Athanasius of Alexandria

Athanasius was born in Egypt about 296, in the last generation of Christians who grew up expecting to be arrested. He was a boy in Alexandria when the Great Persecution under Diocletian broke over the city in 303. He came out of it holding one conviction he never once softened: the church had not held out for a good man or a great teacher. It had held out for God himself, come in a body.

He wrote that down while he was still young. On the Incarnation, probably finished before he was thirty, argues that only God could undo what death had done to the human race, and that God did it by taking flesh and dying in it. Its most quoted line is a trade: he became man that we might become God. Athanasius meant that God's own life is handed to people who could never manufacture it themselves.

In 325 he traveled to the Council of Nicaea as a deacon, secretary to his bishop Alexander. He was under thirty and had no vote. The council had been called to settle the teaching of Arius, an Alexandrian presbyter who held that the Son of God was the first and highest of creatures, made, not eternal. There was, Arius said, when he was not. Nicaea answered with one word: homoousios, of one substance with the Father. Nearly every bishop present signed it.

Then the empire changed its mind, and went on changing it for the next fifty years.

Alexander died in 328 and Athanasius was elected bishop of Alexandria at about thirty-three. He held the see for forty-five years. He spent seventeen of them in exile.

The first removal came in 335. A synod at Tyre, stacked with his opponents, tried him on a heap of charges, including the murder of a bishop named Arsenius, whose severed hand was said to be in Athanasius's possession for magic. Athanasius produced Arsenius alive, with both hands. He was condemned anyway, and Constantine sent him to Trier on the Rhine to keep the peace in Egypt.

The second exile ran from 339 to 346, most of it in Rome, where Bishop Julius took his side and the Western church began to grasp what was at stake. The third was the hardest. In February 356, soldiers surrounded the church of Theonas during a night vigil with the congregation inside. Athanasius later wrote that he refused to leave until the people were dismissed; in the confusion the monks and clergy got him out through the crowd. He vanished into the Egyptian desert for six years while the emperor Constantius installed a rival bishop by force. The fourth exile came under Julian, who had abandoned Christianity; the fifth, four months of it, under the Arian emperor Valens in 365.

Somewhere in those years the phrase attached itself to him: Athanasius contra mundum, Athanasius against the world. For long stretches it was close to literal. Councils at Rimini and Seleucia in 359 produced formulas that dropped the Nicene word, and Jerome later said the whole world groaned to find itself Arian. Athanasius did not bend, did not negotiate the term, and did not go quiet. He wrote from hiding. The Orations against the Arians and the Defense of His Flight were composed by a fugitive.

The desert kept him alive, and he paid it back. Out of those hidden years came the Life of Antony, his portrait of the old hermit he had known personally. It was translated into Latin almost at once and became the most widely read book in the ancient church after the Bible, the book that carried monasticism into Europe and, as Augustine records, helped push him toward his own conversion at Milan.

One more document belongs on his account. Every Easter the bishop of Alexandria sent out a festal letter fixing the date of the feast. The thirty-ninth of these, written in 367, lists the books the church receives as Scripture. Its New Testament is the twenty-seven books, no more and no fewer, the earliest surviving list that matches the one in a reader's hands today.

He came home for the last time in 366 and died in his own bed on 2 May 373, still bishop, having outlasted four emperors and a rival for his chair. He never held political power. He was short, dark, and easy to caricature, and his enemies did. What he left was the church's confession that Jesus of Nazareth is God of God, not a splendid creature standing between us and the Father, and the plain demonstration that one man refusing to sign can outlast an empire.

Sources: Athanasius, On the Incarnation; Athanasius, Life of Antony; Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 (367); Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History; Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 4.