Alexander of Alexandria

Alexander became bishop of Alexandria in 313, the year Constantine's edict ended the persecutions. He had lived through the last of them. He inherited a church that had just stopped bleeding and was about to start arguing.

The argument began in his own clergy. Arius was a presbyter in Alexandria with charge of the church at Baucalis, popular, austere, and a fine preacher. He taught that the Son of God was the first and greatest of God's creatures, that there was, as the slogan went, a time when the Son was not. Alexander heard it, called Arius in, and told him plainly he was wrong. When Arius would not yield, Alexander summoned a synod of about a hundred bishops from Egypt and Libya, somewhere between 318 and 321, and had him deposed and excommunicated.

It did not end there, and Alexander knew it would not. Arius went east and found protectors, chiefly Eusebius of Nicomedia. Alexander wrote letters, long, careful, circulated widely, to the bishops of the world explaining what was at stake. Two survive: one to Alexander of Thessalonica, preserved by Theodoret, and an encyclical preserved by Socrates. They are the earliest sustained statement of the case Nicaea would later ratify. The Son, Alexander argued, is begotten, not made; he is from the Father's own being; to call him a creature is to say that the church has been worshiping a creature.

Constantine at first thought the whole thing a quarrel over words and sent Bishop Hosius of Cordoba to smooth it over. Hosius came back and told him it was not a quarrel over words. The Council of Nicaea was called in 325, and Alexander went, taking with him a young deacon of his household named Athanasius.

Nicaea vindicated him. The creed it produced used the word homoousios, of one substance with the Father, and condemned the propositions Alexander had first flagged in his own presbytery.

He lived less than three years after the council, dying on 17 April 328. Athanasius succeeded him and spent the next forty-five years defending what his old bishop had started.

Sources: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, book I; Theodoret of Cyrus, Ecclesiastical History, book I; Athanasius, Apologia contra Arianos; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. III.