Against the world and for the Trinity

[ABOVE: Cathedral of Catania - 19th century statue of Saint Athanasius, signed by a G. Nicoli, in the "Floretta" (the nearby garden). Picture by Giovanni Dall'Orto, July 4 2008. Giovanni Dall'Orto, the copyright holder has released it for any use as long as he is attributed / Wikimedia]

BORN to a Christian family in the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, almost two generations younger than Arius, a 27-year-old named Athanasius served as Bishop Alexander’s secretary at Nicaea. Already a bit of a prodigy—having written two books in his early twenties, Against the Heathen (318) and On the Incarnation (c. 320), and having been ordained a deacon in 319—Athanasius would have even more impact than this in the generations following the council. Indeed he became one of orthodox trinitarian Christianity’s most controversial and consequential defenders.

On again, off again bishop

Beyond the fact that his parents were believers and that his writings show him to be well educated, we know almost nothing of Athanasius’s early life. One apocryphal story has Alexander noticing him and other boys pretending to baptize each other on the beach. We do have several detailed descriptions of his physical appearance and personality; he was apparently short and spare with a small mouth, a large nose, and auburn hair. He was energetic and dryly humorous. At Nicaea, where he was later said to have made a memorable impression, he sided with Alexander and the homoousian position. He never appears to have confronted his main opponent, Arius, in person.

Alexander, so prominent in the early Arian debates, died soon after the council—probably in 328—and his protégé, now roughly 30, was chosen unanimously as his successor as bishop of Alexandria, one of the most powerful and influential sees in the early church. The gifted and argumentative Athanasius would serve in this role off and on for the next 45 years until his death in 373. The off times incorporated five different banishments into exile by four different emperors who favored the Arians and Eusebians (and may also have found Athansius’s personality abrasive), adding up to a total of 17 years.

During his times of exile, Athanasius traveled, spreading the message of trinitarian orthodoxy. He also continued sending out what were known as “Easter Letters” or “Paschal Letters”—letters that the bishop of Alexandria customarily sent yearly after determining that year’s date of Easter astronomically, with assistance from the scholars of Alexandria. Naturally Athanasius snuck a great deal of advice and argumentation into these. He also wrote a number of theological and pastoral works, mostly while exiled. The most famous of these was the Life of Anthony (360), a biography of the great desert ascetic and a perennial bestseller (then and now).

Orthodoxy's champion

Nobody was neutral about Athanasius; people nicknamed him both the “Father of Orthodoxy” and “Athanasius Contra Mundum” (Athanasius Against the World). After his death Gregory Nazianzus (329–390) eulogized him as the “Pillar of the Church.” Despite political and theological controversy, he remained dedicated to the message of a redeemer who is both God and man, which he had first penned around age 21 in On the Incarnation:

For he [Jesus Christ] was made man that we might be made God; and he showed himself in the body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and he endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality.

In his old age, he wrote to a friend, “Let what was confessed by the Fathers of Nicaea prevail.” Surprisingly Athanasius died peacefully at age 75, surrounded by his clergy and able to name and consecrate his successor, Peter II, before he died.

Athanasius has gone down through history as one of trinitarian orthodoxy’s greatest champions. Gregory Nazianzus described one of his returns from exile thus: “[Athanasius] restored too the teaching which had been overthrown: the Trinity was once more boldly spoken of, and set upon the lampstand, flashing with the brilliant light of the One Godhead into the souls of all.” Sixteen hundred years later, C. S. Lewis wrote in a 1944 introduction to a translation of On the Incarnation that Athanasius

stood for the trinitarian doctrine, “whole and undefiled,” when it looked as if all the civilized world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those “sensible” synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.