Raptor by Gary Jennings

the abbot dismissed me, I went on to my next appointed activity of the day, my instruction in ethics by Brother Cosmas. Before he could commence one of his juiceless lectures, I asked him if it did not bother him that we were but a few Christians among a population mostly Arian.
    “Oh vái,” he said, and mockingly. And he dealt me the second shock I endured that day. “With all your furtive reading and prying, you have not descried for yourself that the Arians also are Christians?”
    “Christians?! They? The Arians?”
    “Or so they claim to be. And in truth they were, originally, when the Arian Bishop Wulfilas converted the Goths from—”
    “The Wulfilas who wrote the Gothic Bible? He was Arian?”
    “Ja, but that was no disgrace at that time, when Wulfilas turned the Goths from their age-old worship of the Germanic pagan gods. It was only later that Arian Christianity was damned as a heresy, and Catholicism decreed the only true Christianity.”
    I must have been reeling where I stood, for Cosmas gave me a look and said, “Here, sit down, young Thorn. You appear to have been much affected by these disclosures.”
    Brother Cosmas was rightfully vain of his knowledge of ecclesiastic history, so now he was pleased to tell me:
    “In the early years of the last century, Christianity was woefully fragmented by schisms into a dozen or more disparate sects. The disputes between bishops were numerous and complex, but I will simplify them, for the purpose of this discussion, by saying that the two bishops who were eventually to be most influential and controversial were Arius and Athanasius.”
    “I know that Christians—or we Christians—follow the Athanasian teaching.”
    “We do, ja—Bishop Athanasius’s true teaching that Christ the Son is of one substance with God the Father. But Bishop Arius contended that the Son is only like the Father. Since Jesus was tempted as a man can be tempted, suffered as a man suffers, and died as a man must die—he could not be equal to the immutable Father who is beyond temptation and pain and death. He had to have been created by the Father, as a man is.”
    “Well…” I said uncertainly, for I had never before meditated on any such distinction.
    “Well, Constantine was then the emperor of both the Western and the Eastern Empire,” Brother Cosmas went on. “He saw the adoption of Christianity as a means of cementing his empire against disintegration. But he was no theologian to understand the vast gulf between the Arian and Athanasian creeds, so he convened a Church council at Nicaea to determine which was the true belief.”
    “Frankly, Brother Cosmas,” I said, “I do not entirely understand the difference either.”
    “Come, come!” he said impatiently. “Arius, clearly inspired by the devil, asserted that Christ was only a creation of God the Father. Inferior to the Father. In effect, no more than a messenger of the Father. But if that were so, you see, then God might at any time send to earth another such redeemer. If another messiah were even remotely possible, then Christ’s priests would have no unique, unrepeatable, uncontestable truth to preach. And so Arius’s scandalous notion naturally horrified most of the Christian priesthood, because it would have abolished their very reason for being.”
    “I see,” I said, though I myself would have rejoiced in the hope that God might send another Son to earth in my own lifetime.
    “The Nicene council rejected the Arian thesis, but did not then condemn it thoroughly enough. So Constantine tended to lean toward Arianism throughout his reign. As a matter of fact, the Eastern Church—the so-called Orthodox Church— still inclines toward some of the Arian teachings. While we Western Christians rightly regard sin as vice, and its cure as discipline, the insipid Eastern Christians regard sin as ignorance, and its cure as education.”
    “So when was Arianism finally condemned?”
    “About fifty years after Arius