the cross was at the center of the theological roundtable; today that focus is reversed, due in no small part to the Reformation’s hoisting of Paul’s epistles, which point almost exclusively to Christ’s death rather than his birth, up the masthead. By the time of the Reformation, the “problem” of Christ’s dual nature was long since taken as solved. We cannot appreciate Arius in context today without sloughing off sixteen centuries of rather thick bark, and that is not easy to do.
It is even harder to put aside modern notions of “equality” and “identity,” concepts that today have a mathematical tinge (if F = G and S = G, then S = F), and adopt third-century Greek understandings of these concepts in order to see how Father and Son might both be thought of as God, and yet as distinct, without doing violence to the tenet that God is One. Some appreciation of this “higher” math is needed in order to set the Arian stage, and that takes a bit of effort for the modern mind—and not just the modern mind; many pre-Arian heresies, such as Adoptionism (which emphasized the Son’s distinction from the Father) and Sabellianism (which emphasized their identicalness), arose because their adherents couldn’t quite do the math here either. As the Latin apologist Tertullian bemoaned well over a century before Nicaea, “The simple, indeed (I will not call them unwise and unlearned) who always constitute the majority of believers, are startled at the dispensation (of the Three in One) . . . They are constantly throwing out against us that we are preachers of two gods and three gods.”
This is hardly an unnatural reaction to Trinitarian teaching even for the wise and learned. Thinking of two beings as distinct, and yet as sharing the same substance or essence, the same ousia, presents no difficulty unless that substance or essence or ousia is itself the unique and absolute self-subsistence of the Mosaic “I AM”—for by definition only one being can have that as its essence. At least today we would see this as a definitional problem; then, it was viewed as a relational one. Efforts in Arius’s time to solve the dilemma—and the first three centuries of the Christian era were marked by an astonishing array of such efforts—are best understood from this perspective.
I found my own thinking on all of this easier to explain in the form of a novel. Perhaps that was inevitable given that I am not a theologian. But I do think that when writing a novel on a theological subject, a lack of theological training is no disqualifier. Henry James, in his essay The Art of Fiction, attributes to the novelist the ability “to guess the unseen from the seen.” James was not describing the essence of religious or theological study, but he may as well have been; for what other field of study is more engaged in precisely such a pursuit?
Moreover, because they are by nature indirect explications, stories have a capacity to stir the imagination that is not found in academic treatises. From earliest times stories have been the primary tools for conveying theological concepts, as was perhaps required by the subject matter, for which direct experience and thus direct language was lacking. This imaginative stirring has inevitably fostered greater understanding of the subject. The divine “story” was and is a collaborative one, told amongst ourselves again and again, augmented in imaginative ways. The use of story still serves that function.
This particular story would have been impossible without the encouragement of my wife, Linda. She does have theological training (a masters degree in divinity from Harvard), and if, at times, she has vaguely suspected that this book might have been an attempt to upstage her, I am confident that her suspicions are dispelled by the final product; such an attempt was clearly too feeble ever to be workable. I knew that all along. I dedicate this book to her.
Acknowledgments
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Quotations from the Epistle of Barnabas, the Second Epistle of Clement, the writings of Ignatius, Theophilus, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Dionysius of Alexandria, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Origen; the various letters of Alexander, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Constantine; the Edict of Milan; the Creed of Eusebius of Caesarea and his letter to his diocese after Nicaea are from Ante-Nicene Fathers (Roberts and Donaldson, eds.,1886), and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II (Schaff, et al., eds., 1890). Arius’s letters to Alexander and to Eusebius of Nicomedia are taken from Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church, vol. II (Kidd, ed., 1923). Quotations from Philo are from Yonge, The Works of Philo Judaeus (1855), and those from Plotinus are from MacKenna and Page, Plotinus: The Enneads (rev. ed. 1930). Constantine’s speech at Nicaea is taken from Schaff, History of the Christian Church (1884). The Nicene Creed itself is from R.P.C. Hanson’s The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (1988), used by permission. Quotation from The Didache is from Anthony Jones’ The Teaching of the Twelve (2009), used by permission. The creed of the Synod of Antioch is from Rowan Williams’ Arius: Heresy and Tradition (rev. ed. 2001), used by permission.
I owe a further debt to Rowan Williams for recommending Tim Vivian, Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at California State University Bakersfield, as a reviewer of the book. His helpful comments greatly improved it. Thanks are due as well to Joe Reidy, Adjunct Professor of History at Saint Louis University, for troubleshooting the novel’s historical plausibility. Rarely did I ignore their suggestions, and always at my peril.
Chapter 1
She always arrives just before dusk, perching on the same branch, watching, waiting. Compared to other Pharaoh eagle-owls I have seen, she is on the smallish side, but with those piercing yellow-orange eyes that take everything in, missing nothing—including me. We have an understanding, she and I. It is simply this: we are to keep our respectful distance.
Several times have I seen her take flight, soaring with a grace that belies her deadly purpose. When she hunts for rodents in the failing light, she is awesome to watch: a silent, devastating dive toward her prey, seizing it with talons far too strong to permit any consideration of escape (as if her victim could consider anything at all in the shock of the moment), snatching it from the ground and up ever higher into the terrifying sky with the fearsome beating of her powerful wings.
But I do not come here to watch a hunter.
I come to pray. Here on the outskirts of Alexandria, on the western shore of Lake Mareotis, its cool waters fed by canals from the Nile, I pray aloud. I pray that God hears me. But what does he hear? Is it my words only, or the thoughts of my heart that words can but poorly express? Does he see in my heart a genuine desire to be submissive to his will, or only a conditional one, tempered by human frailty and restricted to that which is not too difficult, not too inconvenient? I know which. God sees all. More than this owl sees.
How hard it is to pray sincerely sometimes! All too often I find my words encumbered by other thoughts. Even when those words are divinely scripted, even as I pray as the Lord taught us to pray, I find that I cannot slow my mind from distractions. I pray aloud, “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven,” but I think to myself, is God’s will not always done? Scripture reports that Job said to God, “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.” Doesn’t that make it pointless to pray that God’s will be done? Who can resist it? Yet I know that the Lord would never institute an irrelevancy. He wants us to desire the same things as God. He asks us to conform our wills to God’s. And stilling the mind is always the first step toward discerning God’s will.
I am young, and unskilled in the art of meditation. The cares of my world intrude, and weigh heavily on my shoulders—my studies at the Catechetical School, my secretarial service to the Bishop, my writing, my duties as a new deacon. Somehow I must find a way to cast them all aside for a moment. Here, now, sitting under this tree, I must put them out of mind and trust that God will call out to me. I know that he sees me sitting here. The way Jesus saw Nathanael sitting under the fig tree before Philip called out to him to
