ARIANO
no
ARIANO
was quoted by Innocent I in his correspondence
with the bishops of Africa.
Having won over Constans, who warmly took up his cause, the invincible Athanasius received from his Oriental and Serai-Arian sovereign three letters commanding, and at length entreating his return to Alexandria (349). The factious bishops, Ursacius and Valens, retracted their charges against him in the hands of Pope Julius; and as he travelled home, by way of Thrace, Asia Minor, and Syria, the crowd of court-prelates did him abject homage. These men veered with every wind. Some, like Eusebius of Caesarea, held a Platonizing doctrine which they would not give up, though they declined the Arian blasphemies. But many were time-servers, indiffer- ent to dogma. And a new party had arisen, the strict or pious Homoiousians, not friends of Athana- sius, nor willing to subscribe the Nicene terms, yet slowly drawing nearer to the true creed and finally accepting it. In the councils which now follow these good men play their part. However, when Constans died (.350), and his Semi-Arian brother was left svipreme, the persecution of Athanasius re- doubled in violence. By a series of intrigues the Western bishops were persuaded to cast him off at Aries, Milan, Ariniinum. It was concerning this last council (359) that St. Jerome w-rote, "the whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian ". For the Latin bishops were driven by threats and chicanery to sign concessions which at no time represented their genuine views. Councils were so frequent that their dates are still matter of con- troversy. Personal issues disguised the dogmatic importance of a struggle which had gone on for thirty years. The Pope of the day, Liberius, brave at first, undoubtedly orthodo.x, but torn from his see and banished to the dreary solitude of Thrace, signed a creed, in tone Semi-Arian (compiled chiefly from one of Sirmium), renounced Athanasius, but made a stand against the .so-called "Homoean" formula; of Ariminum. This new party was led by Acacius of Cssarea, an aspiring churchman who maintained that he, and not St. C^Til of Jerusalem, was metropolitan over Palestine. The Homoeans, a sort of Protestants, would have no terms employed which were not found in Scripture, and thus evaded signing the "Consubstantial ". A more extreme set, the "Anomceans ", followed Aetius, were directed by Eunomius. held meetings at Antioch and Sirmium, declared the Son to be "unlike" the Father, and made tliemselves powerful in the last years of Con- stantius within the palace. George of Cappadocia persecuted the Alexandrian Catholics. Athanasius retired into the desert among the solitaries. Hosius had been compelled by torture to subscribe a fashion- able creed. When the vacillating Emperor died (361), Julian, known as the Apostate, suffered all alike to return home who had been exiled on account of religion. A momentous gathering, over which Athan- asius presided, in 362, at Alexandria, united the orthodox Semi-Arians with himself and the West. Four years afterwards fifty-nine Macedonian, i. c. hitherto anti-Nicene, prelates gave in their submis- sion to Pope Liberius. But the Emperor Valens, a fierce heretic, still laid the Church waste.
However, the long battle was now turning de- cidedly in favour of Catholic tradition. Western bishops, like Hilary of Poitiers and Eusebius of Ver- cellx' banislied to Asia for holding the Nicene faith, were acting in unison with St. Basil, the two St. Gre- gories, and the reconciled Semi-Arians. As an intel- lectual movement the heresy hud spent its force. Theodosiiis, a Spaniard and a Catholic, governed the whole Empire. Athanasius died in 373; but his cause triumphed at Constantinople, long an Arian city, first by the preaching of St. Gregory Nazianzen, then in the Second General Council (381), at the opening of
which Meletius of Antioch presided. This saintly man
had been estranged from the Nicene champions during
a long schism; but he made peace with Athanasius,
and now, in company of St. Cyril of Jerusalem,
represented a moderate influence which won the
day. No deputies appeared from the West. Me-
letius died almost immediately. St. Gregory Na-
zianzen (q. v.), who took his place, verj' soon resigned.
A creed embodying the Nicene was drawn up by
St. Gregory of Nyssa, but it- is not the one that
is chanted at Mass, the latter lieing due, it is said,
to St. Epiphanius and the Church of Jerusalem.
The Council became oecumenical by acceptance of
the Pof)e and the ever-orthodox Westerns. From
this moment Arianism in all its forms lost its place
within the Empire. Its developments among the
barbarians were political rather than doctrinal.
I'lphilas (311-388), who traaslated the Scriptures
into Ma?so-Gothic, taught the Goths across the
Danube an Homoean theology; Arian kingdoms
arose in Spain, Africa. Italy. The Gepidae, Heruh,
Vandals, Alans, and Lombards received a system
which they were as little capable of understanding
as they were of defending, and the Catiiolic bishops,
the monks, the sword of Clovis, the action of the
Papacy, made an end of it before the eighth century.
In the form which it took under Arius, Eusebius
of Caesarea, and Eunomius, it has never been revived.
Individuals, among whom are Milton and Sir Isaac
Newton, were perhaps tainted with it. But the
Socinian tendency out of which L^nitarian doctrines
have grown owes nothing to the school of Antioch
or the councils which opposed Nicaea. Neither has
any Arian leader stood forth in history with a char-
acter of heroic proportions. In the whole story there
is but a single hero — the undaunted Athanasius —
whose mind was equal to the problems, as his great
spirit to the vicissitudes, of a question on which the
future of Christianity depended.
Eusebius, Life of Constantine; the Church historians, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret; Philostorgius, Frag- ments; Epiphanius, Heresiea; Athanasius, Polemical Tracts; Basil, Against Eunomius, and On the Holy Spirit; Gheoory Nazianzen, Orations; Gregory Nyssen, Twelve Books against Eunomius, and On the Trinity {all the preceding are in Greek); Hilary Pictav., On Faith; Against Arians; On Hynods (Lat.); Mansi, Councils (Lat.); Ammianus Marcellinus, History (Lat.): Petavius, On the Trinity (Lat.); Bull (.\nglican bishop), Defensio Fidei Nieenoe (Lat, and tr. 16S5); Gibbo.n, Decline and Fall, xxi. xxii, xxvii; Mohler, Athanasius (Mainz, 1844); Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century; Select Treatises of St. Athanasius; Tracts Theological and Ecclesiastical; De Regnon, Etudes . . . sur .'a Sainte Trinite (Paris, 1898); GWATKIN, Studies on Arianism (London, 1900); Harnack, History of Dogma, II (tr.); Alzog, Hist, of the Church (tr.). WiLLi.\M Barry.
Ariano, The Diocese op, is in the Archdiocese of Beneventum, comprising seven towns in the prov- ince of Avellino, four in that of Beneventum, and one in the province of Foggia. Ariano, a very ancient town of the Hirpini, is built on the hills, fifteen miles from Beneventum. Its name is of pagan origin: Ora Jani. There are no docimients that fix the time of its conversion to Christianity. Beneventum, at the beginning of the fourtli century, had a bishop, and the Gospel may have leached Ariano from that city. The Bishop of Beneventum wiis one of the nineteen prelates who were present at the Synod of Rome, held in the year 313. (See Routt, Rehquiie Sacra;, III, 312, and Harnack, Die Mission, etc., 501.) Ariano was an episcopal city from the tenth century and perhaps before that time. We find it firet mentionen in the Bull of Pope John XIII (905-972) to establish the Archdiocese of Beneventum; it is named as a suf- fragan see. The first bishop known to have occupied this see was Menardus, a native, not of Padua, as Ughelli believed, but of Poitiers, which Vitale has shown. In 1070, he erected in his cathedral a marble baptistery on the walls of which verses were inscribed.
