The Arians were heretics who denied that Jesus was the true God.
Now don’t get them wrong — they’d insist — they held Jesus in great esteem. He was the greatest of God’s creatures. But, still, he was only a creature. He was god-ish, because God made him that way, but he wasn’t God the way God was God. He couldn’t be, they’d tell you, because a trinity of persons is an impossibility. Three does not equal one. And, anyway, an infinite being could never be contained by a finite body.
Before long, they rationalized their “Jesus” down to a really nice guy, to whom God had given superpowers at his baptism in the River Jordan. Thus, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord was (after Easter) their great annual celebration. That feast, they said, was the anniversary of the Nazarene carpenter’s promotion to demigod and Messiah.
They had little use for Christmas, and even less for Epiphany, because these feasts presented inconvenient data — a baby boy already identified as God’s Son and humanity’s Savior. They wrote anti-Christmas carols, with dismal (but memorable) refrains that denied Jesus’ coequality and coeternity with the Father: “There was when he was not,” they sang. “There was a time when he was not.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that this heresy took the intellectual world by storm. In the mid-fourth century, St. Jerome complained, “the world awoke to find itself Arian.” That’s how quickly the emperors and academics — and, sad to say, many bishops — got swept away by the fad. A few intrepid Christians dared to oppose it. Some chose to die, and others to suffer exile and hardship, rather than betray the truth of Christmas. But the idea had powerful advocates, and a few of them were emperors, and that kept the campaign well-funded for much of the fourth century. When St. Athanasius stood up for the Nicene faith, the Emperor Constantius, who was Arian, taunted him, saying he stood alone against the world.
Eventually, however, the Catholic faith triumphed, not because it raised money or raised an army, but because of Christmas and Epiphany and the characteristic joy of these feasts.
And Christmas joy overflows through an entire octave (eight days) and then into an entire season, ending only on the feast of the Lord’s Baptism, which in the United States is Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. So I hope you’re still celebrating. If you’re not, then start it up again.
Long before the Grinch came to steal Christmas, Arius gave it his level best. That wasn’t good enough, thanks be to God.
