I was reading about the fall of Western Rome and according to the article I was reading it said many of the conquering barbarians had actually adopted Arianism versus Nicenean Christianity. Why that particular branch?
I mainly work in the area of dealing with ‘Arianism’ and its surrounding controversies with the Empire, so this is kind of tangential to my main fields.
To understand your question better, and so realise the difficulties of answering it, let me fill in some context. Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria, acted as a catalyst for theological controversy in the early 4th century, by going head to head with his bishop, Alexander, on key points of doctrine about how to understand the relationship, and the metaphysics, of God as Father and the Christ as Son. Basically Arius held a position in which the Son was a separate entity, created at a certain point in time, and not recognisably ‘god’ in the sense that later Christians would hold. It’s much more complicated, but that’s the gist.
This was pretty much boiling over just after Constantine I came to power, and Constantine took as part of his job keeping the church unified, hence you end up with the first ecumenical council, Nicaea, in 325, which pretty much done and dusted Arius and his ideas.
However, it also revealed that there was far less consensus about some of these issues than perhaps, naively, the bishops had earlier believed. Essentially a large portion of the next 60 years was spent in vigorous theological debate about what exactly that Father-Son relationship was and how it functioned.
We now generally avoid the label ‘Arianism’ for one side of that debate, for two reasons: there was more than ‘one side’, and it’s not very accurate. However, there were factions that showed more similarity with Arius, and they have traditionally been called ‘Arian’, ‘Arianist’, etc., largely because Athanasius who turned out to be on the winning side made it a habit of calling his opponents that.
It’s during this period that you see more and more encroachment for the ‘Barbarian’ tribes, Goths et alii, who are pushing on the Empire’s porous borders. The most famous Goth, at least for our purposes, was Ulfilas, who ended up being ordained as a bishop by Eusebius of Nicomedia. Ulfilas is also responsible for the Gothic translation of the Bible, and almost all we have left in terms of Gothic texts is biblical texts. Anyway, what faction was Eusebius of Nicomedia on in those theological debates? You guessed it, the later-declared-non-orthodox side that generally is called ‘Arian’. So what ‘version’ did Ulfilas take to the Goths? Arianism.
This is all happening in the mid 4th century, while those theological debates are going on, and they’re almost entirely happening in Greek (a little bit in Latin). So once ‘Arian’ Christianity starts spreading among the Goths and other barbaroi, they essentially maintain a kind of autonomy. When things finally get settled around 379-381 and the Council of Constantinople, that is a theological-political solution that doesn’t really get brought to bear on the barbarians, who essentially function outside the structures of the Empire and the Graeco-Roman Church.
Hence, they continue on as ‘Arians’. But it’s difficult to trace what kind of Arianism they had because we have little documentation of this kind. As I said, most of the Gothic we have is simply biblical texts. It’s even worse for the other types of tribes you have in mind. The Visigoths who ended up in Spain eventually embraced Nicene Christianity at the 3rd Council of Toledo in 589.