St. Athanasius the Great

Born in Alexandria around 296, Athanasius was raised in a Christian household and educated in the classical curriculum of his city. While still a young man he wrote two companion treatises, Against the Heathen and On the Incarnation, that already showed the mind which would shape the century: that the Word through whom all things were made had entered His own creation to remake it from within.

As a young deacon he accompanied his bishop, Alexander, to the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325. There the priest Arius taught that the Son was a creature, that there was once when He was not. Athanasius saw at once what was at stake: if the Son is not true God of true God, then He cannot make us partakers of God, and no one is saved. The Council confessed the Son to be of one essence with the Father, and that word became the labor of Athanasius's life.

On Alexander's repose in 328, Athanasius, barely thirty, was elevated to the patriarchal throne of Alexandria. He would hold it for forty-five years, but spend seventeen of them in exile.

Five times he was driven from his see by emperors who sought peace with the Arian party: to Trier, to Rome, to the desert of the Egyptian monks, and to the catacombs and house-roofs of his own city. Each time he returned, and each time he taught the same thing: that if the Son is not what the Father is, no man is saved. From his pen in those years came the Four Discourses Against the Arians, the Defence of the Nicene Definition, and On the Councils, the great arsenal of Nicene theology.

In the Egyptian desert he found not only refuge but friendship. He knew St. Anthony the Great, and after the hermit's repose he wrote the Life of Antony, the book that carried the monastic ideal across the whole Empire and set countless souls, Augustine among them, on the path to God.

Against him stood the power of emperors and the eloquence of the learned; for him stood the Scriptures, the monks, and the faith of the simple. Twice St. Anthony himself came down from the mountain to stand publicly at his side. The age would later remember the lonely struggle in a single phrase: Athanasius against the world.

He outlived nearly every emperor who exiled him. He reposed in peace in Alexandria on May 2, 373, having seen the faith of Nicaea publicly confirmed once more before his death. The Church keeps him as the Pillar of Orthodoxy and a Father of the Fathers, and reads his treatise On the Incarnation still as the clearest brief statement of why God became man.