ATHANASIUS
Athanasius of Alexandria is a giant among giants in the history of the church. Today he is revered by Christians of all shapes and colors as a champion of orthodoxy. Of course, this assessment of the man is made by looking through the rear view mirror of history. In his own day Athanasius often found himself ostracized by the very church and empire he sought to protect. During the tempestuous ecclesiastical atmosphere of the fourth century, Athanasius was both hero and villain, his status always dependent upon the theological bent of those in power. To his enemies he was pejoratively known as the "Black Dwarf," but in the providence of God the world has come to think of him as the defender of the faith who protected orthodoxy from the poison of heresy in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds: Athanasius Against the World.
A Brief Biography
Athanasius was born c. AD 300 in or around the Roman city of Alexandria where he received his theological and philosophical training. While in his twenties he became a deacon in the influential church at Alexandria. As a deacon Athanasius was privileged to accompany his bishop, Alexander, to the first ecumenical council of the church at Nicaea in 325. Though his presence at the council certainly impacted his own career and work for the rest of his life, it is unlikely that he played any significant role at Nicaea. As a young man Athanasius showed great promise as a theologian and was groomed by Alexander to become his successor. When Alexander died in 328, Athanasius became the bishop of Alexandria at the age of thirty-three.
Much of Athanasius' career would be dedicated to defending the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, as defined by the council of Nicaea, against the heretical ideas of the Sabellians on the one end, and the Arians on the other, and this was no easy task. During his forty-six year ministry as bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius was exiled five times. Because of "changing political fortunes due to the involvement of the Emperor in the affairs of the church," he spent a total of seventeen years in exile. Through it all the Alexandrian churches stayed loyal to him and welcomed him back as bishop after each exile. Ironically, the banishments inadvertently helped his cause. By order of the emperor, Athanasius was forced to travel all around the empire, bringing him into contact with many church leaders. This allowed the bishop to use his unmatched theological prowess to gain support and make many allies, especially in the West.
Athanasius' life was a tumultuous one, his fortunes continuously vacillating with the succession of each new emperor. The final seven years of his life were spent as bishop in his home church at Alexandria in relative peace. When he died, the Arian leaning emperor, Valens, was in command of the affairs of the church. Shortly after the death of Athanasius, Valens died and was succeeded by Theodosius who
was a strong supporter of the orthodox, trinitarian faith championed by Athanasius and his Cappadocian friends. It was Theodosius who called the second ecumenical council at Constantinople where the Nicene Creed was strengthened and finally adopted as the binding universal creed for all Christians.. Athanasius did not live to see the fruit of his life's work.
Theological Contributions and Controversies
Though the Nicene Creed was a statement of the orthodox position regarding the Trinity, it was written nebulously enough for the Sabellians to interpret it according to their own modalistic theology. This gave cause for the Arians, who had decidedly lost at the Council of Nicaea, to call for the abandonment of the creed. The Arians turned their guns chiefly upon one word found in the creed that was used to describe the relationship between the nature of the Father and the Son, homoousios, which literally means "consubstantial." The term signified that the Father and the Son were of the same substance or essence. The Sabellians pointed to the use of homoousios found in the creed as support for their position, claiming that by using this particular word the council had declared the Father and the Son to be identical to one another in nature and personhood. This, of course, was not the intent of the bishops gathered at Nicaea, even so, the Arians managed to convince the successor to Constantine, Constantius, that homoousios should be dropped from the creed and replaced with homoiousios, which means "of similar substance," a word clearly favoring Arian theology.
Enter Athanasius. The stubborn bishop of Alexandria refused to give in to the emperors pleas for the modification of wording in the creed. Athanasius vehemently condemned the change as heresy and its supporters as antichrists. And so it was that much of his life would be dedicated to the rejection of a mere diphthong from inclusion in the Nicene Creed. But the solitary letter that separates homoousios from homoiousios carried a weight far beyond its size, as Bruce Shelley notes,
The importance of a message cannot be weighed by the size of the punctuation or the number of letters used. Although only an iota (in English the letter "i") divided the parties after Nicaea, the issues involved represented two sharply different interpretations of the Christian faith. At stake was the full deity of Jesus Christ and the essence of the doctrine of the Trinity.
Roger Olson recognizes the importance of this "iota":
The difference between homoousios and homoiousios is the difference between the divine and the creaturely. One says that the Son is God. The other says that the Son is like God. If a being is God, then saying he is like God is entirely wrong. If a being is only like God, then declaring him to be God would be heresy if not blasphemy. Athanasius saw this and resisted the seductive compromise.
For Athanasius, the defense of the Nicene Creed was nothing less than a defense of the gospel itself. According to Athanasius and his supporters, the Son of God had to be God and not just a creature like God if he was to save us, for only God could unite us with himself. There could be no compromise on this issue; for Jesus Christ to have reconciled us with the Father he had to be both fully God and fully man.
One of Athanasius' greatest achievements was his organizing a council at Alexandria in 362. The synod reaffirmed the use of homoousios in the Nicene Creed and rejected the semi-Arian homoiousios and Sabellian heresies. In addition to this, Athanasius, with the help of his friends the Cappadocian fathers (Basil and two Gregorys), proposed that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were three distinct but not separate hypostases of the one God. Reflecting on this formulation, Olson notes,
The purpose of putting forth this new idea was to contradict Sebellian modalsim by making clear that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, though one substance (homoousios), are not the same identical person or subsistence. They are three distinct persons (hypostases) and not merely three masks or manifestations or aspects of the one personal God, as Sebellianism averred.
The doctrinal formulation developed by Athanasius and the Cappadocian fathers was accepted by the synod and eventually by the church universal and remains the orthodox theology of the Trinity today.
Though it was not an official ecumenical council, lacking as it did support from the emperor and the presence of many leading bishops of the church, the synod of Alexandria did pave the way for the second ecumenical council of the church, the Council of Constantinople. This second ecumenical council would gather only after the death of Athanasius and largely because of his labors. At Constantinople the Nicene Creed was affirmed as the official doctrine of the Trinity for the church universal.
Like many of the church fathers, Athanasius left behind a mixed legacy. This is largely because of some aberrant doctrines that he apparently espoused. As with Origen and Irenaeus before him, Athanasius held to the traditional idea of salvation as deification. According to this view, salvation consisted of unification between God and man which took place in the incarnation. In his own words, "For He was made man that we might be made God."
Athanasius also seems to have proposed what would later be declared a heretical Christology. He taught that because Jesus Christ remained immutable and impassible during the incarnation, he only experienced creaturely things through the human body that he took on. This view was nearly identical to the later theory developed by a contemporary theologian named Apollinarius. Apollinarius' Christology was declared heretical at Constantinople in 381.
Major Works
Athanasius was a prolific writer. Though the majority of his writing consisted in smaller tracts, pamphlets, and letters, he did manage to author several treatises. The most important of these were On the Incarnation of the Word, and Four Discourses Against the Arians. Less important than these was his work Against the Heathen.
Of his many writings, the one that may have had the most practical impact on the life and attitude of the church was actually a biography. The Life of Anthony chronicled the lifestyle and miracles that surrounded the famous Egyptian hermit. Athanasius had spent several years in exile among the desert hermits and gained great respect for them. His writings on Anthony helped to popularize the monastic movement in the fourth century. One of the most famous church figures impacted by his work was Augustine of Hippo, whose own conversion was partly encouraged by reading Athanasius' biography of Anthony.
Conclusion
In his own day Athanasius was both loved and hated. Some saw him as a defender of orthodoxy, while others viewed him as a stubborn theologian from Alexandria who refused to put the unity of the church before trifling theological minutiae. For Athanasius, the details surrounding the doctrine of the Trinity were not mere trifles but truths that pertained to the salvation of men's souls, and he was willing to be exiled for them. Today he is revered by Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians as a saint. Among Protestants he is remembered as a defender of the apostolic faith. In truth, all Christians have Athanasius to thank, for without him the Christology of the Jehovah's Witness might well be orthodox.
