Athanasius of Alexandria

Athanasius of Alexandria, known also as Athanasius the Great and, in the Coptic tradition, Athanasius the Apostolic, was a fourth-century bishop and theologian whose life and writings became central to the defense of Nicene Christianity. He was born in Alexandria in Roman Egypt near the close of the third century; the precise year is not securely attested in contemporary sources and is only inferred by later writers. He received a Greek literary and philosophical education together with instruction in Christian scripture. While still a young cleric he served as deacon and secretary to Bishop Alexander of Alexandria and accompanied him to the First Council of Nicaea in 325. There the bishops condemned the teaching of Arius that the Son was a created being and confessed that the Son is consubstantial with the Father. After Alexander died in 328, Athanasius was chosen and consecrated as bishop of Alexandria, beginning an episcopate of forty-five years. In the Coptic and wider Alexandrian tradition he is counted as the twentieth pope and patriarch of that see.

His tenure was repeatedly broken by the Arian controversy and by the shifting religious policies of the Constantinian and post-Constantinian emperors. Athanasius was driven from Alexandria on five occasions and spent in all some seventeen years in exile: first at Trier under Constantine, then for a long period in the West including Rome under Constantius II, later in hiding among the monks of the Egyptian desert, and in two further shorter expulsions under Julian and Valens. He used these years to write, to correspond with other bishops, and to sustain a network of support for the Nicene settlement. Only after 366 was he able to remain in his see until his death. Throughout, he insisted that the full divinity of the Son was required if the Church’s confession of salvation and of the worship of Christ was to remain coherent.

His principal theological works include the early treatise On the Incarnation and the later Orations against the Arians, in which he argued that the Word must be truly God if humanity is to be redeemed and deified. He also wrote the Life of Antony, a biography of the Egyptian hermit Antony that became a foundational text of Christian monastic literature and helped carry the monastic ideal from Egypt into the Latin West. In his thirty-ninth Festal Letter, issued in 367, he enumerated the twenty-seven books of the New Testament in the form that later became standard in most of the Church, an important early witness to the biblical canon. Other letters, apologies, and festal writings document both his pastoral government of Egypt and his running conflict with imperial and ecclesiastical opponents.

Athanasius died in Alexandria on 2 May 373. He was buried there; in later centuries relics associated with him were translated, and portions have been kept at the church of San Zaccaria in Venice and, since the twentieth century, at Saint Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo. He has been venerated as a saint from antiquity in the Coptic Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglican churches, without a medieval papal canonization of the later formal type. The Catholic Church numbers him among the Doctors of the Church. His feast is kept on 2 May in the West, on 18 January in much of the Christian East (often together with Cyril of Alexandria), and on 15 May (7 Pashons) in the Coptic calendar. Later tradition remembers him above all as the steadfast advocate of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity during the most contested decades of the fourth century.