Ep. 24—Athanasius against the World

Gaude Amus, Omnes Indomino, Diem festum Celebrantes, Subonnore Sandarum Amniu. Welcome to The Way of the Fathers, a podcast sponsored by CatholicCulture.org. I'm your host, Mike Aquilina. We come now to one of those truly pivotal figures in the chronicles of the world. We come to Athanasius of Alexandria, Athanasius the Great, Athanasius the Father of Orthodoxy. He was one of those figures who stood a thwart history yelling "Stop!" at a time when no one else was inclined to do so. He stood alone, and so he appeared to be foolhardy, and his mission quixotic. One of his opponents described the situation in mocking terms. It was "Athanasius against the world." Athanasius didn't care; he stood his ground and made history do his bidding, or rather, heaven's bidding. If ever there was a historical juggernaut, it was the Arian heresy. It arose in Alexandria, Egypt, where two consecutive bishops paid at little mind. The latter of the two, Alexander, was moved to action only when Arius publicly challenged his authority. But by then the heresy was widespread, and Arius' subsequent banishment served only to spread it further. The Roman Empire was newly Christian and weakly catechized, and Arius took that world with a suddenness that was astonishing. It was as if the world awoke to find itself Arian. Born around 298, Athanasius was not yet 20 years old when the Arian trouble started brewing. Extremely precocious, he had already composed important works of theology by then, one titled "Against the Heathens" and the other "On the Incarnation." Both are mature works. "On the Incarnation" is considered a classic and fundamental text in the field of Christology. According to later biographers, Athanasius came to his bishops' attention while still a small child. Alexander saw him playing priest by the seashore and baptizing his playmates one by one. The bishop noticed that Athanasius was performing the act with ritual precision, pouring water, and using the correct liturgical formula for the sacrament. Taking the young boy aside, he explained to him that all his "let's pretend" baptisms were actually valid, and all his playmates were now really, truly Christians. Bishop Alexander urged Athanasius not to do this again and to find a different game to play in the future. It is likely that Athanasius received more guidance from Alexander as he grew. It's obvious from his writings that he received a profound education in Scripture, as well as the arts associated with argument. He had an unusual command of both the Old Testament and the New. While still a teen, he became a confidant and advisor to the bishop. He seems to have shared Alexander's unconcern with Arius and his doctrine. The church in Alexandria had no shortage of problems. Alexander had other more pressing matters to deal with, and Athanasius, in his two early works, shows no awareness whatsoever of Arius or his doctrine. Even though Arius' heresy was immediately relevant to Athanasius' topic, which was Christology, Arius must have been discreet and shrewd. Athanasius was perhaps absorbed in the study of classic texts and not innovative texts. In any event, one day in the year 318, the Alexandrian Church awoke to the problem, and by then it was far advanced. Arius, from his prominent pulpit in the city, was teaching that the Son of God was neither co-eternal nor co-equal to the Father. He was teaching that both the Son and the Holy Spirit were not truly divine persons. He believed that they were merely creatures, though the best and brightest of God's creatures. And from the year 318 forward, Arius was calling his own bishop a heretic for teaching otherwise. While Alexander, with his young assistant Athanasius, was certainly teaching otherwise, for the Church had always worshipped the Son and the Spirit as God, and the scriptures seemed to require such worship. Alexander tried first to negotiate a resolution to the conflict. Failing that, he called a synod of clergy to examine the arguments and make a ruling. It is likely that young Athanasius was present and active throughout these efforts. In the end, the local synod condemned Arius' doctrine and required the man to leave town. The following year, Alexander ordained Athanasius a deacon. Arius was gone from the city, but the problem did not go away. As he moved from one place to another, Arius made new allies and new converts to his way of thinking. Distant congregations were soon riven with the argument that had troubled Alexandria. Arius was especially skillful in courting the intelligentsia. It did not take long for him to rally rulers and bureaucrats and clergy to his cause. Troubled bishops consulted Alexander. Concerned imperial authorities raised the issue with the Emperor Constantine, who grew alarmed. Constantine's dream of an empire united by means of Christianity was vanishing. The Christians themselves seemed to be undergoing a civil war. Constantine summoned a council at Nicaea, which Athanasius attended as secretary to Alexander. These two men from Alexandria emerged as the most authoritative voices at Nicaea, since they had had the most extensive experience with the Arian problem. The council, like the earlier Synod, rejected Arianism forcefully. Constantine issued an edict requiring that Arius' writings should be burned. Any neglect of this requirement was punishable by death. Even so, the Council of Nicaea didn't exactly solve the Arian problem. It was the first ecumenical council, and the Church hardly knew what to do with it. Athanasius and Alexander went home to Egypt, but Arius, from his exile in Illyricum, continued to pursue legal, political, and backroom avenues of appeal and restoration. Alexander died soon after his return to Alexandria. Some of the early sources say that he made clear his wish to have Athanasius as his successor, and the clergy honored that wish. Athanasius was still very young. In fact, his opponents would sometimes claim that he had not yet reached the minimum canonical age of 30. Since the charge was repeated, it must have seemed credible. Athanasius was young, but he was likely optimistic about his prospects, or at least hopeful. Since the council had ruled in favor of the full divinity of Christ, he had the bishops of the world on his side, and the Emperor himself had given the council decrees legal teeth. But just as Athanasius was taking office, Constantine was beginning to change his mind. Arius' allies were lobbying for a generous toleration of dissent, and eventually they prevailed. They convinced Constantine that toleration was the best way to peace. Constantine relaxed his Arian laws. Arius was allowed to return from exile, but Athanasius made it clear that he would not be welcome in Alexandria or anywhere in Egypt or Libya, all of which was under Alexandriaan authority. Athanasius adamantly refused to lift Arius' excommunication. He was unimpressed by the Emperor's change of heart, and he remained unswayed as one bishop after another moved to conform to the new imperial policy of tolerance. From the beginning then, we can see the firmness, steadfastness, obstinacy, and stubbornness that would characterize his life thereafter. He was not there to make friends or get along with others. He was heir to the teaching office of the apostles, and he would be faithful to that office and its inheritance, no matter the cost. Here's how he described his duty in a letter to another bishop, a fellow Egyptian named Serapion. "In accordance with the apostolic faith delivered to us by tradition from the fathers, I have delivered the tradition without inventing anything extraneous to it. What I learned, that have I inscribed conformably with the Holy Scriptures, for it also conforms with those passages from the Holy Scriptures which we have cited above by way of proof." He urged Serapion, and again I quote, "to look at the very tradition, teaching, and faith of the Catholic Church from the beginning, which the Lord gave, the apostles preached, and the fathers kept. Upon this the Christian churches founded, and he who should fall away from it, would not be a Christian, and should no longer be so called." Athanasius was a man certain of his principles, and he was not about to back away, though the personal cost would be dear. Ordained as a young man, he would live to reign as bishop for 45 years, from 328 to 373. That's an extraordinarily long episcopacy. But 17 of those 45 years he would spend deposed and in exile. He would be exiled five times at the orders of four different emperors, Constantine, Constantius II, Julian the Apostate, and Valens. Trouble came early, as bishops throughout the empire began to resent his seemingly eccentric resistance to Constantine's newer laws regarding Arianism. All the bishops were loosening up. Why did Athanasius, the bishop in such an influential church, have to be different? Why couldn't he just go along to get along? They interpreted his resistance as an unspoken reproach, and they resented it. In 335 he was summoned to a synod attire, where his colleagues accused him of mistreating heretics and schismatics. The bishops voted to depose him, but he appealed to the emperor, and both sides went to the capital to argue the case. There, the Arians added new charges, claiming that Athanasius was seditiously conspiring to interrupt grain supplies to Constantinople. The emperor was alarmed and decided against Athanasius, exiling him to the far west, to the cold and distant territory today known as Germany. The purpose of exile is to render the offender ineffective, to punish him by removing him from the advantages of his home, and to silence his voice in the cities that mattered. Almost all of those cities were in the eastern regions of the empire. Athanasius could have spent his exile pouting and lamenting, but he didn't. He used his years abroad, as Arius had done earlier, to make new friends and allies and extend his influence. Arius, meanwhile, continued his own efforts. Though he died a year after Athanasius was exiled, his heresy continued unabated, promoted now by his followers. Arianism was probably stronger, in fact, with Arius gone. His followers were softening his language, moderating his claim, and mutating his heresy in several different ways. As the years wore on, Arianism became a phenomenon increasingly difficult to define. There were just too many variations on the theme. It was, moreover, a movement as political as it was religious. In the fourth century, there was no talk of separation between church and state. The emperors recognized that religion could be useful for the imperial agenda, or it could be an obstacle. They dealt with it accordingly. Constantine genuinely tried to listen and accommodate all sides. The problem with Athanasius was that he would not accommodate heresy at all. Here's the classic example. The Council of Nicaea had declared that the Son of God was "consubstantial with the Father." The Greek word for "consubstantial" is "homoousias," and the Arians considered it unacceptable. They did not agree that Jesus Christ was of the same substance as God the Father. So they proposed inserting the letter "I," the Greek letter "aioda," into the middle of the word, changing it to "homoousias," meaning "of like substance" or "of similar substance." The Arians held that this word should be acceptable to all parties, since substances that are the same are certainly also alike. Athanasius was having none of it. He saw it as obfuscation, sleight of hand, a wink in the devil's direction. He refused to accommodate even one iota's difference in the language of Nicaea. To us, in retrospect, this seems heroic. To most of his contemporaries, it was just irritating. The emperors and the bishops wanted unity. They saw accommodation as the price of doing business. I have a friend who's a non-believer and a secular historian of significant accomplishment, and he views Athanasius as nothing but a fanatic, a religious fanatic, a man who was willing to sacrifice world peace for the sake of a single use of the letter "ai." But Athanasius saw that the stakes were high. If Christians denied the divinity of Christ, if they refused to give the fullness of worship to Jesus, if they cast aside the traditional understanding of a co-eternal, co-equal trinity, then they were from that moment forward committing idolatry. They were worshiping a God different from the God of their ancestors. The Arian God in his eternal solitude was not the Christian Triune God, and he could not be squared with the Christian revelation or Christian liturgy. Nor could anyone be saved by the Christ who was preached by the Arians. Since he was not truly God, he could not give anyone a share in divine life. It was not his to give. An Arian savior might bestow many attractive gifts, including perhaps the promise of a paradisal afterlife, but he could not cause a mere mortal to become a partaker of the divine nature as the scriptures promise. The death of Arius was followed within a year by the death of the Emperor Constantine. The event brought some good news for Athanasius. Constantine, in his will, had divided governance of the Empire among his three sons. Two of those sons, Constantine II and Constans, were sympathetically disposed to Athanasius and the Nicene Faith. Athanasius was soon permitted to return to Alexandria as bishop. The bad news was all about the third son of Constantine. His name was Constantius, and he was inclined to Arianism. And he was the ruler over Athanasius as part of the world. Constantius would live and rule over the course of a long life. He would eventually outlive and prevail over his two brothers, emerging in the year 350 as sole ruler of the Empire. Constantius gave aid and comfort to the enemies of Athanasius and Nicaea. He promoted them to key positions. He enabled them as they brought ecclesiastical and even criminal charges against Athanasius. Athanasius was accused of murder and embezzlement. He was charged with the desecration of holy things and the practice of magic. He was often convicted or forced to flee. He was exiled repeatedly by emperors. He spent much of his life on the run and in hiding. He had many close calls and brushes with death. Once he was fleeing on a raft on the Nile River and another boat approached. He could see that it was filled with soldiers. They called out to him, "Have you seen Athanasius? Is he far off?" Athanasius wouldn't lie, so he calmly responded, "He is quite close. Press on." And his pursuers sped away. His many years as bishop were filled with action, yet it would be tedious to describe the cycle he endured again and again of false accusations and kangaroo synods, of periodic exiles and triumphant returns. He lived to plead his case personally before emperors and popes. The emperor Constantius mocked the bishop's eccentricity and the futility of his efforts, which he described as "Athanasius contra mundum, Athanasius against the world." His cause seemed most unlikely to succeed. Arian Christology had government support. It was increasingly accepted by the bishops, and bad things happened to those who opposed it. Athanasius didn't care. He was resolute and unflinching, and he was prolific in his writing. He never tired of telling the story of the Arian controversy. He told it in numerous apologies, and histories, and letters addressed to many different audiences. To anyone who would listen, he would repeat the scriptural and theological arguments for the Nicene faith. His works are many, but with only a few exceptions, they deal with the same problem, and they echo the same message of the co-eternal trinity and the co-equality of the divine persons. He adapted it as Arianism produced other heresies. He lived to see some of his allies err by denying the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Thus he had to marshal all his old arguments to demonstrate that neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit could do the things they do in Sacred Scripture if they had been anything less than fully divine. In his long lifetime, Athanasius himself became symbolic—iconic, as we say today. His face was the face of the Council of Nicaea, with its creed and its introduction of the term "consubstantial" into the life of the Church. Thus, as the fortunes of Nicaea waxed and waned, Athanasius rose and fell. When emperors wanted to make peace with the Nicene party, they bestowed favors on Athanasius. But when emperors wanted to make trouble for the Nicene party, they made trouble for Athanasius. Unfortunately for our hero, the years of trouble were more numerous than the years of favor. Athanasius lived to see a new generation of great theologians arise to explain and defend and even systematize the doctrine of Nicaea. From Cappadocia came Basil the Great and his brother Gregory of Nissa and their friend Gregory of Naziansus. In the year 366, Athanasius returned from his fifth exile. He was very old by then, probably 68, and he arrived home to find his church in disarray from decades of clerical upheaval and doctrinal confusion. But at last he could be sure he had the support of a Nicene emperor and a strong pope in Rome. His program for reconstruction was simple and it was little different from before. He kept telling the story. He kept rehearsing the doctrine. He died at home in his bed in 373. His was a life lived to the full with no moments wasted. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please consider making a contribution for the continuation of our series. Way of the Fathers is listener-funded, so we're dependent on the support of people like you. Please pay us a visit at CatholicCulture.org/donate/audio and leave us a note if you love the Fathers. We pray for our benefactors every day. Please join us next episode as we spend time with the father of church history, Eusebius of Caesarea. 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