In fourth century Egypt, a young official of the church in Alexandria stood alongside older bishops in the debate that would define Christianity: was Jesus fully God, or merely a creature, however exalted? Athanasius spent his entire life answering that question.
He was born around 296 in Alexandria, a city both Greek and Egyptian, a center of biblical and philosophical learning. While still young, he became a deacon and secretary to Bishop Alexander, serving as his personal assistant in the theological debates of the day.
In 325, he accompanied Alexander to the Council of Nicaea, convened by Emperor Constantine to resolve the Arian controversy, which denied the eternity of the Son of God. As a deacon and secretary, he had no vote, and historians today judge his formal role at the council to have been limited; even so, he left Nicaea determined to defend that creed for the rest of his life.
In 328, three years later, he was elected bishop of Alexandria, succeeding Alexander. From then on, he became the chief defender of the Nicene faith, writing treatises that upheld the full divinity of Christ against the followers of Arius.
His resolve came at a high cost: he was deposed and exiled five times, by order of four different emperors, spending more than seventeen years away from Alexandria in total. He lived in Trier, Rome, and the Egyptian desert, where he stayed among monks. He became known through the phrase, coined by others, “Athanasius against the world.”
At hostile synods, Arian and Meletian opponents accused him of violence against rivals in Egypt, including the case of the Meletian bishop Arsenius, said to have been killed and mutilated on his orders; Arsenius later reappeared alive, and the charge collapsed. Even so, historians acknowledge that his rule in Alexandria was marked by harsh, uncompromising clashes with opponents, Meletians and Arians alike, including accusations of pressure and force against rival clergy.
In his final years, he sought to reconcile the Nicene factions through the Tome to the Antiochenes of 362, and in 367 he listed, for the first time, the 27 books of the New Testament as we know them today, in his 39th Festal Letter. He died in Alexandria on 2 May 373.
The conviction he defended, that the Son is of the same substance as the Father, still upholds the preaching of the gospel in every language today: without a Christ who is fully God, the salvation proclaimed by missions would lose its foundation.
