Athanasius

Athanasius was born in Egypt between 296 and 298, by Robertson's reckoning. He was a child when the Great Persecution under Diocletian broke out in 303. Robertson notes that he could not speak of its events from memory and that persons who had suffered as martyrs taught him. Robertson wrote that he came to the mystery of Christ as "a believing soul in need of a Saviour".

On the Incarnation, which Robertson places in or shortly before 318, argues that only God could undo what death had done to the human race. God did it, the treatise says, by taking flesh and dying in it. One line of it reads, "For He was made man that we might be made 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. 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. Nicaea answered with one word: homoousios, of one substance with the Father. Nearly every bishop present signed it. Socrates names five who would not, and the council's own letter names two.

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

The first removal came in 335. A synod at Tyre tried him on many charges, including the murder of a bishop named Arsenius. His severed hand was said to be in Athanasius's possession for magic. Athanasius produced Arsenius alive, with both hands. He was condemned anyway. Constantine then banished him to Trier on the Mosel on a fresh charge, that he had threatened to stop the grain ships. Robertson allows that to be rid of a cause of disturbance was at least one motive.

The second exile ran from 339 to 346, more than three years of it in Rome. There Bishop Julius took his side and the Western church began to grasp what was at stake. In February 356, soldiers surrounded the church of Theonas during a night vigil with the congregation inside. 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.

A later tag 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. He wrote from hiding. The Orations against the Arians and the Defence of His Flight were composed by a fugitive.

Out of those hidden years came the Life of Antony, his portrait of the old hermit he had known personally. Robertson calls it "the great classic of Monasticism", and Evagrius had put it into Latin by 374. As Augustine records, the story of Antony, told to him at Milan, helped push him toward his own conversion.

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. Its Old Testament differs from the list most readers hold, and it sets Esther among the books to be read. Nicaea had listed no books.

He came home for the last time in 366 and died on 2 May 373, still bishop. Julian called him a contemptible little fellow, and Gregory of Nazianzus praised his beauty of expression.