UC Santa Barbara

The story of the Arian heresy was the work of an embittered bishop named Athanasius of Alexandria (c.298-373 CE) who underwent five exiles under four separate emperors. It was a story that Athanasius and others wrapped around themselves at a time of identity creation and uncertainty. Scholarship on Arianism and Athanasius has up to this point been content to merely deconstruct and discount Athanasius’ grand narratives, classifying them as either misleading or outright fictitious. Yet all seem to take the widespread popularity and preservation of this narrative for granted. This dissertation asks two simple questions: why did this story of “Arians” resonate with contemporary audiences, and just as importantly, who read and replicated Athanasius’ ideas and how did they get access to it?

The following study argues that that Athanasius harnessed a widespread anxiety about the effect that imperial power and coercion had upon the salvation of Christian communities. The source of this insecurity was not related directly to the damage that imperial officials imparted on the bodies of Christians (martyrs had that covered), but rather the fact that when faced with the pressure to conform, Christian communities split into factions of acquiescence and resistance. The result was that these acts of violence threatened the unity of Christian communities and by extension their salvation.

As for how this narrative circled, and with whom, this dissertation takes a two-fold approach. First, it argues that it was Egypt’s positioning relative to the Mediterranean wind patterns and Athanasius’ two exiles (335-37, 339-45), which took him as far afield as Trier in Gaul that contributed success of the narrative. Both during his exile and after his return, the difficulties offered by the Mediterranean winds left only a few highly concentrated corridors of correspondence through which Athanasius maintained an extensive but documentable social network.

To determine how the narrative functioned in a social network context, the study utilizes a social network database rendered through the visualization software GEPHI. The result is a geographically-based image of Athanasius’ social network through which we can watch the story of “Arianism” move across both time and space: information that traveled through the trade networks of antiquity and ultimately between individuals. It becomes clear that the first generation of people who used term “Arianism” were those marginalized by Constantius’ efforts at unification and who possessed an understanding of imperial authority shaped by the memory and after-effects of the persecution. It was the generation that came after however that ultimately propelled the narrative to its lasting success. This generation of wealthy, ascetically-minded individuals had only known an ascendant and wealthy Christianity. They found the Arian narrative attractive in part because of Athanasius’ distaste for imperial authority fit with their own rejection of careers in its bureaucracy and his apocalyptic language and imagery fit their worldview. But Athanasius also managed to weave the Arian narrative into the spiritual authority of the desert monks, a group he courted between 346 and 357, successfully bringing them under the authority of the Alexandrian episcopate.