Arius: Heresy and Tradition (review)

The revised edition of Rowan Williams' Arius: Heresy and Tradition brings this landmark work back into print, this time in paperback and at a price within reach of the student budget. That alone is worth a great deal. However, the book is not a fully revised edition: there is an updated bibliography and a new appendix, "Arius since 1987," in which Williams responds to recent developments and criticism, but regrettably the original text and notes remain unchanged.

On the history of the interpretation of "Arianism," Williams defers to Maurice Wiles' more detailed 1996 Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries. Both authors agree with Newman's assessment that the disagreement between the "Arians" and the "orthodox" was not a matter of literal versus non-literal interpretations of the Bible but rather the more difficult question of "'the sense of Scripture' viewed as a whole" (249; see 109-10; Wiles 171). Yet Williams disagrees with Wiles' claim that a deficiency in the original "material" makes this question unanswerable. The more basic question in his mind is the very nature ofthe material being interpreted and whether it should not include "patterns of devotion, issues about consistency of language in respect of divine action, the pressure to keep open the maximal scope of what can be said about Jesus Christ . . ., [and] a global scriptural context within which more and less adequate readings can be assessed" (249; see 109-13). Williams observes a similar idea in Stephen Thomas' 1991 Newman and Heresy, namely Newman's emphasis that orthodoxy is constituted less by intellect than by a "superior ethos, a spirit of humility and receptivity, which has political as well as theological repercussions" (250; Thomas, 29-30, 45, 49).

As for the history and chronology of the fourth-century controversy in part 1 of the book, Williams cites a 1989 article by Annik Martin in support of his dissociation of Arius from the Melitian schism (251-52), and he stands by his revision of the dating of the controversy—including the composition of the Thalia before 324 and, pace Christopher Stead (1988), the later Athanasian authorship of henos somatos—against Uta Loose's 1990 defense of the traditional Schwartz/Opitz chronology that R. P. C. Hanson follows (1988) (252-56).

Williams likewise defends his analysis of Arius' theology in part 2. After drawing support from Karin Metzler's 1991 identification of the acrostic form of the Thalia fragments, which indicates that the passages in Ar. 1 and syn. 15 come from the same source (256), he answers the criticism of Hanson (1988), Robert Gregg (1989), and Rebecca Lyman (1989) that his treatment neglects the soteriological import of Arius' teaching. He offers several points to consider: it is wrong to separate interest in cosmological divine wisdom from early Christian soteriology; the idea that God promoted Jesus to divine honor as a result of his virtue is foreign to any early Christian writer regardless of orthodoxy; the Son's lack of eternity, immutability, and knowledge of the Father are much more central concerns for Arius; Arius' use of teknopoieo in the active voice in Thalia section A(v) (100, from Ar. 1.5) cannot mean "adopt"; and in any case "Christ cannot be a model of human virtue or liberty since he is first and foremost a 'disincarnate' subject," even if it is a commonplace patristic notion that Jesus' free will is exemplary for the Christian (256-60). Finally, he reiterates that Arius' "Academic" versus "Catholic" theological style represents a conventional Alexandrian form of church life and popular piety, not an elite setting in the modern sense of the term (257).

The material that requires the most significant reconsideration is Williams' argument in part 3 that Arius makes use of Neoplatonist ontology. Holger Strutwolf's 1999 characterization of Eusebius of Caesarea as standing "between Numenius and Plotinus" seems to corroborate Williams' assessment that Arius [End Page 247...