Contemporary Arianism
By St. Justin Popovich
By St. Justin Popovich
Arianism has not yet found its grave; today it is more contemporary and more widespread than ever. Like a soul, it is diffused throughout the body of today’s Europe. Scrape away its culture — and at its bottom Arianism lies hidden: for everything has been reduced to man — everything, including the God-man Christ. On the leaven of Arianism, Europe’s philosophy has risen and been permeated, as have its science, its civilization, and partly even its religion. Everywhere and systematically the Lord Jesus Christ is reduced to a man. The God-man is constantly disincarnated, the work of Arius being ceaselessly carried on. Kant’s “Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason” is nothing other than a new edition of Arianism. Apply Kant’s measure to Christ — what do you think will result? You will get Christ-the-man, Christ-the-sage, but never Christ-the-God-man. Apply Bergson’s criterion to the Lord Christ, and you will scarcely obtain anything more than an ordinary man. Thus both the first criterion and the second, and indeed all the criteria of all philosophies, reduce the God-man Christ to a man. European science does not lag behind philosophy in its Arian attitude toward Christ. In many of its champions Protestantism has surpassed Arius himself in Arianism. Various kinds of Socinians and Schleiermachers are powerful rivals of Arius in disincarnating the incarnate God. Papism owes much of its ethics to Arius; does it perceive the metaphysics underlying this terrible ethic? All this together has managed to infect broad European masses with Arianism. Who does not know the vulgar Arianism of our intelligentsia; to whom have many of our intellectuals not declared with full seriousness: Christ is a great man, a wise man, the greatest philosopher, but by no means God.
Whence comes so much Arianism today? From the fact that man has become the measure of all things, of all beings visible and invisible. Measuring everything by himself, man, in the European manner, boldly rejects and discards everything broader, higher, and more infinite than man. A narrow measure narrows the God-man to a man. The hoop of sin tightens around the proud human mind, so that it sees and acknowledges no reality greater than itself. The supra-rational feat of faith in the God-man Christ breaks this hoop and opens the mind to infinite realities. The First Ecumenical Synod once and for all defined the role of reason in explaining the Person of the God-man Christ: its role is one of obedience. In Christianity faith leads, reason is led; knowledge is the fruit of faith working through love in hope.
Modern European relativism stands entirely under the aegis of Arianism. Metaphysical relativism has given birth to ethical relativism. There is nothing absolute either above the world, or above man, or in the world, or in man, or around the world, or around man. But from this modern relativism, as from the ancient Arian relativism, only faith in the God-manhood of the Lord Jesus Christ saves — faith in His consubstantiality with God the Father; it is the miracle-working Word that saves.
Test your faith, examine it; the criterion is one alone: the Symbol of Faith (the Creed). If your faith in any respect does not conform to the Creed, then you are a heretic. If you reject it, then you are not of Christ, you are of Antichrist, you are of Judas; for the Church calls Arius “the second Judas.”
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
