Athanasius

Khaled Anatolios

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134633814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Christianity
• Index: History

This book presents the fundamental elements of Athanasius' response to the central questions of the identity of Jesus and the nature of his relationship with God.

Providing a useful introduction on his life and work, the book focuses on the tumultuous doctrinal controversies of the day in which he was a central figure.

Key selections from his writings, newly translated, have all been chosen with a view to presenting the rationale for Athanasius' fundamental theological positions: the divinity and humanity of Christ, human redemption, the divinity and work of the Holy Spirit, the logic of Christian worship, and the scriptural basis for the doctrinal formulations of the Council of Nicaea.

Students of history and classical studies, and even students of religious studies will find this an essential part of their course reading.

1
INTRODUCTION

Life and times

When Athanasius became bishop of Alexandria in 328 CE, at around the age of 30, he assumed leadership of the Christian community in one of the most prominent cities of the Roman empire. With its two great harbors, the Portus Magnus and the Eunostus, Alexandria was the major gateway of trade in the Mediterranean world, linking together the Roman empire with the markets of India, China, and Arabia. It was also a great manufacturing and producing center in its own right, famous, among other things, for its shipbuilding and for the production of papyrus, the most common writing material of the ancient world. Egypt, of which Alexandria was the administrative center, was virtually the breadbasket of the empire, its grain representing a significant portion of the food supply of Rome and Constantinople. Egypt was not governed by a “proconsul,” as was the case in other provinces of the empire, but by a “prefect,” a viceregal governor appointed by the emperor as his direct representative. The prefect of Egypt resided in Alexandria, his authority undergirded by a military commander, or “dux.” As well as being Egypt's administrative center, Alexandria was also a major center of culture for the whole Roman empire. It had been the site of the majestic “Great Library,” which was reputed to have contained half a million papyrus rolls, and which was likely destroyed by a fire in the early 270s. Closely associated with the Great Library was “the Museum,” a society of scholars who shared erudition and common meals, and had a “Priest of the Muses.” All the major schools of philosophy were well represented there, and the city was famed for its contribution to the arts and sciences of the day. Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth-century historian, lauds the intellectual vitality of the city, noting that “a doctor who wishes to establish his standing in the profession can dispense with the need for any proof of it by saying (granted that his work itself obviously smacks of it) that he was trained at Alexandria.”¹

Sociologically, Alexandria was a melting pot of native Egyptians, Greeks, and Jews, as well as other immigrants. The combination was not always harmonious. The Alexandrian Jewish theologian Philo paints a lurid picture of a violent persecution of the Alexandrian Jews by the Greeks, during the reigns of Tiberius and Gaius,² and the Jews themselves were involved in a violent revolt in 115– 117, which greatly reduced their presence in Egypt. Relations between the local populace and the Roman authorities were strained and sometimes bloody. In 215, the emperor Caracalla ordered a massacre of Alexandrian youth, in response to a rumor which had gained ground in the city that he was involved in plotting the murder of his brother. On the other hand, Alexandrians had a reputation for being independent and rebellious; we are told that governors entered the city in fear of its reputation.³ Riots and urban violence were not infrequent, and were often associated not only with religious and political motives but also with the theater, chariot races, and the public spectacles, to which Alexandrians were notoriously reputed to be addicted. The struggle between Athanasius and his opponents in Egypt would sometimes manifest this streak of violence; we are told of prefects inciting violent riots against Athanasius's supporters and of the lynching of an unpopular rival bishop, George of Cappadocia, by Athanasius's supporters.

Alexandria was also the ecclesiastical center of Egypt. By Athanasius's time, it was a well-established custom, which came to be ratified by the Council of Nicaea in 325, that the Patriarch of Alexandria had direct authority over the whole Egyptian Church and was responsible for appointing bishops throughout Egypt, Libya, and the Pentapolis.⁴ The bishop of Alexandria was custodian of a rich and complex tradition. Egyptian early Christianity had a strongly Jewish character, as would be expected given that Alexandria contained the largest Jewish population outside of Palestine. It was also eclectic, manifesting “gnostic” variations under the leadership of Valentinus and Basilides,⁵ as well as Manichaean communities,⁶ and the early importation of the writings of Irenaeus, the great antagonist of the Valentinians.⁷ We also hear of a catechetical school of Alexandria which at one time was headed by the great Origen, and, in Athanasius's own time, by Didymus the Blind. Athanasius's lifetime also saw the beginning and dramatic rise of the monastic movement in Egypt, and it would be part of the achievement of his episcopate to transform this conglomeration of desert-dwellers who were suspicious of authority and its pomp into a fairly cohesive group who were intensely loyal to him and zealous for doctrinal orthodoxy.

Athanasius, the man who was destined to maintain a tumultuously intermittent reign over the Egyptian Church for almost half of the fourth century, was born ca. 295–299 CE.⁸ We know very little about his early years. The Arabic History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, composed by the tenth-century Egyptian bishop Severus Ibn al-Muqaffa, indicates that his parents were not Christians, describing the young Athanasius as “the son of an eminent woman who was a worshipper of idols and very rich.”⁹ The same text contains an account of how Athanasius as a young man was baptized along with his mother and taken under the tutelage of the bishop Alexander. It speaks of the efforts of his mother to try to procure for her son a suitable bride, which were continually rebuffed, whereupon she arranged for him to have the opportunity of being persuaded by “a wise man”:

She brought an Alexandrian who was a wise magician, from among the wise men of Saba, and she told him about how things stood with her son. He said to her, “Let me dine with him today.” So she was overjoyed and prepared a great feast and the man met with her son and they ate and drank. But the next day the philosopher came to her and said, “Do not trouble yourself. You have no control over your son for he has become a Galilean and subscribes to the views of the Galileans, and he will become a great man.” She said, “Who are the Galileans?” He said to her, “They are the ones who belong to the Church, who have destroyed the temples and demolished the statues. When she heard this, she said to herself, “If I distance myself from him, he will leave me and I will be left alone.” So she immediately got up and took him with her and went to Alexander and related to him the situation of Athanasius her son and his whole story. Then she and her son were baptized. After some time, she died and Athanasius remained like a son with the Father Alexander, who educated him with gentleness in every art. He memorized the gospels and read the divine scriptures and when he was mature, Alexander ordained him a deacon and made him his scribe and he became like an interpreter of the father and a minister of the word which he wished to speak.¹⁰

Leaving to one side the question of the historical veracity of all the details of this story, it is valuable nevertheless to note some of its features which bear tangible correspondence with more direct evidence. The tradition that Athanasius was of “pagan” parents might partly explain his concern with the theme of Christianity vs. “the Greeks,” taken up in his first major doctrinal work, Against the Greeks— On the Incarnation.¹¹ It would also explain the indirectness of his testimony, in his History of the Arians, about the persecution of Maximin in 311–312.¹² The story also strikingly conveys the close relationship between Athanasius and Alexander, a relationship that by all accounts must have begun while the former was a very young man. Particularly intriguing is the designation of the young Athanasius as Alexander's “scribe,” “interpreter,” and “minister of the word which he wished to speak.”¹³ Such a characterization not only emphasizes the clear continuity in the theological perspectives of the two Patriarchs but seems to lend some credence to the theory that at least one of the important doctrinal letters of Alexander was actually written by Athanasius.¹⁴

That Athanasius was “educated” by Alexander at least indicates the lack of a formal course of education, which is also conceded by the panegyric of Gregory of Nazianzus.¹⁵ This is not to say that a man of Athanasius's intelligence did not avail himself of whatever store of knowledge was readily available to him. Especially his early writing displays at least a colloquial familiarity with philosophical concepts of the various schools, in particular a Stoic cosmology which is employed to speak of the Word as the principle of harmony in the cosmos, and a Middle Platonic ontology in which God is characterized as true being, to which creaturely being is linked by participation.¹⁶ His use of classical rhetorical techniques has also been noted.¹⁷ The reference to Athanasius's familiarity with and study of the Scriptures represents an enduring portrait of Athanasius as a theologian steeped in the Scriptures. Gregory of Nazianzus speaks of him in a similar vein as “meditating on every book of the Old and New Testament with a depth which no one else has reached with even one of them.”¹⁸ Quite naturally, a formation under the shadow of the bishop of Alexandria would include a substantial diet of the principal texts of the Alexandrian tradition. In his later debates with the “Arians,” Athanasius would refer respectfully to “the diligent Origen,”¹⁹ and he quotes his episcopal predecessors Dionysius and Alexander, as well as Theognostus.²⁰ Some close textual parallels and similarity of perspective would also indicate a close familiarity with the theology of Irenaeus, whose writings, as we noted above, were readily available in Egypt soon after their composition.²¹

As evidence of his precocious abilities, we find Athanasius already a deacon and the principal secretary of Bishop Alexander at the Council of Nicaea of 325, when he was barely 30 years old, if not younger. Three years after the Council of Nicaea, on 17 April 328, Alexander died and Athanasius was elected bishop. His consecration was immediately contested. There were accusations that he was under the canonical age of 30, that he was consecrated by a group of seven bishops who withdrew from a larger synod in order to ordain Athanasius secretly, and, according to one version, that Athanasius himself lured two bishops into a church, shut the door behind him, and forced them to consecrate him as bishop. These accusations come from Athanasius's opponents, of which there was never a lack, and they were to be roundly refuted by an Egyptian synod in 338.²² The historical context of these charges and their rebuttal partly predates Athanasius's ecclesiastical career and stems from internal conflicts within the Egyptian Church that began during the Diocletian persecution and were then complicated and intermingled with the doctrinal debates associated with the Council of Nicaea. Thus, from the moment of his consecration, the biography of Athanasius is inseparable from doctrinal and ecclesiastical issues in a way that bears out Harnack's characterization of him as “a man whose biography coincides with the history of dogma of the fourth century.”²³

The Melitian schism

The fourth-century historian Epiphanius tells us that the source of the Melitian schism was a disagreement between a newly appointed bishop, Melitius of Lycopolis, and the bishop of Alexandria, Peter, over the status of those who lapsed during the Diocletian persecution.²⁴ According to this account, Peter was disposed to a more lenient stance, which was rejected by the more rigorist Melitius. Melitius's ordaining of presbyters sympathetic to his views in dioceses which were not under his jurisdiction then led to his excommunication by Peter. More recently, it has been persuasively argued that the issue of the proper disposition toward the lapsed was not a central one in the Melitian schism,²⁵ and that Melitius was simply responding—whether out of ambition or pastoral concern—to the void created by imprisoned bishops who were unavailable to administer their own dioceses. The real issue, according to this rendering of the matter, was the challenge represented by Melitius to the traditional authority of the bishop of Alexandria, “the refusal, by a dissident bishop, of Alexandrian oversight and the monopoly exercised by the capital over the rest of the country.”²⁶ But whatever be the original circumstances, the result was a split in the Egyptian Church that persevered after the end of the persecution in 313, and resulted in two parallel Church bodies tensely juxtaposed. In a synodal letter addressed to the Churches of Egypt, Libya, and the Pentapolis, the Council of Nicaea attempted to resolve this schism by allowing Melitian clergy to continue to serve, albeit “after being confirmed by a holier imposition of hands,” but prohibited Melitius himself from administering any more ordinations, and stipulated that Melitian clergy be subject to the jurisdiction of the “catholic bishop,” Alexander.²⁷ These terms, along with the reaffirmation of the authority of the bishop of Alexandria over Egypt, Libya, and the Penatapolis, constituted a resolution that was decidedly more favorable to Alexander than it was to the Melitians. Nevertheless, it seems that after some resistance which drew the intervention of the emperor Constantine himself, Melitius was able to persuade his supporters to accept the terms of Nicaea, and presented his clergy in person to Alexander. Shortly afterwards, however, Alexander died, and the ensuing process of choosing a successor again alienated the Melitians, who were excluded from the proceedings, perhaps after trying to consecrate one of their own number.²⁸ The accession of Athanasius to the episcopal throne of Alexandria thus led to a reopening of the Melitian schism, though the Melitians themselves seem to have fragmented into various factions. One of these factions, led by John Arcaph, eventually forged an alliance with the sympathizers of Arius that would lead to Athanasius's first exile.

Origins of the Nicene crisis²⁹

We do not have any reliable records to indicate the precise date and exact order of the events that initiated the doctrinal debates of the fourth century.³⁰ We know that sometime between 318 and 320 a crisis erupted within the Egyptian Church, which quickly spread outwards and eventually enveloped the whole empire in a controversy that was arguably the most significant moment in the development of Christian doctrine. The original parties in the controversy were Arius and Alexander, the former an ascetic and charismatic priest of Alexandria, and the latter Patriarch of Alexandria. At this early stage of the controversy, Arius's position was associated with the provocative slogan “there was once when the Son was not,” while Alexander strongly insisted on the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. The early Church historians Socrates (ca. 380–450) and Sozomen (fifth century) give somewhat divergent accounts as to the impetus of the controversy. Socrates seems to assign the initiative to Alexander, whom he describes as attempting “too ambitious a discourse” on the subject of Triune unity, to which Arius reacts out of a fear of Sabellianism, a modalist reduction of the Trinity into a singular unity.³¹ Sozomen, on the other hand, characterizes Arius as “a most expert logician” who initiated investigations into hitherto unexamined questions and thus came up with a novel doctrine which “no one before him had ever suggested.”³² Of these two accounts, the more plausible is surely that of Socrates. Given that Christian piety has always centered on the worship and exaltation of the figure of Christ, it is highly unlikely that an ecclesiastical figure would simply come up with a doctrine that would seem to militate against that momentum unless it were as a reaction to a perceived exaggeration. So the more natural scenario is that Alexander delivered a sermon that put emphatic stress on the correlational unity of the Father and the Son, which Arius construed as endangering both the clear distinction between the Father and the Son as well as the monarchy of the Father. To Arius's ears, Alexander's doctrine then would have seemed to obfuscate both divine unity and trinity, collapsing the Trinity into a modalism and violating the unity by “portioning” the div...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• 2: SELECTIONS FROM ORATIONS AGAINST THE ARIANS
• 3: ON THE COUNCIL OF NICAEA (DE DECRETIS)
• 4: LETTERS TO SERAPION ON THE HOLY SPIRIT (1: 15–33)
• 5: LETTER 40: TO ADELPHIUS, BISHOP AND CONFESSOR, AGAINST THE ARIANS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY