Athanasius 297 AD – 373 AD

Athanasius of Alexandria was a fourth-century Egyptian Christian theologian and bishop and the central defender of Nicene orthodoxy against the Arian doctrine in the decades following the Council of Nicaea. He spent more than seventeen years in five separate exiles for his uncompromising defense of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. His Life of Antony helped to popularize the monastic ideal in the Mediterranean world, and his On the Incarnation articulated the deification theology that would define Eastern Christianity. His thirty-ninth Festal Letter is the earliest list of the New Testament canon as we now have it.

Athanasius was born around 297 in Alexandria, where he received the full Greek paideia and a thorough training in the Christian scriptures and theology. As a deacon in 318 he attended Bishop Alexander at the Council of Nicaea in 325, where the homoousion — the affirmation that the Son is of the same substance as the Father — was defined against Arius. In 328 he succeeded Alexander as bishop of Alexandria and patriarch of Egypt at the age of about thirty.

His writings include the early Against the Pagans and On the Incarnation; the long anti-Arian Orations against the Arians and the Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit; the festal letters that helped fix the Christian biblical canon; the Defense of His Flight, the History of the Arians, and the influential Life of Anthony, the monastic biography that introduced the desert ideal to Greek and Latin readers alike.

Athanasius's defense of the divinity of the Son and his soteriological motto — God became human that the human might become god — set the agenda for the patristic doctrine of redemption. Five times exiled by hostile emperors during a turbulent forty-five-year episcopate, he gave the Catholic and Orthodox traditions their most famous instance of contra mundum perseverance. He died at Alexandria in May 373.