Theological Treatises on the Trinity

Letter of Candidus to Victorinus

LETTER OF CANDIDUS THE ARIAN TO MARIUS VICTORINUS THE RHETOR PREFACE OF CANDIDUS TO VICTORINUS1 LTHOUGH, MY DEAR FRIEND, VICTORINUS, you marshal many arguments and illustrations by which you try to prove that Christ was born, not made, yet Arius, a man of keen intelligence, as well as his disciples, and Eusebius excelling the most eminent of these, have expressed in ther letters2 opinions concerning this matter. We now subjoin those letters. Letter ofArius to Eusebius To you, most loving master, man of God, faithful, right-thinking, Arius, who is unjustly suffering persecution from Bishop Alexander on account of the all-conquering truth for which you also struggle, sends greetings in the Lord. At the moment my father Ammonius was journeying to Nicomedia , it seemed quite fitting to send you through him greetings and at the same time to remind you of the innate love and affection which you have toward the brethren, for the sake of God and his For the most part, this treatise is made up of Arius's Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia (d. 341/42) and Eusebius's Letter to Bishop Paulinus of Tyre (d. 358); for the two letters see J. Quasten, Patro!ogy, 3 vols. (Utrecht/ Antwerp 1950-60) 3.10 and 191 respectively. Paulinus strongly opposed Arianism and died in Phrygia, where he was exiled after the Synod of Aries in 353. Although Eusebius signed the Nicene Creed in 325, he was the leader of the Arian party in the first half of the fourth century. He was a fellow student with Arius in Lucian's theological school at Antioch. Lucian had succeeded Paul of Samosata, whose Adoptianism denied the divinity of Christ, a position which survived in the teaching of Arius. Quasten makes the point that Arianism therefore arose at Antioch and not at Alexandria, where it was first taught; cf. Quasten, Patro!ogy, 2.143. 2 Both reason and authority must enter into theological thinking. 85 86 MARIUS VICTORINUS Christ. For this bishop is haughtily banishing and persecuting us and working all kinds of evil against us, in order to chase us from the city as though we were atheists, because we do not agree with him publicly affirming: "the unbegotten-begotten is always God, always Son; together Father, together Son; uncreated, the Son is consubstantial with the Father; he is always begotten; he is the unbegotten -begotten; neither for thought nor for one sole instant does God precede the Son. Always is God; always is Son; the Son is from God himself." And since Eusebius, your brother, who is at Caesarea, as well as Theodotus, Paulinus, Athanasius, Gregory, Aetius and all who are from the East say that God, without principle, preexists the Son, they were made anathema except for Philogonius and Hellanicus and Macarius, about whom the anathema was silent-heretical men who call the Son, some an exhalation, others a projection, others a counbegotten . And we cannot listen to these sacrileges even if the heretics threaten us with ten thousand deaths! But as for us, what do we say, what do we think, what has been, and what is our teaching? The Son is neither unbegotten nor part of the unbegotten in any way at all, nor drawn from a subject, but he subsists by will and thought, before time and the eons, fully God, only begotten and unchangeable. And before he was "begotten" or "created" or defined or "established," he was not. For he was not unbegotten. We are persecuted because we have said: the Son has a beginning, but God is without beginning. On account of that we are persecuted and also because we said that he is from nonexistents. But we said this to signify that he is not a part of God nor does he come from any subject.3 That is why we are persecuted, you now know. I pray that you may be strengthened in the Lord whenever you recall our tribulations, co-Lucianist, rightly named Eusebius. (2) That is what Arius says. And concerning these matters Eusebius writes thus to Paulinus as follows: 3 Cf. adv. Ar. 11,34-35. SECOND LETTER OF CANDIDUS 87