Athanasius of Alexandria

The word at issue was homoousios, of the same substance. Nicaea used it in 325 to say that the Son is not a creature, however exalted, but is what the Father is. Its opponents had two respectable objections: it is not in scripture, and it had been rejected in an earlier controversy at Antioch because it seemed to collapse Father and Son into one thing. A middle party proposed homoiousios, of like substance, differing by a single letter.

Athanasius would not take the compromise, and his reason is set out in the treatise On the Incarnation, written before the controversy hardened. If salvation consists in humanity being taken into the divine life, then only God can accomplish it, and a Son who is merely the highest of creatures cannot. His formula is that the Word became man so that we might become god, and everything else follows from it. A likeness of substance would leave the creature to be saved by another creature.

The argument had to be made against the current for most of his life. After Constantine's death the imperial court repeatedly supported his opponents, councils in the 350s produced formulas he could not accept, and Jerome later wrote that the world groaned to find itself Arian.

His later Orations Against the Arians are the sustained technical defence, working verse by verse through the passages his opponents used, and they set the terms in which the Trinitarian settlement of 381 was eventually reached, a settlement he did not live to see.

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.