Archetypal Heresy

Arianism started as a movement in the third century AD - maintaining that Jesus was less divine than God. Traditionally regarded as the archetypal Christian heresy, it was condemned in the famous Nicene Creed and apparently squashed by the early church. Less well known is the fact that fifteen centuries later, Arianism was alive and well, championed by Isaac Newton and other scientists of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Maurice Wiles asks how and why Arianism endured.