Faith & RitualGreek → English
Arianism
/ˈɛriənɪzəm/noun
The doctrine that the Son was created by the Father and is not co-eternal with him, condemned at Nicaea in 325.
The Greek roots
Ἄρειος
Áreios
of Ares, warlike
Literally: “the teaching of Areios”
Follow a root:Ἄρειος1 word
The story of the word
Arius was an Alexandrian presbyter whose name simply means belonging to Ares, the war god, a common enough Greek name with no theological cargo. His slogan, that there was a time when the Son was not, forced the council to invent the word homoousios, of one substance, to rule it out. The similarity to Aryan is pure accident: that word is Sanskrit ārya and has no connection to the Greek name at all.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek personal name → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
AresareopagusArianist
In a sentence
Most of the Gothic kingdoms were Arian long after the empire had settled on Nicene orthodoxy.