The Key Teachings of Athanasius of Alexandria

This is not a book by Athanasius of Alexandria. It is a companion to him — an independent work of exposition and appreciation, written by Ochorus, that gathers the heart of his teaching into sixteen short chapters for the ordinary reader. It tells his life plainly, as the life of an African bishop, an Egyptian who spent forty-five years as bishop of Alexandria and seventeen of them in exile, and it draws throughout on the two of his books that sit in the Ochorus library, On the Incarnation and The Life of Antony.

Athanasius had one great theme: God Himself has come the whole way down to us. The Word who made the world took a real body, died a real death and rose again, so that a ruined creation might be remade by the same hand that first made it. Everything he fought for, and everything he suffered, followed from refusing to let that truth be made smaller. This volume follows the thread through creation, the cross, the resurrection, the long battle over the Son’s full divinity, the Holy Spirit, the Scriptures and the desert, and it is honest about where he must be read with care. Each chapter ends in a few questions and a prayer.

Athanasius’s own writings are in the public domain and freely available in older English translations, above all in the fourth volume of the second series of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, and every chapter here names them so that the reader can go to the source. This companion is offered only to open the door. It quotes Scripture from the Authorised (King James) Version, and makes no claim to stand in for his own clear and fearless pages.