Athanasius of Alexandria

← Encyclopedia

Athanasius of Alexandria stands at the hinge where a question of grammar became a question of salvation. The dispute he inherited was, on its surface, about a single Greek word — whether the Son was homoousios, of one substance, with the Father, or a creature however exalted. He spent half a century insisting that the answer decided everything else: if the Word who took flesh was not himself fully God, then the flesh he took was joined to nothing that could save it, and the whole economy of the Incarnation collapsed into a brilliant misunderstanding. From that conviction he would not be moved, by five emperors or by the near-unanimous weight of the Eastern episcopate against him. The phrase that gathers up his career — Athanasius contra mundum, Athanasius against the world — is not an exaggeration of the historians but very nearly a description of the documentary record.

He was born in Alexandria around 296 or 298, in the great Greek-Egyptian port that was then the intellectual capital of Christendom, the city of the catechetical school, of Clement and Origen, of more libraries and more theology per square mile than anywhere else in the empire. He attached himself young to Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, and it was as Alexander’s deacon and secretary that he attended, still in his twenties, the First Council of Nicaea in 325 — the first ecumenical council of the church, convened by the emperor Constantine to settle the quarrel touched off by the Alexandrian presbyter Arius. Arius held that the Son, though the first and highest of all things made, belonged nonetheless to the order of creatures: there was, in the formula attributed to him, a “when” when the Son was not. Against this the council declared the Son consubstantial with the Father and wrote the word homoousios into the creed. Athanasius did not author that creed, but he would become its most relentless interpreter, and within three years — about June 328, on Alexander’s death — he was bishop of Alexandria himself, a post he held, through every interruption, until he died on 2 May 373.

The logic of the Incarnation

Athanasius had set out the heart of his thought before the controversy hardened, in a pair of treatises written while he was young, possibly before he became bishop: the Contra Gentes (Against the Heathen) and its companion De Incarnatione (On the Incarnation). The first clears the ground, arguing against pagan idolatry and for the rational order of a created world that points beyond itself to its maker; the second builds on that ground the central Christian claim. Humanity, made in the image of God and meant for incorruption, had turned toward nothingness and was sliding back into the corruption out of which it was first called. No mere creature could reverse that slide, because the debt was owed to God and the image to be restored was God’s own. So the Word through whom all things were made — the divine Logos itself — took a human body, not as a disguise but as a real assumption of mortal flesh, in order to meet death from the inside and exhaust it.

The book turns, near its end, on a sentence that the later tradition would carry for sixteen centuries. In the Victorian rendering of the Nicene Fathers, Athanasius writes that the Word “was made man that we might be made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality” (On the Incarnation 54). The Greek is starker than any translation — he was humanized that we might be deified. This is the doctrine of theōsis, deification: the claim that grace lifts the human creature into a genuine participation in the divine life, a real sharing in what God is, without the creature ever ceasing to be a creature. It is the inner reason the whole quarrel over homoousios mattered to him. If the Word were a creature, as Arius held, then what came down into flesh was not God but something less than God, and the exchange at the center of salvation — divinity taking on mortality so that mortality might take on divinity — would have nothing divine on its giving side. Only because the one who descended was God in the full and unqualified sense could the descent raise humanity all the way up. The apotheosis the philosophers reached toward by ascent, and the deification the Hermetic writings spoke of as a rebirth into the divine nature, Athanasius located in a single historical movement running the other direction: not the soul climbing to God, but God coming down to the soul.

This placed him, deliberately, athwart the great mediating cosmologies of his age. Where the Platonists set a chain of intermediaries between the unknowable One and the world of matter, and where the Gnostic systems made the maker of the material world a lesser, even a botched, power — a demiurge estranged from the true God — Athanasius insisted that the highest God himself, the very Word who is the Father’s own being, entered matter directly and without loss. There is no intervening rank of half-divine craftsmen in his scheme, nothing standing between God and flesh. The scandal he was willing to defend against every refinement of Greek metaphysics was precisely the directness of it: the unapproachable descending all the way into the approachable.

Five exiles

The defense cost him his see five times. The pattern of the fourth century was that imperial favor swung, for two generations after Nicaea, toward various forms of the subordinationist theology the council had condemned, and a bishop of Alexandria who would not compromise on the consubstantial Word was, again and again, an obstacle the court found it convenient to remove.

His first exile came under Constantine, who in 335 — persuaded by Athanasius’s enemies, and weary of the disorder around the case — banished him to Trier in the Rhineland; he returned only after the emperor’s death in 337. Under Constantine’s son Constantius II, who leaned hard toward the anti-Nicene party, he was driven out twice: first in 339, when he fled to Rome and won the support of the Western church, returning in 346 after the Council of Serdica had vindicated him; then again in 356, when soldiers broke into his church by night and he escaped into the Egyptian desert, sheltered for years among the monks while a rival held his see. This third exile, the longest, was also his most productive in print. Under Julian — the emperor who renounced Christianity and is remembered as the Apostate — he was expelled a fourth time in 362, the pagan emperor judging him too dangerous to leave in place. And under the Arian-leaning Valens he was forced out a fifth and final time in 365, for a few months, before public pressure restored him. The reckoning that the chroniclers give is some seventeen years spent in exile out of forty-five as bishop — close to four decades of episcopate of which more than a third was passed in flight, in hiding, or abroad.

The exiles were not interludes between his real work; they were the conditions of it. The desert years among the monks shaped the most widely read book he ever wrote, and the running argument with the court produced the polemical treatises that fixed the Nicene cause in the language it would keep. The Orationes contra Arianos (Orations Against the Arians) take apart the scriptural case for a created Son verse by verse and argue the full and eternal divinity of the Word at length. The De Decretis (On the Decrees of Nicaea) defends the council’s choice of the unscriptural word homoousios on the ground that only an extra-biblical term could fence out an extra-biblical heresy. And in his old age, in the Letters to Serapion, he carried the same logic one step further than Nicaea had gone, arguing that the Holy Spirit too is fully divine, of one substance with Father and Son and not a creature — the position that the Cappadocian Fathers, and Gregory of Nazianzus above all, would carry to its conclusion at the Council of Constantinople in 381, eight years after Athanasius’s death, when the Spirit’s divinity was written into the creed the church still recites.

The desert and the canon

Two of his acts reached further into the ordinary life of the church than any council decree. The first was a biography. During his third exile, around the year 360, Athanasius wrote the Vita Antonii, the Life of Antony — an account of the Egyptian hermit Antony, who had withdrawn into the desert to wrestle with demons and seek God in solitude, and who had died only a few years before, having emerged from his cell to support the Nicene cause. The book is more than a memoir. It is a portrait of the ideal ascetic life, written in the certainty that the solitary in the desert is fighting a real and cosmic war and winning it, and it moved with extraordinary speed across the Mediterranean. Translated into Latin almost at once, it carried the Egyptian model of withdrawal into the Western imagination and became one of the founding documents of Christian monasticism as a movement; Augustine would record, a generation later, that hearing the Life of Antony read aloud was among the hammer-blows that broke open his own conversion. Through this one book the figure of the desert father entered the permanent repertoire of Christian holiness.

The second act was a list. Like every bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius sent out each year a festal letter announcing the date of Easter and offering pastoral instruction. His thirty-ninth such letter, for Easter of 367, contains the earliest surviving enumeration of exactly the twenty-seven books that the church would receive as the New Testament — the four Gospels, the Acts, the seven catholic epistles, the fourteen letters attributed to Paul, and the Revelation — named as the canonical scriptures, with the instruction that nothing be added to them and nothing taken away. He did not invent the canon; the books had long been read, and the boundaries had been forming for generations. But his is the first catalog that matches the later New Testament exactly, drawn up to settle which writings might be read as scripture and which, however edifying, could not. That a list circulated in an Easter letter from a much-exiled Egyptian bishop should have become the measure of the Christian Bible is a measure of the authority his name had gathered.

Father of Orthodoxy

The tradition that received him made him one of its load-bearing pillars. The Eastern church counts him among the four great Greek Doctors of the Church, alongside Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom; in the Latin West he is likewise honored as a Doctor; and across Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox — the Coptic church of his own Alexandria reveres him as the twentieth of its patriarchs — Catholic, and Anglican communions he is venerated still, under the title the later church gave him: the Father of Orthodoxy. His shaping of the deification formula passed, through the Cappadocians and through the writer who circulated under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, into the whole later mystical theology of ascent — the tradition in which the soul’s participation in God becomes the organizing hope of the spiritual life, and which the Byzantine hesychast Gregory Palamas would defend in the fourteenth century with the distinction between the unknowable divine essence and the energies in which God is genuinely shared. The exact, fully divine Word that Athanasius would not let the Arians diminish is the same Word whose descent makes that sharing possible; the dogmatic precision and the mystical hope are, in him, two ends of one argument.

One famous text that bears his name is not his. The so-called Athanasian Creed, known from its Latin opening as the Quicumque vult — a tightly worded profession of the Trinity and the Incarnation long recited in the Western church — was composed well after his death. It was written in Latin, not the Greek in which Athanasius worked; its earliest secure witness is in sixth-century Gaul; and since the seventeenth century, when the Dutch scholar Gerardus Vossius argued the point, it has been generally agreed to be a Western composition of perhaps the fifth or sixth century, attached to Athanasius’s name for the authority that name carried rather than from any record of his hand. The misattribution is itself a kind of tribute: a later age, wanting a creed to stand unchallenged, signed it with the name of the man who had refused to let the creed of Nicaea be revised away.

Texts and scholarship

The Greek text of Athanasius is gathered in J.-P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, volumes 25 to 28; the modern critical edition is the Berlin Athanasius Werke, begun by Hans-Georg Opitz and continued across the twentieth century. The standard public-domain English collection remains volume IV of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, with introductions and notes by Archibald Robertson — the Select Works and Letters, which carries the Against the Heathen, the On the Incarnation, the Orations Against the Arians, the De Decretis, the festal letters, and the historical apologies into a single freely available volume (CCEL text). For On the Incarnation the most read modern rendering is the one C. S. Lewis prefaced for the mid-century revival of patristic reading, but Robertson’s earlier translation preserves the disputed sentence of section 54 in its full force. The Life of Antony survives in both Athanasius’s Greek and the early Latin of Evagrius of Antioch that spread it through the West, and is included in the same NPNF volume.

The modern scholarly recovery of Athanasius runs along two lines that answer each other. Khaled Anatolios, in Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (Routledge, 1998), argues that the whole body of his work hangs together on a single axis — the radical distinction, and the simultaneous relation, between God and the world — and reads the Incarnation and the doctrine of deification as the keystone of that system. David Brakke, in Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Clarendon Press, 1995), reconstructs the other Athanasius: the bishop who built and governed a network of monks and consecrated virgins, who understood that the desert was a base of ecclesiastical power as well as a school of holiness, and whose Life of Antony was a political act as much as a spiritual one. Between the theologian of the consubstantial Word and the strategist of the Egyptian church stands one figure, and the near-impossibility of separating the two is itself a finding of the scholarship. The standard older account of the doctrinal struggle remains R. P. C. Hanson’s The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, the fullest reconstruction of how the Arian crisis was fought and won.

What he left can be put in a single line that he would have approved of, since it is nearly his own. The Word that the philosophers placed forever beyond reach, and the Gnostics set at an infinite distance behind their lesser makers, Athanasius held had come the whole distance down into a particular body in a particular province of a particular empire — and that this descent, and nothing less, is what opens the road by which the human creature is lifted into God.

→ Related: Arius · Logos · Cappadocian Patristics · Apotheosis · Jesus Christ · Alexandria · Gregory Of Nazianzus · Neochalcedonian Christology · Origen · Monasticism