Arius

Arius gave his name to the greatest doctrinal controversy in Christian history and lost it. Born around 256, probably in Libya, he was a priest of the church of Baucalis in Alexandria, an ascetic and a popular preacher, and by all accounts a persuasive one. His argument was about the Son. If the Father alone is unbegotten and without beginning, and the Son is begotten, then there was a state in which the Son was not — he is the first and greatest of created beings, through whom everything else was made, but not co-eternal and not of the same substance as the Father. The position was not eccentric. It had roots in Origen, it protected monotheism against the charge of worshipping two gods, and it read naturally out of scriptural passages in which the Son is subordinate. His bishop Alexander condemned it around 318 and Arius appealed to sympathetic bishops across the east. The dispute spread through the churches, was argued in the streets, and Arius wrote popular songs to carry his theology to dockworkers. Constantine, who had just reunited the empire, called the Council of Nicaea in 325 to end it. The council adopted homoousios — of one substance with the Father — a term with no scriptural warrant, chosen precisely because Arians could not accept it, and exiled Arius. He was recalled in 335, and died in Constantinople in 336 the night before his formal reinstatement, in a public latrine, which his opponents treated as a judgement. Arianism dominated much of the east for decades and converted the Goths.

• Lived: 256 CE – 336 CE
• Nationality: Libyan
• Roles: religious_leader