Arians
When Constantine took
over the Eastern half of the Roman Empire from Licinius and founded
his new capital at Constantinople in 324 AD,
he was upset to find out that there was a big fight going on between
the Christians in Western Asia. He had had about enough of that with
the Donatists in Africa! Still, he needed
God on his side. Constantine's advisors told him that God wanted all
Christians to believe the same way and not to argue, and so Constantine
tried to get the Arians and the Athanasians (the two sides) to agree.
The Arians (the followers of a priest named Arius) believed that since
there was only one God, Jesus was not exactly
the same as God. First there was God, and then a little later He made
Jesus. The Athanasians (the followers of a bishop named Athanasius)
believed that there was absolutely no difference between Jesus and God.
These differences might not seem important to you, but in the 300's
AD ordinary people like you got into fights
about this in the streets, and hit each other over the head with sticks.
Each side had songs about how they were right, and they went around
in big gangs of monks
and priests singing their songs and getting into fights with the other
side, especially in Alexandria, in Egypt.
Constantine held a big meeting for both sides in Nicaea (nye-SEE-ah)
in 327 AD. He went to the meeting himself. But he could not get the
sides to agree.
Like the Donatists, they kept on fighting
for a long time. First the Arians would be in charge, then the Athanasians.
They fought long after both Arius and Athanasius were dead. In the end
the Athanasians won, and pretty much all the Romans converted to the
Athanasian side by about 400 AD.
But meanwhile the Germans
had all been converted to Christianity by Arian missionaries, so they
were all Arians. It got so people thought of all Romans as being Athanasians
and all Germans
as being Arians. But one by one the Arian Germans were defeated
or converted. Finally the last of the Arians, the Visigoths,
converted to Catholicism (as it got to be called) under their king Reccared
in the 590's AD.
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