St. Alexander of Alexandria

Alexander succeeded St. Achillas as Patriarch of Alexandria around 312, in the years after the peace of Constantine. He inherited a great church recovering from persecution, and a clergy of immense theological vitality. Among his presbyters was a popular preacher named Arius, who had charge of the church of Baucalis in the city.

Around the year 318, Alexander preached in his cathedral on the eternity of the Word and on the equal honour due to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Arius accused him of crypto-Sabellianism, and began to teach, both in his own church and in letters to the bishops of the East, that the Son was a creature, the first and highest, but a creature: "there was when He was not." Alexander gathered a synod of the bishops of Egypt and Libya, examined the doctrine, deposed Arius from the priesthood, and sent encyclical letters to the bishops of the world warning against his teaching.

Arius found refuge in Asia Minor and his powerful old fellow-student Eusebius of Nicomedia took up his cause. By 324 the controversy had divided the Eastern half of the empire. When Constantine summoned the Council of Nicaea in 325, Alexander travelled there with his young deacon Athanasius, who had been by his side throughout the controversy and would carry the Nicene Faith forward for the next half-century.

At Nicaea Alexander led the anti-Arian party. The Synodal Letter from the Council, sent back to the church of Alexandria, is in effect a report to his see of what had been done in his name and in the name of his presbytery. He returned to Alexandria in glory and lived for not quite three more years, dying on April 17, 328. On his deathbed he named Athanasius as his successor, a recommendation the bishops of Egypt ratified within weeks.

He is remembered as the bishop who saw the question, gave it its first canonical answer, and gave the Church the man who would carry that answer through fifty years of struggle. The Greek tradition keeps his memory on May 29; the Coptic and several other Eastern traditions on August 30.