Manlio Simonetti e la ‘crisi ariana’: l’attualità di un metodo di indagine e le nuove prospettive di ricerca

This contribution evaluates the significance of Simonetti’s studies on the Arian crisis, highlighting his uninterrupted interest for this phenomenon and the changing perspectives of his approach, assessing his impact in the international investigation and emphasizing the elements of his method which should be taken into account in future research. The first part describes the itinerary that leads Simonetti from the philological analysis of Christian texts to their contextualization in the religious history of the fourth century, which transforms, that is, from philology to history. The second part discusses the impact that the solutions proposed by Simonetti on the Arian phenomenon have exercised in the international debate and how much of his legacy is present in the new research perspectives.