ATHANASIUS "THE GREAT," saint and bishop of Alexandria, was born about 298, probably at Alexandria. He re ceived a liberal education. From early years he was instructed in the Scriptures, that is the Septuagint and New Testament. He knew no Hebrew. These studies, combined with Greek learning, moulded his later thought. In mind and outlook he was a thor ough Greek. There was nothing of the native Egyptian about him. As a lad, he attracted the attention of the bishop, Alexander, and was taken into his household. At some period he also came under the influence of St. Antony. His first literary work, com prising the "Contra Gentes" and "De Incarnatione Verbi," two parts of what is really one treatise, may be dated with tolerable certainty before 318, since it is entirely silent on the Arian con troversy. It is an amazing production for a youth barely out of his teens. It shows more of the influence of Origen and Alexan drine thought than his later works, but in asserting man's need of redemption and the meeting of that need through the Incarna tion, establishes once and for all the gospel for which he battled throughout his life.
Alexander had inherited from his predecessor the disorders caused by the schismatic ordinations of Meletius (q.v.), bishop of Lycopolis, who had intruded himself during the persecution into the diocese. To these in 319 were added the dissensions caused by the teaching of Arius. Arius taught that the Son of God was a created being. There was a time when He did not exist. He was, indeed, the first born of all creatures and surpassed them in dignity. Through Him all other creatures were made. But He could only be called divine in a limited and secondary sense. Arius also denied the full humanity of Christ. He held that this semi-divine being only took a body through which He acted. The Council of Nicaea were forced to employ some tech nical term, not in Scripture, to rule out such teaching which con tradicted the sense of Scripture. Thus they added to the Creed the test word homo-ousios that is "of one essence" or "substance." There is nothing materialistic about it in Greek. All that it asserts is that whatever the essential being of God is, namely divinity, the Father and the Son possess it equally. They also affirmed that the Son was "of the ousia or `essential being,' of the Father," that is, He was not created out of nothing, He existed eternally. The question of the full humanity of Christ came into full prominence only at a later stage. (See ARrvs.) In 321 Alexander sent out his first encyclical letter defending the de position of Arius by an Egyptian Synod. In this it is reasonable to trace the hand of Athanasius, now a deacon and the bishop's secretary. As such, he accompanied Alexander to Nicaea. He states that he himself spoke in the council, perhaps at unofficial debates, but we must not assign to him too large a part in the proceedings. As a deacon, he was not a member of the council. But his influence was such that the Arians soon came to recognize in him their most formidable antagonist. Alexander returned to his see and, five months after concluding negotiations with the Meletians, died. He had nominated Athanasius as his successor. In June 328 he was canonically elected, in spite of opposition from Meletians and Arians. The cry of the people "Give us Athanasius, the good, one of the ascetics" attest his popularity.
For seven years he occupied his see, devoting himself to the work of his diocese and visiting the monks in the desert. He was rewarded by the solid loyalty shown to him in his later troubles. Meanwhile the reaction against Nicaea was being fostered. It was assisted by Constantine's attempt to enforce unity by per secution, against which Athanasius protested. The policy of Eusebius of Nicomedia was to attack first the Nicene leaders. Eustathius of Antioch and others were deposed on various charges. Trouble was stirred up in Egypt. The Meletians were encouraged to make common cause with the Arians. Athanasius himself was embroiled with the emperor by refusing to admit Arius to com munion. A whole series of charges were brought against him, which he had no difficulty in refuting at an audience with Con stantine. But the attack was not abandoned. Constantine forced him to attend a Synod at Tyre in 335, which was resolved to con demn him. A commission was sent to Egypt to collect more evi dence. Meanwhile Athanasius fled and appealed to Constantine in person. The Synod deposed him, but Constantine summoned the leaders to court. A new charge was now preferred, that he had threatened to stop the export of corn from Alexandria to Constantinople. Possibly the emperor feared his great influence. If so, it must have been due to his dominating personality. The patriarch of Alexandria had not yet had time to acquire the political importance that he later enjoyed, though the develop ment of this was doubtless forwarded by the prominence of Athanasius. More probably the emperor regarded him as in transigent, and as an obstacle to that peace in Church and State on which his heart was set. He was banished unheard to Trier.
Constantine died a year and a half later. At once Athanasius returned, ignoring, perhaps unwisely, the sentence of deposition passed at Tyre. This gave his enemies excuse for declaring the see vacant, and filling it with an Arianiser. Of the sons of Constantine, Constantine II. and Constans were on the side of the Nicenes, Constantius to whom was allotted the East was an Arianiser. Af ter several efforts the enemies of Athanasius suc ceeded in installing an Arian Gregory in the see of Alexandria by force of arms, with the consent of Constantius. Athanasius fled to Rome, where in the autumn of 340 Pope Julius held a council of Western bishops which acquitted him. He followed it by a sharp remonstrance to the bishops of the East. In spite of this, at the Dedication Council of Antioch in 341 the deposition of Athanasius was confirmed. This council marks a change of policy. Not only are the Nicene leaders to be attacked, but an effort is to be made to find a new and vaguer formulary to be substituted for that of Nicaea.
In 343 a new general council was held at Sardica, at the in stigation of Constans. Constantius was too embarrassed by the Persian wars to refuse. Athanasius was vindicated, but the general result was only, by emphasizing religious differences, to deepen the political breach between East and West. In 346 Constans com pelled his brother Constantius to act on the decision and restore Athanasius. So began "the golden decade" of his episcopal rule. But the East was still critical of Nicaea. In 35o Constans was murdered by the troops of the usurper Magnentius, who sent officers to seek the support of Athanasius, a singular proof of his influence in Egypt. Athanasius refused to entertain such over tures, but they formed a ground of accusation against him after the defeat of Magnentius by Constantius. When in 351 Constan tius became sole emperor, the Arianisers had their chance. A council at Sirmium issued a new creed, orthodox as far as it went, but in practical effect anti-Nicene. Under pressure from Constantius the West was compelled to condemn Athanasius. Synods at Arles in 353 and Milan in 355 were forced by the most violent methods to consent to his deposition. This was clinched by the exile of his friends, including Pope Liberius. Finally, in 356 he himself was attacked by imperial troops, but escaped to the desert.
For six years he was lost to sight, but his influence was never greater. He produced a stream of anti-Arian writings, including the three orations against the Arians. He watched the anti Nicene party fall to pieces in the hour of its triumph. At the one extreme were the Anomoeans, so called because they taught that the Son was unlike (avoµocor) the Father. This teaching was only the honest assertion of what Arius had really believed. In the middle came the Homoeans, who wished by using the vague phrase that the Son was like (duocos) the Father to evade the real issue and include as many as possible in a State Church. They were pre-eminently the court party, who were content to subordinate religion to the requirements of the State. At the other end were the so-called Semi-Arians, whose formula was homoi-ousios, of like essence or substance. They were for the most part really orthodox, but had scruples about the Nicene "of one substance." It must be admitted the Nicene word was of dubious meaning. The term ousia might mean either a particular entity, or the common element shared by a class of particulars. Thus to say that the Son was "of one ousia" with the Father might be held to mean they were both only modes or aspects of the one God, a heresy which is technically called Sabellianism, of ter Sabellius who taught it. It is probable that the heretic Paul of Samosata had used the term to assert that God was uni personal and that the term itself had been condemned in this sense. Marcellus of Ancyra, the ally of Athanasius used it in his teaching that the Logos had no eternal personal existence. It is true that in the Creed of Nicaea the distinct existence of the Son was guarded by the further phrase "of the essence of the Father," but the hesitations of the more old-fashioned theologians of the school of Origen can be explained. The weakness of the phrase homoi-ousios was that it was equally unscriptural, and did not by itself safeguard the full divinity of the Son, but Athanasius was prepared to accept it as an alternative with certain additions to strengthen it and to show that it meant more than that the Son was vaguely like the Father. The popular idea that the contro versy between Catholics and Arians was simply "over a diph thong" ignores the complexity of the problem and the variety of shades of opinion.
Athanasius grasped the situation. The Semi-Arians received a shock by a creed put out by the Anomoeans at Sirmium in 357, commonly called the "Blasphemy." They were out-man oeuvred by the Homoeans at the Synods of Ariminum and Seleucia in 359. Then Athanasius produced his "De Synodis" exposing the hollowness of the Homoean position and appealing to the Semi-Arians to support the homo-ousion as the one safeguard against Arianism. Though the appeal failed at the moment it bore fruit later.
Constantius died in 361. Julian recalled the exiles. Athanasius was able to return for eight months. He used his time well. In 362 he summoned a council at Alexandria which had results out of all proportion to its size and advanced the cause of reunion with the Semi-Arians. As we saw, the term ousia was ambiguous. It might mean either a particular being or a common essence. The same ambiguity belonged to the term hypostasis, though it in clined to the meaning of a particular entity. In the anathemas appended to the Creed of Nicaea ousia and hypostasis were em ployed as synonyms. This increased the suspicion of the East that the term homo-ousios really excluded any real distinctions in the Godhead. On the other hand writers who used the term hypostasis in the sense of "Person," to mark the distinctions in the Godhead seemed to those who used it in the other sense to be speaking of three gods. Athanasius saw that the dispute was at bottom a matter of the use of terms. In the important Tomus ad Antiochenos which records the decisions of the council, both uses of hypostasis were recognized and explained, and the term homo ousios was cleared of ambiguity. The way was prepared for the acceptance of the later terminology, "One ousia," "Three Hypos tases," corresponding to the Western, "One Substance," "Three Persons." Julian was acute enough to see in Athanasius the foremost representative of the religion that he hated. He singled him out for persecution, and, in spite of the protests of his flock, forced him to take refuge in the desert. On the accession of Jovian in 363, wlro treated him with great honour, he returned, but when Valens became emperor of the East in 364, and revived the policy of Constantius, Athanasius was again compelled to withdraw for his fifth exile. After a few months Valens restored him, and for the remaining seven years of his life he was left undisturbed. The welfare of the empire demanded peace in Egypt, and peace in Egypt demanded the presence of Athanasius. Outside Egypt Valens was persecuting Semi-Arians and Nicenes alike. The policy of Athanasius was succeeding. The majority of the Semi-Arians were adopting the formula of Nicaea. Athanasius died in 373, before his cause had conquered. When Valens died in 378, Arianism fell and the cause for which Athanasius had fought proved triumphant.
Athanasius was one of the greatest characters in early church history. He was in the best sense of the term a great ecclesiastic. His aim in life was the highest welfare of the Church. Thus we may see in him the first of the great protagonists of spiritual liberty against the encroachments of the State. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was no Byzantine. He was a free Greek, with a Greek's loyalty to truth at all costs. Though he had the courage of a martyr, he never courted martyrdom. But under the new conditions that followed the so-called conversion of Con stantine, he discerned the peril that threatened the life of the Church, and was prepared to defend its spiritual independence even at the cost of his own life, against the State that threatened to stifle it by its embraces as it had formerly threatened to destroy it by persecution. In the administration of his diocese he won the loyalty of his flock. Though his exegetical writings have almost entirely perished, his letters show the true pastoral spirit. His return from exile was followed by a conspicuous re vival both of religion and morality. Nor is our estimate of his character seriously shaken by the papyri recently discovered, one of them a possible autograph of Athanasius. Several of them come from a Meletian source and represent him as instigating outrages by the mob on Meletians, and as tyrannical, shifty and about his own safety. (See W. Idris Bell, Jews and Chris tians in Egypt.) Those familiar with religious partisan literature will discount much of their animosity. At most they show that Athanasius in his earlier years was at times hard and impatient to his opponents. It was the fault natural to his character, and he had much provocation. And after all he may well have felt that it was a bishop's duty to put down false doctrine and disorder.
From the religious point of view, his supreme achievement was that by his unflinching constancy to the truth, combined with his willingness to tolerate a variety of expression, by his personal holiness and devotion he saved Christianity from compromising its assertion of the two fundamental truths of the unity of God and the divinity of Christ. Arianism was but the working out to its logical conclusion of the tendency of much earlier theology to regard the pre-existent Logos as a separate being side by side with the Father, a second and a secondary God. That was polytheism. It is the great strength of Athanasius that he was never the mere theologian. His earliest work the De Incarnatione showed that he had grasped the truth that lies at the heart of the Gospel, that man needs redemption. He is not only weak and ignorant, but rebellious. His formal theology in this work may be vague and confused. For the moment he is concerned with an apology for the Christian faith as a whole, not with its details.
The Incarnation meets man's deepest needs because it brings not only illumination but redemption. Only power from outside could deliver him from sin and death. His refusal to accept the Arian Christ rested on the conviction that one who was not fully God could neither reveal God, nor impart Divine life. To worship the Arian Christ would be idolatry. If at Nicaea he supported the hoino-ousios it was because there was no other phrase that ruled out the speculations that undermined the truth of redemption. Speaking generally, he has a claim to be placed in the first rank of the great religious reformers, because he recalled Christianity from the barren paths of speculation, into which it had strayed since the time of Origen, to a new sense of the reality of the Gospel. There was a danger that the church might have degener ated into a mere philosophical sect. The Logos doctrine was for him not merely an explanation of the order of the universe, but a principle of salvation. He placed at the centre of Christian life the idea of Christ as eternal Son rather than eternal Word. There is a new awareness in his writings of the underlying hostility between the world and the church. No one has suffered more than Athanasius by being judged from collections of dogmatic utterances, divorced from their context, such as are found in histories of dogma. They can only be rightly studied in con junction with his pastoral and ascetic writings. At the same time it is wrong to depreciate Athanasius as a thinker. He is rightly styled "The Father of Greek orthodoxy." In his works, though they are all in the strictest sense of the term "occasional writings," we find laid down the lines on which later orthodoxy developed. If his theology lacks the precision and refinement of later Greek thought, it is at least open to discussion whether this may not, in many cases, be a merit rather than a defect. The so called "Athanasian Creed" is universally admitted to be later than the time of Athanasius.
Lastly, in the history of Christian monasticism Athanasius holds an important place. In the East as contrasted with the \Vest monasticism developed in independence of ecclesiastical organization. Its attitude to the church was in large part that of detachment. Hence it is conceivable that in Egypt a schism might have arisen. Hence the friendship of Athanasius with Antony and Pachomius and his reputation for asceticism were of practical importance. He was the first episcopal promoter of monasticism, and was rewarded by the unfailing support of the monks in all his difficulties. He enabled the ascetic spirit to find a home in the Catholic Church. Further, his visit to Rome had an important effect on Western monasticism. Monasteries of some kind existed in Italy, but his arrival gave the first great impulse to monastic life. His life of St. Antony is addressed to the Western monks and had great influence. It is by no means accidental that the champion of the faith of Nicaea should also be the patron of monasticism. He was the enemy of pagan compromise in Chris tian life no less than in Christian belief.' BIBLIOGRAPHY.—The primary source for the life and teaching of Bibliography.—The primary source for the life and teaching of Athanasius is his own writings. They will be found collected in Migne, P. G. xxv—xxviii. These volumes however include much that is not genuine. The Interpretatio in Symbolum, De Incarnatione Dei Verbi and Quod Unus Sit Christus are universally recognized as Apollinarian works. The De Trinitate et Spiritu Sancto is also to be rejected. There is a growing consensus of opinion that the two books Against Apollinarius and the Fourth Oration against the Arians are not the work of Athanasius. The De Incarnatione Dei Verbi et contra Arianos is dubious. Several other writings are also either spurious or suspect. An English translation of the most important works to gether with a life of Athanasius, by Robertson, is published in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. This includes also the Festal Letters, extant mostly only in Syriac. There is a panegyric by Gregory Nazianzen. The ancient ecclesiastical historians add little of value. More important is the Historic Acrphala translated in Robertson. The best modern account in English, with full references, is to be found in B. J. Kidd, History of the Church, vol. ii. It says, however, little about recent German criticism. For this see A. Stuelcken, "Athanasiana" in Texte and Untersuchungen, N.F. iv. 4; E. Schwartz 1athrkhte,z von der Kgl. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Gottingen, 1904, 1905, 1908, 1911. H. M. Gwatkin's Studies of Arianism is still important. A full account of the writings of Athanasius will be found in Bardenhewer's Patrology. All histories of dogma contain an ac count of his doctrine, see especially those of Harnack, Loofs, Seeburg and Tixeront. (E. J. B.)