Deposition of Arius

The Depositio Arii, the "Deposition of Arius," is the earliest document in the dispute that would become the Arian controversy. It is an encyclical letter issued in the name of Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, to bishops everywhere, announcing that a synod of nearly a hundred bishops from Egypt and Libya had excommunicated the presbyter Arius and his associates for teaching that the Son of God had a beginning and was made from nothing. The text is transmitted in the corpus of Athanasius, who at the time was a deacon in Alexander's service, and its vigorous, combative style has led a number of scholars to attribute its drafting to him; it is also preserved by the church historian Socrates. In the Athanasian collection the encyclical is followed by a short covering letter to the presbyters and deacons of Alexandria and the Mareotis, asking them to add their signatures, together with the list of those who subscribed. The occasion was practical: Arius and his companions, expelled from Alexandria, were travelling to other cities and finding bishops, Eusebius of Nicomedia among them, willing to receive them into communion. Alexander wrote to close that door.

The letter opens with the image of the church as one body whose members must act together, then names the deposed clergy, including two bishops, Secundus of Ptolemais and Theonas of Marmarica. It sets out their teaching in a series of quoted propositions: that God was not always Father; that the Word was not always but was made out of nothing; that the Son is a creature and a work, by nature changeable and capable of virtue or vice; that the Father is invisible and ineffable even to the Son, who knows him only partially. Against each of these the letter answers from Scripture, pressing texts that call the Son the Word, Wisdom, Power and Image of the Father, and asking how what is eternal in God could ever have been absent from him. It then recounts the synod's anathema and instructs its recipients not to receive the condemned men, warning that anyone who does so takes their side against the church. The argument is not yet the full doctrine of consubstantiality, which belongs to Nicaea; it is a first, sharp statement that the Son's generation from the Father is eternal and that to speak of him as a creature is to deny the gospel.

The Depositio Arii matters because it fixes the terms of the quarrel before any council, emperor or creed had intervened. Later accounts of what Arius taught depend heavily on the propositions quoted here, and the letter shows how the question was from the beginning framed around the eternity of the Father's fatherhood rather than around philosophical definitions. Its tone of alarm also explains why the Egyptian church treated the matter as a rupture rather than a difference of opinion.

Who should read this: those studying the origins of the Nicene controversy, who want to see the dispute in its first form, and readers of Athanasius who want the document that preceded his own career as a writer. It is a short official letter, not a devotional or expository work, and readers looking for a developed theology of the Son should go instead to Athanasius's Orations against the Arians.