Five Exiles, a Desert, and a Letter That Fixed a Canon

Athanasius spent roughly seventeen of his forty five years as bishop away from Alexandria, in five separate exiles, under four emperors. The charges against him were rarely theological on their face. At the council of Tyre in 335 he was accused of murdering a bishop named Arsenius and of having his severed hand; the standard account has Athanasius producing Arsenius alive in the assembly with both hands attached. He was also accused of interfering with the Egyptian grain supply to Constantinople, which was the accusation an emperor was most likely to act on.

The third exile sent him into the Egyptian desert for six years, where he lived among the monks, and it produced his most widely read book. The Life of Antony presents the ascetic as a new kind of hero and was translated into Latin almost at once; Augustine describes in the Confessions how hearing about it moved him toward his own conversion. More than any other single text it carried monasticism from Egypt into the Latin West.

The other document that outlived him is administrative. Every year the bishop of Alexandria wrote to the churches announcing the date of Easter, and the letter for 367 included a list of the books to be read as scripture. Its New Testament list is exactly the twenty seven now received, the earliest surviving instance of that list, and no later council fixed it more decisively.

In the Coptic Orthodox Church he is Athanasius the Apostolic, and his memory belongs to the Coptic, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran traditions alike.