Arius  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

Arius (AD 250 or 256–336) was an ascetic Christian presbyter of Libyan origins, and priest in Alexandria, Egypt, of the church of Baucalis.

Socrates Scholasticus (a detractor of Arius) described Arius's death as follows:

It was then Saturday, and Arius was expecting to assemble with the church on the day following: but divine retribution overtook his daring criminalities. For going out of the imperial palace, attended by a crowd of Eusebian partisans like guards, he paraded proudly through the midst of the city, attracting the notice of all the people. As he approached the place called Constantine’s Forum, where the column of porphyry is erected, a terror arising from the remorse of conscience seized Arius, and with the terror a violent relaxation of the bowels: he therefore enquired whether there was a convenient place near, and being directed to the back of Constantine’s Forum, he hastened thither. Soon after a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious hemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died. The scene of this catastrophe still is shown at Constantinople, as I have said, behind the shambles in the colonnade: and by persons going by pointing the finger at the place, there is a perpetual remembrance preserved of this extraordinary kind of death.

Many Nicene Christians asserted that Arius's death was miraculous—a consequence of his heretical views. Several recent writers have speculated that Arius may have been poisoned by his opponents.

See also

• Anomoeanism
• Nontrinitarianism
• Arianism
• Semi-Arianism
• Oneness Pentecostalism
• Unitarianism
• First Council of Nicaea