Jewish Arians

Like many other fathers, Athanasius described heretics as Jews – in his case, the Arians.  He had, as I read Athanasius, biblical and theological reasons for saying so.

When Newman repeats the link between Judaism and Arianism in his book on the Arians, the emphasis is racial.  Jews are a “carnal, self-indulgent religion” that gives “license to the grosser tastes of human nature.”  In Antioch, where Jews were powerful and where Arianism originated (so Newman argues), Judaism could not help but deflect minds from the higher realities of the church: ”it necessarily indisposed the mind for the severeand unexciting mysteries, the large indefinite promises, and the remotesanctions, of Catholic faith; which fell as cold and uninviting on the depraved imagination, as the doctrines of the Divine Unity and of implicit trust in the unseen God, on the minds of the early Israelites.”

As Virginia Burrus has noted, Newman analyzed Jewish-Christian relations in Alexandria in a way that absolved Athanasius’ hometown of the taint of Arianism, despite the large Jewish population there:  ”Although the city was ‘a celebrated seat of both Jewish and Greek philosophy,’ its ‘Christian School’ remained untainted by either Judaism or the rationalism of the ‘Eclectic sect’; the latter a philosophic heresy, as Newman frames it, deviating from the ’comprehensive philosophy’ of the earlier, more salutary Platonism that nourished the Church. For the ‘Proselytizing Church’ of Alexandria (whatever its stratagems of tactful insinuation), influence apparently went only one way when it came to Jews and Eclectic philosophers: these ‘others’ were either converted or excluded. Indeed, Newman seems happy to imagine Alexandria as a city without Jews—however implausibly or inconsistently. It was the Antiochene Church—in explicit contrast to the Alexandrian—that ‘was exposed to the influence of Judaism’ and which ultimately produced the heresy of Arianism.”