Athanasius Quotes on God
Athanasius of Alexandria (c.296–373) — the bishop of Alexandria whose forty-five-year episcopate spanned the principal phases of the Arian controversy — gave fourth-century Greek Christian theology its most influential defense of the Nicene homoousion against the Arian subordinationist alternatives. The central commitments — that the Son is consubstantial with the Father (homoousios) rather than a creature however exalted, that the salvific work of the Incarnation requires precisely this consubstantiality (since only God can deify the human nature he assumes), and that the Holy Spirit is similarly consubstantial with the Father and the Son — articulate the Nicene Trinitarian theology that the subsequent Cappadocian articulation would receive in its definitive form. The framework, defended through Athanasius’s five exiles under successive Arian-leaning emperors and the long sequence of polemical and exegetical works, shaped the entire subsequent orthodox Christian doctrine of God and the Christological framework the Council of Chalcedon would settle.
Quotes
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Attributed to Athanasius:
“God became man so that man might become God.”
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Attributed to Athanasius:
“The Word became flesh that we might be made spirit.”
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Attributed to Athanasius:
“He who knows himself knows his Creator.”
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Attributed to Athanasius:
“What is everywhere written, in heaven and on earth, is one and the same Word.”
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“Jesus that I know as my Redeemer cannot be less than God.”
As quoted in Mona Siddiqui, Christians, Muslims, and Jesus , Yale University Press, 2013, p. 674 -
“For never at any time did Christian people take their title from the Bishops among them, but from the Lord, on whom we rest our faith. Thus, though the blessed Apostles have become our teachers, and have ministered the Saviour's Gospel, yet not from them have we our title, but from Christ we are and are named Christians. But for those who derive the faith which they profess from others, good reason is it they should bear their name, whose property they have become.”
Discourse 1 Against the Arians , Chapter 1. Introduction. Reason for writing; certain persons indifferent about Arianism ; Arians not Christians, because sectaries always take the name of their founder.