Exactly seventeen centuries have passed since the First Council of Nicaea convened on May 20, A.D. 325 — a gathering that, by June 19, promulgated the Nicene Creed, a defining statement of Christian orthodoxy that proclaimed the Son of God to be “true God from true God” and homoousios (of one essence) with the Father. But what if we examine that landmark creed through the eyes of its earliest and most formidable critics? In the wake of Nicaea, two theologians in particular – Arius of Alexandria and, a generation later, Eunomius of Cyzicus – stood in staunch opposition to the Nicene formula. Branded as heretics by their opponents, Arius and Eunomius nevertheless articulated sophisticated theological arguments, grounded in their reading of Scripture and Greek philosophical ideas, to explain why they believed the Nicene Creed had gone wrong. This article takes an engaging yet rigorous journey back into the fourth century, letting Arius and Eunomius speak for themselves. We will explore their teachings in detail – including extensive excerpts in the original Greek (with translations) from their surviving letters and writings – to understand how they construed the relationship between God the Father and His Son, and why they rejected the Nicene doctrine. The goal is not to endorse their views, but to present them fairly and analytically, appreciating the internal logic and scriptural rationale that led these thinkers to their controversial stances. In doing so, we gain a richer historical and theological insight into one of the great debates of Christian history: What exactly is the nature of the Son of God, and did the Nicene Creed get it wrong?
Arius of Alexandria: Theological Vision of a Subordinate Son
Who was Arius? Arius (c. 256–336) was a learned presbyter (priest) in Alexandria, Egypt, whose teachings in the early 4th century ignited a conflict with his bishop, Alexander. Around A.D. 318, Arius began publicly arguing against what he perceived as the bishop’s incorrect teaching on the Trinity. Arius was deeply concerned with safeguarding the uniqueness and transcendence of God the Father. In his view, calling the Son (Jesus Christ) fully divine in the same way as the Father threatened the core Christian confession of one God. Arius maintained that the Son, though exalted, must be subordinate to the Father and not co-eternal or co-equal with Him. This perspective – later termed Arianism – spread quickly, sparking a controversy that led Emperor Constantine to convene the Council of Nicaea in 325. The council condemned Arius’s doctrine and formulated the Nicene Creed to affirm the Son’s true deity and equality with the Father. However, Arius’s ideas did not vanish; for decades after Nicaea, Arian theology persisted among many bishops and imperial courts. To understand why Arius thought the Nicene Creed was wrong, we must delve into his theology and how he interpreted Scripture.
The Son as a Created Being. The fundamental point of Arius’s teaching was stunningly simple: God is absolutely one, self-existent, and unbegotten; therefore the Son, who is called “begotten,” cannot be the same unbegotten God. Arius argued that the Son had an origin and was brought forth by the will of the Father, making the Son a creature – exalted above all others, but still a creature. In a letter to Bishop Alexander’s supporters, Arius and his colleagues wrote that the Son is “an only-begotten Son, but begotten not in time and not from the Father’s essence. Rather, the Son was produced by the Father’s will before the ages as a perfect creature of God, but not as one of the other creatures.” In the original Greek, they describe the Son as “τέλειον ποίημα Θεοῦ, ἀλλ’ οὐχ ὡς ἕν τῶν ποιημάτων; γέννημα, ἀλλ’ οὐχ ὡς ἕν τῶν γεννημάτων.” In other words, Christ is God’s supreme creation and “offspring,” uniquely honored above all creation, but still fundamentally originating from God rather than existing eternally alongside Him.
Arius captured this idea in a now-famous slogan: «ἦν ποτε ὅτε οὐκ ἦν» – “there was a time when He [the Son] was not.” By this phrase Arius meant that the Son of God did not exist from all eternity; he had a beginning. Only the Father is without beginning. Indeed, one of Arius’s favorite epithets for God the Father was “Unbegotten” (ἀγέννητος), signifying that God alone is underived, with no source or origin. The Son, being begotten, could not share this quality. For Arius, to say the Son is unbegotten like the Father would be to confess two ultimate principles (two Gods), which was unacceptable. Thus, Arius’s theology is often summarized as a strict monotheism that makes the Son secondary and subordinate.
Arius’s Thalia – The Son’s Inequality to God. Our clearest window into Arius’s own thought comes from fragments of a work he composed in verse called the Thalia (“Banquet”). Though the original has not survived, sizable excerpts are preserved in writings of his opponents, especially Saint Athanasius of Alexandria. In one fragment recorded by Athanasius, Arius exalts the solitary supremacy of the Father in contrast to the Son:
«Αὐτὸς γοῦν ὁ Θεὸς καθ’ ὅ ἐστιν, ἄρρητος ἅπασιν ὑπάρχει· ἴσον, οὐδὲ ὅμοιον, οὐχ ὁμόδοξον ἔχει μόνος οὗτος. Ἀγέννητον δὲ αὐτὸν φαμέν, διὰ τὸν τῇ φύσει γεννητόν· τοῦτον ἄναρχον ἀνυμνοῦμεν, διὰ τὸν ἀρχὴν ἔχοντα· ἀΐδιον δὲ αὐτὸν σέβομεν, διὰ τὸν ἐν χρόνῳ γεγαότα.»
“So God Himself, as He really is, is unutterable to all. He alone has no equal, no one similar, none of the same glory. We call Him Unbegotten, in contrast to the one who is begotten by nature. We praise Him as without beginning, in contrast to the one who has a beginning. We worship Him as eternal, in contrast to the one who in time has come into existence.”
Arius here draws a stark antithesis between the Father and the Son. Every divine attribute that the Father possesses inherently (inexpressible, without beginning, eternal), the Son possesses only in a derivative or metaphorical sense – because the Son had a beginning and was caused to exist by the Father. Notice Arius’s phrasing: “in time [the Son] has come into existence.” The Greek term used, «ἐν χρόνῳ γεγαότε», indicates that the Son’s existence started within time (or at the very least, within the order of things as “before” and “after”), as opposed to the Father who exists outside of time and without origin. This language directly contradicts the Nicene Creed, which proclaimed the Son “begotten of the Father before all ages” (meaning the Son’s begetting is eternal and not within time). For Arius, any notion of an “eternally begotten” Son was a logical oxymoron – if begotten, then not eternal; if eternal, then unbegotten. Thus, he categorically rejected the Nicene attempt to have it both ways.
“Not Equal to the Father, Nor of the Same Essence”. Another fragment of the Thalia, preserved in Athanasius’s De Synodis 15, shows Arius explicitly denying the core Nicene term homoousios (of one essence) which the council had used to describe the Father and Son. Arius writes:
«Ἀρχὴν τὸν Υἱὸν ἔθηκε τῶν γενητῶν ὁ ἄναρχος… Ἴδιον οὐδὲν ἔχει τοῦ Θεοῦ καθ’ ὑπόστασιν ἰδιότητος· οὐδὲ γάρ ἐστιν ἴσος, ἀλλ’ οὐδὲ ὁμοούσιος αὐτῷ.»
“The one who is without beginning [the Father] made the Son a beginning of all created things… He [the Son] has nothing of His own in proper subsistence that is equal to God (the Father). For he is not equal to Him, nor is he of the same essence as Him.”
In this remarkable passage, Arius unambiguously declares that the Son does not share the Father’s essence or status. The Father, being “ὁ ἄναρχος” (the unoriginated One), has made the Son to be the “beginning” (archē) of creation – effectively the first and highest creature. The Son was “begotten” in the sense of being produced by God’s will as a Son, but Arius adds “He has nothing proper to God’s essence” (Greek: ἴδιον οὐδὲν ἔχει τοῦ Θεοῦ…). That is to say, none of the distinctive properties that belong to God by nature (such as eternal self-existence, immutability, absolute lordship) belong intrinsically to the Son. Therefore – Arius concludes – the Son is categorically “not equal to the Father” and “not homoousios with Him.” This strikes at the heart of Nicene theology. Where Nicaea taught Father and Son are co-essential and co-equal (“Light from Light, true God from true God”), Arius taught inequality and difference of essence.
To bolster his argument, Arius and his followers pointed to various passages of Scripture. They noted that Jesus calls the Father “greater than I” (John 14:28), which in the majority text in Greek reads «ὁ Πατὴρ μείζων μου ἐστίν». If the Father is greater, Arians argued, then the Son must be lesser, not equal in status or being. They seized upon Colossians 1:15, which names Christ “the firstborn of all creation” – «πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως» – suggesting that the Son is part of creation (the highest part, to be sure, but still created). They cited verses like Mark 13:32, where the Son confesses ignorance of the day of judgment, implying limitation, and Proverbs 8:22 (LXX), where divine Wisdom (interpreted as a figure of the pre-incarnate Son) says, “The Lord created me at the beginning of His ways” (Greek: «Κύριος ἔκτισέν με ἀρχὴν ὁδῶν αὐτοῦ»). Such scriptures, in Arius’s view, clearly distinguished the Son from the one true God. And significantly, Arius noted, nowhere does Scripture plainly say that the Son is identical in essence with the Father or that He is the one true God himself. On the contrary, in John 17:3 Jesus addresses the Father as “the only true God” («σὲ τὸν μόνον ἀληθινὸν Θεόν») and refers to himself separately as the one sent by God. Arius read this as Jesus acknowledging the Father’s exclusive claim to absolute Deity.
Christ as Divine by Grace and Name Only. Arius did not deny that the Son could be called “God” or that the Son is worthy of great honor. But he carefully distinguished between the one God (the Father) and the Son’s lesser divinity. The Son is “God” only in a derivative sense – a status granted by the Father’s favor and the Son’s role in creation and redemption. In an extant fragment attributed to Arius’s followers, we find a stark statement of this principle:
«οὐδὲ θεὸς ἀληθινός ἐστιν ὁ Λόγος· εἰ γὰρ καὶ λέγεται θεός, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀληθινός ἐστιν, ἀλλὰ μετοχῇ χάριτος, ὥσπερ καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι πάντες· οὕτως καὶ αὐτὸς ὀνόματι μόνον θεός.»
“The Word (Logos) is not true God. For even though He is called ‘God,’ He is not true God; rather, by participation in grace, just as all others, so too is He Himself God only in name.”
This remarkable quotation (preserved by Athanasius, Oratio contra Arianos I.6) lays bare the Arian viewpoint. Christ is called “God,” but this is a title of honor granted by the Father, not an affirmation of identical deity. The Son’s godhood is by μετοχὴ χάριτος (“participation in grace”), meaning it is a gifted share in divine power and glory, analogous (though far higher in degree) to how other exalted beings (like angels or kings) might be called “gods” metaphorically. In essence and nature, however, the Son remains distinct from and subordinate to the Father. As the text says, the Son is “God only in name.” For Arius, to call Jesus “God” was not wrong – Scripture itself does so (e.g. John 1:1, Isaiah 9:6) – but one must understand this as an honorific use of the word “God,” not implying that Jesus is literally the same true God as the Father. The Nicene Creed’s assertion that Jesus is “true God from true God” would have struck Arius as an untenable blurring of the necessary distinction between the uncreated God and His created Son.
Arian Reasoning: Protecting Monotheism and Divine Transcendence. Stepping back from the polemical details, one can appreciate the internal logic of Arius’s position. Arius was driven by a desire to uphold what he saw as the fundamental truth of Christianity: the absolute oneness and unchangeability of God. If the Son could be said to be fully God in the same sense as the Father, Christianity would seem to have two Gods – one unbegotten and one begotten – which to Arius sounded like an abandonment of monotheism. Moreover, Arius was influenced by Greek philosophical ideas about the utter transcendence of the highest God. God, in Arius’s view, is unapproachable and unknowable in His essence, even to His Son. As one fragment of the Thalia expresses, “the Father is invisible and ineffable, even to the Son. The Son cannot fully comprehend or see the Father” (cf. fragment in Athanasius’s Oratio c. Arianos I.17, where it is stated that the Son “can neither see nor know the Father perfectly and accurately”). Arius even asserted that the Son does not by nature know His own Father – a shocking claim designed to emphasize how vastly higher the Father is. He wrote, “It is impossible for [the Son] to fathom the Father, who is by Himself. For the Son himself does not even know his own essence; for, being Son, he exists by the will of the Father” (Thalia fragment, cf. Athan. Or. c. Ar. I. *). In Greek: «Αὐτὸς γὰρ ὁ Υἱὸς τὴν ἑαυτοῦ οὐσίαν οὐκ οἶδεν… θελήσει Πατρὸς ὑπῆρξεν.» The Son’s being and knowledge are contingent on the Father’s will.
All of these points demonstrate that Arius saw the Nicene Creed’s assertions – that the Son is co-eternal, true God, and consubstantial with the Father – as serious theological errors. In Arius’s eyes, Nicaea had compromised God’s transcendence by bringing the Son too close to the Father’s level. It had compromised monotheism by introducing a second who was called “true God” alongside the Father. And it had contradicted Scripture by using non-biblical terminology (homoousios is not a biblical word) and by overlooking or reinterpreting clear biblical statements about the Son’s subordination. Arius and his followers often protested that homoousios was an unscriptural, even Sabellian term (Sabellianism being the modalist heresy that the Father and Son were merely modes of one person). They feared that to say the Son shares the Father’s identical essence would either make two parallel Gods or collapse Father and Son into a single person – in either case, undoing the faith. Thus, from Arius’s perspective, the Nicene Creed “got it wrong” by not only going beyond Scripture, but by undermining the very foundation of Christian belief in one God the Father.
In summary, Arius’s theology held that:
(1) the Father alone is the eternal, unbegotten God;
(2) the Son, though preeminent and pre-temporal, was begotten or created out of nothing by the Father’s will and therefore had a beginning;
(3) the Son is of a different essence or nature (heteroousios) than the Father – he is not equal to the Father’s divine essence, but is rather a perfect creature and divine agent; and
(4) the Son can be called “God” only in a secondary, honorific sense, by the Father’s grace and not by nature. Any creed or theology (like Nicaea’s) that said the Son was co-essential and co-eternal with the Father was, to Arius, a grave error. It is from this doctrinal standpoint that Arius would argue the Nicene Creed got it wrong about Christ.
Eunomius of Cyzicus: An Extreme Arian Reads the Creed
The Anomoean Leader after Nicaea. Some decades after Arius, in the mid-4th century, the Arian controversy evolved and produced even more radical positions. The most noteworthy figure of this “second wave” of Arianism was Eunomius of Cyzicus (died c. 393), a bishop and theologian who became the chief proponent of what is called Anomoean or Heteroousian theology. The term “Anomoean” comes from the Greek ἀνόμοιος, meaning “unlike.” It refers to the teaching that the Son is unlike the Father in essence. Whereas more moderate, post-Nicene Arians (sometimes called “Homoeans” or “Homoiousians”) were willing to say the Son is “like” the Father (homoios) or even “like in essence” (homoiousios) to the Father – carefully avoiding the Nicene “same essence” (homoousios) – Eunomius and his mentor Aetius took a harder line: the Son is unlike in essence (anhomoios or anomoios) to the Father. In effect, Eunomius doubled down on Arius’s subordinationism and gave it a sharper philosophical expression. If Arius had hinted that the Son was “heteroousios” (of different substance) from the Father, Eunomius openly declared it. This made Eunomius one of the most controversial theologians of his time. He served briefly as Bishop of Cyzicus (in Asia Minor) around 360, but his unapologetic preaching of an extreme Arian creed led to his deposition. He later wrote theological works defending his views, the most famous being his “Apology” (Apologia), composed in the early 360s, which drew a lengthy refutation from St. Basil of Caesarea. Eunomius’s ideas were condemned by the orthodox, notably at the Council of Constantinople in 381, and emperors ordered his writings destroyed. However, through quotations in Basil’s and Gregory of Nyssa’s rebuttals, we can still access much of what Eunomius taught. By examining Eunomius’s own words, we can see how he critiqued the Nicene doctrine and why he believed the Nicene Creed was theologically mistaken.
Unbegotten Essence – Eunomius’s Starting Point. At the core of Eunomius’s theology lies one bold assertion: God’s essence is defined by the fact that He is unbegotten. For Eunomius, “Unbegotten” (ἀγέννητος) isn’t just an attribute of God – it is the very substance of God. In his Apology, Eunomius writes, “if it has been demonstrated that God exists before all things and owes His being to no one, then what follows is that He is ‘the Unbegotten,’ or rather that He is unbegotten essence” (Apol. 7). In Greek, one might reconstruct Eunomius’s claim as: «ἀγέννητον οὐσίαν εἶναι τὸν Θεόν» – “God is unbegotten substance/essence.” This idea is revolutionary in its clarity. It means that everything essential that can be said about God is contained in the single notion “unbegotten.” To be unbegotten (ingenerate) means to have no cause, no beginning, no origin – to exist eternally, independently, and absolutely. Only the Father fits this description. Therefore, by Eunomius’s reasoning, only the Father is God in the fullest sense. The Son, who is begotten, by definition does not possess the property of being unbegotten, and thus cannot share the Father’s essence or rank.
Eunomius was not content to say simply that the Father and Son are different beings; he asserted that we humans can fully understand this difference. In fact, one of Eunomius’s most startling contentions was that human knowledge of God’s essence is exact and total – we know God as perfectly as He knows Himself, at least with respect to the definition of His being. The 5th-century church historian Socrates reports that Eunomius went so far as to say: “God does not know anything more about His own substance than we do; nor is it better known to Him than to us. Whatever we know about it is exactly what He knows” (Socrates, Historia Ecclesiastica, book 4, ch. 7). Whether Eunomius phrased it exactly thus is debatable, but this is how his doctrine was understood by opponents. The rationale behind this claim is tied to Eunomius’s understanding of divine names and simplicity: If “unbegotten” perfectly defines God’s substance, and if God has revealed Himself as unbegotten, then in knowing that term we comprehend the very essence of God, just as God comprehends it. In other words, God’s being has no mysterious depths beyond “unbegottenness” – that is the full truth of what God is, and it is accessible to human reason.
Every Name of God Means “Unbegotten”. Eunomius’s insistence on the primacy of the term Unbegotten led him to a unique approach to Scripture and theological language. He held that all the various names and titles we apply to God (Father, Almighty, Light, etc.) ultimately signify the divine essence under different aspects – and that essence is simply unbegottenness. A famous statement from Eunomius (Apology 17) goes: “Every term that is used to signify the Father’s essence is equivalent in meaning to ‘the Unbegotten.’” In other words, calling God “Father” is, for Eunomius, effectively the same as calling Him “Unbegotten,” since the true significance of “Father” is the one who has no origin (and who therefore gives origin to the Son). He argued that even when we say “Father,” we are not primarily denoting a relationship (as pro-Nicene theologians argued), but highlighting that God is the ultimate source – the one who is from no one. Thus, in Eunomius’s theology, the Father would still be Father (as an eternal characteristic) even if the Son did not exist; “Father” simply equals “ungenerate source.” This stands in stark contrast to the Nicene and orthodox understanding, where Fatherhood is a relational term implying the eternal existence of the Son and an eternal relationship within the Godhead. Eunomius divorced the terms from their relational content to focus on the “nature” behind them. For him, the only thing that differentiates the Father from all else (and thus defines God) is that the Father alone is without cause.
The Son: Created and Unlike in Essence. If God’s essence is to be unbegotten, then what of the Son? Eunomius’s answer follows logically: the Son, being begotten, does not share the Father’s essence at all. Instead, the Son must be classified among created things – in fact, as the highest creature and the direct product of God’s will. Eunomius fully embraced and amplified Arius’s teaching that the Son was created ex nihilo (out of nothing). To avoid any ambiguity, he and his mentor Aetius would say that the Son is heteroousios (of different substance) or even anomoios (utterly unlike) the Father. In one of his works, Eunomius (or a follower summarizing him) states: “There is no similarity or equality of essence between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because the names that define their natures are different: the Father is unbegotten, the Son begotten, and the Holy Spirit proceeding.” This threefold distinction is reported in anathemas against the Eunomians and captures their position succinctly in Greek: «οὐσίαν ἀγέννητον τὸν Πατέρα, οὐσίαν γεννητὴν τὸν Υἱόν, οὐσίαν ἐκπορευτὴν τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον…». The Father is an unbegotten essence; the Son a begotten essence; the Spirit (for completeness) a proceeding essence. Accordingly, the Eunomian teaching essentially posited three disparate essences in the Godhead, united only in will and power, but not in nature – a point that orthodox opponents equated with tritheism (belief in three separate gods). Eunomius, however, would argue that since only the Father is truly God (unbegotten), the Son and Spirit, though divine agents, do not upset monotheism – they are divine in a lesser, derived sense.
We have a direct glimpse of Eunomius’s doctrine of the Son in the creed he included at the start of his Apology. St. Basil, in Contra Eunomium I.4, quotes Eunomius’s personal creed as follows (note how it pointedly omits any Nicene language of co-equality or consubstantiality):
«Πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα Θεὸν, Πατέρα παντοκράτορα, ἐξ οὗ τὰ πάντα· καὶ εἰς ἕνα Μονογενῆ Υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ, Θεὸν Λόγον, τὸν Κύριον ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν, δι’ οὗ τὰ πάντα· καὶ εἰς ἓν Πνεῦμα Ἅγιον, τὸ Παράκλητον.»
“We believe in one God, Father Almighty, from whom are all things; and in one only-begotten Son of God, God the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things; and in one Holy Spirit, the Comforter.”
On the surface, this creed might not alarm an uninformed reader – it sounds similar to traditional formulas. But its silences are telling: it does not say the Son is eternal, or equal with the Father, or “of one essence” with Him. Rather, the Father is the source (“from whom are all things”), and the Son is the agent (“through whom are all things”). The Son is called “God the Word,” but again, Arius would have called the Son “God” too, meaning a secondary divine figure. There is no mention of the Son being true God or very God in this creed – such language was deliberately avoided. Instead, in his Apology, Eunomius goes on to explain that the Son was begotten “before all times and ages” but explicitly insists that the Son was produced by the Father’s will and is subordinate. He writes (Apology 12) that: “We call the Son ‘offspring’ in accordance with Scripture. We do not understand His essence to be one thing and the meaning of that word to be another. Rather, the substance of the Son is exactly what is signified by the name ‘offspring’ (γέννημα), as it properly applies to His essence. We therefore assert that this essence was begotten — not existing before it was begotten — and that it exists having been begotten before all things by the will of God the Father.” In Greek, Eunomius’s statement (reconstructed from Gregory of Nyssa’s quotations) reads to the effect: “τὴν οὐσίαν ταύτην γεννητὴν εἶναι – μὴ πρότερον ὑπαρξάσαν – ἀλλ’ ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς πρὸ πάντων τῶν ὅλων θελήσει γεγεννημένην.” This is an unabashed affirmation that the Son’s very essence or nature is to be a generated being, one that at one point did not exist and then was caused to exist by the Father’s will. By defining the Son’s essence this way, Eunomius left no room for the Nicene idea that the Son’s begetting is an eternal, necessary, and incomprehensible generation from the Father’s own substance. To Eunomius, “begotten” meant what it normally means – having a beginning and being caused – even if the Son’s generation was before all creation.
Thus, Eunomius regarded the Nicene Creed’s key assertions as not only wrong but logically absurd. If the Father’s essence is to be unbegotten, to claim the Son shares the Father’s essence (homoousios) would imply the Son is also unbegotten – a contradiction in terms, since the Son by definition is begotten. Alternatively, if one tried to say (as Nicene theologians did) that “begotten” is a special case that doesn’t make the Son essentially different, Eunomius accused them of playing with words and empty concepts. He insisted that words like “begotten” and “Son” must carry meaning analogous to common usage (minus any physical or passionate aspects). A son derives existence from his father; so the Son of God derives existence from God the Father, and hence the Son cannot be the self-existing Unbegotten. Eunomius even took the debate to the level of linguistics and epistemology: he argued that if the various biblical names for the Son (Word, Wisdom, Son, Image, etc.) were treated as mere “conceptualizations” (ἐπινοίαι) and not indicative of the Son’s substance, then theology would collapse into agnosticism. In his view, the names revealed in Scripture must correspond to the realities: the Father’s names (Unbegotten, Father) reveal an unbegotten nature; the Son’s names (Only-begotten, Son, Offspring) reveal a generated nature. The Nicenes, by saying the Son’s begottenness was an incomprehensible eternal generation, were – to Eunomius – emptying words of meaning and resorting to mystery where clarity was given.
Critique of Nicene “Mysteries”. Eunomius prided himself on a kind of rational transparency in theology. A famous aspect of his polemic was ridiculing the pro-Nicene party for invoking “mystery” and unknowability regarding God’s essence. He saw this as a cover for logical incoherence. If knowing God is possible (as he believed it is, through knowing the meaning of “unbegotten”), then one should not hide behind claims that God’s essence is beyond understanding. Eunomius took the Nicenes to task for what he perceived as obfuscation: they said the Father and Son are one in essence but could not explain clearly how begotten and unbegotten can be the same essence without either making two Unbegottens or reducing Father and Son to a single person. Eunomius thus portrayed the Nicene Homoousians as introducing confusion both in theology and in simple logic. He offered, by contrast, what he thought was a theologically rigorous and philosophically consistent monotheism: a single absolute principle (the Unbegotten God) with two subordinate divine agents (the Son and the Spirit) beneath Him.
We should note that Eunomius’s subordination extended in full force to the Holy Spirit as well. While the Council of Nicaea in 325 had not explicitly defined the Holy Spirit’s divinity (that would come at Constantinople in 381), Eunomius and the Anomoeans went so far as to claim the Spirit was the creature of the Son (and thus a “grand-creature” of the Father). One Arian confession contemporaneous with Eunomius declared the Son to be the first and greatest work of the Father, and the Holy Spirit to be the first and greatest work of the Son. Eunomius’s own “Confession of Faith” in 383 (addressed to Emperor Theodosius) hints at this hierarchy: after professing belief in the one God and “in the Son of God, the Only-begotten God, the firstborn of all creation,” it continues, “And in the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, whom the Only God (the Father) brought forth through the Only-begotten (Son) and made manifest to the apostles…” (a paraphrase of Eunomius’s Confession). This indicates the Spirit, too, for Eunomius was not co-eternal or co-equal with the Father, but a product of the Father (through the Son). Such teaching, of course, diametrically opposed the emerging Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, where the Holy Spirit is worshiped and glorified together with the Father and Son as fully God.
Eunomius’s Arguments Against Nicene Doctrine. In summary, if we list the ways Eunomius would say the Nicene Creed “got it wrong,” they would include:
(1) Misidentifying God’s essence: Nicene theology, by teaching homoousios, fails to recognize that the Father’s essence (unbegottenness) is unique and non-communicable;
(2) Undermining divine simplicity and knowability: by introducing what Eunomius saw as convoluted explanations of “mystery” (like an “eternal generation”), the Nicenes obscured the simple truth of God’s nature and made God unknowable, whereas Eunomius insisted God has made the core of His being known (that He is Unbegotten);
(3) Violating logic and language: Nicene creed phrases such as “begotten not made” and concepts like co-eternal generation sounded to Eunomius like self-contradictions – every begetting is a making or creation, in his view, and only that which is unbegotten is uncreated. By coining paradoxical formulas, the Nicenes, he charged, strayed from the clear meanings of terms given in Scripture;
(4) Flirting with Sabellianism or polytheism: if the Son is homoousios with the Father, either there is no real distinction (Sabellian modalism – just one being appearing as two), or you have two identical Gods (ditheism). Eunomius saw the Nicene position as untenable either way. His solution avoided both by making the Son essentially distinct (thus not collapsing into one person) and subordinate (thus not creating a second ultimate God). To him, this was the only way to preserve true monotheism while acknowledging Father, Son, and Spirit.
Finally, Eunomius believed that in exalting the Son to full deity, the Nicene Creed actually dishonored God. How so? Because, in his reasoning, it robbed the Father of His unique glory as sole source of all. For Eunomius, true worship of God meant acknowledging Him as the one supreme uncaused cause. To say the Son is equal God was, in a sense, to refuse to give God the full honor of being in a class by Himself. This concern for God’s honor echoes Arius’s own worry that Nicenes made God part of a “Trinity of equals” rather than the one fountainhead of all. Eunomius writes (Apology 8) that when we call God “Unbegotten,” we must do so “not just as a label following our own imagination, but in accordance with reality, repaying Him the honor above all honors that is due – the confession that He is exactly what He is.” For Eunomius, that supreme honor was to confess the Father alone as God in the absolute sense, and to worship the Son not as the One God but as the powerful divine-agent begotten by the One God.
Heretical Eyes and Orthodox Rejoinders
Looking back after 1700 years, the Nicene Creed stands as a cornerstone of mainstream Christian orthodoxy, while the teachings of Arius and Eunomius survive only in the reports of their opponents. History judged Nicene Trinitarianism to have “got it right,” and Arian-Anomoean theology to be a dangerous deviation. Yet, through the eyes of Arius and Eunomius – as we have explored – the Nicene Creed got several crucial things wrong. It is fascinating and instructive to enter the mindset of these theologians, not to revive old heresies for their own sake, but to appreciate the theological tensions and questions that demanded resolution. Arius and Eunomius were not mere caricatures of evil heresy-archs; they were brilliant and devout individuals grappling with how to reconcile the Bible’s statements about the Father and Son with the fundamental conviction of one God. They accused the Nicene party of blending what should be distinguished, of importing unscriptural categories, and of muddling the faith of ordinary Christians with paradoxical dogmas. The Nicene defenders, on the other hand, accused Arius and Eunomius of robbing the Son of His true divinity and effectively reducing Christianity to a form of subordinationist polytheism or even pagan philosophy.
In the end, orthodoxy – articulated by fathers like Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus – answered the Arians and Eunomians by refining the doctrine of the Trinity. They argued that God’s essence is indeed incomprehensible to creatures, and that terms like “Father” and “Son” when applied to God must be understood analogically, not in a crude creaturely sense. The orthodox response to Eunomius was especially pointed: they insisted that no single name (not even “Unbegotten”) exhausts the mystery of God’s being, for God is beyond our categories. Basil the Great, in rebuttal, noted that “Unbegotten” is a negative term (telling us what God is not, not what God is), and that the positive revelation of God is as Father – which inherently implies a Son and thus an eternal relationship, not a solitary monad. St. Gregory of Nazianzus famously quipped, “I lose count of the Godhead when I consider the Three, but I also unify it again when I consider the One” – highlighting that the doctrine of the Trinity must hold both the distinction and unity without fully resolving the mystery. The Nicene Creed, in the expanded form from Constantinople (381), affirms one God in three co-equal Persons, an idea Arius and Eunomius could never accept. Yet, the struggle with their objections forced the Church to clarify language: to distinguish between “being” and “person,” to explain that the Son is begotten “not by will or by division of essence” but by an eternal generation that has no analogy in creation, and that this begetting does not make the Son a second, separate God but is the communication of the one divine essence in a second person.
For modern readers, revisiting the Nicene controversy through Arian and Eunomian eyes is an exercise in historical empathy and doctrinal understanding. It reminds us that the early dogmas of the Church were forged in intense debate where scriptural interpretation, philosophical reasoning, and even political pressures all played a role. Arius and Eunomius, despite being on the losing side of history, compelled the Church to articulate what exactly it means to call Jesus Christ “God.” Their sharp criticisms of the Nicene Creed prompted more precise formulations and deeper exploration of how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit relate from all eternity. In that sense, the Nicene Creed’s eventual triumph was achieved by answering the very concerns that these dissenters raised.
In conclusion, Arius and Eunomius believed the Nicene Creed was wrong because it, in their view, blurred the distinction between the uncreated God and His created Son, introduced unscriptural and illogical concepts, and jeopardized the uniqueness of the Father. They championed a theology where the Son and Spirit are divine agents under the one God rather than co-equal Godhead. While the orthodox Church rejected their theology as incompatible with the apostolic faith, studying their arguments grants us a “through the looking glass” perspective. We see a Christianity that might have been – one that venerates Christ as divine yet not equal to the Father – and we understand more clearly the rationale behind the orthodox insistence that Christ is fully God. The legacy of this controversy is, ultimately, a deeper appreciation of the mystery of the Trinity: a doctrine that seeks to do justice to all scriptural data – that the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, and yet there is but one God. The voices of Arius and Eunomius echo as a reminder that this doctrine was not arrived at lightly, but through serious debate and the refining fire of heresy forcing truth into clearer focus. In the end, one may disagree profoundly with Arius and Eunomius, but having looked through their eyes, one cannot deny that their challenge left an indelible mark on Christian thought, compelling the Church to articulate the profound paradox at the heart of its creed: unity of essence, Trinity of persons. (The Nicene Creed was officially adopted on June 19, A.D. 325, Julian calendar — equivalent to June 26 in the modern Gregorian calendar.)
