St Athanasius was one of the six most important men in history

Had Arius defeated St Athanasius in their disputes and the Arian heresy been adopted by the Catholic Church, the world thereafter would have been very different. 

I thought, when I stumbled across the tomb of St Athanasius on Sunday in the beautiful church of San Zaccaria in Venice, that Athanasius is perhaps one of the six or so most important figures in world history. 

Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus and Mahomet would be the first three. 

Who would the others be?

Belloc thought that, had Arianism triumphed, Christianity might resemble Unitarianism or the worship of the stern unitarian God of Islam. 

Belloc, though I love him, was no scholar, but he might be right. 

Or the God of Judaism? 

Or a sort of deism or neo-platonism? 

Deism takes you to the god of the philosophers, who resembles the gods of Lucretius. They contemplated the world without emotion and without intervening in the lives of mortals. 

We don't know, but the world in which we live would have been very different. 

Thinking would have been different.

That has nothing to do with whether religion is true or, as Richard Dawkins says, a kind of computer virus. Religion determines everything, even if no-one believes in his religion any more. 

On the internet I found this written by Professor Anthony Esolen, whose CV makes me feel that I have utterly wasted my life. He has translated Dante, Tasso and Lucretius into English, written many scholarly books and one that sounds fun called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization.

If Arius was correct, then Jesus was only a creature, albeit the highest. Then God can be said to love, but He cannot said to be Love. He is not in his own right a relationship of love among three Persons. He retreats into transcendence: he does not really enter the world to dwell among us. In that case he either becomes the inscrutable and irrational Allah of the Muslims, a universal sultan, or he vanishes into an abstraction, a Neoplatonic Being, impersonal and unapproachable. Christian worship either way loses its bridge between earth and heaven. Its commandments harden into the dictates of a despot, or decay into a moral philosophy, like Stoicism, benevolent enough, but in most men too weak to withstand the furies of the heart. It is the path Unitarianism took in nineteenth century America, from a dilute Christianity at the Harvard of John Quincy Adams, to a vague theism with an overlay of Christian moral teaching at the Harvard of his grandson Henry Adams, to the cultural nonentity it is now, a hobby for atheists or pantheists who like hymns and incense.

Europe and the world would have been much more different still, of course, had there triumphed the Gnostic/Albigensian religion.

It was a completely separate religion from Christianity or the other world religions and taught that all flesh was evil and only the spirit good.

Cardinal Manning told the young Belloc that all political questions are essentially theological questions and we all see this nowadays, faced as we are not only by Islamism but by the religion of Woke.