Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop of Alexandria & Doctor of the Church
May 2 · d. 373
also known as Athanasius the Great, Athanasius of Alexandria, The Father of Orthodoxy
Athanasius was bishop of Alexandria for forty-five years, from 328 until his death in 373, and spent roughly seventeen of them deposed, hunted, or hidden. Five times he was driven from his see, under four emperors, for refusing to soften the Nicene confession that the Son is of one substance with the Father. He wrote On the Incarnation, the Life of Antony, and the letter that first names the twenty-seven books of the New Testament as the church now receives them.
Athanasius grew up in Alexandria, and while he was still a boy the city was arguing about Jesus. A priest named Arius was teaching that the Son of God, though the highest and first of all creatures, was still a creature: there was, he said, a time when the Son was not. The bishop of Alexandria, Alexander, said no. If the Son is a creature, then the one who came to save us is not God, and what reaches us in him is not God's own life but something less. Athanasius entered Alexander's household as a young cleric, became his deacon and his secretary, and in the summer of 325 went with him to the council at Nicaea, where he was too young to vote and stood at his bishop's shoulder while the bishops of the world settled on a word: the Son is of one substance with the Father.
Three years later Alexander died, and on the eighth of June, 328, Athanasius was consecrated in his place. He was under thirty, which was under the age the canons allowed, and his enemies remembered it.
Then the emperor changed his mind. Constantine, who had called the council, decided that Arius should be received back into communion, and told the young bishop of Alexandria to admit him. Athanasius refused. He kept refusing. The refusal is the hinge of his whole life, because from it everything else follows: the charges, the councils, the soldiers, the desert.
The charges came in 335, at a synod convened at Tyre. He had been irregularly consecrated. He had exacted a tax on linen. There had been a broken chalice. And, most terribly, he had murdered a bishop named Arsenius and cut off his hand to use in magic. The synod deposed him. He did not wait for the sentence to be carried out; he sailed for Constantinople and confronted the emperor to his face, arriving on the thirtieth of October. In February of 336 he was sent to Trier in Gaul, and that was the first exile. Constantine died the following May, and by November Athanasius was home.
Count the rest. In March of 339 he was hunted through the night, and fled the Church of Theonas the next day, the record says, after he had baptized many; four days later a Cappadocian named Gregory was installed in his place by imperial force. That exile lasted seven years, most of them in Rome, where Julius I took his part without wavering. In February of 356, on a night when the people were keeping vigil in the Church of Theonas, a duke named Syrianus brought armed troops into the church, and Athanasius went out through the confusion into the Egyptian desert, where he stayed six years among the monks. When Julian let the exiled bishops come home in 362, Athanasius came home, and Julian, alarmed within eight months at how the city loved him, threw him out again. He was expelled a fifth time under Valens in October of 365, and hidden four months. Where? Socrates and Sozomen say he lay in his father's tomb outside the city. The Alexandrian record says he withdrew to the garden of the new river. Nobody now can say which.
But he was not only a fugitive. Between the exiles he governed. He went up into the Thebaid on visitation; he visited Pachomius's monks at Tabennesi; he put Didymus, blind from childhood and never ordained, at the head of the great school of Alexandria, where he taught for fifty years. He wrote On the Incarnation, whose argument is that the Word took a body precisely so that death would have nothing left to hold: "He 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." He wrote the Life of Antony for the monks who had sheltered him, and told how Antony, after twenty years shut in a fort, was hauled out by friends who wrenched off the door and found him "neither fat, like a man without exercise, nor lean from fasting," his soul "neither contracted as if by grief, nor relaxed by pleasure." That book went west in Latin, and a generation later it was the book two officials picked up by chance, the story Augustine heard in Milan just before he wept in the garden and was converted.
And in the Easter letter of 367 he did something whose result the whole church still holds in its hands: he listed the books of the New Testament, all twenty-seven, in the order we have them, and closed the list. He gave his reason first, which was not scholarship but care, that "some few of the simple" not be beguiled by books wearing the names of apostles. Then: "These are fountains of salvation, that they who thirst may be satisfied with the living words they contain."
He died in his own bed on the second of May, 373, with his clergy around him, forty-five years a bishop, having outlasted four emperors and every council that deposed him. Within a decade Gregory of Nazianzus stood up in Constantinople to praise him, and the word he had defended stood in the creed, where it stands still.
You have probably been told, at some point, that a thing you were holding out for was too small to be worth the cost: one word, one clause, one line you would not sign. Athanasius lost his city five times over a single term, and the men pressing him were not villains in their own eyes but emperors managing a fractious church, offering peace for one softened phrase. He would not, because he thought the phrase was the whole of what he had to give people: that the one who saves them is God and not a creature. Notice that he kept working through it, visiting monasteries, appointing teachers, writing letters at Easter, as if the exiles were interruptions in one long charge rather than five separate ruins. What is the thing you are being asked to soften, and do you know clearly enough what hangs on it to keep working while you refuse?
The chronology of Athanasius can be traced to the day, which is rare for a fourth-century figure, because two Alexandrian archival documents survive. The Historia Acephala, so called because its opening and its author's name are lost, was probably composed before 390; the Festal Index, a table prefacing his annual Easter letters, was probably compiled before 400. Both are near-contemporary, both date by the Egyptian civil calendar, and where they agree a date can be trusted. Where they differ, the difference is usually one day, and it is informative: his death is a case in point. The Festal Index says he departed this life on 7 Pachon, which is 2 May 373; the Historia Acephala says 8 Pachon, 3 May. Commontide's feast follows the Festal Index. The nineteenth-century critical edition prepared by Archibald Robertson for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers reconciles the two chronicles in a table that marks its own degrees of certainty typographically, and remains the most load-bearing modern apparatus for the life.
Beyond those two, the evidence has a shape worth naming. The largest body of it is Athanasius's own writing: the apologies, the polemical discourses, the festal letters, and the conciliar and imperial documents he chose to preserve. He is therefore an interested party to nearly every controversy the record narrates, and his editors note that he seldom supplies precise chronological data himself. Gregory of Nazianzus delivered a panegyric on him about 380, rich in praise and thin in fact. Rufinus wrote around 402, and Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret in the first half of the fifth century, none of them Alexandrian eyewitnesses and all of them drawing on the same documentary pool, much of it assembled by Athanasius. The one substantial Arian-sympathetic counterweight, Philostorgius, survives only through a ninth-century epitome. Later reference works must be used with care: the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article, which stands behind much of the received popular account, carries at least two demonstrable dating errors, placing the fifth exile in October 364 rather than 365 and dating the death of Constantius II to 4 November 361 rather than 3 November.
Two things widely attached to his name are not his. The Athanasian Creed, the Quicunque Vult, is a Latin composition with no Greek original; the Greeks did not know it until the eleventh century; it omits the term he fought for at Nicaea and includes the filioque, a Western concern; and it appears in full only around the turn of the ninth century. Gerhard Vossius refuted the attribution in 1642 and Ussher in 1647, but the Book of Common Prayer had appointed the text since 1549 and the liturgical books kept it. And the motto most readers arrive knowing, Athanasius against the world, cannot be traced to any work, book or chapter, nor can the claim that it was inscribed on his tomb. It is what the tradition says of him, and it may be reported as that, but it is not on record as anything he said.
Athanasius was never canonized, and there is no document to point to: he died more than a thousand years before any formal process existed, and his recognition rests everywhere on ancient and unbroken liturgical veneration. When that veneration began cannot be established from the sources consulted here. The one dateable act concerns his title rather than his sainthood: in the revised Roman Breviary of 1568, Pius V named him one of the four Great Doctors of the Eastern Church, with Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom.
Three traditions keep him on three days, which is itself a sign of separate and long-independent transmission. The West keeps 2 May, his death day. The Byzantine churches keep 18 January, jointly with Cyril of Alexandria. The Copts keep 7 Pashons, around 15 May, and call him Athanasius the Apostolic, counting him the twentieth Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria.
His relics are divided between two claims of very unequal strength. On 10 May 1973, in the sixteenth-centenary year of his death and on the first visit of a Coptic pope to Rome, Paul VI gave Shenouda III a portion of the relics venerated in Rome; they reached Cairo on 15 May and rest at St Mark's Coptic Orthodox Cathedral. That is well attested. The relic at San Zaccaria in Venice is not: a single devotional compilation reports that it was brought from Constantinople in 1455, that the head was lost to fire in 1705 and replaced, and that it was moved to San Zaccaria in 1807, and the same source states the scholarly suspicion that the body is that of Athanasius I of Constantinople, who died about 1310. Venerated five centuries under a name that may not be his, on the word of one non-scholarly account.
One caution for anyone tracing dedications: most churches and monasteries in the Greek-speaking world named for Agios Athanasios honour Athanasius the Athonite, founder of the Great Lavra, who died in 1003 and has no connection to the Alexandrian beyond the name.
The quotation from On the Incarnation is at section 54.3, in Archibald Robertson's translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, volume 4 (1892), available at New Advent. The more lyrical wording most readers meet ("He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God") belongs to the 1944 translation by a Religious of C.S.M.V., Sister Penelope Lawson, which carried C. S. Lewis's essay on reading old books and is a separate and later text.
Both quotations from Festal Letter 39, the Easter letter of 367, are from sections 2 and 5 to 6 respectively, translated by R. Payne-Smith in the same NPNF volume, at New Advent. The Festal Index for that year independently confirms the date, noting that in it he wrote, forming a canon of the Holy Scriptures.
The description of Antony emerging from the fort is Life of Antony, section 14, translated by H. Ellershaw for NPNF Second Series volume 4, at New Advent. The narrating voice is Athanasius's own.
The two Alexandrian chronicles are the Historia Acephala and the Festal Index, both in NPNF translations. Robertson's Prolegomena, including the General Chronological Table that reconciles them, is at CCEL and Wikisource. The argument against the Athanasian Creed's authenticity is set out by Philip Schaff in The Creeds of Christendom, volume 1; the creed's text is printed in volume 2, not volume 1. Gregory of Nazianzus's panegyric is Oration 21.
The modern reappraisal of the Egyptian years is R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318 to 381 (T&T Clark, 1988), chapter 9, and Timothy D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Harvard, 1993). The standard critical edition of Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione is Robert W. Thomson's, in Oxford Early Christian Texts (Clarendon, 1971); the incomplete Athanasius Werke (De Gruyter) is the critical series for the rest of the corpus. The current standard modern English translation of On the Incarnation is John Behr's, Popular Patristics Series 44 (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2011).
Modern historians have also reopened the Council of Tyre. That the Arsenius charge was fabricated is not in doubt: the man was produced alive, with both hands, and hostile sources concede it. But the murder charge was one of several, the council deposed rather than acquitted him, and he left for the emperor rather than face judgment. R. P. C. Hanson in 1988 and Timothy Barnes in 1993 argued that the wider dossier, which alleged violent suppression of Meletian congregations and coercion over church property and elections in Egypt, describes a real pattern, and that later historians accepted Athanasius's own account of those years, which is advocacy, too readily. None of this touches the theology, which stands or falls on its own arguments; it means only that the simple story of an innocent framed and vindicated is a contested one.
The composition date of his early paired treatises, Contra Gentes and On the Incarnation, is genuinely open. The older consensus put them between 318 and 323, when he was scarcely out of his teens; a later date, around 335 to 337, has been argued in modern scholarship. No date should be given as settled.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Athanasius special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Athanasius contra mundum /ˌæθəˈneɪʒəs ˈkɒntrə ˈmʊndəm/; Incarnatione /ɪnˌkɑːrnəʃiˈoʊni/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52