The saints

Saint Athanasius

Bishop and Doctor of the Church · Feast day May 2 · About 296 to 373 · Alexandria, Egypt · Also known as Athanasius the Great

Saint Athanasius of Alexandria stood almost alone against the whole world to defend the truth that Jesus Christ is fully God, not a lesser creature. Five times exiled for it, he never yielded, and the church's confession of Christ owes more to his stubborn faithfulness than to almost anyone.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.John 1:14 (KJV)

A young deacon at Nicaea

Athanasius grew up in Alexandria, the great Christian city of Egypt, and while still a young deacon he attended the Council of Nicaea in 325, called to settle the most dangerous controversy the church had yet faced. A priest named Arius was teaching that the Son of God was not truly God but the highest of created things, that there was a time when the Son was not.

Athanasius saw at once what was at stake: if Christ is not truly God, then he cannot truly save us, for only God can bridge the gulf between God and man. At Nicaea the church confessed that the Son is of one being with the Father, true God from true God, and Athanasius spent the rest of his life defending that confession.

Athanasius against the world

Soon made bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius found the tide turning against him. Emperors and councils, swayed by the Arians, condemned and banished him again and again. Five times he was driven from his city into exile, spending years in the deserts among the monks and hermits, and years in hiding, hunted by imperial soldiers.

When it seemed the whole empire had gone over to the Arian teaching, a phrase was coined for his lonely stand: Athanasius contra mundum, Athanasius against the world. He would not bend, because he was convinced that the salvation of every soul hung on the truth that in Jesus, God himself had come to save us.

On the Incarnation

In his great early work, On the Incarnation, Athanasius set out with beautiful clarity why God became man: that the Word of God took a body like ours, and by his death and resurrection healed our nature and conquered death from within. He wrote the sentence the church has never forgotten, that God became man so that man might become like God, sharing in the life of God through Christ.

He also championed the writings of Antony of Egypt and the desert monks, and it was Athanasius who first listed the twenty-seven books of the New Testament exactly as the church now holds them, in a letter of the year 367.

Vindicated at last

Through all the exiles and dangers, Athanasius outlasted his enemies. The tide he had resisted alone finally turned back, and the faith of Nicaea, that Jesus Christ is true God, became the settled confession of the whole church, enshrined in the Nicene Creed that Christians of every tradition still recite. He died in peace in Alexandria in 373, his life's cause secure.

The creed we say, In one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, is in large part the fruit of his refusal to give in.

Why Athanasius still matters

Athanasius is the patron of everyone who must stand for the truth when it is unpopular and the cost is high. He teaches that the deity of Christ is not a fine point for scholars but the ground of our salvation, and that sometimes faithfulness means standing firm, even alone, until the world comes round to the truth.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: Saint Nicholas · Who is Jesus? · Saints for May 2 · Saint of the day