By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos and Agiou Vlasiou
With the year 2025 there has dawned a special feature, because we celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of the convening of the First Ecumenical Synod in Nicaea, Bithynia, in 325 AD, which confronted the heresy of Arius and his followers who maintained that Christ is not God, but the first formation of creation. Thus, the 318 God-bearing Fathers compiled the first articles of faith, the so-called “Symbol of Faith”, the well-known “Creed”, which was supplemented and completed by the Second Ecumenical Synod in the year 381 in Constantinople.
For this anniversary of the 1,700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Synod, Theological Conferences have been and will be held, and speeches will be given to present its entire theological work.
On this occasion, I would like to present the basic thoughts of a text by Saint Justin Popovich the New Confessor, which he wrote in 1925, that is, one hundred years ago, when even then they were celebrating the 1,600th anniversary of the convening of the First Ecumenical Synod, and which is still relevant today with the new anniversary of 1700 years.
The article is titled “From the Arianism of Arius to the Modern European Arianism.” In it, we distinguish two important points.
The first refers to the heresy of Arius, which was condemned by the God-bearing Fathers of the First Ecumenical Synod. Saint Justin writes, citing the words of a foreign theologian, Newman, which he accepts, that “Aristotle is the bishop of the Arians.” This is said from the point of view that the Arians arrived at the heresy by using Aristotelian philosophy and not the revelatory theology of the Prophets, the Apostles, and the Fathers.
In this way, as he writes, Arius, while philosophizing, fell into a greater sin than Nero, since Nero killed the Disciples of Christ, while Arius wanted to kill Christ as God. Moreover, Satan “emerging from the god-killer and self-killer Judas, entered Arius, and through no other does he act so completely as through Arius.” No persecution shook the Church “as much as Arianism,” because Arius expelled God from Christ. In reality, Arianism “is an attempt to adopt the methods and means of human philosophy as the methods and means of Christology and Theology.” And he notes disarmingly: “Arianism is resurrected paganism, because it reduces the God-man Christ to the level of a demigod.”
The First Ecumenical Synod reacted to this fact and “did not create anything new, but simply expressed and formulated the ancient faith and teaching of the Church, which was sacredly and venerably preserved in the charismatic life of the Church through the Holy Spirit.”
The second point that Saint Justin the New Confessor emphasizes and concerns our era is that “Arianism has not yet been buried; today it is more fashionable than ever before and has spread more than ever before. It has spread like a soul into the body of contemporary Europe.” This is seen in the “culture of Europe,” because “everything is limited to man alone, and this God-man Christ has been reduced to the limits of man. With the leaven of Arianism, the philosophy of Europe has been leavened, as well as its science and its culture, and in part its religion.”
To support this fact, he cites the various philosophical systems, “European science,” “Protestantism,” “Papism,” intellectuals, who often say that “Christ is a great man, a wise man, the greatest philosopher, but certainly not God.” These constitute an Arianism, and even “modern European relativism follows Arianism.”
His conclusion is that the Orthodox Church celebrates the 1,600th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Synod as “the victory of the catholic faith over the proud individual mind, the victory of the God-man over man.” The Orthodox Church “does not change its faith and the means of its struggle against Arianism. Just as it defeated ancient Arianism, so it defeats all Arianism, including modern Arianism.” It does this “with its apostolic and holy catholic faith, with the God-given weaponry of the Holy Fathers — catholicity.”
This means that the “Orthodox man” “catholicizes himself,” that is, he completes himself with asceticism according Grace and the Mysteries, he transforms the heart with prayer, the mind with humility, the will with the Christ-loving love that drives out self-love, his thoughts when he baptizes them in the clear waters of the eternity and the God-manhood of Christ, his spirit when he immerses it in the depths of the Holy Spirit, his personality when the whole man is incorporated into the holy Body of Christ, when he becomes the co-member of the body of Christ, “when the whole is ecclesiasticized, when the whole is orthodoxicized." He concludes that this is "the only way. There is no other."
Saint Justin the New had studied the education of Europe, in its own space, and knew its entire course, as he writes in another of his texts, from the "natural man of Rousseau" to the "sensualistic philosophy of Locke and Hume," the "rationalist philosophy" of Descartes and Kant, the "volitionism" of Schopenhauer and Stirner, the "superman" of Nietzsche and its end in the very "suicide" of man.
Thus from “the embryo of Rousseau, the humanistic man evolved into the superman” of Nietzsche and from there he reached the existentialism of Sartre and the “de-theologized and de-souled robot-man”, which robot “does not recognize God and the soul.” Thus Europe was transformed “into a robot workshop” which constitutes the suicide of man, “and the suicide (of man) is the inevitable consequence of theocide.”
The voice of Saint Justin on the 1,600th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Synod, which was celebrated in his time, 100 years ago, in the year 1925, is also prophetic for the 1,700th anniversary of the convening of this Great Synod, which we are celebrating this year, in the year 2025.
Today, too, we need such prophetic voices, because rationalism prevails everywhere in faith, syncretism in theology, the debasement of mystery, atheistic humanism, the descent of the God-man Christ to the lowest human standards, the deification of the passions, the disregard of the ascetic method of knowing God, the alteration of the theology of the Church as revealed by God to the Prophets, Apostles, Fathers and Saints and preserved as a priceless treasure within the Orthodox Church.
Precisely for this reason we must remain faithful to the decisions of the First Ecumenical Synod and the subsequent Ecumenical Synods and with it to judge the contemporary diverse movements of theology and philosophy.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
