Contra Mundum Redux
Mark Tooley on St. Athanasius
I am a United Methodist, but one of my greatest heroes in Christian history comes from the ancient church of Egypt. Athanasius lived 1,300 years before the founding of Methodism, but he was well known to Methodism’s founder. When the aged John Wesley wrote one of his final letters to William Wilberforce, he likened that crusader against slavery to an “Athanasius contra mundum.”
“Athanasius against the world.” For most of his almost 50 years as bishop of Alexandria, he truly was arrayed against the full breadth of the Roman Empire, defiantly defending the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity against pagans and Arian heretics. Parker Williamson of The Presbyterian Layman several years ago wrote a wonderful book, Standing Firm, describing the issues between the orthodox and heterodox at the Council of Nicaea, where the full and eternal deity of Christ was debated and ultimately affirmed.
Arius, an often admirable church leader, denied that Christ was eternally co-existent with the Father. For him, Christ was a creature, not the Creator. As the Arian slogan went, “There was a time when he was not.” Not unfairly, Williamson likened some of Arius’s supporters to modern church leaders who advocate theological “diversity.”
In contrast, Athanasius, a young priest and protégé of the orthodox Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, stubbornly resisted Arius’s theological innovations. Of course, Athanasius, who would soon succeed his mentor to the bishopric, prevailed at the Council of Nicaea in 325, which insisted in its creed that Jesus of Nazareth was “God from God, light from light, true God from true God” and the one “through whom all things were made.” It was a crushing victory, the bishops closing their creed with the declaration that “those who say, there was when he was not, and, before being born he was not . . . these the Catholic Church anathematizes.”
But though he prevailed at the council, Athanasius still faced a half-century of theological combat, as the Arians attempted to gain by practice what they could not gain in a council.
The Force of a Single Mind
One of my favorite descriptions of Athanasius comes from Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which devoted several chapters to the Arian controversy. No fan of Christianity, Gibbon nonetheless lavished his admiration on the zealous bishop of Alexandria who nearly single-handedly championed theological orthodoxy when it seemed all of Christendom was succumbing to Arius’s alternative brand of religion. Gibbon’s introduction of the heroic prelate captures the remarkable magnetism and forcefulness of Athanasius:
We have seldom an opportunity of observing, either in active or speculative life, what effect may be produced, or what obstacles may be surmounted, by the force of a single mind, when it is inflexibly applied to the pursuit of a single object. The immortal name of Athanasius will never be separated from the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, to whose defence he consecrated every moment and every faculty of his being.
Educated in the family of Alexander, he had vigorously opposed the early progress of the Arian heresy: he exercised the important functions of secretary under the aged prelate; and the fathers of the Nicene council beheld with surprise and respect, the rising virtues of the young deacon. In a time of public danger, the dull claims of age and of rank are sometimes superseded; and within five months after his return from Nice [Nicaea], the deacon Athanasius was seated on the archiepiscopal throne of Egypt. He filled that eminent station above forty-six years, and his long administration was spent in a perpetual combat against the powers of Arianism.
Athanasius was expelled from his throne five times and spent 20 years as an exile or a fugitive. Yet almost every province of the Roman empire was “successively witness to his merit, and his sufferings in the cause of the Homoousion [the doctrine of Christ’s co-substantiality with the Father], which he considered as the sole pleasure and business, as the duty, and as the glory, of his life.”
Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.ird-renew.org) in Washington, D.C.
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