Athenagoras of Athens

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Two words sit beside each other in the heading of his chief work, and the whole of the man is in the join: Athenagoras the Athenian, a philosopher and a Christian. Almost nothing else of him survives — no firm birth or death, no city career, no martyrdom, scarcely a sentence about his life that an early source will vouch for. What survives is the posture: a man schooled in the Greek tradition who proposed to argue for the new faith not from its own scriptures, which would have carried no weight with the readers he wanted, but on the ground those readers already stood on — reason, the philosophers, the poets, the order of the cosmos. The pairing was the program. He meant to show that the two titles named no contradiction.

Plato (left, holding the Timaeus) and Aristotle, detail of Raphael’s School of Athens — the Greek philosophical tradition on which Athenagoras built his defense of the faith. Raphael, 1509, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The Plea, and the rumors it answers

That chief work is the Legatio — the Plea, or Embassy for the Christians (Greek presbeia, a word for an emissary’s address, though the text was written, not spoken). It is addressed to the emperors Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and his son Commodus, whom Athenagoras salutes as conquerors but, above all, as philosophers — the flattery exact, because he is about to ask them to behave like the thing he calls them. Commodus was raised to share the purple in 176, and the Plea belongs to the year or two after: late 176 to early 177, the only stretch its address will fit. That single fact dates the work; it does not date the man. Everything chronological we have hangs from the names of two emperors.

The ancient bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor to whom — with his son Commodus — Athenagoras addressed the Plea. Photo by Torquatus, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The occasion is persecution, and the Plea’s opening move is juridical before it is theological. Athenagoras complains that across the empire, subjects of every other belief are left to their gods unmolested, while Christians alone are dragged to trial and condemned not for any proven deed but for a name — for being called Christian. He asks for the ordinary justice the Roman Empire granted everyone else: that the charge be examined, that crimes be required of the accused before punishment, that the hearing be equal. Under Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor whose own reign saw the savage martyrdoms at Lyons in this same period, the appeal to imperial justice was not naïve so much as strategic — it pinned the rulers to their advertised virtue.

Three rumors fueled the killing, and Athenagoras takes them in order: atheism, because Christians kept no images and offered no sacrifices; cannibalism — the so-called Thyestean feasts, named for the myth of a man fed his own children — because their rites were closed; and incest, the Oedipodean charge, because they called one another brother and sister and met behind shut doors. The defense against the last two is mostly a defense of conduct: he answers the charge of obscene rites with an account of Christian sexual discipline so severe it embarrasses the accusation — marriage entered once and for procreation, a second marriage reckoned a respectable form of adultery, even the lustful glance counted as the deed. People this strict, he argues, do not stage the orgies attributed to them.

The spine: why there can be only one uncreated God

The charge of atheism is the one he treats as a philosopher, and the rebuttal becomes the spine of the work. Christians are not godless; they confess one God — and Athenagoras sets out to show that one is the only number a thinking person can confess. His argument is built from the tradition of his readers. The God he describes is uncreated, eternal, invisible, impassible, incomprehensible, without limit — a list of negations lifted straight from the philosophers’ grammar of the divine, the language Plato reaches for in the Timaeus and the Phaedo, sharpened by the Stoics. From that description he draws the conclusion the polytheist will not have expected: that there cannot be two. For two uncreated beings would have to differ in some respect, and an uncreated being admits no parts and no defect by which it might differ; alike in everything, they would not be two at all. The unmade is necessarily one.

Marble portrait of Plato, a Roman copy after a fourth-century BC Greek original (Antikensammlung, Berlin). Athenagoras drew his vocabulary for the one uncreated God from the Platonic tradition. Photo by Marcus Cyron, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA).

It is a Platonist proof in the service of a biblical confession, and it shows the apologist’s whole method working at once. Athenagoras quotes the poets against themselves — the same Homer and Euripides whose verses peopled the heavens with quarreling gods can be made, read closely, to gesture at a single source above them — and he treats the prophets as one more witness to a truth the best pagans half-glimpsed. He is not arguing that Greek philosophy got there first and Christianity merely agreed; he is arguing that the God of the philosophers and the God the Christians worship were never two Gods, and that the cultivated despiser of the new sect is closer to it than he supposes. This is the wager beneath the whole apologetic enterprise, the one he shares with Justin Martyr and, in a harsher key, with Tatian: that reason, followed honestly, runs toward the faith rather than away.

An early word on Father, Son, and Spirit

Pressed to say what kind of God this one God is, Athenagoras gives one of the earliest reasoned statements of the relation later ages would name the Trinity — though he speaks in the idiom of his moment, not in the settled vocabulary of the creeds, which lay a century and more ahead. The Father, he says, has from eternity held his Logos within himself, for God was never without reason; the Son is that Logos, the Father’s own mind and wisdom, going forth as the pattern and energy of all that is made. The Spirit he describes as an effluence from God, returning to its source as a ray returns toward fire. The three are united in power and distinguished in rank.

Read forward, the passage looks like an anticipation: the eternity of the Word, the real distinctions within the one Godhead, are exactly the points the fourth century would labor to fix. Read in its place, it is plainly earlier than that settlement — for Athenagoras, as for his contemporaries, the Son’s “coming forth” is still bound up with the work of creation rather than held clean apart from it, and the careful equality of the later doctrine is not yet his concern. Both readings are true at once, and keeping them apart is the whole of reading him well. He is a witness to how the doctrine looked while it was still finding its words, a generation that knew it confessed three and one and reached for whatever philosophy lay nearest to say how.

On the Resurrection of the Dead

A second treatise travels under his name: On the Resurrection of the Dead. Its question is whether the body, once dissolved, can rise again, and its answer comes in two movements. First, against those who call the thing impossible or beneath God: the God who made the body from nothing can surely remake it from its scattered matter; what created power accomplished, the same power can restore, and to deny it is to slander either God’s ability or his will. Then, on the positive side: a human being is body and soul together, not a soul wearing flesh, so the person who is to be judged, rewarded, or corrected cannot be reconstituted unless the same body is returned to the same soul. Judgment, rightly understood, requires the resurrection it is sometimes thought to make superfluous.

Whether the treatise is really his is an open question of scholarship. Robert M. Grant, in a 1954 article in the Harvard Theological Review, argued that the work fits the third-century debate over Origen’s teaching on the risen body better than it fits the second, and proposed that it is the work of a later hand writing under the apologist’s name — pseudo-Athenagoras. Others, William R. Schoedel among them in his standard 1972 edition, have been readier to keep it among the genuine works; Miroslav Marcovich’s critical edition signals the doubt in its very title, Athenagorae qui fertur — ascribed to Athenagoras. The matter is genuinely unsettled by the evidence, and is best taken for what it is: a contested attribution, argued on internal grounds, with no external fact to close it.

How little is known, and how it survived

The thinness of his biography is not an accident of loss so much as a feature of his reception. Eusebius, who catalogs the writers of the early Church and preserves so many of them by quotation, never mentions Athenagoras at all. Outside his own works, a single citation in Methodius of Olympus is nearly the only ancient trace of him. The two treatises themselves come down through one manuscript — Parisinus Graecus 451, the great codex copied in 914 for Arethas of Caesarea, a deliberate corpus of the Greek apologists into which Athenagoras was gathered alongside Clement of Alexandria, Pseudo-Justin, and Eusebius. Every later copy descends from it. He survives, in effect, because one tenth-century bishop thought the apologists worth saving as a set.

It is from a later and shakier tradition that the most colorful claim about him comes. Philip of Side, writing in the fifth century, made Athenagoras the head of the catechetical school at Alexandria and Clement his pupil. The story is set aside by historians: it contradicts the order Eusebius gives, in which Clement follows Pantaenus, and it inverts the relations between the teachers it names. The dates sometimes attached to Athenagoras’s birth and death rest on no better footing. What can be fixed is the Plea, by the emperors it addresses, and through it the shape of a mind. The man behind it stays a heading on a page.

The wager he made

What Athenagoras left was not a school or a system but a stance, and the stance is the legacy. He addressed the most powerful reader in the world and spoke to him as a philosopher to philosophers, on the conviction that the faith had nothing to fear from the old learning and everything to gain by meeting it on the common ground of reason — that the God argued toward in the Timaeus and the God confessed in the assemblies were one God, and that an honest mind, following its own best instruments, was already on the road. He did not ask the emperors to abandon Plato. He asked them to follow Plato further than they had, and to find the new sect waiting at the end of the path.

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