Arianism as class politics

Joseph Priestley

I’m posting this in part to clarify that very dense little turn of phrase in my hagiography of Emperor Saint Theodosius about Arianism being the religion of the wealthy middle class. This passage from Robert Pattison’s The Great Dissent has stuck with me for some time, and has shaped a lot of my understanding of that period of Church history.

By contrast, Arianism appealed to all those antagonistic to the new economic order and its ruling classes. It was the natural theology of second-level bureaucrats, intellectuals, professionals, shopkeepers, slaves, artisans and men of ambition. Arius maintained a supremely wilful and unapproachable divinity who could be treated as a bureaucrat or businessman would have liked to treat his nominal superior—as a necessary irrelevance. For Arius the intelligible business of creation was conducted by a rational and creative Son, whose role was that of a cosmic master craftsman…

The Arian Christ had an obvious appeal to men who despised the new economic order of fixed obligations and wistfully recalled the freedoms of the Hellenistic world—the freedom to seek advancement on the job market, the freedom to argue free of dogmatic trammels, the freedom to advance from class to class. If the Marxist view is correct, then Arianism was a theological expression of nostalgia for the economic laissez-faire of classical civilisation. Though they appear to us as the radical element of fourth-century Christendom, by the Marxist analysis the Arians were the apologists for a fading libertarianism which reached its high water mark two hundred years earlier in the age of ambitious Trimalchios and virtuous Epictetuses. What little is known about the Arian leaders and their followers confirms the Marxist view of Arianism as a coalition of intellectuals, bureaucrats, professionals, artisans, merchants and freedmen who opposed the orthodox forces of elitism, hierarchy and feudalism…

Ætius, the most logical exponent of Arian theology in the mid fourth century, is also the most representative example of its class characteristics. He was an ambitious artisan who reveled in social mobility. Newman called him a “despicable adventurer”. Before he found his calling as a theologian, he had been a goldsmith, a doctor and a teacher. His career demonstrates the classes to which Arianism appealed. Not surprisingly, he was the most rigorous and forceful exponent of the strict Arian theology that held the Father to be utterly unlike the Son in nature. By background and training men like Ætius had everything to lose in an ideological system that fixed religious and economic obligations for all time and subordinated every creature, politically and metaphysically, to the will of a despot.

The hypothesis that Arianism reflects a social controversy goes a long way toward explaining the weird coalition that supported the heretics. Here was a doctrine that united interests of Gothic barbarians and Alexandrian virgins with those of learned prelates and ambitious craftsmen. These diverse constituencies had one thing only in common—a desire to open the power and wealth of the empire to enterprise and ambition.

Now, despite my disagreements with Chase Padusniak at Jappers and Janglers, I do happen to agree with him in a profound way about the necessity of serious Christian thought maintaining at least a little bit of the materialist inner sceptic when it comes to the history of ideas. Ideas are not necessarily the progenitors of material conditions; indeed, in many cases, the material conditions are themselves the matrix out of which the ideas arise.

This sort of critical eye is all the more necessary a consideration when one begins to examine how Arianism began to recur precisely among the professional and mercantile class of Western Europe and especially the New World – as ‘Socinianism’ or Unitarianism. Very intriguingly, the modern version of Unitarianism arose out of the same haute bourgeois milieus and highly-educated towns in sixteenth-century Poland (Lublin and Kraków) whose seminaries and universities were busily producing the Uniate strategy for suborning and exploiting Orthodox parishes in the poorer Carpathian hinterlands. The resurgence of Arianism, though, appealed primarily to these better-to-do Polish townsmen, who indeed had means enough to influence the likes of the Polish king Zygmund II August.

They continued in Poland until the mid-1600s, when war with Sweden prompted the Polish Catholic authorities to kick them out – where they resettled in such places as Amsterdam, Leiden and London. The primary audience for the Socinian preachers and theologians were indeed the haute bourgeoisie: people like, for instance, Joseph Priestley, the famed chemist who discovered oxygen. Now, some words on Priestly may be spoken here as illustrative. He came from a family of wealthy Calvinist fullers and dyers – owners of some of the first textile mills in the rapidly-industrialising English north. Priestley was very much of the Whiggish political persuasion: an advocate of free trade, capitalism and œconomic laissez-faire; an individualist in legal philosphy; a friend of Benjamin Franklin; a staunch supporter of both the American and French Revolutions; and an intellectual forerunner of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian theory of ethics. What is notable here is that – just as for Ætius of Antioch – Priestley’s desire to reform and rationalise Christianity, and his subsequent embrace of the Polish Reformed ‘style’ of Socinianism in 1782, postdated his œconomic and political commitments, which were built over a period spanning from the 1750s to the 1770s and were a direct result of his class background. Unitarianism in England was indelibly linked with Manchester through the early nineteenth century: a fact which should also rouse some interest in the linkages between the new faith and the concomitant – or possibly predating – rise of a new class and a new œconomic philosophy.

At any rate, Priestley’s writings on religion were the most influential texts in the development of English and American Unitarianism. On these shores the Socinian tendency has been quite early associated with the New England shipping barons and industrialists. And even here the material conditions seem to have provided the context for a religious shift. As this article by the Unitarian Universalist History & Heritage Society puts it: ‘The growing mercantile economy of New England also exerted a moderating influence on New England religious life… They felt that in markets abroad they labored at a disadvantage, in that a certain stigma of intolerance attached to anyone from New England. The interest of the merchants in promoting free movement of people and goods conflicted with the desire of the Puritan leaders to keep New England isolated and free from foreign influence.’ Not to belabour the point, but to this day, the Association tends to be disproportionately white, disproportionately wealthy, disproportionately professional-class and disproportionately post-collegiate, as attested by their own data.

Consider this also. The year 2018 may be our current high-tide mark of vulgar consumerism and crass cutthroat capitalism and a Norman Vincent Peale-quoting reality-TV real-estate huckster as our president , and poor, slipshod ad hoc theological justifications for the same from the likes of the Acton Institute. That year, a Ligonier survey found that the most common theological bias among American evangelicals who consider themselves to be theologically conservative was actually Arianism. Is this actually too much zeal and too little knowledge among the laity, as some of the evangelical academics responding to the survey seem to have deduced? Or are the laity merely responding, as the Arian laity of the fourth century did and as Joseph Priestley did, to a demystified vision of Jesus that reflects and confirms their own œconomic conditions and preferences? To be quite fair, I’m not sure that such a question can be very neatly untangled, but it is still a question that deserves to be asked and considered seriously – particularly when the embrace of a hæretical doctrine among the evangelical laity clearly postdates the uncritical adoption of capitalism as the divinely-ordained œconomic system.

As Americans, the Ligonier poll ought to give us pause. Our œconomic activity shapes the way in which we interact with each other, both online and face-to-face. It seems to me a far too naïve position to take, that it would not also shape the way in which we go to meet Christ. Now more than ever, as a society, we tend to treat ourselves and others as ‘rational’, self-contained, self-sustaining and self-reliant individuals, unanchored from any ‘fixed obligations’ particularly to those who have less than we do. How then are we to make sense of a God – a supreme cosmic reality, the single principle which undergirds the entirety of the universe and all its laws – who has become for our sakes an infant born in a cave in a backwater imperial province to an Aramaic-speaking teenager from an impoverished and near-forgotten branch of the stem of Jesse? Like Ætius and Joseph Priestley, would we not baulk at such a proposition, merely on account of the fact that we are so materially sheltered from any pressing need to engage it? Do we not do so even without thinking?