Arius

Who was Arius?

Arius was an ascetic North African Christian presbyter and priest in Alexandria, Egypt, of the church of Baucalis, who was of Libyan origins. His teachings about the nature of the Godhead, which emphasized the Father's divinity over the Son, and his opposition to Trinitarian Christology, made him a primary topic of the First Council of Nicea, convened by Roman Emperor Constantine in AD 325.

After Emperor Licinius and Emperor Constantine legalized and formalized the Christianity of the time in the Roman Empire, the newly recognized catholic Church sought to unify and clarify its theology. Trinitarian Christians, including Athanasius, used Arius and Arianism as epithets to describe those who disagreed with their doctrine of co-equal Trinitarianism, a Christology representing God the Father and Son as "of one essence" and coeternal.

Although virtually all positive writings on Arius' theology have been suppressed or destroyed, negative writings describe Arius' theology as one in which there was a time before the Son of God, when only God the Father existed. Despite concerted opposition, 'Arian', or nontrinitarian Christian churches persisted throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and also in various Gothic and Germanic kingdoms, until suppressed by military conquest or voluntary royal conversion between the fifth and seventh centuries.