What Arius Taught in His Thalia

Now the opening of Arius’s Thalia, that flippant piece, effeminate in its tune and in its character, runs like this: [a]

And the mockeries he utters in it, repulsive and utterly ungodly, are like these: “God was not always a Father,” but “once God was alone, and not yet a Father; afterwards he became a Father.” “The Son was not always.” For since all things were made out of nothing, and all existing creatures and works were made, so the Word of God himself was “made out of nothing,” and “once he was not,” and “he did not exist before he came into being,” but he, like the others, “had a beginning of creation.” “For God,” he says, “was alone, and the Word did not yet exist, nor the Wisdom. Then, wishing to form us, he made a certain one and named him Word and Wisdom and Son, so that he might form us by means of him.” Accordingly, he says that there are two wisdoms: first, the wisdom that is God’s own attribute and exists along with him; and next, the Son, who was brought into being in this wisdom and is only named Wisdom and Word because he shares in it. “For Wisdom,” he says, “by the will of the wise God, had its existence in Wisdom.” In the same way he says that there is another Word in God besides the Son, and that the Son, again, because he shares in it, is named Word and Son by grace. And this too is an idea peculiar to their heresy, as other writings of theirs show: that there are many powers. One of these is God’s own by nature and is eternal. But Christ, on the other hand, is not the true power of God. Like the others, he is one of the so-called powers, one of which, the locust and the caterpillar, is called in Scripture not merely “the power” but “the great power.” The others are many and are like the Son, and David speaks of them in the Psalms when he says, “The Lord of hosts,” or “of powers.” And by nature the Word himself, like all others, is changeable. He remains good by his own free will, as long as he chooses; but when he wishes, he can change as we can, since his nature is changeable. “For that is why,” he says, “God, foreknowing that he would be good, gave him in advance this glory, which he afterwards attained as man by his virtue. So because of his works, which God foreknew, God brought it about that he, being such, should come into being.”

Moreover he has dared to say that “the Word is not the true God.” “Though he is called God, he is not true God,” but “by sharing in grace, he, like the others, is God in name only.” And since all beings are foreign to God and different from him in substance, so too “the Word is alien and unlike in all things to the Father’s substance and proper nature,” but belongs to the things brought into being and created, and is one of them. Afterwards, as though he had inherited the devil’s recklessness, he has stated in his Thalia that “even to the Son the Father is invisible,” and that “the Word cannot perfectly and exactly either see or know his own Father.” Even what he knows and what he sees, he knows and sees “in proportion to his own measure,” as we too know according to our own capacity. For the Son, he says, not only does not know the Father exactly, since he falls short in comprehension, but “he does not even know his own substance.” He says that “the substances of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are separate in nature, estranged, disconnected, alien, and without any share in one another,” and, in his own words, that they are “utterly unlike one another in substance and glory, without end.” So as to “likeness of glory and substance,” he says that the Word is entirely different from both the Father and the Holy Spirit. Such are the words the ungodly man has spoken, holding that the Son is distinct by himself and in no way shares in the Father. These are portions of Arius’s fables as they appear in that comic composition. [c]

Who, hearing all this, and the tune of the Thalia besides, must not hate this Arius, and rightly hate him, for making a joke of such things as if on a stage? Who must not regard him, when he pretends to name God and speak of God, as the serpent giving counsel to the woman? Who, reading what follows in his work, must not see in his ungodly teaching the error into which the serpent, by his trickery, afterwards led the woman astray? Who is not beside himself at such blasphemies? “The heaven,” as the prophet says, “was astonished, and the earth shuddered” at the breaking of the law. But the sun, with greater horror, could not bear the insults to his body which the common Lord of all willingly endured for us. It turned away and, drawing back its rays, made that day sunless. And will not the whole human race be struck speechless at Arius’s blasphemies, and stop their ears and shut their eyes, so as not to hear them or see their author? Rather, will not the Lord himself have reason to denounce men so ungodly, indeed so ungrateful, in the words he has already spoken through the prophet Hosea: “Woe to them, for they have fled from me; destruction upon them, for they have transgressed against me. Though I redeemed them, they have spoken lies against me.” And soon after: “They plot evil against me; they turn away to nothing.” For to turn away from the Word of God, who is, and to fashion for themselves one who is not, is to fall into what is nothing. This is why the Ecumenical Council, when Arius spoke this way, cast him out of the church and anathematized him, refusing to tolerate such ungodliness. And ever since, Arius’s error has been counted a heresy beyond the ordinary, known as Christ’s enemy and the forerunner of Antichrist. So great a condemnation is in itself especially weighty in making people flee from that ungodly heresy, as I said above. Yet certain people who are called Christians, either through ignorance or pretense, think it differs little from the truth, as I said then, and call those who profess it Christians. So let us go on to put some questions to them, as far as we are able, and in this way expose the unscrupulousness of the heresy. Perhaps, when they are caught like this, they will be silenced and will flee from it as from the sight of a serpent. [d]