Saint Athanasius

Saint Athanasius was bishop of Alexandria in Egypt in the fourth century and a steadfast defender of the truth of the full divinity of the Son of God, professed by the Council of Nicaea. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus called him the pillar of the Church. The Church honors him as a Doctor and celebrates his memorial on May 2.

He was born in Alexandria into a Christian family; his year of birth is given as 295 or about 300. His childhood fell in the time of the persecution under Emperor Diocletian. He received a careful education and then became a deacon and secretary to the bishop of Alexandria, Alexander.

At that time the Alexandrian priest Arius was teaching that the Word, the Son of God, is not true God but a created god. In May 325 Emperor Constantine summoned the first ecumenical council to Nicaea, and the young deacon Athanasius accompanied his bishop there. The council rejected the teaching of Arius and professed that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, that is, of the same substance as the Father, God from God. When Alexander died in 328, Athanasius succeeded him in the episcopal see of Alexandria.

The defense of the Nicene faith filled his entire episcopate. The followers of Arius had the support of the court: for political reasons they were favored by Emperor Constantine himself and then by his son Constantius II. Athanasius was accused and removed from office; the Roman Martyrology recalls that he defended the true faith from the time of Constantine until Emperor Valens and suffered much from the intrigues of the Arians. Between 336 and 366 he had to leave his city five times and spent seventeen years in exile in all. His first exile took him to Trier, and later he stayed in Rome, where Pope Julius I declared him innocent.

Despite these struggles he wrote a great deal. In his best-known doctrinal work, the treatise On the Incarnation of the Word, he explained that the Word of God became man so that man might be made divine. He also wrote four letters to his friend Serapion, bishop of Thmuis, on the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and some thirty festal letters in which he announced the date of Easter to the faithful at the beginning of the year.

Athanasius was close to the hermit Saint Anthony, who left him one of his two sheepskins as a legacy. Shortly after Anthony’s death, while he was living as an exile among the monks of the Egyptian desert, he wrote his Life. This book did much to spread monastic life in the East and in the West.

In the end he returned to his see for good and devoted himself to restoring peace in the Church. He died in Alexandria on May 2, 373, in the forty-sixth year of his episcopal ministry. He has been venerated as a saint since antiquity, and in both East and West he is regarded as a model of orthodox faith. In Saint Peter’s Basilica his statue, the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, stands among those of the four Doctors of the Church who surround the Chair of Saint Peter.