CATHOLIC PICTORIAL - FOOD FOR THOUGHT

CHAMPION OF ORTHODOXY -  St Athanasius
Fr Francis Marsden
	12 May 1991

Athanasius is not a popular saint. I have never baptised any baby Athanasius. I have never seen a medal or a prayer card bearing his image. His statue is rare. Yet he was the man who saved the entire Catholic Church in the fourth century, a little-known Egyptian bishop.

The fine print of the Catholic faith is much ignored nowadays. Athanasius was sent into exile five times, for 17 years in all, over a single letter i in one word in the Creed. We know that a slight error in calculations can ruin a space mission or render a telescope lens useless. An unnoticed word on an insurance policy can mean we can claim nothing. The letter i in the Creed made all the difference between Jesus, Son of God, co-equal to the Father, and a Jesus who was merely a creature, a superman perhaps, but not God.

The story of Athanasius is important in an age which likes to fudge doctrinal issues and gloss over vital differences to achieve an artificial “Let’s all be nice to each other” unity.

He was born in AD 297 in Alexandria, a fabulously rich and cosmopolitan city of Egypt, then a province of the Roman Empire. His wealthy parents provided him with a thorough liberal and Christian education. Some of his teachers suffered and were even martyred under the bitter persecution of Emperor Diocletian. Their conviction and holiness made a deep impression upon the teenager Athanasius. He was 16 when Constantine became Emperor and legalised the Christian religion.

During the persecutions many Christians had taken refuge in the desert. Not all returned from the vast silence. Some stayed to spend their lives as hermits in prayer and contemplation of God. The first communities of monks gathered together. Athanasius came to know St Anthony their leader, whom he held in great reverence. He pursued ecclesiastical studies and was ordained a deacon, working as secretary to Patriarch Alexander.

				Enter now the villain of the piece: Arius, a priest of Alexandria, began to preach a twisted version of the Gospel. Jesus, the Word of God, he said, was not equal to the Father, but had been created in time by the Father. “There was a time when He was not.” God is One, Eternal, Unbegotten. All other beings were his creatures, the Word (Jesus) the first of them. Like other creatures the Word was created from nothingness and not from the Divine substance (Greek: ousia).

According to Arius, God the Father decided at some point to create the Word. He did not have to. The Word then created all other creatures and only in relation to them is known as God. The Word's first creation was the Holy Spirit who was therefore ever less god than the Word. Thus Arius denies the Trinity the three infinite Divine Persons in one God. Son and Spirit came to exist in time. They are just creatures, and only sharers in the divine nature by grace like we do.

This may seem very remote, lost in the mists of ancient time. Sadly, the heresies of Arius are widespread today, under other forms.

Jehovah’s Witnesses and Unitarians deny the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ. So too do some influential Protestant scholars. Various Catholic or ex-Catholic writers have downplayed the Divinity of Christ while emphasising his humanity 

There is an infinite difference between a Saviour who is true God and true Man, and Arius' Jesus who was just the highest creature of creation. The whole meaning of the Incarnation (God himself walks on earth), the atonement and Redemption (the Man-God offers his own life in sacrifice for our sins), and the Eucharist (God-with-us) hangs upon this distinction. Arius’ theories might use almost identical language to the Catholic faith, but they were a lethal poison.

As Arius preached these novelties in Alexandria, the crowds flocked to hear him, readier to have their ears tickled by new ideas and fashions than to absorb solid traditional teaching. He was summoned before the bishop to state his case. After enquiry and consultation, it was decided that Arius' teaching was not in accord with Catholic faith. He refused to retract his theories and was therefore excommunicated along with his followers

However he had old college friends in high places: Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, related to the imperial family, gave him a warm welcome. He settled in Nicomedia writing pamphlets and popular songs to spread his preaching. The bishop of Alexandria protested. Other bishops took sides. The whole of the East was soon aflame with controversy.

THE NICENE CREED

The Emperor Constantine summoned a Council at Nicea, close to his capital Constantinople (Istanbul). 318 bishops gathered along with the Papal legates to debate Arius’ teaching. They condemned it and devised a test formula of the traditional Faith, the Nicene Creed (AD 325). We recite it every Sunday at Mass in its version as later revised at Constantinople (AD 381). To clarify the issue and reject Arius’ teaching, the Bishops wrote:

“We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, the only-begotten of the Father, that is to say, of the Father’s substance, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being (Gk. homoousios) with the Father . . 

Some of the bishops disliked using the new word homoousios (homo = the same; ousios = of the substance) which was not found in Scripture in a formal Creed. Nevertheless 220 bishops signed it. Only 17 stood for Arius.

The declaration concluded with the words: “As for those who say ‘There was a time when He did not exist; before He was begotten He did not exist. He was made from nothing or from another substance or essence; the Son of God is a created being, changeable, capable of alteration’ — to such as these the Catholic Church says Anathema.”

	ATTACKS ON ATHANASIUS
So the matter was decided, and should have ended. Arius’ supporters ever began to try to undermine the decision. Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia called local synods to reinterpret Nicea and rehabilitate Arius. He packed the synods with his supporters, and deposed 12 bishops who stood by Nicea, filling their places with Arian bishops. St Athanasius had now succeeded as Bishop of Alexandria. He was able. He was learned. He was orthodox. “His life was irreproachable. He was to his people a model bishop; and for tenacity of purpose, the inflexibility bred of a clear grasp of principle, no hero of Church history has ever surpassed him.”

Eusebius invented false’ accusations and slanders against Athanasius, and deprived him of his diocese at the Synod of Tyre in AD 335. The Emperor banished him to Trier in Gaul, which must have seemed like the end of the world. The survivors of Nicea who supported the homoousios were crushed. A date was fixed and a church chosen for Anus to be ceremonially welcomed back into full communion by the Emperor in Constantinople.

The Catholics of the city stormed heaven with their prayers. On the way to the ceremony Arius was taken short, and went into an alleyway to relieve himself. It is recorded that his bowels burst from his body and he died in agony. Within a few months the Emperor Constantine was also dead.

The new Emperor restored Athanasius to his see, but the trouble with the Arians continued. Athanasius went to Rome to appeal, successfully, to the Pope. Eusebius and supporters refused to accept the Pope’s jurisdiction and threatened to rebel against Rome if their appointments and decisions were not accepted. Cleverly they devised a new creed which was ambiguous: it could be interpreted in a Catholic sense or an Arian sense (Just as in modern times certain ARCIC documents and Anglican statements of belief can be understood in either a Catholic or a Protestant sense.)

Athanasius refused to compromise, ad was not allowed back to his diocese until AD 346 The Anians continued plotting. Emperor Constantius II sent soldiers into the cathedral one night in AD 356, killing members of  the congregation, but Athanasius fled into the desert. Every bishop who supported him was exiled. Pope Liberius was kidnapped and held in Thrace (Greece). The other bishops, subservient to the Emperor, were brought to meet in Council at Sirmium (AD 358) and approved a new Creed to replace the Nicene Creed: the Son was now described as “of similar substance” (homoiousios) to the Father, but not “of the same substance” (homoousios) That single letter i alters the whole meaning of the word and sidesteps the question of Christ’s Divinity.

The bishops were intimidated into accepting this formula which avoided precision, in the hope of establishing “a happy permanent confusion, where all parties, even the most contradictory, should find their place in the Church.” Of this decree St Jerome wrote: “The whole world awoke and groaned to find itself Arian.”

		RESTORED
When the Emperor died, Athanasius again returned. He suffered two shorter exiles and then 7 years of peace in his see, during which he compiled his Life of St Anthony. Younger men took up his defence of the Faith. The Arians were gradually refuted and driven out. Triumphant now in his old age, vindicated in his lonely and heroic stand by Pope and Emperor, he died on May 2nd, 373 AD. Later he was canonised and made a Doctor of’ the Church.

Cardinal Newman described him as “a principal instrument after the Apostles by which the sacred truths of Christianity have been conveyed and secured to the world.” He has left us hundreds of letters, his writings Against the Arians and On the Incarnation. We take for granted the Creed, Christ’s divinity and the Trinity. It was Athanasius who at great personal cost, stood by those truths when the world went awry, and preserved them for us.

“His epitaph is “Athanasius contra mundum”, Athanasius against the world.  He stood for the Tninitanian doctrine “whole and undefiled” when it looked as if the whole civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius — into one of those ‘sensible’ synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated churchmen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.” (C.S.Lewis)