Anomoean (Eunomian) Christianity

In the 350s a deacon at Antioch named Aetius began teaching the Arian case in its sharpest possible form. Where others said the Son was like the Father, or like him in all things, Aetius said he was unlike him - anomoios - in essence, and argued it with a formal rigour that made his opponents call him a sophist and an atheist. His pupil and secretary Eunomius carried the position further and gave it its most confident claim: that God's essence is simply ingeneracy, that this can be stated, and that a human being can therefore know God's essence as God knows it himself. Eunomius was made bishop of Cyzicus in 360 and driven out within a year. The party split from the Homoians at Constantinople in the same year, when the Homoian creed was imposed and Aetius exiled - which is why filing the two together misreads the controversy. It was against these men, and against that claim about knowing God, that Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus wrote some of the most demanding theology of the century. The Council of Constantinople in 381 anathematized Eunomians by name in its first canon, imperial law suppressed their assemblies, and the sect faded through the fifth century.