Is this the legend of a heretic or do historians accept this strange way to die? What the hell kinda horrible disease would cause that to happen? From Lost to the West by Lars Brownworth. Thank you for any responses.
There is no reason to see it as a historical event. For one thing, how Arius died was not recorded before 358/9 (he had died in 336!), when Bishop Athanasius wrote about this story in a letter:
Praying about these things [Arius and his buddies wanted to go into a church], the bishop [the 'orthodox' bishop of Constantinople] withdrew, very concerned; but a wondrous and unexpected thing took place. As those with Eusebius [an Arian bishop] threatened, the bishop prayed, and Arius, overconfident in those who were with Eusebius, foolishly went in to the ‘throne’ because of the necessity of his gut. Immediately, according to what is written, ‘falling face first, he burst in the middle’. Upon falling, he immediately expired, deprived of both communion and his life at the same time.^1
This description apparently paralleled the death of Judas in the Acts of the Apostles, which only adds to the view that it was a rumour. If it really happened, why did no-one mention it for twenty years, especially when these two decades were filled with angry people writing about how awful the 'Arians' were? Athanasius cited a source, Macarius, but it sounds more like hearsay than anything historical. Sometimes we just have to accept that we don't know what happened. Even for well-documented deaths, such as the death of Julian the Apostate, there were competing stories floating around, despite the seemingly authoritative account of Ammianus Marcellinus (a free overview of some of these stories is available here). Some for example spread the story that Julian was killed by a Christian soldier or that he was killed by a saint. All are very unlikely stories, but we have to remember that people in the fourth century loved stories as well. Although we shouldn't treat every source as equally historical, these stories also provide an insight into the culture of the time.
In any case, Arius' death got embellished further over time and the version Brownworth referenced wasn't even an early one. Brownworth's brief description is this:
While walking in the Forum of Constantinople, Arius was suddenly seized with a desire to relieve himself. Squatting down in the dust behind a column, his intestines spilled out, along with his liver and kidneys, killing him almost instantly.
...which makes it clear that he was using Socrates Scholasticus' account from c.439, as he was the first author to mention the Forum of Constantinople and the column involved in his death:
When he came near to the Forum of Constantine, in which the porphyry column stands, a fear from a bit of conscience seized Arius, and along with the fear followed a loosening of the bowels. Asking whether there was a privy nearby and, learning there was one beyond the Forum of Constantine, he went in that direction. Then faintness took him, and his bottom fell through along with his excrement. The thing which doctors call the rectum immediately fell out through his bottom, with a lot of blood following, and the rest of his intestines flowed out together with his spleen and his liver, and he died immediately.
However, Socrates' contemporaries were perfectly aware of there being multiple traditions of the 'heretic's death, take for example Sozomen's account:
Late in the afternoon, Arius, being seized suddenly with pain in the stomach, was compelled to repair to the public place set apart for emergencies of this nature. As some time passed away without his coming out, some persons, who were waiting for him outside, entered, and found him dead and still sitting upon the seat. When his death became known, all people did not view the occurrence under the same aspect. Some believed that he died at that very hour, seized by a sudden disease of the heart, or suffering weakness from his joy over the fact that his matters were falling out according to his mind; others imagined that this mode of death was inflicted on him in judgment, on account of his impiety. Those who held his sentiments were of opinion that his death was brought about by magical arts.
Basically, Brownworth cited a late account of an unreliable story. The setting had changed from night-time to day-time, from a private event to a public one. It's a fun story, but probably just a story and so if cited we should make clear its unreliable nature, or you know, at least cite the first mention of it, rather than the far more interesting but even less likely story written down a century later. This gets more ridiculous when we think about how Galerius, an emperor who persecuted Christians, and Theodoric, an 'Arian' king of Italy who died in 526, both died from similar causes - isn't it convenient how people who were opponents of 'orthodox' Christianity tended to die in the same way? Over time, Arius' death became more of a trope than a story reflecting reality (if it was anywhere close to reality at all), and this is how we should view it as well - as an anecdote that got embellished over time, which is an interesting topic to study in itself and something we can actually look at, rather than at how Arius died, for which we essentially have no evidence.
It is also mentioning that I have some serious issues with Brownworth' book, as throughout his podcast and his book he consistently took sources at face-value and did not seem to have any interest in reading modern historians on the empire. Instead, he praises the long-outdated Gibbon and often repeats anecdotes such as the one discussed here without any qualification. When discussing Arius, he even called him a bishop, yet the 'heretic' was never a bishop of Alexandria; this is a fairly basic mistake to make, which says a lot about Brownworth' ability to write history. For a far more informed take on late Roman/Byzantine history, see the excellent History of Byzantium podcast. In terms of books, Herrin's Byzantium:The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (2009), Cameron's The Byzantines (2006), and Harris' The Lost World of Byzantium (2015) are my recommendations, as they were all written in an accessible way for the general public.