Critically evaluate the claim that the Council of Nicaea was successful in it’s defeat of Arianism. (20)
The Arian Controversy should have ended at the Council of Nicaea as it had for the moment had driven underground. However the controversy had only served to reveal the deep seated theological division within the church. The new situation in the church’s relationship to the state meant that the success or failure of a doctrine may depend on the support of the reigning emperor, Constantine.

The six decades between the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople in 381, Arianism experienced many victories. There were periods where Arian bishops constituted the majority of the visible ecclesiastical hierarchy. Primarily through the force of political power, Arian sympathisers soon took to undoing the condemnation of Arius and his theology. Eusebius of Nicomedia and others attempted to overturn Nicaea, and for a number of decades it looked as if they might succeed. Constantine adopted a compromising position under the influence of various sources, including Eusebius of Caesarea and a politically worded “confession” from Arius. Constantine put little stock in the definition of Nicaea itself.

During the reign of Constantine the creed of Nicaea was sacrosanct, although the Arian leaders who had been exiled returned and Eusebius of Nicomedia became the leader of the anti-Nicene coalition. Due to Constantine’s view of the creed Eusebuis of Nicomedia policy was to not attack the creed but the personality behind it; The Emperor Constantine. Arius along with two other Bishops Eusebius and Theognis refused to sign the creed of Nicaea and were consequently excommunicated however, soon after their banishment, wrote a declaration that they had changed their opinion, and now agreed in the belief that the Son and the Father are of the same substance. Although fundlemental differences remained since many of those who signed made their own interpretation of the creed as going back to the time of the council, Eusebius Pamphilus, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, spent a while on his own deliberating over whether he could agree with the definition of the faith given in the creed.

By 335 Council of Tyre Eusebuis attacked by sending a letter to Athanasius in order for him to let Arius return although Athanasius believed this to be impossible. Shortly afterwards he received a letter form Constantine stating that Arius himself had now signed the Nicene and should be restored. After the Council of Tyre Constantine wanted to include a reconciliation of all Arians who had come to submit since the council of Nicaea; the Arians assured Constantine of their orthodoxy, and as a result Eusebuis’s triumph would be complete when Arius would be accepted back into the church.

This point would suggest that Arianism was not defeated, Chadwick claims that “During the period Constantine was alive the Nicaea creed remained unquestioned as the criterion of the faith.”

However by AD337 Constantine had been baptised by no other than Eusebuis of Nicomedia, an Arian supporter, just before he died; then shortly after Constantine’s death there was political unrest and his three sons divided the Empire. Once again the Arian Controversy highlighted the unrecognisable division not only in the church but it had developed an imminent spilt between the East and West.
In the short term the vacuum left by the death of Constantine and the splitting of the empire by his three sons allowed the reemergence of Arianism, for a period of 60 years during the reign of Constantine’s son. With the death of Constans in 350 his anti-Arian brother Constantius became the sole ruler of the Empire. The new Emperor demanded that all the bishops of his empire should agree with the homoisos formula. In 359 the summounded two councils one in the East and other in the West. Both councils, under the Emperors threat and with rationalizing arguments aimed at the claim consciences, were induced to the sign the homoios formula. “This Homoean victory was confirmed and imposed on the whole church by the council of Constantinople in the following year’ which condemned the word ‘homoousios’ (Wand) it seemed that the Arian had triumphed over the Nicaea creed.

However this brief reincarnation of Arianism was short lived as the population of this new law died with the Emperor. Having said that, there are still some Arian view points held by Christian denominations in society today. Arianism today is an interpretation of Christianity according to this whole materialistic, humanistic philosophy. Clearly, Jesus Christ as the Divine Son of God and the co-eternal second person of the Holy Trinity doesn’t really fit. Instead Jesus is a good teacher, a wise rabbi, a beautiful example, a martyr for a noble cause. At most he is a human being who is “so fulfilled and self actualized that he has ‘become divine’.”

The council of Nicaea was victorious in the end. It took almost sixty years of bitter battling between the upholders of the council of Nicaea and those against it. The Arian heresy seemed finished when the council so specifically anathematized their teachings one by one.