WHO IS ATHANASIUS OF ALEXANDRIA?
Public Domain.
On any given Sunday in many churches, the worshipping assembly affirms their faith using the words of the Nicene Creed. For some, this text might appear to be no more than a ponderous statement of the core tenets of Christianity, full of formal professions and carefully worded clauses. It is good to remember, however, that the seemingly staid truths affirmed in this Creed were once points of fierce debate; they are full of a theological vigor tested in the crucible of controversy and division.
During one pivotal portion of the 4th century CE, it was by no means assured that the original Christianity of the Apostles would even survive in any recognizable form. The faith’s transition in that century from a grassroots underground movement into the de facto religion of the Empire put enormous strain on the integrity of its fundamental proposition of a God accessible through the flesh of one crucified by that same Empire. That this great mystery did indeed survive to be proclaimed on the lips of the faithful to our own day can be attributed largely to the life and labors of one figure upon that 4th century theological battlefield: Athanasius of Alexandria.
One cannot understand the import of Athanasius in the Christian theological tradition without first understanding the stakes of the controversy which defined his entire ministry, commonly referred to as the Arian heresy. Athanasius was a young protege of the Bishop of Alexandria in the first quarter of the 4th century when the teachings of a certain priest, Arius, began to gain currency both in that influential city and well beyond it. Arius claimed the Church’s traditional teaching—that Jesus, the Son of God, shared the same divine nature as God the Father—was impossible. Creation and God were not the same, Arius argued, and nothing intelligible and accessible to creation, as Jesus was to humanity, could be fully divine. Thus, for Arius, Jesus was instead a part of God’s creation. (1) The best part, surely, and the exemplar and redeemer of creation’s potential, perhaps, but he was not the Creator himself.
It cannot be lost on us that this alternative viewpoint, 300 years into the development of the Christian faith, coincided with the ascension of Christianity to new heights of power and influence under Emperor Constantine. As the faith became increasingly popular and powerful, Arius sought to resolve a longstanding tension between the Gospel narratives of a crucified Savior and the dominant neoplatonic philosophies of the age. He knew that proclaiming a God of the cosmos who had come to inhabit human flesh and suffer an ignominious death on the cross could be confusing, if not repugnant, to those who viewed God as the unmarred, transcendent perfection toward which all creation could only strive. And yet for Athanasius and others who held to the traditional understandings of Jesus’ divinity, it was precisely this—the potent, world-upending, philosophy-shattering truth of the death and resurrection of God’s own body—that lay at the heart of the good news.
The Council of Nicaea, convened by Emperor Constantine in 325, and from which the aforementioned Nicene Creed gets its name, ostensibly settled the matter in favor of the traditional, non-Arian teaching about Jesus’ full divinity. Nevertheless, the controversy continued for decades thereafter, and the fortunes of the Arians waxed and waned as succeeding Emperors either supported or dismissed their cause.
It was into the midst of this heady uncertainty that Athanasius was ordained a deacon in 319 CE, attended the Council of Nicaea as secretary to the Bishop of Alexandria, and was later himself consecrated Bishop of that same city in 328. (2) His fierce opposition to the Arian heresy would shape his entire ministry as Bishop; it forced him into exile five times over the course of 45 years and produced a wealth of surviving letters and treatises arguing for the orthodox teachings of the faith.
Perhaps the most famous and influential of these works—and the one that’s required reading for nearly every seminary student—is his early text On the Incarnation. Although it is, in fact, the second of a two-part series (the first being Against the Gentiles), On the Incarnation stands on its own as one of the definitive pieces of early Christian theology. In it, Athanasius elucidates the Nicene understanding of God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ, claiming not only that it is the immutable received wisdom of both the tradition and of Scripture that “the Word was God…and the Word became flesh” (3), but also that this incarnation is the only logical means of saving creation from the self-evident degradations of sin and death. Through a series of propositions and answers, Athanasius demonstrates how the incarnation of the Son, despite its great mystery, is actually more intellectually coherent than the perspectives of its detractors. No merely human Savior, he argues, could actually save us from death because all of humanity is subject to sin and death. Only God can transcend that power, and only then by imbuing our frail human flesh with the possibility of a share of divine life:
[God] put on the body, that finding death in the body he might efface it. For how at all would the Lord have been shown to be Life, if not by giving life to the mortal? (4)
This is why, for Athanasius, it must be that, as the Nicene Creed states, Jesus is “true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father.” For only the One who is both fully human and fully God can reveal the fullness of eternity to a finite creation, only he can bear the light of immortality into the valley of the shadow of death, and only he can wrest the sovereignty of grace from the humiliation of the crosses we bear and inflict upon one another:
For he was incarnate we might be made god; and he manifested himself through a body that we might receive an idea of the invisible Father; and he endured the insults of human beings, that we might inherit incorruptibility. (5)
Interestingly, the Arian heresy is not explicitly mentioned in On the Incarnation, leading many scholars to date it in advance of that controversy’s eruption around 318CE. This could suggest that Athanasius drafted the text as a very young man in his early 20s as a response to more generalized challenges to Christian teachings. Others claim that he more likely composed the work during the earlier years of his episcopate while the controversies over the nature of Christ lingered post-Nicaea. (6) In either case, he was speaking directly and with incomparable cogency to the pressing theological question of his time. Athanasius saw no room for accommodation to the opposing viewpoint, even as the Arian opposition achieved a measure of toleration within the Empire in the years following the Council. For Athanasius, the stakes were clear: either Jesus was indeed God or the whole religion worshipping him was nothing more than mere idolatry. Christianity without a divine Son would be, in effect, humanity worshipping an exalted version of itself, and thus forever doomed to the inevitability of its own frailty.
And although, over time, Athanasius’ views did prevail, he paid a steep cost for his steadfastness to orthodoxy. As Bishop he was intermittently stripped of his office and forced out of Alexandria when rulers sympathetic to Arianism were in control of the Empire and the Church. Even during these seasons of trial, however, Athanasius was undeterred in his advocacy for the faith and in his writing. During one consequential period of exile, he spent time with the monks who inhabited the deserts of Egypt and subsequently wrote another of his most enduring and influential works, The Life of Antony. Published around 260 CE, it is one of the first examples of hagiography (a laudatory account of a saint), describing the life and teachings of St. Antony of the Desert, the man considered the father of Christian monasticism.
Far from being a side note to his theological writings, The Life of Antony is in many ways the fruitful culmination of On the Incarnation; there is a consistency of vision and purpose across these writings. According to Athanasius, St. Antony was not only a holy and prayerful man, but was one who embodied the fullness of Christian orthodoxy. His life and his teachings were the enfleshment of the truths that Athanasius so ardently upheld:
Antony came forth as though from some shrine, having been led into divine mysteries and inspired by God…and when they beheld him, they were amazed to see that his body had maintained its former condition…he maintained utter equilibrium, like one guided by reason and steadfast in that which accords with nature. (7)
If On the Incarnation was an argument for the enduring teaching of the Apostles, then The Life of Antony was a portrait of how to live that teaching out zealously and consistently. Antony was also, unsurprisingly, described as a fierce critic of the Arians, in once instance having “chased them from the mountain, saying their doctrines were worse than serpent’s poison.” Clearly Athanasius saw in the old monk a kindred spirit in the ongoing defense of the faith.
The widespread popularity of The Life of Antony and its contribution to the growing interest in Christian asceticism and monasticism served to strengthen the theological defense of orthodoxy that Athanasius offered in his other writings. As Christianity became more deeply intertwined with the Empire over the course of the 4th century, the witness of the desert monastics, exemplified by The Life of Antony, served as a necessary counterbalance to the demystification of the faith, just as On the Incarnation served as a corrective to the philosophical dilutions of Arianism. When Athanasius died in Alexandria in 373, having outlasted most of his opponents, his legacy as a stalwart of orthodoxy was already taking shape; he was canonized a saint of the Church less than 10 years later. (8)
And so, whenever we gather to profess the Nicene Creed, we would do well to pause and consider the means by which it has reached us down through the centuries, and how its words encapsulate a mystery worth preserving: how God became human and yet remained fully God, and how we might share in God’s life even as we remain fully human. Athanasius refused to forget that our lives as Christians depended on such a mystery; would that we remember, too.
McGrath, Alister, Christian Theology, 218.
Weinandy, Thomas Gerard, Athanasius: A Theological Introduction, 2.
John 1.
Ibid., 97.
Ibid., 107.
Ibid., 22.
Athanasius, The Life of Antony, 17-18.
On the Incarnation, 18.
