Athanasius of Alexandria

Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria for some forty-five years, was the great defender of the divinity of Christ against Arianism in the fourth century — so often alone against emperors and councils that later ages coined the phrase *Athanasius contra mundum*, "Athanasius against the world." More than any other single figure, he secured the doctrine that the Son is fully God, and with it the Nicene faith that Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants alike confess.

Early life and Nicaea Born in Alexandria around 296 and trained in its rich theological tradition, Athanasius entered the service of Bishop Alexander and attended the Council of Nicaea in 325 as a young deacon and secretary. There the presbyter Arius of Alexandria was condemned for teaching that the Son was a created being — "there was when he was not" — and therefore not truly God. Against Arius the council confessed the Son as *homoousios*, "of one substance" (consubstantial) with the Father. Athanasius would spend the rest of his life defending that single, contested word. In 328 he succeeded Alexander as bishop, aged only about thirty.

On the Incarnation While still young he wrote his twin apologetic works *Against the Heathen* and [On the Incarnation](/christianity/library/books/on-the-incarnation), the classic statement of why God became man: the Word (Logos) through whom all things were made (John 1) took a human body to conquer death and restore the divine image in a humanity enslaved to corruption. His argument was fundamentally about salvation — only if the Saviour is truly God can he save; a created Christ could not deify. The point is summed up in the famous line that God became man that man might become god (by grace, not by nature).

The long war with Arianism Athanasius' episcopate became a decades-long struggle as imperial favour swung between the Nicene and Arian parties. Charged by his opponents with everything from violence to (absurdly) murder and sorcery, he was condemned at the Council of Tyre (335) and exiled five times under Constantine, Constantius II, Julian, and Valens — roughly seventeen of his years as bishop spent in banishment, some of it in the West, some hidden among the desert monks of Egypt who sheltered him. Through it all he poured out his *Orations against the Arians* and a stream of letters rallying the Nicene cause. He lived to see the tide turn, dying in 373; the faith he defended was ratified at the Council of Constantinople in 381.

The Life of Antony and the canon Athanasius also wrote the *Life of Antony*, the biography of the desert father that spread the ideal of monasticism across the Christian world and helped convert, among others, the young Augustine. And in his festal letter of 367 he listed the twenty-seven books of the New Testament exactly as they were later received — the earliest surviving statement of that canon.

Legacy Athanasius is honoured as a saint and Doctor of the Church in the Catholic tradition and as a Church Father and one of the great defenders of orthodoxy across the Orthodox and Protestant worlds; the Nicene faith he championed is common to all three. The Athanasian Creed bears his name by later attribution rather than authorship — a point on which the traditions agree. His life became the enduring pattern of the bishop who holds to defined doctrine against political power, whatever the cost.