In Our Time - Arianism

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the form of Christianity adopted by Ostrogoths in the 4th century AD, which they learned from Roman missionaries and from their own contact with the imperial court at Constantinople. This form spread to the Vandals and the Visigoths, who took it into Roman Spain and North Africa, and the Ostrogoths brought it deeper into Italy after the fall of the western Roman empire. Meanwhile, with the Roman empire in the east now firmly committed to the Nicene Creed not the Arian, the Goths and Vandals faced conflict or conversion, as Arianism moved from an orthodox view to being a heresy that would keep followers from heaven and delay the Second Coming for all.The image above is the ceiling mosaic of the Arian Baptistry in Ravenna, commissioned by Theodoric, ruler of the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy, around the end of the 5th centuryWithJudith Herrin Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, Emeritus, at King's College LondonRobin Whelan Lecturer in Mediterranean History at the University of LiverpoolAndMartin Palmer Visiting Professor in Religion, History and Nature at the University of WinchesterProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, in the 4th century AD, Roman missionaries converted the Ostrogoths to Christianity in the form known as Aeronism, as a way of integrating them into the Roman Empire. Aeronism spread to the Vandals and the Visigoths,

who took it to Spain and North Africa, Africa and the Ostrogoths brought it deeper intuitively after the fall of Rome. Within a hundred years, though, they learned that they had become heretics as the Romans were now following the Nicene Creed, not the Arian, and they faced persecution or converting again or finding common ground. With me to discuss Aeronism and Robin Whelan, a lecturer in Mediterranean history at the University of Liverpool, Judith Herin, Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, Emeritus at King's College, London, And Martin Palmer, visiting professor in religion, history and nature at the University of Winchester. Martin, Martin Palmer, what was changing for Christians in the early 4th century, along with the changes in the Roman Empire?

The major change, of course, was the edict of tolerance issued in 313 by Constantine, and this gave Christians the right to be respected as a proper religion. It did not establish Christianity as their religion. that happened much later in the fourth century, but it did remove the yoke of persecution that had been placed upon them in the year 303 by Diocletian and had caused horrendous persecution and deaths and martyrdoms and so forth. So suddenly the Christian Church finds itself legitimate

and legitimate in a sense that it had never really been before. It also brought to that stage a very highly developed hierarchy of bishops and priests and deacons across the Roman world. So within a year of the edict of tolerance, there was the Council of Arles, at which over 300 bishops turned up, including three from Britain. So it had the infrastructure in place

to take advantage of suddenly being allowed to be much more public. And then, and of course this is based on Constantine's claim that he had a very special relationship with God, that God had guided his military and takings. Then you have this schism within the Roman Empire where you had two emperors, two Caesars, two Caesars as well. The Roman Empire begins to fragment into east and to west. Which date are we talking about now?

This is where we're talking here about, well, this is following on from Diocletian's own division of the Roman Empire. But essentially what Constantine does is that he has to kind of reunite the empire from feuding emperors and Caesars, this is running really from about 300 through to about 323. By 323, Constantine has managed to unite the empire. He is the emperor. He's pretty much crushed everybody else. It's been a period of civil war and unrest and destruction. And then there is a period in which suddenly there is peace. And in that peace, the church thrives. And it thrives, And it thrives particularly because Constantine, having got one emperor, one empire, now wants one church. And that's the real problem for him, because what he encounters is not that there is one church,

but that there are many, many churches, many theologies, many different types of Christian belief. Thank you. So it becomes a political issue inside the empire as well as a theological issue. Judith Heron, we were talking about Aaronism, so who was Arias? Arias, we know, was a deacon and later priest of the Church of Alexandria. We know also that he was born in Libya, in North Africa, and that he died in 336 in Constantinople. But his life is very poorly documented because after he'd been condemned as a heretic and his theology dismissed, and his writings were all burned, evidence about him disappeared. Although, fortunately, some of his writings were quoted by those who opposed him,

and so we do have fragments of his Thalia, which were clearly very important writings. And Stray references indicate that he was a man of ascetic principles, gentle, moral standing. he attracted people, he wrote hymns for people to sing, so that there was a sense of collective support that he generated. He had 70 dedicated women living in a sort of convent, monorry. I'm sure they were all dedicated to him as a person. And so he must have been charismatic,

and he certainly had a very clear notion in his own theology of what was wrong with, various definitions of Christianity. So he wrote a creed, which is slightly different from the creed that was adopted at the Council of Nicaea when Christianity was officially recognized at the meeting that Constantine I presided over. But his was only one of many creeds. Everybody was discussing how to define exactly what the Christians believed. And Arias centered his own definition on the distinction that he wanted to draw between God the Father, who was the only God, the source, the unique source of divinity, and the son who he said had been begotten. And this strange word that we use in the creed today, the only begotten son, it is an indication that the father had in some way created the sum.

which of course is what people normally considered fathers did. And it therefore meant that the son was not, he did not exist from the same time before all time, before the creation of the world when God existed. Would you be true to say that the central bit might be whether Christ could be divine and human at the same time? That was not so much the problem that Arias perceived, which was that the son was naturally obedient to the father. And that was a question of hierarchy,

more than a discussion about his divine and human natures. I think it was recognized that as the representation of God on earth, he was a very divine figure. But of course, he took human form. What Arias was concerned to show was that he was in some way inferior, subordinate to the father. And by the same token, the Holy Spirit was in some way subordinate to Christ, the son of God. And it was this Trinitarian problem of three aspects of the Godhead that worried Arias.

Thank you. Robin Whelan, we've gone somewhere along the line there with Judith, but what was the distinction between the ideas of Arias and his opponents and so on? The really key distinction between Arias and his main opponent in the Church of Alexandria, which is bishop, Alexander, later Alexander's successor, Athanasius, was over this precise relationship between God the Father and God the Son. For Alexander, God the Father and God the Son were, and this is where we get further into some kind of theological terminology, where consubstantial homoosios in Greek,

that just basically means they were made of the same stuff. and co-eternal, they'd always existed together. Whereas for Arias, the oneness of God, the one true God of the Bible, was the father who was, as Jesus said, was unbegotten. He'd not been born, whereas the son had been born and created and therefore came after him. For Arias, the problem with Alexander's views is that if the son has always existed with the father and is made of exactly the same stuff,

then how is he a son? Sons are different from fathers and have to come after them. On the other hand, for Alexander, what Arias is doing is making the son a lesser God. Why was there a value in defining the status of father and son rather than leaving it vague? The fundamental problem in many ways for early Christians,

this goes back to some degree to what Martin was saying before, in terms of really defining their religion as a separate religion from, on the one hand, the Judaism which it sprung out of, and which in many ways it was still very much entangled with. And on the other hand, what they would see is the paganism of traditional Roman religion, which is often polytheistic. And so there is this kind of central issue of how you can have one God who is multiple without ending up potentially with, with multiple gods. And this is something that they haven't just started worrying about now. They've been worrying about this all along. And that will keep being a problem in the decades to come, this tension between including and excluding.

Thank you very much. And back to Martin. I'd like to get the listeners have some idea how important this was. The Christians were a small group, really, we're told, in the sum total of the empire. and then there was this conference at Nicaea. How important was it? Was it something that was going to shake the empire? Was it something that was going to shape the empire? Well, the heft of it was going back to this quest by Constantine, who had struggled for 20 years to basically unite the empire again,

to make himself the sole ruler. And he'd kind of nailed his colours to the master or to the cross of Christ, which he claimed to have seen before his victorious battle in 312. And for him it was, it essentially was he sensed that his authority came from this God. And therefore it was important that he should be the agent of that God upon earth. At one level, you're quite right, Melvin. I mean, it was not of huge importance to the vast majority of people. And in fact, the Council of Nicaea in 325 really has almost no impact initially on the western half of the empire.

It's very much a Greek debate about can you philosophically define the infinite. And out of that comes this great angst that Robbins so beautifully captured of this sense of, well, what are we? Who are we? So its impact was initially for Constantine. And he sends a letter in the year 324, a year before Nicaea, and he sends it to Alexander of Alexandria, the bishop. and he sent it to Arias and they were absolutely, as Judith has said, they were miles apart.

I mean, Arias was a popular preacher and Alexander was a bit of a pompous bishop. And Constantine just simply says, well, for goodness sake, really, is this of the slightest importance, this tiny little theological difference, for goodness sake. Let's get together, let's unite, and let's get on with a job of being, you know,

the religion that's totally useful to everybody. So his counsel, in the... 325 is essentially Constantine saying, right, I think you'll all agree I'm right, won't you? And they all kind of go, well, sort of, well, maybe, and then he kind of really brings the pressure down. So in the

end, out of all these bishops, only two opposed and they're sent off into exile. But it's, in other words, it's a compromise, as Robin has said, it lays the foundations for schisms, for debates, for arguments that run really for about another 300 years.

And there are various attempts, Nicaea is the first council. It eventually comes to one in Constantinople in 381, in which it's sort of said, right, folks, this is it, this is what you've got to believe. But on route, you've had councils like the Council of Tire in the year 335, which completely throws out the Nicene Creed and says no Arius was right and brings Arias back. And then you have other great conflicts around 357, where Constantius II, who was an Aryan, basically says, look, I've got an even better definition. So you have this period of enormous difference,

but the roots of this are that then really was no unity anyway. And into this confusion, Martin, I'm now talking to Judas, came the Goths, the Visigoths, came, pushed to the West by what was happening in China and wanting to convert to Rome for the wealth and power. would give them. How did that mix in with what Martin's been talking about? The Germanic tribes and all these different peoples that, as you say, had been pushed further and further west, came against the boundaries of the Roman Empire, which were very firmly defended. And at that point, they were interested in the different ways of doing things that highly

civilised organisation, use of money, various other things that typified the Roman world. And as Christianity was spreading within the Roman Empire, they understood that there was this new religion. And we learned that Ulfila, Wulfila, Wulfilas, differently spelled in English, but of course it was a Gothic name, was sent on an embassy from his people to Constantinople, where he arrived in 336 and learned about, met Constantine I first, and learned about the definitions of Christianity. and he wished to learn more. And in a way, he is the person who became the prophet, the leader of the Gothic Christians. And he, over many years, because he lived a very long life, he converted many of them.

And what he did specifically was to invent a Gothic script and then translate the Old and New Testament into Gothic. so that the Goths had, they could celebrate Christianity in their own language. That, of course, gave them a fantastically important entry point to Christianity because they could sing the Psalms, they could listen to the liturgy, they could hear the sermons in Gothic, and they could understand their conversion to Christianity in their own terms. Were the Goths Arians?

Well, Phyllis was introduced to different forms of Christianity, And when he moved back to Constantinople in 341, Constanius was emperor, and he supported Aryan Christianity. Arias had been summoned back from exile and supported in Constantinople. And the emperors, after Constantine I, the first, supported the area definitions of Christianity. And therefore, Ophelos, when he became consecrated bishop, he was consecrated as an Aryan bishop. And that is why the Goths became Aryans. One of the real issues that we have in reconstructing this period is that most of the accounts that we have are written by those who supported what eventually triumphed, that is the Nicene Creed, for whom all of those creeds and councils of the middle decades of the 4th century that Martin's already mentioned, they were all Aryan. But another way of looking at this period is one in which you get various factions within the Imperial Church trying to come up with.

a better solution than Niccia to unite people, especially under Constantius II. And that these people, although they in some ways might map on to what Arias really cared about because they introduced some level of subordination between father and son, they did not think they were Aryans. Athanasius of Alexandria, who's the person who really popularizes the term Aryan as a kind of heresy, he thinks they are, but they would deny that. They deny that they followed Arias. They wouldn't use the label for themselves.

And a later anonymous text late in the 4th century said, you know, we Christians, who the false name of Ariens has been imposed upon. So there's a sense in which we often use Aryan just as a kind of, it's the easiest term to use for all these different Christian bishops and theologians who come up with alternatives in Isaiah, but they would just say we're the Orthodox and they're the heretics. What Arias was promulgating, was preaching, had been considered basically orthodoxy

up until the beginning of the 4th century. Origin, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, these great theologians all basically had a subordinate theology, a bit of theology that Christ was not equal to God, very much. Arias were saying. So in one level, Arias was simply saying, look, you know, this is what I was brought up with. And exactly as Robin says, many of the bishops also thought that's what they've been brought up with and that this was perfectly all right. They didn't need to identify it as

Aryan. Martin, so what was so compelling about Aaronism? You've described, it's been described once or twice, but it seems to have struck home with, well, we're still talking about minorities, aren't we? It seems to have struck home very deeply with people who were prepared to die for it, be persecuted for it, be exiled for it. It had been orthodoxy. It had been basically what Christians thought. And you get this very strange process in the later 4th and 5th centuries, whereby some of the greatest theologians who'd given their lives for the gospel, like origin, were then denounced as heretics because they didn't fit into this new,

substantial notion that the godhead was complete and absolute and everybody was equal and all descended from being God. But at a second level, and I think this is particularly applies to the Goths, it offered a model that made a great deal of sense to any structure, any society that had a very hierarchical view of leadership. If you are a tribal leader, if you have been leading your people, you know, through the Central Asian steps and down into the Roman Empire, and you've been in charge and you've had everybody doing what you've said, then frankly, the Aryan view or the traditional view, the view that Alface was promulgating, of a supreme God who has basically two really good helpers, makes a lot more sense.

And again, it's this issue of there are a... trinities in every major religion. That's not a great problem if you're not trying to claim that there is only one God. And when you come from a pluralistic polytheistic faith, you know, you don't have that much of a problem of believing there is a kind of supreme God who bestows some of his powers down to other ones. And I think it basically made a lot of sense to people as a model of leadership, of hierarchy, of where power lay, and that in a sense what you have is you have this remote God and then this personal experience of God, which is Jesus, and then the sense of a spirit moving amongst you.

And frankly, for most people, that was all they really needed to know. Judith, with the cult of the Virgin Mary, you also have another aspect of Christianity, which becomes very important and is very much written up and appreciated, particularly by the 50% of Christians who are female. But because she's got to be the virgin who conceives and brings forth a son according to the gospel, it's quite useful that the Holy Spirit is here employed as the helper that brings

the Holy Spirit to her and she then gives birth to a human called Jesus, who is the Christ, because he has been conceived by the Holy Spirit. And this in a way brings the three elements of the Trinity and the role of the Virgin Mary, Theotocos, in the Orthodox tradition, together in a sort of family organization. And that again is something that people found quite reassuring. And it made sense of what they read in the gospel stories. And I think that attracted them very much. I'd like to come back to the Ariens here. Talking with you, Judith, we have a third.

Theodoric. He marched into Italy in the fifth century, an Aryan is still powerful. I'm trying to keep some hold on. The political effect these religious movements had, were there discussions to the side, or did they employ a central and defining place in the way the empire behaved, change? How did Theoderic make a difference? Theodoric is a very curious figure because he'd been sent as a young boy as a hostage to the of Constantinople. And he'd spent a decade of his life being the sort of prisoner who was going to be held for the good behaviour of his father. And in that experience, he witnessed the Goths in Constantinople, who were very powerful militarily, but were excluded from the churches and had to go

outside the city to their own churches where they celebrated according to the Aryan right. Theodoric remained very devoted and linked, very essentially linked to this Gothic identity as an Aryan Christian as opposed to the other Christians. And he led his people after some negotiations which he assumed gave him the right to lead them through the Balkans across the Hungarian plain over the Julian Alps into Italy, where he conquered Ravenna and set himself up as the king. under the authority of the emperor in Constantinople, but as a Gothic king in a very much larger area, populated very entirely, almost entirely, by those who were Catholic Christians, who were not Aryan Christians.

And so he brought with him a very strong identity, both ethnically as a goth and religiously as an Aryan Christian. And this double minority status meant that he had to be very careful in his dealings, for example, with the Bishop of Rome, who was a very firmly orthodox, i.e. Catholic and follower of the Council of Nicaea and all the official Christianity of the East. And therefore the Goths, when they arrived, brought with them their own priests who had looked after their soldiers on the way. and Theodric then built churches for them in Ravenna, which are some of the very few that have survived, which is how we know a little bit more about Aryan veneration in the early 6th century. Robin Willan, what about the Vandals?

They'd moved into North Africa earlier. How did they were their erinism and how, again, how did it affect the power play among the religious sects? What the Vandal Kings, Geyseric and Hunnerick in particular, but also to extent their successes, seem to seek to do, is effectively to make their form of Christianity the orthodoxy of their kingdom in North Africa. They look back to one of the councils that I mentioned in the middle decades of the 4th century, that under Consantius II at Rimini and Saluquia and say, well, that formula that was propounded then, is the correct one, the Nicene Creed that the pre-existing churches in North Africa adhere to is heresy. And what they then seek to do is basically to apply the sorts of methods that late Roman emperors had used against heresies, including against Arianism, to the Homoosian heretics, the Nicenes, by exiling bishops,

by on occasion seeking to convert sometimes forcibly the 19 Romano-African population. And that's one way in which you can see that this is not simply a question, or doesn't really even seem to be a question of ethnic identity here, is that these Vandal kings want all their subjects, Vandal and Romano-African to agree with their form of orthodoxy. So it's kind of an interesting experiment in what, happens if what seemed to be a really settled question from the end of the fourth century, that actually know orthodoxy is the Nicene Creed, these other options there, they are in

heresy. What happens if the people in power are convinced that the opposite is true and are willing to use the coercive mechanisms of the state to try to bring this about? Can I come back to you, Martin, for a second? The idea of heresy grew at this time as well. What was important about it? And was that, again, I'm getting back to the connection between these divisions and the deeper unrest and power? The issue around heresy, it's the old thing. A family feud is often far more vicious, far more horrible, than a feud with other people, because you're so close that any betrayal of that closeness is essentially a betrayal of you and of your family relationships, if you like.

Within the issue of heresy, it was, the issue was this, why had Christ not returned? Why had the second coming not happened? He said that some of the people he was speaking to would still be here when he came back. He hadn't come back. And there was this great desire for the return of Christ,

for the breaking out of universal peace and so forth. And this was linked also to the question of, well, if this isn't true, does it mean I don't get to heaven? Because that was one of the very powerful attractions of the Christian message. You have the whole notion that this is what is going to take you, carry you beyond this world, into the next world. And Justin Marta, for example, in the second century, says, you know, this is it.

This is our promise. We can open the gates of heaven for you. So there was this real risk that if you were with the wrong gang, if you were with the wrong tradition, you would not. get to heaven and moreover, these wrong groups were stopping the return of Christ. So it's a huge issue. And given the links that were then emerging between the church and the state, and very often the state was an abysmal disappointment to the church because it did not achieve the kind of morality and virtues that it was supposed to have equally. The state felt that about the church.

you had this real struggle for absolute power. If I am true and I am in touch with the truth, I can therefore have the right to be in charge. When you say huge issues, is the emperor, are people changing their policies because of this? Is this having an effect on the way the state operates in terms of its laws and decisions? Well, exactly, as Robin just mentioned, vis-à-vis North Africa.

The Roman state had developed or the Christian Roman state, the Byzantium and others, had created a very, very sophisticated method of dealing with heretics. And it also inspired horrendous riots. I mean, when Arias was supposed to be coming back to Alexandria and the emperor had said you could take him back, the great founder of monasticism, St. Anthony, aged about 83, comes into Alexandria with a gang of monks. They riot. They burn things down. They destroy churches. They attack people. So yes, in terms of civil disobedience, if there is no one truth and all truths are in a sense in competition, then where does truth lie in order that you can establish order? So although it doesn't happen a lot, when it does happen,

when you do get the riots, when you do get the heretical groups saying, no, we're not heretical, we actually have as much right to exist as you. It threatens civil order. Judith, you've talked about Theodric in Ravenna. It seems like a utopia of tolerance compared to what Martin's been saying. Not necessarily. It was a very, very large part of the Western Roman Empire that he controlled. And therefore, his Gothic Aryan priests were in charge of a very small population and had to keep on good relations with everyone else. I think the key feature for Theodryx's toleration is his much fairer treatment of the Jews, which had often been persecuted and were to be persecuted by the Visigoths, particularly in 6th and 7th century Spain.

But Theodric's principle was, they write to say, please can we rebuild our synagogue because we've lost the roof or it blew off or something. And he says, yes, you may rebuild your synagogue to the same size. No bigger. I agree that you may carry on with your faith, although I don't prove of it at all, but I cannot impose my own faith on you. Every man must follow his own faith. And that principle was the one that was so frequently cited in the Reformation, because it seemed to allow that there were different definitions and that people should worship in their own way and respect other people. I think it's a very interesting notion that in Ravenna, Theodric built new churches, partly because of course he wanted to compete with the already beautiful churches that have been put up by the Catholics, by the non-Arians. But in addition, he wanted to provide for his people the most splendid places where they could worship.

And we do have this extraordinary example in the Church of Santa Polinari Nouveau, which was his palace chapel, huge, enormous basilica, very beautifully decorated in mosaic. And in the baptistery attached to his cathedral, which, again, follows very much the traditional pattern of baptistery decoration, but is a little bit specific to Aryan, well, it was just for Ariens. And so there were two communities in Ravenna. And the big difference there, between Ravenna and Africa, for example, is that the vandals actually took over a lot of Catholic churches and converted them into Aryan use.

And this control over property and wealth and resources was one of the competitive things which made the situation in Africa so tense because, of course, very major churches which had their own resources in form of estates and taxes and wealth that was given to them. Those were resources which were taken away from the Catholics and given to the Aryans.

Robin, thank you very much. Robin, why and when did Aaronism decline? In the first place, it's after the Council of Constantolople in 381 were a first phase of anyone considered Aryan increasingly being ejected from Episcopal sees and excluded from the mainstream church. obviously with these barbarian groups coming into the empire and establishing their own churches either in parallel or kind of taking it over in the 5th and 6th centuries, they've re-established themselves in a more significant way. And it's then in the mid to late 6th century through a series of either military conquests or conversions of rulers that these churches lose their political backers. In Vandal Africa and Austro-Gothic Italy, it's the reconquest under Justinian, which means that old anti-Aryan laws are reapplied and that the property that Judith's already mentioned of these churches is confiscated, and it becomes a much more difficult proposition to remain part of these communities.

In Burgundian Gaul, we get the conversion of the King Sigismund, and then shortly after the kingdom is in any case taken over by the Franks. whereas in Visigothic Spain, you actually see the kind of ceremonial conversion of the Goths under their King Recorred at the Council of Toledo in 589, something which results in a series of revolts against his rule, but which kind of holds, and again means that being a kind of non-Nic Christian in this way starts being a problem. So you can really see how, at the very least, we stop being able to see these communities. persisting in the kind of textual material record, whether or not they totally cease to exist, they're not sufficiently present that we continue to see them in kind of surviving sources beyond the end of the 6th century in those areas. Martin, how did areas come to be presented in late years, say after the 6th century? As the quintessential bogeyman, he is, he becomes, and Robbins already refers to

to this, he becomes the sort of the archetype of rebellion against God, of pollution, of the true church, of a dangerous pit of wickedness. He really becomes the image of everything that is wrong about heretics. And in a sense, as Judith pointed out, it bears very little resemblance to the actual man himself, who was this rather wonderful charismatic poet, songwriter, somebody, who could be poetic about the imminent when others were trying to be philosophical about the infinite and was therefore actually someone people liked to be with.

So he becomes this, not quite a satanic figure, but it gets quite close to that. And he's also, right up, I mean, Hilaire Belloc writes a book in the last century called The Great Heresies, and he opens with Arias, and he actually claims that if Arias' is description or vision or understanding of the subordinate nature of Christ, and therefore the

subordinate nature of the human, had triumphed instead of orthodoxy, it would have led to social disintegration. And within orthodoxy, the great icon of the Nicene Council is, and of course in orthodoxy, you do not look at icons, icons look at you. So the perspective is from the icon. And the icon of the Council of Nicaea shows this horseshoe shape council table around which are gathered all the great and the good presided over by Constantine. And in a sense what it says to you is, are you Orthodox? Are you, Arias? Are you being judged? So it's very much, Arias becomes this warning of what happens when you deviate. You become the bogey man. You lose heaven. I'd just like to point out one very nice element of Arias' fate. Oh, yes.

After a very checkered life of being exiled and being recalled and being supported and then being condemned, he was in Constantinople in 336 and he was being supported by Constantine the Great, the great emperor who died one year later. But Arias was ill or he was perhaps made ill, poisoned perhaps. and he was caught in the forum of Constantine and had to go into the public latrines where he died. And of course his enemies said, there you are, there you see, that is God's judgment on him.

He was a real heretic. And about 150 years later, Theodosius II set up statues of the heretics, Arias and three of his consorts, and these were statues put up in the forum so that people could go and spit at them. And I think that shows that the notion that Arias had released some terrible heresy that was spreading and, you know, multiplying and had all these went on living through the years, that it had to be put, it had to be visualized in that way. Because I think there were always worries about the Trinity, always worries about the relationship of God to the other holy people. and that was a constant in Christianity

and of course is still problematic for people who think it is they want to worship correctly in order to get to heaven and order to be without sin and therefore there are very very very fundamental things that afflict individuals and need to be resolved which are still with us Robin and wheel and finally what airing ideas have persisted where can we look for them

There's a wonderful finding of a survey of American evangelicals from 2018 a few years ago, the state of theology survey where they asked the evangelical Christian surveyed, whether they agreed with the statement, Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God. And 78% of the respondents agreed strongly or somewhat with this statement, which is one which I think if Athanasius was reading it would look rather a lot. like Aryanism. This is not to accuse those American evangelicals of that heresy. I'm not in the business of being a heresiologist, but it is to show that there's a kind of a fundamental tension,

as Judith has already said, how you might think about the status of Jesus. The way in which Athanasius and subsequent Nicene theologians try to deal with this is by, you know, attributing certain passages to Jesus being human and certain to him being divine, depending on which bit you're looking at. But, you know, there's always the worry if you over-emphasize one or other of these that you might fall into Aryan heresy. And you only have to think about the kind of nativity services that many people attend every year where there's such a stress on Jesus.

as a baby being little weak and helpless, and the degree to which that might jar with a sense of a fully divine Christ, the true God, equal with the father, consubstantial with him. Again, it can be obviously explained just as easily by those who support the Council of Nicaea, which has continued to be the orthodoxy

of the major world churches to this day. but if you're coming at it in a hurries logical way, you might be able to see problems in something as banal and benign as the sorts of hymns that we sing at nativity services. Can I just add another search? There was a survey to follow on, Robin's survey. There was a survey about 20 years ago of Anglican church wardens who were asked a not dissimilar question,

but this was with regards exactly to the nativity and to the crucifixion. And something like 35% of Anglican church wardens thought that the Jesus of the nativity story was a different person from the Christ on the cross. So I think the ambiguities and the complexities of the Trinity will be with us forever. Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Martin Palmer, Judith Heron and Robin Whelan, and to our studio engineer Jackie Marjoram. Next week, it's the Franco-American Alliance of 1778 when the French helped the Americans with their revolution

a favour that wasn't returned. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What you think was an unsaid that should have been said? Oh, I feel very strongly that we didn't make quite clear what Nicaea stands for. And the Nicene Creed coming out of the Council of Nicaea of 325.

We got distracted by other aspects of areas. And he was counseled and he was condemned. And I think Martin mentioned that two bishops were sent into exile, Arias with them. He was only a priest so he couldn't vote, but he was sent off into exile. That was the first. Yeah, that is a good point.

I mean, I see, I mean, it is this issue that essentially it is a political deal forced through fairly vigorously by Constantine, but it does create the, if you like, the fundamental language of the Trinity. And particularly if you compare it with what's called the Athanasian Creed, which is not written by him. Athanasian Creed is this basically an essay on Greek philosophy on how you try and define absolutely everything that you can possibly define about the infinite. Whereas the Nicene Creed does actually capture the core elements of relationship within the Trinity

and relationship of the Trinity to salvation. And although it has, you know, it didn't quash all the issues, it did set out language that on the whole, still broadly works for most people who call themselves Christian, even if they would be slightly amazed to know what it was supposed to be also not saying. But can I ask Judith, because I'm always fascinated by this figure of Ulfellas, however we pronounce him, is it true that he, when translating the Old Testament into Gothic, he dropped, the book of kings, two books of kings, because that was just full of dreadful warfares and

stuff, and his people were quite warlike anyway, and the last thing they needed was a faith that encouraged that, or is that a myth? No, I think it is correct. There isn't a complete Bible in Gothic that we could read to tell us exactly how it was done, but certainly the two books of kings were not translated, and people read them in Latin, or in Greek original, yes, it would have been the Greek of the Septuagint, because the Goths were already very warlike, and they needed to learn the roads of peace, and they did need to be taught about salvation and sinfulness and not being so murderous, perhaps. I love that story. I have to say, I just think that's a wonderful, wonderful story in that sense.

And, I mean, in terms of the impact that he had on the very nature of Gothic tribes, Is there any evidence that the coming of Christianity kind of made them less warlike? Or was that more a phenomenon of being part of the Roman Empire and sort of settling down to having baths and going to schools and trading? I think in the fourth century there was absolutely no way they could stop fighting. If they were fighting the Romans, they were fighting each other. There were several different Gothic tribes and different Germanic groups that were not in total agreement about,

who was going to have that bit of land or who was going to have those, that cattle, those flocks or whatever. They were fighting each other as much as the Romans. But they did press constantly on the frontiers of the Roman Empire because they wanted to occupy more fertile land. They wanted to get into the sunny south of Italy. Who wouldn't, if you'd been stuck north of the Danube for centuries? You'd see what civilization, they knew from visits.

They knew from trading, they knew from embassies, what great cities there were, and they wanted those facilities, baths and all, yes. And also there's a certain degree. I don't think we should be expecting Christianity to make anybody necessarily less warlike in the fourth century, when you're going to remember that Christianity increasingly over time becomes part of the culture of the Roman army and of the kind of victory ideology of the late Roman. and state. Constantine, of course, has the Labarum put on

the shields of his soldiers and increasingly there's a kind of sense that imperial victory is tied to Christianity and so there's no particular reason why

the adoption of Christianity should make anyone any less inclined to military activity, shall we say. Yeah, you see that also with Genghis Khan's horde of which about a quarter to a third were Church of the East, or as the West calls them Nestorian Christians, and they went into battle in their massacres with crosses on their helmets, some of which you can still see in Japan from the force that tried to invade

Japan. But I suppose I was just hoping that there might be some sign that this had had some sort of moderating effect, but I think it goes back to my sense that this was a very good version of a religion that gave a sense of power and hierarchy to those who were in power and light hierarchies. Yes, that's true. But of course, there was the Christian morality and the notion of monogamy and marriage for not having many wives or not having, you know, like Attila the Han polygamous. There was a great, there was a great impact in that respect. And I suppose the Aryan priests who are documented as those who are. accompanied the forces as they marched and went on the campaign with the troops.

Nonetheless, they were there to give sustenance, to inspire, to give sermons and prayers, and then to bury the dead, because it was very important to bury people properly. And as they were Christian, they were hoping very much that they were going to heaven. Yes, that's a very interesting point, that there was that sort of social impact in terms of the end of polygamy. fully appreciated that point before. Well, thank you all very much. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. And if you'd like to hear the In Our Time on the Nicene Creed, you can search for it on BBC Sounds.

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