#Athanasius of Alexandria

[tonreihe]

I was not expecting a parallel to be drawn between Athanasius of Alexandria and Karl Barth. (Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy & Tradition)

[cruger2984]

THE DESCRIPTION OF SAINT ATHANASIUS OF ALEXANDRIA The Great Champion of the Catholic Faith Feast Day: May 2

Athanasius was born circa 296 or 298 AD in Alexandria, Egypt.

After completing his theological studies, he served as secretary to the bishop of Alexandria, whom he succeeded in 328. It was then that he began the theological struggle against Arius, the Alexandrine priest who denied the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Even though the Council of Nicaea in 325 had formulated the Homousian Doctrine - meaning, that the Son is of the same divine substance as the Father - the conflict was far from over. The Arians were influential at the imperial court, and very active in propagating their heresy through popular songs.

In 355, there were so widespread, that St. Jerome exclaimed: 'The whole world groaned and marveled to find itself Arian.'

The anti-Arian bishops were kept in isolation, including Pope Liberus, and Athanasius himself was exiled five times, for a total of 17 years. In order to escape assassination attempts, he took refuge twice among the monks of the desert. In 164, Athanasius went back victorious to Alexandria, and spent the rest of his life writing the 'Life of St. Anthony the Abbot' and other inspiring books.

Athanasius died on May 2, 373, and his body was subsequently translated to Venice, Italy. Athanasius is considered to be the greatest champion of the Church, because he defended the Catholic faith against overwhelming odds and emerged triumphant.

[quote-bomber]

“If the world is against the truth, then I am against the world.”

Athanasius of Alexandria

[humorwithatwist]

Ten Most Influential Christians in History

I was recently talking with a friend who wants to learn more about church history and they asked for some top ten lists to get acquainted with important people and books from the history of Christianity. So I sent them the following list. Now, a quick caveat here: these are Christians who specifically influenced theology, faith, and Biblical interpretation. Christians certainly can and have…

[seekingtheosis]

Gnosticism & the Church's Response: The Apostles' Creed - Part 3

Explore how the early Church confronted and overcame one of its most significant heresies: Gnosticism. This blog delves into the nature of Gnostic beliefs, which challenged core Christian teachings...

In the name of God the Father, Christ Jesus His Son and the Holy Spirit, One True God. Amen Dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus In the previous blog, we tried to get some brief insights into the theological debates of the early Church which led to the emergence of the Niceno-Constantinople Creed, which is a pivotal statement of faith for the Orthodox Christians. This creed, born from a…

[poligraf]

The people who walk angelically according to their free will and practice discipline in the life of the angels remove themselves completely from the desires of the flesh, beloved brothers; they die daily in the life that belongs to earth, but they live in the life of the angels, just as they share in the life of the Lord.

— Athanasius of Alexandria

[wellthatsclever]

"Jesus became what we are, that He might make us what He is." Saint Athanasius

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[orthodoxadventure]

You cannot put straight in others what is warped in yourself.

Saint Athanasius of Alexandria

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Today in Christian History

Today is Wednesday, February 8th, the 39th day of 2023. There are 326 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

356: Athanasius of Alexandria goes into hiding after escaping five thousand soldiers who burst into his church.

1250: Defeat and captivity of King Louis IX of France, “St. Louis,” in a crusade in which he had attacked Egypt.

1529: Revolution breaks out in Basel, Switzerland when a Protestant mob surrounds the town hall, plants cannon, and forces the council to expel the twelve Catholic members, meanwhile destroying church pictures and statues. “We raged against the idols, and the mass died of sorrow,” wrote Reformer Oecolampadius.

1576: Puritan parliamentarian Peter Wentworth is sent to the Tower of London for making a rousing defense of freedom of speech.

1587: Beheading of the Catholic prisoner Mary, Queen of Scots, on the orders of the Protestant queen, Elizabeth I of England. Mary was accused of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth.

1786: Philip Quaque, an Anglican priest serving on the Gold Coast, writes an account of an uprising of slaves on a Dutch ship, and commiserates his fellow Africans on their cruel treatment by slavers.

1792: Ordination of hymnwriter Joseph Swain to pastor a church in London. His most famous hymn was “O Thou in Whose Presence.”

1883: Death of hymnwriter Mary Stanley Dana Shindler. Her best-known hymn began with the words “Flee as a bird to your mountain, thou who art weary of sin.”

1893: Confirmation in the Anglican Church of Hamu Lujonza Kaddu Mukasa. After Muslims take control of Uganda, he will lead a strong military counter-attack and win political control of the nation for Christians. As a trustee of the national church, he will advocate a policy of self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation.

2001: Death of Rousas John Rushdoony, a Presbyterian clergyman and theologian known as the “Father of Christian Reconstruction” who had advocated strict implementation of biblical moral law in America.

[theartarchive]

icon of saints athanasius the great and cyril of alexandria, 1300s

image from the hermitage

[elby-and-a-blog]

“The marks we read on Jesus’ tortured, crucified body are not the marks of divine retribution but of man’s cruelty to man.    This violence is wrong: Jesus died to stop us from doing this. Calvin’s theology, however, fails to provide us with a salvific stop sign: Satisfaction-atonement without Christus Victor requires Jesus to be executed. In [the model of] Christus Victor, Jesus consents to crucifixion, not to reconcile us with God but to call out and defeat human evil. Caiaphas, the scribes and the Sadducees are bound by no metaphysical requirement. If they believed in God, they would not kill godly people who threaten their security. They kill Jesus because they are part of the despairing, faithless machine of the Roman empire that benefits a tiny minority at the expense of a vast majority. A three-day pause ensures we have indeed killed Jesus who came to save us, before God steps in with a vertical response, the removal of the stone from the tomb (John 20:1) and the appearance of a living and breathing resurrected Jesus (John 20:15). God, not Pilate or Caesar, has authority over life and death, so in the end, love wins. Man’s cruelty to man fails to kill vulnerable God-as-Jesus.

from Reincorporating Christus Victor in the Reformed Theology of Atonement, by Liz Estes

IF GOD REALLY WANTED TO FORGIVE US THAT BADLY THEN HE WOULD JUST FORGIVE US.

You're telling me this Almighty being created everything in the universe and created us and knows our hearts and our souls every detail of our lives and he wants to be with us for eternity more than anything else, and yet there are rules and conditions to his forgiveness? He's an unlimited unknowable being, he's everywhere and sees everything, he tells us to forgive people around us, (above all we need to forgive everyone no matter what) we're supposed to give forgiveness out freely, completely unrestricted, and you're telling me, HE cannot-

GOD, cannot extend that same forgiveness to humans?

What kind of immensely powerful God endlessly loves us but makes it such a conditional love?

[godbeautyorder]

If the world is against the truth, then I am against the world.

Athanasius of Alexandria

[portraitsofsaints]

Saint Athanasius

Doctor of the Church

297-373

Feast Day: May 2

Saint Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria and Doctor of the Church, assisted at the Council of Nicaea, where the Nicene Creed was established. Under the care of St. Alexander the Patriarch he received a classical education and succeeded him as Bishop in 326. His life struggle was correcting Arianism, the heresy denying the divinity of Christ, to the effect that 47 years of his Episcopate were lived in exile as his life was frequently in danger. St. Athanasius is a “Champion of Orthodoxy” who fully lived his life as Bishop, caring for his flock even in exile.

Prints, plaques & holy cards available for purchase here: (website)

[apilgrimpassingby]

Theologian Tagging Game:

Favourite New Testament Writer: St. James

Favourite Church Father: St. Athanasius of Alexandria

Favourite Medieval Theologian: St. John of Damascus

Favourite Post-Reformation Theologian: C. S. Lewis

Favourite Living Theologian: Fr. Stephen DeYoung

Tagging @sapphosremains, @thomasstaples and @idylls-of-the-divine-romance: fill in your answers and tag others!

[wonderful101gecs]

in my research on early Christianity over the past couple weeks, i have learned enough to know that i want to beat the shit out of Saint Athanasius of Alexandria

[racefortheironthrone]

So I know my homoiousios vs. homoousios, and my monophysite vs. dyophysite, and my monothelite vs. dyothelite, and how it all led to the Arab caliphates getting a decent navy and winning the Battle of the Masts.

I don't, and I'd love to! (If you feel like it, obviously.) I'm pretty sure the homoiousios one is about, like, the Trinity or something, but beyond that it's all Greek to me.

(At this point, I feel like I owe @apocrypals royalties or something, but I'm getting a weird kick from doing this on Saint Patrick's Day, so let's do this).

I covered the impact of the monophysite vs. dyophysite split and the Battle of the Masts here, so I'll start from the top.

You are quite correct that the homoiousios vs. homoousios split was, like most of the heresies of the early Church, a Cristological controversy over the nature of Christ and the Trinity. This is perhaps better known as the Arian Heresy, and it's arguably the great-granddaddy of all heresies.

The Arian heresy was the subject of the very first Council of the early Church, the Council of Nicea, convoked by Emperor Constantine the Great in order to end all disputes within the Church forever. (Clearly this worked out well.) In part because the Church hadn't really sat down and attempted to establish orthodoxy before, this debate got very heated. Famously, at one point the future Saint Nicholas supposedly punched Presbyter Arius in the face.

What got a room of men devoted to the "Prince of Peace" heated to the point of physical violence was that Arius argued that, while Christ was the son of God and thus clearly divine, because he was created by God the Father and thus came after the Father, he couldn't be of the same essence (homoousios) as the Father, but rather of similar essence (homoiousios). Eustathias of Antioch and Alexander of Alexandria took the opposing position, which got formulated into the Nicean Creed. As this might suggest, Arius lost both the debate and the succeeding vote that followed, as roughly 298 of 300 bishops attending signed onto the Creed. This got very bad for Arius indeed, because Emperor Constantine enforced the new policy by ordering his writings burned, and Arius and two of his supporters were exiled to Illyricum. Game over, right?

But something odd happened: the dispute kept going, as new followers of Arius popped up and showed themselves to be much better at the Byzantine knife-fighting of Church politics. About ten years later, the ever-unpredictable Constantine turned against Athanasius of Alexandria (who had been Alexander's campaign manager, in essence) and banished him for intruiging against Arius, while Arius was allowed to return to the church (this time in Jerusalem) - although this turned out to be mostly a symbolic victory as Arius died on the journey and didn't live to see his readmission.

....and then it turned out that Constantine the Great's son Constantius II was an Arian and he reversed policy completely, adopting the Arian position and exiling anyone who disagreed with him, up to and including Pope Liberius. While the Niceans eventually triumphed during the reign of Theodosius the Great, Arianism unexpectedly became a major geopolitical issue within the Empire.

See, both during their exile and during their brief period of ascendancy within the Church, one of the major projects of the Arians was to send out missionaries into the west to preach their version of Christianity. Unexpectedly, Arianism proved to be a big hit among the formerly pagan Goths (thanks in no small part to the missionary Ulfilas translating the Bible into Gothic), who were perhaps more familiar with pantheons in which patriarchal gods were considered senior to their sons.

While they weren't particularly given to persecuting Niceans in the West, the Ostrogothic, Visigothic, Burgundian, and Vandal Kings weren't about to let themselves be pushed around by some Roman prick in Constantinople either - which added an interesting religious component to Justinian's attempt to reconquer the West.