Arianism 1641891009, 9781641891004

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Arianism

Marilyn Dunn

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Contents

Introduction: What Was Arianism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 1. Was Arius an Arian? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Chapter 2. Entry-Level Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Chapter 3. Barbarian Homoianism after 381 . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Chapter 4. Barbarian Homoianism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Chapter 5. Arianism after Arianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Maps Map 1.

Europe, 476 CE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Map 2.

Europe, 533–534 CE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Contents

Introduction: What Was Arianism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 1. Was Arius an Arian? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Chapter 2. Entry-Level Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Chapter 3. Barbarian Homoianism after 381 . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Chapter 4. Barbarian Homoianism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Chapter 5. Arianism after Arianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Maps Map 1.

Europe, 476 CE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Map 2.

Europe, 533–534 CE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Introduction

What Was Arianism?

What was Arianism? Most people will only ever hear the word if they visit Ravenna in northeastern Italy and go into two of its stunning UNESCO world heritage sites: the church of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, originally the palace church of Theoderic the Great, the Ostrogothic leader who was de facto ruler of Italy from 493 to 526; and its contemporary, the Arian Baptistry. Thanks to the internet, you can now visit them from the comfort of your armchair and marvel at the beauty of their mosaics.1 On the Baptistry ceiling, a youthful and naked Christ stands in the River Jordan, flanked by John the Baptist on one side and on the other by a figure personifying the river; a dove symbolizing the Holy Spirit pours light from its beak on to his head. Here are two persons of the Christian Trinity, Son and Holy Ghost: by implication the third, God the Father, is also present, as a voice declaring that Jesus is his beloved son in whom he is well pleased (Matt. 3:13–17; Mark 1:9–11; Luke 3:21–23). Guides, guidebooks, and websites all note that Theoderic and the Goths were Arian heretics: Arius, 1  See the virtual tours at www.turismo.ra.it/eng/Storytelling/ Multimedia/Virtual-tours; www.turismo.ra.it/eng/Discoverthe-area/Art-and-culture/Unesco-world-heritage/Basilica-ofSant%27Apollinare-Nuovo; www.turismo.ra.it/eng/Discover-thearea/Art-and-culture/Unesco-world-heritage/Arian-Baptistery; www.turismo.ra.it/eng/Discover-the-area/Art-and-culture/Unescoworld-heritage/Neonian-Baptistery. All accessed August 30, 2020.

2  Introduction the heresy’s founder, had denied the divine nature of Christ and thus the equality of God the Son with God the Father. Arianism is commonly summed up in two or three phrases: “Arius denied the divinity of Christ” (or “the unity of the Trinity”); “Arianism was subordinationist: it made the Son a lesser God than the Father.” But anyone attempting to dig deeper will swiftly become aware of the subject’s complexity and breadth. Modern approaches fall into three broad areas. The first covers Arianism’s origins and emergence. This hinges on a basic narrative in which Arius, a priest of Alexandria in Egypt in the early fourth century, proposed a radical theology in which the Son was “not part of God and could never have been ‘within’ the life of God” but was “dependent and subordinate” (Williams, Arius, 177). He was condemned at the Council of Nicæa, called by the Emperor Constantine in 325, where the Nicene Creed, which said that Father and Son were “of the same substance,” was proclaimed as the universal creed of the Empire. However, Arius’s condemnation was swiftly followed by the removal of many of his opponents, in a conspiracy masterminded by his supporter, Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia. Arius’s followers joined with the “Eusebians” in the 330s to engineer the downfall of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who had refused to re-admit Arius to the Alexandrian Church. Arianism was supported by Constantine’s son, the Emperor Constantius II, who in 360 replaced the Nicene Creed by an Arian statement of belief; and by a number of other emperors. But in 381, the tables were turned when Arianism was outlawed as a heresy by the Emperor Theodosius. The theology of Arius and the initial development of Arianism constitute a vast and intimidatingly technical field of scholarship populated by ecclesiastical historians, scholars of patristics (the study of the “Church Fathers”), and theologians, who analyze the intricate theological controversies and political manoeuvrings that followed Nicæa. Arianism is treated as a part of the “search for the Christian doctrine of God,” a long-running intra-ecclesiastical controversy over the development of the doctrine of the Trinity that took place

What Was Arianism?  3

within what I will call for convenience “mainstream” Christianity. Arianism was also the Christianity of the Goths, the forerunners of Theoderic’s Italian Ostrogoths. This second area has a chequered past: in an earlier era, German Nationalists and National Socialists attempted to claim that Arianism was the “real” Germanic Christianity: anti-Roman and anti-papal, even an expression of authentic Germanic religiosity; the remnants of such discredited nonsense still float around the murkier reaches of the internet. Nowadays, historians point firmly to the origins of Arianism within the Roman Empire. The prevalent discourse in works written in English is one in which the Goths accepted Arianism for political reasons, because it happened to be the creed of the reigning Eastern Emperor, Valens. In 376, he permitted a large number of Tervingi Goths—under pressure from population movements caused by the activities of the Huns further East—to cross the Danube and enter the Empire. Some historians suggest that their leader Fritigern had previously accepted Christianity in return for imperial support in internal power struggles among the Gothic tribes. A substantial body of scholarship in several languages focuses on Ulfila (d. 383), often misleadingly referred to as the apostle of the Goths. Ulfila was the descendent of Cappadocian Christians who had been carried off into captivity in the third century by Goths. He was consecrated bishop to the Christians amongst the Goths by Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia in or before 341, only to be expelled from trans-Danubian Gothia after seven years. He and his followers were then settled in the province of Moesia Secunda by Constantius II. Ulfila’s major achievement was the development of a Gothic alphabet and the translation of the Bible into Gothic and he is credited not only with the conversion of Goths to Christianity before his expulsion but also with continuing his work from across the Danube in the Roman province of Moesia. He is regarded as an Arian partly because of his associations with Eusebius of Nicomedia and Constantius II, but mainly because his pupil Auxentius of Durostorum wrote a vivid

4  Introduction description of his opposition to the theology of the Nicene Creed and his support for a view of the Trinity consistent with the Arian creed backed by Constantius II. The third area is post-381 Arianism, when it was classed by the Empire as a heresy and was officially sanctioned only in the “churches among the barbarians.” Exactly how and where Arianism was passed on by the Goths to other barbarian groups is usually treated as opaque and untraceable, a sort of conversionary osmosis. The Arian Churches of the barbarians within the frontiers of the Roman Empire in the fifth century—Visigoths in Aquitaine (later Spain and Septimania); Sueves in Gallæcia; Burgundians in Eastern Gaul; Vandals in North Africa; and Ostrogoths in Italy, are mostly assumed— apart from their Bible and liturgy in Gothic—to replicate on a reduced scale the Catholic Churches of their territories. Ostrogothic Arianism has been co-opted into debates about barbarian ethnicity and identity: at one extreme of the spectrum of opinion, it has been presented as having nothing to do with either, while at the other Arianism is described as a mark of Gothic national identity or defining force, a signifier of distinctiveness. This book presents an alternative view of Arianism, taking into account recent trends and developments in history and theory. The first is the changing narrative created by the study of early Christianities rather than early Christianity. In the fourth century, many groups identified themselves as Christian despite holding beliefs that might appear bizarre to modern Christians: for example, the view that the world had been created not by God but by a subordinate, ignorant, or malevolent divinity (Christian Gnostics); or that human beings were constituted of light imprisoned in dark matter (Manichaeans). What is now regarded as Christian orthodoxy was still evolving in Arius’s time and he should be seen in the context of a world in which many of the now “lost” Christianities which had grown up in the second and third centuries continued to flourish and attract adherents. The second is our changing view of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria in Egypt 328–83 and one of the most controversial

What Was Arianism?  5

figures of early Christianity. As well as being its implacable opponent, Athanasius happens to be our single most important source for early Arianism. At one time he was regarded as an unimpeachable authority and accounts of the “Arian Controversy” were largely based on his writings. Modern scholarship is more sceptical, highlighting not just his use of violence to further his own ecclesiastical ends, but also his wholesale manufacturing of adversaries and conspiracies to explain his several depositions from office. It is also becoming clear that the traditional view of the Nicene Creed of 325 as a totem of orthodoxy is very much Athanasius’s construct: recent work emphasizes its problematic nature and the numerous attempts made to find a suitable replacement for it between 340 and 360.2 The third is theoretical: the development of the discipline of the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) which presents new ways of looking at religion in history. As opposed to the application of theory from other disciplines to religion, this is theory rooted specifically in the study of religion, generating books, articles, and journals (see Further Reading at the end of this volume) over the last few decades. Its central postulate is that religious systems, as they are produced by similar human minds, share similar types of concepts and behaviours across cultures. This means that we can drill below the surface of religions to examine underlying concepts and behaviours at a structural level. While many— most?—readers might automatically think of religion in terms of doctrine and theology, a major tenet of CSR is that these are not necessarily its most important aspects and that we should look beyond or beneath them. Currently, we view Arianism in strictly theological terms—unsurprisingly as it was framed in terms of that most challenging of Christian theological concepts, the Trinity. But we can achieve a broader and deeper view through the application of some important CSR insights: the contrast between “doctrinal” and “imagis2  Mark S. Smith, The Idea of Nicæa in the Early Church Councils AD 431–451 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 7–28.

6  Introduction tic” modes of religiosity to contextualize Arianism’s beginnings on one hand and the nature of intuitions of divinity and the dead to help us understand the take-up and character of so-called Arianism among the barbarian peoples on the other (all discussed at greater length below). In the light all these developments, I am about to offer you a radically different view of Arianism. In it, Arius is not a heretic who sought to reduce Christ to the status of a lesser God but a pastorally active churchman, concerned to defend his Church against what he saw as the powerfully subversive views of the nature of God, of good and evil, darkness and light offered by contemporary Gnostic and Manichaean Christianities. The Athanasian version of events—for over a millennium the essential framework of our understanding of Arianism—is treated as a spectacularly unreliable narrative, a picture of heresy and conspiracy fabricated in an attempt to explain away his own depositions for misconduct; constantly reworked in response to events; and extended to cover the Homoian Creed of 360. This creed, commonly identified as Arian, is shown to have no connection to Arius. It was developed partly as a replacement for the formulas put forward since 340 as substitutes for the Nicene Creed and also as an aid to the Christianization of the Goths on the Danube frontier. The Homoian Creed is presented here as “entry-level Christianity,” representing the complex Christian doctrine of the Trinity in a way designed to resonate with the Goths’ intuitions of divinity, as well as their concerns about the fate of the souls of their unbaptized ancestors in the Christian afterlife. This book also reassesses the rise and fall of barbarian Arianism, the Homoian Christianity of the Goths and other Germanic peoples. The emergence of militarized migratory groupings and their settlement in the Roman Empire led to the use of conversion and re-baptism, initially in an effort to establish Visigothic hegemony over other rulers and then, within individual kingdoms, to create socio-political ties that could transcend ethnic distinctions. At the same time, the Homoian Churches developed an organizational individuality

What Was Arianism?  7

largely ignored in current work.3 In the fifth and sixth centuries Homoianism was woven into the fabric of barbarian states to such an extent that attempts by rulers to disengage and enter the majority Catholic world generated tensions with their military élites. In their different ways, the violent convulsions which shook Vandal North Africa in 484 and some (almost) contemporary representations of the last years of Theoderic’s rule in Ostrogothic Italy both reflect attempts to neutralize these tensions through a conspicuous performance of Homoianism. In Burgundy, the reign of a Nicene convert, Sigismund, between 516 and 524 did not imply the kingdom’s automatic transition to Catholic Christianity. In Suevic Gallæcia and Visigothic Spain, rulers were only able to turn Arian-ruled kingdoms into Catholic states after lengthy manoeuvrings, which in Spain included abortive attempts to establish a new-style Homoian theology and Church. Homoianism was ended by conquest in the first half of the sixth century (Burgundy, North Africa, Italy) and by royal policy in the second (Gallæcia, Spain). Even as it disappeared, another barbarian group, the Lombards, was misleadingly labelled Arian, as the term became one shorthand for Other against which orthodox Christianity would define itself in the Middle Ages.

Terminology This introduction has made liberal use of the terms Arian—as well as its “antithesis,” Catholic—and Arianism. But no-one ever called themselves an Arian: Arian and Arianism are part of the terminology of opponents and heresy-hunters. We see the emergence of the pejorative Arian in the following chapter. The Greek Areianismos was coined in the fourth century 3  Conflicting opinions about Arian church organization: Ralf Mathisen, “Barbarian Arian Clergy, Church Organization and Church Practices”, 145–91, and Uta Heil, “The Homoians in Gaul,” 271–96, both articles in Arianism, ed. Berndt and Steinacher.

8  Introduction in a work in praise of Athanasius,4 turning into the neo-Latin Arianismus and the English Arianism (and its French and German equivalents) in the early modern period. From now on: 1. the terms Arian and Catholic are avoided except in reference to heresiological writings of the period, or where they are used by modern scholars;

2. Nicene, rather than Catholic, is used for the sup­ porters and theology of the Nicene Creed of 325 and its modified replacement, the Nicene–Constan­ tinopolitan Creed of 381;

3. the modern terms Homoian and Homoianism are employed when referring to the followers and theology of the Homoian Creed of 360, which characterized God the Son as like (Greek: homoios) the Father and was labelled by opponents as Arian. In other words, where previous writers might use the term “Arian(ism)” when writing about the period after 360, you will mostly find “Homoian(ism)” used here.

4  Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nazianzus, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series 7 (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1999), 275.

Chapter 1

Was Arius an Arian?

We know very little about Arius: he was apparently a Libyan by origin and a priest of the Baucalis district in Alexandria. Only fragments of his writings survive, some deliberately lifted out of context by his opponents. Crucially, however, we have the complete text of a letter which he and other Alexandrian clerics sent to their bishop, Alexander, after he had excommunicated them at some point before 318. In it they express their opposition to the idea that the Son is consubstantial with—of the same substance as—the Father. They also explain their opposition to this idea, stating that the Son of God is not “as Valentinus has laid down an emanation nor as the Maniacheans taught a one-in-essence portion (alternatively, consubstantial part, in Greek meros homoousion) of the Father.” These important statements have been dismissed as heresiological rhetoric—or ignored.1 But they reveal that Arius and associates were opposed to the idea that the Son was of the same substance as the Father, because it seemed to them too close to the teaching of two forms of Christianity, Valentinian Gnosticism and Manichaeism, both powerful rivals to the “mainstream” church in the early fourth century. In the second century, Valentinus, an Alexandrian teacher in Rome, had founded a type of Christian Gnosticism that 1  Based on www.fourthcentury.com/urkunde-6/, accessed August 30, 2020. Christopher Stead, Divine Substance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 243; Williams, Arius.

10  Chapter 1 continued to evolve long after his death. Gnostics saw the human soul as a fragment of a good God, and the present world as the creation of a lower creator god, an evil demiurge. Salvation would be attained through the gnosis—literally, knowledge—that would guide the intellect, the highest part of the soul, out of this evil world, re-integrating it with its original source, the good God. Manichaeism had originated in third-century Iran: its founder, Mani, envisaged a cosmic struggle between the forces of darkness and light and taught that human beings were composed of a mingling of particles of the divine light with malign darkness and matter. However esoteric these ideas might seem now, Manichaeans and Valentinians both regarded themselves as Christians. Mani proclaimed himself “the apostle of Jesus Christ,” claiming to complete the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, and Zoroaster: Gospel sayings and references to the writings of St. Paul are scattered throughout his writings. Valentinians distinguished between the human and divine natures of Christ, ascribed the creation of the world to the lower demiurge and envisaged Jesus as the bringer of gnosis or knowledge—but they also claimed apostolic authority for their message and composed some of the earliest known commentaries on books of the Bible. In the words of David Brakke (Gnostics, 115), they developed the more overtly Christian features of the Gnostic myth. Valentinian Gnosticism and Manichaeism were both enormously popular movements. They long outlasted the period discussed here: later in the fourth century, St. Augustine of Hippo was a Manichaean adherent before turning to conventional Christianity. Even though Valentinians emphasized strongly that the divine presence compensated for the inferiority of the material creation, both groups tapped into an intuitive view of existence as a cosmic struggle between good and evil, darkness and light. One strand of the Cognitive Science of Religion (Barrett, Why Would Anyone) helps us understand the importance of such intuitive or nonreflective belief in religion. Another indicates further reasons for the popularity of Manichaeism and Gnosticism: in Modes of Religiosity

Was Arius an Arian?  11

Harvey Whitehouse proposes that the most successful religions combine “doctrinal” elements—regular, non-arousing rituals with learned meanings, written narrative revelation— with “imagistic” features: less regular, more exciting rituals creating “flashbulb memories” that generated intense bonds between participants. Manichaeism was rich in arousing rituals whose “speech acts” are preserved in many surviving Manichaean texts (BeDuhn, Manichaean Body). So was Gnosticism: controversy exists over whether some Gnostic groups practised orgiastic rites or whether was this just a slander concocted by their opponents. Valentinian Gnostics did not reject the Eucharist or practise a distinctive form of baptism but it has been suggested that they did create additional (non-orgiastic) rites of their own. One way or the other, both groups appealed to intuitive and “imagistic” levels lacking in the “doctrinal” Christianity of the “mainstream” Church. Both groups were able to infiltrate and make converts in the wider Christian community. Manichaeans lived among other Christians, while their élite, commonly referred to as the Elect and—crucially—including women, travelled through both countryside and cities, creating new groups of believers. Bishop Theonas of Alexandria (282–300) wrote a letter condemning what he called Manichaean madness: downgrading of marriage (the Elect was celibate); worship of creation (Manichaeans regarded the sun and moon as manifestations of divine light); and belief that the divine light was also imprisoned in plants, vegetables, and fruits (Manichaeans held that this light could be restored to the divine realm through their consumption by the Elect). He was particularly concerned about the infiltration of female Elect (who he claims used menstrual blood “for the abominations of their madness”) into “our houses.”2 Theonas’s sensationalist letter betrays his very real fear of Manichaean potential to subvert his flock. 2  Colin H. Roberts, ed., Catalogue of the Greek and Latin Papyri in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, 3: Theological and Literary Texts (Nos. 457–551) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1938), 38–46.

12  Chapter 1 Valentinian Gnostics are thought to have constituted a particularly insidious threat because educated Christians could readily understand or absorb their teachings: David Brakke (Gnostics, 115–16) suggests that there must have been bishops and presbyters whose preaching and teaching reflected Valentinian ideas without any inkling that they were not “mainstream”. This may explain why Arius castigated three Palestinian bishops as “unlearned heretics” because of their crudely phrased statements about the Father–Son relationship. He was equally unhappy with the “light-from-light” theology of an influential teacher in the Nile delta, Hieracas of Leontopolis: to him it must have appeared dangerous because of the centrality of the concepts of emanation and transmission of light in Manichaean belief and practice. Arius also highlighted the resemblances of contemporary emanationist declarations to an earlier theology, Sabellianism, which had been already been condemned for its presentation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as different manifestations of the same essence or substance.3 Arius was willing to take on and combat Valentinian ideas. In their letter to Alexander, he and his associates declared that the Son’s being, glories, and life—a triad found in the Valentinian text the Tripartite Tractate—are given by the Father and are not to be understood in the sense of a shared substance, or as produced by emanation. We see the same combative engagement in the remains of his poem Thalia—of which, unfortunately, only fragments survive in the hostile works of Athanasius. Its opening declares that his own wisdom and knowledge have come from God. He thus appropriated two key Gnostic terms—sophia (wisdom) and gnosis (knowledge)—for his own “mainstream” Christianity. Arius’s assertion that the Father was unknowable to the Son is a reply to the Tractate’s picture of a Son who is ingenerate like the Father. 3  www.fourthcentury.com/urkunde-1/; www.fourthcentury.com/ urkunde-6/. Accessed August 30, 2020.

Was Arius an Arian?  13

Arius and Alexander The little we are told about Arius all points to a cleric with a highly developed pastoral awareness prepared to make energetic attempts to reach out to the laity. Bishop Alexander accused him and his supporters of allowing their own young women to wander shamefully on every street. Plausibly, this mobilization of female support was intended as a counter to the influence of the Manichaean female Elect, so abominated by Bishop Theonas, and also as a response to the involvement of Valentinian women in teaching and sacraments. The fifth-century historian Philostorgius, who was sympathetic to Arius, claimed that he wrote songs for work and travel and set them to suitable music. Thalia was a poem expressing theological themes in popular form. Athanasius later denounced it as effeminate in tune and nature, so it looks as if Arius had also set his words to a non-ecclesiastical musical mode. Thalia means banquet: whether the title was Arius’s or not, it was designed to be sung in convivial surroundings. Arius comes over as a dynamic populariser but not as an innovative theologian. He did not set out to create a new theology: the two surviving letters he sent in the early stages of the controversy indicate that he was simply responding to what he perceived as a dangerous threat to the “mainstream” church in Alexandria and Alexander’s failure to respond to it. His exasperation is vented in a letter sent to Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia complaining of the woolliness of Alexander’s public pronouncements and the bishop’s treatment of himself and his associates: […] he drives us out of every city like godless men, since we will not agree with his public statements: that there was “always a God, always a Son”; “as soon as the Father, so soon the Son [existed]”; “with the Father co-exists the Son, unbegotten, ever-begotten, begotten without begetting”; “God neither precedes the Son in aspect or in a moment of time”; “always a God, always a Son, the Son being from God himself.”

14  Chapter 1 He defends their own position: But what do we say and think and what have we previously taught and do we presently teach?—that the Son is not unbegotten nor a part of an unbegotten entity in any way, nor from anything in existence, but that he is subsisting in will and intention before time and before the ages full [of grace and truth] God, the only-begotten, unchangeable. Before he was begotten, or created, or defined, or established, he did not exist […].4

They had declared the same beliefs when writing to Alexander: We acknowledge one God, alone unbegotten, alone everlasting, alone without beginning […] who begat an only-begotten Son before time and the ages, through whom he made both the ages and all that was made; who begot him not in appearance but in reality; and that he made him subsist at his own will, unalterable and unchangeable, the perfect creature of God, but not as one of the creatures, offspring, but not as one of the other things begotten […].5

In other words: all Arius and his group set out to establish was that the Son was not an emanation of the substance of the Father but was a distinct and separate being, the only begotten God. The further clarifications—that he was begotten before time and was not like the rest of creation—were perhaps responses to or anticipations of criticism, but they state firmly that the Son was indeed God. In Arius’s early letters—and contrary to the modern popular view of Arian theology—there is no suggestion that the Son was inferior to the Father. We might say that Arius was not what is generally understood as Arian. But distortion or misrepresentation of Arius’s views began at a very early stage. Alexander soon hit back. It may be that he had underestimated the threat from Manichaeism and Val4  www.fourthcentury.com/urkunde-1/. Accessed August 30, 2020.

5  www.fourthcentury.com/urkunde-6/. Accessed August 30, 2020.

Was Arius an Arian?  15

entinianism because his attention was focused on a split in the Egyptian clergy that had begun under his predecessor, when a group known as the Melitians broke away, refusing to re-admit individuals who had sacrificed to the Roman gods during the final state persecution of Christians. This alternative hierarchy presented a challenge to his headship of the Egyptian church: the rise of a second highly visible dissenting group led by Arius represented another possible threat. He wrote to the bishop of Byzantium accusing Arius and supporters of plotting against him—and also of saying things they had specifically denied. He claimed that when Arius taught the Son’s creation out of nothing, he was placing the Son on the same non-divine and mutable level as the rest of creation; and that Arius had said there was a time when the Son did not exist (as opposed to existing before time and being involved in its creation). Alexander repeated these untruths in a letter circulated to a wider audience of bishops. Not everyone was taken in: Arius was backed by a council of bishops held in Palestine and two of the most eminent churchmen of the Empire, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Eusebius of Cæsarea, expressed their support for him. However, a council held at Antioch in 325 attended by over fifty bishops accepted Alexander’s version of Arius’s teachings, producing a creed with anathemas condemning any suggestion that the Son was not of the same substance as the Father or was not light. It provisionally excommunicated Eusebius of Cæsarea and others who endorsed his views and announced a further synod at which they would be given the opportunity to repent.

The Council and Creed of Nicæa, 325 The conventional picture of Arianism is that it was a theology overwhelmingly rejected by the first Ecumenical (literally “world,” therefore general) Council at Nicæa in 325, attended by three hundred and eighteen bishops from all over the Empire. This calls for major qualification. The summoning of a large-scale assembly of bishops facilitated by and attended by the Emperor himself was a landmark in the

16  Chapter 1 history of Christianity: but this meant there were no precedents for it to follow. And for all its iconic status we know surprisingly little about the Council of Nicæa. There were no minutes, so it is impossible to reconstruct exactly what happened, though a number of documents circulated afterwards reflect the council’s decisions and discussions. But we should not imagine that the council consisted of a “trial” of Arius; it also dealt with a number of other questions, including the important matter of the calculation of the date of Easter. The tale that an enraged St. Nicholas of Myra—Santa Claus—took a swing at Arius during the proceedings is a later myth. We have no reliable evidence that either Nicholas or Arius was actually present—or that, if Arius actually did attend, he was allowed to speak. We cannot be sure how many bishops turned up. Three hundred and eighteen (a biblical number, Genesis 14:14) later became the standard figure quoted: but modern scholarship places the number at around two hundred and fifty. Although later dubbed the First Ecumenical Council, Nicæa was an overwhelmingly Eastern affair. Ossius, bishop of Cordoba, probably presided over proceedings, but only four other bishops from the Western Empire attended, along with two priests representing the pope. This lack of western participation would have fateful consequences. After the council had discussed the issues concerning Arius, it concluded by producing the following creed to be used by the entire Empire: We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things seen and unseen. And in one Lord, Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only-begotten, that is, of the substance of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of the same substance as the Father, through whom all things came to be, both the things in heaven and on earth, who for us humans and for our salvation came down and was made flesh, becoming human, who suffered and rose again on the third day, ascended into heaven, who is coming to judge the living and the dead.

Was Arius an Arian?  17

And in the Holy Spirit. The catholic and apostolic church condemns those who say concerning the Son of God that “there was a time when he was not” or “he did not exist before he was begotten” or “he came to be from nothing” or who claim that he is of another subsistence or substance, or a creation, or changeable, or alterable.6

The Nicene Creed represents a total defeat for Arius. It affirms that the Son was “from the substance of the Father” (Greek: ek tis ousias tou patros) and “of the same substance as the Father” (Greek: homoousion to patri) as well as “light from light.” The anathemas—condemnations—attached at the end of the creed attack the positions falsely attributed to Arius by his opponents. Along with two bishops from his native Libya who refused to “subscribe” (that is, sign and thereby express assent to) the creed, Arius was excommunicated and exiled.

Arius Exonerated Yet by 327–28, things looked very different. Constantine recalled Arius and an associate, Euzoius, from exile. They were allowed to put forward a profession of faith on behalf of themselves and their group: We believe in one God the Father, the ruler of all; and in the Lord Jesus Christ his only Son, the one who was begotten from him before all ages, God the Word through whom all things came to be, things in the heavens and things on earth; the one who descended, and took flesh, and suffered, and rose and ascended into the heavens, and is coming again to judge living and dead. And in the Holy Spirit, and in the resurrection of the flesh, and in the life of the age to come, and in the kingdom of the heavens, and in [the] one catholic church of God, [extending] from one end of the earth to the other. We have received this faith from the holy 6  Modifying www.fourthcentury.com/urkunde-24/. Accessed August 30, 2020.

18  Chapter 1 gospels, where the Lord says to his disciples: “Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and Son and of the Holy Spirit” [...] and if we do not truly accept Father and Son and Holy Spirit just as the whole catholic Church teaches and as the Scriptures (which we rely on in all things) teach, God is our judge now and on the day that is coming […].

Williams (whose translation this is) describes it as a plea for amnesty, a studiedly uncontroversial composition (Arius, 278–79). But there is much more to it than that. The idea that it is a plea for amnesty is undermined by the fact that Constantine had cajoled Arius and Euzoius into meeting him to be taken back into favour. Their profession does not recant their views: it repeats what they had earlier stated—that the Son was God, begotten before all ages. Other elements agree with the portions of the Nicene Creed dealing with the Son’s descent, incarnation, passion, ascension, and role in judgment at the end of time, issues over which there is no record of any disagreement. What is startling is that there is no reference to questions of substance or light whatsoever. In historical terms, the Creed of Nicæa enjoys an iconic position, endorsed by the councils of Constantinople in 381 and Chalcedon in 451. But its subsequent pre-eminence should not distract us from the way in which, only two or three years after it was proclaimed, its theology of substance was now being quietly side-lined—as were its closing condemnations of views falsely attributed to Arius. Why? If we take a close look at the evidence, it is not at all clear that the bishops present at Nicæa had immediately rushed to support the idea that the Son was consubstantial with the Father. It looks as if the controversial phrase “of the same substance as the Father” had been put forward by the Emperor himself. Or at least this is what we are told by Eusebius of Cæsarea. Eusebius had been a prominent supporter of Arius—but went on to subscribe the Nicene Creed. Unsurprisingly, the Council was scarcely over when he wrote to his diocese in an attempt to justify this about-turn. He claims that the Emperor had put forward the statements about substance but had also qualified them by saying that the Son was

Was Arius an Arian?  19

not “consubstantial” with the Father in any physical sense and was not a division of, or breaking off from, the Father. Eusebius follows up with some very convoluted excuses for agreeing to the anathemas at the end of the creed. How was Constantine—an unbaptized believer with no theological education—able to pronounce on such complex issues? The most convincing suggestion is that he had been coached by Alexander of Alexandria.7 To ecclesiastical audiences, Alexander had been for some time attempting to distance himself from the expression “the same substance as the Father,” preferring “the stamp” or “the image” of the Father. But he may have realized that he could persuade the theologically untrained Constantine that his original “consubstantial” could be acceptable. Eusebius’s comments, along with those of two exiled bishops who petitioned Constantine to be restored to their dioceses after the recall of Arius, certainly suggest that the assembled bishops had only accepted the imperial recommendation after clarification and qualification. Many probably agreed to it primarily because it had been put forward by an emperor who had not only ended state persecution of Christianity but was also now its enthusiastic supporter and source of patronage. (Eusebius himself is the author of an Ecclesiastical History representing the emperor as the centre of a Christian Empire.) The simplest explanation for the change of policy in 327–28 is that Constantine, who at first stuck to what he thought he understood as the relationship between Father and Son, had been tactfully persuaded that “consubstantial”—homoousios—was too close to Manichæan, Valentinian, and Sabellian ideas—and so began to engineer Arius’s readmission to communion, achieved after Arius’s and Euzoius’s profession of faith had been accepted by a local synod. It may also have been around this point that he sent out his officer Strategius Musonianus to enquire into the beliefs of the Manichaeans and other sects. In early 328, Constantine instructed Alexander to 7  Mark Edwards, “Alexander of Alexandria and the Homoousion,” Vigiliae Christianae 66, no. 5 (2012): 482–502.

20  Chapter 1 forgive Arius and Euzoius and to receive them in Alexandria. He wrote that he himself could confirm after personal, public discussions with them that they held to the faith of Nicæa. This apparently did not now include commitment to the specific wording of its creed. The Nicene Creed was never going to be retracted or replaced in Constantine’s lifetime, but its problematic aspects were being glossed over. However, Alexander refused to re-admit Arius and his supporters to communion: this intransigence was kept up by Athanasius, his deacon, who succeeded him in 328. What happened to Arius himself after 328 is something of a mystery. The traditional chronology of his last years involves a second deposition and exile in the early 330s, before Constantine once more ordered the Alexandrian church to re-admit his associates in 335—but this has been questioned.8 While his death is usually placed around 336, it could have occurred in the late 320s or early 330s.

Athanasius Invents Arianism The account I have set out is very different from the familiar view of Arianism as a theology that demoted the Son to a position lower than the Father and of the Nicene Creed as the benchmark of orthodoxy. These fictions were launched by Alexander and developed by his successor Athanasius. Athanasius is a polarizing figure, attracting both devotees and detractors. While there have been attempts to achieve a balanced and neutral assessment of his personality and career, for some time now a spotlight has been shone on the accusations of violence that tainted his reputation as bishop.9 8  Timothy D. Barnes, “The Exile and Recalls of Arius,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 60, no. 1 (2009): 109–29; Hanns Christof Brennecke, “Die letzten Jahre des Arius,” in Von Arius zum Athanasianum: Studien zur Edition der „Athanasius Werke“, ed. Annette von Stockhausen and Hanns Christof Brennecke, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristliche Literatur 164 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 63–83. 9  Gwynn, Athanasius; on allegations of violence, 28–29.

Was Arius an Arian?  21

But the powerful persona he created for himself still endures: Athanasius contra mundum, Athanasius against the world, suffering no fewer than five periods of exile from his diocese of Alexandria as a result of persecution by a coalition of enemies, led by Arians. He spun this image over nearly four decades of writing directed either to his own supporters or to a Western audience, constantly expanding and polishing his own version of events. The Athanasian narrative has been dominant for over fifteen hundred years; and although unquestioning acceptance of Athanasius’s self-representation as persecuted innocent is in decline, his view of ecclesiastical politics dominated by parties and conspiracies still lingers on in the face of determined attempts to banish it. It is unfortunate that many of the documents on which our knowledge is based, from imperial letters quoted in full, to fragments of Arius’s Thalia, are woven into Athanasius’s own self-serving version of events. The fourth-century heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis, another important but highly biased transmitter of original texts, adopted one of his favourite expressions, “Ariomaniacs”—Arian madmen—using it in his lengthy exposition of heresies. Athanasius even provided a highly tendentious account of the proceedings of the Council of Nicæa at the beginning of his work On the Decrees of the Nicene Synod, written in the 350s; there were no official minutes, as already noted, to contradict him.10 Generations of scholars have used the work of ecclesiastical historians writing in the late fourth and fifth centuries—Gelasius, Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, Theoderet—when attempting to chart a course through the religious controversies of the fourth century. Unhappily, all these authors were highly influenced by the Athanasian narrative and provide limited independent testimony. But alongside Athanasius they were instrumental in creating the Eastern Christian tradition—particularly that of the Syriac and 10  Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., 4 (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1999), 149–72.

22  Chapter 1 Armenian Churches—in which Athanasius was an innocent and heroic figure persecuted for his opposition to Arianism. This was definitely not the view of large sections of the Eastern Church outside Egypt throughout much of his long career. Why should Athanasius have attempted to construct a misleading view of Arian theology and of events in the years after Nicæa? He may already have had a hand in the misrepresentation of Arius when he was Alexander’s deacon and he was possibly the actual composer of the circular letter Alexander sent to bishops denouncing Arius and his supporters. But what triggered a sustained campaign of distortion and falsification was his deposition at the Council of Tyre in 335. This stemmed from his treatment of a problem he had inherited from Alexander: the rival Melitian ecclesiastical hierarchy in Egypt. The Melitians had been re-integrated into the Church at Nicæa: but when Athanasius succeeded Alexander in 328 in controversial circumstances they again seceded, appointing a rival bishop. In the early years of his episcopate, Athanasius made visitations throughout the Egyptian church that resulted in accusations of the extensive use of physical violence by his associates. The Melitians claimed he was responsible for the death of Arsenius, the Melitian bishop of Hypsele: Athanasius’s Apology against the Arians highlights the fact that the bishop was actually discovered hiding in one of their monasteries.11 A church council summoned to deal with this accusation was called off, but another took place at Tyre in 335 to investigate a fresh allegation: that one of Athanasius’s assistants had assaulted a priest called Ischyras in a house-church and had broken a consecrated chalice. Six bishops (the “Mareotic Commission”) were despatched to Egypt to investigate: when they reported back, Athanasius, realizing that he was about to be found guilty as charged, fled to Constantinople. There, he attempted to persuade the Emperor that he was the victim of a grave injustice. This went 11  Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, ed. Schaff and Wace, 105, 134–35.

Was Arius an Arian?  23

disastrously wrong: instead of re-instating him, Constantine exiled him to Trier in the Western Empire. But when Constantine died in 337, the new Emperor in the West, Constantine II, permitted the return of exiled bishops. Athanasius travelled back to Alexandria, en route reinstating a number of bishops who had also been deposed and promising to restore others. Eastern bishops in council at Antioch took exception to these high-handed actions and also questioned the legitimacy of his original election. And in 339 they renewed his deposition, initially appointing one of Arius’s supporters in his place. Athanasius’s double deposition set him on a course of action that led to the construction of the Athanasian version of Arianism. He turned to the West for support, arriving in Rome in 339. There, he and another deposed Eastern bishop, Marcellus of Ancyra, lobbied Pope Julius I in an attempt to have their depositions set aside. Julius was an ideal audience. The minimal Western presence at Nicæa in 325 and lack of any formal written minutes meant that Athanasius and Marcellus could impose their own construction on its proceedings and on the emergence and significance of the Nicene Creed. There appears to have been little contact between Eastern and Western churchmen in the intervening period: Western clerics were apparently unaware either that the phrase “of the same substance as the Father” had been tacitly sidelined or that Marcellus’s theology was considered dangerously Sabellian in the East. In a commented series of documents first put together in Rome and later transformed into Part 2 of his Apology Against the Arians, Athanasius attempted to explain away his sentence of deposition in terms of a long-term conspiracy which began with the rise of the “party of Eusebius,” the bishop of Nicomedia. Despite David Gwynn’s demonstration that this “party” was an Athanasian fabrication with an ever-changing cast of characters,12 the Athanasian spectre of factions and 12  David M. Gwynn, The Eusebians. The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the Construction of the “Arian Controversy” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

24  Chapter 1 conspiracies continues to haunt scholarship. But there is no sign of such plots in his pre-335 correspondence or writings. In his Apology, Athanasius claimed that Eusebius had become the “secret friend” of the Melitians in 330. In the same work, letters from Egyptian bishops writing to the Council of Tyre in Athanasius’s support also identify “the Eusebians” as conspiring against him. However, these appear at the very least to have been creatively edited and the work also includes an extraordinary communication purportedly from Constantine I, announcing that Athanasius had been sent to Trier for his own safety! Part 2 of the Apology has the appearance of a decidedly dodgy dossier, while the “party of Eusebius” looks as if it was first created when Athanasius was appealing to a Western audience, safely out of reach of Eusebius of Nicomedia (who died in 341). From 339 onwards, the “Eusebians” make frequent appearances in Athanasius’s writings and by 357, Athanasius was representing them as leaders of a systematic Arian purge of the “orthodox,” that had begun in the period shortly after Nicæa and extended into the 350s. Athanasius’s masterstroke in getting his Western audience onside was his construction of an Arian theology—which he then proceeded to elaborate over subsequent decades. He had already begun to fabricate a theology for the “Arian heresy” in his tenth Festal letter (for 338), sent to Alexandria in advance of his return, repeating the allegation that Arius placed the Son on the same level as the rest of God’s creation and asserting that “Ariomaniacs” were enemies of the doctrine of the Incarnation. For his Western audience, Athanasius now created three Discourses Against the Arians.13 Athanasius’s claims in the First Discourse are based on a selective presentation of points cherry-picked from the Thalia and other writings by Arius, deliberately taken out of context to be skilfully travestied. He quotes fragments of the Thalia, deriding its style. He lists what he claims are Arian arguments, exaggerating the Arian differentiation between 13  Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, ed. Schaff and Wace, 131–47; 527–32; 306–431.

Was Arius an Arian?  25

the substances and glories of the Father and Son, actually an aspect of their anti-emanationist teaching, while falsely claiming that Arians believed the Son’s substance to be less than divine. He attacks Arian attempts to differentiate between the Word and Wisdom of Father and Son, suggesting that Arians reduced the power of the Son to the lowly status of other powers mentioned in Scripture—such as the locust and caterpillar. Athanasius quotes Thalia’s statements to the effect that the Son is invisible and unknowable to the Father: but he does not give any context for them, although as we have already seen, they were part of Arius’s response to the Valentinian teachings of the Tripartite Tractate.14 One of the most striking aspects of the Discourses is Athanasius’s dismissal of Arius’s denial of the charge that he taught that the Son was mutable as a “great sophism”: he quotes Arius but omits his affirmation that the Son was perfect. Another is his claim that when Arius and his supporters said, “Once the Son was not,” they were simply too afraid to admit that they meant “there was a time when he was not.” A third is his misrepresentation of Eusebius of Nicomedia and a layman, Asterius “the Sophist,” as part of an Arian theological group. Neither was a follower of Arius but both were participants in a very lively line of theological discussion whose origins pre-date Arius’s first criticisms of Alexander (and Asterius apparently conceived of the Son as the “exact image” of the Father—a phrase which chimes with Alexander of Alexandria’s use of the term “image”). The fictions presented to the West by Athanasius underpin what has traditionally been understood as Arianism—a theology that puts the Son on a lower level to the Father and denies his eternity. His narrative has been so dominant that as recently as 1981 two eminent scholars could produce a work on “Early Arianism,” suggesting an Arian theory of salvation put forward by Arius, Eusebius, and Asterius and based on the Athanasian picture of the Son as a creature 14  Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, ed. Schaff and Wace, 308–14.

26  Chapter 1 on a lower level than God.15 But none of the doctrines Athanasius extrapolated from Arius’s words was ever taught by Arius or by his alleged supporters. One of the aspects of the Discourses that commentators have found puzzling is that Athanasius uses the term “consubstantial” only once,16 preferring to say that the Son was proper to the Father’s substance or the image of the Father’s substance, or offspring derived from His substance. His hesitation suggests that he was all too aware of the problems surrounding “substance.” It was not until the period 350–56 that he began to uphold the Nicene Creed as anti-Arian bulwark and to defend the concept of consubstantiality. His fabrication of what he claimed was Arian theology along with polemic against it continued into the late 350s. His work On the Synods of Rimini and Seleucia, composed in 359, expands on the contents of Thalia given in the Discourses, composed two decades earlier. Apparently framed in response to the creed discussed at these councils (see below) the new version now states explicitly that the Son is not equal to the Father, a claim absent from his earlier representation of Thalia’s errors and deficiencies.17 At a series of councils held at Antioch in the late 330s and early 340s, Eastern bishops upheld the canons of the Council of Nicæa, simultaneously trying to evolve a new formula that avoided substance terminology while remaining true to the less controversial aspects of the Nicene Creed. But Athanasius had succeeded in positioning himself in Western eyes as victim of a conspiracy between Eusebians and Arian heretics. The bishops in council at Antioch were accused by the West of being “followers of Arius.” They replied that they had readmitted Arius to communion and upheld the orthodoxy of 15  Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh, Early Arianism. A View of Salvation (London: SCM, 1981).

16  Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, ed. Schaff and Wace, 311: this translation uses “essence” rather than “substance” for ousia.

17  Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, ed. Schaff and Wace, 451–80 at 457.

Was Arius an Arian?  27

his and their own faith.18 Relations between the Eastern and Western parts of the Church became increasingly strained.19 In 343 a joint council of Eastern and Western bishops, convened at Serdica with the support of Emperors in both East and West, went disastrously wrong. The Eastern delegation believed they were there to discuss issues of authority and jurisdiction; the Westerners turned up with Athanasius and Marcellus in tow, evidently set on having them reinstated. The council split, producing two creeds. The “Eastern Creed” of Serdica echoed the theology recently developed at Antioch. A “Western Creed” of Serdica—issued as a supplement to or explication of Nicæa—anathematized two bishops from Illyricum who had been members of the “Mareotic Commission” as “adders sprung from the Arian asp.”20 With Western backing, Athanasius was re-instated as bishop of Alexandria in 346 in the face of opposition from many Eastern bishops. Western support allowed him to remain in office; but when the Eastern ruler Constantius II became sole emperor in 351, his position was again threatened. Not only was Constantius inclined to listen to the Eastern bishops, but he also suspected Athanasius of having treasonably communicated with the rebel Magnentius. A creed was issued at the Council of Sirmium (351) condemning twenty-seven unsatisfactory views of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Incarnation;21 the depositions were proclaimed of Marcellus’s disciple Photinus of Sirmium and—probably—of Athanasius himself. Constantius sent this round Western ecclesiastical councils for episcopal approval and applied pressure, first to Pope 18  www.fourthcentury.com/first-creed-of-antioch/. Accessed August 30, 2020.

19  Christopher W. Stephens, Canon Law and Episcopal Authority: The Canons of Antioch and Serdica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

20  www.fourthcentury.com/creed-of-the-western-serdicancouncil/ and www.fourthcentury.com/creed-of-the-eastern-councilof-serdica/. Accessed August 30, 2020.

21  www.fourthcentury.com/first-creed-of-sirmium/. Accessed August 30, 2020.

28  Chapter 1 Felix and then to Pope Liberius, to accept. Liberius gave in. In 356, Athanasius fled Alexandria, going into his “third exile.” During this “third exile,” Athanasius added yet another strand to his construction of Arianism: a sensational account of Arius’s death in a latrine. Around 358–59 he sent a letter to an Egyptian associate, Bishop Serapion of Thmuis, alleging that Arius had died in Constantinople on the point of being reconciled with the Church. He claimed that this proposed reconciliation had been engineered by the “party of Eusebius,” but was heroically resisted by Bishop Alexander of Constantinople who prayed to God to destroy Arius rather than allow him to be re-admitted to communion. And While Eusebius and his fellows threatened, the bishop prayed; but Arius who had great confidence in Eusebius and his fellows, and talked very wildly, urged by the necessities of nature withdrew; and suddenly, in the language of Scripture, “falling headlong he burst asunder in the midst” and immediately expired as he lay and was deprived both of communion and of his life together.22

The reference here is to the death of Judas Iscariot as described in Acts 1:18: “and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst and all his bowels gushed out.” Athanasius would repeat the story in a letter to the bishops of Egypt and Libya. As well as claiming that Arius had died before being readmitted to communion, the letters created an extraordinarily enduring heresiological trope. Arius—who had only set out to produce a clear demarcation between “mainstream” Christianity and its competitors—was now a betrayer of Christ on a par with Judas.

22  Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, ed. Schaff and Wace, 565.

Chapter 2

Entry-Level Christianity

In this chapter I want to show how new creeds, statements of belief, were formulated in the context of Gothic tribes entering the Roman Empire in an attempt to offer an “entry-level Christianity” that would make sense to them in terms both of their intuitions of divinity and of their relationship with their ancestors. I examine the way in which the “Homoian” Creed of Constantinople (360) emerged as an imperial solution not only to the problem of the Goths on the Danube frontier but also to the theological wrangling which had been taking place since the 340s over the problems created by the Nicene Creed. Moving on from the activities of Ulfila, the creator of a Gothic alphabet and Gothic Bible, the chapter then focuses on the misleading identification of the Creed of Constantinople as Arian and the way in which Homoianism was defeated in 381, to live on in pockets of the Roman Empire.

The Homoian Creed of Constantinople, 360 In 360, a new creed replaced the Nicene Creed of 325 as the official creed of the Empire. According to the Athanasian narrative this was an Arian creed, produced by two Arian bishops, with the backing of the Emperor Constantius II, who had been his enemy since the 340s. Despite considerable opposition from churchmen in both Eastern and Western Empire, the creed of 360 survived as the imperial creed—the Western Emperor Valentinian (364–75) and his brother Valens (Eastern

30  Chapter 2  Emperor 364–78) were both Arians. It is often assumed that Arianism spread to the Goths because large numbers of Tervingi Goths—some of whom may already been Christians— took the emperor’s religion when Valens permitted them to cross the Danube and settle inside the Empire in 376. Not only does this traditionally accepted outline build on Athanasius’s highly unreliable and ever-evolving version of events, but it also treats the Christianization of the Goths as an essentially top-down process, with no reference to their previous beliefs or possible reactions to attempts to present the Christian God to them. There are other ways of understanding the creed of 360. In part, it was framed to provide a replacement for the problematic universal creed produced at Nicæa in 325—and its replacements—by getting rid altogether of discussions of “substance” in relation to the Trinity. Using insights offered by the Cognitive Science of Religion, it is possible to see how it was also a response to pastoral and conversionary needs, as Constantius II attempted to secure the Empire’s Danube frontier not just through military victories but also through the Christianization of the Goths along this frontier. The creed offered for the approval of Western bishops at the Council of Rimini and Eastern bishops at the parallel Council of Seleucia in 359 and proclaimed at Constantinople in 360 was designed to describe the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in a way that would not just avoid discussions of “substance,” but also resonate with non-Christian intuitions of divinity and provide an entry-level Christianity for the Goths. What did the creed proclaimed at Constantinople in 360 say? We believe in one God, Father Almighty, from whom are all things. And in the only-begotten Son of God, begotten from God before all ages and before every beginning by whom all things were made, visible and invisible, and begotten as only-begotten, only from the Father only, God from God, like to the Father that begat him according to the Scriptures; whose origin no one knows except the Father alone who begat him. He as we acknowledge the only-begotten Son of God, the Father having sent him, he came here from the

Entry-Level Christianity  31

heavens, as it is written, for the undoing of sin and death and was born of the Holy Ghost, of Mary the virgin according to the flesh, as it is written and conversed with the disciples, and having fulfilled the whole Economy according to the Father’s will, was crucified and died and was buried, and descended to the parts below the earth, at whom hades itself shuddered; who also rose from the dead on the third day and abode with the disciples and forty days being fulfilled was taken up into the heavens and sits on the right hand of the Father to come in the last day of the resurrection, in the Father’s glory, that he may render to every man according to his works. And in the Holy Ghost, whom the only-begotten Son of God himself, Christ, our Lord and God, promised to send to the race of man, as Paraclete (Comforter), as it is written, “the Spirit of truth” which he sent to them when He had ascended into the heavens. But the name of “substance,” which was set down by the Fathers in simplicity and being unknown by the people, caused offense because the Scriptures do not contain it, it has seemed good to abolish, and for the future to make no mention of it at all; since the divine scriptures have made no mention of the substance of the Father and the Son. For neither ought “subsistence” be named concerning Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. But we say that the Son is like (Greek: homoion) the Father, as the Divine Scriptures say and teach; and all the heresies, both those which have been already condemned and whatever are of modern date, being contrary to this published statement, be they anathema.1

This is very different from the Nicene Creed. It mentions “substance” (Greek: ousia) only to dismiss it altogether as confusing for the masses: it was naively inserted into the Nicene Creed and is not founded in the Bible and therefore unscriptural. It also dismisses hypostasis, translated here as “subsistence,” a term often regarded as interchangeable 1  Adapted from www.fourthcentury.com/the-homoian-creed/. Accessed August 30, 2020.

32  Chapter 2  with substance/ousia at this period. Instead, it teaches that the Son was “like” the Father. The creed of 360 represents the end-product of discussions that had been ongoing since 357. Spearheaded by a small group led by two bishops from the Danubian region, Ursacius of Singidunum (modern Belgrade in Serbia) and Valens of Mursa (modern Osijek in Croatia). The Homoian creed of 360 and its forerunners, two creeds produced between 357 and 359 at councils held in the city of Sirmium (modern Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia), mark a paradigm-shift in credal statements. They differed in a number of important respects from the string of creeds produced in the 340s and early 350s in attempts to resolve the issues created by Nicæa and also by the Sabellian theology of Marcellus of Ancyra. The first result of these new initiatives was promptly labelled by opponents as the “Blasphemy of Sirmium.” It was created by a small council of bishops assembled at Sirmium near the Empire’s Danubian border in 357. Constantius II was campaigning in the region at the time and may even have attended the discussions. It looks more like a position paper than a creed; but it laid down some important parameters indicating its orientation towards an audience including potential converts. It banned the discussion of ousia or substance/essence as in homoousion (of the same substance) as unscriptural. It depicted something new: an obviously hierarchical Trinity in which the Father has no beginning and is greater than the Son who is clearly subordinated to him, while the Son in turn sends out the Holy Spirit to teach and sanctify. The so-called “Dated Creed” produced at Sirmium two years later repeated the idea that discussion of ousia should cease—the term being unscriptural, offensive, or a stumbling-block, confusing to the people. It also affirmed a hierarchical Trinity and, like the “Blasphemy,” affirmed that we cannot comprehend the unknowable nature of the generation of the Son. While the “Blasphemy” stressed that Christ had taken on a human body, the “Dated Creed” chose to emphasize his role in judgment and resurrection: the Son

Entry-Level Christianity  33

[…] was born of the virgin Mary, and conversed with the disciples, and fulfilled the Economy according to the Father’s will, and was crucified, and died and descended into the parts beneath the earth, and regulated the things there, whom the gate-keepers of hell saw and shuddered; and He rose from the dead the third day, and conversed with the disciples, and fulfilled all the Economy, and when the forty days were full, ascended into the heavens, and sits on the right hand of the Father, and is coming in the last day of the resurrection in the glory of the Father, to render to everyone according to his works.2

The idea that the Son will sit in judgment at the end of time appears in the Nicene Creed. But a new element is here: Christ’s descent into hell after his death where he “regulates the things there”—that is, he brings salvation to those in the “parts beneath the earth.” The chief promoters of these creeds, Ursacius and Valens, had become bishops in the 330s at a crucial period in the history of the Danube frontier, ushered in by Constantine the Great’s defeat of the Tervingi Goths in 332. According to Heather and Matthews, this marked the beginning of three decades during which the Empire’s policy in the region involved “the economic, military and political linkage of the Tervingi to the Roman state” (Goths in the Fourth Century, 20). Roman fortifications doubled as centres of trade, while cultural contacts included the appointment of Ulfila as bishop for Christians in Gothic territories. It was vital to imperial interests to keep the whole Danube border from west to east as peaceful as possible—especially during periods when the Persians threatened the eastern frontier of the Empire and there was a shortage of military manpower. The credal formulas promoted by Ursacius and Valens offered Constantius not only a potential solution to the problems created by Nicæa but also an approach to the Christianization of the Goths on the Danube frontier that took into account the differences between Germanic religions and Christianity. 2  www.fourthcentury.com/fourth-creed-of-sirmium-or-the-datedcreed/. Accessed August 30, 2020.

34  Chapter 2 

Intuitions of Gods The Cognitive Science of Religion indicates an intuition of supernatural beings common across many eras and cultures: the perception that the god who created the universe withdraws from regular dealings with humanity, leaving these to a hierarchy of lesser gods, spirits, and minor supernatural beings. The lower their level of divinity, the more they are likely to interact with mortals on an everyday basis. Our evidence for Gothic religion is fragmentary but it suggests that in common with other Germanic peoples they venerated deities whose importance and roles conformed to this model: a sky or creator god, *Tiwaz; possibly *Wodenaz; Nerthus a fertility goddess—who may or may not be identified with a goddess named Hreda or Hreða; and semi-divine ancestors, Anses. The Germanic peoples’ intuitions of the role and importance of these divinities would alter over the centuries: Tiw would metamorphose into the Germanic god of war, then the Scandinavian Tyr; Nerthus became the Scandinavian masculine divinity Njør∂r; and the Anses became Scandinavian Æsir, gods rather than ancestors. Woden and Oden, the later manifestations of *Wodenaz would overtake Tiw as supreme god.3 The hierarchical version of the Trinity presented by the creeds of 357–60 offered a cognitively attractive version of this difficult concept to the Goths. It was a representation designed to resonate with the intuition that the god who created the universe did not routinely concern himself with everyday existence, normally the preserve of subordinate entities. Its tiered picture of the delegation of the Son by the Father and his delegation in turn of the Spirit to help those on earth—not to mention the avoidance of any confusion created by issues of shared substance—could aid the task of conversion. In theory, it might also discourage the development of syncretistic forms of Christianity in which baptized Christians routinely turn to their old gods and spirits for help in everyday matters. 3  See Dunn, Belief and Religion, chap. 2. Asterisks mark hypothetical reconstructions of the early names of deities.

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Intuitions of Ancestors The Dated Creed’s introduction of the subject of Christ’s Descent to Hell and his activities there has been little discussed, except with reference to its basis in biblical texts (Matt. 12:40; Romans 10:7; 1 Peter 3:19 and 4:16) which suggest that after his death Jesus would visit the departed or the “heart of the earth”; or its possible connections to eastern liturgies. However, it has a clear significance in the context of the conversion of the Germanic peoples. CSR emphasizes the role played by ancestors in many religions worldwide. The spirits of the dead do not live in a differentiated afterlife, based on their conduct while alive: they are intuited as dwelling in a settlement or land of the dead, close to the world of the living. Finnish anthropologist Juha Pentikäinen encourages us to see the kin-group as extending below as well as above the ground.4 Intuition of the dead as part of the kin-group meant that the place of the unbaptized ancestors in the Christian afterlife was a vitally important question for potential converts from Germanic religions. (This is reflected as late as the eighth century in the tale of the pagan Frisian leader Radbod, portrayed as stepping back from the baptismal font when informed by a cleric that his non-baptized ancestors were, in Christian thinking, damned.) Some early Christian theologians had taught that, after his death, Christ had descended to Hell to convert or baptize all those who had lived before his coming. In referring to Christ’s descent into Hell, the creed implied the possibility of salvation for the unbaptized ancestor. The idea would be re-iterated in the so-called “Apostles’ Creed,” another creed associated with conversion and the frontiers of Christianity that divided Nicene clerical opinion: some held that Christ had only released the Old Testament prophets and patriarchs from Hell, so some versions of the Apostles’ Creed excised the “descent” section. Divisions about the correct approach continued for centuries: the English monk Boniface 4  Juha Pentikäinen, “The Dead Without Status,” Temenos 4 (1969): 92–102 at 95.

36  Chapter 2  denounced a missionary in eighth-century Germany who had taught that “Christ, descending to the lower world, set free all who were imprisoned there, believers and unbelievers, those who praised God and the worshippers of idols.” But his aim was to comfort potential converts with the thought that they might be re-united with their ancestors under the Christian dispensation— which was the aim of the Dated Creed and its successor, the Creed of 360.

Ulfila One of the bishops present at the 360 Council of Constantinople that endorsed the Homoian Creed was Ulfila, who had been consecrated bishop among the Christians of trans-Danubian Gothia in 341. Ulfila’s pastoral activity was backed by imperial authority as part of the general drive to increase Roman influence among the Goths after 332. But in the eyes of some Gothic leaders, Christianity was suspect as an arm of the Empire and after only seven years he and his followers were expelled from Gothic territory. Settled by Constantius II near Nicopolis in the province of Moesia Secunda, they carried on with their great project of creating an alphabet for the Gothic language and translating the Bible into Gothic. The Passion of Sabas, an account of the death of a Christian martyr in Gothia, mentions a priest able to cross the Danube and move out of Gothic territory during a period of persecution. This suggests that Ulfila’s group could also have continued to support the Christianization of the Goths from their base in imperial territory in the decades following their expulsion. Ulfila was the descendant of Christians from Cappadocia, captured by the Goths in the third century. There may have been bishops for Christians in Gothic territory before him: one possibly attended the Council of Nicæa in 325. There was even a schismatic group—the Audians—active in Gothia for a short period: expelled from the Empire at some time after 325, they appointed their own bishops and established monasteries, before being forced out by hostile Gothic leaders. Either because of these groups’ marginal position, or because

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Gothic society may have been relatively unstratified at this stage, the Gothic Christian vocabulary that was inherited by Ulfila did not attempt to assimilate to the values of high-status warriors (in marked contrast to the vocabulary developed by Anglo-Saxon churchmen in the seventh century). The account of the Goth Sabas’s martyrdom in the mid-fourth century suggests that he was a village dweller. This may have been the type of convert Ulfila took into Moesia with him ca. 348: the sixth-century East Roman writer Jordanes famously characterized the descendants of Ulfila’s Goths as poor and unwarlike pastoralists. But this did not mean that Ulfila wished to limit what had become a trans-Danubian mission. He may have encountered Homoian ideas before 360: there are indications that Valens and Ursacius were evolving a view of the Trinity that distinguished clearly between its three persons as early as the 340s, although they were based in western Danubian provinces, while Ulfila worked further to the east. But even if he first came into contact with them in 360, Ulfila recognized the advantages of presenting the Trinity in cognitively optimal terms. According to his pupil Auxentius of Durostorum, he was an energetic advocate of the view of the Trinity outlined in the Homoian Creed: […] the Father is for his part the creator of the creator while the Son is creator of all creation; and that the Father is God of the Lord, while the Son is God of the created universe […] […] the Holy Spirit our advocate can be called neither God nor Lord, but received its being from God through the Lord […] neither originator nor creator, but illuminator, sanctifier, teacher and leader, helper and petitioner and confirmer, minister of Christ and distributor of acts of grace […].5

Auxentius claimed that a personal confession of faith inscribed on Ulfila’s tombstone set out a similar view of the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And there are signs that 5  Heather and Matthews, Goths in the Fourth Century, 148–49.

38  Chapter 2  after 360, Christianity began to spread amongst high-status Goths: we know of the conversion of the Gothic leader Fritigern and of Gaatha, the consort of another Gothic chief, by the 370s and 380s. This level of society would have been attracted not only by the general appeal of a more intuitive version of the Trinity but also by the assurance that the souls of their ancestors were not eternally damned.

Homoianism as Arianism: “Adders Sprung from the Arian Asp” The driving force behind the identification of the Homoian Creed—along with its precursors and producers—as Arian, is the unreliable narrative of Athanasius in which he effectively invented Arianism for a second time. As in the case of his original crafting of a spurious Arian theology, it evolved over the years; once again, scholars have misread his writings as a coherent and credible narrative rather than a series of tendentious responses produced for specific audiences in an evolving situation. The main promoters of the Homoian creeds, Bishops Ursacius of Singidunum and Valens of Mursa were labelled as “adders sprung from the Arian asp” by the Western Council of Serdica in 343. This council of Western churchmen had swallowed wholesale the accounts of Athanasius and his ally of convenience, Marcellus of Ancyra, so it is not difficult to see not only the influence of Athanasius behind this description but also his motivation for suggesting it. The two bishops had been part of the “Mareotic Commission” sent by the Council of Tyre in 335 to investigate the allegations of violence against Athanasius’s agents, so their condemnation in 343 looks suspiciously like the product of his desire to avenge his first deposition. Ursacius and Valens always denied any connection with Arius but were compelled to apologize to Athanasius by Pope Julius I. (The apology was later retracted.) The Council of Serdica accused them of teaching that the persons of the Trinity were of different substances—not even what Athanasius had originally accused Arius of saying, but

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just possibly a distorted version of their early attempts to explain the complexities of the triune God to an audience that included Tervingi Goths—and of a variant, opaquely expressed theology, in which Word and Holy Spirit suffered, died and rose again. In 356 Athanasius alleged in an encyclical letter to the Egyptian bishops that Ursacius and Valens had been instructed by Arius as young men: this has been accepted as a reality, occurring during Arius’s exile (often stated, without any supporting evidence, to have been to Sirmium). The Athanasian narrative is responsible for scholarly representations of Ursacius and Valens as theological weathercocks trimming to the wind of imperial favour, or as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the Arian Controversy. In 359 Athanasius began his work On the Synods of Ariminum and Seleucia even before these councils, set up by the Emperor Constantius II to approve a new creed, had run their entire course: it labels the creed and its promoters as Arian and heretical. It also presents Athanasius’s highly questionable second version of the contents of Arius’s Thalia. This— unlike his earlier denunciation—makes the explicit claim that Arius had said the Son was not equal to the Father: in other words, he is expanding his early version of Arius’s theology to make it conform more closely to the Homoian definition.

An Imperial Creed Constantius II aimed not just to produce a creed that that would aid in the consolidation of the Danube frontier but one which would finally—after a number of failed attempts in the 340s and 50s—replace the Nicene Creed as a creed for the entire Empire. This was no easy task: rather than prioritizing the conversion of the Goths, many Eastern bishops wanted to continue the line of credal and theological discussion initiated in the 340s. When the Dated Creed was under discussion in 359, Constantius attempted to placate a group of Eastern bishops, who argued that Father and Son were “of like substance” (homoiousios) by insisting that it had to include the affirmation that the Son was like the Father, “in

40  Chapter 2  all respects.” Athanasius’s On the Synods also indicates the importance of this Homoiousian group. Although they were later categorized by the fourth-century heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis as “semi-Arians,” we find Athanasius for the first time failing to suggest that a theology which differed from his was Arianism and advocating reconciliation with them (another indication of their importance). But the phrase “like in all respects” was unacceptable to the Homoians. So Constantius tried a fresh tactic, hoping to outmanoeuvre the Homoiousians by setting up separate councils at which Eastern and Western bishops could discuss a new creed. However, by the time he finally pushed the Western bishops at Rimini into accepting a Homoian creed which did not contain the offending expression, the Eastern Council at Seleucia had already broken up. Later Western pro-Nicene writers, such as Hilary of Poitiers and Jerome claimed that there had been a “fraud of Rimini,” when Valens of Mursa affirmed that he had never been an Arian and that God the Son was not a creature like others.6 Jerome would perpetuate the idea of Arian conspiracy claiming, in his Dialogue Against the Luciferians that after the proclamation of the Creed of Niké–Constantinople in 360, “The whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian.”

Was Ulfila a Eunomian? Eunomianism is named for Eunomius, one of the leaders of a group that drew on both neo-Platonic and Aristotelian thought to express, in highly technical philosophical terms, the idea that Father and Son were of different substances. Eunomians have been unhelpfully characterized in modern works as “neo-Arian”—a term that says more about the influence of Athanasius’s construction of Arianism than about their actual theology. Some French and Italian scholars of an earlier generation characterized Ulfila’s theology as 6  See Daniel Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the End of the NiceneArian Conflicts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) 28–34.

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Eunomian and this assertion has recently been revisited in English-language scholarship.7 But the only historical source to suggest that Ulfila was a Eunomian was the fifth-century historian Philostorgius, a Eunomian himself, also responsible for the claim that Ulfila did not translate the Old Testament books of Kings as they were too full of warlike deeds for the militaristic Goths. Although there are similarities between the end product of Homoian and Eunomian theologies—in that both rejected the idea of shared substance in God the Father and God the Son—it is extremely hard to see the practical appeal to a missionary like Ulfila, let alone to illiterate non-Christians, of theology based on neo-Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and expressed through syllogisms. It is true that Eunomianism is not listed among the long list of beliefs which Ulfila’s pupil Auxentius said he condemned. In fact, this list reflects clearly Ulfila’s Homoian and missionary priorities. He denounced all groups—Manichaeans, Marcionites, Montanists, Paulinians, Sabellians, Anthropiani, Patripassiani, Homoousians, Homoiousians and Macedonians—that professed identity of divine substance. He also rejected the beliefs of the Novatians and Donatists, groups that took a hard line on those who lapsed in times of persecution: such rigorism would have been very unhelpful in the conversion of the trans-Danubian Goths, where Christian converts had frequently been subjected to persecution by pagan leaders. If Eunomians do not appear in the list, it is probably because Ulfila regarded them as less of a problem on account of the highly technical nature of their theology and their outright rejection of the idea of shared substance. 7  Roger Gryson, Scolies ariennes sur le concile d’Aquilée, Sources Chrétiennes 267 (Paris: Cerf, 1980), 175; Manlio Simonetti, “L’arianesimo di Ulfila,” Romanobarbarica 1 (1976): 297–323; Sara Parvis, “Was Ulfila Really a Homoian?,” in Arianism, ed. Berndt and Steinacher, 49–65. But see also Richard Paul Vaggione, Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 286–87.

42  Chapter 2 

The Defeat of Homoianism Constantius’s religious settlement aimed to cover too many bases and had been achieved only by extensive manoeuvring. Unsurprisingly, it began to unravel very quickly. He died in 361 and this unravelling was encouraged by his successor Julian “the Apostate” who had abandoned Christianity in favour of traditional Roman religion and was only too happy to let Christian groups war amongst themselves. In the Western Empire, Homoianism was strongest in the Balkan provinces along the Danube where it had originated, Pannonia and Moesia. Other prominent Western supporters included the aged Ossius of Cordoba—who is thought to have presided over Nicæa in 325 and possibly over the Western Council of Serdica in 343—along with Potamius of Lisbon and Auxentius, bishop of Milan. Ossius’s change of mind has been represented as a consequence of imperial pressure, but it is possible that he recognized the value of the Homoian creed as an aid to Christianization and a solution to the Nicene problem of substance. Elsewhere there was little depth of support for the 360 Creed and Hilary of Poitiers in Gaul and Eusebius of Vercelli in Italy began to campaign against it even before Constantius died. Hilary persuaded the bishops attending the Council of Paris of 360/61 to accept the Nicene Creed instead and to depose Homoian bishops. In Italy, any bishop who accepted the Creed of 360 was pardoned and allowed to retain his see, if he affirmed Nicæa. The most notable Italian Homoian bishop was Auxentius who had been appointed by Constantius II to the huge diocese of Milan back in 355. He held out in the face of attack from Nicenes until his death in 374; but he was then succeeded by the fiercely pro-Nicene Ambrose. Although there were Homoian bishops of Constantinople, it is not at all clear that in the two decades following 360 Homoianism was even the majority creed in the East. Eunomians, Nicenes, Homoiousians and other groups competed with each other, often appointing rival bishops in the same city. The Eastern Emperor Valens (364–78), a Homoian from

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Pannonia, began by deposing some Homoiousian bishops, then retreated to a more neutral position, before launching a persecution of non-Homoians in the last five years of his reign. The position of Homoianism as the official imperial creed became more and more precarious as a result of military and political developments. The Tervingi Goths admitted to the Empire in 376 were unhappy at their subsequent exploitation and mistreatment by the imperial government. They revolted in 378, inflicting a massive defeat on imperial forces at the battle of Adrianople in which the Emperor Valens was killed. They then defeated his successor Theodosius in 380. These disasters meant that the enemies of Homoianism— notably Ambrose of Milan—could denounce it as a calamity for the Empire. Theodosius (379–95) began to legislate against anyone who did not accept the Nicene Creed and deposed the Homoian bishop of Constantinople. He then called the Council of Constantinople of 381, which endorsed the so-called “Nicene–Constantinopolitan Creed.” This was far from a straightforward reiteration of the Creed of 325. The Eastern bishop and theologian Basil of Cæsarea (d. 379) played a key role in retrofitting Nicene Christianity, proposing that God should be regarded as a single ousia—substance—but with three distinct hypostases—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. At one time, the term hypostasis had often been loosely equated with ousia. Now it was interpreted as properties or characteristics, forming part of a definition which distanced itself from any problematic suggestion that the Son was an emanation of matter. While the 381 creed contains the homoousion, it removes the statement that the Son is “from the ousia of the Father.” It also amplifies Nicæa’s very cursory reference to the Holy Spirit and drops the anathemas denouncing the beliefs found unacceptable in 325. The 381 Council of Constantinople also ruled that […] it is fitting that the churches established among the barbarian peoples (in barbaricis gentibus) be governed

44  Chapter 2  according to the custom that was instituted by the fathers (consuetudinem quae est patribus instituta).8

In effect this conceded the continuation of Homoianism amongst the Goths with a view to using them as soldiers of the Empire. The following year, Goths were settled by treaty in the Empire, given lands to farm, and allowed to maintain their own laws. Ulfila and the Moesians were now effectively marginalized, rather than being members of an official imperial Church. Ulfila’s journey to Constantinople shortly before his death to attend Theodosius’s 383 “Conference of the Sects” was probably made with the intention of fighting for the restoration of his beliefs as the imperial creed. Homoian Gothic troops were stationed outside the Eastern capital and John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople at the turn of the century, tried to convert them fearing that they would make common cause with any remaining Homoians in the city. He assigned them Nicene clergy and a church—which was burned down in the riots of 400 that accompanied the defeat of the Gothic general Gainas, by another Goth, Fravitta.

Homoians in the Empire after 381 Once the creed of 360 had been replaced, its followers were known by the label Athanasius had applied to the founders of Homoian theology—they were Arians, followers of an individual heresiarch. Along with Eunomians, they now found themselves defined as heretics in imperial legislation and were forbidden to assemble or teach. Later in 381, Ambrose of Milan—who had already managed to remove the Homoian bishop of Sirmium—engineered the condemnation, at a council held in Aquileia, of two Homoian bishops from the Danu8  Concilium Constantinpolitanum, ed. Adolf Martin Ritter, 1:381, canon 2, in Conciliorum oecumenicorum generaliumque decreta: editio critica, Vol. 1, The Oecumenical Councils from Nicæa I to Nicæa II (325–787), ed. Giuseppi Alberigo, Adolf Martin Ritter, Luise Abramowski, Ekkehard Mühlenberg, and Pietro Conte (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 65.

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bian provinces, Palladius of Ratiraria and Secundianus of Singidunum. Palladius quite justifiably questioned the legality of the proceedings and repeatedly denied that he had any connection with Arius. What did it mean to be a Homoian in the Empire after 381, when imperial laws forbade Arians, Eunomians, and other groups the right of assembly and aimed at the social exclusion of heretics? In practice, this depended on who and where you were. Despite recurrent imperial legislation forbidding them to meet, a community of Constantinopolitan Homoians, the Exakionites, headed by a bishop, managed to survive outside the Constantinian walls. For a time, it may have been protected by the rise to power of the Alanic–Gothic generalissmo Aspar, who served under three emperors and was patron of the Anastasia Church inside the city, where the Gospel was preached in Gothic on feast-days. A Homoian community in Constantinople led by its own bishops survived his downfall in 471. There were still Homoians in Constantinople in the sixth century: but by then the overwhelming majority were barbarian soldiers, including the Herules mentioned by the East Roman historian Procopius as part of the expeditionary force sent to reconquer Vandal North Africa in the 530s.9 In Illyricum the Empire was slow to replace the Homoian bishops deposed thanks to the efforts of Ambrose, so Homoianism was not completely extinguished. In 427/28 in North Africa, Augustine of Hippo debated with one Maximinus, who had arrived in Africa as Homoian chaplain to Gothic troops under an imperial commander. Augustine identifies him, without giving further details, as a bishop. Maximinus clearly had strong links with Illyricum and is a very important source for our knowledge of Homoianism. Over ten years after his encounter with Augustine, he compiled a series of 9  Geoffrey Greatrex, “Justin I and the Arians,” in Papers Presented at the Thirteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 1999: Historica, biblica, theologica et philosophica, ed. Maurice Wiles and Edward Yarnold, Studia Patristica 34 (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 72–81.

46  Chapter 2  Homoian texts: an account of the 381 Council of Aquileia at which Palladius and Secundianus were condemned; Palladius’s own reaction to the proceedings and to Ambrose of Milan’s treatise On Faith; and Auxentius of Durostorum’s account of Ulfila’s life, teachings, and final journey to the 383 “Conference of Sects.” Maximinus invented details of his own, making Palladius and Secundianus travel to Constantinople with Ulfila and inferring that the conference had been aborted because of the machinations of Ambrose of Milan. One theory is that Maximinus had returned to Illyricum when he put together this collection.10 We know that the region fell under Hunnic control for several decades in the fifth century and its isolation from the rest of the Empire may have permitted the precarious survival of some Homoian bishops, churches, and Latin Homoian texts. In the late 1990s, as part of his thesis that Ostrogothic and Roman identities were ideological constructs, Patrick Amory asserted (People and Identity, 246) that “patchy evidence of Arian continuity” persisted in late fifth-century Italy. This cannot be sustained. An apparent Homoian revival in Northern Italy under Valentinian II in the later 380s was short-lived. The young emperor along with his mother Justina, a Homoian, and a contingent of Gothic troops, made his court in Milan, where they ran into opposition from Ambrose. At one stage Valentinian attempted to guarantee freedom of worship to those who accepted the creed of 360 but was soon compelled to back down. What Amory has actually found were not surviving communities of Latin Homoians, but churches in Rome and Ravenna used by fifth-century Homoian barbarian generals, such as Ricimer and Odoacer, and their troops. Finally, we know of some Latin Arians in North Africa early in the fifth century: but their importance is magnified dispro10  Neil McLynn, “From Palladius to Maximinus: Passing the Arian Torch,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 no. 4 (1996): 477–93. Roland J. Teske, Arianism and Other Heresies, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century 18 (Hyde Park: New City, 1995), 175-336.

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portionately because they appear in the writings of Augustine of Hippo. At some time between 410 and 427, Augustine composed a refutation of an “Arian Sermon” of unknown origin;11 he instructed a North African convert from Homoianism; and he also debated and corresponded with Pascentius, an imperial tax-collector who held Homoian views. Tellingly, when challenged during the debate, Pascentius hastily condemned Arius (and Eunomius) and panicked at Augustine’s use of stenographers to record proceedings, suspecting that he was being set up for prosecution. In these cases, in contrast to his encounter with Maximinus, who was chaplain to Gothic soldiers, Augustine was dealing with either texts or laypeople: there is no trace of any continuing Roman Homoian hierarchy in North Africa any more than there is in Italy. After 381, the only officially tolerated Homoianism in the Western Empire was that of barbarian troops.

11  Teske, Arianism and Other Heresies, 119-71.

Map 1. Europe, 476 CE.

Map 2. Europe, 533–534 CE.

Chapter 3

Barbarian Homoianism after 381

This chapter deals with the entry of barbarian groups into the Roman Empire in the early fifth century and the evolution of Homoianism (i.e., what opponents called “Arianism”) in the emergent barbarian kingdoms. It examines the way in which barbarian Homoianism developed socio-political dimensions as it was used to signify hegemony, military service and reward, and ties of loyalty, considering both its relationship to the practice of re-baptism of Nicene Christians (i.e., those who followed the Nicene Creed and are conventionally considered “Catholic”) and to gender. Then it focuses on what we know of the barbarian Homoian Churches: their language, liturgy, way of dating Easter, relic cult, funerary rituals and finally their organization.

Who Were the Barbarians? In 381 Goths in the empire were permitted to follow their own form of Christianity and in 382 they were formally settled by treaty in imperial territory. But in 395 the Gothic leader Alaric rebelled against the Empire, harassing the Balkans in the late 390s, and sacking Rome in 410. In 406/7, large groups of barbarians—Vandals, Alans, Sueves, and (possibly) Burgundes— breached the Rhine frontier and headed across Gaul into Hispania. After Alaric’s death in Italy, his forces turned northwards and also entered Gaul. Under the leadership of Wallia, they became imperial agents, inflicting a massive defeat on

52  Chapter 3  the Siling Vandals and Alans in 418. The Sueves retreated to Gallæcia in northwestern Iberia and the Alans, after the death of their leader Addax, allied themselves with the Hasding Vandals. The Goths were rewarded with federate status by the Empire: settled in southwestern Gaul in the 420s they gradually created what became the Visigothic kingdom, centred on Toulouse and the Garonne valley. Later in the fifth century the Visigoths staged military interventions in the Iberian Peninsula, before the Franks inflicted a crushing defeat on Alaric II at the battle of Vouillé in 507. Visigoths had already begun to settle in Spain in the fifth century; and after Vouillé, a Visigothic state centred on Spain and the southern Gallic province of Septimania began to take shape. Meanwhile, in 429, Hasding Vandals and Alans under Geiseric, along with some Sueves, Goths, and Hispano-Romans, crossed from southern Spain to North Africa. In 435 they were granted federate status by the imperial government in the provinces of Numidia and Mauretania; a treaty of 442 allowed them to settle in the two north African provinces of Africa Proconsularis and Byzacena. The Burgundes, composed of groups who had been infiltrating eastern Gaul since the 430s, were formally established there after a heavy defeat in 435 by Hunnic forces working for the Empire; subsequently they were given new and better lands in the Alpine territory of Sapaudia. Further east, Gothic-led military groupings emerged from the wreckage of the Hunnic empire after the death of Attila in the 450s. Thracian Goths under Theoderic “the Squinter” were eventually absorbed by the Pannonian Goths under Theoderic “the Amal,” creating the group we know as the Ostrogoths. In 489, the Ostrogoths were invited into Italy by the Empire to deal with Odoacer, the barbarian general who had deposed the last western Emperor in 476. Theoderic replaced him in 493; and the Ostrogoths along with the remnants of the Rugi, originally from Noricum, settled in Italy. All these names—Goth, Vandal, Sueve, etc.—can be regarded as conveying one of two things. Ethnogenesis theory presents them as indicators of the fusion of barbarian bands that did not necessarily share a common ancestry but

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  53

accepted a “core of [Gothic/Sueve/Vandal] tradition” under a charismatic leader. Ethnogenesis theory has certainly had the fortunate effect of propelling historians away from older biologically deterministic ideas of ethnicity towards acceptance that ethnicities and identities are socially constructed. However, it may be less satisfactory as an explanation of state formation. Appellations such as Goth, Vandal, or Sueve can also be interpreted as imprecise, generalized labels applied by Romans to barbarians: the familiar division of the Goths into Visigoths and Ostrogoths originates with the sixth-century East Roman writer and apologist of the Goths, Jordanes. But we can still catch glimpses of smaller-scale associations: Greuthingi and Tervingi (Goths), Silings and Hasdings (Vandals).1 As the barbarians settled inside Roman territory, charismatic leaders or (hypothetical) “cores of tradition” were not necessarily sufficient in themselves to hold together emergent kingdoms. All these groups were, or became, Homoian Christians. The Visigoths are seen as the vector for the spread of Homoianism but the actual process of transmission is generally passed over or framed in vague terms: “spread”; “unknown contexts.” A comparative approach to their conversion of other groups, however, helps us see the stages by which it occurred and the way in which Homoianism developed political and social aspects.

Homoianism and Hegemony At the battle of Pollentia in 402, Alaric appears to have been leading a Christian army, ambushed at dawn while celebrating the Easter vigil. Did this mean that his troops were 1  See discussion and bibliography in Andrew Gillett, “Ethn­ ogenesis: A Contested Model of Early Medieval Europe,” History Compass 4, no. 2 (2006): 241–60; Walter Pohl, “Ethnicity, Theory and Tradition: A Response,” in On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Middle Ages, ed. Andrew Gillett (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 221–39.

54  Chapter 3  all Homoian “treaty Goths”? Or had he already forced any pagans or Nicene Christians who joined his forces in the Balkans to accept his form of Christianity? We cannot tell. But as the Visigoths emerged first as imperial allies, then federates settled within the Empire’s borders, and finally as effectively independent powers, their leaders imposed their religion on leaders of other groups they wished to dominate, using their own form of Christianity in a political sense as a signifier of hegemony. Before their encounter with the Visigoths, barbarian warlords who entered the Empire had faced a choice that did not involve Homoianism: they could either remain pagan, like the Sueve Hermeneric and the Vandal Gunderic, or, in the case of ambitious dynasts like the latter’s half-brother Geiseric, opt for baptism as Nicene Christians. The choice of Nicene Christianity sprang from a perception of the Christian God as the God of a mighty and wealthy Empire, whose cult had the potential to bring victory and riches: in other words, he was viewed within the same framework as the pagan deities of the Germanic peoples. Leaders who made this choice initially viewed it as a strategy for personal advancement and practised a syncretistic Christianity in which the veneration of the Christian God was added to a pre-existing range of cults. The eastern ecclesiastical historian Socrates claims that early in the fifth century several thousand Burgundian warriors— he does not name their leader(s)—had themselves baptized by a Gallic bishop, believing that this would bring them success against the Huns. Socrates also describes a very short period of fasting and instruction before they received baptism and headed off to fight the Huns, indicating a plausibly minimal level of Christianization.2 But such perceptions and choices did not survive contact with the Visigoths. The Visigoths attempted to establish hegemony over the leaders of the Sueves, Vandals, and Burgundes—whether pagan or Nicene—by making them accept Homoian Christian2  Socrates, Sozomenus: Church Histories, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., 2 (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1999), 169–70.

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  55

ity. They followed a pattern familiar to us from a later date: in conversion period Anglo-Saxon England a ruler would accept the baptismal sponsorship of a more powerful king, also becoming his relative by marriage. In Gallæcia, the northwest part of Iberia, the pagan Sueve leader Hermeneric (d. 441) was compelled to marry his son Rechila to the daughter of the Visigothic leader Wallia. But while Rechila (d. 448) accepted a Visigothic bride, he tried to signal his independence from the Aquitanian Visigoths by becoming a Nicene Christian. His death was followed by a period of anarchy: in 465, his grandson Remismund emerged as leader with Visigothic backing, receiving both a Visigothic wife and the Homoian form of Christianity. The Visigoths also imposed Homoianism on the Vandal leader Geiseric, who had previously accepted Nicene baptism, at some time between 418 and 422. His son Huniric was betrothed to a Visigothic princess. Finally, around 456 and in terms reminiscent of Rome’s dealings with client kings, the Visigothic ruler Theoderic II of Aquitaine “received” the Burgundian leader Gundioc into “society and friendship,” an event likely to have been accompanied by the acceptance of Homoianism. The Visigoths’ political use of Homoianism makes it very difficult to accept the suggestion that Clovis, the pre-eminent Frankish leader in the late fifth and early sixth century had been tempted to abandon paganism for Homoianism. He maintained his independence of Alaric II of Aquitaine, a Visigothic king, going on to defeat him at the battle of Vouillé in 507. When Bishop Avitus of Vienne wrote to congratulate him on his baptism as a Nicene Christian he mentioned his avoidance of unnamed schismatic Christianities, making no reference to Arianism.

The Bonds of Homoianism Homoianism was not merely a signifier of hegemony or external alliances. Homoian Christianity was introduced to warriors by leaders who had learned its political uses from the Visigoths and then went on to employ it as one means

56  Chapter 3  of creating unity amongst the discrete ethnicities, fissile coalitions and sometimes mutually hostile groups they were attempting to rule. In 429, Geiseric led a mixed group of Vandals and Alans along with some Sueves and Goths, as well as Hispano-Romans, across the Straits of Gibraltar. The Sarmatian Alans (originally nomads from the region of modern Iran) had until recently been pastoralists on the Danube frontier, but had played a significant part in the crossing of the Rhine frontier and in the division of the Spanish provinces, before the loss of their leader Addax led them to join forces with the Vandals. Over the next twelve to thirteen years Geiseric’s forces forged eastward across North Africa, capturing Carthage in 439 and making a treaty with the Empire in 442. Homoianism not only linked the Vandals and Goths under his leadership but as an “entry-level” Christianity provided means of absorbing pagan Sueves and Alans. The title “King of the Vandals and Alans,” was used by his son Huniric and revived by Gelimir, the last Vandal ruler of North Africa: Procopius later claimed that the Alans “and all other barbarians, except the Moors” were united under Vandal rule. Historians locate the origins of the Burgundians in groupings that began to settle in imperial territory in Eastern Gaul from the 430s onwards. It is not clear how many were connected to the Burgundian warriors who earlier converted to Nicene Christianity: even if there were some links, it is doubtful that perception of Christ as a mighty God of war would have survived the mid-430s, when a Burgundian army was wiped out by the Hunnic allies of the Empire. When the Visigothic ruler Theoderic II of Aquitaine intervened in Burgundian settlement inside the Empire in 456, the Burgundes are likely to have been a mixture of pagans with some Nicene Christians and Homoianism had the potential to create greater unity under the rule of Gundioc. In Gallæcia, the recognition of Remismund as ruler in 465 ended a long period of violent anarchy amongst the mostly pagan Sueves (we know the names of four other individuals who had previously aspired to rule them). Remismund imported a “senior Arian” (and

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  57

Nicene apostate) from Aquitaine to convert the Sueves to Homoian Christianity. It is impossible to tell how many of the groups eventually known to us by the collective label Ostrogoths were either descendants of Goths Christianized in the fourth century or became Homoians during the groupings and manoeuvrings of the period ca. 450 to ca. 480. (But Homoian baptism could have helped them assimilate surviving remnants of the Hunnic forces after the collapse of Attila’s empire in the 450s.)

Homoianism and Military Service Homoianism was intertwined with the military settlements underpinning individual barbarian kingdoms. In North Africa, the Nicene chronicler Victor of Vita claimed that Geiseric divided up the Proconsular Province as “an allotted portion for his people,” an allusion to 1 Chronicles 16:18: “to you I will give the land of Canaan as the portion you will inherit.”3 As we shall see, Victor’s account of the reigns of Geiseric and his son Huniric is overwhelmingly hostile: but the biblical reference points to the perception of a connection between religion and the allocation of the so-called sortes Vandalorum or “Vandal shares” to Vandal and Alan military. Made up of lands confiscated from Romano-African landowners and the Nicene Church and exempt from taxes, these were passed on in return for military service to the Homoian warrior élite and their dependents. We need to remember that we are dealing with relatively small numbers of incomers nested among much larger populations. Writing after 484, Victor cites a figure of eighty thousand males as arriving in North Africa, adding that “now their number is small and feeble”: his original figure is thought to be exaggerated.4 In Africa, the military élite was concentrated in the Proconsular province, while in Ostrogothic Italy, 3  Victor of Vita: History of the Vandal Persecution, trans. John Moorhead (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992), 7.

4  Victor of Vita, trans. Moorhead, 3; Merrills and Miles, Vandals, 48.

58  Chapter 3  historians estimate there were fifty to sixty thousand fighting men unevenly distributed over a wide area from the north to Naples.5 In these circumstances, musters, where equipment was inspected and booty distributed and which had always played a very important part in the relationship between leaders and armies, would have been of great significance. It is difficult to imagine that such occasions had not originally been accompanied by sacrifices to a god of war, now replaced by a Homoian benediction. In early sixth-century Burgundy, the Nicene Bishop Avitus of Vienne refers to an “annual contagion” at which his enemies and those of the Nicene Sigismund, son of Gundobad (473–516), assembled. Usually taken to mean an annual synod of the Homoian Church in Burgundy, this sounds more like an annual military muster accompanied by a religious ritual.6 In Ostrogothic Italy, Theoderic summoned warriors from the scattered Ostrogothic settlements in Italy to Ravenna, Pavia, and Verona for inspection and distribution of donatives (money payments). Was the identification between military service and Homoianism for élite warrior males so strong that conversion to Nicene Christianity could lead to loss of military status and reward? Victor of Vita suggests apostasy by individuals involved in the military–political nexus could have serious consequences. He tells the tale of Armogas, a Vandal who had become a Nicene Christian and therefore suffered torture together with a very public loss of military status, condemned to digging ditches for vines and herding cows. Victor’s story may find confirmation if we look at other Homoian kingdoms. Although in 1997 Patrick Amory attempted to suggest that it was possible for Ostrogothic men to opt for Nicene Christianity, his own evidence (People and Identity, 476-77) does not bear this out. Of the very small number of male Goths he 5  The Ostrogoths, ed. Barnish and Marazzi, 38 (Heather), 67 (Ausenda).

6  Avitus of Vienne: Letters and Selected Prose, trans. Danuta Shanzer and Ian Wood (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), 231.

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  59

is able to identify as Catholic, some had entered the Nicene Church. Others seem to be Goths who settled in Italy before the arrival of Theoderic and the Ostrogoths. And if we accept current models of service and reward in Theodoric’s Italy,7 the remaining (very) few could have been beyond the age of military service, having passed on their military obligations, along with associated lands and donatives, to their sons, while they themselves lived on purchased land. It is also striking that in sixth-century Spain, the prominent Gothic converts John of Biclar and Masona of Mérida both became Nicene ecclesiastics.

Re-Baptism The political dimension developed by barbarian Homoianism is nowhere more evident than in the practice of the re-baptism of Nicene Christians. Previous discussion of Homoian re-baptism has focused on the Vandal kingdom and been framed in the context of the rigorist third-century North African Christian group known as the Donatists.8 The Donatists re-baptized individuals originally christened by bishops who had handed over scriptures during state persecution of Christianity. They were condemned in 411 and the concept of re-baptism was rejected by the Church. But re-baptism as practised by the Vandals and other Homoians had nothing to do with sacramental issues: whatever form it took it was an important public, ritual indicator of political and social allegiance or submission. Originally imposed on major leaders as a signifier of hegemony, once Homoianism was introduced in individual kingdoms, it would also have become a require7  Guy Halsall, “The Ostrogothic Military,” in A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy, ed. Jonathan J. Arnold, M. Shane Bjornlie, and Kristina Sessa (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 173–99.

8  For instance, Eric Fournier, “Rebaptism as a Ritual of Cultural Integration in North Africa,” in Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity, ed. David Brakke, Deborah M. Deliyannis, and Edward Watts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 243–54.

60  Chapter 3  ment for any warriors who had previously been baptized as Nicenes. It was also used to signify loyalty and allegiance across ethnic or cultural boundaries. As early as 437–40, Geiseric executed a number of Italo-Romans in Sicily as well as four advisers who had accompanied him from Spain because they refused to signal their loyalty through becoming Homoians. Victor of Vita vividly represents his politicized use of re-baptism by an account of his supposed dealings with the renegade Count Sebastian, who turned up at his court in the 340s after fleeing Spain. Geiseric demands that […] so that your friendship may always remain linked with us and constant, I have resolved in the presence of our bishops, that you are to become a follower of the religion which we and our people venerate.9

Sebastian’s deflection of this request with a clever reply is of no avail: Geiseric later has him killed. According to Victor, Geiseric’s other targets for re-baptism included a prominent Romano-African actor Mascula and Saturus, the superintendent of his son Huniric’s household—so for non-Vandals, it appears that Homoianism signified a bond of loyalty rather than specifically military service. Although Victor highlights the resistance of these individuals to Geiseric’s threats, the exiled Nicene Bishop Quodvultdeus of Carthage worried about the seductions of Vandal power for his congregation, implying that some ambitious locals may have chosen to change religion voluntarily. But instances of enforced re-baptism or pressure to convert hint at fluctuating political tensions in the Vandal kingdom. At one point, Geiseric decreed that only Homoians were to be permitted to serve at his and his sons’ courts. This regulation seems to have been relaxed when Huniric came to the throne, only to be suddenly reversed later in his reign when any Nicene member of the royal household who attended their church dressed in court clothing was brutally and publicly mal9  Victor of Vita, trans. Moorhead, 9–10.

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  61

treated. There are indications of the equation of Homoianism with loyalty further down the social scale. One of Victor’s stories concerns a millenarius or commander who tried to force his armourer, originally a slave, to convert and to marry another slave who was head of his household and who was also put under extreme pressure to convert. Behind this gory and convoluted tale may lie an offer of liberation and promotion in an attempt to create links of dependence that crossed ethnic divisions. Although the bulk of references to Homoian re-baptism of non-barbarians come from North Africa, especially after 484, there are indications that it played a role in internal politics elsewhere. We lack evidence for the Aquitanian Visigothic state. But while there is no trace of re-baptisms in Ostrogothic Italy itself, it may have been practised by Goths in the Balkans in the later fifth century. In the sixth century, Nicene Churches in Burgundy (517), Gallæcia (538), and Visigothic Spain (546) all made arrangements for the re-admission of the re-baptized. Significantly, Spain and, by implication, Gallæcia, differentiated between voluntary and coerced rebaptism. In Spain—where the Church also attempted to limit public social contacts with those who had undergone re-baptism, decreeing that Nicenes should not eat with them—individuals who had their sons baptized as “heretics” were to be penalized, an indication that Hispano-Romans were placing their children in the service of the ruling Visigothic élite.10 We cannot quantify the extent of re-baptisms in the Homoian kingdoms let alone the relative proportions of coerced and voluntary conversions. But we might assume that the former was more characteristic of times of political tension—not necessarily just 10  Concilia Galliae A.511–A.695, ed. Charles de Clercq (Turnhout: Brepols, 1963), 31; Martini Episcopi Bracarensis Opera omnia, ed. Claude W. Barlow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 292; Concilios Visigóticos e Hispano-Romanos, ed. and trans. José Vives, Tomás Marín Martínez, and Gonzalo Martínez Díez (Barcelona and Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1963), 57–59.

62  Chapter 3  between barbarian incomers and indigenous populations, but also between sections of the ruling barbarian élites. The significance of re-baptism drew heavily on its symbolic ritual performance. The rite itself may have changed with time and location. For North Africa, Victor of Vita refers consistently to “sprinkling”—aspersion—rather than the usual baptismal methods of immersion or affusion (pouring): but this may be an attempt to excuse the re-baptized, as he suggests that many had been aspersed against their will. In Visigothic Spain it possibly consisted of a full baptism by immersion. Gregory of Tours’ dramatic, possibly fictitious, tale of the Frankish princess Ingund’s resistance to Homoian re-baptism when she married into the Spanish ruling family has her being thrown into a baptismal pool.11 Her father-inlaw King Liuvigild is on record as subsequently ruling that the laying-on of hands was now sufficient for those who wished to become Homoians, suggesting that second baptism by immersion had originally been the norm.

Gender What were the implications for women of Homoianism’s military and political aspects? As we have seen, Visigothic princesses were sent to marry Suevic leaders in an attempt to establish Aquitanian hegemony over Gallæcia in the fifth century. In the sixth, Theoderic the Great attempted to construct a system of Homoian alliances through marriages: one daughter Theodegotha married the Visigothic king; another, Ostrogotho, wed Sigismund, son of the Burgundian ruler Gundobad; his sister Amalafrida became the wife of the Vandal ruler Thrasamund; and his niece Amalaberga married the ruler of the Thuringians. His daughter Amalasuentha (who will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 4) had a very different upbringing but she remained Homoian; was married to a Visigothic husband who came to live in Italy; and after 11  Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, bk. 5, ch. 38, trans. Thorpe, 302.

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  63

his and Theoderic’s death became regent for her Homoian son. In Visigothic Spain, the alleged mistreatment of King Liuvigild’s Frankish daughter-in-law for her refusal to convert occurred at a crucial point when he hoped to persuade Nicenes and even Nicene bishops into accepting a modified form of Homoianism. These are all cases in which women’s Homoianism mattered for political reasons. However, there are also more ambivalent signals, suggesting that the religion of women who were not part of a dynastic strategic plan; had produced an heir; or were past childbearing age; was not always of particular concern, as they were no longer tied into the military–political nexus. Homoianism does not appear to have been compulsory for all women of ruling dynasties at all times. Theoderic the Great’s mother, Erilieva, became a Nicene Christian. In Burgundy, the wives of Chilperic I, of Gundobad, and of his brother Godegisel were Nicenes. So were the wife and daughters of Chilperic II, murdered by Gundobad: one married the Frankish leader Clovis and the other became a nun. In North Africa, Huniric’s wife, the Roman imperial princess Eudocia, was allowed to maintain her own religion and leave the Vandal kingdom after producing an heir. At the level of warrior families, there are indications in the Burgundian law-code’s inheritance regulations that Burgundian women could become members of Nicene religious communities. In Italy, there is evidence of women of the incoming Ostrogothic élite marrying local men and—bearing in mind that the quantity of evidence at our disposal is tiny—not only becoming Nicene Christians but benefactors of Italian Nicene churches.12 What evidence we have suggests that Homoianism was firmly tied to rulers and élites inside the barbarian-ruled kingdoms, reflecting the priorities of a patriarchal military society. It is difficult to imagine Homoianism as a voluntary 12  The Burgundian Code, trans. Katherine Fischer Drew (Phil­ adelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 32–33; John Moorhead, Theoderic in Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 95–96.

64  Chapter 3  choice for women: Lentechild, sister to the Frankish ruler Clovis was apparently a Homoian, but this is likely to have been the consequence of marriage, probably to a Burgundian. (When still married or, more probably, widowed she later converted to Nicene Christianity at around time of her brother’s baptism.) Apart from cases where Homoians managed to obtain control of relics and shrines (for which see the section below) Homoianism could not match the wider spiritual and social appeal of the Nicene Church, especially as there do not appear to have been Homoian monasteries and religious communities. The exception is the dramatically altered post-484 North African Homoian Church, discussed in detail later.

Language Recent researches on the Bible produced by Ulfila and his associates have important implications for our understanding of the Gothic Bible and by extension the Homoian Churches in general. Previously, many scholars assumed that Ulfila worked from a Greek text of the Bible and that his translations were later amended or improved by reference to Latin Bibles acquired by the Visigoths in the course of the fifth century. But it is now clear that Ulfila and his school based their translation on a lost Greek text of the Bible, which pre-dates any surviving Greek version and that he and his translators compared it with a Latin text or texts as they went along to obtain the best possible reading. The conventions and devices used in the surviving manuscripts (which all date from the sixth century) either to indicate parallel passages (Eusebian Canons, Ammonian Sections) or divide the text (Euthalian Apparatus) are likely go all the way back to Ulfila and his collaborators (Falluomini, Gothic Version, 25–65). It looks as if the text of the Gothic Bible—with its vocabulary established by the mid-fourth century—remained more or less stable between the period of Ulfila and his school and the early sixth century, when Ostrogothic Italy, particularly Ravenna, became a centre of production of Gothic Bibles and other Homoian works.

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  65

All these findings place a large question mark beside previous suggestions of interactions between barbarian Homoian clerics and their Nicene counterparts. We have other indications of linguistic separation between Homoian Churches and Nicene populations. It is likely that the liturgical language of the Homoians was Gothic or East Germanic: there is evidence of a Gothic/Vandalic version of the invocation Kyrie eleison/Domine miserere—froia arme. It is also generally assumed that sermons were delivered in the vernacular: the Vandal ruler Huniric agreed to the Eastern emperor’s request for the re-appointment of a Nicene bishop at Carthage on condition that the emperor allow Homoian clergy in the Eastern Empire to preach to the people in any language they chose. Anyone who voluntarily accepted re-baptism as a Homoian was presumably either prepared to learn Gothic or Vandalic or had already acquired some knowledge of Germanic language as part of a barbarian household.

Liturgy and Church Layout Current thinking supports the idea that, despite linguistic differences, the basic shape of the Homoian and Nicene liturgies was so similar that the plans of churches were not used as a means of defining difference or opposition. Although in Vandal North Africa churches could be considerably altered over the course of two or three centuries, archaeologists have failed to find any decisive difference between the layout of Homoian and Nicene churches: the striking “occidentation” of some Homoian churches in the province of Byzacena turns out to have been a feature of both religions, sometimes “corrected” after the Byzantine re-conquest. In Italy, Homoians took over churches used by Homoian generalissimos Ricimer and Odoacer and their troops, but there is no evidence that this is because they differed in basic layout from Nicene buildings. Elsewhere in Italy, as in all Homoian kingdoms, it appears that Nicene churches were also appropriated for Homoian use and so far there has been no suggestion that

66  Chapter 3  they were altered.13 However, in the absence of any substantive attempt to correlate written and archaeological evidence across the Homoian churches as a whole, we are currently working in terms of a plausible hypothesis rather than established fact.

Baptism Homoian baptism was performed by three immersions in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, just as it was throughout most of the Nicene Church. In the 530s Pope Vigilius discovered that Nicene clergy in Gallæcia were baptizing by single immersion: he reminded them that triple immersion was the practice of the Catholic Church and instructed them not to deviate from it. But in 591, when Gallæcia was part of Nicene Spain, Gregory I wrote to his friend Archbishop Leander of Seville permitting a single immersion—in case heretics might “divide the Divinity” while counting the immersions and claim they had got the better of orthodox custom. The traditional explanation of these developments was that single immersion began as an anti-Arian response. However, this has recently been questioned: the new suggestion is that single immersion was a traditional Spanish mode of baptism at variance with most of the Nicene Church, only given a spurious anti-Arian rationale after it had been challenged by Pope Vigilius.14 It has certainly proved difficult to make any meaningful distinctions between Homoian and Nicene baptistries 13  Bryan Ward-Perkins, “Where is the Archaeology and Iconog­ raphy of Germanic Arianism?” in Religious Diversity In Late Antiquity, ed. David M. Gwynn and Suzanne Bangert (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 265–89; Taher Ghalia, “L’Architecture religieuse en Tunisie aux Ve et VIe siècles,” Antiquité Tardive 10 (2002): 213–22; Ralf Bockmann, “The Non-Archaeology of Arianism—What Comparing Cases in Carthage, Haïdra and Ravenna Can Tell Us about Arian Churches,” in Arianism, ed. Berndt and Steinacher, 201–18. 14  Maxwell E. Johnson, The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolu­ tion and Interpretation (Collegeville: Liturgical, 2007), 234–36.

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  67

in terms of their architecture. In Ravenna, Arian and Neonian baptistries are both octagonal in design—as was the baptistry attached to a large basilica at its port, Classe. This plan derived from the fourth-century Lateran Baptistry in Rome: so even if there are other differences in layout, the structures all follow the same “big” ritual/liturgical movement around the baptismal pool. Archaeologists have read the multiplication and monumentalization of Spanish rural baptistries as evidence of Nicene–Homoian tensions and rivalries over baptism in the sixth century.15 This is possible, but there may be other explanations and further investigation is needed, particularly in mapping baptistries in relation to possible areas of Visigothic settlement. In North Africa the creation of large baptismal and pilgrimage centres after the East Roman conquest has been interpreted as evidence of attempts to create cleansing rituals to reconcile Homoians and Donatists with the official Church. Such hypothetical procedures would surely have looked too much like the second baptisms practised by both groups: the new and elaborate buildings are more likely have been part of attempts to establish East Roman authority in the face of tensions and to unite the African population under Constantinople’s rule.

Easter Although the fifth-century church historian Sozomen claimed that, apart from the Quartodecimans and Novatians, all heresies celebrated Easter at the same time as the Romans and Egyptians, a distinctive “Arian Easter” has been proposed. Arians supposedly rejected the Council of Nicæa’s attempts to establish a uniform method of calculating the Easter date: while Nicæa privileged the Alexandrian tradition, they based 15  Alexandra Chavarría Arnau, “Finding Invisible Arians: An Archaeological Perspective on Churches, Baptism and Religious Competition in 6th Century Spain,” Hortus Artium Medievalium 23, no.2 (2017): 674–85.

68  Chapter 3  their reckoning on the work of an earlier authority, Anatolius of Laodicea. This hypothesis of an “Arian Easter” accepts Athanasius’s invention of Arian and Eusebian parties as fact and then assumes the maintenance of a deliberately divergent observance.16 But divergent from what? As time went on sets of tables, each providing slightly different Easter computations, were devised. These could be contradictory: the Victorine tables, created in Aquitaine in the fifth century, even offered alternative dates for some years. Regional differences opened up: but no contemporary ever highlighted a specifically Arian Easter—not even Bishop Gregory of Tours, who was highly conscious of clashes and contradictions that had emerged by the late sixth century.17 The councils of the Spanish Nicene Church in the sixth and seventh centuries indicate that there had been problems in establishing uniform Easter observance: but crucially, the canons of the Third Council of Toledo (589) which abolished Homoianism in Spain, make no mention of a Homoian Easter dating.18 In fact, no Nicene church council of any region settled by Homoians ever identified any specifically Arian Easter deviation, so it seems likely that Homoians celebrated Easter on the same day as their Nicene neighbours.

Relics At the intuitive level of religious experience, Nicenes and Homoians shared a belief in the power of the relics of the saints. We can see the Gothic attachment to veneration of saints in martyrologies and in the fragments of a sixth-century calendar from Ostrogothic Italy listing their own saints 16  Brigitte Englisch, “Ostern zwischen Arianismus und Katholizismus: Zur Komputistik in den Reichen des Westgoten im 6 und 7 Jh.,” in The Easter Controversy of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Immo Warntjes and Dáibhí Ó Cróinin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 76–109. 17  See Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, trans. Thorpe, 274. 18  Concilios Visigóticos e Hispano-Romanos, ed. Vives et al., 107–45.

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  69

and martyrs.19 Nicenes and Homoians vied for control of these potent creators of the non-reflective belief vital for underpinning reflective, conscious belief in religious doctrines. The contest may even have gone back to the earliest days of Gothic Homoianism in the trans-Danubian regions, where relics, such as those of the martyr Sabas, were transferred into imperial territory. While this could reflect the desire by Homoians to keep the relics out of the hands of non-Christian Goths, it could equally show that Nicene Christians were attempting to remove relics from Homoian control. Control of major relic–shrines was a key element of Vandal rule in North Africa. One of Geiseric’s first acts on occupying Carthage had been to take possession of the major shrines in the area including that of two of the region’s most famous Early Christian martyrs, Perpetua and Felicitas. His son Huniric seized the seaside basilica of Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, one of Africa’s most famous martyrs (and a third-century advocate of re-baptism). The East Roman historian Procopius recorded that during Justinian’s reconquest of Vandal North Africa, Arian priests were preparing to celebrate the feast of Cyprian there, but fled when they learned that the Vandal forces had been defeated. Nicene Christians arrived and, finding everything in order, they promptly carried on with the celebration. Homoian preparations […] hanging up the most beautiful of the votive offerings there, and making ready the lamps and bringing out the treasures from the storehouses and preparing all things with exactness, arranging everything according to its appropriate use […]20

were evidently the same as Nicene preparations. Major festivals were celebrated in the same manner—and probably by all sections of the Christian populace regardless of confession. 19  Heather and Matthews, Goths in the Fourth Century, 125–31.

20  Procopius, De bello Vandalico 3.21, in Procopius, History of the Wars, Books 3–4, trans. H. B. Dewing, Loeb Classical Library 81 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 183–85.

70  Chapter 3  In Ostrogothic Italy, the dedications of the major new Homoian churches in Ravenna to the Saviour and the Resurrection suggests that they did not house relics and that in keeping with the good relations prevailing for most of Theoderic’s rule, there was no attempt to remove relics from Nicene churches. But did the dedication of another Gothic church there to the Sirmian martyr Anastasia indicate that contact relics—cloths or objects that had come into contact with her body or tomb—were brought from her native city when it came under Gothic control? After the fall of the Ostrogothic state, the Gallic Bishop Nicetius of Trier derided Arians in Italy who furtively venerated the relics of the apostles (perhaps trying to make their own contact relics?). Control of relics became a major political issue in the reign of Liuvigild, the last Homoian ruler of Visigothic Spain; and after Nicene Christianity became the state religion in Spain, a church council held at Zaragoza decreed that Arian relics should be tested by fire to see whether they were genuine or not.21

Funerary Ritual Nowadays, many archaeologists and historians regard the funerary rituals of the barbarian peoples as an expression of identity or of social status. Older approaches identifying different styles of objects found in burials—jewellery, belt-buckles, fibulas (costume fasteners), or weapons—with bounded barbarian ethnicities have been challenged by newer views of identity as a social construct. Grave goods are regarded as an articulation of status: their use is even thought to have spread to indigenous inhabitants in areas where barbarian groups settled.22 We rarely hear about the connection between funer21  Concilios Visigóticos e Hispano-Romanos, ed. Vives et al., 154.

22  For instance, Edward James, Europe’s Barbarians AD 200600 (Harlow: Pearson, 2009), 209–14; Identidad y Etnicidad en Hispania. Propuestas teóricas y cultura material en los siglos V–VIII, ed. Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo and Santiago Castellanos (Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 2015).

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  71

ary ritual and beliefs about death and the dead (though see Dunn, Belief and Religion, 133–61). But viewed from this perspective, a very different picture emerges in which barbarian peoples, Homoians included, gradually abandoned grave goods in favour of the Christian ideal of unfurnished burial. The insights provided by CSR offer a key to understanding the funerary practices of the barbarian peoples. They highlight the fundamental intuition of the recently dead, deriving from fear of the polluting corpse, as a threatening presence, thus explaining the consequent widespread preoccupation with the transitional period between death and some further state (Boyer, Religion Explained, 232–61). Burial with grave goods has long been identified as a “rite of transition,” performed to usher the soul safely into the Otherworld and to prevent its lingering in this existence where it might haunt the living as ghost or re-enter the body as malevolent zombie. Additional means of ensuring the transition of the immortal soul out of this world include burial in older structures or close to the resting places of earlier peoples. To ensure the body’s reduction to a safely fleshless state, it may be cremated; alternatively, its decay may be checked on at intervals after burial and the skeleton eventually disarticulated and sometimes tidied away, making room for a new occupant in the grave. Those who cannot afford elaborate grave goods are buried with abridged rituals.23 With the exception of cremation—a procedure likely to have been discontinued for economic reasons—all these rites were practised by barbarian Homoians inside the Empire. Neither early Christian funerary ritual on its own nor early conceptions of the interim afterlife (between death and the Last Judgment) offered any particular certainty about the soul’s safe passage out of this world. Goths, Sueves, Vandals, 23  Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960); Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand (Aberdeen: Cohen and West, 1960); Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

72  Chapter 3  and Burgundes all continued with rites of transition long after they became Christians, as indeed did the Nicene Franks and later the Lombards and Anglo-Saxons. The long drawn out survival of the furnished burial rite may have partly been encouraged by the insecurities created by outbreaks of the Justinianic Pandemic between the 540s and 750s. We find furnished burials inside churches and even Christian grave goods distributed by clerics as a kind of afterlife passport, before the Church started to re-think its deathbed rituals and view of the interim afterlife.24 But before this there are indicators of a gradual move towards unfurnished burial amongst the barbarian peoples, including Homoians. The fashion for burial ad sanctos, beside the tombs of saints, was popularly thought by Nicene Christians to provide a good outcome at the Last Judgment; but for groups that had traditionally practised rites of transition, it might also be intuited as facilitating safe passage for the soul out of the present world. In the absence of actual bodies of saints in churches, contact relics might be considered to generate a similar protective aura. In the sixth century no less than three cemeteries are associated with the Gallo-Roman village of Lunel-Viel on the northern fringes of Septimania. One contained unfurnished burials, presumably those of Gallo-Romans; in second, the high proportion of furnished burials suggests a Visigothic cemetery; while a third, attached to a church, contained not just Visigothic furnished burials but also several in urban-style sarcophagi. An even more marked acculturative tendency in Septimania’s capital, Narbonne, is likely to have been replicated in other urban contexts.25 In 24  Alexandra Chavarría, “Local Churches and Lordship in Late Antique and Early Medieval Northern Italy,” in Churches and Social Power in Early Medieval Europe. Integrating Archaeological and Social Approaches, ed. José C. Sanchez-Pardo and Michael G. Shapland (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 69–97; Dunn, Belief and Religion, 148–61. 25  Claude Raynaud, “Gallo-romains, wisigoths, septimaniens?,” in Identidad y Etnicidad en Hispania. Propuestas teóricas y cultura material en los siglos V–VIII, ed. Quirós Castillo and Castellanos, 313–31.

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  73

Ostrogothic Italy, Theoderic ordered the removal of precious metal from graves with no owner, adding that remains should be protected by buildings and graves adorned by columns or marble.26 Ravenna’s Arian Baptistry contains burials, a fact so startling that scholars have explained them as later insertions post-dating its conversion to a Nicene church— even though their position immediately under what appears to be the original floor might suggest otherwise.27 But this building, dedicated to Christian initiation, contained not only the famous mosaic of Christ’s baptism but also depictions of crowns offered to an empty throne, evoking the twenty-four elders of the Book of Revelation and Christ’s Second Coming. Are we looking at a Homoian approximation, in the absence of relics, of the practice of burial ad sanctos?

Organization Homoian churches and clerics were closely associated with élite families. Vandal warriors in the Proconsular province in North Africa seem to have appropriated Nicene churches for their own use; in European Homoian kingdoms, members of the military élites may not just have taken over, but also built, churches on their estates. Homoian churches were analogous to proprietary churches in non-Homoian regions: a large proportion of the proprietary churches of medieval Spain, Burgundy, and Gallæcia may formerly have belonged 26  Cassiodorus, Variorum libri xii, 4.34, ed. Theodore Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi 12 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1894), 129.

27  Maria Cristina Carile and Enrico Cirelli, “Architettura e decoro del complesso vescovile Ariana,” in Il Patrimonio culturale tra conoscenza, tutela e valorizzazione. Il caso della ‘Piazzetta degli Ariani’ a Ravenna, ed. Giuseppe Garzia, Alessandro Iannucci, and Mariangela Vandini (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2015), 97–127; Michele Mazzotti, “Scavi recenti al battistero degli ariani a Ravenna,” Felix Ravenna 101 (1970): 115–23.

74  Chapter 3  to Homoians.28 Homoian clergy similarly had family connections. In Vandal North Africa, Geiseric set up courts for himself and his sons, each with their own attached clerics. The connection between family and clerics was so close that when, in North Africa and Burgundy, rulers murdered family rivals, they executed their priests as well. Sources from Visigothic Spain indicate that Homoians did not require clergy to remain celibate, so it is quite possible that one member of a warrior’s family could become a priest, marry and produce children, one of whom, in turn could become a priest. All this was, perhaps, not so different from the situation on the ground in large parts of the West for much of the Middle Ages. However, what was conspicuously lacking in the Homoian churches of the barbarian kingdoms was an articulated episcopal hierarchy and government through councils or synods that we find in the Nicene Church. Conditioned by military and political structures, the Homoian Church came to assume its own distinctive shape. The Goths had a word for bishop—aipiskaupaus—a rendering of the Latin/Greek word episcopus/episkopos. But they used this in the traditional sense which linked the bishop either with a city—for example Constantinople—or a people beyond the frontiers of the Empire, as in the case of Ulfila amongst the trans-Danubian Goths. While the Moesian Goths—along with the Goths and Homoians settled around Constantinople—maintained their own bishops, in the case of the armed groups moving across Italy, Gaul, and Hispania, the association with cities or settled peoples had been decisively disrupted. In 403, when Goths under Alaric were active in Italy, Jerome wrote that they carried tent-churches with them. By this point their most senior clergy may have been designated by the Gothic word papa, deriving from the spoken Greek papas. The organizational adaptation that began in the period in which the Goths moved across Europe continued into the Visigothic settlement of Aquitaine and was then transmitted 28  Susan Wood, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 17–18.

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  75

to the barbarian leaders and peoples who received Homoian Christianity from the Visigoths. Sometimes the term papa was rendered by Nicenes in Latin as sacerdos (priest). But it is only an approximation: the Gallic bishop Sidonius Apollinaris describes Theodoric II, Visigothic ruler of Aquitaine between 453 and 466, starting each day by attending “the service of his sacerdotes”: is this a papa assisted by lower-rank clergy or Theoderic’s papa along with others attached to leading élite members attending his court?29 Our scanty information about lesser clergy comes from a handful of sources covering a long period. Some of them seem to correspond to Nicene presbyters and clerics, deacons and sub-deacons, clerks and doorkeepers. However, there are also spodei—scribes—and back in trans-Danubian Gothia we find the bilaif, whose function is unknown and does not seem to have survived. Did monasticism survive the militarization of Homoianism? The Roman historian Eunapius paints a picture of monks among the Goths crossing the Danube in 376. Surviving fragments of a Gothic calendar record the martyrdom of forty female religious in Beroea (Greek Macedonia). But there is no evidence for barbarian Homoian monasticism, as distinct from Nicene monasteries, in barbarian kingdoms. (The monastery “of the religion of the Vandals” in sixth-century Egypt is likely to have been Nicene in origin—see further below.) The misleading rendering by Nicenes of papa as episcopus, or bishop, sometimes even as “patriarch,” has muddied our understanding of the nature of Homoian Church organization. In the Homoian kingdoms, bishops were only appointed to individual cities in a handful of exceptional cases: in North Africa, after the crisis of 484, when a former notary was sent to oversee a city in Mauretania and in Visigothic Spain during the reign of Liuvigild (572–86), a key period of change in Homoianism. The unique instance by Homoians of the use of the Latin term episcopi—bishops—for senior Homoian clerics occurs in a document issued by the Vandal ruler Huniric 29  Sidonius, Poems and Letters, ed. and trans. W. B. Anderson, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1936 and 1965), 1:336.

76  Chapter 3  in 483.30 But this was modelled on an imperial document of 411 and is another exceptional case (see further below). We cannot be certain of a system of seniority operating amongst these senior clergy: though Victor of Vita seems to suggest at one point that there was a chief “bishop” in Vandal North Africa, attached to the ruler Huniric, this may just be an assumption on his part. The presumed annual Homoian synod in Burgundy was likely to have been a military muster. There is no trace of regular Homoian synods or councils in the barbarian kingdoms—not because evidence has been lost or suppressed but on account of the distinctive structure of their Homoian Churches.

Ravenna’s Homoian Buildings A closer look at Ostrogothic Ravenna confirms the non-standard organization of Homoianism. This is tricky to conceptualize because of the tendency to assume the existence of a bishop in the conventional, Nicene sense. Our only written source for Ravenna’s buildings is the ninth-century churchman Andreas Agnellus: though his writings are prized by historians because he had local knowledge including access to many features that have now disappeared, he naturally thought in terms of Nicene Church organization, referring to an episcopium or episcopal complex/residence near the church described nowadays as the “Arian Cathedral.”31 This was dedicated to the Anastasis or Resurrection, a dedication assumed without evidence to be a deliberate echo of the Nicene Cathedral’s name. However the latter was popularly known as the Ursiana after its founder, Bishop Ursus and while the Gothic Anastasis is located near the so-called “Arian Baptistry” (in the same way that the Ursiana was near the “Baptistry of the Orthodox”) attempts to prove that 30  Victor of Vita, trans. Moorhead, 37–38.

31  Agnellus of Ravenna, The Book of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna, trans. Deborah M. Deliyannis (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 198–204.

Barbarian Homoianism after 381  77

there was a structure linking the two have so far proved inconclusive. The Arian Baptistry was not the only Homoian baptistry in Ravenna. Andreas Agnellus notes another that had belonged to Theoderic’s palace church. Near Classe, Ravenna’s port, archaeologists have found the remains of an extensive church with attached baptistry, which may date to Theoderic’s time and could be a Homoian complex.32 Classe’s importance is reflected in its depiction in the mosaics of Theoderic’s palace church: there was no Nicene bishop of Classe and this is a very substantial building rather than a subsidiary baptismal church. Andreas identifies at least one more Homoian church inside Ravenna, three outside the walls and another in Classe. He also records that one of these extramural churches was built in the twenty-fourth year of Theoderic’s reign by a Gothic “bishop”; and that both this and a second extramural church had an episcopium attached. This is a high number of ecclesiastical buildings for a group comprising only a fraction of the total Italian population: we know of only eight Nicene churches inside Ravenna itself in the period immediately before the arrival of the Goths. Did these Homoian churches reflect the clustering of other Gothic lineages as well as the ruling Amals in Ravenna? Or were some of them mainly used during the periods when Goths from other parts of Italy assembled for military musters? A decade after the fall of Ostrogothic Ravenna, a papa still presided over a church described in a legal document as St. Anastasia, ecclesia legis Gothorum. Was this the last senior Homoian cleric, whose church now housed the remnants of a number of disbanded Homoian communities and organizations?33 * * * 32  Deborah M. Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 197–99.

33  Jan-Olof Tjäder, Die nichtliterarischen lateinischen Papyri Italiens aus der Zeit 445–700, 3 vols. (1954; repr., Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1982), 2:98–103.

78  Chapter 3  Barbarian Homoianism was neither an expression of ethnic identity, nor a straightforward transplantation of trans-Danubian or even Moesian Homoianism to the barbarian kingdoms, nor a scaled-down Gothic-language imitation of its Nicene neighbours. It developed its own distinctive shape as barbarian groups moved across Europe and North Africa and underpinned the establishment of kingdoms inside the Roman Empire. Within these kingdoms, it intersected with many fundamental aspects of élite barbarian life from the relationship of the living to the ancestral dead to warrior service, reward, and the bonds of loyalty and allegiance.

Chapter 4

Barbarian Homoianism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries

Homoian Christianity was part of the fabric of the barbarian kingdoms that emerged inside the western Roman Empire in the fifth century. For ambitious rulers of these kingdoms, however, it also developed significant disadvantages. Initially, it tied Vandal, Sueve, and Burgundian leaders into external alliances with the Aquitanian Visigoths. When the Aquitanian state vanished, Homoianism upheld the network of alliances that Theoderic the Great attempted to create with the Visigoths, Burgundians, and Thuringians – though he may have found himself the junior partner to the Vandals under Thrasamund. Viewed in a wider perspective, Homoianism could be an impediment to becoming major players in world of the Roman Empire. At home, it meant that rulers did not have a fully functioning relationship with their Nicene bishops, who occupied positions of major influence in the indigenous communities, even if they were on relatively good terms with them. Many rulers looked outwards from the microcosm of the religion and politics of the Homoian world, aspiring to enter the macrocosm of the Roman Empire irrespective of the fall of its western half in 476 and the shift of focus to the East Roman Empire with its capital in Constantinople. But a move too far in the direction of Romanitas or of the Nicene Church could appear as a potential threat to their warrior class for whom Homoianism was interlinked with the fundamentals of military service, reward, and landholding. So Homoian Christianity was not to be easily shaken off and aspiring rulers

80  Chapter 4 could find themselves forced to demonstrate their commitment to it as a sign of their reciprocal relationship with their élites. This chapter investigates the way these dynamics played out in the individual Homoian kingdoms.

Visigothic Aquitaine The Visigothic rulers of Aquitaine show fewest signs of aspirations to Romanitas. As a result of their leading role in ending the advance of the Huns in 451, they were major players in western Europe and used Homoianism to help establish hegemony over the Burgundes and Sueves. Euric (466–84) was able to take advantage of the weakness of the western emperors to acquire most of southern Gaul and extend his rule into Spain. But this period also saw the murder of two rulers by their successors and expeditions into Spain were headed by prominent members of the military élite. There is no sign of any move away from Homoianism by kings who needed to control their unruly microcosm. Rather than viewing the Nicene Church as tactically desirable ally, in the 470s Euric exiled a number of bishops for political reasons and refused to allow Nicene episcopal elections. His successor Alaric II (484–507) allied with Theoderic the Ostrogoth in the 490s, marrying his daughter Theodegotha. But détente set in. Peter Heather (The Goths, 213) points out how Alaric II later approved the appointment of Nicene bishops and summoned Nicene church councils. The Nicene Council of Agde in 506 reciprocated by praying for the expansion of the Homoian Alaric’s kingdom. Defeat by the Franks at Vouillé wiped out the Visigothic Aquitanian state in 507, so we cannot see where this rapprochement might have led.

Vandal North Africa The situation was very different in Vandal North Africa. Our main written source is Victor of Vita’s History of the Persecution in the African Provinces. His well-known accounts of Arian persecutions and Catholic martyrdoms can be questioned in

Barbarian Homoianism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries  81

the light of other sources (see further below), while less-examined parts of his work find support elsewhere, revealing a number of attempts by the rulers Geiseric (429–77) and his son Huniric (477–84) to enter the macrocosm of Empire. Geiseric spent his long reign alternately attacking and making peace with the Western and Eastern Empires. His treaty in 442 with the Western Emperor Valentinian III had opened up new vistas of alliances and power for the Hasdings: he sent his son Huniric as hostage to the Western imperial court in Ravenna, where he was betrothed to the princess Eudocia. Huniric already had a wife, a daughter of Theoderic, Visigothic ruler of Aquitaine. Along with the political alliance she represented, this unnamed princess was speedily discarded: she was accused of plotting to poison Geiseric, disfigured, and packed off home. Geiseric’s naked ambition caused unrest: the chronicler Prosper of Aquitaine records that in 442 “some of his magnates” conspired against him, “because he was proud, even among his own people, due to the successful outcome of events.”1 For the rest of his reign Geiseric attempted to balance the wider interests of the Hasding dynasty with the necessity of conciliating his military. In 454 he agreed to an imperial request to allow the appointment of a Nicene bishop at Carthage: when this did not bring about the marriage of Huniric to Eudocia, the princess he had been promised a decade earlier, she was brought back when a Vandal force sacked Rome in 455. In the same year, he expanded his territories, gaining control of western Numidia, Mauretania Sitifensis, parts of Mauretania Caesariensis, Sardinia, Corsica, and other Mediterranean islands, leaving their Nicene bishops in place. He set up a system of succession in which kingship would devolve on the oldest survivor amongst his descendants. But he also tried to keep his military onside by running down the Nicene Church in the Proconsular province in North Africa, 1  Prosperi, Epitoma Chronicon, anno 442, trans. Alexander C. Murray, in From Roman to Merovingian Gaul: A Reader (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2000).

82  Chapter 4 preventing the replacement of bishops in the Vandal heartlands. And when the Nicene bishop of Carthage died in 457, the see remained vacant. A much more overt move towards the imperial and Nicene macrocosm opened up on Geiseric’s death in 477, the year after the deposition of the last Western Emperor. Huniric— husband of a Western imperial princess—immediately began to cultivate the Eastern Emperor. Victor notes approvingly the steps he took to conciliate the Nicene Church. Nicenes were allowed to conduct church services in the Proconsular province; Manichaeans were persecuted; and Huniric agreed to a request from the Emperor Zeno to re-instate a Nicene bishop at Carthage. But Victor presents a dramatic about-turn later in Huniric’s reign. He alleges that he not only revived Geiseric’s ban on Nicenes serving at Hasding courts but also tortured nuns, and exiled thousands of Nicene clergy to the desert. While the latter charges look like exaggerations, he also describes Huniric’s summoning of Nicene bishops, accused of illegally “holding liturgies” in the sortes Vandalorum, to a public disputation in Carthage. They were challenged to prove the validity of the homoousion “from Scripture” in debate with Huniric’s Homoian “bishops.” Huniric went on to announce the closure of Nicene churches; the confiscation of episcopal property; the imposition of a ban on homoousion (the doctrine that the Son was of the same substance as the Father) and fines on its supporters—all in terminology appropriated from the imperial campaign of 411 against the North African Donatists. Nicene bishops were sent into internal exile, either to Corsica or to the desert fringes of the kingdom. Victor lingers over graphic details of tortures allegedly inflicted on Nicenes who refused to abandon their faith, claiming that many others were forcibly re-baptized as Homoians against their will. Although Victor’s primary concern is to paint a picture of outrages inflicted on Nicene Christians, we can also catch glimpses of the politics underlying the events of 483–84. His narrative exposes deep divisions among the Hasdings them-

Barbarian Homoianism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries  83

selves. To secure his own position Huniric had persecuted the family of his brother Genton, executing Genton’s Homoian “bishop” and other Arian clerics as well as some of their late father’s associates. The exile of many Nicene bishops in 484 was preceded by an extraordinary offer from Huniric: he would restore them to their churches if they would support the succession of his son Hilderic, in direct violation of the succession rules that made Genton’s son Gunthamund the legitimate heir. The convulsions that shook the Vandal state were the result of Huniric’s attempts to become a player on a wider stage by cultivating Zeno through a pro-Nicene policy; and to engineer his succession by his own son. The dramatic switch to anti-Nicene policies and punishments inflicted on Vandals, tortured in the presence of the Emperor Zeno’s legate, can be read as measures forced upon him by the reaction of his opponents led by the legitimate heir Gunthamund, who succeeded when Huniric died later in 484. Victor alleges that people were forcibly baptized by aspersion—sprinkling—in some cases as they slept and maintains that certificates of re-baptism were issued, without which neither private citizens nor merchants could travel. These claims may again be exaggerated but the political aspect of Homoianism breaks through his description of the “heresy” as “a game rather than any religion.”2 Gunthamund (484–96) was succeeded by his brother Thrasamund (496–523): both maintained Homoian Christianity as the religion of the Vandal–Alan state. When Huniric’s son Hilderic, grandson of a Western Emperor, finally became king in 523 he promptly attempted to revive imperial pretensions. One of his coins shows him wearing the imperial diadem. He allied with the Eastern Empire; promoted his nephews over the rightful heir, Gelimer; and recalled exiled Nicene bishops, guaranteeing them freedom of worship and allowing elections to fill the many sees left vacant under his predecessors. Following military failure in 530, he was removed by 2  Victor of Vita, trans. Moorhead, 83.

84  Chapter 4 Gelimer and some of the Vandal élite. Gelimer signalled his commitment to the relationship between ruler and military through his Homoianism and his use of the title Rex vandalorum et alanorum. Victor’s graphic account of persecutions culminating in the events of 484 has to be read in the context of a document produced by the African Nicene Church in 487 entitled the Notitia provinciarum et civitatum Africae, which indicates that nearly twenty per cent of the Nicene episcopate in the Vandal kingdom went over to Homoianism as a result of Huniric’s persecution of 484.3 (Given that its list of faithful Nicenes includes the name of Bishop Lucifer of Cagliari in Sardinia, dead over a century earlier, the percentage of defectors may actually have been higher.) In the same year, Gunthamund allowed bishop Eugenius to return to Carthage and restored the important shrine of Agileus outside the city to the Nicenes (though other Nicene churches remained closed until 494). However, this limited degree of détente further revealed the scale of the problem. In 488, Pope Felix III convened a Roman ecclesiastical council, at which four African bishops were present, to condemn widespread apostasy in North Africa among both clergy and laity.4 The council prescribed penances according to age and status for those seeking re-admission to the Nicene Church, with particularly severe punishments for bishops and clergy. Penance was to be based on the degree to which re-baptism had been voluntary—so Victor’s lurid account of long-term persecution, bloodshed, “martyrdoms” (he relates few actual deaths), and forced re-baptisms was calculated to arouse some sympathy in the wider Nicene community in an effort to take some of the heat off potential returners. 3  Victor de Vita, Historie de la Persécution Vandale en Afrique, ed. and trans. Serge Lancel (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2002), 223–383 (“Registre des Provinces et Cités d’Afrique”).

4  Felix III, Epistolae et decreta, Patrologia latina 58 (Paris: Migne, 1862), 924–27 (Epistola VII).

Barbarian Homoianism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries  85

The Extraordinary Evolution of the African Homoian Church Victor’s representation of Arianism as un-Roman throughout his work also points indirectly to an extraordinary—and extraordinarily under-examined and under-estimated— change in the makeup of the North African Homoian Church. The defection to Homoianism of eighty-eight African Nicene bishops (around twenty per cent of the episcopate) along with an apparently substantial number of Romano-African monks, nuns, clerics, and laypeople gave the post-484 Vandal Homoian Church a unique character. As well as acquiring Romano-African congregations—possibly outnumbering their Vandal counterparts—it now included members of a clerical class literate in Latin, with access to Latin Bibles and theological works. No longer exclusively the preserve of the Vandal élite and individuals serving in their households or at the Hasding courts, it was evolving into a much better theologically resourced and more genuinely African Church. The pre-484 Homoian Church had hardly been on the same level as its Nicene neighbour: the African Nicene tome Against Varimadus looks less like a response to a now-lost Homoian book, as is often assumed, than a list of suggested replies to oral declarations of Homoian arguments. Huniric’s 484 summons to the Nicene bishops reflects both the lack in Vandal Homoianism of theological progression beyond the Creed of 360 and also its linguistic limitations. The Nicene bishops turned up at the debate with a theological treatise which four of them had prepared, prompting the hasty retreat of Huniric’s “bishop” Cyrila who claimed that he did not know Latin. This statement might look like bluff but was possibly accurate where technical theological Latin was concerned. The Homoian clergy’s concern, after all, had been the performance in a Germanic language of the liturgical and Eucharistic service of the Vandal–Alan military and the Hasding courts and Cyrila found himself confronted by the theology and Christology produced at the Council of Chalcedon (451). By contrast, the post-484 Homoian Church included clerics not only competent in Latin but sometimes in Greek as well. It was pastorally dynamic: in

86  Chapter 4 the early sixth century, the eminent Nicene Bishop Fulgentius of Ruspe, who had been exiled to Sardinia by Thrasamund, was dismayed to learn that a renegade Nicene monk named Fastidiosus had stolen the text of one of his sermons against the Donatists and was now passing it off as part of a homily of his own. In this sermon, Fastidiosus also attacked the “Homoousians,” as the African Homoians termed the Nicenes, using the 360 Creed of Constantinople as his base text.5 Given these circumstances, we might consider whether a famous Latin Homoian text of disputed origin, the Incomplete Commentary on Matthew, was a Nicene text modified in North Africa by a former Nicene like Fastidiosus to incorporate an acceptable—actually meagre—level of Homoian theology. Another consequence of the Vandal Church’s acquisition of a Latin section was Thrasamund’s extraordinary theological confidence. Between 517 and 519 he recalled Fulgentius of Ruspe from his exile in Sardinia so that he could debate Trinitarian theology with him in person. The ten objections to Homoousian belief Thrasamund sent to Fulgentius indicate access to theological advice: at one point he insinuates that Homoousian belief verges on Sabellianism. Nicene clerics, conscious that they were now under attack from well-informed opponents, responded by producing a flurry of works containing imaginary debates between Nicenes and Homoians. The classic of this genre was composed by Vigilius of Thapsa—an elimination debate not only involving Arius and Athanasius, but also collapsing time to include Photinus and Sabellius, who are knocked out before the main bout. In this remarkable work, Athanasius is made not only to credit Arius with a radical, Eunomian theology, but also to perform another time-travelling feat, referring to a work he has composed against Marivadus—probably the “Varimadus” mentioned earlier. These imaginary disputations are read by Whelan (Being Christian, 84) as evidence of a lively 5  Fulgentius Ruspensis, Opera, ed. J. Fraipont, 2 vols., Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 91 and 91A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), 1:277–308.

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level of Homoian–Nicene polemic in Vandal North Africa, perhaps dating back to the 450s: they look more like evidence of increasing desperation in the North African Nicene Church during Thrasamund’s reign. Whereas his predecessor Gunthamund had allowed the gradual return of Nicene clergy, Thrasamund exiled a substantial number of Nicene bishops, including Fulgentius of Ruspe, from the province of Byzacena. Thrasamund’s assurance may have stemmed not just from his own access to theological advice, but from a perception that Homoianism was putting down roots among Romano-Africans. Fulgentius’s rhymed “psalm” or abecedarium, a poem where each verse begins with a successive letter of the alphabet, anxiously warns its audience against entering Homoian churches.6 The new style of Homoianism was arguably much more attractive for women than the old: a group of female burials in the basilica at Hippo Regis may indicate the existence of an ascetic group composed of women from both Germanic and Romano-African backgrounds. A substantial proportion of the Romano-African élite appears to have reached an accommodation with Gunthamund and Thrasamund by accepting Homoianism. One indicator of this is the respect with which the tomb of Victorinus a bishop “of the Vandals” at Ammaedara in Byzacena was treated after the Byzantine conquest of North Africa. Such a display of regard, combined with a Latin name, points to a Homoian bishop who was one of the Romano-African élite and whose memory was not to be erased after the East Roman takeover.7 Another indicator is the Anonymous Commentary on Job, produced during the reign of Hilderic. This is an extensive Latin biblical commentary with a minimal Homoian element openly attacking the “Homoousian” enemy. After the death of Thrasamund, Hilderic’s revival of Huniric’s imperial connections and sup6  Fulgentius Ruspensis, Opera, ed. Fraipont, 2:877–85.

7  Bockmann, “Non-Archaeology of Arianism,” in Arianism, ed. Berndt and Steinacher, 208–10; Roland Steinacher, Die Vandalen (Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 2016), 271.

88  Chapter 4 port for Nicene Christianity represented a major setback for members of the Romano-African élite who had gone over to Homoianism: the Commentary encourages them to maintain a Job-like patience in the face of the political reversal they are now experiencing.8 When the Eastern Empire defeated Hilderic’s Homoian successor Gelimer in the 530s and brought the Vandal state to an end, the Romano-African section of the Homoian Church was sufficiently important and the practical differences between it and Nicene Christianity sufficiently minor for the Emperor Justinian to imagine that its personnel could easily be re-integrated into the Nicene Church. This assumption outraged the long-suffering Nicene episcopate, its numbers reduced over the decades by persecution, defection, exile, and prohibitions on new appointments. It swiftly acted to disabuse Justinian of any notion that they might be willing to accept their rivals back into the fold.

Burgundy In Burgundy, where the ruling family already had active connections to imperial politics, there are clear indications of a desire to a move towards Nicene Christianity. Gundioc’s successor Gundobad (473–526), already magister militum for Gaul, acquired the titles of magister militum and patricius. By 500, he had abandoned the older custom of shared leadership, brutally murdering his two brothers and a sister-in-law. He issued a written law code as symbol of his regal authority. As his correspondence with Bishop Avitus of Vienne reveals, Gundobad’s ambitions were accompanied by a strong desire to convert to Nicene Christianity. He made numerous enquiries about doctrinal matters, which Avitus generally dealt with tactfully: he praised Gundobad’s piety and even his “orthodoxy” and “Catholic understanding,” diplomatically reserving his criticism for Gundobad’s Homoian sacerdotes. Yet Gundobad never felt sufficiently confident in his position 8  Leslie Dossey, “The Last Days of Vandal Africa,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 54, no. 1 (2003): 60–138.

Barbarian Homoianism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries  89

to proceed to open conversion. Writing late in the sixth century, Gregory of Tours portrays him as covertly desiring to become a Catholic, and even arranging for Avitus to anoint him with the chrism in secret. He represents Avitus admonishing the king to act: You are a king and you need not fear to be taken in charge by anyone: yet you are afraid of your subjects and you do not dare to confess in public your belief in the Creator of all things.9

The conversation may be invented, but it encapsulates the essence of Gundobad’s problem. His elimination of his own brothers, particularly the murder of Godgisel (along with Godegisel’s “Arian bishop”) in what amounted to an internal war ca. 500, increased his power, to the point where it is likely to have fuelled resentment among sections of the military élite. Conversion risked alienating them altogether. His son Sigismund, who obtained a title from the Emperor, became a Nicene Christian in 502 and succeeded his father in 516: but his did not mean that Burgundy automatically became a Nicene kingdom. A standoff between king and élite is signalled by the inability of Avitus and the Nicene bishops to take over Homoian private churches the year after Sigismund’s accession. They expressed no hesitations over recovering Nicene churches appropriated by violence, so their affected disdain for these “polluted” buildings (and their liturgical vessels) suggests that they were effectively inaccessible on warrior landholdings. There are indications that Sigismund’s son Sigeric—whom he murdered—remained Homoian. Sigismund’s brother Gundomar led the Burgundian forces alongside him during a Frankish invasion in 523 and succeeded him after his death. His ability to rally Burgundian warriors to defeat the Franks in 524 is likely to have rested in part on his remaining Homoian. He also called on Theoderic the Great for help and Burgundy remained a Homoian-ruled kingdom until it was finally conquered by the Franks in 534. 9  Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, trans. Thorpe, 148–49.

90  Chapter 4

Ostrogothic Italy Ostrogothic Italy was another state where Homoian rule was terminated by invasion: in this case the “Justinianic Reconquest,” commenced in the 530s by the East Romans, hard on the heels of their invasion of North Africa. Discussion of Ostrogothic Homoianism has been dominated since 1997 by Patrick Amory’s attempt to characterize Ostrogothic identity as an ideological construct. He argued that the terms “Goth” and “Roman” were nothing more than classicizing literary conventions masking a fluid and often chaotic reality in the late fifth-century Balkans, where leaders of warbands cherry-picked martial-sounding names such as “Goth” from the past. In Amory’s view, these Goths were only linked to the earlier Goths by their adopted name: in reality, they were a mercenary army, whose leader, Theoderic was a member of a Balkan Roman military aristocracy. These contentions have haunted the study of the Ostrogoths in Italy. Did Theoderic’s forces subsequently marry into and integrate with the Italo-Roman population, only to identify as Goths in the 530s in the face of the threat from the East Roman Empire? Or did the Goths enter Italy with women and families and live a largely separate existence from the native population?10 To make his arguments work, Amory attempted to dismantle any association between Goths and Homoianism. He asserted that “some, if not most” of Theoderic’s Balkan followers had “surely” been Catholics (People and Identity, 259) and that other warriors converted. However, the prosopographical basis of his arguments has been tellingly criticised by Heather (“Merely an Ideology?”, 51–52). In addition, it takes no account of questions of gender or lifecycle: we cannot state confidently that any active warriors in Theoderic’s era 10  Heather, Goths; Amory, People and Identity; Heather, “Merely an Ideology?”; Thomas S. Brown “The Role of Arianism in Ostrogothic Italy: The Evidence from Ravenna,” in The Ostrogoths, ed. Barnish and Marazzi, 417–26, discussion 427–41; Brian Swain, “Goths and Gothic Identity in the Ostrogothic Kingdom,” in A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy, ed. Arnold, Bjornlie, and Sessa, 203–33.

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were Nicenes or converted to Nicene Christianity (see above). Amory also alleged that an existing Italian Homoian Church rebranded itself as the ecclesia legis Gothorum (church of the law of the Goths) in order to ensure Theoderic’s patronage, using Gothic, which was not a living language, in the same way that Latin was used in the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church. As we have seen, there is no evidence for the former and the latter assertions also fail to stand up to examination (see further below). What we know at the moment does not contradict testimonies to the effect that, in line with Victor of Vita’s description of the Vandal arrival in Africa, Theoderic’s armed followers brought women and dependents into Italy with them. Ostrogothic Homoianism exhibited the political, military, and economic aspects encountered in other emerging Homoian kingdoms. We can detect the use of baptism and re-baptism as signifier of hegemony or alliance over peoples with whom Pannonian Goths came into contact. Flaccitheus, leader of the Rugi in Noricum after the collapse of the Hunnic empire possibly accepted Homoianism from one group of Pannonian Goths. According to Eugippius’s Life of Severinus, our source for the closing years of Roman control in this region of the Danube, his son Feletheus/Feva married Giso who is thought to have been kin to Theoderic and is portrayed attempting to persuade her husband to re-baptize Nicenes.11 Some Homoian Rugi accompanied Theoderic into Italy after a crushing defeat at the hands of Odoacer but maintained a separate existence once settled there. Other neighbouring groups on the frontiers of Empire, the Gepids and Herules, accepted Homoian baptism as token of submission. The Gepids are often referred to as Arians because, according to the East Roman historian Procopius, they were described as such by their adversaries, the Lombards: it is likely that Gepids in the region of Sirmium had converted when Theoderic captured the city in 488. Procopius also describes one 11  Eugippius, Life of St. Severinus of Noricum, trans. George W. Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 46.

92  Chapter 4 section of the Herules as Arians, raising the possibility that they in turn had come under Gepid influence. Once Theoderic and the Goths were established in Italy, re-baptism of Nicenes as a means of creating ties of allegiance was not a possibility. Theoderic technically ruled in the Emperor’s name and in contrast to North Africa, Gallæcia, Spain, and Burgundy, Italy had a powerful Church and senatorial class. Even the ambitious Italo-Roman Cyprian, who fought in the campaign to recover Sirmium, learned Gothic, and had his sons taught the language is not recorded as changing religion. However, military musters and assemblies of warriors continued to link Gothic Homoianism with warrior service, the source of economic benefits—land grants, donatives, tax revenues. We are a very long way off being able to map Ostrogothic proprietary-style churches: but after the defeat of the Ostrogoths, Justinian is recorded as handing over to the bishop of Ravenna not only their city churches but also those in suburbs and hamlets, indicating patterns of ownership probably replicated elsewhere in Italy. For the greater part of his reign in Italy, Theoderic cultivated a good relationship with Romano-Italians, the Senate, the popes, and the Nicene Church. His advisers constructed a discourse of civilitas as a means of addressing the Italo-Roman population, representing the Goths as the armed wing of the Roman state. He originally maintained a highly respectful demeanour towards the Italian Church and was asked by the Nicene bishops to arbitrate in the disputed papal election in 498 and again in 502. However, civilitas disappeared after 522/23, in a period which also saw the treason trials of the senators Boethius and Symmachus. The second part of the chronicle known as the Anonymus Valesianus and the Liber Pontificalis entry for Pope John I (523–26) both indict Theoderic for aggressive Arianism. He is accused of destroying a Nicene oratory in Ravenna; of sending John to Constantinople to dissuade the Emperor Justin from anti-Arian measures; of ill-treating the pope on his return, causing his death; and with threatening to close Nicene churches in Italy. It has been suggested that these sources, written after 530, simply reflect a tonal change from

Barbarian Homoianism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries  93

tacit acceptance of barbarian Homoianism to the more militant anti-Arianism of the era of Justinian.12 But if we consider the military and economic significance of Homoianism alongside Theoderic’s Roman imperial style and view his succession arrangements through the perspective of gender, they can further be interpreted as Nicene representations of an energetic performance of Homoianism in the last years of his reign. Theoderic was unique among Homoian rulers in the extent of his Romanization, cultivating a markedly imperial style. When young, he had spent ten years as a hostage in Constantinople and both his palace and mausoleum in Ravenna were modelled on recognizably imperial prototypes. He dressed in the imperial purple and embarked on an ambitious programme of renovatio in several Italian cities, including Rome. But the most remarkable aspect of his Romanization was his upbringing of his daughter Amalasuentha. Born in Italy and educated in the palace in Ravenna, Amalasuentha was allegedly fluent in Latin and Greek as well as Gothic. All this set her apart from her own female kin, married off abroad as instruments of Theoderic’s foreign policy. Dynastic marriages and the production of heirs had traditionally been the only political role of the females of Homoian ruling dynasties: they might influence their husbands but could not play any formal role in the military-political nexus. By contrast, Amalasuentha’s accomplishments were represented by Theoderic’s Italo-Roman panegyrists in terms implying her fitness to rule.13 In 522/23, her husband Eutharic died, leaving as Theoderic’s male successor a child, his grandson Athalaric. The 12  The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis), trans. Raymond Davis. rev. 3rd ed. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 48–49; Anonymus Valesianus, Pars posterior, in Ammianus Marcellinus, vol. 3, ed. and trans. John C. Rolfe, 3 vols., Loeb Classical Library, 300, 315, and 331 (Cambridge, MA: Loeb, 1935–39): 531–69; Samuel Cohen, “Religious Diversity,” in A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy, ed. Arnold, Bjornlie, and Sessa, 503–32.

13  Massimiliano Vitiello, Amalasuintha. The Transformation of Queenship in the Post-Roman World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

94  Chapter 4 accusations of aggressive Arianism all relate to the period after Eutharic’s death when Theoderic’s project to ensure Athalaric’s succession with Amalasuentha as regent began to emerge. A female regent was an extraordinary innovation in Gothic terms and many of the Homoian warrior class must have been alarmed by the possibility that her education rendered her potentially susceptible to Roman and East Roman influence, thus undermining their own position. Theoderic’s anti-Nicene moves can be explained by a need to mollify opposition to his scheme. He seemed to succeed: on his death in 526—according to the Anonymus, a suitably Arian demise from diarrhoea—Amalasuentha became regent for her son. However, Ostrogothic opponents soon wrested control of Athalaric’s upbringing from her. Amalasuentha’s position became even more precarious when he died young and she appointed her cousin Theodahad as co-ruler. Her murder by Theodahad in 535 gave Justinian the excuse he needed to invade Italy. Viewed against this background, the accusations of the Anonymus and Liber Pontificalis can be read to suggest that Theoderic had made an ostentatious parade of Homoianism to reassure his warriors of his commitment to the status quo. It is not clear that the Emperor Justin was actually proposing the forcible conversion of Homoians in the Eastern Empire, now mainly barbarian troops: he may have been attempting to seize the wealth of Homoian churches in and around Constantinople. Whatever the situation, Theoderic was handed the opportunity to act as champion of Homoianism by threatening some degree of Nicene church closure in Italy. His penalisation of an Ostrogothic woman, Ranilda, who converted to Nicene Christianity may be another reflection of attempts to demonstrate commitment to Homoianism and therefore to his warrior élite. Art and artefacts associated with Theoderic’s Italy are often interpreted simply and misleadingly as either Arian or Catholic, ignoring the religious complexities of his reign. Art historians scrutinize the ceiling mosaics of the Arian Baptistry for Arian messages but end up writing instead about the relationship between Christ’s divinity and humanity or Adop-

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tionism, rather than Homoianism. Although not identical, the mosaics are similar to those of the earlier Neonian (“Orthodox”) Baptistry. Both depict Christ’s baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist, while the Holy Spirit descends on him in the form of a dove—the point at which the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke describe the voice of God declaring from heaven that Jesus is His beloved Son. These Gospel texts were never the subject of Homoian–Nicene controversy and even though the accompanying wall mosaics of the Neonian Baptistry have survived, while those in the Arian Baptistry have not, it is difficult to argue for any substantive differences. The fact that the latter’s mosaics enjoyed a long subsequent existence when the Baptistry was re-consecrated as the Catholic church of Sancta Maria in Cosmedin, should warn us against finding Homoian meanings where none exist. The same applies to the sequences representing the life and teaching of Christ that survive in the nave mosaics of Theodoric’s palace church, now Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. We are asked to believe that Ostrogoths read scenes including the Wedding at Cana, the Raising of Lazarus, the Feeding of the Five Thousand, the parable of the Widow’s Mite, and episodes from the Passion of Christ as pointing them to biblical texts implying the subordinate nature of the Son. The argument is inconsistent and untenable: their universal significance is reflected in their survival of the major remodelling of the church’s decorative programme by the Nicene Bishop Agnellus (557–70). Also questionable is the suggestion that Agnellus removed representations of saints venerated by the Goths: the palace church was an expression of Theoderic’s quasi-imperial style and the excised sections are much more likely to have depicted his court in procession.14 14  Emanuela Penni Iacco, L’arianesimo nei mosaici di Ravenna (Ravenna: Longo, 2011), where the Ostrogoths are presented as Eunomians; Mark J. Johnson, “Art and Architecture,” in A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy, ed. Arnold, Bjornlie, and Sessa, 350–89; Deborah M. Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 172.

96  Chapter 4 While the mosaics of the Ravenna churches of Theoderic’s era were the work of Italo-Roman craftsmen, every one of the six fragments of Homoian biblical manuscripts still in existence is now thought to have been copied in Theoderic’s Italy in Gothic ateliers. The most famous is the Codex Argenteus, the remains of a de-luxe Gospel manuscript written in silver and gold ink on purple vellum.15 It is generally agreed that this must have been created for Theoderic and was probably the product of the workshop of the Ostrogothic bokareis (scribe) Wiljarith, identified as the magister Viliaricus antiquarius, who also produced a fine Latin manuscript of Orosius’s Seven Books of History Against the Pagans. This universal history is notable for the way it aligns Romans and Christian barbarians, in harmony with the original Theoderician construct of civilitas. Fragments of bilingual codices—the left-hand page in Gothic and the right-hand in Latin, where the Latin is a translation of the Gothic text—have been read by Falluomini in a context of intermarriage between Gothic males and Italo-Roman women and the use of Latin by a second generation of Goths (Gothic Version, 29–30). But these are artefacts simultaneously affirming the status of Ulfila’s Gothic text while proclaiming that the Ostrogoths are part of the Roman world. The same applies to the Latin Codex Brixianus, a splendid purple manuscript comparable to the Argenteus. Its Latin text not only follows the readings of the Gothic Bible but, remarkably, even contains two folios that appear to outline in Latin the methods used by Ulfila, or his associates and successors. They describe their use of vulthres, signs indicating whether the translators had followed the Greek or Latin biblical text when translating certain passages into Gothic. (No text showing actual vulthres has survived.) These manuscripts indicate that Ostrogothic Italy was not only capable of generating Latin translations from the Gothic original but also of asserting the sound basis and accuracy of the Ulfilan Bible itself. 15  www.ub.uu.se/about-the-library/exhibitions/codex-argenteus/. Accessed August 30, 2020.

Barbarian Homoianism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries  97

Some of the tiny number of surviving Ostrogothic Homoian manuscripts, including fragmentary remnants of Gothic Gospels and Skeireins, a commentary on the Gospel of John which is possibly an earlier Gothic translation of a fourth-century Greek work, may have been produced in Italian cities other than Ravenna. The same applies to an enigmatic series of biblical citations, the Codex Bononiensis, probably the basis for homilies or for scriptural study. All this activity combines to refute Amory’s assertion that Gothic was an obsolete ecclesiastical language. Other manuscripts copied in Theoderic’s Italy are versions of Latin Homoian works that appear to have been obtained from Vandal Africa. The only part of this material that seems to have attracted any attention from Ostrogothic clergy was a set of uncontroversial Gospel homilies, where marginal glosses in Gothic note the topic of each sermon. (Several of the Gospel texts they were based on—including the Raising of Lazarus, the Widow’s Mite, the Pharisee and the Publican, the Feeding of the Five Thousand—are also represented in the mosaics in Theoderic’s palace church.) In sharp contrast, the homilies for feast-days in the collection are aggressively anti-Nicene—as are two fourth-century Latin Homoian treatises originating in Illyricum, probably obtained via Sirmium.16 The fact that such fiercely anti-Nicene material was not merely imported to Italy but re-copied there may be linked to Theoderic’s performance of Homoianism in the last years of his reign.

Endgames: the Iberian Peninsula While Nicene Christianity was established by conquest in Burgundy, North Africa, and Italy, it became the religion of 16  Scripta Arriana Latina, I, ed. Roger Gryson, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 87 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982), 1–146, 229–65; Rémi Gounelle, “Les sermons ariens (Pseudo-Maximinus),” in Preaching in the Patristic Era. Sermons, Preachers and Audiences in the Latin West, ed. Anthony Dupont, Shari Boodts, Gert Partoens, and Johan Leemans (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 168–76.

98  Chapter 4 Suevic Gallæcia and Visigothic Spain as a result of rulers’ policies. By 589, Reccared, ruler of Visigothic Spain, had played out an endgame that allowed him to ally with the Nicene bishops, key figures in the cities of his kingdom and to move into the macrocosm of Nicene Christianity. Our knowledge of events in Gallæcia is extraordinarily limited: one ruler Chararic (?550–?58) is known only from the writings of Gregory of Tours. But the emergence of a Homoian Visigothic kingdom in Spain probably encouraged rulers to move towards Nicene Christianity as a demonstration of independence from their Homoian neighbour. They may also may have thought that the Nicene episcopate would help control the indigenous populations of a region that appears markedly heterogeneous both in terms of ethnicities and of the articulation of social and economic power.17 We can only trace a skeletal outline of developments, but we begin to see the Nicene Church in Gallæcia re-connecting with the wider Nicene Church in 538, when Bishop Fructuosus of Braga wrote to the pope for guidance on issues such as the date of Easter and baptism. This prepared the way for a further re-alignment of the kingdom in the direction of Nicene Christianity in the 550s, consolidated by the importation of relics of St. Martin of Tours—associated with the conversion of the shadowy Chararic—and also by the arrival of Martin, a Pannonian with connections to Francia, who became Bishop of Braga. Re-orientation continued under Ariamir (558–61) who lifted a ban on Nicene church councils: his successor Theodemir (561–70) declared for Nicene Christianity in 569. The very gradual nature of process suggests a degree of resistance from sections of the Suevic Homoian élite. In the 580s, there were two attempts by its members to seize power. In 585 the Visigothic ruler Liuvigild invaded and conquered Gallæcia. The main zone of Visigothic settlement in Spain appears to have been in the Meseta plateau of central Iberia. After 17  S. Castellanos and I. Martín Viso, “The Local Articulation of Central Power in the North of the Iberian Peninsula,” Early Medieval Europe 13 (2005): 1–42 at 5–8.

Barbarian Homoianism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries  99

the fall of the Visigothic state in Aquitaine this area, along with Septimania (around Narbonne, in modern France) came under the control of Theoderic the Ostrogoth, whose daughter Ostrogotho had married Amalaric, son of the last Aquitanian ruler. Subsequently one of Theoderic’s generals, Theudis, became king in 531. He appropriated the Roman title of Flavius Theudis Rex and permitted the Nicene Church to hold the Council of Lleida in 546, suggesting that he was attempting to align himself with the Nicene world. A reaction against his ambitions led to his murder in 548 and the emergence of a short-lived series of rulers elected by the Visigothic military. A stronger monarchy emerged under Liuvigild (568–86), who aimed to create a united Spain. He established control over Septimania which had been ruled by his brother; expelled the East Roman Empire from the south; and defeated the Basques and Sueves. Liuvigild aimed to create a new discourse of Visigothic kingship. Toledo, in the main area of Visigothic settlement, became the ceremonial centre of his kingdom and he founded the new cities of Reccopolis and Victoriacum. He also surrounded his rule with the trappings of Romanitas, using Late-Roman regalia—crown, sceptre, and throne—and issuing coinage with his bust on both obverse and reverse. We might expect all this to be accompanied by a rapprochement with Nicene Christianity. But Liuvigild was evidently nervous of his élite, so attempted instead to strengthen his control by extending Homoianism beyond its original Gothic base. He confiscated Nicene property; and Gregory of Tours tells a lurid tale of the casting of a Frankish princess into a Homoian baptismal pool by her mother-in law (who happened also to be her grandmother), the wicked queen Goiswinth. However, Liuvigild also promoted a modified Homoianism designed to make conversion easier and more attractive. Nicenes were offered a new version of the Gloria—“Glory to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit”—and could now become Homoians simply through the laying-on of hands and communion. (This paralleled the Nicene rite of chrismation—anointing with chrism, a conse-

100  Chapter 4 crated mix of oil and spices—for those who had undergone Homoian baptism.) The importance of control of the cities and the Hispano-Roman population is reflected in Liuvigild’s attempts to persuade Nicene bishops to go over to his new version of Homoianism. But only one, Vincent of Zaragoza, defected. The pro-Nicene Lives of the Fathers of Mérida reveals a struggle for control of Mérida, the chief city of Lusitania. Its Nicene bishop, Masona, had actually been born into the Visigothic élite: he is represented in the Lives as converting out of personal devotion to the martyr Eulalia and consolidating his position as bishop by his works of charity.18 When Liuvigild failed to either bribe or intimidate Masona, he first of all appointed a Homoian bishop, then replaced him by a subservient Nicene. He also attempted to remove one of the city’s most precious relics, the tunic of the martyr Eulalia, to Toledo. Under Liuvigild we see the creation for the very first time in the barbarian kingdoms of a number of Visigothic Homoian bishops appointed to cities—Toledo, Barcelona, Valencia, Palencia, Tortosa, Mérida, and Narbonne, as well as Viseu, Tuy, Lugo, and Porto in the former Suevic kingdom. Bold as this policy was, it was not enough. Liuvigild’s son, Reccared, who succeeded him in 586, realized that his best chance of controlling the Hispano-Roman cities as well as entering the wider Christian community was to take the ultimate step of making Nicene Christianity the state religion. In 587, ten months after his accession, he persuaded most of the recently created Homoian bishops to accept this decision. He began to return the property confiscated by his father, restoring rights and legal privileges that had been removed from Nicenes. In 589, the Third Council of Toledo proclaimed Nicene Christianity as the official religion of Visigothic Spain. The majority of the recently created Homoian bishops converted and were allowed to remain in office, even if this meant that there were for a time two bishops in some 18  Lives of the Visigothic Fathers, ed. and trans. Andrew T. Fear (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), 45–105.

Barbarian Homoianism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries  101

cities. The council also legislated against married priests; and while earlier councils of the Nicene Church in Visigothic Spain had dealt with some issues relating to private churches and monasteries, it now enabled the wholesale extension of episcopal control over former Homoian churches. Although there is evidence of resistance to Reccared’s policies by a few of the élite and some Homoian bishops, Visigothic Spain was now a Nicene state—and remained so as the Visigothic élite attached itself ever more firmly to the Nicene Church in the seventh century.19

19  Alexandra Chavarría Arnau, “Churches and Aristocracies in Seventh-Century Spain: some Thoughts on the Debate on Visigothic Churches,” Early Medieval Europe 18, no. 2 (2010): 160–74.

Chapter 5

Arianism after Arianism

The Lombards, who entered Italy from Pannonia in 568, have traditionally been thought of as the last barbarian people to become Arians. The concept of Lombard Arianism owes much to older and misleading ideas of what Arianism actually was— the core assumptions against which this book is directed. For example: historians formerly discussed the Lombards’ acceptance of Homoian Christianity before they entered Italy, visualizing its spread along the Danube to Herules, Pannonian Suevi, and Rugi and the incorporation of many Arians from these groups amongst the Lombards prior to their move into Italy. Such viewpoints are based on notions of the wholesale conversion of entire peoples to Christianity and the absorption of Homoianism simply as a result of contact. But we have seen that conversions were much more complex and fragmented, with warrior groups coalescing and dissolving and Homoianism being imposed on leaders by others as a token of hegemony or allegiance. The dispersal of the Rugi and the defeat of the Pannonian Sueves argues against their being able to compel Lombard leaders to convert; and while one Lombard ruler married the daughter of a Herule king, this was only after subjugating him. Another factor contributing to the illusion of Lombard Arianism is the assumption that—if Lombards had converted after entering Italy—the choice they faced was one between Arianism or Nicene Christianity—or, strictly speaking, Nicene– Tricapitoline Christianity, because much of the Northern Ital-

104  Chapter 5 ian Church had been estranged from the popes (in the “Three Chapters” or Tricapitoline Schism) since the mid 550s.1 But the evidence of other conversions demonstrates that for groups entering the Roman Empire the options were the status quo—paganism—or Nicene Christianity. Before their move into Italy, the Lombards’ pagan leader Alboin received a Homoian delegation: but he also put out feelers to Nicene Christianity—although, tellingly, his first approach seems to have been to the potent relics of the saints that rested in the Roman basilicas rather than to the pope. By the time the Lombards entered Italy, Homoianism was the religion of the losers and rapidly fading from memory. In 551, the church of St. Anastasia in Ravenna was selling off land and Ravenna’s remaining Homoian assets passed to the Nicene bishop by 565. Homoians did not control Italy’s major relic shrines. In the 590s, Gregory I’s correspondence regarding the re-dedication of two Arian churches in Rome implies that they had been closed for some time. The suggestion that after the fall of the Ostrogothic state there was still a sufficient Homoian clerical presence to pass on their religion to the Lombards—and even to help them with civic administration2—is rooted in another common misunderstanding: that the Homoian Church possessed structures and hierarchies resembling those of the Nicene Church. But its personal and proprietary nature meant that in the Italian countryside, any remaining Homoian clerics would have been attached to churches belonging to the family or entourage of a defeated—or dead—Gothic leader or warrior, making them 1  Thomas S. Brown, “Lombard Religious Policy in the Late Sixth and Seventh Centuries: The Roman Dimension,” in The Langobards before the Frankish Conquest: An Ethnographic Perspective, ed. Georgio Ausenda, Paolo Delogu, and Chris Wickham (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), 289–308.

2  Walter Pohl, “Deliberate Ambiguity: the Lombards and Christianity,” in Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals, ed. Guyda Armstrong and Ian N. Wood (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 47–58 at 54.

Arianism after Arianism  105

highly unlikely converters of pagan, let alone Nicene, Lombard warriors. In any case, there is the question of how many defeated Goths remained Homoian or did the same as the warrior Gundila, who had his property seized by Justinian’s armies and converted to Nicene Christianity to get it back. (The ebb and flow of Justinian’s war of reconquest ensured that this was not the end of the story, but Gundila eventually retained his lands by remaining a Nicene.) And while it is possible to visualize a Lombard warrior and his family taking over the lands and church formerly belonging to an Ostrogothic Homoian, it is not possible to see a priest who remained Homoian continuing to serve the church. One of the most intriguing aspects of discussions of Lombard Arianism is that, while there is a consciousness of the absence of any ecclesiastical council to bring Homoianism to an end by dealing with its personnel or extending episcopal jurisdiction over its churches, only a few historians seem prepared to entertain the logical implication that these did not exist. A more positive approach is to consider what we know of Lombard religiosities. We find strong indications of the practice of syncretistic forms of Christianity: in the semi-independent southern duchy of Benevento as late as the 660s, the decade after the Lombard ruler Aripert (653–61) finally opted for Nicene Christianity, baptized Lombards maintained some of their traditional pagan rites or had even taken up surviving local non-Christian cults.3 While there has been a growing consciousness of the hole at the centre of the model of Lombard Arianism, attention has largely focused on the scarcity of evidence for its existence. The testimony of the eighth-century Lombard monk Paul the Deacon has been questioned by historians who pinpoint not just Paul’s vagueness and errors but also his political 3  Marilyn Dunn, “Lombard Religiosities Reconsidered: ‘Arianism’, Syncretism and the Transition to Catholic Christianity,” in Heresy and the Making of European Culture: Medieval and Modern Perspectives, ed. Andrew P. Roach and James R. Simpson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 89–109.

106  Chapter 5 bias.4 By the same token, we should be aware of Gregory I’s ignorance of the situation in Northern Italy at the beginning of his pontificate, when he characterized the Lombard ruler Authari as Arian: later on and better informed, he wrote of Lombards either as pagans or Catholics. We should not place much reliance either on the officious letter sent by Sisebut, the Visigothic king, to the regent Theudelinda and her son Adaloald, taking them to task for supporting Arianism. The widowed Theudelinda and her son were both Nicenes and Sisebut’s letter says more about his domestic enforcement of Nicene Christianity and his penchant for interfering in the religious affairs of other rulers than about the situation in Lombard Italy. It looks like an ill-informed response to the young Adaloald’s participation in traditional non-Christian military rituals in a situation where some of the powerful Lombard dukes possibly still remained pagan; others practised syncretistic versions of Christianity; and Theudelinda had to perform a difficult balancing act to ensure her survival and her son’s succession. What was not acceptable was a ruler’s moving into the Nicene and imperial macrocosm: after he came of age, Adaloald attempted to align himself with the Byzantine Empire, only to be overthrown in 626. Lombard rulers trod a cautious path. They might marry Nicenes, have their children baptized as Nicenes, or support the Nicene monastery of Bobbio; but it was not until the 650s that Aripert felt secure enough to declare openly for Nicene Christianity. In this case, the microcosm holding him back had not been Homoianism/Arianism, but the paganism or syncretistic Christianity of the Lombard dukes. Our evidence for the existence of Lombard Arianism boils down to a handful of writings from the monastery of Bobbio, 4  Walter Pohl, “Heresy in Secundus and Paul the Deacon,” in The Crisis of the Oikoumene: The Three Chapters and the Failed Quest for Unity in the Sixth-century Mediterranean, ed. Celia Chazelle and Catherine Cubitt (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 243–64; Piero Majocchi, “Arrianorum abolevit heresem: the Lombards and the Ghost of Arianism,” in Arianism, ed. Berndt and Steinacher, 231–38.

Arianism after Arianism  107

founded by the Irish monk Columbanus soon after his arrival in Italy in 613. None of it stands up to close examination. Columbanus wrote to Pope Boniface V challenging him to take active steps to help achieve the conversion of the Lombard ruler Agilulf (590–616). In his letter, he used the expression “Arian” in an attempt to indicate a subordinationist Christianity among the Lombards. But he also referred to Agilulf as a “pagan king”: crucially, his use of the term “substance” shows that he was only aware of its significance in relation to the Christological disputes that had triggered the Three Chapters Schism, not in the Homoian sense. Columbanus’s hagiographer Jonas attempted to cover up his hero’s inept intervention—in which he had accused the pope of favouring heresy—and to underline his orthodoxy, claiming he was the author of an anti-Arian tract of which no trace has ever been found. And although Jonas presents a dramatic account of a later encounter between a monk of Bobbio, Arioald, duke of Milan, and the latter’s “Arian bishop,” the terminology he uses betrays a lack of contact with actual Homoian belief while his narrative reveals the existence of syncretistic religious practices in Bobbio’s vicinity. Was a juxtaposition of “Arian” and “pagan” the nearest seventh-century monks could get to defining a Lombard religious culture built around intuitions of a remote creator-god Father and a more active Son, venerated along with non-Christian deities—a combination we would term syncretism? The eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monk Bede resorted to biblical analogy to describe the syncretistic practices of Rædwald, ruler of the East Angles who kept a smaller pagan altar beside a Christian one: “in the manner of the ancient Samaritans he seemed to be serving both Christ and the gods whom he had previously served.”5 Elsewhere, we can see a drift towards identifying Christian–pagan syncretism with Arianism. Gregory of Tours’ Ten 5  Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Judith McClure and Roger Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 98.

108  Chapter 5 Books of Histories completed in the 590s show his awareness of some of the ever more imaginative versions of Athanasius’s fiction of Arius’s death produced in the intervening centuries: he makes several references to Arius “who emptied out his entrails through his back passage in the lavatory.”6 In his narrative, Arius’s gross fate is visited not just on heretics but on those guilty of insubordination or opposition to episcopal authority. However, Gregory goes further: as well as representing himself as disputing Liuvigild’s modified Trinitarian theology with envoys from Spain, he also makes one of them remark that Visigoths saw no harm in paying respect to both Christian and pagan altars.7 Gregory, who shared the worries of the Frankish episcopate about the survival of non-Christian practices amongst Christians in sixth-century rural Francia, was quite prepared to label syncretism as Arianism. Lombard Arianism is a mirage that has materialized from images of Arianism constructed from Athanasius onwards. Later in the Middle Ages, Arianism would become the Other that defined orthodoxy. In the twelfth century, the illuminator of the Bible of the Cistercian abbot Stephen Harding illustrated the opening of St. John’s Gospel by depicting the eagle, symbol of St. John, carrying in its beak a scroll bearing the words “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God,” as its talons seized the head of a figure carrying another scroll inscribed “Arrius. There was a time when he was not.” Having earlier done duty to cover syncretistic Christianities, the term Arian could even be popularly applied— for a time—to Catharism. Arius himself had long enjoyed the dubious honour of being regarded as the arch-heretic on a par with Judas, just as Athanasius intended. The image known as the “Quinity of Winchester” in an eleventh-century English prayer-book, shows Mary and the Christ Child, the Holy Spirit, 6  Ellen Muehlberger, “The Legend of Arius’ Death: Imagination, Space and Filth in Late Ancient Historiography,” Past and Present 227 (May 2015): 3–29; Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, trans. Thorpe, 135, 137, 161, 309, 498. 7  Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, trans. Thorpe, 309–10.

Arianism after Arianism  109

God the Father, and God the Son enthroned over Arius and Judas. Both are portrayed naked and in chains beside Hellmouth, damned as betrayers of the different aspects of God. From the fourteenth century, Arius was demonized further in the iconography of the Eastern Church where depictions of the Council of Nicæa show him being slapped in the face by an outraged St. Nicholas of Myra. * * *

Modern historiography has contributed its own misleading images of Arianism: as emerging exclusively from a mainstream intra-ecclesiastical theological dispute; as a heretical creed handed down to the Goths by Roman Emperors; as a religion unaffected by changes of membership or location; as an organizational duplicate of the Nicene Churches. Homoianism has been overshadowed by other issues that have dominated the historiography of the barbarians in recent decades, above all those of ethnicity and identity, where it has been viewed as everything from a defining mark of ethnicity to part of a last-ditch choice of identity by Ostrogoths facing an East Roman invasion. But the only way to understand both Arianism and Homoianism is to throw out the divisive rule book that separates history and theology and forge a cross-disciplinary approach combining them with the fresh insights provided by CSR. The resultant picture is a of a more complex phenomenon that first emerged from the excitingly diverse world of early Christianities; that, as Homoianism, attempted to address non-Christian religious intuitions and practices as Christianity expanded; then mutated into a mainstay of barbarian groups and kingdoms; and finally vanished as it became a hindrance to rulers who wished to play a role on the wider political and religious stage. Does Arianism have a future? There is certainly more to be said about the way that Athanasius, having disposed of Arius’s response to competitor Christianities in Egypt, faced up to their challenge himself. Long-running controversies over questions of ethnicity and identity are set to be rewritten in the light of work on aDNA obtained from barbarian buri-

110  Chapter 5 als, on the lines pioneered by a recent study of Lombard inhumations in Hungary (Pannonia) and Italy.8 It would be good to develop further investigations of this kind for areas where barbarian settlement was supposedly concentrated, such as the Iberian Meseta or Africa Proconsularis to bring about an in-depth understanding of the relationship between ethnicities and Homoianism. There is huge potential for investigating churches, baptistries, and cemeteries, expanding work already done on the Spanish countryside and Ostrogothic Italy. The extensive corpus of archaeological findings for North Africa could be used as a basis for mapping further study of the Vandal takeover of Nicene churches in the Proconsular Province: combined with the Notitia provinciarum et civitatum Africae’s details of Nicene defectors, it could plot the geography of the Latin Homoian Church to help scope out further investigations. Where the later development of Homoianism is concerned we might give serious consideration to the possibility that the Incomplete Commentary on Matthew (Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum), a text enjoying the unique distinction of being both a supposedly Arian work and a favourite of St. Thomas Aquinas, was a Nicene production slightly adapted in the Latin Homoian Church of Vandal North Africa. These are just a few of the many possibilities for the study of Arianism. Can we move, to quote the title of the series in which this book appears, from past imperfect to future active?

8  Carlos Eduardo G. Amorim, Stefania Vai, Cosimo Posth, et al., “Understanding 6th-century Barbarian Social Organization and Migration through Paleogenomics,” Nature Communications 9, no. 3547 (2018): www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06024-4, accessed August 30, 2020.

Further Reading

Cognitive Science of Religion Barrett, Justin L. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Lanham: AltaMira, 2004. Outlines the importance of nonreflective belief in sustaining religions.

Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained. The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors. London: Vintage, 2002. Explains intuitions of deities, ancestors and the recently dead.

Eidenow, Esther and Luther H. Martin, eds. Journal of Cognitive Historiography (2014–) Cognitive theory supporting historical research and vice versa.

Whitehouse, Harvey. Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek: AltaMira, 2004. “Doctrinal” and “imagistic” modes of religiosity.

—— . and Luther H. Martin, eds. Theorizing Religions Past: Archaeology, History and Cognition. Walnut Creek: AltaMira 2004.

Essays applying Whitehouse’s “modes theory” in specific contexts.

Early Christianities BeDuhn, Jason. The Manichaean Body in Discipline and Ritual. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Brakke, David. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Ehrman, Bart. D. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

112  Further Reading

Athanasius Barnes, Timothy D. Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gwynn, David M. Athanasius of Alexandria. Bishop, Theologian, Ascetic, Father. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Arius and Arianism Hanson, Richard P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God. The Arian Controversy 318–381. Edinburgh: Clark, 1988.

Massive if now dated presentation of the “Arian Controversy” as intra-ecclesiastical Trinitarian debate.

Löhr, Winrich A. “Arius Reconsidered.” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 9 (2006): 524–60; 10 (2006): 121–57. Important discussion of the fragmentary remains of Arius’s writings and their response to Valentinian Gnosticism.

Williams, Rowan. Arius. Theology and Tradition. 2nd ed. London: SCM, 2001. Approaches the thought of Arius via Origen and Platonic philosophy.

Conversion among Barbarian Peoples Dunn, Marilyn. The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons. Discourses of Life, Death and Afterlife. London: Continuum, 2009. Uses CSR to examine conversion from paganism to Christianity, especially in relation to the conversion of rulers; death and funerary ritual.

—— . Belief and Religion in Barbarian Europe. London: Bloomsbury 2013.

Includes an earlier approach to some of the areas discussed in this book.

Further Reading  113

Arianism in General Berndt, Guido M. and Roland Steinacher, eds. Arianism: Roman Heresy and Barbarian Creed. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. An attempt to provide a comprehensive overview through individual essays on history, theology, and archaeology. Contributors include Brennecke, Schäferdiek, and Wolfram as well as those mentioned earlier in this book.

Arianism and the Goths Brennecke, Hanns Christof. “Der sogenannte germanische Arianismus als ‚arteignes‘ Christentum. Die völkische Deutung der Christianisierung der Germanen im Nationalsozialismus”. In Evangelische Kirchenhistoriker im “Dritten Reich”, edited by Thomas Kaufmann and Harry Oelke, 310–29. Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 2002. Surveys the growth of German nationalist and Nazi distortions of Homoianism/Arianism.

Heather, Peter J. and John Matthew. The Goths in the Fourth Century. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991. Good collection of sources in translation, though aspects of the discussion have been superseded.

Schäferdiek, Knut. “Germanic and Celtic Christianities.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 2, Constantine to c.600, edited by Augustine Casiday and Frederick. W. Norris, 52–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Schwarz, Andreas. “Cult and Religion Among the Tervingi and Visigoths and their Conversion to Christianity”. In The Visigoths. From the Migration Period to the Seventh Century. An Ethnographic Perspective, edited by Peter J. Heather, 447–59, discussion 459–72. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999. Sums up older approaches to Gothic paganism and the conversion of the Goths.

Thompson, Edward A. The Visigoths in the Time of Ulfila. 2nd ed. London: Duckworth, 2008. Originally published in 1969. New introduction by Michael Kulikowski.

Wolfram, Herwig. History of the Goths. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. The Goths as seen by one of the pioneers of ethnogenesis theory.

114  Further Reading

Gothic Bible and Language Falluomini, Carla. The Gothic Version of the Gospels and Pauline Epistles. Cultural Background, Transmission and Character. Arbeiten zur neutestamentlichen Textforschung 46. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. New work on the Gothic Bible text and manuscripts, with significant implications.

Green, Dennis Howard. Language and History in the Early Germanic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Includes studies on Gothic biblical translation with work on vocabulary and target audience of conversion.

Barbarian Kingdoms and Homoianism Amory, Patrick, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Attempts to show that “Goth” and “Roman” are ideological constructs and that Goths learned Homoianism from a Latin Homoian Church in Italy.

Arnold, Jonathan J., M. Shane Bjornlie, and Sessa Kristina, eds. A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2016) Includes essays on Ostrogothic military (Halsall), Gothic identity (Swain), art and architecture (Johnson), religious diversity (Cohen).

Barnish, Sam and Federico Marazzi, eds. The Ostrogoths from the Migration Period to the Sixth Century. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007. Collins, Roger. “King Leovigild and the Conversion of the Visigoths.” In Roger Collins, Law, Culture and Regionalism in Early Medieval Spain, item II. Variorum Collected Studies 356. Aldershot: Variorum 1992. Heather, Peter J., The Goths. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. —— . “Merely an Ideology?—Gothic Identity in Ostrogothic Italy.” In The Ostrogoths from the Migration Period to the Sixth Century, ed. Barnish and Marazzi, 31–60 and discussion 60–80. Telling criticisms of Amory’s approach, notably his prosopography.

Merrills, Andy and Richard Miles. The Vandals. Chichester: Wiley, 2010. Substantial section on religion in Vandal North Africa.

Modéran, Yves. “Une guerre de réligion? Les deux églises d’Afrique à l’époque Vandale.” Antiquité Tardive 11 (2004): 21–44. Foundational work on the Notitia Dignitatum, though presented in the context of a supposed long-term Arian drive to convert Catholics.

Further Reading  115

Shanzer, Danuta. “Intentions and Audiences: History, Hagiography, Martyrdom, and Confession in Victor of Vita’s Historia Persecutionis.” In Vandals, Romans and Berbers. New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa, edited by Andrew H. Merrills, 271–90. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Ubric, Purificación. “The Church in the Suevic Kingdom (411–585 AD).” In Culture and Society in Medieval Galicia, edited and translated by James D’Emilio, 210–43. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Useful outline of the take-up and abandonment of Homoianism by Suevic rulers in the context of the development of the Galician Church.

Whelan, Robin. Being Christian in Vandal Africa. The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Presents events in Vandal North Africa as part of ongoing theological debate about definition of faith.