Feast day: May 2

St. Athanasius

Bishop & Doctor of the Church · c. 296–373

Patron of Theologians, defenders of orthodoxy

Bishop of Alexandria exiled five times by four emperors for insisting that Jesus Christ is fully God — and outlasting them all.

Athanasius was born about 296 at Alexandria and as a young deacon accompanied his bishop to the Council of Nicaea in 325, where the Church confronted the teaching of the priest Arius — that the Son of God was a creature, not truly God. Nicaea condemned it and confessed the Son to be 'one in being' with the Father. Athanasius would spend the rest of his life defending that single word against an empire that often preferred compromise.

Made bishop of Alexandria around 328, he found himself almost alone as emperors, courtiers, and large parts of the hierarchy swung toward Arianism for the sake of peace. His unbending insistence on the full divinity of Christ made him a marked man, and he was driven from his see again and again — five separate exiles totaling some seventeen years, in Trier, Rome, and the Egyptian desert among the monks.

Through it all he wrote tirelessly — defenses of the Nicene faith, the life of his friend St. Anthony of the desert that spread monasticism across the West, and works on the Incarnation arguing that God became man so that man might be raised to God. So solitary was his stand at times that a phrase was coined for it: 'Athanasius against the world.'

He lived to see the tide finally turn back toward the orthodox faith, and died at Alexandria in 373, secure in his city at last. The Nicene Creed that Christians recite at Mass is in large part the fruit of his long fidelity. He is honored as a Father and Doctor of the Church and the great champion of Christ's divinity.

The saying 'Athanasius contra mundum' — Athanasius against the world — exists because at times he nearly was.

“The Son of God became man so that we might become God.”
— St. Athanasius

Image: Byzantine Institute staff (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/02035a.htm