Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
of Nicaea's architects, Marcellus of Ancyra (d. 374), whose unitarian theology seemed to blur any real distinction between Father and Son.9 The other controversial figure was Athanasius (d. 373), Alexander's successor as bishop of Alexandria.10 Athanasius's opponents accused him of violence and various criminal misdeeds and had him deposed in 335. Athanasius claimed that the real issue was theological: his opponents were, at heart, "Arians" who denied Christ's divinity.11 During two exiles in the West (335–337 at Trier and 339–345 at Rome), he won over much of the Latin-speaking world to his interpretations, both politically and theologically. Early on, Athanasius positioned himself as a stalwart defender of Christ's divinity, but he championed Nicaea's Creed and its language late, only in the 350s (a fact often overlooked and variously interpreted).12 His Orations Against the Arians and later treatises laid the groundwork for the eventual orthodox consensus on Christ's divinity. But that consensus arose slowly.
In the 350s, there evolved various competing theologies that were not "Arian" (despite Athanasius's claims), but were anti-Nicene.13 Some anti Nicene bishops were willing to speak of Christ as "God," but in some lesser, derived sense, and they envisioned an unequal hierarchy within the Godhead. In 359, a pair of large councils held at Rimini and Seleucia sanctioned and promulgated a creed seen as official and universal, insisting in selfconsciously vague terms that Christ was "like" (homoios) the Father. Proponents of this tradition would be labeled by Augustine and his pro-Nicene contemporaries as "Arian." Scholars now regard this label as inaccurate (and as polemical sloganeering) and speak of them instead as "Homoians." Augustine would have bumped into Homoian Christians during his days in Milan since Ambrose's immediate predecessor, Auxentius, had been a leading Latin Homoian.14 Here and there, in sermons and treatises, Augustine denounces "Arians" in passing, but around 419, he got hold of an eloquent Homoian pamphlet. He published it under the title The Arian Sermon, and composed a refutation. Here are a few of its propositions:
9. See Joseph Lienhard, Contra Marcellum: Marcellus of Ancyra and Fourth-Century Theology (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999); Sara Parvis, Marcellus of Ancyra and the Lost Years of the Arian Controversy 325–345, OECS (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
10. See Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius, Early Church Fathers (New York and London: Routledge, 2005); Thomas G. Weinandy, Athanasius: A Theological Introduction (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007).
11. See David M. Gwynn, The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the Construction of the 'Arian Controversy,' Oxford Theological Monographs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
12. See Lewis Ayres, "Athanasius' Initial Defense of the Term Ὁμοούσιος: Rereading the De Decretis," Journal of Early Christian Studies 12 (2004): 337–59.
13. See Michel René Barnes and Daniel H. Williams, eds., Arianism After Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth-Century Trinitarian Conflicts (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993).
14. See Daniel H. Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts, OECS (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).