’.220 Two features of Cudworth's approach enabled him to combine his commitments to Platonism and to Christianity. First, his particular interpretation of Platonism was one that brought it unusually close to orthodox Trinitarian thought. Secondly, it was the Nicene Fathers, not Arius, whose teaching was allied to a true Platonism. Nevertheless Cudworth insists that, despite their being more closely allied to Platonic philosophy than the Arians were, it was Scripture and not Plato that was the true basis of Nicene theology:

211

Ibid. 594.

212

Ibid. 552.

213

Ibid. 592.

214

Ibid. 595.

215

Ibid. 598–9.

216

Ibid. 608.

217

Ibid. 620.

218

Ibid. 579.

219

Ibid. 628.

220

Ibid. 629.

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Arius did not so much Platonize as the Nicene Fathers and Athanasius: who notwithstanding made not Plato, but the Scripture, together with reason deducing natural consequences therefrom, their foundation.221 Cudworth's complex interpretation of the links between Platonic philosophy and Trinitarian doctrine was not the only one on offer. Theophilus Gale, writing at the same time and at the same great length, saw Platonism, especially as mediated by Ammonius and Plotinus, as leading directly to Arianism.222 Nor were all Cudworth's readers convinced that he had made out his case, or that he had succeeded in staying within the bounds of orthodoxy. From the orthodox side John Turner's crude polemic describes him as either ‘an Arian, a Socinian or a Deist’, claiming that only the next volume of The Intellectual System (projected but never in fact to appear) could determine which.223 From the Unitarian side the far more perceptive Stephen Nye argues that ‘if we will give a name to Dr Cudworth's explication of the Trinity, we must call it Mollis Arianismus or Moderate Arianism’. Nye regards Eunomius and Aetius as the strict followers of Arius, and sees the distinguishing marks of the moderate Arians as the denial of any interval of time before the Son's creation and the interpretation of consubstantial in terms of like substance. On that basis he draws the conclusion that ‘the moderate Arians ascribed as much to the Son as Dr Cudworth does’.224 By the time that Cudworth was writing, influences towards a more radical approach to Trinitarian questions were beginning to make themselves felt. Publications from Holland were becoming available in England. The main inspiration of these was Socinian in character, but one important work constitutes a link with the Arian movement in Poland. Nucleus Historiae Ecclesiasticae by Christopher Sandius, an exile from Poland, published in Amsterdam in 1669, is a detailed historical study, emphasizing the traditional rather than innovative character of the teaching of Arius. Its circulation in England was one of the factors

221

Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678 ), Pt. 1, 579.

222

Theophilus Gale, Court of the Gentiles , Part III. The Vanity of Pagan Philosophy Demonstrated (London, 1677 ), 140. Cf. ‘These Platonic philosophers were the seminary of Arianism’ (ibid., Part IV, 384). For a fuller discussion, see Sarah Hutton, ‘The Neoplatonic Roots of Arianism: Ralph Cudworth and Theophilus Gale’, in L. Szczucki (ed.), Socinianism and its Role in the Culture of xvi-th to xviii-th Centuries (Warsaw, 1983 ), 139–45.

223

John Turner, A Discourse Concerning the Messias (London, 1685 ), dedication pp. xix and clxii.

224

S. Nye, Considerations on the Explication of the Doctrine of the Trinity by Dr Wallis, Dr Sherlock, Dr S—th, Dr Cudworth and Dr Hooker (London, 1693 ), 18 and 32.

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leading to the publication of George Bull's famous Defensio Fidei Nicaenae in 1685.225 It is evidence of the weakness of antitrinitarianism in England at that time that it is entirely against Continental antitrinitarians that Bull's work is directed. But all that was about to change. The most important single event to hasten the process of change was the accession of William and Mary in 1688, and the freer discussion of religious ideas to which that gave rise. The publication of heterodox views was made still easier when the Licensing Act was allowed to lapse in 1695. One example of such publication in the early years of the new reign was a series of unitarian pamphlets, financed by a wealthy philanthropist, Thomas Firmin, and largely written by Stephen Nye, rector of Little Hormead for a period of forty years. Nye was opposed to what he took to be the tritheism of most contemporary orthodox Trinitarianism, to Arianism which he dismisses ‘as only a more absurd and less defensible Tritheism’ than the orthodox view,226 and to the teaching of Socinus whom he describes as ‘having not the least tincture of academical, much less of theological learning’.227 Socinianism was a misnomer for the Unitarianism he himself professed.228 His own position was of a modalist or Sabellian nature; claiming the authority of Augustine's non-personalized understanding of the Trinity,229 he believed himself justified in presenting his own Unitarian understanding of the person of Christ as true to traditional Christian teaching. The claim he makes is well summed-up in the title of another of his pamphlets: The Agreement of the Unitarians with the Catholics (1697). Unitarians, he argues, are not opposed to the Trinity, only to the common tritheistic misunderstanding of it. They are nominalists not realists about the persons of the Trinity, and, although the technical language of the Catholic Church is unfortunate, it is a nominalist understanding that represents the true faith of the General Councils.230 Christ is God, and Man . . . God in respect of God in him . . . not only occasionally assisting . . . but . . . always in Christ, illuminating, conducting and actuating him. More than this is the heresy of Eutyches.231

225

See R. Nelson, The Life of George Bull (London, 1713), 281–3.

226

S. Nye, The Explication of the Articles (London, 1715 ), 84.

227

S. Nye, Institutions Concerning the Holy Trinity (London, 1703 ), 30–3.

228

The section headings of Nye's A Brief History of the Unitarians, Called also Socinians (1687 ), use the phrase ‘Unitarians, vulgarly called Socinians’ (pp. 3, 41, and 117).

229

S. Nye, The Explication of the Articles , 84.

230

Ibid. 27, 19–21, 26.

231

Ibid. 7.

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And to refuse to grant the name of God to such an indwelling is Nestorianism.232 But there were pamphlets of an explicitly Arian provenance. One example, by William Freke, an eccentric writer much given to the interpretation of dreams, is entitled A Vindication of the Unitarians. He emphasizes at the outset that he is writing as ‘an Arrian’ and ‘no Socinian’.233 The pamphlet sets out very briefly many of the points that were to figure in the larger-scale ‘Arian’ debates of the next century. He sees Arianism as keeping ‘a due mean’ between orthodoxy and Socinianism.234 It is orthodoxy against which his work is specifically directed. He sees it as a form of idolatry, with its worship of three coequal Gods, and pours scorn on its two-nature exegesis of the gospels, comparing Christ's divine nature on such an account with the sleeping Baal of the Elijah story.235 It was the study of the New Testament, he says, that converted him to Arianism. The study he describes adumbrates that which Samuel Clarke was later to publish to such effect: having ‘collected every text relating to Father, Son and Holy Ghost into an Imperial Sheet of Paper,’ he says, ‘ . . . I could not but fall into Arianism’. Indeed it was only later he discovered that the view to which his study had brought him had been held in earlier times and went by the name of Arianism.236 But Arianism of this explicit kind is a rare voice in the Trinitarian controversy that marked the closing decade of the seventeenth century. Orthodox contributors to the debate vary in the degree of care with which they pin heretical labels on their opponents. Arian and Socinian are frequently used together, without any concern for the differences between them, as descriptions of anyone falling short of the expected Trinitarian or Christological orthodoxy. But the steadily increasing knowledge of the Fathers and the production of new texts helped to make the true meaning of those terms more widely known. So while the weaker orthodox controversialists tended to go on using the terms as a form of polemical abuse without attention to the distinctions between them,237 their more scholarly counterparts could

232

Nye, The Explication of the Articles , 25.

233

W. Freke, A Vindication of the Unitarians (2nd edn.; London, 1690 ), 1. A subsequent work includes ‘Arrian’ in the title: The Arrian's Vindication of Himself (London, 1691 ).

234

Freke, A Vindication , 21.

235

Ibid. 3, 8.

236

Ibid. 11–12.

237

An interesting justification for ignoring such distinctions even when known is to be found on the first page of an anonymous work, A dissertation on Deistical and Arian Corruption (London, 1742 ), where the author writes: ‘As the Arians and Socinians deny several fundamental doctrines, plainly declared in the Holy Scriptures, and in so doing, invalidate all Revelation, the differences between them and the avowed Deists is rather verbal than real; and therefore, I rank them all under the same common name of Deists.’

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even on occasion turn their knowledge of those distinctions to advantage. John Wallis, for example, another of those whose Trinitarian views were carefully scrutinized by Stephen Nye,238 does so in two sermons preached in 1691. In meeting what he gives as the final Socinian objection, namely that Trinitarians themselves hold divergent views, he claims that the antitrinitarians are even more divided: Do not the Arian and the Socinian differ as much from one another, as either of them do from us; (and declare that they do so?).239 In a subsequent sermon in the same year he distinguishes the different ways in which Socinians and Arians interpret the use of the word ‘God’ in the New Testament, and spells out the difference between them in these terms: They object that though he be sometime called God, yet by God is not there meant the Supreme God; but either a mere Titular God, as the Socinians will have it (as one of the λεγόμενōι Θεōί, 1 Cor. 8. 5, one who is called God, but indeed is not, but a mere man however highly dignified), or (as the Arians will have it) that he is God indeed, but not the Supreme God, not the same God with the Father, but an Inferior God (Deus factus), a made God, a Creature-God, who was indeed before the world, but not from eternity, [sic] , there was (a time, a moment, a quando) when he was not, when he had not a being.240 Wallis ignores the distinctive Socinian concept of the exaltation of Jesus to divine status, and follows the general practice of regarding Socinians as straightforward psilanthropists. Nevertheless, the fundamental difference between Socinianism and Arianism is clearly drawn. Many of the opponents of Trinitarian orthodoxy in that final decade of the seventeenth century could with a little stretching of the word be termed ‘Socinian’. And Cudworth could with some plausibility be

238

Considerations on the Explication of the Doctrine of the Trinity , 7–9, 32. Nye quotes Wallis as defining a divine person as ‘only a mode, a respect or relation of God to his creatures’. On that basis he interprets him as a Sabellian, and mischievously suggests he must really be a covert Socinian. Wallis was a distinguished mathematician, who had been appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford more than half a century earlier and whose mathematical work was a significant element in Newton's early studies.

239

J. Wallis, Three Sermons Concerning the Sacred Trinity (London, 1691 ), 64. The first of the three sermons was preached in 1664, and Wallis claims in the preface that the substance of it goes back twenty years earlier than that. All three are directed against the antitrinitarian interpretation of John 17: 3. It does not mean that the Father only is true God, but that the Father is the only true God (and the Son is the same God).

240

Ibid. 70.

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likened to a Homoiousian or moderate Arian. But as yet very few of those publicly deviating from orthodox belief were advancing a view that corresponded to mainline Arianism. This was a position that was soon to change. Cudworth's understanding of the development of orthodoxy as one in which Platonism played a powerful and positive role did not find much favour. But his more general insistence that the basis of Nicene theology was ‘Scripture together with reason deducing natural consequences therefrom’ was a more influential legacy. It was commitment to that ideal that he bequeathed to his successors, to John Locke in the first instance and more indirectly through him to those eighteenth-century divines who came to adopt an essentially Arian view.241 Whether Locke and Cudworth ever met is an open question, but Locke had a special link with him through his intimate friendship with Cudworth's daughter, Lady Damaris Masham.242 He fully shared Cudworth's basic understanding of theology as based on ‘Scripture together with reason deducing natural consequences therefrom’. But his understanding of reason was not the same as Cudworth's, so that the application of the principle had very different results for him. Locke may have been an apostle of reason, but not in a sense that implies the assertion of its omnicompetence. Indeed, his rejection of innate ideas and insistence that reason was dependent on ideas drawn from sensation and reflection led to a recognition of the limitations of reason, especially in the realm of religious knowledge. And that in turn gave rise to, or at least was compensated by, an insistence on revelation, which runs through all his writings, and on the impossibility of making significant deductions that take us beyond the expressions given in that scriptural revelation. His earliest writings reveal a conviction that reason is unable to deduce complex doctrines from Scripture and that the belief that it can do so has disastrous effects on the practice of religion. As early as 1661 he had argued that Scripture contains ‘profound mysteries which utterly transcend the human intellect’, and that ‘whoever attempts to explain the trinity of persons in the divine nature in words other than those in which God has revealed it brings not so much light to Scripture as darkness’.243 And in another

241

See F. J. Powicke, The Cambridge Platonists (Cambridge, Mass., 1926 ), 208.

242

For Cudworth's influence on Locke, see R. I. Aaron, John Locke (Oxford, 1937 ), 28–30.

243

See John C. Biddle, ‘John Locke's Essay on Infallibility’, Journal of Church and State , 19 (1977 ), 323. Locke's essay is particularly aimed to demonstrate the inconceivability of any infallible interpreter of Scripture. Cf. his later insistence that there is no ‘other infallible interpreter of Scripture’ than the Holy Spirit (Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity , in Works (1824 ), vi. 359).

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essay from the same period he asserts that one of the original causes of schisms and heresies is to be found in the ‘clogging [of religion] with creeds and catechisms and endless niceties about the essences, properties and attributes of God’.244 It is consistent with that early and continuing attitude of mind that Locke should not have shared the growing interest of many of his contemporaries in the Fathers. His extensive library contained relatively few patristic texts, and the great majority of those it did hold were historical rather than dogmatic works.245 Neither Arius nor Arianism was a subject of concern to him, and although he was frequently accused of being a Socinian or a deist, he was never accused of being an Arian. So it is not for his own theology, but for his influence on those who came after him that Locke merits a place in a study of Arianism in history. Many of those who were justifiably described as Arians in the early eighteenth century were people who had learnt their empirical approach from him, but who did not always combine that with his cautious mistrust of the extent of human reasoning power. Their dependence on Locke was something they were happy to own and which their opponents were equally happy to use as a weapon against them. But all that lay still in the future. In the fifteen years of his life that remained to him after his return in 1689 from a sixyear exile in Holland, Locke was much concerned with religious questions. Two of his major writings during that time, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), involved him, one indirectly and the other directly, in extensive controversy. Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, was provoked by the publication in 1696 of Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious into writing A Discourse in Vindication of the Trinity. In his appeal to antiquity, Stillingfleet shows himself well versed in patristic knowledge. Since it is a Unitarian challenge to Trinitarian faith that he is concerned to rebut, the heretics about whom he writes are Theodotion, Paul of Samosata, and Photinus. Arius receives scarcely a mention—except to point out that even the Arian party acknowledged the earlier condemnation of Paul and actually joined in the condemnation of

244

Reflections on the Roman Commonwealth , cited by H. R. Fox-Bourne, Life of John Locke (London, 1876 ), 147–9. Fox-Bourne describes the essay as ‘certainly written either before or very soon after the Restoration’.

245

See J. Harrison and P. Laslett, The Library of John Locke (2nd edn.; Oxford, 1965 ).

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Photinus.246 But it is not in his appeal to antiquity that Stillingfleet involves Locke in the controversy. Like other orthodox controversialists of the time, he was anxious to refute the charge that the doctrine of the Trinity was incoherent and unintelligible. He and Locke shared the same latitudinarian background. So reason was important to him as well as to Locke. And it is Locke's understanding of reason to which he takes exception.247 He does so on two scores. In the first place he sees Locke's Essay as providing the basis for the argument used by the overtly deistical Toland. But even more seriously, Stillingfleet sees it as undermining the concept of substance in a way which makes impossible the very formulation of an orthodox Trinitarian doctrine at all. It thereby cut at the root of what he was most concerned to demonstrate. Locke was unrepentant on both issues. The association of his name with that of Toland was one that was to persist. The Reasonableness of Christianity and Christianity Not Mysterious were a natural pairing. In 1697 the Grand Jury of Middlesex was to class them together as ‘books to be suppressed’ on the grounds that they contributed to a general undermining of church doctrine ‘by means whereof Arianism, Socinianism, Atheism and Deism do greatly abound’.248 and a little later William Carroll was to describe them as ‘two titles [that] are different in sound but agree in sense’.249 But Stillingfleet's complaint was a more thoughtful and a more serious one. That Toland had drawn substantially on Locke's Essay was beyond dispute. Locke's response that no one is to be blamed for the uses to which other people may put one's ideas is fair enough as far as it goes. But he could, and did, say more than that. With his stress on revelation, he could claim that it was precisely the difficulties posed by deism that his work was designed to overcome.250 Nevertheless, the question of whether he or Toland was

246

E. Stillingfleet, A Discourse in Vindication of the Trinity (London, 1697 ), ch. 4, esp. pp. 39 and 53. The same point about Arian participation in the condemnation of Photinus had also been made earlier by John Turner, A Discourse Concerning the Messias , p. xi.

247

Stillingfleet, A Discourse in Vindication of the Trinity , 233–4.

248

See J. Gailhard, The Epistle and Preface to the Book against the Blasphemous Socinian Heresy Vindicated (London, 1698 ), 82–3.

249

W. Carroll, A Dissertation on the Tenth Chapter of the Fourth Book of Mr. Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1706 ), 276.

250

See e.g. Locke's A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity , in Works , vi. 188–9. On this whole question see esp. John C. Biddle, ‘Locke's Critique of Innate Principles and Toland's Deism’, JHI 37 (1976 ), 411–22. (Reprinted in J. W. Yolton (ed.), Philosophy, Religion and Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New Haven, 1990 ), 140–51.

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making the more well-reasoned use of Locke's ideas remained open. Locke had insisted that revelation, though never contradicting the certainties of human reason, could give us knowledge of things ‘beyond the discovery of reason’ and moreover that it could rightly override the ‘probable conjectures of reason’;251 but the grounds for accepting the New Testament as such a revelation are never made clear. Toland went further; he claimed that all revelation was subject to the assessment of human reason, aiming to show, as the subtitle to his book expresses it, ‘that there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to reason, nor above it’.252 Which of the two claims was the more coherent development of Locke's approach was to remain a central issue of debate throughout the ensuing century. But the Arianism that was about to erupt in the first decade of the century, which was certainly far closer to Locke than to Toland on the issue of revelation, complicated the issue; it constituted yet another candidate for the most plausible religious development of Locke's approach. Stillingfleet's second objection was hardly likely to appear very damaging to anyone as fundamentally hostile to speculative theology as Locke. And it has been the general verdict both then and since that in his rebuttal of it Locke had the better of the argument philosophically. By showing that Stillingfleet had failed in his attempt to offer an intellectually convincing account of the Trinity, Locke strengthened the two main planks of his own defence. His demonstration of the weakness of Stillingfleet's presentation of Trinitarian doctrine enhanced the credibility of his own contention that it was very difficult to know what the received doctrine of the Trinity to which he was supposed to conform really was,253 and in doing so it served also to reinforce his long-held conviction that faithfulness to Scripture was the only reliable norm. He rested his case on a readiness to make public retractation of anything in his book that he could be shown ‘contained or implied any opposition in it to anything revealed in Holy Writ concerning the Trinity’.254 But the effectiveness of his argument had a longer-term implication too. It also reinforced the more general conviction of antitrintarians that the doctrine of the Trinity that they were opposing was not just false, but meaningless.

251

J. Locke, Essay IV. 18. 5–8.

252

J. Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious (London, 1696 ). Italics added.

253

J. Locke, Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester , in Works iii. 197–8.

254

J. Locke, A Letter to the Right Reverend Edward Lord Bishop of Worcester Concerning Some Passages Relating to Mr Locke's Essay of Human Understanding , postscript in Works , iii. 96.

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The other, slightly earlier controversy in which Locke was embroiled was the result of an immediate and direct attack on The Reasonableness of Christianity by John Edwards, a strong Calvinist who lacked Stillingfleet's underlying kinship of spirit with Locke's approach. Locke's insistence in the book that the only belief necessary for becoming a Christian is that Jesus is the Messiah was seized on by Edwards as evidence that Locke was a covert Socinian.255 Locke repudiates the charge with vigour but also with circumspection. His concern, he insists, was only with the belief incumbent on every believer, however limited his, or especially her,256 understanding might be. Wherever in the New Testament, he argues, faith in Jesus as Son of God is demanded of someone wishing to become a Christian, Son of God is a synonym for Messiah (whatever further meaning it may have elsewhere).257 His emphasis on that one belief as alone basic to the being of a Christian did not preclude other beliefs being of importance to him or to other Christians. Every Christian should believe whatever he knows with certainty to have been taught by Christ. But as the mutually inconsistent beliefs claimed by differing Christian confessions to be the intended meaning of Christ's teaching demonstrated, it was no easy task to determine what that teaching was.258 What his own beliefs on the matter were he does not disclose, except that they were not Socinian. Locke's desire not to go beyond Scripture is evident throughout his writings, and is not just an expedient excuse to avoid being drawn into making a socially or politically embarrassing disclosure of his true beliefs. But it is still a legitimate question to ask what understanding of Christ the New Testament implies. Notes that Locke made at the time of the controversy show that this was a question with which he himself wrestled. The notes, entitled Adversaria Theologica, set out in parallel columns the scriptural evidence for and against certain propositions,

255

John Edwards, Socinianism Unmasked: A Discourse on the Unreasonableness of a Late Writer's Opinion Concerning the Necessity of Only One Article of Christian Faith (London, 1696 ); The Socinian Creed, or A Brief Account of the Professed Tenets and Doctrines of the Foreign and English Socinians. Wherein is shewed the Tendency of them to Irreligion and Atheism (London, 1697 ).

256

See Locke, Reasonableness , 302: ‘Where the hand is used to the plough and the spade, the head is seldom elevated to sublime notions, or exercised in mysterious reasonings. ’Tis well if men of that rank (to say nothing of the other sex) can comprehend plain propositions'.

257

J. Locke, A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity , in Works , vi. 179–80; A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity , in Works , vi. 242, 361–74.

258

Ibid. 433–8.

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such as Trinitas/Non Trinitas; Christus Deus Supremus/Christus non Deus supremus; Christus merus homo/Christus non merus homo; Spiritus Sanctus Deus/Spiritus Sanctus Non Deus. In each case the evidence cited for the non-orthodox position far outweighs that cited for the orthodox. Comments from A Confession of Faith Touching the Holy Trinity by John Biddle, the leading antitrinitarian of the previous generation, are interspersed with the Scripture references.259 Locke draws no conclusions, but there can be no question as to where he felt the weight of evidence to lie. It is also noteworthy that the main questions he poses are in the form of a sharp dichotomy between Christ's absolute divinity and straightforward humanity. The midway Arian proposal of a lower order of divinity is not brought into consideration at all. All this was Locke's private cogitation. The fruit of his New Testament study that saw the light of day was of a very different kind. It took the form of A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul; it was designed for publication, though it only appeared in 1705–7, shortly after his death. For the most part the notes are designed to elucidate the structure of the argument and the meaning of particular words and phrases. But in one passage he clearly affirms a belief in Christ's pre-existence. In a note on Eph. 1: 10 he speaks of Scripture showing how, before the revolt of Satan and his angels, ‘Christ at first had the Rule and Supremacy over all, and was head over all’.260 Whether that was a belief to which Locke had newly come as a result of his detailed study of the epistles or whether it was something he had long held but had not previously made public is impossible to determine with any confidence.261 It is a belief that would have helped to justify his firm disclaimer of being a Socinian, but no trace of it is to be found in the Adversaria Theologica. But however late it may have arisen, in itself it points in the direction of at least an incipient Arian style of belief. That certainly was the direction which others, with an approach similar to

259

Adversaria Theologica (Bod. MS Locke c43), 12–13; 26–31. Biddle's work is, like Locke's, a collection of scriptural evidence for various basic propositions, but it includes substantially more discussion and is directed to the support of one particular view. Biddle affirms the subordinate divinity of the Son in an explicitly Socinian sense, i.e. as something conferred by God on the man Christ Jesus. It was first published in 1648; Locke uses the recently issued 1691 edition.

260

J. Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul , ed. A. W. Wainwright (Oxford, 1987 ), ii. 616. The note also cites Col. 1: 15–17 and Heb. 1: 8 in evidence.

261

The paraphrase on Ephesians in which it occurs was the last to be completed and was still not fully transcribed three days before his death. See the letter from Locke to Peter King (The Correspondence of John Locke , ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford, 1976 ), iii. 416–17, cited in Paraphrase , i. 7–8).

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Locke's, were to move more firmly in the immediately succeeding years. One of Locke's friends indeed had already moved a long way in that direction. It was after his return to England in 1689 that Locke first met Isaac Newton, and they continued to correspond for the remaining years of Locke's life. It was not always an easy relationship. In 1693 Newton apologizes for having wrongly believed that Locke had ‘endeavoured to embroil me with women’ and for having, as a result, responded to news of Locke's illness by remarking that ‘'twere better you were dead’; he also admits that he had, again wrongly, represented Locke as having ‘struck at the root of morality in a principle you laid down in your book of Ideas’.262 But the friendship survived, thanks to Locke's forgiving spirit and his admiration for Newton's intellectual powers. Their correspondence deals with a variety of topics, scientific and religious, but scriptural interpretation seems to have been their dominant shared interest. It is the subject of both the first and last of the surviving letters between them.263 The first letter included a short treatise entitled ‘An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture’. The two texts in question were 1 John 5: 7 and 1 Tim. 3: 16, and, although formally a purely textual discussion, it carried clear antitrinitarian implications. Newton's normal attitude was one of obsessive secrecy about any of his religious ideas that might cause him social or political embarrassment. Indeed the discussion of his convictions with Locke on this occasion, his biographer suggests, was something he had never previously dared to undertake with anyone else. But as far as making his views public was concerned, his customary caution soon reasserted itself, and at the last minute he cancelled the publication of the treatise, which Locke was arranging in France at his request.264 Even though Locke may have been treated as an unusually favoured confidant about Newton's religious views, it is likely that the interchange between them was restricted to scriptural matters and that Newton did not confide to Locke his more speculative ideas about the person of Christ and the Arian direction in which his thoughts were developing. But to us those thoughts are accessible thanks to the private notes and manuscripts that have survived.

262

Correspondence , iv. 727 (no. 1659 of 16 Sept. 1693). The reference is clearly to Locke's rejection of innate ideas.

263

Ibid. iv. 164–5 (no. 1338 of 14 Nov. 1690), and viii. 1–2 (no. 3287 of 15 May 1703).

264

R. S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1980 ), 488–91. For the text of the treatise, see The Correspondence of Isaac Newton , ed. H. W. Turnbull (Cambridge, 1959–77 ), iii. 83–122.

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The Secret Arianism of Isaac Newton Despite his secretiveness about his theological views, the heretical tendency of Newton's beliefs was not unknown to some of his contemporaries. William Whiston, his successor as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, described him as one whose study led him to recognize that ‘what has long been called Arianism is no other than old uncorrupt Christianity’.265 Hopton Haynes, on the other hand, Newton's close associate over many years at the Mint, is reported to have said of Newton that he did not believe in Christ's pre-existence, being in that respect a Socinian, and that he much ‘lamented Mr Clarke's embracing Arianism, which opinion he feared had been, and still was, if maintained by learned men, a great obstruction to the progress of Christianity’.266 The evidence of both Whiston and Haynes has to be treated with caution. Each is, in fact, claiming Newton for his own favoured belief. So too, in the years after his death, a host of orthodox Trinitarians, unwilling to admit that so respected a figure could have been tainted with heresy, did their best to deny his antitrinitarianism. In 1831, when he wrote his Life of Sir Isaac Newton, David Brewster had, as he was later to admit, ‘no hesitation in coming to the conclusion that he was a believer in the Trinity’.267 He argued that when, in his discussion of the inauthenticity of 1 John 5: 7, Newton pointed out that ‘for a long time . . . the faith subsisted without this text’, the context required that ‘faith’ there must mean ‘faith in the particular doctrine of the Trinity’.268 But that conviction was rudely overthrown by Brewster's examination of Newton's unpublished manuscripts in 1836, where he found expressions of opinion adverse to his own, and, as he judged, to those of the great majority of Newton's admirers. This clearly caused him great distress. He did include a number of Newton's previously unpublished writings in his later and larger work, but deliberately forbore from drawing any conclusions from them.70

265

W. Whiston, A Collection of Authentic Records (London, 1728 ), Pt. 2, 1077. In his Memoirs Whiston twice states that Newton thought the two witnesses in the Book of Revelation might be the Baptists and the Eusebians or Arians (London, 1749 : pp. 206 and 477).

266

See Richard Baron's preface to Thomas Gordon, A Cordial for Low Spirits (3rd edn; London, 1763 ), i, xviii. Newton may well have lamented the public nature of Clarke's Arianism, however close it may have been to his own views.

267

Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Edinburgh, 1855 ), ii. 340.

268

David Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac Newton (London, 1831 ), 283–4. [see p. 78 for n.

269

Brewster, Memoirs , i, preface, p. xv (‘What the gifted mind of Newton believed to be truth, I dare not pronounce to be error’); ii. 341.

269

]

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The increasing availability of an even more extensive range of manuscripts in the twentieth century has made possible more reliable judgements. L. T. More affirmed straightforwardly that ‘personally, Newton was an Arian’.269 H. Maclachlan (himself a Unitarian), writing in 1941, described Newton simply as a Unitarian; but by the end of the decade, on the basis of a study of the Keynes MSS, he had come to speak of him as ‘in general an Arian’.270 A more detailed study of the full range of the manuscripts led Frank Manuel to warn against any attempt to define the specific form of Newton's antitrinitarianism.271 But Richard Westfall, on the basis of the same evidence, confidently describes him as ‘an Arian in the original sense of the term’.272 The evidence on which any assessment has to be based is voluminous, but as scrappy as it is plentiful. It consists of jottings and reflections derived from Newton's extensive reading, as well as outlines (often in more than one draft) of more developed pieces of writing. But the main thrust of his thought is not too hard to unravel. Newton's basic approach is in full agreement with that of Locke. The scriptural revelation is fundamental. But, like Locke, Newton insists that that does not imply that all scriptural truth, let alone the more complex beliefs supposedly derived from Scripture, are essential for communion or salvation. What is necessary are only those truths taught from the very beginning as part of the prebaptismal catechism.273 Separation between Christians on any other issue is an offence against charity. ‘All the old heresies lay in deductions; the true faith was in the text’.274 The logical corollary of such a position for anyone who took his faith seriously was a thorough study of the New Testament. Locke had undertaken such a study of the gospels for his Reasonableness of Christianity and of St Paul for his Paraphrases. But even at the end of that process, he regarded Newton as far superior to him in that realm of study, speaking of his ‘great knowledge in the Scriptures, wherein I

269

L. T. More, Isaac Newton: a Biography (New York, 1934 ), 644.

270

H. Maclachlan, Religious Opinions of Milton, Locke and Newton (Manchester, 1941 ), 200; Sir Isaac Newton: Theological Manuscripts (Liverpool, 1950 ), 5.

271

F Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 1974 ), 58.

272

Westfall, Never at Rest , 315.

273

Keynes MS 3, Irenicum (C-H Reel 18. 82), pp. 1, 13, and 25 (Maclachlan, Theological Manuscripts , 29, 32–5. Maclachlan's version of the Irenicum, as Westfall points out (Never at Rest , 820 n. 127), is an amalgam of the various versions in this MS).

274

Yahuda MS 15, p. 11 (cited in Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton , 55).

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know few his equals’.275 Circumstances had indeed caused Newton to embark on an even more intensive course of study at a much earlier stage in his career. The requirement of ordination which was a condition for the continuation of his fellowship, and so of his career at Cambridge, was a cause of grave anxiety to Newton. For like Locke he felt acutely the discrepancy between what he read in the New Testament and the orthodoxy of the Church of England to which he would have to give public assent as an ordained minister. The immediate problem was eventually solved by a special dispensation from the requirement of ordination for holders of the newly founded Lucasian chair, but only after a three-year period from 1672 to 1675 during which he gave himself to theological study to the virtual exclusion of all his other studies.276 Where he differed from Locke was in his determination not only to clarify his understanding of Scripture, but also to understand just how and when that discrepancy had arisen. So his period of intensive study was devoted not just to Scripture, but to the writings of the Fathers of the second, third, and fourth centuries. The volume of his reading was prodigious, and he made extensive notes on his findings. On the scriptural side, a small number of texts or short passages stand out as controlling influences on his understanding of the person of Christ. By and large it is the same selection of scriptural evidence that had shaped Arian understanding in the fourth century. Most formative of all is 1 Cor. 8: 5–6, which speaks of ‘the one God, the Father, from whom are all things . . . and the one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things’.277 This provides Newton with his basic monotheistic premiss: there is one God, the Father. Newton generalizes the point by insisting that ‘whenever it is said in the Scriptures that there is one God, it means the Father’.278 But that does not preclude there being two divine realities to whom worship is due. ‘We

275

Letter from Locke to Peter King (The Correspondence of John Locke , vii. 772–4: no. 3275 of 30 April 1703).

276

Westfall, Never at Rest , 309–34.

277

1 Cor. 8: 5–6 is the basis of the confession of faith that provides the introduction to Eunomius' Apology (5), and the formal structure of the main body of the work. It is said by Basil (but probably erroneously), to go back to Arius himself (Adversus Eunomium 1. 4). Locke's Paraphrase brings out the same implications of the text that Newton does, but less explicitly. It reads: ‘there is but one god the father and author of all things to whom alone we address all our worship and service, and but one Lord viz Jesus Christ by whom all things come from god to us’ (i. 206).

278

Yahuda MS 14, p. 25 (this important text is reproduced in full in Westfall, Never at Rest , 315–16).

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are forbidden to worship two Gods, but we are not forbidden to worship one God and One Lord.’279 ‘We worship the Father as God, the Son as Lord’.280 What is crucial is that we recognize that this involves two distinct kinds of worship. It is evident, Newton argues, that the early Christians did follow such a principle; the one passage in Justin Martyr (1 Apology 6) which might seem to imply the full worship of Christ would, were that the correct interpretation, also apply to the angels and so incorporate them into the Christian Godhead—‘quod absit’.281 Any failure on our part to remember and act by the principle of dual worship lands us in the sin of idolatry, ‘a breach of the first and greatest commandment’,282 ‘a more dangerous crime’ than atheism.283 What then are the basis and the nature of this secondary, but distinctively Christian form of worship? Here Newton draws on two diverse strands of scriptural evidence, which do not seem to be fully integrated in his thought. The first of those two strands derives primarily from the Johannine prologue. One of the reasons for the writing of the gospel, Newton claims, was that ‘some heretics had taken Christ for a mere man and others for the supreme God’. In correcting such heretical views John, he argues, uses the word ‘Logos’ in the sense of the Platonists of the time to signify an intelligent being (indeed, in order to be a successful communicator, John had to use it in its current sense). Moreover, Newton adds, ‘the Arians understand it in the same sense and therefore theirs is the true sense of St John’.284 Elsewhere Newton prefers to emphasize a Jewish background to the idea of the Logos: Christ was the ‘Logos or Oracle of God’ who ‘gave laws to Adam, Noah and Moses’.285 In any case the stress is always on the distinct, personal, entitative character of the pre-existent Logos, who is the agent of creation. But the Johannine prologue differs from the Corinthians passage in using the word θεός of both these divine beings. Newton acknowledges this, but describes it as something that has never been denied or seen as a problem even by the most extreme

279

Yahuda MS 15, p. 46.

280

MS 438 (C-H 42. 310), p. 4.

281

Yahuda MS 1: 5: 2 (C-H 35. 245), pp. 3–4. For the passage from Justin, see p. 19 above.

282

Keynes MS 3 Irenicum (C-H 18. 82), p. 15 (Maclachlan, 35); Keynes MS 4, A History of the Nicene Council (C-H 18. 83), p. 14.

283

Keynes MS 7 (C-H 18. 83), p. 1 (Maclachlan, 49).

284

Yahuda MS 14, 25 (Westfall, 316).

285

Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 1, p. 9. Cf. Yahuda MS 15, pp. 96, 97.

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Arians of the ancient world.286 As with the distinct forms of worship, we have to acknowledge varying senses of the word θεός. ‘To give the name of God to Angels or Kings is not against the first commandment. To give the worship of the God of the Jews to Angels or Kings is against it’.287 Despite 1 Cor. 8: 5, the word ‘God’ is no more univocal, no more to be restricted to the supreme God, than is the word ‘worship’. But attention to the different senses in which it is used in different contexts is crucial. The unique character of the Son as a pre-existent being might seem to offer all that is needed to account for this secondary order of Christian worship. But that is not where Newton puts the main emphasis. The passage of Scripture which plays the primary role in determining his thought on the issue is the so-called Philippians hymn (Phil. 2: 5–11). In that passage worship of Christ is linked to the ‘name’ given him as the outcome of his humbling himself to undergo the death of the cross. It is a passage that played a bigger role in Socinian than in Arian thought. But Newton read the passage as affirming Christ's pre-existence. The ‘form of God’ ( ), the phrase used in the passage to describe Christ's initial status, refers to ‘the state of glory and dominion which he had before the incarnation’, whereby he was already the unique Son of God.288 But the exaltation, as again the passage implies, leads on to something more. ‘Equality with God’ ( ) is understood to refer to his ‘being worshipped as Lord’; and that was not true of him earlier but something assumed only after the incarnation and crucifixion.289 So in distinguishing the worship due to the ‘one God’ and the ‘one Lord’, Newton regularly distinguishes between the primary grounds for the offering of each of those two forms of worship: that offered to the one God or Father is for his creation of all things, that offered to the one Lord or Son is because he is the Lamb of God who was slain for us.290 This dual emphasis on creation and redemption finds expression not only in a contrast between God the Father and the Lord the Son. It

286

Keynes MS 4, A History of the Nicene Council (C-H 18. 83), p. 13: Deum Ariani impigre nominabant Christum, etiam qui inter ipsos perditissimi erant, Anomaei .

287

Keynes MS 8, Twelve Articles (C-H 18. 87), art. 11 (Maclachlan, 57). Cf. Yahuda MS 15, p. 47.

288

Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 1, p. 12.

289

Keynes MS 3, Irenicum (C-H 18. 82), p. 47.

290

Ibid. 13 (Maclachlan, 33). Cf. Keynes MS 8, Twelve Articles (C-H 18. 87), art. 12 (Maclachlan, 57). The influence of the book of Revelation, the book of the Bible most intensively studied by Newton, is evident at this point.

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is also an important characteristic in Newton's understanding of the Son himself. Another key text influencing the shape of Newton's reflection is John 5: 26 (‘As the Father has life in himself, so has he given the Son to have life in himself ’). The idea recurs continually, often in a form which highlights the priority of the Father. Thus we read: The Father is the ancient of days and has life in himself originally essentially and independently from all eternity, and has given the Son to have life in himself.291 The Son receives life from the Father; but he is the only recipient of life directly from God and is then the mediator of life to all others. And this is true in respect both of creation and redemption: Because the Word of God received life from the Father immediately, both before the world began and at his resurrection from the dead, therefore he is the Son of God in a sense peculiar to himself.292 Earlier in the same discussion this parallelism between the precosmic and historical origins of the Son is developed in a threefold form. There Newton speaks of how The nativity of his tangible body—whether before the world began or at his birth of the Virgin or at his resurrection was the nativity of the Son of God.293 The reference to a precosmic tangible body may seem surprising, but it is an integral part of Newton's belief. It is yet another feature of the secondariness of the Son. Only the Father with his λόγōς ἐνδιάθετōς is a pure spirit, invisible, intangible, and immoveable, being alike in all places and incapable of incorporation.294 As his wrestling with Jacob and his being handled by Thomas show, the Son had the same kind of body in his preincarnate and his post-resurrection states. It was not the body of an Angel or Spirit which hath not flesh and bones, but a body which by the power of his will he could form into the consistence of flesh and bones as well before his incarnation as after his resurrection.295

291

Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 1, p. 12. The other New Testament texts, in addition to John 5: 26, which Newton cites at this point form a catena familiar to any student of fourth-century Arianism (with supplementation from his own favourite book, Revelation): Rev. 1: 1; 5: 3, 5, 7, 9; Mark 13: 32; John 5: 19; 5: 22–3; 17: 3; 1 Tim. 2: 5; 1 Cor. 8: 5.

292

Ibid. 17.

293

Ibid. 11.

294

Ibid.

295

Ibid. 10. Cf. Yahuda MS 15, p. 97.

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Reflection on the scriptural teaching about Christ led Newton into much bolder and more detailed affirmations than it did Locke. And those affirmations are predominantly ‘Arian’ in character, in the sense that they understand the preexistent Christ as a distinct being of a secondary divine nature. But they also lay great stress on a worship of Christ as Lord, which is focused more on the dignity awarded to him after and on the basis of his redemptive death. That is something that has figured far less prominently in traditional understandings of Arianism, though some recent studies suggest that it may have been a more significant factor in the early fourth-century strands of that movement than has usually been recognized. In Newton's case it is the predominant emphasis. On occasion it is emphasized to the exclusion of any reference to Christ's pre-existence in a manner that helps to explain why he might sometimes have been regarded as more Socinian than Arian. Thus, in a short piece on Religion he defines ‘Our Religion to Jesus Christ’ in these terms: Jesus Christ a true man born of a woman was crucified . . . and by the same power by which God gave life at first to every species of animal being revived, he appeared to his disciples and explained to them Moses and the Prophets concerning himself, as that he was the Sun of righteousness spoken of by Malachi, the son of man and the Messiah spoken of by Daniel, the servant of God and lamb of God and Redeemer spoken of by Isaiah . . . and is gone into the heavens to receive a kingdom and prepare a place for us, and is mystically said to sit at the right hand of God, that is to be next to him in dignity, and is worshipped and glorified as the Lamb of God.296 Here Christ is portrayed not as the Word who spoke through the prophets, but simply as the man about whom the prophets spoke. As a careful student of Scripture, Newton found the pre-existence of Christ inescapable, but religiously it does not seem to have been of great importance to him. He enunciates the general principle that ‘God does nothing by himself which he can do by another.’ The Son is his agent for the tasks of creation and judgement. His distinctive title of ‘only-begotten Son’ derives from the fact that he alone has received life directly from the Father. But he is simply the agent of God, and ‘all other beings formed by the Son may be considered as the works of God's hand’.297 It was his redemptive death that was distinctively Christ's work, and the reason for his special worship. That it was the

296

Keynes MS 9 (C-H 18. 88), p. 1.

297

Matin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 1, p. 17. Cf. Yahuda MS 15, p. 97.

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pre-existent Son who died that death receives occasional emphasis.298 But at times, as in the passage just quoted, Newton seems content to see the crucifixion as the death of a man subsequently raised to the dignity of God's right hand, and made by God the legitimate object of our secondary worship. At such times a Socinian Christ seems to be all he feels the need to affirm. That such a measure of prima-facie inconsistency should appear in jottings made over many years and never prepared for publication or integrated into a single coherent treatment of the theme is hardly surprising.299 But though one might describe his religious position as predominantly Socinian, there is no doubt that his overall theological position is Arian rather than Socinian. Nor indeed is there any logical inconsistency in an ‘Arian’ belief in the pre-existence of a divine being, the agent of the Father's creative work, which none the less places its main religious stress on that divine being's redemptive self-giving in crucifixion and on the even greater glory given by the Father as the outcome of it. Newton went beyond Locke not only in the extent of his biblical studies, but also in his concern with the early Fathers. We need to review the outcome of those studies also if we are to evaluate more precisely the nature of any link between Newton and Arius or the early Arians. Newton tends to view the church of the second and third centuries through rose-tinted spectacles. Its great merit in his eyes was its freedom from credal tests. The charity of the first Christians is very conspicuous by their keeping in communion and friendship with one another all over the Roman Empire for above three hundred years together, excepting some ruffles made by those Jews who were so zealous of the law as to impose it upon believing Gentiles and by the bishops of Rome, Eleutherus, Victor and Stephen.300 This idyllic picture of mutual acceptance, marred only by a few little local difficulties, operated even in the case of the understanding of the nature of Christ, which was later to prove so contentious an issue. The Christians therefore who believed that Christ was before the world began were very much the greater number in the days of Justin Martyr and did not

298

See p. 91 below.

299

Dating all the various manuscripts would be an extremely difficult task, but Westfall dates one of the most explicitly ‘Arian’ statements to the time of his early theological studies, 1672–5 (Westfall, Never at Rest , 315).

300

Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 1, p. 5.

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look upon the Christians of the other opinion as heretics (i.e. Nazarenes) or think the difference between the two opinions material to the truth of the Christian religion.301 The closing words of that passage are highly significant for Newton's own self-understanding. He is well aware of the difference between what I have been calling an Arian and a Socinian understanding of Christ, but he does not regard it as religiously important. Elsewhere, indeed, he explicitly commends this attitude of the early Christians as one that ought to prevail in his own day. Having set out the early Christian view of Christ as a second God with a spiritual body and a God-given dominion over the human race, he concludes by saying that ‘if any man cannot believe all this, yet if he believes as much as the Nazarenes or primitive Christians of the circumcision believed’, he ought not to be excommunicated or condemned.302 The same principle lay behind the many drafts of his Irenicum.303 But he took a very different attitude towards any view of Christ which compromised the clear demarcation between Christ and the supreme God, thus involving the church in the great sin of idolatry. Justin Martyr was Newton's favourite example of this early dominant (but not exclusive) view of Christ as pre-existent; and Justin regarded the Son as ‘less than the Father’ in respect of his divinity and not only by virtue of his incarnation.304 Newton finds the same view clearly expressed in all the many ante-Nicene Fathers whose writings he surveys. Tertullian, he acknowledges, might be cited as linguistic justification for the adoption of the word ὁμooύσιōς at Nicaea, but in terms of belief, Newton claims, his description of the Son as part of the Father's substance shows him to be more extreme in stressing the secondariness of the Son than even Arius himself.305 Newton

301

Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 5/4 (italics added). Chs. 4 and 5 of On the Church are in an exceptionally confused and scrappy state, with many breaks and repetitions, including repeated chapter headings. They are also unpaginated, so that no precise form of reference is possible. The references given are to the nearest preceding heading. Yahuda MS 15, p. 122 has almost identical wording.

302

Yahuda MS 15, p. 97; Martin Bodmer MS (C-H 33), ch. 5/4.

303

See n. 75 above.

304

Keynes MS 4, A History of the Nicene Council (C-H 18. 83), p. 2: ‘Justinus Martyr unus ex antiquissimis qui quidem extra controversiam sunt, et ipse philosophus, minorem Patre filium posuit, non solum quatenus hominem se fecit, sed etiam divinitate et antequam humana se carne vestiret.’

305

The Fathers discussed are Athenagoras, Tatian, Theophilus, Irenaeus, the Clementine writings, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Dionysius of Alexandria, the episcopal letter about Paul of Samosata, Gregory of Neocaesarea, Methodius, Lucian, Tertullian, Novatian and Lactantius. For Tertullian, see ibid. 30 and 38.

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summarizes the findings from his studies of these early Fathers as revealing a common belief that the Logos was a distinct entity (no temporary sound or word) produced by the Father to be the agent of creation with dominion over all.306 And with that distinction in the understanding of the divine persons went an approriate distinction in the forms of worship to be given to each. In other words Newton's reading of the second- and third-century Fathers on this issue agreed with his reading of the Scriptures. But there was a snake in the grass introduced into that idyllic paradise. It took the form of an infiltration of Greek and Gnostic ideas. That influence was already at work in Justin himself, in ways about which Newton is clearly ambivalent. While himself siding, as we have seen, with an ‘Arian’ belief in a hypostatic pre-existent Logos, he is less confident about the appropriateness of speaking of a precosmic generation. That notion did not seem to him to have the same clear scriptural backing. In his view it was something we are unable to determine, nor indeed do we need to. He writes: Justin supposes according to the doctrine of Orpheus that this generation was not from all eternity but only before the world began, and that with respect to this antemundane generation Christ is called the Son of God; whereas in scripture he is called the Son of God with respect to his miraculous birth of a Virgin and his resurrection from the dead, and there is no mention in scripture of any other generation of the Son of God. John tells us, In the Beginning was the Word, but he does not tell us that he was begotten before or in the beginning. This opinion came partly from the words of John by deduction and partly from the theology of the heathens and whether it is true or false we cannot know without an express revelation, nor is it material to the Christian religion.307 Another, in Newton's eyes more dangerous, influence derived from a tendency within Platonism to interpret the Logos in immanentist rather than personalist terms. Its effect is already to be found at work in Clement of Alexandria and was to wreak havoc later on.308 And Gnostic speculations about that Logos immanent in the Father (λόγōς ἐνδιάθετōς) being later generated as a Son were equally perverse.309

306

Ibid. 44–5. Cf. Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 1, pp. 13–14.

307

Ibid., ch. 14 (incorporated in ch. 5/5a).

308

Ibid., ch. 4a.

309

Yahuda MS 15, pp. 89, 178. Cf. Newton's comment elsewhere: ‘The inherent powers and attributes of the Father are not his children’ (Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 4a).

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Such opinions did not derive ‘from the Apostles by tradition’; they were ‘brought into the Church from the theology of the heathens or Cabbalists in which learned men happened to be educated and instructed before they became Christians’.310 The fall to which these evil influences enticed the church is, rather surprisingly, not identified by Newton with the Council of Nicaea or the condemnation of Arius. Athanasius is the evil genius, but it is the mature and not the early Athanasius on whom the main burden of guilt is laid. There was a combination of three errors that resulted in the serious and permanent corruption of the church's doctrine. Athanasius is guilty on all three counts, but the first he shares with Arius, and the other two belong only to his later years. The first error was the posing of the issue of the relation of the Father and the Son in terms of substance or essence. And on that score Arius and Athanasius were both at fault. In Newton's view, ‘both of them perplexed the Church with metaphysical opinions in novel language not warranted by Scripture’.311 In making this contrast which is so fundamental to his whole position, Newton uses some variation in terminology. In one general statement of this basic error for which ‘philosophers, cabbalists and schoolmen’ bear the guilt, he describes it as a switch from ‘a moral and monarchical to a physical and metaphysical sense of scripture’.312 ‘Physical’ is not a term he uses often, but ‘moral’ and ‘monarchical’ are both widely used, often jointly or as virtual synonyms. But the two terms carry a slightly different emphasis. ‘Moral’ particularly recalls the Arian reading of John's gospel that Newton regarded as its ‘true sense’. It is there that Christ himself describes ‘the union between him and the father’ as ‘like that of the saints one with another. That is in agreement of will and counsel’.313 ‘Monarchical’ stresses the positive exercise of that power or dominion, implicit in the use of the title ‘Lord’ and brought out by the climax of the Philippians 2 passage. And that is the aspect of the matter which Newton emphasizes time and again, because it is, in his view, the key to correcting the prevailing misconstrual of the nature of the Son's divinity. Even Paul's condemnation of heathen worship of stocks and stones as idolatrous was, he claims, ‘not because they were creatures

310

Yahuda MS 15, p. 38.

311

Yahuda MS 15, p. 154 (cited in Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton , 58).

312

Yahuda MS 15, p. 97.

313

Yahuda MS 14, p. 25, Proposition 12 (Westfall, Never at Rest , 316).

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but because they were vanities destitute of power over us’.314 The proper category for elucidating the sense in which Father and Son are one, and for illuminating how it is that they are to be worshipped, is dominion and not substance. ‘'Tis not consubstantiality but power and dominion which gives a right to be worshipped.’315 The Philippians 2 passage makes that abundantly clear. Substance and essence are not ‘acquirable’. So the ‘name’ that Christ is given and which underlies the universal worship due to him cannot relate to substance or essence. Nor, if understood in that sense, is ‘equality with God’ even potentially obtainable by ‘rapine or violence’. The worship due to Christ is due to him as ‘a God over . . . creation: for deity and worship are relative terms’.316 And what the Philippians hymn expresses so forcefully is borne out by other passages in the New Testament. It is after the resurrection that ‘all power’ is given to Christ (Matt. 28: 19) and that he is ‘made Lord’ (Acts 2: 36).317 For Newton, the concept of dominion or lordship was scriptural in character, relational in the sense that it directly involves the lives and worship of human beings, while at the same time allowing for a gradation of primary and secondary, appropriate to the distinction between Father and Son. To move away from this essentially moral or monarchical concept and pose the question of the relation between the Father and the Son in metaphysical terms of substance and essence was a serious category mistake, and one that took the church away from the proper sense of Scripture. For Newton that lesson was not one taught only by Scripture. He found it clearly expressed in the book of nature also. In his famous General Scholium to the Principia, he argues that even in the case of bodily things ‘their inward substances are not to be known either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds; much less, then, have we any idea of the substance of God’, who is ‘utterly void of all body’. ‘We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivance of things, and final causes . . . God is a relative term . . . it is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God . . . a god without dominion, providence and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and nature.’318

314

Yahuda MS 15, p. 98.

315

Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 5/4. See also Yahuda MS 15, p. 154 (cited in Manuel, 60).

316

Keynes MS 2, On Phil. 2: 6 (C-H 18. 81), included as final page of Observations on the Works of Athanasius (Maclachlan, 130–1).

317

Keynes MS 3, Irenicum (C-H 18. 82), p. 47.

318

H. G. Alexander, The Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence (New York, 1956 ), 166–9.

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A passage from his writing On the Church sums up this fundamental conviction of Newton's religious thought with particular force and clarity. If the Father or Son be called God: they [men skilled in the learning of heathens, cabbalists, and schoolmen] take the name in a metaphysical sense, as if it signified God's metaphysical perfections of infinite eternal omniscient omnipotent: whereas it relates only to God's dominion over us to teach us obedience. The word God is relative and signifies the same thing with Lord and King but in a higher degree. As we say my Lord, our Lord, your Lord, the supreme Lord, the Lord of the earth . . . so we say my God, our God, your God, the supreme God, the God of the earth . . . but we do not say my infinite, our infinite, your infinite, the supreme infinite, the infinite of the earth. . . . When therefore the Father or Son are called God, we are to understand it not metaphysically but in a moral monarchical sense.319 The adoption of the word ὁμooύσιōς by the Fathers at Nicaea was a sadly misguided move. They allowed the unbaptized Constantine to impose it on the Council against the wishes of the majority.320 Their acceptance of it derived in part from Eusebius of Nicomedia's description of it as something implied in Alexander's teaching, to which Arius and his supporters were implacably opposed.321 It was that fact that attracted them to it; it was not their intention, in adopting it, to change the older doctrine. Compound words beginning ὁμō- generally indicate similarity rather than identity.322 The specific word ὁμooύσιōς itself was a relatively loose term. It was used ‘by heathen, Cabbalists and Gnostics of the relation of the soul to the supreme God’, so that on that basis one could ‘believe Christ to be of one substance with the Father without making him more than a mere man’.323 The natural and intended meaning of the term at the Council was ὁμōιōύσιōς—of similar, not identical substance. Newton even suggests that many of the bishops at Nicaea added the words (i.e. of

319

Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 5/4. See also Yahuda MS 15, pp. 98; 154. In each case the wording is almost identical. Manuel (p. 22) cites Yahuda MS 15, p. 154.

320

Keynes MS 11, Queries Regarding the Word ‘Homoousios’ (C-H 18. 90), nos. 4 and 5 (Maclachlan, 44–7).

321

Yahuda MS 2. 5b, pp. 40–41 (cited in Westfall, 314).

322

Newton cites not only the relatively obvious example of ὁμōπαθης (of like feelings), but also the much less obvious ὁμόνεκρōς (companion in death), and ὁμόφλōιōς (with like bark), (C-H 42. 308), p. 1. Liddell and Scott's entry under ὁμόφλōιōς reads simply: ‘v. sub ὁμōιόφλōιōς’.

323

Yahuda MS 15, p. 98 (cited in Manuel, 60). Cf. Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 5.

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similar substance) to their subscriptions of the Creed, with the approval of the Council.324 Thus, while the term was certainly an unfortunate one, the real damage was done by its later interpretation. The result of the term's coming to be understood in the narrower sense of identical substance was to remove the secondary status of the Son's deity and do away with the difference of the worships offered to the Father and to the Son. This involved the whole church in idolatry and constituted the great apostasy of which the New Testament gives prophetic warning. Two factors gave rise to this disastrous misinterpretation. The first was the mistranslation of the term into Latin by Hosius. Unius substantiae could only convey the false sense of identical substance.325 This led to such a misunderstanding of the Council of Nicaea on the part of the West, that the range of views regarded by the Western church as ‘Arian’ in fact included the true meaning of the Nicene Creed itself.326 The later Latin Fathers (Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine) and the evil influence of the papacy (guilty of so many other forms of idolatry also) ensured that this misinterpretation became the established teaching of the Western church.327 But Athanasius was also to blame. The Council of Nicaea did not distinguish between ōὐσία and ὑπόστασις.328 Nor did Athanasius until the reign of Julian. Without any such distinction the Son must have the character of an ὐσία or ὑπόστασις deriving from the ὐσία or ὑπόστασις of the Father. So in that early period, when he made no distinction between the words, Athanasius did not stray very far from the truth. But in Julian's reign, and more specifically at the Council of Alexandria, when he introduced a distinction between the two terms, he was palpably untruthful (aperte mendax).329 Moreover, the effect of that shift was to set on foot a belief in the equality of the substances of the Father and the Son.330 The resultant

324

Keynes MS 11, Queries Regarding the Word ‘Homoousios’ (C-H 18. 90), no. 6 (Maclachlan, 44. Maclachlan mistakenly prints ὁμooύσιōς for ὁμōιōύσιōς Yahuda MS 15, pp. 8, 49–51, 117; Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 3.

325

Keynes MS 11, Queries Regarding the Word ‘Homoousios’ (C-H 18. 90), no. 7 (Maclachlan, 44–5).

326

Ibid., no. 9 (Maclachlan, 45).

327

Of the twenty-two queries regarding the word ‘Homoousios’, 1–6 deal with the Council and the time before it, 7–14 with the subsequent interpretation of the word, and 15–22 with the growth of papal power.

328

Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 2, p. 37.

329

Keynes MS 2, Observations on Athanasius' Works (C-H 18. 81), 2. (Abbreviated Eng. trans. in Maclachlan, 130). Cf. Martin Bodmer MS, On the Church (C-H 33), ch. 6, p. 51.

330

Keynes MS 11, Queries Regarding the Word ‘Homoousios’ (C-H 18. 90), no. 12 (Maclachlan, 45).

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‘doctrine of the Athanasians’ is, he claims, constituted by two tenets: (i) that the Son is the mind or wisdom of the Father, without which the Father would lack wisdom, and (ii) that the Father and Son are a single ὑπόστασις or substance, so that the Son is not a distinct ὑπόστασις deriving from the ὑπόστασις of the Father but is related to the Father as a human mind is to a human person.331 The moment of that doctrine's triumph was the Council of Constantinople in 381. That year ‘was without all controversy that in which this strange religion of the west first overspread the world. And so the Earth and they that dwell therein began to worship the Beast and his Image’. It was also ‘the first [year] of the Great Apostasy’.332 Differentiating between ōὐσία and ὑπόστασις, which in Newton's view led on to a modalist view of the Trinity utterly repugnant to a truly scriptural view of God, was not the only change in Athanasius' opinions to which he draws attention. Equally sinister in Newton's eyes was the introduction of the idea of a human soul in Christ, distinct from the Logos. This, Newton insists, is not to be found in any of Athanasius' early writings—not even in ‘the five lengthy Orations against the Arians written in the last year of Constantine's reign’. Nor was Arius' view exceptional; it was the universal view. It is Athanasius who is the innovator, introducing the idea at a relatively late stage in his career solely to make a case against Arius' insistence on the passibility of the Logos which it was impossible for him to do in terms simply of Christ's body.333 But the innovation undermines a basic aspect of Christian faith. It is not only that it asserts something not explicitly taught by the Apostles; more importantly, it does away with the great truth that it was the preexistent Word who was made flesh and took on him the form of a servant, the Son of God who suffered and died for us.334 If Athanasius in his later years was thus contradicting Scripture, the whole of the ante-Nicene tradition, and even the broad intention of Nicaea itself, it might seem surprising that he should have proved so successful. One factor contributing to the triumph of Athanasianism was, in Newton's view, the influence of the papacy, using its jurisdictional powers to enforce the new doctrine. Another, in which

331

MS 436 (C-H 42. 308), p. 1.

332

Yahuda MS 1. 1. 4 (C-H 34. 241), p. 50. On other occasions Newton gives other dates for the beginning of ‘the Great Apostasy’.

333

Keynes MS 2, Observations on Athanasius' Works (C-H 18. 81), 1. (Abbreviated Eng. trans. in Maclachlan, 129–30).

334

Yahuda MS 14, p. 25 (Westfall, 316).

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Athanasius was more directly involved, was the corruption of evidence to make it appear that the new doctrine was much older than it really was. The two scriptural texts whose authenticity Newton had discussed with Locke were both key texts used in support of Trinitarian doctrine.335 In an accompanying letter Newton listed a further twenty-eight texts, almost all of which had, he believed, been changed to give a Trinitarian sense in the fourth century in the course of the Arian controversy.336 Although Newton frequently charges Athanasius with forgery, he does not accuse him personally of corrupting the scriptural evidence. The accusations directed against Athanasius himself are related rather to patristic texts and to matters of historical evidence. Many of the letters to which Athanasius appeals in his own defence were, in Newton's view, forgeries.337 The Dionysian correspondence, Newton argues, makes sense only in a post-Nicene context and is largely an Athanasian composition.338 And the tale of the death of Arius, with its resemblance to that of Judas, which Athanasius reports as evidence of divine judgement on his impiety was, Newton concludes, something that Athanasius had invented.339 Newton's attitude emerges as passionately anti-Athanasian rather than pro-Arian. Arius is a figure of no great interest to him. But Athanasius was the prime cause of that doctrinal corruption of the church, which caused such practical embarrassment to Newton personally as well as frustrating the purposes of God. Positively, Newton saw himself as a faithful follower of primitive Christianity, which was taught by Scripture and to a large degree practised by the church of the second and third centuries. And that primitive Christianity was, as Whiston observed with reference to Newton in a way Newton would have been reluctant to do, not very different from what had for many centuries been designated ‘Arianism’.340 Newton's influence on the Arian revival of the early eighteenth century was twofold. Like Locke, his general philosophy fostered a

335

See p. 76 above.

336

The Correspondence of Isaac Newton , ed. Turnbull, iii. 129–42, esp. p. 138. (See my ‘Newton and the Bible’ in S. E. Balentine and J. Barton (eds.), Language, Theology and The Bible (Oxford, 1994 ), 349).

337

Keynes MS 10, Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and his Followers (C-H 18. 89), questions 7–10 (Maclachlan, 80–91). The documents referred to are the letters of Pinnes, Arsenius, and Ischyras, and the Recantation of Valens and Ursacius.

338

Yahuda MS 1. 5. 3 (C-H 35. 245), 5–6.

339

Keynes MS 10, Paradoxical Questions (C-H 18. 89), Q1, p. 5.

340

See p. 77 above.

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style of intellectual approach that led, and was seen to lead, in that direction. But in Newton's case there may well have been a more direct influence as well. The two leading figures in the early years of that Arian debate were two of his closest scientific colleagues, William whiston and Samuel Clarke. Although Newton deplored the openness with which they avowed their convictions and deliberately distanced himself from them in consequence,341 it is difficult to believe that the similarity of their views to his was simply a matter of their having pursued the same basic methods of study. It seems more probable that Newton shared with them in the intimacy of private discussion at least some of his theological concerns, even their more heretical aspects. If so, it is an intimacy that they respected, and the extent of any debt to him of that more specific kind can only be a matter of conjecture.342 But a few clues to such discussions do survive. Writing after Newton's death, Whiston refers explicitly to one occasion, at the time when his own doubts about orthodoxy had first been raised, on which he had ‘a conference with Mr Newton’ from which he ‘returned much more inclined to what has been of late called Arianism’.343 He also records how a little later he encouraged Clarke to ‘advise with Sir Isaac Newton’ in order to clarify his mind on the same issues and determine the appropriate action to be taken.344 These accounts certainly suggest that Whiston and Clarke looked to Newton as a guide in religious as well as in scientific matters. In any case, whatever they may have learnt from Newton they made fully their own. Their views are of sufficient interest and importance to merit separate treatment.

The Public Arianism of William Whiston William Whiston was appointed, on Newton's recommendation, to succeed him in the Lucasian chair at Cambridge in 1703.345 Whiston

341

Newton e.g., gave Whiston no support when he was dismissed from the Lucasian chair for Arian heresy, and later as President of the Royal Society blackballed attempts to have him elected. Newton's biographer in the Biographia Britannica (1760 ), v. 3241, attributes Newton's behaviour to his displeasure at being called an Arian, and cites Whiston's Memoirs in evidence. But while Whiston acknowledges that his being a heretic was part of the problem, he himself attributes Newton's personal opposition to his dislike of anyone who dared to contradict him (pp. 292–4).

342

See Westfall, Never at Rest , 649–51.

343

Historical Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Dr Samuel Clarke (London, 1730 ), 13.

344

Ibid. 17. See p. 114 below.

345

On Whiston as a man of science and religion, see J. E. Force, William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (Cambridge, 1985 ).

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had already published work in theology as well as in mathematics. His early theological interests seem, like Newton's, to have been concentrated on biblical chronology and the fulfilment of prophecy. But soon after his appointment to Cambridge he discovered that Samuel Clarke (whom he had first met through shared scientific interests and who had subsequently followed him, on his recommendation, as chaplain to the Bishop of Norwich), ‘had been looking into the Primitive writers, and began to suspect that the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity was not the doctrine of those early ages’.346 An intensive and extensive study of the Fathers, together with his reading of Ellies Dupin's Nouvelle bibliothèque des auteurs ecclesiastiques . . . des trois premiers siècles de l'Eglise (1687–91)347 and Brocklesby's Explication of Gospel Theism (1706),348 soon convinced Whiston of the truth of Clarke's suspicions. Whiston had been ordained in 1693, so he stood in a somewhat different position from that in which Newton had found himself in relation to the dawning of that same conviction. But the dramatic difference in their respective responses to it was a matter more of the difference of their temperaments than of their ecclesiastical status. Whiston made no attempt to conceal his findings, and word soon got round to his friends that he had ‘become a heretical Arian’.349 Then on 17 July 1708, he wrote to the two archbishops acquainting them of his findings and seeking their counsel about how his views might best be assessed and appropriate changes made in the ordering of the church's life.350 The two archbishops, Tenison of Canterbury and Sharp of York, were men of broader sympathies than most of the other bishops; they had both studied at Cambridge and come under the influence of the Cambridge Platonists. Whiston may have felt that they would not be unduly hostile to his views.351 But there was never any chance that Whiston

346

Whiston, Life of Samuel Clarke , 12.

347

Ibid. 13. On Dupin's book, see M. Slusser, ‘Traditional Views of Late Arianism’, in M. R. Barnes and D. H. Williams (eds.), Arianism after Arius (Edinburgh, 1993 ), 18–19. The book caused much opposition in Roman Catholic circles at the time and was finally put on the index in 1757.

348

Whiston, Primitive Christianity Revived , i. An Historical Preface (London, 1711 ), pp. iv–v. The particular influence of Brocklesby's book was that it introduced Whiston to the notion that Christ had no human soul.

349

Whiston, Memoirs (London, 1749 ), 139.

350

Historical Preface , pp. xvi–xix.

351

An anecdote told by Thomas Emlyn indicates that Sharp was one of those who were unhappy with the use of the Athanasian Creed in the liturgy (S. Emlyn, ‘Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Emlyn’, in T. Emlyn, Works (London, 1746 ), vol. i., p. lviii–lix). But Sharp had by this time moved much further from his early latitudinarian views than Tenison had done.

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would receive the response he hoped for; nor did he. Both archbishops advised strongly against the immediate publication of his findings, which they felt could only be disruptive of the good order of the church; but to no avail. William Lloyd too, the learned Bishop of Worcester who had ordained Whiston and helped him in the early stages of his career, was equally dissuasive and equally unsuccessful.352 In the final letter of a nine-month correspondence between them, Whiston reiterated his underlying conviction in uncompromising terms: I am abundantly satisfied that the Arian doctrines are those delivered by our Saviour and his Apostles and all the first Christians till philosophy from the ancient heretics, particularly from Tertullian, prevailed at Rome, the seat of Antichrist; and thence spread like a torrent over the Christian Church.353 Lloyd, Whiston complained, never answered that letter. But three weeks later, on 4 May 1709, Lloyd wrote sadly to Archbishop Sharp: having known [Whiston] many years, I always took [him] to be an humble, modest good man; and was pleased with his more than ordinary inquisitiveness; till I found that by the discoveries he had made, some true, and other only imaginary, he was shot up to such a pitch of self conceit that now everything he fancies he takes to be true, and thinks himself as certain in every little of it, as if he had it all by divine revelation. And, as being such, thinks himself obliged to go on with them and to publish them whatsoever it may cost him.354 The cost was indeed to be great. It soon became clear that Whiston's views were in fact so unacceptable to the great majority of people that in the University he was removed from his professorship in 1710 and in Convocation he was the subject of sustained attacks for the next four years.355 He was 43 years old when he was dismissed from his chair, and was unable to secure gainful employment again for the remaining forty-two years of his life. But throughout that time he never wavered in his beliefs or in his determination to make them as widely known as possible. His fundamental position, as his letter to Lloyd makes clear and the more detailed evidence to follow will reveal

352

Their lengthy correspondence is recorded in Historical Preface , pp. xxiii–liii.

353

Historical Preface , pp. xlix–l, liv.

354

Cited in A. T. Hart, William Lloyd 1627–1717 (London, 1952 ), 244, in an appendix devoted to the correspondence between Lloyd and Whiston.

355

For a detailed account of those attacks, see E. Duffy, “ ‘Whiston's Affair”: The Trials of a Primitive Christian’, JEH 27 (1976 ), 128–9.

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more fully, was remarkably close to that of Isaac Newton;356 but in Whiston's case it found detailed public expression in a long series of scholarly treatises and polemical pamphlets. In the long-running debate that ensued, the primacy of Scripture is universally acknowledged by both sides, with reason and tradition as subsidiary norms given varying degrees of secondary authority. Two textual points figure frequently—the authenticity or inauthenticity of I John 5: 7 and the variant readings of I Tim. 3: 16 (θεός, ἅς or ὁ), the two texts about which Newton had written at such length and on which Locke had so nearly got him to publish his findings.357 But the primary issue was one of scriptural interpretation rather than of scriptural text. Whiston did not himself do much in that field. There Samuel Clarke's Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity was to become the crucial work.358 In that work Clarke frequently supports his interpretation of the texts cited by reference to the writings of the Fathers. That is the area to which Whiston devoted the bulk of his studies. For the most part he saw the ante-Nicene Fathers as faithful to scriptural teaching, though expressing it in an alien philosophical idiom for which he himself had little predilection. But on the fundamental issue that the Father alone is supreme God and the Son a secondary divine being, no shift of intention was to be detected. When the ante-Nicene Fathers did speak of the eternity of the Logos, it was only a metaphysical existence in potentia that they envisaged and not the later concept of the coeternal existence of a distinct personal Son.359 The real corruption of Christian truth belonged to the fourth century, even though presages of it were to be found earlier. Stricter Unitarians acknowledged the same picture but evaluated it differently. For them the ante-Nicene Fathers, like Justin and Origen, had already deserted scriptural teaching by introducing the novel idea of personal pre-existence in their misguided attempts to give Christ higher honour, and had strengthened their case by destroying earlier Ebionite writings—only for their Arian successors to be upstaged in the same way later on by the Nicenes.360 What is more surprising is that basically the same reading of the underlying facts of the case is to be found in some Roman Catholic

356

The similarity of their views is particularly noticeable in their assessments of Athanasius and Arius.

357

See p. 76 above.

358

See pp. 111–13 below.

359

Historical Preface p. vii; Primitive Christianity Revived , iv. 128–9.

360

See Stephen Nye, A Brief History of Unitarianism (London, 1687), 28–9.

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scholars, most notably Petavius. Petavius believed that the teaching of those early Christian scholars on the nature of the Trinity was in error—but understandably so since the issue was still ambiguous, not yet having been clarified or determined as it was to be later at the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea. Such a view was anathema to all parties in the English debate. In putting the whole weight on the decision of an ecumenical council, such teaching was seen as part of a ‘sly Jesuitical design’, serving to ‘promote the papal (rather than the Arian) interest’ by lending support to those who wished to insist on the authority of the Council of Trent.361 Neither side in the British debate was prepared to accept the risk of an argument that might carry so unwelcome a conclusion. Avoidance of Romanism was an important part of the hidden agenda of the whole discussion. So the orthodox had to find their orthodoxy not only in Scripture but in the ante-Nicene Fathers as well.362 It was not an easy task. Whiston could point to the difficulty Bishop Bull had found in providing an orthodox interpretation of, for example, Justin Martyr or Theophilus.363 He himself, on the other hand, was free to accept Petavius' historical judgements on the ante-Nicene Fathers; it was Petavius' evaluation of Nicaea, and his theological judgements on those earlier Fathers in the light of that evaluation, to which he objected. Petavius was right to acknowledge the difference between their teaching and that of Nicaea, but that was not because writers like Justin Martyr or Origen were in error. Whiston's very different evaluation of them led him to describe them as ‘those great patrons of the old Christian doctrine, against the Athanasian heresy, even before it was broached’.364 In his eyes it was the Council of Nicaea that was suspect, the introduction of the word ὁμooύσιōς (of one substance) there being the first step on the slippery slope that led to Trent.365 Nevertheless, Whiston's overall evaluation of Nicaea was not as negative as that account, or the designation of him as an ‘Arian’, might lead us to expect.366 The designation ‘Arian’ was not one that he would

361

G. Bull, Defence of the Nicene Creed (London, 1851 ), i. 11. See also A. Thirlby, An Answer to Mr Whiston's Suspicions Concerning Athanasius (London, 1712 ), p. lxxxv.

362

That was still the case more than a century and a half later. A question set for an examination paper for the Oxford Theology School in 1878 reads: ‘Show, with instances, that the ante-Nicene Christian writers held Nicene doctrines.’

363

Primitive Christianity Revived , iv. 237 ff.

364

Second Letter to the Bishop of London Concerning the Primitive Doxologies (London, 1719 ), 48.

365

Advice for the Study of Divinity (London, 1709 ), 267.

366

One of his essays bears the title ‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated from the Athanasian Heresy’.

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himself have chosen, but neither was it one that he felt able to refuse.367 For him it was essential to distinguish two senses in which the word ‘Arianism’ can be understood. The first he regularly describes as ‘gross Arianism’ or ‘those novel doctrines and language which Arius himself, and his peculiar followers, introduced’.368 With that he had little sympathy. Nicaea was right to condemn it. The second was the teaching of that broad band of fourth-century antiAthanasians who are more accurately described as Eusebians,369 and who, in Whiston's view, would be even better described simply as Christians370 or ‘honest old Christians’.371 But he recognized that the name ‘Arian’ was given to them in the fourth century and had stuck to them ever since.372 The injustice of that designation was clearly evidenced for him by the readiness of the Eusebians to condemn Arianism proper373 and their unwillingness to readmit Arius to communion until he had withdrawn his novel assertions.374 But the usage was of such long standing and so universal that he was prepared to accept it—provided the necessary qualification was made. One of his complaints about Clarke's Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity was that Clarke fails to make the distinction and criticizes ‘the Arians’ when he should have made it clear that his objection was really directed only against ‘gross Arianism’.375 Clarke, always more cautious than Whiston, objected to any use of the term except to refer to someone who held ‘the particular doctrines of Arius’.376 Whiston, while allowing the wider usage, certainly saw a vast difference between the two uses of the word. It was Arian doctrines only in their Eusebian form of which he declared himself ‘abundantly satisfied that [they] are those delivered by our Saviour and his Apostles, and all the first Christians’.377 What then constitutes the ‘rashness’ of Arius, from which Whiston was so anxious to distance himself? It is summed up in three phrases from the anathemas attached to the Creed of Nicaea—

367

Historical Preface , second appendix, 38.

368

‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, in Three Essays (London, 1713 ), 4.

369

For the same judgement by a modern scholar on purely historical grounds, cf. the remark of J. Lienhart: ‘As a historical phenomenon it would be most accurate to call the “Arian” theology “Eusebian’ ”. (‘The “Arian” Controversy: Some Categories Reconsidered’, Theological Studies , 48 (1987 ), 419.)

370

‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated,’ 4.

371

Primitive Christianity Revived , iii. 154.

372

‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, 27–8. See also Primitive Christianity Revived , iv. 178.

373

‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, 16.

374

Historical Preface , second appendix, 14.

375

See p. 116 below.

376

S. Clarke, Reply to Mr Nelson (London, 1714 ), 220.

377

See p. 95 above.

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(there was when he was not), (before he was begotten he was not), and ἐξ ōὐκ ἄντων (out 378 of nothing). They are rash because they try to pronounce on the time and the nature of the Son's derivation from the Father, themes on which Scripture provides no clear teaching. Nicaea was therefore right in its negative reaction to those assertions. But in seeking to replace them by (from the substance)379 and ὁμooύσιōς (of one substance) it fell into the same trap. As philosophical statements they may possible be true, but they have no rightful place in a statement of the substance of Christian faith. Thus ‘the Council of Nicaea, and Arius with his peculiar followers, were both highly to blame.’380 But though ‘highly to blame’ in terms of method, the Council was not seriously at fault in terms of the content of what it affirmed. It was not affirming a coequal Trinity.381 Such an idea was ‘not so much as dreamt of there’.382 In denying that there was when the Son was not, it did nothing to establish a full personal coeternity of the Son. Rather it was confirming the established ante-Nicene view that the Son's derivation from the Father was pretemporal, that is prior to the creation of the world, and that he might be thought of as potentially existent in or an attribute of the Father.383 In denying that he was made out of nothing, it was only denying that he was made in the same way that everything else was made. The careful avoidance of such a view by insisting that Christ was a creature but not as one of the other creatures is attributed to the Eusebians and Eunomians.384 It is not directly credited to Arius himself, the justice of the charge against him personally being left an open question.385 The understanding of Christ as κτιστός (created) was, he affirms, not condemned. It could hardly have been, in the light of the long-standing tradition of the exegesis of

378

Historical Preface , second appendix, 12; Reply to Dr Allix (London, 1711 ), 36; ‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, 7, 11; ‘A Collection of Ancient Monuments Relating to the Trinity and Incarnation and to the History of the Fourth Century Church’, in Three Essays (London, 1713 ), 140.

379

Historical Preface , 77–8; ‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, 7.

380

Historical Preface , second appendix, 13.

381

‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, 9–10.

382

Primitive Christianity Revived , iv. 77.

383

‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, 11–12; ‘A Collection of Ancient Monuments’, 142.

384

‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, 13.

385

Historical Preface , second appendix, 46–7. That Whiston has no good grounds for distancing himself from the specific figure of Arius on this score is rightly pointed out by E. Welchman, A Conference with an Arian Occasioned by Mr Whiston's Reply to the Earl of Nottingham (Oxford, 1721 ), 7–8.

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Prov. 8: 22.386 The impression that it was is entirely due to an Athanasian forgery, adding the words ἢ κτιστόν (or created) to the text of the anathemas.387 The adoption of the word ὁμooύσιōς was not intended to do more than reinforce the denial of ἐξ ōὐκ ἄντων. It is true that it was an unfortunate term to use, having entered the church by the tainted route of Tertullianic philosophy and Roman patronage. But its essentially negative intention at Nicaea is borne out by the immediate cause for its adoption, namely its expediency as an anti-Arian device in the light of Eusebius of Nicomedia's expressed abhorrence of it.388 As far as any more positive signification goes, Whiston insisted that ‘the sense of the Council in using [that] ambiguous word was not distinct and determinate’.389 As John Jackson, a close supporter of Whiston and Clarke, was to put it, if the Fathers at Nicaea had intended the fuller sense of identity insisted upon by modern orthodoxy, they could and would have used the term ταὐτooύσιōς (of the same substance). But they did not, because that would have constituted Sabelliansim, which was the true character of what was being affirmed in the contemporary church under the guise of orthodoxy.390 What is perhaps the even more difficult phrase from Whiston's point of view, ‘very God of very God’, does not seem to have figured in his historical discussions, though he acknowledges that it is one of the phrases in the Nicene Creed that he was unwilling to say when it was to be recited in the church service, and it is omitted in his own proposed revision of the liturgy.391 Such an understanding of the Council is, he claims, confirmed by the writings of Alexander and Athanasius themselves. Alexander's description of the Only-Begotten as of a middle nature between the unbegotten Father and the created order shows that he had himself preached the same doctrine as Arius and that he probably had private reasons for proceeding against him.392 The early writings of

386

Historical Preface , second appendix, 47.

387

Athanasius Convicted of Forgery in a Letter to Mr Thirlby (London, 1712), 21–9 (revised version in ‘Collection of Ancient Monuments’, 196–203). For a modern defence of Whiston's claim, see M. F. Wiles, ‘A Textual Variant in the Creed of the Council of Nicaea’, in SP 26 (Leuven, 1993 ), 428–33.

388

Primitive Christianity Revived , iv. 191–3.

389

‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, 15.

390

J. Jackson, A Reply to Waterland's Defence (London, 1722 ), 343–4. See also A. Sykes, The Case of Subscription to the 39 Articles Considered (London, 1722 ), 40; A Reply to Dr Waterland's Supplement to the Case of Arian Subscription (London, 1722 ), 6.

391

See p. 104 below.

392

Primitive Christianity Revived , iv. 194; ‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, 16–17.

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Athanasius, especially the Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione, tell the same story.393 Indeed, even in the Contra Arianos (2. 10) Athanasius is to be found speaking of the Father, in contradistinction from the Son, as ‘alone indeed and really the true God’.394 So the villain of the piece is neither Nicaea nor the early Athanasius. But if it is only the later Athanasius who plays the role of villain, the degree of villainy amply compensates for the delay in his emergence in those colours. The ‘orthodoxy’ or ‘antichristianism’ (the terms are synonomous for Whiston) that establishes itself in the later fourth century is largely his doing and is rightly known by his name. But it is not only the antichristian substance of Athanasianism that is the object of Whiston's attack, it is also the method by which he went about getting it accepted; it is the character as well as the doctrine of Athanasius that was suspect. Just as Newton had published a work entitled Paradoxical Questions Concerning the Morals and Actions of Athanasius and his Followers,395 so Whiston similarly provides a list of seventeen Suspicions Concerning Athanasius.396 He is particularly concerned with the question of forgery, describing Athanasius not only as an ‘ignorant and pernicious heretic’397 but also more specifically as ‘an ignorant forger’ or ‘a notorious forger and liar’.398 In addition to the claimed tampering with the anathemas at Nicaea, already mentioned but not itself included among the seventeen suspicions, Whiston throws doubt on the genuineness of the account of Arius' death399 (still being appealed to by Bishop Bull as a ‘signal example of divine vengeance’400) and of the anti-Arian citations from Origen, Dionysius, and Theognostus,401 in addition he suggests that Athanasius may knowingly have quoted spurious versions of the Epitome of the Apostolic Constitutions and the Ignatian Epistles.402 His final summary is an example of one of his wilder judgements: Athanasianism is no other than a remote branch of Montanism, as conveyed down in Galatia and Ancyra to the heretic Marcellus, and by him to his known friend and companion Athanasius.403

393

‘A Collection of Ancient Monuments’, 23–6; cf. ‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, 16.

394

Primitive Christianity Revived , iv. 48–9.

395

See p. 92 above.

396

Historical Preface , pp. cxvi–cxxvii.

397

Letter to Robert Nelson of 31 July 1710 (Barker MSS, Leicester Public Record Office (DE 730/2), no. 97).

398

Memoirs , 178, 601.

399

See also ‘A Collection of Ancient Monuments’, 98–100.

400

Bull, Defence of the Nicene Creed , ii. 665.

401

See also ‘A Collection of Ancient Monuments’, 90, 88–9, 81–2.

402

Ibid. 111–12.

403

Historical Preface , p. cxxvii.

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Nevertheless, some of his accusations are justified. What is primarily to be said in Whiston's favour is that he was prepared to practise a hermeneutic of suspicion in relation to Athanasius, which so many of his contemporaries were totally unwilling to entertain but without which it is impossible to achieve any satisfactory understanding of the fourth century. In Whiston's view Athanasius and Arius were equally ill suited to make a positive contribution to the cause of Christ's church, but Athanasius did more damage than Arius because he was the one who triumphed. Speaking of Athanasius, Whiston writes: I confess I neither like his character nor behaviour; no more than I do those of his antagonist Arius; they both seeming to me cut out for the disturbance of the Church of Christ; and to have been neither of them masters of learning and temper enough to become so considerable among those less knowing or more modest than themselves.404 What then of the Eusebians with whom Whiston so closely identifies himself? Even here not everything is entirely straightforward. In his earlier writings he recognizes that it is Eusebius of Nicomedia after whom the Eusebians are named. But he is not entirely comfortable about the fact, as there are aspects of that Eusebius' conduct about which he is unhappy.405 And so later we find him describing Eusebius of Nicomedia as ‘head of the gross Arians’, and ‘the great Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea’ as ‘head of the genuine Eusebians’.406 Yet even the Bishop of Caesarea, though all along much admired, was not altogether without blemish in Whiston's eyes. Whiston sees him, as he saw many of the anteNicene Fathers despite his overall commendation of them, as being ‘in some measure influenced by the notions of his own times, distinct from the proper testimonies and evidences for them’. His acceptance of the Creed of Nicaea was problematic. It was not to be held seriously against him, since he did properly satisfy himself that an acceptable and traditional sense could be given to it before signing. But Whiston suspected, no doubt with justice, that another motive also had a part to play in his decision to sign—fear of the deprivation of his see.407 And that for Whiston was a

404

Primitive Christianity Revived , iv, appendix, 17.

405

‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, 4.

406

A Collection of Original Texts of Scripture and Testimonies of Antiquity that Relate to Christian Discipline (London, 1739 ), 41.

407

Primitive Christianity Revived , iv, appendix, 16. Eusebius' behaviour in this respect is used as a taunt by an orthodox opponent in the context of the subsequent debate about subscription to the Articles. ‘The doctrine and practice of subscribing contrary to one's beliefs shall, with your good leave, go under the name of Eusebianism’ (Welchman, A Conference with an Arian , 6). Cf. also D. Waterland, The Case of Arianism Considered (1721 ), in Works (Oxford, 1823 ), ii. 357.

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serious blemish. Whiston's experience had taught him that appointment to episcopal office often bred a reluctance to support, or even to tolerate, views which the bishop himself had regarded with sympathy in the past. He is scathing in his condemnation of his erstwhile friend, Benjamin Hoadly, as one whose mind had been corrupted by episcopal preferment.408 And in a letter to William Wake, five years after his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury, Whiston tells Wake that he will ‘sorely lament your fall from your old pure and peacable Christianity as did the Athanasians the fall of the great Hosius from their novel and pernicious heresy’ and quotes the comment of a visiting Italian Protestant: Happy is that man who is not made a worse Christian by being made a Bishop and thrice happy that man who is not made a much worse Christian by being made an Archbishop.409 Nevertheless, Whiston himself did not express unqualified opposition to the ways of the Church of England. He continued for a long time to worship and receive communion there—despite being refused communion at his parish church of St Andrew's Holborn for over a year (1710–11),410 and again being publicly asked to leave the church in the middle of a service there in 1719.411 The offering of worship to the Son was no problem; it was acceptable to Whiston (as to the strict Socinians) provided it was fully understood that it was worship in a secondary sense, worship (as Origen had insisted long before) whose ultimate destination, whether the fact be made explicit or not, was the Father, the only true object of worship in the strictest sense of that

408

Memoirs , 243–5. Hoadly was successively Bishop of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury, and Winchester.

409

Letter of Whiston to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 18 May 1721 (Barker MSS, Leicester Public Record Office, DE730/2, no. 114). An example of the radical nature of Wake's very early views is shown by an unpublished MS, dated 3 March 1675/6, which defends a Socinian reading of the New Testament evidence on the Trinity as being just as reasonable as an orthodox one; the latter would commend itself only to ‘one that takes Athanasius's Creed for Scripture, because its sometimes bound up with it’ (Christ Church Arch. W. No. 268, p. 3).

410

See E. F. Carpenter, Thomas Tenison (London, 1948 ), 306.

411

Mr Whiston's Account of Dr Sacheverell's Proceedings in Order to Exclude Him from St Andrew's Church in Holborn (London, 1719).

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word.412 The list of points in Anglican liturgical practice in which Whiston declared himself unable to join is not extensive.413 In 1713 he produced a Liturgy of the Church of England Reduced Nearer to the Primitive Standard Humbly Proposed for Public Consideration. It is a conservative revision with the Apostolic Constitutions as its primary guide, as the opening sentence of the preface makes clear.414 The real offence was the Athanasian Creed, which he describes on one occasion as ‘the most heretical creed now extant in the world’.415 When it was said, he would absent himself altogether from church. Finally, on Trinity Sunday, 1747 (thirty-seven years after his removal from his Cambridge chair), he concluded that he could no longer continue to receive communion from those who, even if only on occasions on which he was not present, performed this ritual cursing of Christianity.416 So the one thing that qualified Whiston's otherwise great respect for Eusebius of Caesarea was an issue of no small moment to him. The figure from the patristic age for whom he had the most unqualified regard was Eunomius, whom he speaks of as ‘the most honest and downright of those that have so long been called Arians’.417 And Eunomius' longer creed he describes as the most ‘full, plain, distinct, judicious, and agreeable to the original doctrines of Christianity’ of all the longer creeds of the fourth century.418 To those accustomed to the widely held view that Eunomius was one who out-Ariused Arius in an essentially philosophical understanding of Christianity, this comes as a surprising judgement.419 At the time Dr Smalbroke seized on it as evidence that Whiston's attempt to distinguish his own position from that of Arius could carry no conviction; Eunomius, he points out, was an Anomaean, so extreme a group that the moderate Arians (in whose

412

Postscript to an Account of Convocation Proceedings (London, 1711); Primitive Christianity Revived , iv. 70.

413

Memoirs , 396–7.

414

Whiston's proposed communion service is printed in W.J. Grisbrooke, Anglican Liturgies of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1958 ), 249–61, with comments (pp. 56–66).

415

Letter of Whiston to Robert Nelson, 31 July 1710 (Barker MSS, Leicester Public Record Office, DE 730/2, no. 97). This aversion, in milder form, was shared by some holders of high ecclesiastical office. John Tillotson, when Archbishop of Canterbury, had declared in a letter of 23 Oct. 1694, to Gilbert Burnet: ‘I wish we were well rid of it’ (T. Birch, The Life of John Tillotson (2nd. edn.; London, 1753 ), 315).

416

Memoirs , 508–9.

417

Primitive Christianity Revived , v. ix.

418

Primitive Christianity Revived , iv. 52.

419

Even Hanson still speaks of ‘his peculiar brand of rationalistic Unitarianism’ (The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God , 636).

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tradition Whiston was claiming to stand) refused to be in communion with them.420 In his reply to Smalbroke, Whiston does not comment on what he has to say about Eunomius. But elsewhere he compares Eunomius with Alexander and the early Athanasius as one who saw the Son as having a middle nature between the unbegotten Father and the world created ex nihilo.421 Whiston knew and valued Eunomius well enough to provide us with the only English translation of his Apology until the appearance of Dr Vaggione's edition and translation in 1987.422 And Vaggione (though not sharing Eunomius' beliefs as Whiston did) also sees Eunomius as essentially a biblical theologian, for whom the scriptural text understood in the light of reason and early tradition was decisive.423 Whiston's high regard for Eunomius is significant in another respect, which represents the most idiosyncratic element in Whiston's Arianism. We have already seen that he was fully aware of the need to be alert to the possibility that some of our texts may have been forged or tampered with. It was a practice he believed to have been widely followed by the orthodox. While fully justified in that claim, he shows the partiality of his judgement by the strong reverse insistence that ‘no such thing appears on the side of the Arians’.424 One instance of such corruptions, to which he frequently returns, is the form of the doxology in the writings of the early Fathers. Here, he believed, the so-called Arian form (‘through’ the Son ‘by’ or ‘in’ the Holy Spirit) was often the original form but had been changed to the later standard (but to him unacceptable) form which offers praise to ‘the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’. In that he was undoubtedly right. While some of his opponents were misguided enough to challenge him on textual grounds, others more wisely admitted the early, though not exclusive, use of the ‘ . . . through . . . in . . . ’ form but argued that its original usage had no ‘heretical’ intention and that its abandonment after Nicaea was a result of Arian misuse of it.227 But Whiston was not always right. On

420

R. Smalbroke, Reflections on the Conduct of Mr Whiston in his Revival of the Arian Heresy (London, 1711 ), 14–16; The New Arian Reproved: Or a Vindication of Some Reflections on the Conduct of Mr Whiston (London, 1711 ), 32.

421

‘The Council of Nicaea Vindicated’, 17.

422

Whiston's translation is at the end of Primitive Christianity Revived , i, with its own separate page numbers. For Dr Vaggione's translation, see R. P. Vaggione, Eunomius: The Extant Works (Oxford, 1987 ).

423

See Dr Vaggione's unpublished Oxford University D.Phil. thesis (1976), ‘Aspects of Faith in the Eunomian Controversy’ and his forthcoming book on Eunomius.

424

Primitive Christianity Revived , iv. 156. [See p. 106 for n.

425

W. Berriman, A Seasonable Review of Mr Whiston's Account of Primitive Doxologies (London, 1719 ), 38–42.

425

]

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two issues, one of which was a matter of paramount importance to him, he was undoubtedly wrong. He believed the longer recension of the Ignatian epistles to be genuine and the shorter version to be a Marcellan forgery,425 and he believed the Apostolic Constitutions to be a genuine first-century document. Since both these documents are almost certainly Eunomian in origin, it is not surprising that the work of Eunomius himself should have seemed to him so fully in tune with early apostolic teaching. It is the placing of the Apostolic Constitutions in the first century that is both more unusual and more far-reaching in its implications. For Whiston it was the single most important outcome of that intensive study of primitive Christianity in the second half of the first decade of the eighteenth century that was so decisive for his whole career. The third and longest (it runs to 718 pages) of the five volumes of his Primitive Christianity Revived is entirely devoted to it. The conclusions to which he came can be summarized briefly. The substance of the contents of the Apostolic Constitutions was communicated to the Apostles by Christ during the forty days between the resurrection and the ascension.426 On the basis of which books of the New Testament are or are not quoted and of the times when it would have been possible for the Apostles to have come together, Whiston thought that he could date the writing of the earlier books to AD 67 and the later ones to a fifth Council of the Apostles, probably at Jerusalem around AD 86.427 Copies were deposited in the nineteen churches founded in the times of the Apostles, but no further copies were made in light of the Disciplina Arcana. The Apostolic Constitutions are, therefore, the ἄγραφα, the unwritten traditions to which frequent reference is made by the Fathers—they are unwritten not in a literal sense, but as not being part of Scripture (ἡ γραφή) and also as not to be copied in writing. This accounts for the many allusions to the contents of the Apostolic Constitutions in the earlier Fathers but the absence of any actual copies or direct citations. This tradition of non-publication was finally broken in the mid-fourth century, probably by Euzoius of Antioch, to defend the ‘honest old Christian’ view that goes ‘under the name of Arian’ against the radical orthodox corruption of the faith

425

‘A Collection of Ancient Monuments’, 111.

426

Primitive Christianity Revived , iii. 14–24.

427

Ibid., ch. 3, esp. pp. 242–3.

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being perpetrated at that time.428 Antioch is to be trusted to have preserved the true text; in sorting out variants in our manuscripts, it is not Arian interpolations (as the sixth General Council suggested) against which we have to be on our guard, but orthodox ones, mostly emanating from ‘orthodox or antichristian Rome’.429 It is not possible here to survey the cumulative evidence with which Whiston supports this remarkable theory. The complex character of the various church orders on which the final version of the Apostolic Constitutions draws allows plenty of scope for finding detailed allusions to it in earlier writings. Add to this what Whiston regarded as its generally unphilosophical character and the primitive nature of its liturgical and disciplinary regulations, and he could find plenty of arguments both general and particular with which to support his case. Certainly he convinced himself. But he did so against the best scholarly evidence of the day. Dr Grabe had already made out a strong case for a very different reading of the Apostolic Constitutions ten years before Whiston wrote,430 and repeated it in a devastating critique after Whiston's publication of his theory.431 Nor did Whiston convince many even of his friends. As early as 1708 Sam Bradford, to whom he had shown his still-unpublished findings, expressed himself unconvinced and pleaded with him to think again before going ahead with publication.432 And John Jackson, who had accepted Whiston's argument for the longer recension of the Ignatian epistles,433 dared diffidently to disagree with his verdict on the Apostolic Constitutions.434 Even Whiston had to acknowledge in 1719 his failure to convince many others, speaking of ‘those few who with me allow of their sacred authority’. But his own confidence was undented; indeed in the same letter he goes on to claim that his subsequent work on the subject had rendered ‘their genuine antiquity certain and undeniable’.435 And as

428

Ibid. 130–59.

429

Ibid. 680. See also Historical Preface , p. lii.

430

J.E. Grabe, Spicilegium (London, 1698), i. 40–55.

431

Grabe, An Essay on Two Arabic Manuscripts (London, 1711). Grabe's conclusion was that the Apostolic Constitutions had ‘been formed in the fourth or fifth century by an Arian writer . . . made out of that small book, called The Doctrine of the Apostles ’, and other sources in two stages, the first constituting books 1–6 with books 7 and 8 added later (p. 72).

432

Historical Preface , pp.lxi–iii.

433

Letter of Jackson to Whiston of 31 Oct. 1716 (Barker MSS, Leicester Public Record Office, DE 730/2, no. 105).

434

Letter of Jackson to Whiston of 17 Apr. 1717 (ibid., no. 106): ‘I am sorry (for my own sake), to tell you that I cannot come entirely to your own sentiments’.

435

Second Letter to the Bishop of London Concerning the Primitive Doxologies (London, 1719 ), 10.

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late as 1739 he could still claim that the outcome of his initial examination of the Apostolic Constitutions ‘about twentynine or thirty years ago’ had been strongly confirmed by his enquiries ever since; he had no more doubt that they belonged to the first century than that Paul's letters did.436 To ascribe the Apostolic Constitutions to the first century was clearly to enhance their authority. Even so they were not, of course, part of the accepted canon. But Whiston saw his account as giving them a kind of supracanonical authority. The directness of their derivation from Christ and the involvement of all the Apostles in their composition gave them a ‘greater authority than the occasional writings of single Apostles or Evangelists’. They stood to the New Testament rather as the Pentateuch did to the rest of the Old Testament.437 He could even refer to them as ‘the most sacred books of the New Testament’.438 The implication of giving them that measure of authority is enormous. For the Apostolic Constitutions provide detailed instructions over the whole range of Christian order, life, and worship. Whiston's Arianism involved not only the recovery of a true understanding of the nature of God and the person of Christ; it involved also a total reformation of Christian practice. In the passage just quoted in which he speaks of the twenty-nine or thirty years since he first learned the true character of the Apostolic Constitutions, he claims to have lived by their rule throughout that time. His Memoirs give evidence of his sticking to his Wednesday and Friday fast even at the cost of some social embarrassment—or perhaps one should say what others might have regarded as social embarrassment; it is not an emotion one can easily imagine Whiston feeling.439 Anthony Collins teases him with the complaint that he had not done so with complete consistency. For despite following some practices how rigid and seemingly ridiculous soever, and how remote soever from the practices of the age and country wherein he lives . . . he continues, as in the time of his darkness, to shave his beard, contrary to the express declaration of the Apostolic Constitutions (Ap. Con. 1. 1. 3).440

436

Collection of Original Texts , 69.

437

Primitive Christianity Revived , iii. 4.

438

Historical Preface , second appendix, 52. The basis of this and other aspects of Whiston's theory lies in the Apostolic Constitutions themselves where the 85th Apostolic Canon includes in the list of canonical books ‘the Constitutions dictated to you bishops by me Clement in eight books, which it is not fit to publish before all because of the mysteries contained in them’ (Ap. Con. 8. 47).

439

Memoirs , 242–3.

440

Anthony Collins, A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (London, 1724 ), 275.

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But Whiston's life-long ardent desire that the church as a whole might decide to determine every aspect of its corporate life on the basis of the Apostolic Constitutions, accepted as dominical and apostolic in its authority thanks to his scholarly endeavours, always belonged to the realm of fantasy rather than reality. His commitment to such a goal is a mark of his uncompromising integrity, his egoism, and his eccentricity. For eccentric he certainly was in the eyes of most of his contemporaries, a fact which tempered both the support he could look for from friends and, in later life, the vigour of his opponents' attacks. The reaction of the wider public to him is well reflected in the ambivalent attitude of the poet, Edward Young, shown in a letter to the Duchess of Portland of 6 April 1746. He writes: The famous Mr Whiston called on me, who prophesied severe things to this poor nation; he pretended to support himself by scripture authority; how just his pretence is I cannot absolutely say, but I think there are so many public symptoms on the side of his prophecy as to hinder it from being quite ridiculous.441 But perhaps the fairest assessment of him comes from the pen of Anthony Collins, a friendly critic writing not from an orthodox but from the opposing deist standpoint: He is a person of extraordinary natural parts, and of great acquired learning in philosophy and mathematics, but, above all, in theology . . . He is an upright and very religious man, and a most zealous Christian: leading a moral life, as is common to most who are styled heretics . . . But his judgment does not seem to be equal to his sagacity, learning, zeal and integrity. . . . He seems still qualified to admit the most precarious suppositions, and to receive many things without the least foundation.442

441

The Correspondence of Edward Young 1683–1765, ed. H. Pettit (Oxford, 1971), 227. Forecasts of the coming of the Millennium on the basis of scriptural prophesies were a common feature of the time, and not in themselves as much a mark of eccentricity as they would appear today. In his Memoirs , Whiston reports reading out a paper, at a public meeting in Tunbridge on 6 Sept. of the same year as Edward Young's letter, which concludes: ‘If I be right in my calculation as to our Blessed Saviour's coming to restore the Jews and begin the Millennium twenty years hence, I cannot but conclude that after those twenty years are over, there will no more be an infidel in Christendom, and no more a gaming-table in Tunbridge’ (p.398). Newton made many calculations of the time of the Millennium, but tended to place it much later, even as late as the 21st century. Whiston attributed this to Newton's desire to avoid public commitment to the reformation of the church (see my ‘Newton and the Bible’, in Balentine and Barton (eds.), Language, Theology and the Bible , 344–5).

442

Collins, A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons , 273–8.

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Certainly his rejection of the orthodox Trinitarian teaching of his day included some shrewd insights into the nature of the Arian controversy. Nor was he afraid to suffer for the truth he thought he saw. However, his lack of judgement on important issues of scholarship and his uncompromising directness in his dealings with people ensured that his views were even more firmly rejected than would anyway have been their fate. But among the eminent adherents of the ‘Arian’ cause were not only the overcautious Newton and the overbold Whiston. In Samuel Clarke, described by Benjamin Hoadly in words that could never have been used of Whiston as one whose ‘memory was almost equal to his judgment’,443 the same cause had an advocate noted for his moderation and personal goodness.444 He too merits our attention.

The Moderate Arianism of Samuel Clarke Samuel Clarke was remarkable for both the breadth and the depth of his learning. He not only shared Newton and Whiston's scientific and theological interests; he also published works of classical scholarship.445 In his scientific work he was a close associate of Newton, translating his Opticks into Latin446 and acting as his spokesman in the Clarke–Leibniz correspondence.447 Whiston spoke of him as ‘Newton's bosom friend’448—in itself no small testimony to that ‘calmness of temper’ for which Clarke was renowned.449 In the field of theology he was far ahead of either of them in the philosophical aspects of the discipline. His Boyle lectures, given in 1704 and 1705 and published shortly afterwards, were among the most distinguished contributions

443

Preface to Sermons of Samuel Clarke , ed. John Clarke (London, 1730 ), i. xxxv.

444

Even if the anonymous author's description of him as ‘the greatest man that was ever born into the world’ be put down to rhetorical exuberance, not many people elicit such an encomium even from their most fervent admirers (Observations on Mr Whiston's Historical Memoirs of the Life of Dr Samuel Clarke (London, 1748 ), 70).

445

An edition of Caesar's Commentaries in 1712, which Addison described as ‘the finest book that I have ever seen’ (Spectator , no. 367), and of the first twelve books of Homer's Iliad published posthumously in 1732.

446

The translation so pleased Newton that he gave Clarke £500, a hundred for each of his five children (J. P. Ferguson, Dr Samuel Clarke (Kineton, 1976 ), 35).

447

For the relation of Clarke to Newton in the correspondence, see especially A. Koyré and I. B. Cohen, ‘Newton and the Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence’, Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences , 15 (1962 ), 67.

448

Whiston, Memoirs , 293.

449

The phrase is from Thomas Emlyn, ‘Memoirs of the Life and Sentiments of Dr Clarke’, in Emlyn, Works (London, 1746 ) ii. 495.

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to that series and won wide acclaim.450 They made Whiston acutely aware of the difference between himself and Clarke in their attitudes to philosophy, leading him to express to Clarke his doubts about the wisdom of such ‘abstract and metaphysical reasonings’ which he himself ‘never durst meddle with’.451 But it was through a work in the field of biblical studies that Clarke came to play so prominent a part in the ‘Arian controversy’. His earliest publications in that field had taken the form of Paraphrases of the Four Gospels (1701–3). The paraphrases are terse in character, and do not expand greatly on the text itself. Even in his treatment of such texts as Matt. 19: 17, Mark 13: 32 and John 17: 3, loci classici of historical Arianism which were also to play a prominent role in his own subsequent controversial writing, no shadow of their past or presage of their future significance is to be detected.452 But the detailed study of the biblical text that work on the Paraphrases had entailed, combined with preparation for the Boyle lectures, which were delivered only a year after they had come out, seems very soon to have had a major effect on Clarke's thinking.453 For it was at that time that Whiston began to hear how Clarke's studies were leading him to question whether the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity corresponded to that of the earliest Christian teaching.454 The grounds of Clarke's doubts were fully revealed in his magisterial Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1712). The work is divided into three parts. The first part sets out the relevant texts under appropriate headings, numbered 1–1251.455 Some of the more important texts are given a textual or exegetical note, or citations from the Fathers by way of elucidation. The majority are allowed to make their point simply by the heading under which they are placed. The second part seeks to codify in 55 propositions the doctrine embodied in those texts. It is

450

The first series was published in 1705 under the title A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God . From 1716 the two series appeared together under the title A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Religion .

451

Whiston, Life of Samuel Clarke , 11.

452

By contrast Daniel Whitby's Paraphrase and Commentary of the New Testament , also published in 1703 , contains a detailed refutation of a Socinian reading of each of the three texts.

453

For the importance of metaphysics for Clarke's Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity , see pp. 119–21 below.

454

See p. 94 above.

455

The actual number of texts cited is less than 1,251, as the same texts are sometimes repeated under different headings.

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from this part that Clarke's own reading of the New Testament most clearly emerges. The third part points to 157 passages in the Anglican liturgy which affirm and to 27 passages which seem to differ from that doctrine. The strengths of the book are its comprehensive setting-out of the evidence, the careful nature of its reasoning, and the clarity and moderation with which it draws its conclusions. It was to be the focus of attention in the ensuing debate for a long time to come. Clarke's own position, as the propositions of Part II reveal it, can be summarized as follows. The Father alone is selfexistent (v); The Son (xii) and the Holy Spirit (xix) are not. Wherever Scripture speaks of the ‘one God’ or ‘only God’, it means the Father (ix). No metaphysical account of how either the Son (xiii) or the Holy Spirit (xxi) derives from the Father is given in Scripture, and none ought therefore to be attempted. But the Son was not made ‘out of nothing’ (xiv); nor was there ‘a time when he was not’ (xvi); whether the derivation of his being was a necessity of nature or by the power of the Father's will is an open question, though the latter seems more probable (xvii).456 The word ‘God’ is sometimes used of the Son (xxiv), but with reference not to his metaphysical nature but to his relative attributes and his authority over us—as is true also of the use of the word ‘God’ to refer to the Father (xxv). All the divine powers (except supremacy and independency, which are logically incommunicable) are to be ascribed to the Son (xxvii); but he is subordinate to the Father (xxxiv). The unity of God lies in the single source of all authority in the Father (xxxix). Before the incarnation the Son had glory with the Father (xlvii), but distinct worship of the Son (being grounded in his action towards us, rather than his nature—li) belongs only to the time after his incarnation and exaltation (xlviii–l). Prayer to and worship of the Son are ultimately to the glory of the Father (xliv, lii). The picture is a familiar one. What Newton had cogitated in his inner chamber and Whiston had shouted from the house-tops, Clarke was now promulgating in the measured tones of reasoned exposition. Each doctrinal proposition was accompanied by its own catena of supporting scriptural texts. Moreover, Clarke went out of his way in the third part of the book to present his position as one that was

456

Elsewhere in the book (p. 431) Clarke affirms it to be by the Father's will, and in the debates following the book's publication he becomes even more emphatic on the point. In a letter to Whiston he stated that the Son is begotten ‘not by absolute necessity of nature (which infers self-existence and independency) but by the power of the will of the Father’ (Whiston, Life of Samuel Clarke , 79).

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essentially compatible with the existing liturgy and articles of the Church of England. The basic form of liturgical prayer (to God the Father through Jesus Christ our Lord) was claimed to be expressly affirmative of the doctrines expounded in the second part. And even those passages in the liturgy which could not straightforwardly be claimed to provide such prima-facie support were only described as ones ‘which may seem to differ from the foregoing doctrine’ (p. 415). Since those passages include the Athanasian Creed, used in the liturgy and affirmed in the Articles, the attempt to interpret them in a way consistent with his own subordinationist doctrine was an unconvincing tour de force, comparable with Newman's equally unconvincing attempt much later to interpret those same articles of belief in a way consistent with Roman Catholic doctrine. Nevertheless the conciliatory tone, seeking as far as possible to preserve rather than to disrupt the life and practice of the church, was evident. Such an approach, from the pen of one with so high a scholarly and personal reputation as Samuel Clarke, whose Boyle lectures had been greeted as a valuable defence against deism,457 was sure to exercise a stronger influence than Whiston's more erratic arguments and more strident exhortations. As Francis Hare, Bishop of Chichester, put it in an allusion to the two of them under the designation of ‘two clergymen of the town’, ‘the imprudent man is treated as a madman, and a rash Arian; the prudent one is less a heretic but more dangerous.’458 The book had its converts, including some of those who were to prove Clarke's most staunch supporters in the ensuing controversy. John Jackson, already sympathetic to the book's ideas and later to become Clarke's most persistent and vigorous defender, was, he told Clarke, stirred by it to go public and abandon the use of the Athanasian Creed.459 The book also played a key role in the more striking conversion of Daniel Whitby, Precentor of Salisbury. He was already 74 years old when the book was published and had himself earlier written a book against the Arian and Socinian heresies; but the

457

Archbishop Wake described Clarke as ‘a good man and one who had done very good service to the Church in his excellent books written in behalf of the Christian religion and in strenuous defense against all the endeavours of Deists and libertines’ (Letter of Wake to Picket of Dec. 1719 cited by N. Sykes, William Wake (Cambridge, 1957 ), ii. 155 n. 1).

458

F. Hare, Difficulties and Discouragements which Attend the Study of the Scriptures in the Way of Private Judgment (London, 1714 ), 25 and 28.

459

Letter of Jackson to Clarke of Christmas Day 1714 (cited by L. Stewart, ‘Clarke, Newtonianism, and the Factions of Post-Revolutionary England’, JHI 42 (1981 ), 58 n. 17).

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wholeheartedness of his conversion to an Arian view finds forceful expression in a posthumously published retractation of his earlier beliefs.460 For the majority of churchmen, however, Clarke's position was an unacceptable diminution of the faith, which needed to be firmly repudiated. The Lower House of Convocation condemned the book as one that tended ‘to substitute the author's private conceits and arbitrary interpretations of Scripture in the room of those catholic doctrines, which the Church proposes and maintains, as warranted both by Scripture and antiquity’.461 But some of the bishops, led by Wake, were keen to avoid any direct condemnation of Clarke in person, and prevailed on him to write a conciliatory document462 to aid them in their purpose. The next day Clarke sought to have a gloss463 added to what he had written to make clear that his statement was only explicatory of his book and was not intended to retract anything that he had written in it. But in the end he succumbed to Wake's pleas not to insist on having his gloss added, and the unglossed statement enabled Wake to win the bishops' support and prevent Clarke's condemnation, much to the chagrin of the Lower House. Clarke's accommodating attitude in the face of the indictment of Convocation may have commended itself to Wake, but it did not do so to Whiston. As early as January 1709, Whiston had written to Clarke, exhorting him not to accept preferment in the Church of England before he had studied the documents Whiston was sending him and had clarified his mind on the doctrinal issues with which the two of them had been wrestling.464 But Clarke had ignored his plea and accepted the living of St James, Piccadilly, in that same month. So it is hardly surprising that Whiston should declare himself highly critical of Clarke's behaviour in response to Convocation's attack on him, comparing it unfavourably with his own response to the same situation.465 More surprising is the negative aspect of Whiston's response to the book itself. Although he begins his Observations466 by acknowledging how close it stands to his own position and how significant is the support of one so ‘learned, judicious and eminent’ as Dr Clarke (p. 1),

460

DNB xxi. 29. The books referred to are Tractatus de Vera Christi Deitate adversus Arii et Socini Haereses (1691 ) and Ὕστεραι Φρōντίδες Or the Last Thoughts of Dr Whitby (1727 ). See also n. 254 above.

461

Anon., An Apology for Dr Clarke (London, 1714 ), 24.

462

For the text, see ibid. 45–8.

463

For the text, see ibid. 59–62.

464

Whiston, Life of Samuel Clarke, 16.

465

Ibid. 73.

466

‘Observations on Dr Clarke's Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity’, printed as appendix 1 to Primitive Christianity Revived, v.

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twenty-eight of its twenty-nine pages are devoted to criticism of the book. Some of his criticisms are directed against that same cautious and conciliatory approach that was to show itself in Clarke's conduct under challenge. Whitson objects to Clarke's tendency to present his material not in its most exact form but in that which will be least offensive to a modern reader (p. 2), to his readiness to accept modern formulations if they can in any sense be reconciled with Scripture, even though that sense be neither natural nor the one originally intended (p. 4), and particularly to his ‘evidently forced and unnatural’ interpretation of phrases from the liturgy and the Articles in the third part of the book (p. 25). Indeed, in a personal letter to Clarke he went so far as to say that his ‘unsincere excuses and palliations for [the Athanasian] Creed . . . are so visible that this book will utterly sink your reputation with the honest’.467 But if these are objections to Clarke's style of reasoning, there are objections also to his use of sources and to the substance of the doctrine he presents. On the issue of sources Whiston objects to Clarke's use of Scripture only to the exclusion of the ‘more sacred authority’ of the credal tradition in the Apostolic Constitutions (p. 3). On the substance of the doctrines he objects to a hesitancy about Clarke's disavowal of the coeternity of the Son (p. 7), to his reluctance to use the language of creation about the Son (p. 9), and to his false claim that all divine powers except supremacy and independency have been transmitted to the Son, whereas in fact the subordination of the Son involves ‘lesser power, lesser knowledge [and] lesser goodness’ (p. 6).468 But it was from the side of the orthodox, naturally enough, that the main stream of criticism came. It was a long drawn-out debate. Clarke's own contribution, after the initial stage, was relatively small, Jackson, and to a lesser degree Whitby, both more robust controversialists than Clarke himself, taking up the cudgels on his behalf. The most distinguished disputant on the orthodox side, Daniel Waterland, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, entered the fray relatively late and almost inadvertently, as a result of Jackson publishing some queries on the subject that Waterland had sent to him privately. But once started, his contribution was both thorough and persistent. Even the posthumous publication of Clarke's non-polemical Exposition

467

Life of Samuel Clarke, 41–2.

468

Emlyn makes the same point with particular reference to knowledge on the basis of Mark 13: 32 (Works, ii. 481–2).

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of the Church Catechism elicited a long response from him lest the unwary be misled by its omissions.469 The kind of objections raised by Whiston that I have called objections to Clarke's ‘style of reasoning’ were levelled against him by orthodox opponents as well. John Edwards, veteran polemicist of the Trinitarian debates of the 1690s, saw Whiston and Clarke as joint revivers of the heretical opinions of ‘the Racovian gentlemen’ with whom he had grappled then. The only difference between the two of them was one for which Whiston was to be commended. His lack of disguise was to be preferred to Clarke's ‘gift of equivocating’; Clarke was just as much ‘a staunch Arian (however he endeavours to disguise it)’.470 Clarke rejected the imputation of the title, as Locke had repudiated Edwards's attempt to label him a Socinian twenty years earlier.471 When in his book he had criticized ‘the errors of the Arians’,472 it was no equivocation. He was using the word in its only proper sense, namely to mean ‘one who himself maintains, or imposes upon others, the particular doctrines of Arius’.473 And those particular doctrines were that ‘the Son of God was a creature, made out of nothing, just before the beginning of the world’, none of which had he himself ever taught.474 If there was any equivocation, it was not in his denial of the name but in his opponents' inaccurate extension of its use. Waterland did have scruples about the use of the term ‘Arian’ with reference to Clarke. These were based on his respect for Clarke with whom he maintained a personal friendship right up to the time of Clarke's death.475 In orthodox ears the term ‘Arian carried overtones of dishonest equivocation and of barbarity’.476 ‘I am very unwilling’,

469

D. Waterland, Remarks upon Doctor Clarke's Exposition of the Church Catechism (London, 1730 ) in Works (Oxford, 1823 ) v. 373–430.

470

John Edwards, Brief Animadversions on Dr Clark's Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1712 ), 3 and 42.

471

See p. 74 above.

472

Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity, 293.

473

Reply to Mr Nelson, 220.

474

Whiston, Life of Samuel Clarke, 79. The first of the three, as Whiston points out, is less firmly disavowed than the other two.

475

W. van Mildert, A Review of the Author's Life and Writings, in D. Waterland, Works (Oxford, 1823 ), i. 344.

476

For equivocation, see D. Waterland, A Vindication of Christ's Divinity (1719 ), in Works, i. 286; The Case of Arian Subscription Considered (1721), in Works, ii. 305; J. Potter, A Defence of the Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Oxford in July 1719, in Works (Oxford, 1753 ), 340. For barbarity, see the Earl of Nottingham, An Answer to Mr Whiston (London, 1721 ), 77. Sykes in his A Letter to the Earl of Nottingham (London, 1721 ), 17–21 meets the charge, not by claiming that it is false but by arguing that it has been no more true of Arians than of the orthodox, who did more to initiate the practice of persecuting fellow Christians.

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Waterland wrote, ‘that any man of sense and learning should be thought an Arian (Arians generally have been men of a different character).’477 And with specific reference to Clarke, he went so far as to assert: ‘I never represented that person under the invidious name of Arian; nor was it ever in my thoughts to do it.’478 But he had no scruples about using the term ‘Arianism’. He was not prepared to accept Clarke's own attempts to differentiate himself from the teaching of Arius, and thereby from the charge that what he taught was properly to be called Arianism. The modifications that the immediate successors of Arius had made to Arius' own teaching were a matter of language, not of substance.479 The fact that they avoided, and even anathematized, the teaching that the Son was ἐξ ōὐκ ἄντων (out of nothing) was not to be regarded as something to their credit, for that belief remained implicit in the teaching they preserved. It was evidence of their customary prevarication and not of any significant difference between them and Arius himself.480 Nor was anything gained by their denial that there was a time when the Son was not, though in that case the equivocation went back to Arius himself.481 The heart of the matter was that there was no midway position between a fully orthodox understanding of the Son and a fully Arian affirmation of his creatureliness. Semi-Arianism, which hoped to palliate the sharpness of outright Arianism, was an incoherent concept. There was no middle way.482 But the crucial issue was, of course, not the appropriate labelling of Clarke's position but the truth about Christ's divinity. Clarke had insisted that ‘the books of Scripture’ were ‘the whole and the only rule of truth in matters of religion’.483 Few of his opponents demurred, and

477

Eight Sermons in Defence of the Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1720 ), in Works, ii, preface, p. xv.

478

A Supplement to the Case of Arian Subscription Considered (1722), in Works, ii. 395.

479

Vindication, 145. Cf. A Supplement, 393–4.

480

Vindication, 151–6. For prevarication as a distinctive feature of the early Arians, see also Potter, A Defence of the Charge, 340.

481

Vindication, 156. E. Welchman allows a nice distinction on the issue when he says of Clarke's view that ‘though it comes not quite up to the blasphemy of Arius in asserting, There was a time when the Son was not, yet he falls not very far short of it in implying that There was a time when He might not have been.’ (Dr Clarke's Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity Examined (Oxford, 1714 ), 28).

482

Vindication, 159. Cf. E. Wells, A Second Letter to Dr Clarke (London 1715 ), postscript, 34–6.

483

Scipture-Doctrine of the Trinity, introd., p. v.

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so the debate resounds with conflicting interpretations of key texts of Scripture, such as John 1: 1, Rom. 9: 5, 1 Cor. 8: 6, Phil. 2: 5–11, and many others. But how was such a conflict of interpretations to be resolved? Edward Wells, a gifted geographer and mathematician, was one who did object to Clarke's formulation of Scripture as the only rule of truth, which he criticized as characteristically sectarian. He claimed that the openness of Scripture could ‘be decided by the testimony of the Primitive Church’. For the primitive church included some who had actually conversed with the Apostles themselves, and who therefore ‘can't be reasonably supposed but to have infallibly known the true sense of Scripture’. We should ‘let the testimony of the Primitive Church overrule our understanding’, which, as his use of the word ‘reasonably’ in the earlier citation implies, was in his view a necessary corollary of letting it be overruled by reason.484 An old Calvinist like Edwards, on the other hand, saw a danger in overvaluing the judgement of the writers of the early Church. He diagnoses three causes behind the rise of Arminianism and its natural offshoot in the contemporary Arianism: not paying enough attention ‘to the Mind of the Holy Spirit in Scripture’; an ‘overvaluing of human reason’; and giving ‘too great esteem . . . to some passages in the books of the Ancient Writers of the Church, who were but just entered into the study of the Christian religion’.485 Clarke, and the majority of his orthodox opponents, stood somewhere between these two extremes. Clarke himself allowed the Fathers a restricted role as guides to assist our understanding of Scripture, but nothing more than that;486 Waterland, on the other hand, ascribed a far greater importance to them than Clarke was prepared to allow, though falling well short of the absolutism of Wells.487 In any case, appeal to the Fathers invariably gave rise in practice to a further conflict of interpretations, similar to that resulting from the appeal to Scripture. In Clarke's judgement there was no other ultimate court of appeal than our own understanding. An unprejudiced use of the human reason was the only path to determining the true sense of Scripture, and thereby the true substance of Christian

484

E. Wells, Remarks on Dr Clarke's Introduction to his Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1713 ), 5–11, 21 and 23–4 (italics original).

485

J. Edwards, Some New Discoveries of the Uncertainty, Deficiency and Corruption of Human Knowledge and Learning (London, 1713 ), preface, p. iii.

486

Clarke, Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity, pp. i–iv.

487

Vindication, 322; A Second Vindication of Christ's Divinity (1723 ), in Works, iii, preface, pp. xx–xxiii; p. 446; The Importance of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity (1734 ), in Works, iv. 261–5.

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faith.488 Looking at the actuality of Clarke's reasoning, Waterland described what was going on very differently. As he saw it, the real source of Clarke's opinions was not Scripture (not even Scripture and the Fathers), but philosophy.489 Just as the Fathers were drawn into metaphysical argument only in order to refute the prior false metaphysical arguments of the original Arians,490 so it was for the same reason that Waterland now found himself having to resort to metaphysical reasoning.491 This insistence on the crucial significance of metaphysics for Clarke's whole position was not something that came gradually to light through Waterland's more delayed reflections. It was immediately and widely recognized. Clarke's main claim to fame was, after all, as a metaphysical theologian. Thomas Emlyn, a critic from the other, more emphatically Arian side, even claimed to have deduced from reading Clarke's Boyle lectures, when they were first published well before the appearance of Clarke's Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity, that Clarke could not hold an orthodox Athanasian view of the Trinity. The crucial passage that he cites is Clarke's VIIth Proposition, which asserts ‘that it follows from his necessary existence, that God must of necessity be but one’.492 Phillips Gretton similarly argued (in his case after the event) that Clarke's a priori argument from the metaphysical necessity of God's existence inevitably leads to a denial of the full divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit, and that his Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity reveals that inescapable process in operation.493 Even

488

Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity, pp. i–iv.

489

A Second Vindication, 105–6, 307–8, 399, 475; A Farther Vindication of Christ's Divinity (1724 ), in Works, v. 50–51. Cf. Stewart's judgement on Clarke's book: ‘While his analysis was scriptural, his concerns remained primarily metaphysical’ (‘Clarke, Newtonianism’, 57).

490

Vindication, 212–13, 228; A Second Vindication, 470.

491

Ibid. 308.

492

Emlyn, Works, ii. 479. Emlyn's work was not written until 1731, after Clarke's death, and not published until 1748. Whether or not Emlyn grasped the Trinitarian implications as soon as he asserts, Clarke made them increasingly clear in subsequent editions. The 1st edn. (1705, pp. 93–6) goes on to state that his argument neither proves nor disproves the existence of other persons with all the divine attributes except necessary existence, and that therefore ‘when declared and made known to us by clear revelation, it ought to be believed’. The 3rd edn. (1711, pp. 50–1) is little changed but makes explicit that the issue relates to ‘the divinity of persons in the ever-blessed Trinity’. The 5th edn. (1719, p. 48) omits the whole section on the possible evidence of revelation and replaces it with the claim that his Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity has shown that revelation is in perfect accord with natural religion in respect of the true and real unity of God. See Stewart, ‘Clarke, Newtonianism’, 56–7. For Emlyn's own views, see pp. 136–7 below.

493

Phillips Gretton, A Review of the Argument a Priori, in Relation to the Being and Attributes of God (London, 1726 ), preface, pp. iv–xi.

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Richard Mayo, who comes nearest to restricting the debate to scriptural exegesis, as the title of his work (A Plain Scripture-Argument against Dr Clarke's Doctrine of the Ever Blessed Trinity) suggests, cannot avoid acknowledging the significance of the metaphysical dimension. After lengthy discussion of several scriptural texts, he ends by emphasizing the crucial necessity of distinguishing between two understandings of the term ‘self-existent’, which can indicate either a personal property (when it is equivalent to ‘not-begotten’) or an essential attribute (when it is equivalent to ‘necessary existence’).494 So just as the meaning of ἀγέννητōς (unbegotten) became a central feature of the initial Arian controversy in the midfourth century, so the meaning of ‘self-existent’ became a central feature of the controversy set in motion by Clarke's Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity. Other critics of Clarke make the same distinction as Mayo but in slightly different terms. Wells distinguishes the ‘natural self-existence of God, that is the most essential attribute of the divine substance’ from the ‘personal self-existence of God the Father’ to which that same description is not applicable.495 Edward Potter contrasts ‘self-existence’, which implies ‘self-origination’ and is applied to the Father, with ‘eternal and necessary existence’ which is applied to the Son.496 And with Daniel Waterland the difference between ‘self-existence’ and ‘necessary existence’ is a continually recurring theme.497 But perhaps the most interesting discussion is the refreshingly courteous exchange of letters between Clarke and the youthful Joseph Butler.498 The inherent ambiguity in the word ‘self-existent’ that Butler raises in his first letter is that between its meaning either ‘to exist independent from the other’ or else ‘that nothing exists with it’ (pp. 6–7). Clarke's response is that whatever exists necessarily must first of all be independent of anything else. But, being self-sufficient, it will also be the case that it could be the only existent. From this it follows that everything else can be imagined as not existing; so nothing else can have its existence necessarily. There cannot therefore be more than

494

A Plain Scripture-Argument, (1715) p. 40.

495

E. Wells, A Second Letter to Dr Clarke (London, 1715 ), postscript, 31.

496

E. Potter, A Vindication of our Blessed Saviour's Divinity Chiefly against Dr Clarke (Cambridge, 1714 ), 10–16.

497

Waterland, Vindication, 86–8; A Second Vindication, 162–4, 204–6, 242–6, 286–8, 334–5.

498

Published as an appendix (with its own pagination) to the 1719 edition of Clarke's A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God under the title ‘Several Letters to Dr Clarke from a Gentleman in Gloucestershire’.

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one necessary existent (pp. 10, 41). A necessary existent is needful to the existence of everything else, not causally but as a sine qua non in the way that space is (p. 17). Space is a property of the self-existent but of nothing else; other things exist in space (p. 21). The link between Clarke's defence of his understanding of necessary existence and Newton's understanding of space and time is clear, and Clarke is explicit about it in his final contribution to the correspondence (p. 32). To him and to his friends that was a strong argument in its favour; to many of his critics it was a reinforcement of their objections. Thus, while Jackson tells Clarke with pleasure how he has found ‘the Scholium to Sir Isaac Newton's Princip: Mathemat: concerning the true nature of God . . . exactly agreeable to your Scripture doctrine’,499 George Hickes, a prominent non-juror, could complain that it was ‘Newtonian philosophy which has made so many Arians and Theists, and that not only among the laity but I fear among our divines.’500 Newton had rejected Descartes's separation of body and spirit, as constituting a dualism which denied the dependence of the material world on God and allowed to bodies a falsely absolute and independent reality in themselves. Clarke's argument for the unicity of the self-existent was a powerful formulation of the grounds of that Newtonian conviction against a God-matter dualism, and is explicitly directed to that end in his discussion of Proposition VII in his Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God.501 If that same reasoning ruled out not only matter as a possible second self-existent principle but also a second necessarily existent divine being, that was not, in Clarke's view, a religiously damaging conclusion. It accorded with Scripture's insistence on the Father as the sole, absolute, supreme, and selfexistent reality. The Son could still be regarded as truly God, because all other divine attributes had been communicated to him, especially dominion over everything in heaven and earth.502 But the debate was not concerned only with such lofty theological and metaphysical matters. There were more immediately practical matters in contention also. Whatever might prove to be the ultimate truth or falsity of the ‘moderate Arian’ view espoused by Clarke, there

499

Letter of John Jackson to Samuel Clarke of 30 Jan., 1715 (cited by Stewart ‘Clarke, Newtonianism’, 60).

500

Letter of George Hickes to Roger North of 23 May, 1713 (cited ibid. 61).

501

1705 edn., p. 49.

502

Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity, 441 (Clarke refers back to this passage later in the book as part of his defence of the acceptability of the phrase ‘very God of very God’ in the Nicene Creed—p. 464); Reply to Mr Nelson, 81.

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was also a question of its acceptability within the Church of England. Clarke, Jackson, and Whitby were all ordained members of the Church of England, holding pastoral offices which involved subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles. But could an ‘Arian’ subscribe to the Articles with integrity? That issue too had its point of departure in Clarke's Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity. In the original 1712 edition of that work, Clarke had argued that a person could assent to the Articles, ‘whenever he can in any sense reconcile them with Scripture’.503 Although the passage was omitted from the second (1719) edition, Waterland still saw its claim as one that needed to be refuted.504 In Waterland's view it was wrong both in principle and in substance. Subscription must be made in the sense intended by the original compilers and the contemporary imposers of the Articles.505 Clarke's alternative proposal would render the whole business pointless, since it was agreed on both sides that the dispute was not about the words of Scripture but about their proper interpretation.506 It was also seditious in that it constituted an incitement to private interpretation of all public laws and oaths.507 But even Clarke's unacceptable interpretation of what was involved in subscription would not help his particular case. The Articles were more specific than the Council of Nicaea had been, though even that, being explicitly directed against Arianism, had not allowed the latitude of belief that was now being claimed for it.508 On the specific issue of the Trinity, Clarke's view was clearly and unequivocally excluded by the Articles.509 On that last point Waterland could and did call on Whiston in his support.510 The argument was strong but not watertight. There was scope for reply, of which Arthur Sykes, Waterland's main interlocutor in this aspect of the debate, was not slow to avail himself.511 On the initial issue an equally strong case could be made for the practical necessity of restricting subscription to the actual propositions subscribed. Could we always be sure of the sense intended by the compilers?512 In any

503

Introduction, pp. xx–xxii.

504

Waterland, Vindication, preface, p. v; Arian Subscription, 282–3.

505

Ibid. 288.

506

Ibid. 300.

507

Ibid. 289–91.

508

A Supplement, 366. Cf. Potter, A Defence of the Charge, 379.

509

Arian Subscription, 313.

510

A Supplement, 398–400.

511

Sykes, like Clarke, was a Church of England minister having close association with Sir Isaac Newton. In November 1755 he was sent a selection of Newton's theological papers with a view to his revising them for publication; but he died in 1756 and they remained unpublished. They are now in the Bodleian Library (New College MS

512

A. A. Sykes, The Case of Subscription to the 39 Articles (London, 1721), 40–2.

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case, as even Waterland had had to admit, the intention of the compilers and that of the imposers might not always be in agreement.513 Nor was the substantive issue as straightforward as might appear. The language of Article I was not as clear or determinate as Waterland had suggested. Its key terms had been used in a variety of senses throughout Christian history.514 The word ‘substance’ in particular was notoriously indeterminate.515 Moreover, the variations in understanding of the Trinity between South and Sherlock in the 1690s and between Waterland himself and Bennett at the time, all claiming to be defenders of orthodox Trinitarian doctrine, were evidence that there was no precise ‘sense of the church’ to which all subscribers could be expected to adhere.516 And if Waterland should still choose to insist that the Articles were as precise and determinate as his argument required them to be, he would find himself hoist with his own petard. For in the case of Article XIII about works done before Christ being unpleasing to God, was not his Arminianism as strongly in conflict with both the straightforward sense of the words and the intention of the compilers as any so-called Arian interpretation of Article I?517 Waterland's counter to the argument was to contrast the precision of the Articles relating to Arianism with the general and indefinite nature of those relating to predestination.518 The debate had no outright winner. It served primarily to show the inefficacy of the Articles as court of appeal in such a debate. As Sykes's biographer, the Unitarian John Disney, was to assert, each of them was more convincing in his attack on the other's way of subscribing than in defence of his own.519 Make the interpretation strict and you were in danger of making subscription impossible even for the orthodox. Relax it and you might open the way for ‘popery’, for, as Waterland pointed out, an attempt had been made to show the Articles to be compatible even with that.520 There were altogether too many ways in which subscription might be undertaken. Joseph Priestley, in a light-hearted article much later in the century, listed fourteen different senses in

513

Waterland, Arian Subscription, 288.

514

Sykes, The Case of Subscription, 33.

515

Ibid. 40.

516

Ibid. 3–5.

517

Ibid. 20–1, 37–9.

518

Waterland, Arian Subscription, 311–14.

519

John Disney, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Arthur Ashley Sykes (London, 1785 ), 114–128.

520

A Supplement, 363. The work alluded to is Franciscus a Sancta Clara, Expositio Paraphrastica Articulorum Confessionis Anglicae (1634); its author (by birth, Christopher Davenport) was a convert to Roman Catholicism who worked tirelessly in his attempts to effect a reconciliation between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.

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which it had been defended in the course of the long drawn-out controversy.521 In insisting on a strict interpretation of the Articles and a firm commitment to the doctrine of the Trinity, the orthodox were arguing from a position of present power. Subscription to the Articles was for Waterland, as we have seen, closely tied up with obedience to the civil order. Continuity of the present orthodoxy was seen as vital to the stability of the state. A remarkable expression of such a view is to be found in the Earl of Nottingham's reply to Whiston, when he quoted in support of his case the advice of Maecenas to Augustus ‘never to allow any innovation in religion, because the peace of the state depended upon it’.522 It was not difficult for Sykes to respond to so extreme a presentation of the argument that on that Hobbesian principle Christianity itself, let alone the Reformation, would never have got under way.523 But there was a theological, as well as a political, aspect to the matter. Both sides were in agreement that it was not the intention of the church or of the Articles to insist on unity except in matters that were essential to human salvation (which in the light of Article VI must mean only in matters demonstrably required by Scripture). The orthodox were keen therefore to show that the doctrine of the Trinity was one of crucial religious significance and not of a purely speculative nature where a variety of views could easily be tolerated. Two arguments continually recur. First, God's revelation of himself as Trinity is above all a revelation of how he ought to be worshipped. And since true worship is the fundamental duty of humankind, knowledge of the Trinity is an essential condition for the fulfilment of our primary obligation to God. Arian worship, as the Fathers had complained of the early Arians,524 was a form of idolatry. Secondly, the full divinity of Christ is the necessary condition for any doctrine of salvation, which rests on a full satisfaction and propitiation having been made for human sin.525 In developing their side of the argument, the ‘Arians’

521

Joseph Priestley, Defence of Unitarianism for the Years 1788–9 (Birmingham 1790 ), appendix, 185–7.

522

Earl of Nottingham, An Answer to Mr Whiston (London, 1721 ), postscript, 76.

523

Sykes, A Letter to the Earl of Nottingham (London, 1721 ), 5–14.

524

As Whitby himself had pointed out in his early anti-Arian work, Tractatus de Vera Christi Deitate, 98.

525

See Waterland, The Importance of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity (1734), 26–33, 37–45; Earl of Nottingham, An Answer to Mr Whiston, 4–6; W. Webster, Preface to Maimbourg's History of Arianism (London, 1728 ), 43–50.

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were in a more difficult position. The logic of their view in religious terms pointed to a similarly exclusivist attitude. For in their eyes the orthodox were guilty of the ultimate blasphemy of ascribing to the secondarily divine Son, and even the Holy Spirit, the absolute worship that is emphatically due to the Father alone, the only supreme or selfexistent God. But practical considerations pointed in the opposite direction. It was not only that liberty of theological enquiry had been the means by which they had been enabled to recover that vital truth. Still more, the most they could conceivably hope for in the Church of England was to be tolerated alongside the orthodox. So Sykes claims that his basic aim in the controversy was ‘not to defend Arian subscription . . . but to vindicate that liberty or latitude of subscribing, which the Articles themselves allow’.526 Partly no doubt from conviction and partly from a recognition of what was practical, what he was arguing for was a broad comprehensiveness that would include his orthodox opponents, despite their fundamental error about the true nature and worship of God. But the more conciliatory tone of such remarks was not likely to find favour with the orthodox. John Potter, who while still Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford had been the one to announce the judgement of the Lower House of Convocation against Clarke in 1714 and who was later to become Archbishop of Canterbury, was representative of the reaction it produced among conservative churchmen. He spoke of a ‘scheme of general comprehensiveness or confusion’ as being one of the aims of the contemporary revival of ‘the Arian and Semi-Arian heresies’—and one that had met with ‘too much success’.527 Thus, through his personal influence as well as through his writings, Clarke did much to transform the image of Arianism in Britain. To an orthodox opponent like Waterland, the phenomenon of Samuel Clarke posed an awkward dilemma. In the eyes of the orthodox, what Clarke taught was Arianism. But for them the connotation of the word ‘Arian’ included moral depravity and intellectual poverty, concepts manifestly inapplicable to a man of Clarke's piety and learning. So either what Clarke taught was not Arianism, or Arians could be both pious and learned. While Clarke himself argued for the first option, it was the second which Waterland espoused. By being the kind of man that he was, Clarke endowed Arianism with an aura of respectability. It

526

Sykes, A Reply to Dr Waterland's Supplement, 46.

527

Potter, A Defence of the Charge, 283–4. On Potter and the ‘Arian’ controversy, see L. W. Barnard, John Potter (Ilfracombe, 1989 ), 81–7.

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could no longer be dismissed simply on the basis of the evil associations of its name. Even the charge of dishonest equivocation that was levelled against Clarke does not seem to have had much effect on the high esteem in which he was generally held. Nor indeed were his motives for staying in office in the Church of England purely prudential or self-serving. Having ignored Whiston's counsel to him not to accept initial preferment in the Church of England, his unhappiness with the requirement of subscription led him to refuse all further offers of preferment that came his way.528 And when he was offered the more secure and lucrative post of Master of the Mint in succession to Sir Isaac Newton, he turned it down as incompatible with his spiritual calling.529 The Church of England was committed to teach the faith of the Scriptures and of the early Fathers, and that was what Clarke believed himself called to do. Whiston continually complained that Clarke had failed to join him in his vigorous campaigning for the reform of the Church of England. But Clarke was concerned for such reform; he preferred to seek it by the less confrontational means of establishing a ‘moderate Arian’ way as a voice within the church. There was never any likelihood that it would become, as Whiston hoped, the dominant and determining creed of the church's life. Nor indeed did Clarke succeed in securing his lesser goal of winning a fully recognized place for it. What he did do was to begin a process which looked as if it might lead to moderate Arianism becoming an allowable minority view among the already existing variety of sometimes conflicting positions within the Church of England. Indeed, there was no very clear line of demarcation between Clarke's ‘moderate Arianism’ and some liberal or latitudinarian views within the church that were not so labelled. Tillotson, for example, when Archbishop of Canterbury, had spoken of one property of the Deity, namely ‘that he is of himself, and of no other’, as exclusive to the Father.530 James Peirce, a Presbyterian ‘Arian’, in seeking to

528

Emlyn, Works, ii. 491.

529

Ibid. 489–90.

530

John Tillotson, Sermons Concerning the Divinity and Incarnation of our Blessed Saviour (London, 1693 ), sermon II, pp. 121–2. The sermons, though published in 1693 in response to the antitrinitarian controversy, were originally delivered in 1679–80. Cf. also a work by E. Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester, entitled Certain Propositions by which the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity is so explained, according to the Ancient Fathers, as to speak it not contradictory to Natural Reason (London, 1694), esp. proposition 4 (‘The Father alone . . . is self-existent’) and proposition 16 (‘The Son and the Holy Spirit . . . have all divine perfections but the forementioned [i.e. self-existence]’).

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vindicate his own essential orthdoxy, appealed to Tillotson's words to support his case;531 critics of Tillotson, on the other hand, seized on them as evidence that the Archbishop's view was the unorthodox one that ‘the three persons are not coequal in all essential perfections’.532 The dividing line between Tillotson's view and Clarke's restriction of selfexistence to the Father, for which he was accused of Arianism, is not easily drawn. Can the Father be described as the fount of deity without implying any form of subordination in the Son? Despite the barrage of polemical writing against him that continued right up to the time of his death and beyond, Clarke was still regarded by many as one who had made, and was continuing to make, an important contribution to the life of the church. Benjamin Hoadly, the leading latitudinarian bishop, who had been so scathingly attacked by Whiston as having sacrificed his integrity for episcopal preferment, remained a great admirer of Clarke. He ends a eulogistic memoir of him, published just after Clarke's death, by saying that the memorial he himself would most value would be ‘to be thought of, and spoke of, in ages to come under the character of FRIEND of Dr CLARKE’.533 Clarke's name, indeed, was twice put forward as a possible nominee to a vacant bishopric. Though the source of the suggestion was in fact the court and the idea was firmly rejected by Wake and Gibson, it was still not without some support in church circles.534 Whether Clarke would have accepted is another matter. The proposal was known to him, and he regarded it in a different light from other possible occasions of preferment because it did not involve a formal act of subscription to the Articles. His cogitations about the possibility in 1727 show him torn between his conscience (would it be right to ordain people who had to make a subscription he was not prepared to make himself?) and his desire to be in a position where he could exert an influence that might further the reform of the church to which he was unwaveringly committed.535 So two years before his unexpected and relatively early death in 1729, he still had hopes that his ‘Arian’ view of Christian truth might continue to gain ground within the Church of England. Those hopes did not die with him. In the succeeding decades those who shared the cause that he had espoused had rather more grounds

531

J. Peirce, The Western Inquisition (London, 1720 ), 129. For Peirce, see pp. 138–40 below.

532

George Smith, Remarks on the Life of Tillotson (London, 1753 ) p. 56.

533

In Sermons of Samuel Clarke, ed. J. Clarke (London, 1730 ), preface, 1 (capitals original). For Whiston's attitude to Hoadly, see p. 103 above.

534

Sykes, William Wake, ii. 159.

535

Emlyn, Works, ii. 491–4.

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for hope than Clarke himself had had. The temper of the age seemed to offer a better prospect of change than that which preceded it. The new generation of those in authority were men for whom the turmoil of the revolution and the passions it had aroused were a matter of history rather than of personal experience. The clash of extreme convictions was less in evidence. ‘By 1730,’ write Walsh and Taylor, ‘the old Calvinist clergyman was not merely an endangered, but almost a vanished species.’536 And the non-jurors too were dying out. The Jacobite threat (despite 1745) was not as pressing as it had been, and the Jacobin threat had not yet arisen to take its place. George Horne, a high churchman and Hutchinsonian, who was Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge in 1776 and later Bishop of Norwich, might describe George II's reign as ‘a time when the smoke of Arianism, Deism, and Laodiceanism [a synonym for latitudinarianism] have darkened the air’,537 but others saw it as a welcome era of greater toleration and Christian charity than the earlier years of the century. The Whig hegemony ensured the appointment of several latitudinarian bishops, who constituted a less militant continuation of the Hoadly tradition. These included some who rose to the most senior positions on the bench, like James Herring, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1747 to 1757. Herring, writing privately in 1753 to a fellow latitudinarian, John Jortin, Archdeacon of London, expressed approval of Clarke's modifications of the Prayer Book: I have seen Dr Clarke's Book of Common Prayer; I have read it and approved the temper of it; but into what times are we fallen, after so much light, so much appearance of moderation that we can only wish for the success of the truth. The world will not bear it.538 His pessimistic tone is probably due more to the frustration of one in authority unable to pursue the reforms he would like to enact than to any hardening of attitudes in the general outlook of the time. Fear that reform would reactivate party strife made the kind of reform that he and others of like mind desired a practical impossibility. But it also helped to preserve those of heterodox view from active persecution.

536

John Walsh and Stephen Taylor, ‘The Church and Anglicanism in the “long” Eighteenth Century’, in J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor (eds.), The Church of England c. 1689–c. 1833 (Cambridge, 1993 ), 43.

537

Cited by J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1989 ), 248 from CUL Add. 8134/B/1: 2.

538

See T. Lindsey, An Historical View of the State of the Unitarian Doctrine and Worship (London, 1783 ), 136.

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The suppression in 1717 of Convocation, which had shown itself so much more militant than the bishops in the persecution of Samuel Clarke, also made it easier for the bishops of the day to leave any ‘Arian’ clergy unmolested. How many such clergy there were holding Arian views is hard to assess, for ‘the views of most parish clergy lie clouded in obscurity’.539 Nor is it easy to determine how many of the latitudinarian bishops themselves may have held Arian beliefs, for caution in public utterance, particularly in written form, was the general rule. Most seem to have been more concerned with moral reformation than with issues of doctrine. One notable exception was the maverick Irish bishop, Robert Clayton, whose book, An Essay on Spirit (1751) is an outand-out affirmation of Arian belief. Much influenced at the start of his career by Samuel Clarke, as were so many at that time, his book stands closer in spirit and in substance to Newton (whose General Scholium to the Principia he explicitly cites540) than to Clarke. The book's dedication speaks scathingly of Athanasius' claim to sainthood.541 The main body of the text draws on Newtonian conceptions of a single divine cause, on Old Testament theophanies and the interpretation of them by the ante-Nicene Fathers, whose language, Clayton insists, is incompatible with later orthodoxy, and on the standard New Testament texts to which Arians had always appealed. On this basis he argues for the existence of a second God, but one who ‘could not have been from all eternity coequal with the Father’.542 The designation ‘God’, as Jesus had said (John 10: 34–5), was given to the prophets of old on the basis of their God-given authority; it is even more fitting in the case of the Son, who is ‘the most perfect being next to God, acting with the highest authority which God is pleased to communicate or delegate’. It is on that ground and with that understanding that worship of the Son is an appropriate human response.543 He ends by insisting that the Articles are not merely wrong in demanding obedience to the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds but actually incoherent in doing so, since the former declares Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to be one hypostasis and the latter three.544 It is a remarkable book to have come from the pen of an Anglican bishop, but wholly uncharacteristic of the latitudinarian tradition of the time. Orthodox rebuttals were forthcoming but no

539

Walsh and Taylor, ‘The Church and Anglicanism’, 31.

540

An Essay on Spirit 100.

541

Ibid., pp. lv–lvi.

542

Ibid. 93–5.

543

Ibid. 84.

544

Ibid. 145–6.

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official action was taken. Five years later Clayton formally proposed in the House of Lords in Ireland that the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds should be replaced in the liturgy by the Apostles' Creed. In the course of his speech he described Athanasius as ‘a young, forward, petulant deacon in the Church of Alexandria’ who deliberately fomented the dispute between Arius and the bishop in order to get Arius excommunicated and so clear the road towards his own succession to the bishopric, and the Nicene Creed (in so far as it differs from the Apostles' Creed) as ‘nothing else but the determination of a number of bishops in the fourth century . . . concerning a metaphysical point of theology not plainly revealed in Scripture’.545 In a further book written at about the same time he reiterated his views in a still more extreme form. Christ is the creator of the world, but his designation as Son ‘must not be understood as being significative of the manner of his production into existence but only as intended to denote God's affection towards him’.546 Michael and Gabriel are the only two angels not to fall, and the archangel Michael is to be identified with Christ.547 This time he was summoned to meet his fellow bishops with the expectation that he was to be deprived of his see; but he died before the meeting could take place. Clayton was an eccentric, indicative of the range of heterodox belief that could be held with relative impunity at that time rather than of beliefs which were widely held. The accession of George III in 1760 marked a change in the political, and thereby also the ecclesiastical climate. The Tories were free of the taint of suspicion that had so often clung to them in the eyes of the court during the years following the revolution of 1688. It was now the liberalism of the Whigs and of the latitudinarians within the church that was liable to fall out of favour. The growth of radical political ideas, as exemplified in the American and then the French revolutions, was a context that militated against the aspirations of those who hoped for liberalizing reform. A few latitudinarian appointments to the episcopate were still made, but those appointed were left at the margin rather than promoted to the centre of affairs. Richard Watson, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, was made Bishop of Llandaff in 1782, but was left there for the remaining thirty-eight years of his life.

545

The Bishop of Clogher's Speech Made in the House of Lords in Ireland, on Monday, February 2nd, 1756 (2nd edn; London, 1758 ), 19 and 12.

546

R. Clayton, Vindication of the Histories of the Old and New Testaments Part III (London, 1758 ), 79.

547

Ibid. 102, 128.

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He saw himself as standing in the tradition of Benjamin Hoadly, but never progressed up the ladder of influential and wealthy sees as Hoadly had done.548 He himself attributed his failure to win promotion to his ‘lack of political pliancy’ and ‘having fallen under Royal displeasure’.549 Watson is more articulate about his own theological position than most of his latitudinarian predecessors. For him a reasoned understanding of Scripture was the one thing needful; all else paled by comparison. Moral reformation was the heart of the matter, and the doctrinal basis on which it stood was straightforward and beyond question: The two great foundations of Christianity, that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, and that he rose from the dead . . . stand firmly established. Questions about the status of Christ such as: Whether he be equal to, or inferior to the eternal God; whether the worlds were made by him; or he had no preexistent state are ‘speculative opinions’ which it ‘becomes not sober men too peremptorily to determine either way’.550 So the issues that gave rise to Arianism were for him undecidable, and therefore should be treated as adiaphora. Why Athanasians and Unitarians should calumniate one another for not agreeing on the quantum of honour which is to be given to Jesus Christ, when they both agree that he is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the World—all this quite exceeds my ability to account for.551 There was no doubt in his mind that Unitarians (though he did not share their beliefs) were Christians.552 If there had to be any supplementary guides to Scripture (a view which he firmly rejected), the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could provide better ones than the fourth: Was I compelled to receive a creed of human composition, I would more willingly in these enlightened times receive one from such men as Locke,

548

R. Watson, Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson; Written by Himself (London, 1817 ), 43.

549

Ibid. 225, 445–6.

550

‘A Letter from a Christian Whig’ (1772) in R. Watson, Miscellaneous Tracts on Religious, Political and Agricultural Subjects (London, 1815 ), ii. 10–12.

551

‘Considerations on the Expediency of Revising the Liturgy and Articles of the Church of England’ (3rd edn., 1790) in Miscellaneous Tracts, ii. 153–4.

552

Anecdotes, 47.

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Clarke and Tillotson, than from either Athanasius or Arius, or even from hundreds of contentious and political bishops, assembled in solemn council at Nice, Antioch or Ariminum.553 Watson repudiated the title of latitudinarian.554 He was, like Clayton, an individualist, but his views were much closer to the main latitudinarian tradition than Clayton's were. His attitude shows how significant those earlier latitudinarians had been in making room for a potential flourishing of Arianism within the church, while themselves being a long way from it as a matter of conviction. But Watson lacked the political or ecclesiastical influence that they had exercised. And without such influence an attitude such as his had little to offer that might assist the continuation of Arian conviction in times of adversity. With the political climate increasingly inimical to the possibility of reforming the church, it is not surprising that those clergy who were unhappy with official orthodoxy and with the restraints imposed by subscription should have come to feel an increasing sense of frustration. That frustration came to a head in the ‘Feathers Tavern Petition’ to Parliament for a relaxation of the terms of subscription in 1772, originated by Francis Blackburne, Archdeacon of Cleveland. Its rejection by an overwhelming majority in Parliament was effectively the end of those hopes for reform that had sustained Samuel Clarke through his hard times as minister in a Church of England whose official position repudiated his own strongly held convictions. Its failure led to the resignation of a small but influential number of convinced antitrinitarians, who left the church not because they were forced out but from conscientious conviction and at considerable personal cost to themselves. Those who remained found it increasingly difficult to maintain their liberal identity in a church dominated by the rising tides of high church and evangelical attitudes. In Martin Fitzpatrick's phrase, it was ‘the end of the Anglican–latitudinarian compromise’.555 An occasional ‘Arian’ voice was still to be heard. As late as 1788 there appeared a book by Henry Taylor, Rector of Crawley and Vicar of Portsmouth, arguing vigorously for a subordinationist view.556 His

553

‘Considerations’, 115.

554

See R. Watson, A Collection of Theological Tracts (London, 1791 ), i. xvi: ‘I have no regard for latitudinarian principles, nor for any principles, but the principle of truth.’

555

M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Latitudinarianism at the Parting of the Ways’ in Walsh, Haydon, and Taylor (eds.) The Church of England, 210.

556

H. Taylor, Considerations on Ancient and Modern Creeds Compared. The Supremacy of the Father. The Personal-Existence of the Holy Ghost. The Prae-Existence of Christ, and his Divinity (London, 1788 ).

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son protested at the description of him as an Arian.557 Taylor's own account of his doctrinal pedigree shows that the appellation was not groundless. He described his position as both Unitarian and Trinitarian in the proper senses of those words, firmly distinguishing it from both modern Unitarianism and modern Trinitarianism; it was, he claimed, a way of belief at one with that of the New Testament, of the ante-Nicene Fathers, of Arius, and of Sir Isaac Newton.558 But he was a voice from the dying past. Indeed, he himself died before the book could be published, though he had intended and prepared it for publication.559 For the future the Church of England would cease to be a habitat in which Arianism could continue as a form of piety and life. Throughout the period Clarke's writings had exercised great influence. Along with those of Locke and Sir Isaac Newton, they had begun ‘to find countenance in the schools’ at Oxford as early as 1721,560 and at Cambridge they held a prominent place in the syllabus of study. The antiquary William Cole, a man of catholic learning and a caustic tongue, comments in a letter that those responsible for Clarke's books being used as the basis for university lectures ‘may thank themselves if Arianism prevails, when they idolise the promoters of his doctrines’.561 From the Unitarian side it was suggested that Clarke's influence was a primary reason why Arianism did not give way to fully-fledged Unitarian beliefs earlier than it did. Had not the late Dr Clarke, by his great judgement in other things, given a sort of sanction to the Arian hypothesis, and in the opinion of many almost precluded all examination of the Scriptures; this great controversy had been long ago determined in favour of the Humanity.562 But whatever truth there may be in that judgment, it is also true that some were moved by Clarke's writings to the adoption of a faith based on reason and Scripture, which took a different form from his own

557

Ibid., Epistle to the Reader by his son, Henry Taylor, p. x. Gibbon also alludes to him simply as ‘Taylor the Arian’ (E. Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (London, 1984 ), 161).

558

Taylor, Considerations, 150–1. Cf. p. 138.

559

Ibid., p. i.

560

N. Amhurst in Terrae Filius, cited by W. R. Ward, Georgian Oxford (Oxford, 1958 ), 79.

561

Cited by Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment, 200 from BL Add 5873; pp. 48–9.

562

Richard Baron, preface to T. Gordon, A Cordial for Low Spirits (London, 1763 ), p. xvi.

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Arian convictions. Robert Tyrwhitt's conversion to Unitarianism, for example, which led him to resign his Cambridge fellowship in 1777, was set in train by his study of Clarke.563 And Clarke's influence extended even further into the communities into which such people moved. Theophilus Lindsey, son-in-law of Francis Blackburne, and one of those who left the Church of England after the failure of the Feathers Tavern Petition, sought to found a reformed Church of England with a reformed liturgy; and the liturgy he adopted was a revised version of Samuel Clarke's Prayer Book, that had earlier won Herring's approbation.564 It became the liturgy used in the Essex St. Chapel that he founded. In practice the Chapel became a part of the new Unitarian movement that grew primarily out of a similar liberalizing development within the dissenting churches, which they could no more contain that could the Church of England. The story of that parallel development calls for our attention, before we attempt any more general reflections on the phenomenon of eighteenth-century Arianism as a whole.

English Presbyterianism's ‘Insidious Tendency to Arianism’ The tendentious title given to this section is taken from a section heading in Drysdale's History of the Presbyterians in England.565 It gives expression to what has been a traditional view of eighteenth-century Presbyterianism in England, whose history has commonly been seen as the story of a lapse into Arianism—itself the first stage towards a further fall into Unitarianism. But three of the constituent terms in that summary—‘lapse’, ‘Presbyterian’, and ‘Arianism’—have all come under challenge in some more recent accounts.566 The first two challenges

563

DNB xix. 1372. He remained a liberal Unitarian, resigning from the Unitarian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge when it declared the worship of Christ ‘idolatrous’ (see p. 156 below).

564

T. Belsham, Memoirs of Theophilus Lindsey, in Lindsey, Works (London, 1812 ), x. 103; A. E. Peaston, The Prayer Book Reform Movement in the 18th Century (Oxford, 1940 ), 14–16. He revised it still further in 1793 (Belsham, 336–40; Peaston, 18–19). For Herring's comment, see p. 128 above.

565

A. H. Drysdale, History of the Presbyterians in England (London, 1889 ), 509.

566

For the first and third, see Jeremy Goring, ‘Introduction’, in G. C. Bolam et al., The English Presbyterians (London, 1968 ), 17–28. For the second, see R. E. Richey, ‘Did the English Presbyterians Become Unitarian?’, Church History, 42 (1973 ), 58–72. For an earlier vigorous protest on all three counts, see F. W. Powicke, ‘Apology for the Nonconformist Arians of the 18th Century’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, (1916–18 ), 101–28. The older account still figures in comparatively recent writing: see e.g. J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985 ), 317, which speaks of how ‘Presbyterians . . . slid down the slippery slope from Arianism to Socinianism’.

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need not detain us long. The third is more central to our concerns. ‘Lapse’ is an evaluative term, which takes it for granted that orthodoxy is always to be preferred to heterodoxy. But when the objections of the heterodox are being levelled against some of the more rigid orthodoxies of Calvinism on behalf of a more liberal attitude and a greater openness to the best developments in contemporary thought, such a description of it is at least open to question. Secondly, if the use of the term ‘Presbyterian’ is intended to imply that the changes I shall be seeking to describe were confined to Presbyterians, it would be seriously misleading. They were part of a wider movement within all the dissenting churches. Nevertheless, it is among the Presbyterian churches that the most marked tendencies towards heterodoxy are to be found. There are a number of reasons why that should have been so. Presbyterians had the tradition of a learned ministry and attracted better educated, more middle-class, congregations; they were, therefore, more exposed to the intellectual challenges of the day. Moreover, important decisions were more narrowly restricted to ministers and a small band of trustees than in the Independent churches. Thus if heterodox beliefs, arising from new ideas of the time, once found a foothold in the preaching ministry of a Presbyterian church, they were more likely to establish themselves there on a long-term basis, despite their strangeness to the main body of the congregation, than in those churches where the decisions lay with the whole membership of the church. Still other factors need to be taken into account, which complicate any attempted analysis. Ministers from an Independent background were often invited to a Presbyterian charge, and theological radicals (like Joseph Priestley) often chose to move to a Presbyterian church because of the greater freedom they found there for the expression of new ideas. So the Presbyterian churches tended to attract to themselves ministers whose heterodoxy had its roots in other dissenting bodies. It was the second half of the second decade of the century that saw the emergence of ‘Arianism’ as a broadly felt problem among conservative dissenters.567 But well before that time one dissenting minister had developed a distinctively ‘Arian’ position—before, indeed,

567

Roger Thomas dates it to 1717 (‘The Non-Subscription Controversy amongst Dissenters in 1719’, JEH 4 (1953 ), 184–5).

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either Whiston or Clarke had come to similar convictions or given them publicity. Thomas Emlyn was a man of independent spirit, opposed to all forms of subscription that involved any other norm than an individual's own understanding of Scripture. It was the publication of Sherlock's Vindication of the Trinity in 1689 that led him, and a neighbouring non-conformist minister, William Manning, to give serious attention to that particular doctrine. Their reaction to the book was the reverse of that intended by the author. Sherlock's account appeared to them to be tritheistic and convinced them of the falsity of the doctrine he was defending. Manning adopted a Socinian view, ‘but Mr Emlyn never could be brought to doubt either of the pre-existence of our Saviour, as the Logos, or that God created the material world by him’.568 He acknowledged that Christ was God as Scripture called him,569 but with much greater passion insisted that the Father alone was the supreme God. As God, Christ was to be worshipped, but it was an inferior worship, of a different order from that which belonged to the Father, as the only supreme, self-existent God.570 Emlyn regularly describes himself as a Unitarian (but not a Socinian). His critics ‘judged [his position] to be near Arianism’.571 His own insistence was that his position had been worked out ‘without reference either to Arius or Socinus, not agreeing wholly with either’.572 For him it was the scriptural witness only that counted. Patristic evidence was relatively unimportant, though he claimed the support of ‘Romish and Reformed writers’ for the view that the evidence of ‘primitive antiquity . . . runs for Arius's doctrine’,573 and was happy to point out that while Constantine ‘banished Arius for his faith’, he ‘banished Athanasius for crimes’.574 From 1691 to 1702 he was one of a group of dissenting ministers serving a Presbyterian congregation in Dublin. It was only at the end of that time that some of the congregation, alerted not by what he said but by what he did not say, challenged him on his beliefs about the divinity of Christ. The exposition of his views elicited a response of horror from congregation and fellow ministers alike. He was tried in a

568

S. Emlyn, ‘Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Emlyn’, in Emlyn, Works, i. p. xiii. Cf. T. Emlyn, ‘A Narrative of the Proceedings Against Him’, ibid. 15.

569

Ibid. 48.

570

See ‘A Vindication of the Worship of the Lord Jesus Christ on Unitarian Principles’, ibid. 207–312.

571

Emlyn, ‘Memoirs’, p. xxix. Cf. Emlyn, ‘A Narrative’, 29.

572

‘A Narrative’, 16.

573

T. Emlyn, ‘An Humble Inquiry into the Scripture Account of Jesus Christ’, in Works, i. 126.

574

‘A Narrative’, 13.

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civil court and imprisoned for two years.575 Non-conformist piety, in Dublin at least, seemed implacably opposed to such new ideas, and could look to the state to give active support to that opposition. Matthew Tomkins, another independent minister, suffered a similar fate sixteen years later at Stoke Newington. He too was challenged by his Presbyterian congregation as to his views on the divinity of Christ, and based his defence on the same ground that Scripture alone was to be allowed as evidence and that nothing should be regarded as doctrinal heresy unless Scripture pronounced it so.576 His own position was closer to orthodoxy than Emlyn's. But on one basic point he maintained his resistance to what he was being pressed to affirm: Christ was not ‘the very God, of the same substance or equal to the Father’.577 His position, he insisted, was not Arian, since he did not affirm the Son to be a creature.578 The title ‘only-begotten Son’ related to Christ's pre-existent state, indicating that his derivation from God was of a different kind from that of human beings or angels.579 Moreover it was an everlasting relation; ‘there never was a time when he was not’.580 And he was to be worshipped, not just with an inferior worship, but ‘in all kinds of it, or in all the instances wherein it is given to the Father’. That insistence is grounded on the injunction of the Johannine Christ that ‘all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father’.581 But it was not enough to save Tomkins from being removed from his ministry. His case is further evidence of how hostile conservative dissenting congregations were to any deviation from a fully orthodox understanding of the divinity of Christ. By the time of Tomkins's dismissal, the issue had already begun to emerge in a wider context, affecting not just single congregations but the dissenting churches as a whole. The incident that gave rise to this broader discussion of the problem occurred in Exeter. In this case the external influence of Whiston and Clarke was an important factor. It is not surprising that it should have been within the Church of England, with its well-established interest in the writings of the Fathers, that

575

For the official charge against Emlyn, see ‘A Narrative’, 27–8. He was accused of ‘impiously, blasphemously, falsely and maliciously assert[ing] . . . that the blessed Jesus has declared himself not to be the supreme God or equal to the Father, . . . publish[ing] the said infamous and scandalous libel with intention to disturb the peace and tranquillity of this kingdom, to seduce the pious true and faithful subjects of our Lady the Queen from the true and sacred Christian faith and religion, established in this kingdom of Ireland’.

576

M. Tomkins, The Case of Mr Martin Tomkins (London, 1719 ), 53.

577

Ibid. 35. Cf also p. 24.

578

Ibid. 44–6.

579

Ibid. 79.

580

Ibid. 78.

581

Ibid. 83–4.

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more specifically Arian ideas had first taken firm root. But, despite the evidence of Dublin and Stoke Newington, there was soil within the dissenting churches ready to receive the impact of their ideas. That soil was to be found in the training academies rather than in the congregations. Students at the Exeter Academy had been in correspondence with Whiston (Joseph Hallett Jun.) and with Clarke (Herbert Sogdon), and had been won over wholeheartedly to their views.582 The coming of James Peirce to a ministerial charge in Exeter provided a focal point for those already there who were attracted by these new ideas. It was to prove an explosive combination. While ministering in Cambridge Peirce had got to know Whiston, who described him as ‘the most learned of all the dissenting ministers that I had known’ but also as, at that time, ‘a zealous Athanasian’.583 When Peirce, who had left Cambridge by then, first heard of Whiston's move away from orthodoxy, he wrote him a strong but courteous letter of remonstration on 10 July 1708, expressing his amazement at the news.584 As late as 1710 Peirce was still insisting that, unlike the Church of England, there were no Socinians in the Protestant dissenting body.585 But Whiston persuaded Peirce to read his own Primitive Christianity Revived. A little later Peirce went on to read Clarke's Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity, and it was that book that was the primary influence in bringing him to a subordinationist view, very close to that of Clarke himself.586 Like Tomkins, Peirce affirmed a relatively conservative subordinationism. His aim in the controversy, he insisted, was to ‘explain the Trinity’ not to ‘explain it away’.587 About the same time Joseph Hallett Jun. wrote a pamphlet entitled, The Belief of the Subordination of the Son No Characteristic of an Arian, in which he cited a catena of passages from Church of England divines, such as Tillotson, Pearson, and Bull, from eminent dissenting ministers and Continental Reformed divines—all designed to show that the subordinate status of the Son is an integral element in orthodox statements of the doctrine of the Trinity as

582

Roger Thomas, ‘Presbyterians in Transition’, in Bolan et al., The English Presbyterians, 155–6.

583

Whiston, Memoirs, 139.

584

Ibid. 139–42.

585

A. Gordon, Addresses Biographical and Historical (London, 1922 ), 126–7, citing Peirce's Vindication of the Dissenters. In the second edition of 1717 , translated from Latin into English, the section embodying this claim is omitted.

586

Whiston, Life of Samuel Clarke, 121–5; Peirce, The Western Inquisition, 5–8.

587

J. Peirce, Remarks upon the Account of What was Transacted in the Assembly at Exon (London, 1719 ), 8.

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well.588 Peirce's scriptural commentaries argue the case for the subordination of the Son with careful attention to the scriptural text. Christ could not be ‘equal to God’, for that necessarily implied a plurality of gods; he was in the ‘form or likeness of God’ by virtue of a resemblance to God in glory and majesty and also of his delegated authority and dominion, something which appertained to the time before as well as after his incarnation.589 The Logos, though subordinate to the Father, was to be clearly distinguished from the angels, which led Peirce to a tentative rejection of the traditional exegesis of angelic appearances in the Old Testament as appearances of the Logos.590 He strongly objected to the standard designation of his view as ‘Arian’, not only, like Clarke, because he did not hold ‘all those monstrous absurd and blasphemous opinions that Arius and some of his followers did at first’,591 but still more because it was Christian liberty rather than any particular form of antitrinitarian belief that was his overriding concern.592 Trinitarian doctrine was, in his view, too abstruse a notion for it conceivably to be of crucial importance for Christian salvation.593 The objection that his view undermined the true object of Christian worship or the nature of Christ's satisfaction was vigorously denied. It could only appear to do so, he retorted, to people who went against Scripture by denying that the Father was the only ultimate object of Christian worship, and who maintained not only the scriptural notion that Christ's death was a propitiation for sin but also the unscriptural notion that what we needed saving from was an infinite misery in punishment for the infinite evil of sin.594 But, as the ‘Arianism’ of Samuel Clarke, however carefully presented, had proved unacceptable to the authorities in the Church of England, so strong opposition to Peirce's beliefs was forthcoming from those in authority in his church. He and his fellow ministers were required to define their understanding of the Trinity. The demand on this occasion came from the trustees, and a wider circle of ministers,

588

Exon 1719. A similar but independent catena from many of the same authors is given by Peirce in The Western Inquisition, 113–37.

589

J. Peirce, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistle of St Paul to the Philippians (2nd edn; London 1733 ), 26–7 (on Phil. 2: 6).

590

J. Peirce, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistle to the Hebrews (2nd edn; London, 1734 ), 2–3 (on Heb. 1: 2).

591

J. Peirce, Propositions Relating to the Controversy among the Dissenters in the West Concerning the Trinity in a Letter to Mr Enty (London, 1720 ), 97–8.

592

Ibid. 88.

593

Peirce, The Western Inquisition, 9.

594

Peirce, Remarks, 25–6.

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rather than from the congregation. The outcome of the prolonged struggle that ensued was the ejection of Peirce and Joseph Hallett Sen. from their ministry. But they met with support as well as opposition, and on this occasion a considerable following, some three hundred people, moved with them to start a new chapel which was to continue with an ‘Arian’ ministry for ninety years.595 The incident raised the question: how was such a sharp difference between ministers to be dealt with? Peirce admitted that Scripture itself was too ambiguous to serve as a test that could settle such a case.596 But he had no alternative to offer. When Article I was proposed for that purpose, he, like Sykes, objected that the ambiguity inherent in its language, especially its use of the word ‘person’, rendered it an equally ineffective tool.597 But his objection was not merely pragmatic; it was a matter of principle. Although non-scriptural language was inevitable, it should never be imposed.598 Non-scriptural tests ran counter to the very raison d'être of the dissenting churches. No view rooted in Scripture as his was should be excluded from the church. Although this more general issue played a part in the pamphlet war that accompanied the Exeter debate, it was not the dominant issue in the quarrel; that remained the question of whether or not an ‘Arian’ view of the Trinity was admissible. But appeal was made to London, and in the wider forum of debate that ensued there, the balance of emphasis was tilted the other way. Although orthodox Trinitarian doctrine was still the substantive issue in the case, the focus of the debate was on the broader question of the appropriateness or otherwise of requiring any form of nonscriptural test. And when that issue was put to the vote at Salters Hall in 1719 at an assembly in which all the dissenting churches were involved, it was the opponents of such tests, the ‘non-subscribers’, who won the day—albeit by only four votes. The vote should not be taken as evidence of any widespread sympathy for Arianism; the great majority of the non-subscribers held orthodox views of the Trinity.599 But objection to non-scriptural tests had a stronger appeal in the dissenting world in general than defence of Trinitarian orthodoxy. Edmund Calamy provides an interesting example of what was probably

595

See Thomas, ‘The Non-Subscription Controversy’, 162–6.

596

The Western Inquisition, 176.

597

Ibid. 176, 181.

598

Ibid. 110–11.

599

See Thomas, ‘The Non-Subscription Controversy’, 175 n. 4.

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a widely shared attitude. He was strongly opposed to Arianism, but even more strongly opposed to the imposition of tests. Opposition to the Church of England's insistence on subscription to the Articles was a deeply ingrained element in the English Presbyterian tradition after the Restoration. Unhappy with the way the issue was being posed at Salters Hall, Calamy absented himself from the vote, though his sympathy with the non-subscribers was well known.600 But at the same time he preached, and subsequently published, thirteen sermons on the Trinity.601 They are primarily directed against the writings of Thomas Emlyn. In the preface to his book he gives as his reason for publishing them the desire ‘to prevent its being hereafter said that the Dissenters did not at this time appear against Arianism, when it so much threatened us’.602 The one aim of the sermons, he declares, was to demonstrate the scriptural character of orthodox Trinitarianism.406 One sermon (no. 10) is devoted to a survey of the early patristic evidence. But even then Calamy begins the sermon by reminding his audience that he does not ‘think the proof of the Trinity should be fetched from the Fathers, but from the Scriptures’.603 None the less he, like many others who insisted on the exclusive authority of Scripture for doctrine, was not averse to looking for secondary confirmation of the orthodox view. And that, he believed, was provided by a survey of the ante-Nicene Fathers, who, in his judgement, all shared the orthodox scriptural view. ‘Arius and his followers were the real innovators.’604 Arianism was a form of tritheism, owing more to Platonism than to Christianity.605 It was a familiar view. But with no doctrinal tests to support it, it was not one that could easily withstand the acids of more open and critical assessments of the scriptural evidence. And assessments of that kind were beginning to gain ground within the dissenting churches. ‘By 1730’, writes Jeremy Goring, ‘something resembling a liberal “party” within Dissent was coming into being.’606 The real powerhouse of the ‘party’, if the word be not too formal, was the Dissenting Academies, developed to meet the needs of those excluded from Oxford and Cambridge by the requirement of subscription. In the Academies Locke's works figured prominently in the syllabus (in one case since the very

600

E. Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life (London, 1829 ), ii. 411–18.

601

E. Calamy, Thirteen Sermons Concerning the Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1722 ).

602

Ibid., preface.

603

Ibid. 291.

604

Ibid 327.

605

Ibid., preface.

606

J. Goring, ‘The Break-up of Dissent’, in Bolam et al. English Presbyterians, 180.

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beginning of the century), and Clarke's works were also studied. The overriding concern of this more liberal movement was to insist on the sufficiency of a reasoned approach to Scripture, and to object strongly against the imposition of any other form of test. In spirit it stood close to the latitudinarian movement in the Church of England; in 1748, indeed, Samuel Chandler, one of its leaders, had cordial talks with Archbishop Herring, seeking once again to overcome disunity by way of comprehension.607 In the Church of England the primary touchstone of orthodoxy was the doctrine of the Trinity.608 It is not surprising, therefore, that it should have been in relation to that doctrine that the main challenge to orthodoxy was felt in the Church of England. But for the Presbyterian churches the orthodoxy whose powerful hold was being called into question was not Athanasian but Calvinist. In their case, therefore, the emerging heterodoxy might be expected to have taken an Arminian or Pelagian rather than an Arian form. But ‘Arian’ is in fact the designation that has traditionally been given to the movement. To assess the appropriateness of that nomenclature calls for a survey of the writings of its leading proponents. To that end we will review the work of John Taylor (‘one of the most distinguished of the Arian party’609), George Benson (one of the two ‘real heads of the new rising school among the Presbyterians’610), and Samuel Bourn (who in his writings ‘emitted the most pronounced Arian note’611). John Taylor was a distinguished scholar, particularly of Hebrew. His book, The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin (1740), played within Dissent much the same role that Clarke's book had played in the Church of England. Taylor studied Clarke's Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity with his congregation at Norwich, but what he took from it was more its method than its content. He regularly insists that there is no other basis for Christian truth than Scripture assessed by the understanding God has given us. He told his students at the Warrington Academy to assent to no principle or sentiment by me taught or advanced, but only so far as it shall appear to you to be supported or justified by proper evidence from Revelation or the reason of things.612

607

Bolam et al., English Presbyterians, 180.

608

Jonathan Clark speaks of ‘Trinitarian orthodoxy’ as ‘the intellectual underpinning of Church, King and Parliament’ (English Society, p. 277).

609

J. H. Colligan, The Arian Movement in England (Manchester, 1913 ), 96.

610

A. H. Drysdale, History of the Presbyterians, 508. The other ‘head’ was Samuel Chandler.

611

Ibid.

612

Monthly Repository, 8 (1813), 89.

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And in his book he, like Clarke, seeks to survey all the scriptural evidence germane to his topic and to draw from it a reasoned account of the matter. This process led him to a rejection of the accepted orthodoxy on the subject of original sin, as it had led Clarke in the case of the Trinity. And it produced an equally vigorous response. From John Wesley it elicited a letter of remarkable charity but total disagreement: ‘Either I or you mistake the whole meaning of Christianity from the beginning to the end.’613 And from an Irish minister it drew the agonized comment: ‘It is a bad book and a dangerous book and an heretical book; and, what is worse than all, the book is unanswerable.’614 But if sin and grace were the dominant concerns of the heterodox Dissenters, so that ‘Arian’ seems an inappropriate overall label to give to the movement of thought that they represent, the question still remains open whether they may not, none the less, have held ‘Arian’ views of the person of Christ. If Clarke was their mentor in method, it would not be surprising if they came to conclusions similar to his in relation to the Trinity—even if that doctrine did not have the same central significance for them that it had for Clarke. The example of Peirce was already there to point them in that direction. Taylor's writings present a clear and consistent picture. The Son is pre-existent. A central feature of his sacrificial love on the cross is that he emptied himself of that ‘state of glory that he had with the Father before the world was’.615 In commenting on Rom. 9: 5 Taylor suggests an emendation of the text which would make ‘God over all’ refer to the Father, but he is happy to accept that it may refer to the Son, for ‘Christ is God over all, as he is by the Father appointed Lord, King and Governor of all.’616 ‘God’ is a word used of Christ, but it refers to that which is given him as the outcome of his obedience on the cross. Benson's view is similar to Taylor's but is given fuller and more explicit expression.617 Benson was a particular admirer of Locke, whom

613

Letter of John Wesley to John Taylor of 3 July 1759 (Wesley's Journal (London, 1909 ), iv. 338).

614

Cited by Goring in The English Presbyterians, 185.

615

John Taylor, The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin (London, 1740 ), 34. This is the only allusion in the book to Christ's pre-existence. The same phrase occurs in a much fuller context in Taylor's A Key to the Apostolic Writings, sect. 160, printed as a preface to his A Paraphrase with Notes on the Epistle to the Romans (2nd edn.; London, 1747 ).

616

Taylor, Paraphrase, 329.

617

Jeremy Goring (in The English Presbyterians, 197) notes that Glasgow University gave Taylor a DD but refused to do the same for Benson because he was suspected of Socinianism.

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he speaks of as an illustration of the way in which ‘God has so wisely ordered things that some should be men of genius and leisure’.618 He wrote annotated paraphrases on some of the New Testament epistles in conscious imitation and continuation of Locke's paraphrases. And his theology, as well as his scriptural method, follows that of Locke. ‘The two fundamental articles of the Christian faith’ for Benson are ‘that there is one, only living God and that Jesus is the Christ.’ ‘The one true God’, moreover, is ‘the proper object of worship; and Jesus Christ, the only mediator between God and man.’619 But the pre-existence of Christ is a far more prominent theme with Benson than with Locke: He who was called the angel of the covenant, the angel of the Lord, and Jehovah, and had so long tabernacled among them in the cloud of glory, appeareth, at last, to have laid aside his glory, to have become incarnate, and partook of flesh and blood like the children of men, and was by the gospel declared to be . . . God over all, Jews and Gentiles, a prince and a saviour, to grant unto all penitent persons remission of sins.620 A pre-existence in glory with the Father is strongly affirmed, and the kenotic self-giving of the incarnation is essential both to the gospel of God's love and to Christ's designation as ‘God over all’. But Benson shows no sign of being involved in a battle for Arianism against orthodoxy. In commenting on the phrase ‘only wise God’, he compares other similar phrases from Matt. 19: 17, 1 Tim. 6: 16, Rev. 15: 4 and Rom. 16: 27, but does not press the point home in characteristically Arian fashion. The uniqueness of God's wisdom is contrasted in its underived and infinite character with the derived and limited nature of that of humans and of angels. But the implication that others had found in those texts of a contrast also between the wisdom and goodness of the Father and those of the Son is not drawn.621 Samuel Bourn was more of a philosopher than a biblical scholar, but his understanding of the role of Scripture in relation to doctrine was the same as that of Taylor and Benson. The articles of the Christian

618

G. Benson, The Reasonableness of the Christian Religion (London, 1747 ), 144.

619

G. Benson, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistle of St John in Imitation of Mr Locke's Manner (London, 1749 ), 141. Benson argues that the phrase ‘This is the true God’ in the text refers to the Father, although he recognizes that it would be more natural grammatically to take it of the Son. Cf. also A Paraphrase and Notes on St Paul's 1st Epistle to the Thessalonians (London, 1731 ), 10–11.

620

A Paraphrase and Notes on St Paul's 1st Epistle to Timothy (London, 1733), 73. Cf. also A Paraphrase and Notes on the Second Epistle of St Peter (London, 1745), 15–16.

621

A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistle of St Jude (London, 1745 ), 163 (on Jude 25).

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faith are the doctrines that Christ and the Apostles require of us, namely that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, that he rose from the dead and is ordained of God to be the judge of mankind: but they do not require our belief of any thing concerning his dignity or excellence, previous to his human appearance.622 That is a mystery about which nothing more can be said than about the mystery of the union of our own souls and bodies. It is ‘folly and arrogance’ that have led some to maintain. with an amazing degree of assurance, certain propositions concerning the person or essence of our Saviour, and his state of glory and dignity before his coming into this world.623 Bourn's aim was to elucidate and justify what he calls, using the prevalent idiom, ‘the Scripture-Doctrine of a Mediator between God and Man’.624 While he eschews the spectacular detail that he criticizes in others, the process of elucidation does involve him in some reflection on what it is to be ‘the Son of God’. Two widely held but erroneous views are to be avoided: the one that the Son is ‘little more than a prophet’, the other that he is ‘equal in all attributes, and the very same in essence, with God who appointed him to be mediator’.625 The title ‘Son of God’ has no reference to the unscriptural concept of metaphysical essence. It is frequently used of angels, and even of humans, ‘on account of their piety and goodness’. And when it is used of Christ, it is a more pre-eminent version of that sense that is intended, indicating ‘his moral worth and dignity in the divine estimation’. So too the title ‘God’ is sometimes applied to ‘angels, and even earthly governors’. It is in this sense that it too is used of Christ, ‘on account of the dominion of government which God has committed to him for the eternal salvation of men’.626 Thus the designation ‘Son of God’ is a mark of Christ's pre-eminent moral status in the ranks of the invisible powers that exist between the divine and human realms; and his further designation ‘God’ is a mark of his authoritative status as governor and judge of the world, a role which was always intended for him and to which he has been exalted as the culmination of his obedience to the divine will in his incarnate state.

622

S. Bourn, A Series of Discourses on the Principles and Evidences of Natural Religion and the Christian Revelation (London, 1760 ), i. 296 (italics original).

623

Ibid. 297 (italics original).

624

Ibid. 293.

625

Ibid., ii. 150–1.

626

Ibid. 141–2.

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But Bourn was concerned not merely to expound this as a truth witnessed to by Scripture. He was concerned also to show that this mediatorial concept is ‘something perfectly rational and agreeable to the constitution of nature’. To that end he claims that the existence of ‘orders of wise, powerful and active beings, the subjects and servants of the One supreme being, is a dictate of reason as well as of revelation’.627 The dominant Newtonian view of the world showed that ‘in the constitution of nature all events proceed from intermediate causes or subordinate powers’.628 God's purposes were ‘accomplished by the intervention either of material causes or of intelligent beings subject to the will and design of the Supreme Being’.629 It was consonant therefore with God's known way of acting in the physical world, that he should effect his way of salvation also through a mediator. All these writers assert the pre-existence of Christ. It is something that they find in Scripture and that they see as a strengthening of the gospel message of his gracious self-giving for humankind. But beyond that there is little they find themselves able to say about it. He is called ‘Son of God’ and ‘God’, but these terms are not designed to describe the nature of his being. On the analogy of their use with reference to angels and humans, they indicate his moral dignity in the one case and his God-given authority over the human race in the other. They do so, admittedly, in some preeminent sense. So Christ's pre-existent nature, if one were allowed to give any more specific expression to it, would seem to be that of a pre-eminent exemplar of those intelligent celestial beings, whom we generally know as angels. The term ‘super-angelic’ is sometimes used.630 In his children's catechism Bourn includes the question: ‘Who was Jesus Christ before he came into the world?’ and provides the answer: ‘A divine person, higher than all the angels.’631 But speculation on the theme is to be discouraged. What is more germane to our religious needs is the divinely given authority over us that his obedient, mediatorial role involves. Thus the primary religious substance of the position of these writers is more Socinian than Arian in character. The affirmation of Christ's pre-existence adds to that primary substance a kind of broadly ‘Arian’ prologue. But it is ‘Arian’ in a weak sense, closer to an ante-Nicene angel Christology than to any developed fourth-century view. Moreover it is, for them, an issue of

627

Bourn, Discourses, i. 294.

628

Ibid., ii. 175–8, esp. p. 176.

629

Ibid., i. 293.

630

See pp. 147 (Withers) and 150 (Price) below.

631

S. Bourn, Lectures to Children and Young People in a Catechetical Method (Birmingham, 1738 ), 53.

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relatively small significance and not one open to further elaboration. A conception of Christ's pre-existence, so little stressed and so little developed, was not likely to have much staying power when brought out into the open and subjected to hostile questioning. One dissenting minister who did give more concentrated attention to the Christological question was Nathaniel Lardner. He was an Independent, who had voted with the non-subscribers at Salters Hall, and who opted to become a Presbyterian. For several years in the 1740s he was Benson's senior colleague in a shared ministry, but severe deafness forced him to withdraw and exercise his considerable skills through study and writing rather than through pastoral ministry. In a work entitled Letter Concerning the Question Whether Logos Supplied the Place of Human Soul in the Person of Jesus Christ, Lardner deals with an aspect of characteristically Arian belief that had not played a prominent role in the early debates within the Church of England. Whiston, it is true, had described how his first attraction to an Arian position was the result of reading Brocklesby's Gospel Theism and learning from it about the Arian and Apollinarian notion that the Logos had supplied the place of the human soul in Christ.632 But Priestley comments with surprise that Whiston was the only one of the earlier generation of Arians who paid any attention to the matter.633 That is to overstate the case. Among the early Presbyterians it did figure in the debates. John Withers, for example, who was a colleague of Peirce at Exeter and was originally ejected with him but rapidly restored when he agreed to give his assent to Article I, summarized the heresy of Arius which he abjured as consisting in three things: the third (in addition to the belief that the Son was a creature and that there had been a time when he had no existence) was ‘that his super-angelic nature animated his body instead of a reasonable soul’.634 More significantly Joseph Hallett Jun., who succeeded Peirce as minister of the new congregation founded as a result of the ejection, put the issue at the centre of his understanding of the gospel. Christ did have flesh and blood like ours and a reasonable soul, but it was not a normal human soul; it was an intelligent, pre-existent spirit which genuinely became poor for our sake. Such a view, he argued, expressed a deeper redemptive love than orthodoxy, which sees the Son of God in practice as only related to rather than becoming

632

See p. 94 above.

633

J. Priestley, An History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ (Birmingham, 1786 ), ii. 211.

634

J. Peirce, Western Inquisition, 104.

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a human soul.635 Lardner's basic objection to this view was the obvious one that it constituted a denial of Christ's humanity.636 Thereby, he argued, it undermined the reality of his temptations and robbed them of their moral significance for us;637 it similarly weakened the force of his resurrection as an assurance of our own.638 The Letter was composed as early as 1730, but not published until 1759. Even then, according to Lardner's biographer, it expressed ‘sentiments . . . confined to a few persons’, but by thirty years later (when the biographer was writing) it had contributed to a remarkable change in outlook.639 Among those whom it influenced was Joseph Priestley. He is said to have described Lardner as the ‘prince of divines’640, and ascribes his own conversion from Arianism to become ‘what is called a Socinian’ to the reading of Lardner's Letter.641 The conversion of Priestley from Arianism to Unitarianism was an outcome of no small moment, for Priestley was to play a more significant role than any other single person in the demise of British Arianism. He was born in 1731 and was another in the sequence of outstanding scientists committed to an antitrinitarian view. He was brought up in an orthodox Trinitarian faith, but was converted to Arianism at the age of about 20 as a result of his studies at the Dissenting Academy at Daventry. It was not until fifteen or sixteen years later that, under the influence of Lardner's Letter, he finally espoused the Unitarian cause.642 He summarizes his development as one ‘from Trinitarianism to high Arianism; from high Arianism to low Arianism; and from this to Socinianism even of the lowest sort’.643 But having once espoused Unitarianism or ‘Socinianism of the lowest sort’, he showed himself a militant polemicist on its behalf. In spirit he stands closer to Whiston than to either Newton or Clarke. His aim was a total reformation of the church in the light of his understanding of the

635

J. Hallett Jun., The Christian Creed Concerning the Son of God as Professed by Those Christians Who are (though Falsely) Called Arians (c. 1736), as summarized by F. J. Powicke, ‘Apology for the Nonconformist Arians of the 18th Century’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, 1 (1916–18 ), 126–7.

636

Lardner, Letter, 4–5 (Works, x. 85).

637

Ibid. 6–8 (Works, x. 86–7).

638

Ibid. 44 (Works, x. 106–7).

639

A. Kippis, Life of Nathaniel Lardner, in Nathaniel Lardner, Works (1788 ), i. lx–lxi.

640

Ibid., p. civ.

641

J. T. Rutt, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley (London, 1831), i. 69. Priestley allows the use of ‘Socinian’ to mean the same as ‘Unitarian’ as common, if imprecise, usage in relation to himself.

642

Priestley, Letters to Dr Horsley (Birmingham, 1783 ), preface, v–vi.

643

Priestley, Defences of Unitarianism for the Year 1786 (Birmingham, 1788), Letters to Dr Price II, p. 101.

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primitive church. Of the rightness of that understanding he had no more doubt than Whiston did of his—but Priestley's was a Unitarian understanding and Whiston's an Arian one. The polemic he conducted was on two fronts. Orthodoxy and Arianism had to be refuted. His primary opponent on the orthodox side was Samuel Horsley. Horsley (like Priestley) was a Fellow of the Royal Society, engaged at the time in the process of editing the first complete edition of the works of Sir Isaac Newton. He expresses himself reluctant to take up the well-worn topics of general Trinitarian discussion, especially with one lacking the appropriate qualifications, ‘great as his attainments are confessed to be in the profane sciences’. The area of debate he was prepared to pursue was the historical one, which was in any event at the heart of Priestley's case.644 Priestley's main Arian opponent was Richard Price, another FRS; like Priestley he was best known for his nontheological writings, in his case on financial and political matters. Priestley's relationship with Price was very different from that with Horsley. He and Price were close personal friends. Price had been responsible for introducing Priestley to the Royal Society, and Priestley delivered the funeral oration on Price in 1791. Price was the son of an orthodox Calvinist minister. His father is said to have found him reading the works of Samuel Clarke, and to have seized them and thrown them on the fire.645 Whatever the truth of the story, Price was, like so many others, undoubtedly influenced by Clarke, and developed a position similar to that of Bourn and the other Presbyterian divines we have reviewed. His primary emphasis was on religious practice. For him nothing was ‘properly fundamental in religion, besides sincerely desiring to know, and faithfully endeavouring to do the will of God’.646 There were, it is true, fundamental doctrines: that Christ was sent to be the Saviour of the world—that he worked miracles—rose from the dead and ascended into heaven—that he will hereafter appear to judge the world and that through him mankind will be then raised from death—the wicked punished, and the virtuous established in glorious immortality.647

644

S. Horsley, Letters in Reply to Dr Priestley (London, 1784 ), i. 1–3. Cf. the full title of the published tracts: Tracts in Controversy with Dr Priestley upon the Historical Question of the Belief of the First Ages in Our Lord's Divinity (Gloucester, 1789).

645

See D. O. Thomas, The Honest Mind (Oxford, 1977 ), 8.

646

R. Price, Sermons on Various Subjects (London, 1816 ), sermons III and IV on Matt. 7: 21, 51–87, esp. pp. 56, 64–5, and 67–8.

647

Ibid. 84–5.

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But these were so clearly revealed that there was no room for dispute about them. The points that were in dispute between sincere orthodox, Arian, and Socinian enquirers did not fall into that category. On those issues it had proved impossible to come to a common mind, and we should not suffer ourselves to indulge impatience when we hear some saying that Christ was a mere man, and others that he was a super-angelic being, and others that he was God himself in union with a man.648 But despite holding this characteristically latitudinarian view of the relatively minor importance of the matter, Price argues with far more conviction than most of those holding similar views, for the truth of the Arian position. Arianism, as Price presents it, is a middle way between ‘Athanasianism’ or ‘Calvinism’ on the one hand, and ‘Socinianism’ on the other;649 the Calvinist ‘carries our notions very high on the narrow side’ and the Socinian ‘sinks them as low on the contrary side’.650 Lardner's complaint that Arianism with its denial of Christ's human soul undermined the true humanity of Christ could be turned on its head. Arianism alone, Price claimed, avoided having to ascribe the saving events of virgin birth, crucifixion, and resurrection to one who ‘was simply a man feeling all our wants and subject to all our infirmities’.651 Unitarians clearly did so; but so did high Trinitarians. At first hearing this charge against Trinitarians (which we have already met with in the case of Joseph Hallett Jun.652) is a surprising one, but it is to be found also in the earlier exchange between Jackson and Waterland—and indeed goes back to the fourth century. Waterland follows the standard orthodox line of ascribing Christ's ignorance (as attested in Matt. 24: 36/Mark 13: 32) to his human nature only. Jackson objects that it is people, not natures, who know or are ignorant; the orthodox handling of such texts inadvertently results, therefore, in treating the Son as simply human.653 But despite the reasoned conviction and religious sensitivity with which Price argues the Arian case, he lacks the confident militancy of both Horsley and Priestley. The recognition that sincere Christians may reasonably have adopted a different view from his own blunts the edge of his polemic in a way which may endear him to the modern

648

Sermons on the Christian Doctrine (London, 1787 ), 31.

649

Ibid. 33, 106.

650

Ibid. 72.

651

Ibid. 88–9.

652

See pp. 147–8 above.

653

Waterland, Vindication, 101; Jackson, Reply to Waterland, 237.

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reader, but did not help his view to endure at the time. He told Priestley that he felt no disposition to be very anxious about bringing you over to my opinion. The rage for proselytism is one of the curses of the world. I wish to make no proselytes except to candour, and charity, and honest enquiry.654 The difference between Price and Priestley on this score could hardly have been greater. His difference from the earlier Presbyterian Arianism of Peirce is also worthy of note. Where Peirce had seen himself as a Trinitarian, giving a true explanation of the Trinity,655 it was the name of Unitarian that Price was keen to claim for himself. He had, he claimed, a better right to it than the Socinians, since Socinians worshipped a deified man, whereas ‘it is an essential part of religion with me to worship God only’.656 ‘Our invocation in prayer’, Price declares, ‘must be confined to the one selfexistent being who governs all beings.’657 He insists to Lindsey that he does not ‘hold that [Christ] is almost equal to the Supreme God; a sentiment at which I shudder and which probably no Arian now holds’.658 ‘Arianism’, as Price presented it, had moved much further from orthodox belief than those versions of it put forward at the beginning of the century. It was one form of a rational, latitudinarian approach, and little match for the militancy of its two competing rivals for the allegiance of the Christian mind. The arguments employed by Priestley against his two adversaries were primarily historical in character. The Arians earlier in the century had done a good job in refuting the appeal of the orthodox to Scripture and to the ante-Nicene Fathers.659 Where they had gone wrong was in believing that those sources gave grounds for their belief in the preexistence of Christ, as a secondary divinity. Priestley saw his role as completing the task they had begun and showing the falsity of their alternative way of reading the evidence. Arius was a genuine

654

Cited by M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Toleration and Truth’, in Enlightenment and Dissent, 1 (1982 ), 25.

655

See p. 138 above.

656

R. Price, Sermons on the Christian Doctrine, 143. Cf. the titles of articles in the Theological Repository: ‘Socinians Not the Only Unitarians’ ((1784), iv. 370–3); ‘An Attempt to Prove that Arians are Entitled to the Appellation of Unitarian’ ((1786), v. 56–63). See also T. Belsham, who complains of hearing ‘nothing from the Arians for the last twenty years but lugubrious complaints against the Unitarians for appropriating to themselves the honourable name’ (Letters upon Arianism (London 1808 ), 26–8).

657

Price, Sermons on the Christian Doctrine, 102.

658

Cited by Thomas, The Honest Mind, 36–7 (italics original).

659

Priestley, History of Opinions, preface, p. xxiii.

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innovator, the first to affirm that the Son was created out of nothing and the first to deny Christ's human soul.660 But that is not to say that he was the first to introduce error into Christian teaching about the Son. Although Justin and the other ante-Nicene Fathers did not, in his view, assert a personally pre-existent Christ at all closely akin to later Arian teaching, they were responsible for introducing from their Platonic learning the idea of an impersonal pre-existent Logos.661 That was a first move away from the purity of the original apostolic teaching and a stage on the road to later Arian and Athanasian views. But Priestley's primary aim was to show that this original teaching had involved a straightforward Unitarian understanding of Christ as a man. That was the heart of his debate with Horsley. Priestley regarded it as self-evidently the view of the Apostles; their whole conduct towards Jesus militates against any suggestion that they thought of him as the maker of the universe and of themselves.662 It was also that of the first Jerusalem Christians, who were to be identified with those spoken of as Nazarenes or Ebionites.663 And that view, he believed, remained the belief of the silent majority of Christians, who were less prone to outside influences than their leaders, well into the fourth century.664 Any claim about the views of the silent majority is bound to be indirect and inferential, but Priestley draws on a variety of clues in the patristic writings, such as Tertullian's description of the major pars credentium in Adversus Praxean 3. 1.665 Its continuation beyond the time of Nicaea is witnessed by a variety of tell-tale signs, such as the opposition encountered by Basil of Caesarea.666 So where some modern scholars have believed that the simple believers were worshippers of Christ as God, whose natural beliefs were held back and qualified by the church's scholars,667 in Priestley's eyes it was those selfsame scholars who were gradually drawing them away from their primitive Unitarian

660

Priestley, A General View of the Arguments for the Unity of God (Birmingham, 1791 ), 211–12. Cf. History of Opinions, preface, p. xiv.

661

See, among other places, Priestley, History of Corruptions, i. 42. Horsley's annotation in the margin of his copy of the book (now in the Bodleian Library) ends: ‘Their language upon this subject is too platonic for Dr P. to have any apprehension of it.’

662

Ibid. 143–4.

663

Ibid. 7. See also Letters to Dr Horsley, ii. 14–25.

664

Priestley, Defences of Unitarianism for the Year 1787 (Birmingham, 1788), Letters to Dr Geddes III, 17.

665

Ibid. 21; Defences of Unitarianism for the Years 1788 and 1789 (Birmingham, 1790), Letters to Mr Barnard, IV, 95.

666

History of Early Opinions, iv. 236.

667

See e.g. J. Lebreton, ‘Le Désaccord de la foi populaire et de la théologie savante dans l'Église chrétienne du IIIe siècle’, RHE 19 (1923), 501–6; 20 (1924), 16–33.

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convictions. The high value that Priestley accords to the ordinary believer does not arise only from the support he found there for his historical argument. The influence of contemporary political ideals is clearly another important factor. The appeal of his opponents to the Fathers at Nicaea as ‘the representatives of the whole christian church’ is dismissed as no more representative than the ‘House of Lords might be said to represent the English nation’. There was ‘no House of Commons at that assembly . . . to speak the sentiments of the common people’.668 But Priestley had also to deal with the scriptural evidence for Christ as divine creator, to which both orthodox and Arians appealed, while drawing different conclusions from it. It is impossible, he argues, to deny that some texts require to be interpreted figuratively, if one is not to land oneself in absurdities.669 Arians certainly interpret some texts literally and others figuratively.670 So they cannot object in principle to his insistence that to give a literal interpretation to ‘those texts which ascribe the creation of the material world to Christ is unnatural’.671 It is better to follow the tradition of interpretation which understands such texts to refer to the spiritual creation and which can claim the example of Calvin (Eph. 3: 9), Grotius (Col. 1: 15) and Locke (1 Cor. 8: 6; Eph. 3: 9).672 There were also more general theological arguments being used in support of Arianism. One contributor to Priestley's journal, the Theological Repository, writing under the pseudonym Charistes, acknowledged that they had a strong attractive force: Nothing can furnish us with so astonishing an instance of humiliation and condescension, or give such an amazing view of God's love to mankind, as the Arian scheme carried to its utmost height.673

668

Defences for 1787, Letters to Dr Geddes, I, 8–9.

669

Ibid., Letters to Dr Price, IV, 55.

670

Ibid. 60.

671

Ibid., Letters to Dr Price, V, 61–2.

672

Ibid. 62–3.

673

‘Charistes’, ‘Further Thoughts Concerning the Person of Christ’, in Theological Repository (3rd edn., 1795), iii. 64; see also pp. 59–60. Six volumes of the Theological Repository appeared between 1770 and 1788, all under Priestley's editorship. He wrote extensively for it himself under twelve different pseudonyms, but Charistes is not one of them (See iii. 478 and vi. 491). The original owner of the Manchester College Library copy of the book (a John Taylor of Norwich) identifies Charistes as the Revd. S. Merivale of Exeter. An account of Samuel Merivale written by his great-granddaughter, Anne Merivale, is to be found in A. Merivale, Family Memorials (Exeter, 1884 ). Merivale's views clearly developed in a way very similar to those of Priestley. He was brought up a strict Calvinist, but chose to study under the liberally minded Doddridge. The memoir speaks of his position becoming increasingly ‘Arian’; it also speaks of his carrying on a ‘voluminous correspondence’ with Nathaniel Lardner and other dissenting divines. Lardner may well have been an important influence with him, as with Priestley, in his further move beyond Arianism. He died in 1771, leaving many unpublished writings; many of his contributions to the Theological Repository must, like that of Tomkins (see n. 479 below), have been published posthumously. In correspondence with his fiancée during their four-year engagement, he addresses her by the pseudonym Charissa.

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But however religiously appealing the notion might be, the question of its truth remained to be determined. Some earlier critics had dealt with the Arian claim in dismissive fashion. Welchman, for example, had objected that Samuel Clarke's understanding of the incarnation involved the Son's actually divesting himself of his divine nature, ‘a thing absurd and impossible’.674 Whether or not that was a fair criticism of Clarke's brief remarks, it was certainly a natural argument to bring against anyone who emphasized that the pre-existent Logos took the place of the human soul in Christ. And a Unitarian, like Lardner, was in an even stronger position than a Trinitarian like Welchman to make such criticisms. The whole concept of such a divine self-humiliation was, in Lardner's judgement, ‘an imaginary thing’, because it was an impossibility.675 Tomkins's attempt to meet Lardner's criticism, while maintaining the religiously attractive idea of a divine self-emptying, by suggesting that at the incarnation the pre-existent Logos ‘was actually degraded to the rank of a human soul’, was hardly likely to convince.676 ‘Charistes’ describes the Arian scheme that he found so attractive as ‘improbable to a high degree’, something that ‘a mind unbiassed by prejudice’ would not easily take up but that falls short of ‘direct absurdity’.677 It was something that ought to be accepted only if unequivocally asserted by revelation. And that, in his view, it was not. It was true that there were passages in John and in Paul which might seem to favour an Arian interpretation; but the absence of such passages in any other writing of the New Testament was strong evidence against such an interpretation678. The appeal to revelation to determine the issue is one which even

674

Welchman, Dr Clarke's Scripture Doctrine, 22–3.

675

Lardner, Letter, 40–3 (Works, x. 105–6). Cf. ibid. 22–3 (Works, x. 94–5); Four Discourses upon Phil. 2: 5–11 (Works, xi. 614–15).

676

‘Letter sent by Mr Tomkins . . . to Dr Lardner in Reply to his Letter on the Logos’, in Theological Repository, iii. 257–291. Tomkins had studied with Lardner in Holland. As Tomkins seems to have died about 1755 (four years before the publication of Lardner's Letter ), his own letter most probably goes back to the time when Lardner's was originally composed in 1730; Lardner may well have shown it to Tomkins as a close friend.

677

‘Some Thoughts Concerning the Person of Christ in Defence of Dr. Lardner's Letter’, in Theological Repository, ii. 69; ‘Further Thoughts’ in iii. 64–5.

678

Ibid.

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the most convinced of the Arians would have been happy to accept. ‘I have’, Whiston had declared, ‘no difficulty upon me in believing mysteries, whenever I find them revealed by God.’679 And Peirce had made the same point with specific reference to Philippians 2 and the incarnation. I can believe what I find God has revealed, when the manner of the thing is past my understanding. I believe, for instance, that the Son of God, at his incarnation, emptied himself, according to the apostle's expression, Phil. ii: 7, and that he parted with the glory he had with the Father before the world was, John xvii . . . while I can give no account at all how he did this.680 Nothing absurd or impossible could be the true meaning of revelation; but the highly improbable and the mysterious could well be. Everything hinged, therefore, on the meaning of the text. ‘Charistes’ claimed that no text of Scripture, not even the famous Philippians hymn, requires such an understanding.681 And Priestley argued that the New Testament understanding of the love of Christ does not involve the notion of a divine condescension in becoming incarnate for us; it is the suffering and death of Christ on our behalf to which appeal is constantly made.682 Whether exegesis can really sustain the determinative role ascribed to it is another matter. The recognition of the extent to which Scripture calls for figurative rather than strictly literal interpretation, and the difficulty of discriminating between the irrational and the mysterious in affirmations about God mean that the overall scheme with which an interpreter approaches the text is as determinative of the resultant exegesis as is the exegesis of the overall scheme. Lardner's Four Discourses upon Phil. 2: 5–11, in which he sets out fairly an orthodox, an Arian, and his own Nazarean interpretations of the passage provides an interesting example of this interplay between theological presupposition and exegesis, and illustrates the inevitable inconclusiveness of such a procedure—despite Lardner's hope to demonstrate the supeiority of his own position. The claim that Arianism is a middle way between two unacceptable extremes has rhetorical rather than evidential force. And Priestley will have none of it. At a much earlier stage of the debate, Waterland had argued against Clarke that there was no middle ground between the

679

Whiston, Historical Preface, xvii.

680

Peirce, Remarks, 33–4.

681

‘Further Thoughts’, in Theological Repository, iii. 73–6.

682

Defences for 1787, Letters to Dr Price III, 42–4.

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orthodox view of the Son and Arius' view of him as a created being.683 Now Trinitarian and Unitarian alike were combining to assert that there was no middle ground between the orthodox view and the assertion of Christ as simply, if superlatively, human.684 Priestley suggests that the appearance of providing a middle way was indeed one reason for the emergence of Arianism as an effective force in the fourth century.685 But in reality there was no middle sense to the word ‘God’, which such a scheme required. The word was admittedly used figuratively of human beings in Scipture, but there was no acceptable sense between that and its proper application to the supreme God himself. Degrees of divinity were utterly foreign to the apostolic faith.686 So the conviction grew that the choice lay between Trinitarianism and Unitarianism. What Priestley argued for at the level of theory was reflected in the institutional life of the church. Some ministers and congregations, which had for a time been centres of a liberal or ‘Arian’ piety, reverted to a more orthodox pattern of belief. But many followed the path that Priestley had travelled and adopted a fully Unitarian position. As the latitudinarians had come under severe pressure in the Church of England, so the liberal or ‘Arian’ movement within the Presbyterian Church lost ground to both orthodoxy and Unitarianism. The Unitarianism that emerged grew rapidly in self-consciousness and in confidence. It distinguished itself sharply from Socinians as well as from Trinitarians and Arians. 1791 saw the foundation of the Unitarian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, with Lindsey's Essex St. Chapel as its focal centre. The new society sought to establish the truth of its own position against the other alternatives, including Arianism, which was formally described as ‘idolatrous’.687 Price, who, as we have seen, shared Lindsey's opposition to any worship of Christ, attended its inaugural meeting,688 but had he not died that same year, he would surely have withdrawn from it as some other old liberals were soon to do. It was not a place where the more

683

See p. 117 above.

684

Priestley, Defences of Unitarianism for 1788 and 1789, preface, pp. ix–x.

685

History of Corruptions, i. 82.

686

Defences for 1787, Letters to Dr Geddes, IV, 25–7. Cf. ibid. Letters to Dr Price II p. 40.

687

Belsham, Memoirs, 298–9.

688

Price was described by Lindsey as ‘though an Arian . . . one of the finest Unitarians I know’ (see G. M. Ditchfield, ‘Anti-Trinitarianism and Toleration in Late Eighteenth Century British Politics: The Unitarian Petition of 1792’, JEH 42: 1 (1991 ), 48).

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liberal opponents of orthodoxy could feel at home. In the West Country, for example, one of the primary goals of the new Unitarians was ‘to eradicate the deeply-rooted errors . . . derived from the writings and instructions of the learned Peirce’; and by 1812 Belsham could claim such success that ‘Arianism seems to be nearly expelled from one of her strongest citadels’.689 Both he and Priestley speak scornfully of the contemporary Arianism. ‘Modern’ or ‘low’ Arians, who have abandoned the idea that Christ is the creator of the world and simply maintain the notion of his preexistence, have abandoned too much of characteristically Arian teaching to claim any right to the name of Arian. In effect they are simply following a much less plausible form of Unitarianism.690 The Christian Moderator, a dissenting journal which began publication in May 1826 with a firm commitment to the cause of ‘non-subscription to creeds’, does contain some voices proudly claiming the name of Arian and defending specifically Arian views.691 It also carried a review of an edition of Belsham's Essex St Chapel discourses, which, though generally friendly in tone, rebukes him for treating Arians as idolatrous polytheists.692 But these are lone voices, very conscious that the world (including the world of rational dissent) regards them as intellectually and spiritually discredited. In seventeenth-century Poland the Arian movement had been absorbed into the more numerous body of Socinians; in eighteenth-century England it was squeezed out of existence by the greater vigour of the older orthodoxy on the one hand and the new Unitarianism on the other.

The Third Death of Arianism As Priestley looked back, he was struck by the contrast between the vigour of the Arian movement at the beginning of the century and its decline at the close. Although British Arians had been a rare species in the seventeenth century, that had been radically changed by the influence of Whiston, Clarke, Emlyn, and Peirce. The early eighteenth century had seen the virtual elimination of the old Unitarians,

689

Belsham, Memoirs, 304–7.

690

Belsham, Letters upon Arianism (London, 1808 ), iii. 32; ix. 141–3; Priestley, History of Corruptions, i. 145–7; A General View, 197–8.

691

See e.g. vol. i, no. 7 (Nov. 1826), 257; vol. i, no. 8 (Dec. 1826), 281; vol. ii, no. 17 (Sept. 1827), 219, with its bold ‘I am an Arian’.

692

Vol. ii, no. 18 (Oct. 1827), 291.

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especially at the scholarly level.693 ‘The learned Christians of the last age (excepting the Athanasians)’, he claimed, ‘were almost all Arians.’694 But that had changed yet again. Now, Priestley complains, writing in 1786, he could find no learned Arian with whom to hold public discussions about the findings embodied in his History of the Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ. 695 In the preceding sections I have described the character of eighteenth-century Arianism and recounted the history of its rise and fall. It still remains to be asked why it should have arisen with such vigour at that particular time, and faded away again within the century. The fact that many of the leading Arians at the beginning of the century were also the leading scientists of the day was no coincidence. They saw a connection between their scientific work and their religious writings, and were right to do so. The revolutionary advances that were being made in scientific thought were based on a readiness to challenge older, traditional views, to take careful note of the empirical data and to reason with rigorous precision on the basis of them. It was the same basic method that these individuals sought to apply to theology: they applied it to both natural and revealed theology. In the preface to his Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, Clarke spoke of confining himself to one only method or continued thread of arguing, which I have endeavoured should be as near to mathematical as the nature of such a discourse would allow.696 The application of that principle to the sphere of philosophical theology led to a powerful stress on the oneness of God, and on the exercise of authority and dominion over the world and humankind as the defining marks of deity. Some contemporary commentators claimed to see Clarke's Arianism already present in that basic understanding of godhead. For the primary stress of the eighteenth-century Arians was on the unicity of the Father as the one supreme God. But with their emphasis also on dominion as a defining attribute of God, they were able at the same time to affirm the godhead of the Son on the basis of a shared dominion over the world entrusted to him by the Father. Clarke applied the same methodological ideal to the question of

693

J. Priestley, History of Corruptions, i. 140.

694

J. Priestley, History of Early Opinions, preface, pp. xxii–xxiii.

695

Ibid., preface, p. xiv.

696

Preface, A3.

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how one should approach the interpretation of Scripture. In his controversy with Dr Wells (also a mathematician) he complains: Is this . . . the argument of a mathematical writer? One of the great benefits of such studies, and that which uses to distinguish men who are skilled in that learning from those who are not, is their taking care that their conclusion be sure to follow from their premises: but this you almost constantly neglect.697 Here the appeal to mathematical reasoning is no more than a general appeal to reasoned argument, and Wells retorts by applying the criticism back on Clarke himself.698 But there is more to the scientific and mathematical influence on the eighteenth-century Arians than such an exchange might suggest. What distinguished the Arians from the deists, with whom they were so often classed in contemporary polemic, was the attitude of the former to Scripture and revelation. They accepted Scripture without hesitation as the specific revelation of God. It contained the primary data on which theology was to be based. If its meaning was beyond doubt, then what it taught was to be accepted without question—even if with our finite minds we were unable to grasp how its teaching could be true. In apprehending the meaning of Scripture, they were less influenced than the orthodox by older, traditional forms of interpretation. It was their own reason applied to the text of Scripture on which they relied. But such an enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. The text treated in that way is not patient of any one, incontrovertible sense. If one does attempt the impossible task, an Arian interpretation probably comes nearer than any other to incorporating the varied affirmations of apparently human and divine characteristics with respect to Christ to be found in the New Testament. Christopher Evans, speaking of the theologians of the later Nicene period, describes them as having

697

S. Clarke, A Letter to the Revd Dr Wells (London, 1714 ), p. 67 (italics original). For a very different evaluation of the benefits of a mathematical training by another eighteenth-century writer concerned with early church history, see Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, 99: ‘As soon as I understood the principles, I relinquished for ever the pursuit of the mathematics; nor can I lament that I desisted before my mind was hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration so destructive of the finer feelings of moral evidence which must however determine the action and opinions of our lives.’

698

E. Wells, A Letter to the Revd Dr Clarke (London, 1713 ), 20. (Despite the date, the letter is a reply to Clarke's letter with a 1714 date.)

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found the New Testament embarrassingly Arian, as indeed it is, if its statements are taken separately and out of their context in the whole, and read in isolation on the background of a largely philosophical conception of God.699 A period in which critical reasoning of a mathematico-scientific kind had come to be applied to the process of reasoning from the scriptural text, but which had not yet undertaken to challenge the authoritative status of the texts themselves, was thus a period that was very likely to give birth to an intellectually responsible Arian theology. That was the judgement of Leonard Hodgson in a survey of these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century controversies. He sums up his reaction to the controversies in these words: The impression which they leave on my mind is that on the basis of argument which both sides held in common, the unitarians had the better case.700 Priestley himself does not ask why Arianism began to flourish when it did. But he does reflect on why it declined when it did, and suggests a number of contributory factors. He attributes its lack of staying power compared with Trinitarianism to a variety of causes. Some of the factors to which he points are non-theological ones: Trinitarianism's long hold over the minds of ordinary people, and the support given to it by the civil power. These did undoubtedly work strongly in its favour.701 He also allows to Trinitarianism a wider range of appeal to the New Testament than Arianism, and a stronger internal coherence as a doctrinal system.702 Those more theological reasons are commonly advanced, but not easily demonstrated. We have already seen reason to doubt the superior cogency of the way in which the Trinitarians appealed to the New Testament in terms of the general approach to Scripture shared by both sides. In a situation where no one scheme of interpretation can be wholly comprehensive or wholly

699

C. F. Evans, ‘Christology and Theology’, in id. (ed.), The Communication of the Gospel in New Testament Times (London, 1961 ), 30.

700

L. Hodgson, The Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1943 ), appendix VI, p. 223 (italics original). Hodgson speaks here of ‘unitarians’, but he is using the word in a very broad sense as Samuel Clarke is one of the primary witnesses he cites for the Unitarian case.

701

Priestley, Defences for 1787, Letters to Dr Price IV, 50–1. That was for Priestley the most significant cause, and applied not only to the failure of Arianism but also to the struggle of Unitarianism to make more inroads against the bastions of orthodoxy. Cf. Martin Fitzpatrick's summing-up of Priestley's attitude: ‘If the Establishment was out of the way, Unitarianism would have rapidly spread. Nine out of the ten of the “common people” would, he thought, in such circumstances, prefer Unitarianism’ (‘Toleration and Truth’, 19–20).

702

J. Priestley, Defences for 1787, Letters to Dr Price IV, 50–1.

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coherent, the determination of which will appear the more convincing will depend primarily on how each relates to the background beliefs of the time. Priestley proposes yet another factor of just that kind in explanation of the success of orthodoxy over Arianism which he was witnessing. The strength of early Arianism, he suggests, had lain in its affinity to the underlying philosophical and religious assumptions of its day. An age in which the pre-existence of souls was an intelligible and acceptable notion to learned and unlearned alike was an age in which Arianism had been able to take root and to flourish. But late eighteenth-century Britain was not such a world and could not be expected to provide a milieu in which Arianism would prosper.703 The suggestion is a particularly interesting one, which is perhaps even more apposite than might appear at first hearing. The contrast is one that will have appealed naturally enough to Priestley with his materialist philosophy. But it does not relate only to the difference between the time when Arianism originated and Priestley's own day. A very similar contrast marks an important difference between the beginning and the end of the eighteenth century. In the late seventeenth century, belief in the existence of a spirit world was seen as an important basic notion which helped to under-gird belief in God. Cudworth, for example, appeals to apparitions, alongside miracle and prophecy, as extraordinary phenomena to which the apologist can make reasoned appeal. He admits that stories of apparitions include ‘much of fabulosity’, but claims that tales of them are too widespread and too well attested to be dismissed as not embodying any truth at all. In his view they prove that there is a rank of understanding beings, invisible, superior to men, from whence a Deity may afterwards be inferred . . . If there be once any invisible ghosts and spirits acknowledged as things permanent, it will not be easy for any to give a reason why there may not be one supreme ghost also, presiding over them all and over the whole world.704 His close friend and fellow Platonist, Henry More, developed the same theme in less guarded terms. In the preface to his Antidote against Atheism More declares that his one aim is to use the

703

Ibid. 54. Cf. ‘A Christian’, ‘Objections to the Arian Hypothesis, in answer to Moderatus’, in Theological Repository, v. 6–8.

704

Cudworth, The True Intellectual System, ch. V, sect. 1, pp. 114–15.

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history of things miraculous and above the ordinary course of nature for the proving that there are Spirits, that the Atheist thereby may the easier be induced to believe there is a God.705 Explaining apparitions as due to the human imagination is ascribed to the ‘credulity of besotted atheism’.706 The final ringing words of the book are: Assuredly that saying was nothing so true in politics, No Bishop, no King; as this in Metaphysics, No Spirit, no God.707 But the hold of that belief in spirits, so vital in the eyes of Cudworth and More, was to decrease steadily in the course of the eighteenth century. By 1800, as Terry Castle observes, there was a change of attitude ‘among the educated classes across Western Europe’, with regard to the idea of a transcendental spirit world.708 Whereas in the early years of the century Daniel Defoe was still deploring those who 'persuade themselves that there are no spirits at all' and so end up by believing ‘that there is no God’,709 by the end of it Walter Scott could borrow words of the poet, George Crabbe, to describe a belief in spirits as ‘the last lingering fiction of the brain’.710 For Cudworth and More the great importance of a belief in spirits was as a grounding for belief in God in general. But its importance for distinctively Arian belief is more crucial. Belief in the existence of one supreme, mysterious God has many roots, and can survive (indeed has survived) where belief in other spirits no longer obtains. But Arianism is an interpretation of the specifically Christian evidence which affirms the existence of another pre-existent spiritual being, distinct from the one supreme God. In the Arianism characteristic of eighteenth-century Dissent, the pre-existent Son was indeed often described as a super-angelic being.711 For orthodoxy, on the other hand, the Son, though in some measure distinct, was an integral part of the one supreme Trinitarian God. The existence or non-existence of a realm of lesser spiritual beings, clearly separate from the supreme God, was

705

H. More, An Antidote against Atheism (London, 1653 ), preface.

706

Ibid. 159.

707

Ibid. 164.

708

Terry Castle, ‘Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphysics of Modern Reverie’, Critical Inquiry, 15 (1988 ), 53.

709

Daniel Defoe, ‘A Vision of the Angelic World’, The Works of Daniel Defoe, ed. G. H. Maynadier (New York 1903–4 ), iii. 306.

710

Cited by Terry Castle, ‘Phantasmagoria’, 53.

711

See p. 146 above.

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therefore a more significant aspect of the background beliefs contributing to the credibility of the doctrinal scheme in the Arian than in the Trinitarian case. If on purely exegetical grounds neither scheme could show a decisive advantage over the other, and the decision between them was going to depend on their relative plausibility in terms of the underlying beliefs of the day, then a general acceptance of the reality of a realm of spiritual beings was of vital importance to the Arian cause. It provided a context within which the assertion of the Son as a distinct but lower order of divine spiritual being would not appear a grossly implausible one to make. The influence which this waning of a belief in spirits in the course of the eighteenth century had on the more specific question of Arian belief can also be traced. John Locke, whose thought was so dominant an influence on the common sensibility of the period, acknowledges that the belief in spirits could appear to be undermined by his denial of innate ideas. In ‘The Epistle to the Reader’, which appears as a Preface to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he records it as the reaction of some that ‘if innate ideas were not supposed, there would be little left either of the notion or proof of spirits’.712 Locke himself fully believed in the spirit would, but based his confidence entirely on revelation.713 But a belief based solely on revelation does not constitute a background belief, affecting the choice between an Arian or a Trinitarian understanding of revelation, to the same degree that it would do were it part of a broader structure of beliefs understood to be accessible to natural, unaided, human knowledge. By 1760 Samuel Bourn was arguing that it was the failure to recognize that ‘there could be . . . intermediate powers or natures between man and the one supreme and infinite being’ that was leading people to believe that they had to choose between Christ the prophet and Christ the coequal Son of God.714 The background belief that gave Arianism its plausibility as a serious option in determining the most appropriate form for a reasoned Christian theology to take was losing its hold on the populace at large. Priestley, writing shortly after his conversion from Arianism to Unitarianism, describes how in his infancy he was brought up with ‘the ideas of invisible malignant spirits and apparitions’, but avers that, at the time of writing, he ‘believe[d] nothing of those

712

J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. K. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975 ), ‘The Epistle to the Reader’, p. 10.

713

Ibid., IV. 3. 27, IV. 11. 12.

714

Bourn, A Series of Discourses, 150–1. Cf. p. 146 above.

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invisible powers’.715 And Theophilus Lindsey, Priestley's close collaborator in establishing Unitarianism as a form of belief and worship distinct not only from orthodoxy but also from Arianism, reveals more explicitly the importance of the issue in the making of that distinction. In the course of drawing a contrast between Unitarian rejection of the worship of Christ and Arian acceptance of it, he comments that it is not after all surprising that Arians should ‘worship a creature so astonishingly great, if it were possible that any such could be’.716 The issue had become not so much whether an Arian Christ was in some absolute sense the most natural reading of the New Testament text, but whether it was a credible conception for believers in the late eighteenth century. Although throughout the century Arianism had been up against a well-established and more privileged orthodoxy, it was not persecution or external pressure that was mainly responsible for its collapse. Its thrid and final death was primarily due to a changing perception of the world: this perception undermined the background conditions that had been present at the origins of Arianism in the fourth century, had served to keep it alive as at least a credible alternative through the centuries that followed, and so had enabled it to revive for a brief but vigorous period of flourishing with the help of the new scientific thinking that emerged in the early years of the eighteenth century.

715

J. Priestley, ‘Remarks on Dr Reid's Ideas’ (1774), in The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, ed. J. T. Rutt (London, 1817–32 ), iii. 50–1.

716

Lindsey, An Historical View, 337 (italics added).

5 Faith and Historical Judgement in British Arian Scholarship The Nineteenth Century: Newman and Gwatkin The aim of this book has been to provide an outline history of Arianism, not of Arian scholarship. But the two are, of course, closely intertwined. Whiston, perhaps the most passionate ‘Arian’ of later centuries, came to adopt his Arian views as a result of scholarly study. And for all his eccentricity and lack of judgement, he was capable of shrewd insights into the origins and early history of the Arian movement that more cautious scholars failed to see. Historians need not only that objectivity of judgement which alone can save them from lapsing into the prejudices of mere propaganda, but also some personal conviction about or empathy with the issues involved, if they are to grasp and record a narrative that makes sense of the diverse happenings of the past. Even more judicious historians, such as Sandius and his respondent, Bull, wrote not merely out of some disinterested concern with the past, but with the express intention of either defending or fending off antitrinitarian understandings of the life and thought of the early church. But as far as a study of Arianism through the centuries is concerned, the disappearance towards the end of the eighteenth century of conditions hospitable to the continued life of ‘Arian’ piety might seem to spell the end of the story. From then on, with Arianism no longer a live option for faith, the tale, it would seem, must be one exclusively of Arian scholarship. But the transition was not as sharp as that. And the ways in which concern over the issues felt to be at stake in the Arian controversy interacted with historical scholarship in Britain after the demise of the eighteenthcentury Arian revival merits some exploration. In the first half of the nineteenth century the spectre of the Arian movement of the previous century was still a potent influence on attitudes to Arianism, pre-eminently on the most famous treatment of

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the subject in Newman's Arians of the Fourth Century, published in 1833. That same year saw also the publication of Thomas Arnold's Principles of Church Reform. In it Arnold described Unitarianism as containing a wide spectrum of belief, from those who were really unbelievers but were unwilling to acknowledge the fact publicly to those whose only impediment to membership of the Anglican Church was its retention of the Athanasian Creed. More specifically he discussed the case of Arian belief. He wrote: I believe that Arianism involves in it some very erroneous notions as to the object of religious worship; but if an Arian will join in our worship of Christ, and will call him Lord and God, there is neither wisdom nor charity in insisting that he shall explain what he means by these terms; nor in questioning the strength and sincerity of his faith in his Saviour, because he makes too great a distinction between the divinity of the Father, and that which he allows to be the attribute of the Son.717 Arnold set himself against any kind of doctrinal test; a readiness to address Christ in prayer was all that was needed. So the old hope for a comprehensive church in which both Arian and Trinitarian could feel at home, which had surfaced from time to time in the eighteenth century but which seemed to have been killed off in its final decades, was not yet quite dead. To this kind of liberalism, which Arnold expressed with such force, Newman was implacably opposed.718 And that implacable opposition underlies his book on the Arians, which though dealing in the first instance, as its title implies, with the fourth century, has been described as ‘an oblique satire upon liberalism in his own age’.719 The degree to which past and present concerns are intermingled in the book finds vivid expression in the words of Jean Guitton: La philosophie religieuse des Pères alexandrins rappelle le platonisme des hommes d'Oxford . . . L'école des sophistes, ce sont des noëtiques; Paul de Samosate est proche de Whately. Quant aux ariens, ils resemblent aux protestants. En se penchant sur ce lointain passé, Newman y saisit, comme en un miroir, l'image idéale de son entourage et il se rassure dans ce reflet.720 That Newman's book can properly be read in this way is widely acknowledged, and we shall see plenty of supporting evidence as we

717

Thomas Arnold, Principles of Church Reform (London, 1833 ), 36–7.

718

Newman is reported to have questioned whether Arnold could be regarded as a Christian at all (see Ian Ker, John Henry Newman (Oxford, 1988 ), 87).

719

Stephen Thomas, Newman and Heresy (Cambridge, 1991 ), 3.

720

J. Guitton, La Philosophie de Newman (Paris, 1933 ), 3.

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proceed. Today, more stress may need to be laid on the fact that it is also an innovative scholarly treatment of its subject. Rowan Williams goes so far as to describe it as the real starting-point of ‘the modern critical study of the subject’.721 Nor does Stephen Thomas see it as exclusively a satire on the liberalism of the day. He writes: Newman's interest in the Early Church has as much to do with the controversies of the early nineteenth century than [sic] the impartial investigation of scholarship.722 The ungrammatical structure of the sentence perhaps reflects a hesitation between two drafts. Is the scholarly investigation of equal strength with the contemporary polemic or is it a subordinate factor? In either case it is a significant element in the enterprise. The book's origin was a request by H. J. Rose that Newman should write a ‘History of the Councils’ as a preliminary to his already intended book about the Articles.723 As one of his conditions for accepting the proposal Newman insisted on its role being seen as introductory to his work on the Articles.724 Thus from the outset the venture was closely related in Newman's mind to contemporary issues. Once he had started work on the new book, he soon found himself dissatisfied with the writings of his predecessors. He saw them ‘as Antiquarians or Doctrinists not Ecclesiastical Historians’.725 Neither group, it seemed to him, had succeeded in spanning the prima-facie gulf between the councils as ancient history and the councils as unshakeable guides for the faith of the contemporary church. He was so aware of the crucial significance of the Arianism with which the first ecumenical council was dealing that he found himself unable to write about the Council of Nicaea without first writing at length about Arianism. ‘To understand it [the Nicene Confession]’, he wrote, ‘it must be prefaced by a sketch of the rise of the Arian heresy.’726 So Newman was faced from the outset with the problem posed at the beginning of this study: can one affirm the absolute dogmatic truth of a council whose substantive decisions were so integrally related to a contingent and temporary historical movement?727 The ecclesiastical

721

Rowan Williams, Arius (London, 1987), 2–3.

722

Thomas, Newman and Heresy, 2.

723

Letter of H. J. Rose to Newman of 9 Mar. 1831, in The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman ed. Ian Ker and Thomas Gornall (Oxford, 1979 ), ii. 321.

724

Letter of Newman to Rose of 28 Mar. 1831 (ibid.).

725

Letter of Newman to Samuel Rickards of 30 Oct. 1831 (ibid. 371).

726

Letter of Newman to Rose of 24 Aug. 1831 (ibid. 352).

727

See pp. 1–2 above.

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historian he was aspiring to be was one who could deal with that problem in a way that did justice to the proper concerns of the antiquarian and of the doctrinist alike. It is Newman's recognition of the nature of that task and his determination to tackle it that prompts Rowan Williams to commend the book, despite all its manifest short-comings, as one that opens up the possibility of a genuine doctrinal history.728 Yet despite his strong sense of the contingency of the fourth-century history, Newman did find a close resemblance between that century and his own. In the closing paragraph of the book, he wrote of how ‘the present perils with which our branch of the Church is beset . . . bear a remarked resemblance to those of the fourth century’.729 That resemblance was not only in the general nature of the struggle with which the church was involved in each of the two periods; it included also the particular participants in that struggle. He saw the faces of his liberal opponents in the persons of the early Arians. On first acquaintance it seems like just one more example of the tendency, which we have seen at work throughout this study, to use ‘Arian’ as a term of abuse for any particularly objectionable theological opponent. Even Newman himself had been accused by Whately of ‘Arianizing’ on the basis of a sermon he preached at Easter, 1827.730 But for Newman the links in this case were felt to be of a far more substantial kind. The specific nature of the likenesses he saw will be considered in a moment. But in Newman's eyes it was not just a matter of chance resemblances across the gap that separated the fourth century from the nineteenth. As he saw it, there was a more organic link between the liberals of the nineteenth century and Arianism; to him they were the direct descendants of the antitrinitarians of the eighteenth century, and Arians had been, of course, an important element within that broader group. In The Force of Truth, written in 1779, Thomas Scott, the evangelical mentor who was so influential on Newman's early religious development, had described his own conversion from Socinianism to Arianism by the reading of Clarke's Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity, and his further conversion to Trinitarian belief which followed quickly on the

728

Rowan Williams, ‘Newman's Arians and the Question of Method in Doctrinal History’, in Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill (eds), Newman after a Hundred Years (Oxford, 1990 ), 283.

729

J. H. Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century (London, 1833 ), 421–2 (3rd. edn., 1871 , p. 406).

730

John Henry Newman, Autobiographical Writings, ed. H. Tristram (London, 1956 ), 211; J. H. Newman, Apologia, ed. M. J. Svaglic (Oxford, 1967), 25.

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first. More frequently, Scott lamented, the movement was in the opposite direction; and that movement he designated ‘the natural progress of unhumbled reason: from Arianism to Socinianism; from Socinianism to Deism; and thence to Atheism’.731 His words give succinct expression to the widespread belief in an inevitable progression of Arianism into Unitarianism (and beyond), which we have already seen to provide the underlying framework for much of the historiography of the eighteenth-century English Presbyterians. However much Newman may have grown away from Scott in other respects, that was a view that he fully shared. He saw such a progression as the inevitable outcome of ‘a lack of internal consistency’ in the basic tenets of Arianism. It was bound to end up either in a form of polytheism or in ‘the more practical alternative, that of the mere humanity of Christ’. The latter was the more likely destination. ‘The real tendency of Arianism’, he concluded, ‘lay towards . . . the humanitarian scheme.’732 Stephen Thomas suggests that we have here, in Newman's convicton about the downward progression inherent in Arianism, the germ of his famous idea of development. He cites from Newman's 1844 Copybook on Development words highly reminiscent of Scott's formula: ‘Sabellianism becomes Socinianism—down to atheism.’733 But since the developmental tendency in Arianism was due to its internal inconsistency, it was a very different kind of development from that which Newman was later to ascribe to orthodox doctrine. Be that as it may, the idea of development was certainly not operative in his treatment of orthodoxy in the early church at the time he was writing his Arians. Like all those who had participated in the Arian and Unitarian controversies of the previous century, Newman had to come to terms with the implications of the writings of the ante-Nicene Fathers. As a historian he was aware that, by later standards, their language was ‘ambiguous, and in consequence afforded at times an apparent countenance to the Arian heresy’. But he does not appeal to the concept of development in dealing with the problem. He accounts for their language by insisting that they were spiritual writers, not systematic theologians. It is we who are at fault, he writes, when we ‘convert doxologies into creeds’—or rather the fault lies with the heretics who force us to do so by sowing ‘tares among the wheat’.734 Once his

731

Thomas Scott, The Force of Reason (8th. edn.; London, 1808 ), 31.

732

Arians, 248–50 (3rd edn., 236–8).

733

Thomas, Newman and Heresy, 231.

734

Arians, 195–7 (184–5).

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concept of development had come to fruition, however, Newman not surprisingly includes the changes in orthodox language about the divinity of the Son from that of the ante-Nicene Fathers, which could too easily, though wrongly, be ‘accommodated to the Arian hypothesis’, into the different style of speech characteristic of the post-Nicene Fathers, as one example of doctrinal development in action.735 Newman's liberal opponents had not travelled down the road that Scott describes even as far as overt Unitarianism, let alone to atheism. But Newman's conviction that such a descensus Averni was inherent in any position that did not do full justice to the Christian mystery helps to explain the vehemence of his opposition to them. It is one of the reasons why the resemblances he found between them and the early Arians were so convincing in his eyes. Yet it was not this religious instability that was for him the most marked point of similarity. Engaged as he was in what he saw as a religious protest against people who had the ear of the political powers of the day, the likeness that impinged on him with the greatest force was the essentially political character of both movements. The early Arians ‘were a mere political faction, usurping the name of religion; and, as such, essentially anti-Christian’. The doctrine that they promulgated was a secondary matter, ‘an instrument towards attaining ends which they valued above it’.736 Where they did show the marks of learning, it was in the Sophistic tradition, giving rise to ‘a sceptical rather than a dogmatic system’. Arianism had ‘a close connexion with the existing Aristotelic school’, and drew on the ‘mere intellectual literature’ that ‘arose in the Eclectic school’—an ‘old philosophy’ in which one could not fail to recognise ‘the chief features of that recent school of liberalism and false illumination, political and moral, which is now Satan's instrument in deluding the nations’.737 But even this misdirected concern for the wrong kind of truth was only skin-deep. It was firmly subordinated to their political goals. The Arians' readiness to compromise when political expediency required it reveals their underlying indifferentist attitude to doctrinal truth. At Nicaea itself, ‘they began by maintaining an erroneous doctrine; they ended by concessions which implied the further heresy that points of faith are of no importance.’738 Even their much-vaunted faithfulness to Scripture was only a façade. Their

735

An Essay on the Development of Doctrine (London, 1845 ), VIII. 1. 1, 397–40 (new edn., 1878, I. iv. 2, pp. 135–7).

736

Arians, 278 (266).

737

Ibid. 28–30, 32, 117 (26–8, 30, 109).

738

Ibid. 279 (266–7).

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objection to non-scriptural tests showed that for them Scripture was not the teacher of precise meanings, but a set of flexible words, adaptable to changing political needs.739 The significance of the point for Newman is obvious in the light of his original conception of the work as an introduction to future writing on the Articles. And a letter written a month before the finished manuscript was due to go to press shows how the sense of that significance had stayed with him throughout the process of composition. ‘The one point I strive to show’, he wrote, ‘is the importance of the ὁμooύσιōν and similar tests.’740 The Arians did not, Newman graciously allows, ‘altogether throw aside in controversy the authority of Scripture’.741 But they moved with dazzling inconsistency, he claims, from perverse literalism to evasive appeals to figurative meanings.742 Yet appealing to both literal and figurative meanings could not be regarded as in itself objectionable, for Newman himself insists that the true meaning of Scripture is to be found sometimes in the one and sometimes in the other.743 ‘Allegorism’ and argumentation based on ‘explicit and literal testimonies of Scripture’ are both an essential part of the armoury of orthodoxy.744 The real issue between the Arians and the orthodox was, as Newman recognized, not one between appeals to literal and figurative meanings; it was rather a question of which of them had the truer understanding of ‘the sense of Scripture’ ‘viewed as a whole’.745 And that is a much more difficult issue to determine. This medley of at times incompatible characteristics is brought together in varied ways in the lively pen-pictures which Newman draws of the leading figures of the early Arian movement. The vividness of the portraiture owes something to the more immediate availability of corresponding contemporary models. Arius himself was less devious in his initial challenge to Alexander than the Arian movement was later to become. But he led the way in discreditable compromise when Constantine demanded it. Even his death, which Athanasius had found so significant, had its modern parallels; ‘similar occurrences, which happen at the present day, are generally connected with some unusual perjury or extreme blasphemy’.746 Eunomius stands out by way of contrast as one of the few who refused to tread the path of

739

Ibid. 325–6, 373–4 (312–3, 360–1).

740

Letter of Newman to Rickards of 5 June 1832 (Letters and Diaries, iii. 54).

741

Arians, 238 (italics original) (p. 226 with revised word-order).

742

Ibid. 244 (232).

743

Ibid. 67 (62).

744

Ibid. 126 (117).

745

Ibid. 161–4 (151–3).

746

Ibid. 255, 363, 290 (243, 350, 277).

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compromise. But Newman's distaste for Eunomius' style of ‘hard mathematical reasoning’ holds him back from giving to this refusal of compromise any greater approbation than its being ‘in one sense an honest disdain of compromise and dissimulation’.747 Eusebius of Nicomedia was ‘the most dexterous of politicians’; his namesake of Caesarea ‘the most accomplished theologian of his age’ but with ‘the faults and virtues of the mere man of letters’, putting the ‘comforts and decencies of literary ease’ above either ‘the cause of truth’ or ‘the prizes of secular greatness’; Acacius of Caesarea is credited with ‘establishing the principles of liberalism at Constantinople’.748 Athanasius, on the other hand, stands out not only by way of contrast with the Arian leaders but also when compared with other champions of orthodoxy. He is far superior to them in ‘maturity and completeness of character’; he embodies a ‘union of opposite excellences, firmness with discrimination and discretion’, evincing where appropriate ‘an admirable tenderness and forbearance’.749 The links between history ancient and modern that Newman found both in the general tendencies of the fourthcentury Arian movement and in the persons of its leading figures made a profound impression on him. When, ten years later, work on the translation of Athanasius' writings led him to undertake further study of the period, he developed those links with renewed vigour but with some significant changes of detail. In his Apologia he describes that later study as one of ‘three blows that broke’ him, as he wrestled with the issue of his allegiance to the Anglican Church. ‘I saw clearly, that in the history of Arianism, the pure Arians were the Protestants, the semi-Arians were the Anglicans, and that Rome now was what it was.’750 It is now the semi-Arians who are the focus of his attention, and it is the Anglican Via Media that is undermined by that reading of the Arian story. As the nineteenth century progressed, the shadow of eighteenth-century Arianism began to fade. ‘The profession of Arianism and Socinianism had dwindled to a vanishing point during the last century in this country,’ wrote Robert Leslie, ‘till in the year of grace 1884 the very name has disappeared from enumeration among a hundred and eighty sects in public Records.’ Leslie himself did not draw much comfort from that statistic. It was his conviction that ‘the deadly thing itself ’ was still very much alive; it now lived a hidden existence, but was to be found ‘in Parliament, and among prelates and priests of the

747

Arians, 362–3 (349–50).

748

Ibid. 280, 281, 385 (267, 269, 373).

749

Ibid. 379–80 (367–8).

750

Apologia, 130.

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Establishment’. Indeed in his view, ‘in proportion as their devices are concealed’, the situation was more perilous than it had been two centuries earlier, when his non-juring ancestor, Charles Leslie, had been an outstanding hammer of the heretics.751 Both Leslies deny that Arianism is a form of Christianity in any sense; where Charles had declared that ‘the Alcoran is a system of Arianism’ and claimed that ‘wherever Arianism prevailed, and nowhere else among Christians, was Mohametanism embraced’,752 Robert tells the story of a Jew, who in the 1860s expressed himself content despite the absence of a synagogue in his locality since he was so well served at the local Arian meeting-house.753 But Robert Leslie was as untypical of mainline churchmen in his day as his non-juring ancestor had been in his. Most students of Arianism after Newman were more struck by the absence of overt Arians than by the possible presence of covert ones. So their motives in writing and their concentration on the historical evidence were less clouded (and less enlivened) by the passions of contemporary polemic than Newman's had been. But the other problem remained. They were still faced with the apparent conflict between the historical contingency of Arianism and the claim to permanent and universal significance for the Nicene formulation of faith that had been designed to meet that particular threat. Almost exactly half a century after Newman's Arians and at about the same time that Leslie was complaining of the continued presence of covert Arians in church and state, the Cambridge scholar, H. M. Gwatkin, published Studies of Arianism, the outstanding British contribution to Arian scholarship in the later part of the century. Like Newman, Gwatkin wrote self-consciously as an ecclesiastical historian, but his idea of what constituted a true ecclesiastical historian was very different from Newman's. The theme appears repeatedly in his writings. Ecclesiastical history is a branch of history ‘like Political, Social or Economic History.’ The methods to be followed in each case are identical. ‘They are simply the ordinary methods of historical research’. Admittedly, ‘the power of life divine’ is at work in ecclesiastical history, but it ‘works equally in the rest, and works in all by natural powers’.754 His vigorous insistence on the point is rooted in a strong

751

R. J. Leslie, Life and Writings of Charles Leslie (London, 1885 ), 188–9.

752

C. Leslie, ‘The Socinian Controversy. The Second Letter, July 17, 1697’, in The Theological Works of Charles Leslie (London, 1721), i. 217.

753

R. J. Leslie, Life and Writings of Charles Leslie, 190.

754

H. M. Gwatkin, The teaching of Ecclesiastical History (n. pl., 1901 ), 1; The Meaning of Ecclesiastical History (Cambridge, 1891 ), 8–9. Cf. also Studies of Arianism (Cambridge, 1882 ), 1.

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reaction to recent tendencies in Oxford. ‘The clamorous intolerance of the Oxford school threw back study in England for nearly half a century. Their research was a mere finding of what they wanted to find; their criticism hardly got beyond the labels Catholic and Heretic.’755 Newman's work is summarily dismissed: Of Newman's Arians of the Fourth Century let it suffice to say that his theories have always been scrupulously examined; so that if they have not often been accepted, it is only because there is usually good reason for rejecting them.756 Gwatkin's historical judgements are very different from Newman's and have better stood the test of time and further study. In particular his insistence on Alexandria rather than Antioch as the primary seed-bed of Arian ideas is diametrically opposed to Newman's view. But despite the marked differences in their approaches to history and in their particular historical judgements, Gwatkin's overall interpretation of the conflict is very similar to Newman's. He too, like Newman, insists that Arianism was marked by much court intrigue. But with Gwatkin that is a more secondary issue. Arianism is judged to be first and foremost an ‘utterly illogical and unspiritual system of belief ’.757 Athanasius, on the other hand, is consistently praised. The praise may not match the lyrical tones of Newman's eulogies, but more than once Gwatkin speaks, for example, of the spirit of ‘comprehensive charity’ that marks Athanasius' De Synodis.758 In a long and critical review article devoted to the book, William Bright, high churchman and Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, compared the spirit of Gwatkin's approach unfavourably with that of Newman. The ‘solemn music’ of Newman's words with their ‘peculiar combination of awe and tenderness’ is contrasted with Gwatkin's ‘tendency now to off-hand peremptoriness, now to jerky smartness, and now to grandiose declaration’. But Bright expressed himself agreeably surprised that such strong support for orthodoxy and such warm appreciation of Athanasius should come from the pen of a ‘zealous and accomplished disciple of the modern Cambridge school’. Gwatkin's evaluation of the conflict and its leading contenders was the more valuable in that not even ‘the

755

The Meaning, 9–10.

756

Studies, xix.

757

Ibid. 2–3. See also his fuller condemnatory summary of the Arian movement at the end of the book, already cited on p. 9 above.

758

Ibid. 70, 163.

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most anti-Christian critic’ could ascribe them to a love of ‘stereotyped dogmas’ or ‘ecclesiasticism’.759 We may well find ourselves sharing Bright's surprise that a historian of Gwatkin's stamp should have interpreted the Arian conflict in the way he did. What was it that led him to understand the issue at stake in that fourth-century conflict as one of such absolute and abiding significance? As Bright indicates, Gwatkin was no credal fundamentalist. In an Open Letter to the Bishop of Oxford he was later to criticize the bishop's desire to have ‘at least the Creeds of the Catholic Church fenced off from questioning’. But that did not mean that he himself had doubts about them. He could not ‘imagine them disproved’. His wholehearted adoption of critical enquiry into Christian history went with a strong confidence that it would confirm the truth of Christian faith which the creeds were designed to safeguard, even though in the process we might find them ‘transformed by new light into something very different from what we now mean by them’.760 The late nineteenth century was, he acknowledged, very different from the fourth. Yet there were ways in which it did seem to him to resemble the Nicene age. Both were characterized by stormy controversies. And in those controversies, he claimed, the ‘deepest question at issue is the same now as then–the idea of God’. Then the prevalent idea that needed to be expunged was the heathen conception of God as an unknown Supreme; and what was needed to replace it was a firm stress on the incarnation. In his own day the widespread misconception in need of correction was the idea of God as ‘a wise and mighty engineer, who designed the world, set its clockwork going and left it’; and what was needed to replace it was the idea of the immanent working of God through all the processes of natural law.761 The current debate was no simple repetition of the earlier one. But it was the same underlying conviction about the radical nature of God's involvement in the world that was at the heart of both. The controversies then and now were concerned with matters of great moment. As he put it in the preface to his Studies of Arianism, the old fourth-century debates ‘were not mere word battles in their own time.

759

‘Gwatkin's Studies of Arianism’ (unsigned article), Church Quarterly Review, 16 (1883 ), 375–402. The citations are from pp. 379–82. See also R. Strange, Newman and the Gospel of Christ (Oxford, 1981), 13 n. 39.

760

The Bishop of Oxford's Open Letter: An Open Letter in Reply (London, 1914 ), 4–5.

761

The Meaning, 13–14.

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Neither are they obsolete in ours; for they have a direct bearing on our modern scientific difficulties.’762 In his later Gifford Lectures Gwatkin presents one point of resemblance in a more specific form. Arianism, he says, is ‘strangely English in its impatient common sense’. On the authority of a recent scientific writer he suggests that the colder northern climate is one causal factor in the English tendency to unimaginative literalism. And in his fatal inability to understand metaphor, Arius was ‘just like the English deists and their successors, though he had no excuse of climate’.763 The identification of the ancient struggle and its participants with the events and combatants of more recent times is much looser with Gwatkin than it is with Newman, but the shadow of the eighteenth-century deists has not completely disappeared. For Gwatkin the rejection of Arianism was vital for the development of a conception of God at work within the processes of nature, something which recent discoveries of the evolutionary nature of the world had made essential for Christian thought. Gwatkin's defence of Nicene orthodoxy and his repudiation of Arianism were as firm and as passionate as Newman's. But their two passions had very different roots. Gwatkin was motivated not so much by a call to faithfulness to past truth as by the need to be able to respond to the changing demands of the future.

The Twentieth Century: Williams and Hanson Gwatkin's book remained in possession of the field as the only substantial British monograph on Arius or Arianism for more than a century. Its combination of objective historical scholarship and passionate theological orthodoxy made it a welcome guide for many throughout that period of theological questioning and change. But historical research moved on and important new findings and ideas in Britain and elsewhere increasingly revealed the need for a full-scale reworking of the ground that Gwatkin had covered. Recent years have seen the publication of two significant monographs—Rowan Williams' Arius (dealing only with the individual figure of Arius) and Richard Hanson's more comprehensive The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (covering the fuller range of the long drawn-out controversy, as Gwatkin had done). These two books have a number of features in common. Both

762

Studies, xvi.

763

H.M. Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God (Edinburgh, 1906 ), ii. 106.

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authors have filled the roles of university professor and of Anglican bishop. Neither of them shows any urge to cut the knot that ties together the dual emphasis on historical scholarship and theological truth that was so determinative a feature of Gwatkin's work. But the marked change in historical evaluation of Arius and of Athanasius that characterizes both books makes the integration of those two concerns a much less straightforward matter than it was for Gwatkin. Williams sees the heart of the conflict in which Arius was engulfed as one between two approaches, which he dubs the ‘Academic’ and the ‘Catholic’.764 The ‘Academic’ continues the tradition of a ‘school’ Christianity, centred on the person of a saintly teacher like Justin or Origen, which had been such a marked feature of second- and third-century Christianity. The ‘Catholic’ represents the priority of episcopal rule, which had often been in conflict with ‘school’ Christianity, as the definitive way of ordering the church's life. Parallels with contemporary concerns about the gulf between university theology and the church's life, which Williams himself has done and still does so much to hold together, are unremarked but never far away. Their contribution to his way of interpreting the problem of Arius seems hard to deny. That way of describing the conflict has similarities with older accounts of Arius the philosopher over against Athanasius the man of religion. But Williams insists strongly that Arius was ‘not distorting theology to serve the ends of philosophical tidiness’.765 He was rather a man of faith, properly concerned to develop a ‘biblically-based and rationally consistent catechesis’.766 His fault was to have pursued his worthy goal in too conservative a fashion for times of such rapid political and cultural change. Athanasius is not central to Williams's concerns, but Williams is more ready than Gwatkin was to acknowledge his imperfections. Athanasius was not above the use of ‘unscrupulous tactics’ and (most probably) of ‘brutality towards opponents’ also.767 The account that Williams gives of the beginnings of the Arian controversy make it sound like many another controversy—a genuine struggle to discover the most appropriate forms of expression for Christian theology in changing circumstances, where the strategy of each side can rightly claim points in its favour but where each approach has its distinctive weaknesses also. But in the context of how the church has developed subsequently, it cannot be treated as just

764

Arius, 87.

765

Ibid. 230.

766

Ibid. 111 (italics original).

767

Ibid. 239.

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one theological controversy among others. For the shape of the Nicene faith was determined by the victory of Athanasius over the Arian alternative. And despite the radical contrast of Williams's evaluation of Arius and his theological intentions as compared with those of Gwatkin, Williams shares Gwatkin's conviction that the theological victory of the anti-Arians was essential for the preservation of Christian truth. He suggests a parallel with the German Church Struggle and the difference between the German Christians and the supporters of the Barmen declaration, which he admits to be ‘unfair’ but is perhaps even more unfair than he allows. Only the Nicene side of the debate, it is claimed, allows for the direct involvement of God and so for the distinctive voice of Christianity to be heard over against the cultural milieu of the day.768 But the preceding description of Arius provides little preparatory evidence for the making of such a distinction, which seems to rest more on the Athanasian picture of Arius' teaching, which Williams has taught us to view with some suspicion. Near the beginning of the book Williams suggests that ‘if the problem of Harnack's Arius is that he has not digested Ritschl, Gwatkin's Arius suffers from not having studied in late nineteenth century Cambridge’.769 The problem of his own Arius, one is tempted to add, is that he has not read Karl Barth. A much fuller argument will be needed if we are to be convinced that the condemnation of the Arius Williams depicts was essential in order to secure the heart of Christian faith. The greater breadth of Hanson's book prompts a broader definition of the essence of the conflict. He defines the underlying problem as ‘how to reconcile two factors which were part of the very fabric of Christianity: monotheism, and the worship of Jesus Christ as divine’.770 Arius is relatively quickly dismissed as ‘the spark that started the explosion, but in himself . . . of no great significance’.771 Though of no great significance, Arius was none the less a genuine and serious Christian theologian whose overall purpose was theological rather than philosophical; like his opponents, he too was ‘attempting to discover or construct a rational Christian doctrine of God’.772 What was most distinctive about his attempt at construction was not excessive dependence on any particular form of philosophy but his determination to incorporate in it the biblical witness to the suffering of God.773 The traditional importance attached to Athanasius, on the other

768

Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God (Edinburgh, 1906 ), 237–42.

769

Ibid. 11.

770

The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, p. xx.

771

Ibid., p. xviii.

772

Ibid. 98.

773

Ibid. 128.

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hand, is seen as fully justified. He was the Moses who led the church almost single-handed to the verge of the promised land of discovery of the true Christian doctrine of God. Until the 350s Athanasius did stand contra mundum as the only theologian free of subordinationism in one form or another; and that was to prove a key feature of the ultimate doctrinal resolution.774 His ‘achievement in his doctrinal works was a great one’.775 But the crucial nature of that achievement for all future Christian theology does not mean that the one who secured it was a ‘saint’ in the common understanding of that term. His actions were characterized by ‘mendacity’, ‘unscrupulousness’, and ‘gangsterism’;776 and his writings by ‘fantastic argument’ and ‘bad logic or polemical sharp practice’.777 Nor was it only in the East that sharp practice and bad argument served to secure the triumph of orthodoxy. In the West the decisive moment was the Council of Aquileia, whose ‘proceedings were well rigged beforehand’; and the decisive figure was Ambrose, who was guilty of ‘injustice and bullying’, and whose anti-Arian writings are too often marked by arguments which ‘are, as rational discussion, beneath contempt’, and by biblical interpretation which is ‘little more than fantastic nonsense woven into a purely delusive harmony’.778 Church historians have of necessity become inured to the notion that it is not always men of probity who have most effectively furthered the outward well-being of the church. And Hanson finds no difficulty in claiming that the morally and intellectually ambiguous story of the fourth-century debates, commonly known as the Arian controversy, did serve to establish vital Christian truth. It was not a matter of conserving a truth already apprehended. Indeed, like Williams, he ascribes the failure of the Arians to the fact that ‘they were so inflexible, too conservative, not ready enough to look at new ideas’.779 ‘The story’, he insists, ‘is the story of how orthodoxy was reached, found, not of how it was maintained.’780 That goal was achieved by ‘a process of trial-and-error’, including error on both sides. Moreover, the process involved specific changes in content from

774

Ibid., p. xix and 409 n. 128.

775

Ibid. 458.

776

Ibid. 244, 245, 254.

777

Ibid. 457. A selection of extracts from 19th- and 20th-century accounts of Athanasius shows how the contrast between 19th-century eulogy and 20th-century vilification is not something peculiar to Newman and Hanson but is characteristic of scholarly evaluation generally (pp. 239–40).

778

Ibid. 821, 667, 669, 673.

779

Ibid. 873.

780

Ibid. 870.

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earlier beliefs; beliefs that had been explicitly taught by second- and third-century theologians were subsequently declared heretical.781 But the outcome, in Hanson's view, was clear and decisive. In spite of a host of impediments, the pro-Nicene Fathers ‘found a satisfactory answer to the great question which had fired the search for the Christian doctrine of God’.782 What are the grounds that enable Hanson to express such confidence in the lasting success of their achievement? By defining the central problem of the controversy in terms of the reconciliation of monotheism and the worship of Jesus Christ, he is able to present the controversy as one dealing with a permanent and fundamental Christian concern, apparently little affected by its immediate historical context. For him the Greek philosophical terms that loom so large belong to the form, not the substance, of the debate. They were necessary just because the substance of the debate was rooted in the Bible. Exclusively biblical terms are bound to be insufficient when the central ‘questions are about the meaning of biblical language itself ’.783 It is a healthy reaction to extreme claims that the patristic development of doctrine involved a Hellenizing distortion of the Christian gospel. But one needs to beware of claiming too much for it. If Greek philosophical terms were a necessary tool for clarifying the faith, it is highly likely that they will have helped to mould the particular form that that clarification took. They are more than purely neutral devices for the clarification of ideas. The substance of a debate cannot be wholly separated from the historical thought-forms in terms of which it is conducted. As with Williams, the satisfactory nature of the outcome of the debate is affirmed rather than argued in a brief theological conclusion to an essentially historical work. Reasons are given for the failure of Arianism rather than for the success of orthodoxy. In addition to Arian inflexibility and lack of openness to new possibilities of belief, another more substantive cause is claimed. Hanson quotes some words of Meijering: We have to maintain the view that any talk about a divine being which is not truly and essentially divine is mythology.784

781

The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, 872–3.

782

Ibid. 875.

783

Ibid., p. xxi.

784

Ibid. 875. What Meijering actually wrote in God Being History (pp. 101–2) was ‘his [i.e. Athansius'] view’.

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The objection is similar to the one which I have earlier suggested was a main underlying cause of the collapse of Arianism at the end of the eighteenth century. Whether it had the same force in the fourth century is open to question; that it has overwhelming force today is not. But the ‘satisfactory’ nature of orthodox Trinitarianism needs more support than simply the unacceptability of its primary fourth-century rival—or, more properly, rivals, in view of the variety of beliefs that were lumped together under the single title ‘Arianism’. Portrayals of the history by which Nicene faith was, in Hanson's phrase, ‘reached’ or ‘found’ will no doubt continue to change as scholarly study of the period goes on. But the difficulties which the kind of accounts being offered by contemporary scholarship pose for those who still ascribe to that formulation of the faith the same determinative role it has held in the past will not be quickly resolved.

6 Epilogue My aim has been to trace the history of Arianism as a form of faith in the period after what Maimbourg calls its ‘first death’. It has been possible to relate that history in a relatively brief compass. The story ends, I have argued, with the disappearance of the lively resurgence of Arianism in eighteenth-century Britain. It died away when the conditions that made it a plausible interpretation of Christian faith no longer prevailed. But the demise of Arianism did not simply open the way for orthodox Trinitarianism to flourish. Orthodoxy has, of course, always had a variety of challenges to meet. The precise issues between it and its many rivals have always been changing, and the increasing speed of cultural change in the twentieth century has intensified that process. But the relation between orthodoxy and Arianism is a unique one. For Arianism was the primary foe at the most crucial stage in the self-definition of orthodox Trinitarian faith. Indeed ‘Arianism’, as we have seen, was to a significant degree a creation of Athanasius, designed to further his campaign on behalf of that particular form of Christian self-definition. It is this crucial role of Arianism in the establishment of Trinitarian faith that has led the church throughout history to treat it as the archetypal heresy. And because of that intimate relation between the two, its disappearance as a possible alternative to orthodox Trinitarianism, so far from leaving its original antagonist in undisputed possession of the field, serves rather to put the credibility of its rival at risk as well. Even if Arianism is a sowing of tares among the orthodox wheat, the uprooting of the tares is in danger of damaging the wheat also. One particular result of the end of Arianism as a lived form of faith has been to expedite the emergence of a more balanced and sympathetic understanding of fourth-century Arianism. It was not a necessary condition for that piece of revisionary scholarship. It would no doubt have happened in any case. Neither Protestantism nor Catholicism had to wither away (though they did have to change) before both

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learnt to revise radically their standard negative evaluations of each other's histories. But the death of Arianism eased and simplified the process of historical revision. Without a live enemy beating at the door, the pressure of prejudice diminished. The resultant reinterpretation of Arianism enhances the feeling of discomfort that for many adheres to orthodox Trinitarianism today. For orthodox Trinitarian faith has now to be seen not only as something whose selfdefinition is couched in terms of the denial of a form of faith that no-one holds or even inclines to hold; it has also to be seen as a faith whose self-definition was established, often by unscrupulous means, over against an alternative form of faith that was consistently parodied and misrepresented. These difficulties are not necessarily insuperable. Neither Williams nor Hanson, as we have seen, plays down the kinds of difficulty I have been describing, yet both find themselves able to affirm the intrinsic and vital truth of orthodoxy over against Arianism. They do so in full awareness of the chequered nature of the intellectual and political history on both sides in the great fourth-century debate. They also do so in the context of a widespread contemporary resurgence of interest in Trinitarian doctrine, which contains much that is scholarly, profound, and of great religious value. Their claims are inevitably made only very briefly in concluding epilogues to primarily historical writings. In raising a question about the validity of those claims in the concluding epilogue to this book, which is also of a primarily historical nature, my comments will be characterized by a similar breadth and brevity. But a question does need to be asked about the degree of continuity between the revisionist Trinitarianisms of the present moment and the orthodox Trinitarianism of the fourth century. The way that I ask that question will no doubt be influenced, as one critic of allusions to Arianism in my earlier writings has claimed, by my own beliefs, as surely as Newman and Gwatkin—or Williams and Hanson—were influenced by theirs.785

785

F. W. Norris describes the relation between my relatively favourable interpretation of Arianism and my critical attitude towards traditional incarnational and Trinitarian doctrine as ‘not accidental’. (See his ‘Wonder, Worship and Writ: Patristic Christology’, Ex Auditu, 7 (1991 ), 68, and ‘The Arian Heresy’, Ecumenical Church History (forthcoming)). In accepting the basic fairness of Norris's comment, I would add only that the process of influence between historical judgement and contemporary belief seems to me to have been in my case a two-way affair. The historical study of Arian exegesis of the fourth gospel which led to my first book, The Spiritual Gospel (Cambridge, 1960 ), certainly contributed to the development of those beliefs which Norris now sees as an important influence on my understanding of fourth-century Arianism (see my ‘Pilgrimage in Theology’, Epworth Review, 5:2 (May 1978 ), 50–5).

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It is frequently claimed that the role of the early dogmatic definitions, and the Creed of Nicaea in particular, is and was intended to be of a negative character. This is presented as an important virtue. For on such an understanding, they are not making overweening claims to true and precise theological definition; nor do they preclude further theological exploration in greater depth and in new contexts. What they do do it is claimed, is to provide valuable guidance for that further exploration by showing the parameters within which it can properly be carried on. But in the light of the account of Arianism that this study has sought to trace, what has been claimed as an advantage is made to appear much less helpful. Fourth-century orthodox Trinitarians felt passionately the need to exclude the Arian scheme as an utterly unacceptable expression of the underlying faith of the Scriptures and of early Christian experience. It did so at the time, I have argued, with the help of serious misrepresentation of the challenges it was facing. And later history, I have gone on to argue, makes clear that no view of the kind it was so passionately opposing is a plausible alternative form of faith today. So it is not easy to see how those parameters for Trinitarian faith, which were established out of the Arian conflict, can be of help in the present continuing struggle to understand the significance of Christ in relation to the being and purposes of God. They are more likely to distort our search by encouraging us to place it in the context of so different a debate. The claim to stand under their authority and in their tradition, if it is to be of any constructive help to us, has to be by way of a translation of them into the terms of our own contemporary debates. The process of effecting such a translation is almost bound to involve a prior reading into them of insights that we have already judged to be essential to a contemporary faith. It is those prior insights, rather than the formulations of the ancient credal definitions, that are likely to play the determinative role in our doctrinal decisions. The Arian movement of the eighteenth century, as it has been traced here, suggests another way of looking at this conflict of ideas that began in the fourth century and continued intermittently until the end of the eighteenth. One of the intellectual strengths of the eighteenth-century movement, I have suggested, was its handling of the scriptural text on the basis of the understanding of the nature and status of a scriptural text that was shared by both sides in the debate at that time. In the cases of Newton and Whiston, two of its most

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intellectually gifted if not always its most judicious exponents, three issues were of dominant interest: biblical chronology, messianic prophecy, and Trinitarian belief. All three had a basis of argument in the apparently explicit meaning of the biblical text; all three were interpreted in ways that gave them a powerful contemporary relevance. Biblical chronology provided material that could be used in coming to terms with the emerging awareness of age-old religious traditions, developed in apparent independence of the Judaeo-Christian revelation. The interpretation of prophecy served the cause of affirming divine providence in a world where growing knowledge of scientific regularities was making it ever less easy to affirm it with confidence; for Newton this took the form primarily of providing a way of recognizing God's providence in the past, while for Whiston it offered a way of foretelling the near future as part of a call to personal and national repentance. Whatever sympathy may still be felt for their overall religious intentions, their use of Scripture on both these topics would almost universally be dismissed today as a misuse. What seemed to them to be a careful interpretation of the explicit meaning of the text, would now be regarded as a mistaken exploitation of its surface meaning, resulting from a failure to recognize the true genre of the scriptural writings involved. The relation between Christianity and other ancient faiths and the concept of divine providence may still be important issues to pursue, but Christians today need to pursue them by means very different from those employed by Newton and Whiston. In the case of Christology the conclusions which Newton and Whiston drew from their scriptural and historical studies would be almost equally widely rejected. Yet the enterprise on which they were engaged would not be so generally forsworn. But perhaps it should be. It is not, I suggest, that on this topic Newton and Whiston drew the wrong conclusions and their Trinitarian opponents the right ones. Rather on this topic, as with the other two, both sides were seeking to answer questions for which the material, properly understood, does not provide the requisite resources. Understanding the figure of Christ in relation to the ultimate reality of God is certainly an issue that Christians will rightly continue to pursue, but the pursuit will need to take very different forms from those in which it was couched between the fourth and the eighteenth centuries. Determining the true relation between two pre-existent divine ‘persons’ is not the only, or necessarily the most appropriate way of pursuing that goal. To say that is not to dismiss our forebears as having foolishly

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contended about nothing more significant than the inclusion or omission of a single iota, the difference between ὁμooύσιōς (of the same substance) and ὁμōιōύσιōς (of like substance). They were pursuing a serious issue in terms of the philosophical understanding of their time and with the aid of the historical knowledge available to them. It is we who are guilty of folly if we fail to recognize that the changes in philosophical and historical understanding that have developed since that time (and that continue to develop) radically alter the way in which the discussion can responsibly be carried on. One important outcome of a study of the history of Arianism, as of many other historical studies, is its capacity to free us from the restrictive shackles that that history is liable to impose on us.

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Steenson, J. N., ‘Basil of Ancyra and the Course of Nicene Orthodoxy’ (unpublished D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1983). Stewart, L., ‘Clarke, Newtonianism and the Factions of Post-Revolutionary England’, JHI 42 (1981). Sykes, N., William Wake (Cambridge, 1957). Tanner, N., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London, 1990). Thomas, D. O., The Honest Mind (Oxford, 1977). Thomas, R., ‘The Non-Subscription Controversy amongst Dissenters in 1719’, JEH 4 (1953). ——, ‘Presbyterians in Transition’ in G. C. Bolam, J. Goring, H. L. Short, and R. Thomas, English Presbyterians (London, 1968). Thomas, S., Newman and Heresy (Cambridge, 1991). Thompson, E. A., ‘Christianity and the Northern Barbarians’ in A. Momigliano (ed.), The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1963). ——, The Goths in Spain (Oxford, 1969). ——, The Visigoths in the Time of Ulfila (Oxford, 1983). Thouzellier, C., ‘La Profession trinitaire de Durand de Huesea’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 27 (1960). Toth, W., ‘Trinitarianism and Anti-Trinitarianism in the Hungarian Reformation’, Church History, 13 (1944). Vaggione, R. P., ‘Aspects of Faith in the Eunomian Controversy’ (unpublished D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University 1976). ——, Eunomius: The Extant Works (Oxford, 1987). Van Banning, J. H. A., ‘The Critical Edition of the Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum: An Arian Source’, SP xvii. 1 (Oxford, 1982). ——, ‘The Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum’ (unpublished D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1983). Wakefield, W., and Evans, A. P., Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York, 1969). Wallace, R., Antitrinitarian Biography (London, 1850). Walsh, J., and Taylor, S., ‘The Church and Anglicanism in the “Long” Eighteenth Century’ in J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor (eds.), The Church of England c. 1689–c. 1833 (Cambridge, 1993). Ward, W. R., Georgian Oxford (Oxford, 1958). Westfall, R. S., Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1980). Wilbur, E. M., A History of Unitarianism (Cambridge, Mass., 1945–52). ——, The Two Treatises of Servetus on the Trinity, Harvard Theological Studies, 16 (Cambridge, Mass., 1932). Wiles, M. F., ‘Attitudes to Arius in the Arian Controversy’ in M. R. Barnes and D. H. Williams (eds.), Arianism after Arius (Edinburgh, 1993). ——, ‘Newton and the Bible’ in S. E. Balantine and J. Barton (eds.), Language, Theology and the Bible (Oxford, 1994).

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Wiles, M. F., ‘The Philosophy in Christianity: Arius and Athanasius’ in G. Vesey (ed.), The Philosophy in Christianity (Cambridge, 1989). ——, ‘Pilgrimage in Theology’, Epworth Review, 5:2 (1978). ——, The Spiritual Gospel (Cambridge, 1960). ——, ‘A Textual Variant in the Creed of the Council of Nicaea’, SP, xxvi (Louvain, 1993). Willey, B., The Seventeenth Century Background (London, 1934). Williams, D. H., Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene- Arian Conflicts (Oxford, 1995). Williams, G. H., The Polish Brethren, Harvard Theological Studies, 30 (Missoula, 1980). ——, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962). Williams, R. D., Arius: Heresy and Tradition (London, 1987). ——, ‘Newman's Arians and the Question of Method in Doctrinal History’, in I. Ker and A. G. Hill (eds.), Newman after a Hundred Years (Oxford, 1990). ——, Review of R. P. C. Hanson's The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, in SJT 45 (1992). Wolfram, H., History of the Goths (Berkeley, 1988). Wood, I. N., ‘Gregory of Tours and Clovis’, Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, 63 (1985). Yolton, J. W., Philosophy, Religion and Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New Haven, 1990). Zeiller, J., ‘Étude sur l'Arianisme en Italie’, Mélanges d'archaeologie et d'histoire, 25 (1905). Manuscript Sources Locke, Adversaria Theologica: Bodleian Library, Oxford: MS Locke c43. Newton, Theological Manuscripts: Babson College MSS Nos. 436 and 438 (C-H Reel 42). Keynes MSS Nos. 2–4 and 7–11 (C-H Reel 18). Martin Bodmer Foundation MS (C-H Reel 33). Yahuda MS 1:1 (C-H Reel 34). Yahuda MSS 1:2 and 1:5 (C-H Reel 35). Yahuda MSS 14 and 15 (Cambridge University Library, Microfilm MS 823). Wake: Christ Church Archives W. No. 268. Whiston, Letters: Barker MSS, Leicester Public Record Office DE 730/2.

Index of Biblical References Old Testament Genesis 1: 26 57 18 20 Exodus 3: 14 21 Deuteronomy 32: 18 13 Job 38: 28 13 Psalms 33: 6 11 Proverbs 8: 22–4 13, 19, 100 Malachi 3: 18 21

New Testament

Matthew 19: 17 55, 111, 150 24: 36 150 28: 19 88 Mark 10: 18 10–11, 22 13: 32 34, 82 n., 111, 150 John 1: 1 12, 22, 86, 118 1: 1–18 59, 80 1: 14 12 1: 18 12 5: 19 82n. 5: 22–3 82n. 5: 23 50 5: 26 82 5: 30 15 10: 30 14, 35 10: 34–5 129 14: 28 22, 55 17: 3 10, 12–13, 55, 82n., 111

17: 4 15 17: 5 155 Acts 2: 36 88 Romans 9: 5 118, 143 16: 27 10–11, 144 1 Corinthians 1: 24 12 8: 5 69, 81, 82n. 8: 5–6 79 8: 6 14, 118, 155 Ephesians 1: 4 61 1: 10 75 3: 9 153 Philippians 2: 5–11 15, 81, 87–8, 118, 155 2: 6 50, 139n. 2: 7 155 Colossians 1: 15 60, 153 1: 15–17 75n. 1 Timothy 3: 16 76, 96 6: 15–16 10, 144 2 Timothy 1: 9 61 Hebrews 1: 2 139n. 1: 8–9 15, 75n. 5: 8 15 1 John 5: 7 76, 77, 96 Jude 25 144n. Revelation 1: 1 82n. 5: 3, 5, 7, 9 82n. 15: 4 144

General Index Acacius of Caesarea 172 Aetius 25, 29, 55, 66 Albertz, M. 31 Alexander of Alexandria 16, 89, 100, 105 Alexandria, Council of 90 Amann, É. 28 Ambrose 36–7, 90, 179 Ammonius 66 Anhomoians, see Eunomians ante-Nicene Fathers; influence on Arius 19–23; evaluations of that influenceBull 97Chillingworth 64Cudworth 65Hanson 180Newman 169–70Newton 84–7Petavius 97Priestley 152Reformation 58–9Whiston 96–7 Antioch, Council of 6, 132 Apostolic Constitutions 101, 104, 106–9, 115 Aquileia, Council of 36–8, 179 Aretius 58–9 Ariminum, Creed of 33, 49, 132 Arius; modern study of 2–4; teaching 9–17, 23, 24–6; death 92, 101, 171; attitudes toArians, fourth century 6Athanasius 5–7Cudworth 65Emlyn 136Gwatkin 176Hanson 178mediaeval 54Newman 171Newton 87, 92Reformation 55–6, 58–9Whiston 102Williams 177–8 Arminianism 118, 123, 142 Arnold, Thomas 166 Articles, Church of England 129, 140, 167, 171; subscription to 122–7, 132, 141 Athanasius 5–9; attitudes toClayton 130Cudworth 65–6Emlyn 136Gwatkin 174Hanson 178–9Newman 172Newton 87, 90–2Whiston 100–2Williams 177 Athenagoras 85n. Atticus 25 Augustine 30, 67, 90 Auxentius 36, 43–4 Basil of Ancyra 28 Basil of Caesarea 14, 79n., 152 Belsham, T. 157 Benson, George 142–4 Bertaridus 52 Biddle, John 75 Blackburne, Francis 132 Bourn, Samuel 142, 144–6, 163 Bradford, Sam 107 Brewster, David 77 Bright, William 174–5 Brocklesby, R. 94 Bull, George 67, 101, 138, 165

Butler, Joseph 120–1 Caesarius of Arles 46 Calamy, Edmund 140–1 Calvin 54, 153 Calvinism 57, 135, 142, 150 Campanus, John 56

GENERAL INDEX

Caroli, Peter 54 Carroll, William 72 Casimir, John 61 n. Castle, Terry 162 Chadwick, Henry 18–19 Chandler, Samuel 142 Chillingworth, William 64 Christ, no human soul 91, 147–8, 150, 152 see also Son Chrysostom, John 33, 45 Clarke, Samuel 110–27, 158–9; influence 133–4, 137–8, 142, 168; relation with Newton 77, 93, 110, 121; relation with Whiston 94, 98, 114–16, 122, 126; Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity 96, 111–14, 119n., 122, 138, 142, 168 Clayton, Robert 129–32 Clement of Alexandria 20–1, 65, 85n., 86 Clementine Recognitions 65, 85n. Clovis 44–5 Cole, William 133 Collins, Anthony 108–9 comprehensiveness, Anglican desires for 125, 142, 166 Constantinople, Council of (360) 33, 43, 49 Constantinople, Council of (381) 1, 4, 30, 32, 37–8, 45, 91 Constantinopolitan Creed, see Nicene Creed Constantius II 42 Crabbe, George 162 Cudworth, Ralph 64–6, 69–70, 161–2 Cyprian 18, 22 Defoe, Daniel 162 deism 68–9n., 72, 113, 159 dissenting academies 138, 141–2, 148 doxology 105 Drysdale, A. H. 134 Dupin, E. 94 Edwards, John 74, 116, 118 Emlyn, Thomas 119, 136–7, 141 Epiphanius 28–9 Eunomians 30–4 Eunomius 14, 29, 31–4, 55, 66, 104–5, 171–2 Eutyches 67 Evans, Christopher 159–60 Fanning, S. C. 53 Farnovius 59–60 Feathers Tavern Petition 132 Filastrius of Brescia 37 Fitzpatrick, M. 132 Franciscus à Sancta Clara 123n. Freke, William 68 Fretela 49 Friedrichsen, G. W. S. 49 Fulgentius of Ruspe 48 Gabriel (angel) 130 Gale, Theophilus 66

201

Gentile, Valentine 58 George III 130 Gibbon, E. 159n. God; Arius' understanding of 10–11; defined by dominion 87–9, 112, 158; self-existence 112, 119–21, 126–7 see also Son Gonesius, Peter 58 Goring, J. 141 Grabe, J. E. 107 Gregg, R. C. 3 Gregory of Nazianzus 28, 30 Gregory Thaumaturgus 65, 85n. Gretton, Phillips 119 Groh, D. E. 3 Grotius 153 Gryson, R. 35 Guitton, J. 166 Gundobad 48 Gwatkin, H. M. 9, 28, 173–6 Hallett, Joseph (Jun.) 138–9, 147–8 Hallett, Joseph (Sen.) 140 Hanson, Richard 4, 6, 17, 28, 176–7, 178–81, 183 Hare, Francis 113 Haynes, Hopton 77 Heather, Peter 27, 43 Herrin, Judith 44 Herring, James 128, 142 Heylyn, Peter 63 Hickes, George 121 Hilary of Poitiers 35–6 Hippolytus 24 Hoadly, Benjamin 103, 110, 127, 131 Hodgson, Leonard 160 Homoians 27–8, 47–8 Homoiousians 28–9 homoiousios 29n., 89

202

GENERAL INDEX

homoousios 28, 54, 85, 89–91, 97, 99–100, 171 Horne, George 128 Horsley, Samuel 149, 152 Hosius 90 idolatry; Arians guilty of 7–8, 65, 124, 134n., 156–7; Trinitarians guilty of 68, 80, 85, 90–1, 125 Ignatian Epistles 101, 106–7 Irenaeus 56, 64, 85n. Jackson, John 100, 107, 113, 115, 121, 122, 150 Jerome 32, 49, 90 John Chrysostom, see Chrysostom Jordanes 44 Justin Martyr 19–20, 58, 65, 84–6, 96, 97, 152 Justina 37–8 Kidd, B. J. 32 Kopocek, T. 3, 31 Lactantius 58, 59, 65, 85 n. Lancut, Synod of 59 Lardner, Nathaniel 147–8, 154–5 latitudinarianism 72, 126–32, 150–1 Leovogild 48 Leslie, Charles 173 Leslie, Robert 172–3 liberalism 166, 170–2 Liebeschutz, J. 47 Lindsey, Theophilus 134, 156–7, 164 Lloyd, A. C. 24 Lloyd, William 95 Locke, John 70–6, 78–9, 131, 153, 163; influence of 133, 141, 143–4, 163 logos, see Son Lombards 52–3 Lucian 85n. Luther 54 Macedonians 30 Maclachlan, H. 78 Maimbourg, Louis 52–3, 55, 60–1, 62 Manichees 53 Manning, William 136 Manuel, F. 78 Marcellus of Ancyra 11–12, 28, 56, 101, 106 Marrou, H. 31 Masham, Lady Damaris 70 Matthews, J. F. 27, 43 Maximinus 48 Mayo, Richard 120 Meijering, E. P. 180 Melancthon 57 Merivale, Samuel 153n. Meslin, M. 35, 40 Methodius 85n. Michael (archangel) 130

Montanism 101 More, Henry 161–2 More, L. T. 78 neo-Arians, see Eunomians Nestorianism 68 Nestorius 34 Newman, J. H. 166–74 Newton, Isaac 76, 77–93, 96, 110, 121, 133, 184–5 Nicaea, Council of 1, 4, 41, 122, 167; critical attitudes to 87, 89–90, 97–101, 132, 153 Nicene Creed 1–3, 50, 54, 90, 100, 121n., 129–30, 184 Norris, F. W. 183n. Nottingham, Earl of 124 Novatian 85n. Numenius 25, 65 Nye, Stephen 66–9 Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum 38–40 Origen 11, 17, 21–2, 59, 64, 85n., 96, 97, 101 Osborn, E. F. 19n. Palladius of Ratiaria 36–7, 39 Paul of Samosata 71, 85n., 166 Pauli, Gregory 59–60 Paulinus of Nola 41 Pearson, John 138 Peirce, James 126–7, 138–40, 155, 157 Perctarit, see Bertaridus Petavius 97 Philostorgius 42 Philpot, John 63 Photinus 56, 71, 72n. Pinczov, Synod of 58 Plato 25 Platonism; influence on ante-Nicene Fathers 86,

GENERAL INDEX

152; influence on Arius and Athanasius 24–6, 84–6, 141 Plintha 48 Plotinus 24, 64–6 Pneumatomachians, see Macedonians Polycrates of Ephesus 18 Porphyry 65 Potter, Edward 120 Potter, John 125 pre-existence, see Son Presbyterianism 63–4, 134–5, 142 Price, Richard 149–51, 156 Priestley, Joseph 123–4, 147–58, 160–1, 163–4 Proctor, John 62 Psathyrians 48 Racovian Catechism 60 Reccared 48–9 redemption; only orthodoxy can do justice to 7, 124; orthodoxy cannot do justice to 39–40, 57, 91, 147–8, 150 revelation 72–3, 78, 154–5, 159 Rose, H. J. 167 Sabellianism 67, 69n., 100 Salters Hall 140–1 Salvian 46 Sandius, Christopher 66, 165 Scott, Thomas 168–9 Scott, Walter 162 Secemin, Synod of 58 Secundianus 37n. Selenas 48 semi-Arianism 28–30, 32, 117, 125, 172 Servetus 55–6 Sharp, John 94–5 Sherlock, William 59n., 123 Simonetti, M. 35 Sirmium, Blasphemy of 36 Skeireins 50 Skrzymo, Synod of 59 Smalbroke, R. 104–5 Socinianism; attributed to Locke 74; attributed to Newton 77, 83–4; designation for Unitarianism 67, 148; distinguished from Arianism 68–9; distinguished from Unitarianism 151, 156; in Poland 52, 60–1 Socinus 67 Sogdon, Herbert 138 Son; called ‘God’ 7, 12, 15–16, 35, 80–1, 112, 129, 143–6, 154, 164; created 7, 13–14, 21, 31, 65, 69, 99–100, 115–16; created by the will of the Father 20, 112; creator of the material world 136, 153, 157; middle nature, view of Alexander and Athanasius 100–1; no middle nature possible 7, 117, 155–6, 180–1; pre-existent as archangel 130; pre-existent as distinct being 11–12, 19–20, 57–60, 80–1, 85; pre-existent as embodied 82; pre-existent as

203

superangelic being 146, 147, 150, 162; pre-existent in foreknowledge 61; pre-existent in potentia 11, 96, 99; worship due to 19, 22, 60, 79–81, 103–4, 112, 129, 136 see also Christ, God South, Robert 123 Sozomen 34 spirits, belief in 161–5 Stancaro, Francis 57 Stillingfleet, Edward 71–3 Sunnias 49 Sykes, Arthur 122–5 Szlichtyng, Jonas 61 Tatian 65, 85n. Taylor, Henry 132–3 Taylor, John 142–3 Taylor, S. 128 Tenison, Thomas 94 Tertullian 56, 64, 65, 85, 95, 100, 152 Theodosius I 32–4, 45 Theodotion 71 Theognostus 101 Theophilus of Antioch 59, 85n., 97 Theophilus, Bishop of Gothia 41 Theophilus the Indian 42 Thomas, Stephen 167, 169 Thompson, E. A. 50 Thrasamund 48 Tillotson, John 104n., 126–7, 132, 138 Toland, John 71–3 Toledo, Council of 49, 50

204

GENERAL INDEX

Tomkins, Matthew 137, 154 Transylvania 42, 52–3 Trent, Council of 97 Trinity, doctrine of, 183; Anglican orthodoxy, touchstone of 142; lacking precise sense 73, 123; speculative 139; subordinationism inherent in 65, 138; tritheistic 59n., 67, 136 Turner, John 66 Tyrwhitt, Robert 134 Ulfila 40–4 Unitarians; seventeenth century 67–8, 96, 136, 157–8; eighteenth century 131, 133–4, 148–57, 166 see also Socinianism Ursacius, Bishop of Singidunum 36, 92n. Vaggione, Richard 105 Valens, Bishop of Mursa 36, 92n. Valens, Emperor 32, 36–7, 42–4 Victorinus 25 Wake, William 103, 114, 127 Wallis, John 69 Walsh, John 128 Waterland, Daniel 115–20, 122–6 Watson, Richard 130–2 Welchman, E. 117n., 154 Wells, Edward 118, 120, 159 Wesley, John 143 Westfall, Richard 78 Whately, Richard 166, 168 Whiston, William v–vi, 93–110, 137–8, 147, 155, 165, 184–5; relation with Clarke 94, 98, 114–16, 122, 126; relation with Newton 77, 92–3 Whitby, Daniel 111n., 113–15, 122, 124n. Wightman, Edward 63 Williams, Daniel 35 Williams, Rowan 3–5, 167–8, 176–8, 183 Withers, John 147 worship, see idolatry, Son Wotschke, Theodor 57 Young, Edward 109