Arianism: The Great Could-Have-Been of Christendom

Arius, Presbyter of Alexandria in Egypt, created one of the great controversies in Christendom with his heretical movement, which came to be outlawed by the Council of Nicaea and the Imperial Government of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great. The basic premise of Arianism is this: God is the Father, while Jesus was a man, although a great one, and a son of God only in the sense that he was a human being who recognized profoundly the kinship of his soul with that of God the Creator, the fount of all souls; Jesus understood the spiritual affinity within each of us for the energy of good in the world, and having attained that fully in himself, he had become God's spiritual offspring. Jesus for the Arians was the perfect saint and an exemplar to all human beings. He died unjustly on the cross as a mortal man, an enemy of the State of Rome. Arians did not believe the Jewish People carried any moral onus for Jesus' death. Arius and his followers were ejected from the Empire, and they took ship across the Black Sea and landed in the Crimea. There they encountered not only safe havens in towns dominated by Jewish merchants and artisans, but also a tribe called the Goths, who inhabited an unbroken area in what is now the Ukraine and Romania. The Goths were much impressed with Arian Christianity, and they converted wholesale. All outside the northern borders of the Empire, the influence of the Goths continued to grow. The tribe itself had to split in two in order to manage its affairs as a semi-nomadic people. So there were the Ostrogoths ("East Goths") and the Visigoths ("West Goths"), both of them robustly Arian Christian peoples, and many other tribes took their cue and also converted to Arianism through the efforts of Arian clerics, who could freely proselytize and had no social stigma outside the Empire. At one point there were two vast realms of opposed Christian sects: the Trinitarian Christians inhabiting the Empire and the Arian Christians inhabiting what the Romans liked to call, "The Barbaricum". As the political and military strength of Rome began to weaken, the two Gothic groups began to conquer or annex large sections of the Western half of the Empire, including what is today all of Italy, southwestern France and the whole of Spain. Into these regions they brought Arianism, and though Catholics were allowed to exist, Papal Authority was declared null and Catholics had a more difficult time obtaining high office. Under Arian law, Judaism was not an alienated religious community, and indeed, Jews were equal subjects with Christians under Gothic Law, with equal rights and privileges. This happy situation of mutually friendly coexistence lasted for several centuries, wherever Arian monarchies held sway. But gradually, this humane situation came to an end. Tribes who had converted to Catholic Christianity overthrew the Ostrogoths in Italy (i.e., the Catholic Lombards) and the Visigoths in Gaul (i.e., the Catholic Franks). Catholic political power in Western Europe was reasserting itself, and soon there remained only one last enclave of sturdy Arian political strength: Visigothic Spain. In the late sixth century, the Pope began to send emissaries to the Spanish Visigothic Court, pressuring the Visigothic monarchy and its nobility to give up Arianism and become Trinitarians and thereby partake freely of the fruits of becoming a member of Catholic Christendom, which now once again dominated all other parts of the f0rmer Western Empire. At last, in the seventh century the Visigoths began to capitulate, Catholic missionaries flooded in, and Canon Law Courts were set up. Successive kings were then pressured to change the secular laws of their kingdom, and most decidedly to take away all rights and privileges from the Iberian Jewish populations that had so flourished under their protection. Gradually, the kings acceded to these pressures, issuing more and more severe edicts, until the Jews of their kingdom were reduced to serfdom and utter vulnerability before any judicial court. The happy days of Judaeo-Christian coexistence had come to an end, and Christian Spain would evolve into one of the most anti-Semitic realms in all of Christendom.