Athanasius of Alexandria Biography and Books

Athanasius was bishop of Alexandria for forty-five years and spent seventeen of them in exile. He was driven from his city five times, by four different emperors, and each time he came back. He was short, dark, and slight, and his enemies, who included most of the imperial court for most of his life, accused him of murder, sorcery, treason, sacrilege and interfering with the grain supply of Constantinople. Every one of the charges collapsed. What he would not do was sign a document he believed to be false, and that single refusal, held for half a century, is very largely why the Christian church still confesses that Jesus Christ is God.

He was born in Alexandria around AD 296, into a Greek-speaking Egyptian world where the church had just come through the worst persecution in its history. He grew up knowing Coptic as well as Greek, which mattered later: when the empire turned against him, the Egyptian countryside hid him. He was still a young deacon, secretary to Bishop Alexander, when he travelled to the council at Nicaea in 325. He had no vote there. He was perhaps twenty-seven.

The question at Nicaea

The argument that consumed his life had been started by an Alexandrian presbyter named Arius, and it was not a quibble. Arius taught that the Son, though the highest of all creatures and the agent of creation itself, was nevertheless a creature: there was, he said, a time when he was not. It was an attractive position. It kept God safely simple and unchangeable, it fitted the philosophy of the age, and it could quote Scripture.

Athanasius saw with unusual clarity what it cost. If the Son is a creature, then what came into the world in Jesus Christ was not God but the best thing God had made, and the whole Christian hope collapses into a rumour. In the little book he wrote as a young man on the incarnation, he put the alternative in one line that the Greek church has never stopped quoting:

For He was made man that we might be made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality.

— Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54

He is not saying that human beings become divine beings. He is saying that God has come the whole way down, taken a real body, died a real death, and by doing so has made it possible for creatures to share the life of God. Everything else in Athanasius follows from that sentence, including all the trouble.

Five exiles

He became bishop of Alexandria in 328, aged about thirty, and within seven years he was in Trier, on the Moselle, banished by Constantine after a synod stacked against him. That was the first. The second sent him to Rome. The third, and the strangest, began on a Thursday night in February 356.

He disappeared for six years and fourteen days. Where he went was the desert. The Egyptian monks, whose life he had learned to love and whose founder he had known, hid the most wanted man in the empire among the cells and caves of the Nile valley and the western oases, and no one betrayed him. Two more exiles followed, under Julian and under Valens; a persistent tradition says that in the last of them he hid for four months in his father's tomb.

Out of the years in hiding came the most widely read book he ever wrote. The Life of Antony is the biography of the old hermit whom Athanasius had known personally, and it did more than any other single text to carry the monastic ideal into the West. It reached as far as a garden in Milan, where a young African professor named Augustine heard the story of two officials who read it and abandoned their careers on the spot, and could not get it out of his head.

The letter that fixed the New Testament

Every year the bishop of Alexandria wrote a festal letter announcing the date of Easter, and every year Athanasius used it to teach. The thirty-ninth of them, sent out in 367, contains a list. It names the four Gospels, Acts, the seven catholic epistles, the fourteen letters of Paul, and the Revelation of John: the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, in an order any modern reader would recognise, and it is the earliest surviving list to name exactly those and no others.

These are fountains of salvation, that they who thirst may be satisfied with the living words they contain. In these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of godliness. Let no man add to these, neither let him take ought from these.

— Athanasius, Festal Letter 39

He was not inventing a canon by decree. He was writing down what the churches had come to read, and the fact that his list is the one the church kept says something about how carefully he had listened.

What he passed on

Athanasius wrote the Life of Antony as a man who had watched the old monk at close quarters, and the book is more careful than its reputation suggests. Its miracles are told with a persistent refusal to credit Antony himself. A girl is brought across the desert to be healed and Antony will not even let her in, sending word instead that the accomplishment of this is not mine, wretched man that I am, but her healing is the work of the Saviour.

That instinct, deflecting everything away from the holy man and back onto Christ, is Athanasius as much as it is Antony, and it is the reason his own life reads the way it does. He is not a mystic and he almost never talks about his inner experience. What he gives instead is a fixed point: God has actually come, in a body, to where we are. Everything he suffered was in defence of that one plain claim, and everything he wrote was an attempt to keep it from being explained away.

Alone, and not alone

The phrase attached to him in the Latin church, Athanasius against the world, is a later coinage rather than anything he said, and it is only half true. He was often outnumbered at councils to the point of absurdity, and there were stretches in the 350s when nearly every bishop who mattered had signed something he could not sign. But he was never actually alone. He had Alexandria, which rioted for him. He had the monks, who hid him. He had a network of correspondents that reached from the Egyptian desert to Rome to the Rhine, and he wrote to all of them, endlessly, in a Greek that is plain and quick and occasionally very funny at his opponents' expense.

He was also capable of generosity that his reputation for stubbornness does not predict. In his later years he worked patiently with bishops who had once signed against him, arguing that many of them had meant the right thing in the wrong words, and he made room for them. A man who had spent decades refusing to compromise on the substance turned out to be flexible about almost everything else.

He came home for the last time in 366 and had seven quiet years. He died in Alexandria on 2 May 373, in his own bed, in his own city, having outlived the emperors who exiled him. Eight years later the council at Constantinople settled the question in the words the church still says on Sundays, that the Son is of one being with the Father. Athanasius did not live to hear it. He had held the line long enough for someone else to.

What is worth taking from him is not mainly the doctrine, which most Christians now inherit without effort, but the temperament that defended it. He was told, repeatedly and by people with the power to destroy him, that he was the only obstacle to peace and that a single signature would end everyone's trouble. Five times he chose the road out of the city instead. He seems never to have thought of himself as heroic; he thought of himself as a bishop who was not free to say what was not true.