This article is taken from Henry Bettenson, ed., and trans., The Early Christian Fathers. A selection from the writings of the Fathers from St Clement of Rome to St Athanasius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 24-27. It is here reproduced with the kind permission of Oxford University Press.
The terminus proposed for these selections is the formula of the Faith promulgated by the Council of Nicaea [325]: but that formular did not win immediate and universal acceptance—it was really the product of a minority accepted under pressure by some of the delegates and received without enthusiasm by many of the 'neutrals'—and a bitter struggle was waged for half a century between Arianism of varied shades and the supporters of Nicaea under their champion, Athanasius, from whose writings the points at issue are illustrated. The implications of this Faith and its technical terms were discussed and finally settled by the three great Cappadocian Fathers, Basil and the two Gregorys, who consolidated positions won by Athanasius.
Athanasius was born in Alexandria about 296, and received a good grounding in secular learning and made himself well versed in the Scriptures. At an early age he attracted the notice of Alexander, the bishop, who made him his companion and secretary, and later ordained him deacon. In 319 Arius, the popular and able rector of a suburban parish, was accused of teaching that Jesus Christ was neither truly God nor truly man; and for this combination of unitarianism and paganism—the doctrine of one God in lonely transcendence together with the worship of one who was less than God—he was condemned and deposed in 321. Yet he persisted in his teaching and was active in propaganda and intrigue, claiming the support of the writings of Origen, Dionysius of Alexandria, and Lucian, the martyr of Antioch. Certainly there were passages in Origen—where he stresses the subordination of the Son—and in other earlier writers, which, taken by themselves, could be interpreted in an Arian sense; just as there were many passages in Scripture which the Arians delighted to quote as proof-texts of their doctrine.
In 325 Concstantine summoned the first Oecumenical Council at Nicaea, a council which, thought predominantly Eastern in composition, represented the whole Church and at the suggestion of a Western bishop, Hosius of Cordova, adopted the term homoousion, 'of the same substance', to describe the essential unity of the Father and the Son. To the formula of Nicaea all but the extreme Arain wing subscribed. Athanasius attended the council as secretary and adviser to his bishop, and when Alexander died, three years afterwards (or later), his trusted deacon succeeded him, to meet the troubles which the dying bishop had foretold. they were not long in gathering: Eusebius of Nicomedia, the leader of the Arians at the council, had accepted the Nicene formula; but scarely had the bishops dispersed when he busied himself in the intrigues in which he took such pleasure and displayed so much skill and assiduity. He demanded the recall of Arius, obtained the ear of Constantine, and induced him to press the demand. Athanasius refused; fantastic charges were trumped up against him, and in 335 a council at Tyre decreed his deposition, and the Emperor sent him into honourable exile in Trève, where his elderst son had his court. On the death of the great Emperor two years later Athanasius was restored to his see, which had been left vacant since his departure; but Eusebius was still busy, and he prevailed on Constantius, Emperor of the East, to foist anonther bishop on Alexandria. For the second time Athanasius went into exile, making his way to Rome, where he was welcomed with every show of respect by Constans, Emperor of the West, who, seeing the danger of schism in the Empire, interceded with his brother and achieved the restoration of Athanasius in 346. Four years later Constans was murdered; Constantius became sole Emperor, and a Western council at Milan was coerced to condemn Athanasius, who spent the next seven years in hiding, somethimes in his episcopal city, but chiefly among the monks in the desert. Yet from his hiding-places the bishop continued to direct his flock; the monks distributed his writings and it was in this period that he produced his Orations against the Arians, to support the acceptance of the Nicene Faith in Asia Minor.
The 'royal-hearted' exile, the 'invisible patriarch', was always effectively governing his church, consoling or stimulating the faithful, keeping in his hands a network of correspondences, dispatching messages and orders which would be received as loyally as if brought by a deacon of the Alexandria throne. And with what marvellous power of self-adaptation prominent among the Pauline qualities which Dean Stanley has so well pointed out in this majestic character, Athanasius made these six years of seclusion available for literary work of the most substantial kind, both controversial and historical. The books which he now began to pour forth were apparently written in cottages or caves, where he sat, like a monk, on a mat of palm-leaves, with a bundle of papyrus beside him, and the intense light and stillness of the desert, which might harmonise with his meditations and his prayers.
Constantius died in 361, and Julian succeeded, Athanasius was recalled to his see (the intruded Arian bishop, George of Cappadocia, having been imprisoned and then lynched); and his first concern was to reconcile the 'conservative' party, the 'Origenists', to the Nicene formula. He achieved this aim at a synod of Alexandria in the next year; but after eight months the Emperor expelled him from Egypt, and he spent over a year on the run. Recalled by Jovian, he was again exiled after two years, in 365. This fourth and last exile was only of four months' duration; he was brought back in response to popular clamour throughout Egypt, and enjoyed seven years of peace and honour until his death in 373.
The chequered history of Athanasius, with its alternations of honour and exile, bound up as it was with the personalities and predilections of successive Emperors, and beset by intrigue, is paralled in the procession—a bemused observer might call it a phantasmagoria—of councils and formulas during these fifty years, wherein creed and counter-creed, extreme manifesto and attempted compromise, tumbled after each other in bewildering sequence. The final triumph of the Nicene fatih, and its ratification at the Council of Constantinople in 381, is due to Athanasius more than to any other man. With unflagging energy he defended the formula of the homoousion, as expressing the truth, that if Christ is God, then he must be God in the same sense as God the Father is God; divinity is one 'substance'. To believe in the godhead of the Son in any other sense is to introduce paganism with its ranks of divinities, semi-divinities, demi-semi-divinities. How then can we maintain that the Father is God, the Son God, and the Spirit God, and yet safeguard Christian monotheism? The final working-out of the terminology by the Cappadosians developed the teaching of Athanasius. There is but one substance in the Trinity, one essential 'stuff' of the godhead. But the revelation in Scripture, and in Christian experience as witnessed in the Church's worship, shows us thress distinct 'persons', three hypostases or objective realities, having relations with each other, and, severally yet not independently, with man. Both 'Monarchianism', in its modal form of Sabellianism, and 'Emanationism', as taught by Arius, would have paganized Christianity: Sabellianism by reducing to a mere apparition the revelation of God in Christ; Arianism by separating the Redeemer from the Creator, by making the Son a creature and thus looking for salvation to one who is less than Almighty God. Athanasius, 'single-hearted, and sometimes single-handed, had saved the Church from capitivity by pagan intellectualism. Indeed he had done more. By his tenacity and vision in preaching one God and Saviour he had preserved from dissolution the unity and integrity of the Christian faith.'
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