Contemporary Readings of Athanasius

Even today in current international debates it is difficult for historians to avoid  projecting  their  own  preconceptions  in  regard  to  Christianity, especially in the case of such a striking character in Church history as Athanasius.^[1]

The Uncontested Positive Reception of Athanasius

by the Churches

An account of the contemporary reception of Athanasius should begin by identifying where Athanasius’s contested legacy lies and where it does not. The formal or official reception of Athanasius in the churches—creeds, confessions, feasts, public documents—is unanimously positive. During his own lifetime, controversy surrounded Athanasius: bishops and emperors hotly disputed whether he ought to be received and welcomed as a bishop and a teacher of the faith. But since  the  Nicene  settlement  in  the  late  fourth  century,  there  has been little to no controversy within or between the Eastern and Western churches concerning either the orthodoxy or the holiness of Athanasius.

For the Coptic Church especially, but for all the Oriental Orthodox and Eastern churches, Athanasius remains a beloved father of the church and a primary authority.^[2] Among the Byzantine Orthodox, Athanasius is prized as one of the great fathers, even though his theology does not play as significant or central a role as does, for example, that of the Cappadocian fathers and Maximus.^[3] The Catholic Church receives Athanasius as a doctor of the church and one of the four great Eastern fathers; he is cited as an authority in the documents of Vatican II and in the latest edition of the Catholic Catechism.^[4] Athanasius’s feast day is celebrated in the Coptic Church on May 15, in the Eastern Orthodox Churches on January 18, and in the Catholic Church on May 2. It is more difficult to measure the place of Athanasius in the various Protestant communions, but we noted above how Athanasius was warmly received by several of the early Reformers, and the Creed that bore his name was included in several early Protestant confessions.

The legacy of Athanasius reemerged as a point of controversy largely in Western scholarly writing: among church historians, patristic scholars, and theologians. It was in these contexts that the traditional “orthodox” narrative of Athanasius, as received by the churches, was queried and challenged—and the challenge was aimed at both his teaching and his character. The aim of this final chapter is to trace the lines of this challenge to Athanasius’s legacy, first in terms of the quality and adequacy of Athanasius’s teaching and then in terms of his character and reputation.

The Teaching of Athanasius

Challenges to the excellence or adequacy of Athanasius’s teaching can be grouped into three primary subjects: (1) his doctrine of the Triune God, (2) his Christology, and (3) his teaching on salvation, especially his emphasis on deification. Athanasius is best known for defending and defining the full divinity of the Son and the nature of the Christian God as triune. Is his account of God—the Father, Son, and Spirit—as solid and secure as tradition has claimed? Athanasius’s Letter to Epictetus was granted canonical status at the Council of Chalcedon (in 451) as representing the true teaching of the church on the person of Christ. But does his Christology actually hold together and stand up under scrutiny? Athanasius is also renowned for his doctrine of salvation, describing the purpose of God to rescue the human race through Christ and to bring us to full sanctification and deification. But does his soteriology adequately interpret the New Testament or does it represent a foreign, pagan importation into Christian truth? There is a certain artificiality in treating these topics separately, since the doctrine of the Triune God, of Christ, and of salvation all belong together in one integrated whole, but for the purpose of presenting the contemporary reception of Athanasius it will be helpful to distinguish them and consider them each in turn.

Trinity

For Isaac Newton and the British Arians—and for those who identify with a Unitarian view of God—Athanasius’s forceful presentation of the Trinity is simply wrongheaded and false at its root. Their critique, however, is usually not with some specific aspect or element of his Trinitarian teaching; they simply reject this way of reading the New Testament and consider the orthodox way of defining God as both one and three to be misguided. We are concerned here with something different: with contemporary scholars who criticize Athanasius for presenting an inadequate account of the orthodox view of the Trinity. This is to ask: in what ways is Athanasius taken to task for failing to express a satisfactory theology of the Christian doctrine of God?

The principal critique is that Athanasius leans toward—or fully adopts—a form of Trinitarian modalism. This is known under the name of Sabellianism and was condemned in the person of Athanasius’s friend and colleague Marcellus of Ancyra. A modalist view of the Trinity allows for the manifestations of the Father, Son, and Spirit, but either positively denies that there are any real, distinct persons in God or fails to uphold these distinctions and blurs them together in an unvariegated monism. Adolph von Harnack, writing in the late nineteenth century, concludes that Athanasius’s view of God was full of contradictions that the Arians were correct to point out; for Harnack, Athanasius was Sabellian at the core.^[5] Richard Hanson judges that Athanasius leans toward Sabellian modalism but that he was far from holding it in the end. For Hanson, Athanasius lacked a distinct terminology to identify the persons, resulting in a Trinitarian exposition that failed to accentuate personal distinctions in God.^[6] More recently, Christopher Beeley has renewed the charge that Athanasius’s Trinitarian theology leans toward modalism: “We can see that Athanasius’s Trinitarian doctrine is vulnerable to modalism and that it notably omits the language of hypostasis still current in other Origenist traditions.”^[7] He admits that at points Athanasius gives attention to the subsistence of the three persons but concludes that “structurally speaking, Athanasius ends up diverting the Origenist heritage in a modalist direction.”^[8]

It is true that Athanasius’s Trinitarian theology lacks a technical term (such as “hypostasis” or “person”) to designate what is “three” in God, and to this extent his description of the Trinity does not possess the terminological clarity that comes with the Cappadocians and later writers. But as Thomas Weinandy observes, though Athanasius lacks a clear technical terminology to identify the divine persons, he “does indicate that their own distinct biblical designations establish and confirm that they are each unique with their own unambiguous, discrete and non-interchangeable subjective identities.”^[9] Furthermore, as Weinandy shows, Athanasius maintains on several occasions that the Father and Son are distinct and can never be confused. For Athanasius, the term homoousion guarantees at one and the same time both the unity of the divine nature and the distinctness of the persons. Only if the Son is distinct from the Father does it make logical sense to say that the two are homoousion: “Neither do we hold a Son-Father, as do the Sabellians, calling him monoousion but not homoousion, and thus destroying the existence of the Son. . . . For neither is the Father the Son, nor the Son the Father. For the Father is the Father of the Son, and the Son, Son of the Father.”^[10] The sheer lengths that Athanasius goes to in order to show the unity yet distinctiveness of the Father and Son—and later of the Spirit—speaks against a Sabellian-leaning view of the Trinity. Nowhere does he indicate, as Marcellus did, that the distinct subsistence of the persons was only for the sake of the saving economy or would come to an end at some point. For Athanasius as for Origen before him, the Father, Son, and Spirit remain forever distinct even as they together comprise the one God.

Christology

It is within the sphere of Christology that Athanasius receives the sharpest censure from contemporary scholars. Though criticism of Athanasius’s doctrine of Christ goes back to the nineteenth century, an appropriate place to anchor the critique of Athanasian Christology is in the widely influential study of patristic Christology by Aloys Grillmeier in 1965.^[11] Grillmeier adopts a model of two contrasting paradigms for evaluating christological thought: Logos-Sarx and Logos-Anthropos. The former conceives of the incarnation as the union of the eternal Word with human flesh, such that the Word functionally takes over the human operations of Christ. The central plank of the Logos-Sarx model is the lack of a theological role for the soul of Christ. In contrast, the Logos-Anthropos model conceives of the incarnation as the joining of the eternal Word to a full humanity, such that all human capacities are activated, especially the soul of Christ. For Grillmeier, though each model has its strengths and weaknesses, the Logos-Sarx model is plainly inferior because it fails to give a theological role to the full humanity of Christ.

When evaluating Athanasius’s corpus, Grillmeier concludes that Christ’s soul was a physical reality for Athanasius but not a “theological factor” in his christological schema.^[12] “We have Athanasius’s remarkable procedure of making the ‘flesh’ of Christ the physical subject of experiences which normally have their place in the soul.”^[13] Assessing Athanasius’s Tome to the Antiochenes, a work that specifically identifies a human soul in Christ, Grillmeier grants that the soul of Christ is present, but in a “physical” not “theological” sense.^[14] In the end, however, he concedes that for Athanasius, the incarnation meant that “the Logos is man” and rates the Athanasian approach as preferable to that of Antioch because it provides for a unified subject in Christ (the Logos).^[15]

Richard Hanson, in his monumental history of the fourth-century conflict, delivered another shot across the bow of Athanasian Christology. Hanson famously describes Athanasius’s approach to the Word and the flesh as amounting to a “space-suit Christology”—that is, for Athanasius the Word’s relation to his own body is no closer than an astronaut to his space suit. He agrees with earlier critiques that Athanasius all but ignores the human mind and soul of Christ, and additionally finds no place in Athanasius’s portrayal of Christ either for suffering or for the cross. For Hanson, “whatever else the Logos incarnate is in Athanasius’ account of him, he is not a human being.”^[16]

The most detailed censure of Athanasian Christology comes from Christopher Beeley, for whom “decentering Athanasius in the grand picture of fourth-century orthodoxy” is an explicit goal.^[17] For Beeley, it is not only that Athanasius has no use for the human soul in Christ; the greater fault is that Athanasius’s Christ has no real contact with suffering and so with our humanity. By making the body or the flesh of Christ the agent of suffering, emotion, or ignorance in Christ, Athanasius effectively shuts off Christ’s humanity—and so ours—from effective contact with the divine nature.^[18] His Christ is like a superhero immune from the real impact of death.^[19] Beeley acknowledges instances where Athanasius appears to teach a “unitive Christology” but believes these are really indicative of his tacit-Apollinarianism, not a genuinely orthodox Christian account of the unity of Christ.^[20] Turning the tables on the scholarly assumption that Athanasius teaches a unitive Christology, Beeley sharply critiques Athanasius’s picture of Christ as dualistic and so insufficient for accomplishing human redemption:

Athanasius’s Christology is not, in the end, more unitive than that of others, as it is sometimes imagined to be, for his anti-Arian polemic and his Logos Christology both require that the Word be kept separate from human experience, and that humanity as such be eliminated in order to make room for the Word’s dominion. Athanasius imagines divine and human existence as mutually exclusive realms that cannot be brought together without compromising the one or destroying the other.^[21]

It is difficult not to conclude that Beeley interprets Athanasius’s texts in the most unfavorable and unsympathetic way possible. Even when treating the Letter to Epictetus, Beeley charges Athanasius with maintaining his “Word-flesh Christology,”^[22] failing to mention the numerous times in the letter itself where Athanasius insists that by “flesh” he means “man” (anthropos) and that in Christ’s case this certainly includes a soul. The Letter to Epictetus is sharply anti-Apollinarian and teaches a soteriological Christology in which the entirety of human nature is genuinely assumed by the eternal Word in order to bring about its transformation.

Another line of scholarship, while admitting limitations or shortcomings in Athanasius’s view of Christ, defends him against the charge of being a tacit-Apollinarian. In his penetrating study of Athanasius’s theology, Khaled Anatolios argues that Athanasius’s view of Christ is framed as it is precisely in order to ensure that it is the divine Word who genuinely experiences human life and suffering.^[23] For Athanasius, the crucial point of the incarnation is the direct and unmediated relation between the divine Son (and the divine power) and the human race. Through a careful exegesis of Athanasius’s texts, Anatolios deflects the charge that Athanasius teaches a “space-suit Christology” and shows how Athanasius, by claiming that the flesh/body of the Word is “proper” to the Word, forges the strongest possible relation between the Word and his assumed humanity:

Thus the hermeneutical key to understanding Athanasius’s Christology is the paradoxical relation between God and the world whereby the total otherness between the two natures is “bridged over” by the initiative of divine grace. Through the incarnation of the Word, and the appropriation of our condition by the divine subject, this “bridge” amounts to our deification through participation in the Logos.^[24]

Anatolios sums up the christological achievement of Athanasius: “As Athanasius saw very clearly . . . in Jesus Christ, we are truly and definitively ‘joined’ to God in a deifying communion.”^[25] Where Beeley sees in Athanasius’s Christology an unbridgeable duality, Anatolios discovers a genuinely bridged, deifying communion.

In a similar way, John Behr rejects the Logos-Sarx paradigm for Athanasius’s Christology. Admitting a potential imbalance in the way that Athanasius describes Christ as fully God and fully human,^[26] Behr nonetheless interprets Athanasius’s account of Christ’s divine-human constitution, in direct contrast to Beeley, as enabling the Word to genuinely experience suffering in the human body he has assumed:

The whole being of Jesus Christ is understood, without minimizing its physical reality, in terms of the Word of God, for it is the Word that has become flesh. Finally, as Athanasius makes explicitly clear in the very next sentence, the Word takes a body, not to provide a means of dwelling impassibly in the world, but so that the Word can undergo death in a body capable of dying.^[27]

Where Beeley sees Athanasius creating a chasm between the Word and genuine human experience and suffering, Behr believes that Athanasius provides a means by which the Word authentically experiences human suffering: “It is emphatically not that one ‘part’ of him (his body) suffered, while another ‘part’ (his divinity) remained above suffering; such a resolution would dissolve the paradox. . . . Both of the elements must be maintained and, at the same time, attributed to one and the same subject.”^[28]

Alvyn Pettersen offers an explanation for why Athanasius emphasizes the divine, rather than the human, in Christ: “Athanasius is not primarily concerned with the anthropology of the Incarnation; his interest is the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what’ of Christ’s humanity. . . . There is then an absence of stress on the humanity; but it is not underplayed.”^[29] Rather than viewing this as a dualistic Christology that fails to connect the Word with our humanity, Pettersen interprets Athanasius as presenting a Christology aimed at deification:

A potentially static view gives way to a dynamic view. Ignorance, fear, suffering and death are admitted, but only to be alleviated. In his dispelling ignorance, lightening suffering and conquering death, there is the divinizing of everyone in Christ. What superficially may appear to be inchoate Docetism is in fact pervasive soteriology.^[30]

Soteriology

In their landmark study, Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (1981), Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh launched a formidable challenge to the traditional orthodox reading of the fourth-century struggle between Arius and Athanasius and proposed a new paradigm for viewing this conflict. Rather than placing the emphasis on metaphysics and the ontology of God, they argue that the debates of the fourth century are, at root, a disagreement over the doctrine of salvation. The core issue is “a clash of two soteriologies, each with its own understanding of the spiritual progress or sanctification of believers.”^[31] The chief distinction is one of will versus nature: in the first version progress is made through willed obedience; in the second, through attachment to an immutable God-man who secures our stability. “It is this Athanasian confidence in the stability of divine nature over and against his fears for the instability of human nature which constitutes the very heart of both his Christology and his soteriology.”^[32] For Gregg and Groh, the pivotal issue is whether the Son of God is changeable, and in their view Athanasius taught a doctrine of salvation that was captive, at least in part, to a Platonic conception of immutability: “To biblical Platonists like Bishops Alexander and Athanasius such a changeability in the redeemer was unthinkable.”^[33] The thesis that Arius was foundationally committed to a particular soteriology has not received universal acceptance, but Gregg and Groh succeeded in bringing soteriological issues to the forefront of the study of Arius and Athanasius.

Related to Gregg and Groh’s characterization of Athanasian soteriology is a long-standing critique that Athanasius teaches a “physicalist” doctrine of salvation, whereby Christ assumed and healed our nature in himself (through the incarnation), such that the human race is somehow automatically restored by solidarity with this new humanity in Christ. Christopher Beeley expresses what many have found to be defective in Athanasius’s view of salvation:

Athanasius thus presents us with a fairly unique example of what many modern readers have assumed most of the Greek fathers held, namely, divinization and salvation (of a sort) at the point of incarnation rather than in the passion and resurrection. Likewise, Athanasius presents Christ’s saving effects as being universal for humanity as a whole.^[34]

The problems with the approach here attributed to Athanasius are twofold. First, this view of salvation seems to depend on a theory that Christ assumed not an individual and concrete human nature but a universal human nature that then has universal (and automatic) effects on all of humanity. But does this not cut the ground out from under the doctrine of the incarnation and the Son’s sharing in our actual, concrete humanity? The second perceived problem is that the passion and cross of Christ become secondary and even redundant. If Christ healed and renewed our humanity through the incarnation, what role does the cross actually play in human redemption? According to Richard Hanson, “one of the curious results of this theology of the incarnation is that it almost does away with a doctrine of the Atonement.” Athanasius believes in the atonement but cannot really explain why it is needed: “Once the Logos has taken human flesh on himself, in a sense, certainly in principle, redemption is accomplished.”^[35]

This critique of Athanasian soteriology has been contested. Norman Russell suggests that in Athanasius “a fruitful approach is perhaps to see Christ’s humanity as having a representative significance. . . . The deification of humanity in principle, however, still leaves salvation to be appropriated by individuals.”^[36] Russell identifies two parallel lines for deification in Athanasius: the ontological and the ethical. The first is brought about by the incarnation and is made effective through baptism; the second involves growth in virtue and is portrayed most fully in Athanasius’s Life of Antony.^[37] Importantly, Russell points to the sacramental appropriation of salvation in Athanasius’s thought: “What is often described as ‘physical redemption’ is actually transmitted sacramentally.”^[38] Alvyn Pettersen draws a similar conclusion, that the universal saving significance of Christ’s humanity is balanced by a concern for personal appropriation: “Athanasius’ Christ is a representative and not a collective figure. This recognition allows Athanasius to do justice to both the close bond between Christ and all people and his standing over against everyone, working the salvation of all, calling for repentance and ultimately judging everyone.”^[39] Thomas Weinandy makes the further claim that “Athanasius recognizes that the Son did not take upon himself some untainted generic humanity, but rather he assumed the fallen humanity of the race of Adam.”^[40]

John Behr offers a reading of Athanasius’s classic text On the Incarnation that directly counters the claim that Athanasius minimizes the cross and the atonement. In Behr’s view, On the Incarnation is not so much about the Word taking flesh but is, in fact, an “apology for the Cross.”^[41] For Athanasius, the term incarnation “does not simply refer to the birth of Jesus from Mary . . . but rather refers to this birth when seen from, and then described in, the perspective of the Cross.”^[42] Behr takes Hanson and other scholars to task for failing to discern Athanasius’s meaning, and so for faulting Athanasius for views he does not hold (that is, that redemption is secured simply by virtue of the incarnation). In Behr’s view, rather than minimizing the passion and cross of Christ, Athanasius places them at the center of his narrative of salvation: “There is no question but that Athanasius understands the incarnation in terms of the Passion: the Savior takes a body to die, for it is only through death itself that death is overthrown and life resurrected.”^[43]

In his account of soteriology and the life of grace in Athanasius, Khaled Anatolios rejects the characterizations proposed by Gregg and Groh and instead argues for an integration of divine initiative and human response in Athanasius.^[44] The holiness and stability that the Word brings to his own assumed humanity accomplishes this very thing in the lives of Christians. But this is not an automatic effect occurring apart from human effort and striving. Rather, it is precisely because Christians have received the divine life of Christ through the Spirit that they are encouraged and required to strive for holiness. For Anatolios, Antony is the great model for this Athanasian account of salvation and grace:

Thus Antony’s spirituality, as presented by Athanasius, is not one where divine aid precludes human effort but rather one in which divine aid is seen to be an inducement to greater human effort, with the confidence that comes from trusting that this effort is guaranteed success through the victory of the Incarnate Word.^[45]

The Reputation and Character of Athanasius

An account of the contemporary reception of Athanasius would be incomplete without a brief summary of the intense dispute over his character and reputation. As we saw in the case of Isaac Newton and John Henry Newman, how one evaluates Athanasius’s teaching tends to line up with how one views his character. This tendency to align theological and moral evaluations of Athanasius continues in the contemporary period, though some scholars, aware of this alignment, consciously resist equating an evaluation of Athanasius’s doctrine with an estimation of his moral character.

Athanasius seems to provoke both strong admiration and fierce dislike in equal measure; people tend either to rally to his defense or to go on the warpath against him. In the early modern period, Isaac Newton and William Whiston represent the tendency to discredit Athanasius and to overturn what they perceive as the false aura of holiness and sanctity that surrounds him. This public discrediting of Athanasius gained new momentum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has continued to this day. Duane Arnold helpfully catalogues the pro and contra Athanasius writers of this period.^[46] We will examine the moral critique of Athanasius through one of his most outspoken recent critics, Timothy Barnes.

Writing not as a theologian but as a historian, Barnes seeks to set the historical record straight concerning the episcopal behavior of Athanasius. In the opening line of the preface to his study of Athanasius and Constantius, Barnes unveils the goal of the work: “The central purpose of this study is to use modern techniques of historical research to probe behind Athanasius’ misrepresentations, many of which have held sway for sixteen centuries.”^[47] It becomes plain that Barnes is not approaching the historical evidence as a neutral observer; he comes with the force of a prosecuting attorney to make his case against Athanasius and overturn what he believes to be long-held misrepresentations. He presumes from the start that Athanasius’s own testimony is tainted and cannot be trusted: “This study starts from the presumption that Athanasius consistently misrepresented central facts about his ecclesiastical career, in particular about his relationship with the emperor Constantine and his three sons . . . and about his own standing within the Christian church in the eastern half of the empire.”^[48] For Barnes, the very fact that Athanasius was heralded in his own day as an impressive figure provides damning evidence against his presumed humility: “He could not have cut such an impressive figure had he not been conspicuously lacking in the Christian virtues of meekness and humility.”^[49]

Barnes rehearses in detail the charges of misbehavior leveled against Athanasius and concludes that “Athanasius exercised power and protected his position in Alexandria by the systematic use of violence and intimidation.”^[50] Further, “Athanasius’ primary techniques in the History of the Arians are suppression and distortion. . . . The omissions are matched by tendentious misrepresentations. . . . As a result, the History of the Arians is a systematically deceptive work.”^[51] This characterization matches Barnes’s earlier estimation of Athanasius’s moral character: “Like a modern gangster, he evoked widespread mistrust, proclaimed total innocence—and usually succeeded in evading conviction of specific charges.”^[52] Barnes accounts for Athanasius’s popularity and his ability to persuade so many of the rightness of his cause by pointing to Athanasius’s skill as a liar and deceiver. He was not only a bad man but also clever in convincing others that he was not.^[53]

A second line of contemporary scholarship acknowledges deep flaws in Athanasius’s character but is more moderate in estimation. Richard Hanson makes reference to “the darker side” of Athanasius’s character and, accepting the case made by Barnes at least in part, judges that he is at points guilty of “equivocation, not to say mendacity,” and that he behaved “like an employer of thugs hired to intimidate his enemies.”^[54] Yet, Hanson acknowledges more virtuous aspects to Athanasius’s character: “That he had courage nobody could possibly deny. . . . And as far as tenacity of purpose goes, his career speaks for itself. He was not lastingly vindictive. . . . By the time he died he had been reconciled to almost all of his early enemies.”^[55] Frances Young attempts to maintain a balance between the “good tradition” surrounding the figure of Athanasius and the “revisionist picture” presented by Barnes and others in the late twentieth century.^[56] She allows that “there seems to have been a pitiless streak in his character” but cautions against going too far in blackening his character: “This ‘deflation’ of Athanasius may go too far; some elements in the good tradition are certainly right.”^[57]

A third contemporary “reading” of Athanasius, while admitting shortcomings, leans toward the positive view of his character. Surprisingly, Adolph von Harnack, though a strong critic of Athanasius’s theology, provides a glowing estimation of his character: “In the midst of this Athanasius alone in the East stood like a rock in the sea. If we measure him by the standards of his time we can discover nothing ignoble or mean about him. The favorite charge of hierarchical imperiousness has something naïve about it.”^[58]

Duane Arnold has written the most thorough study to date of the early career of Athanasius, complete with a comprehensive review and evaluation of the charges against him. Sifting the evidence from Athanasius’s day and other sources that have come to light more recently, Arnold cautiously concludes that Athanasius’s critics, ancient and contemporary, have not made a compelling case against him:

To assert an absolute or certain historical knowledge concerning the character of Athanasius is, of course, difficult, if not impossible. It is possible, however, to arrive at certain reasonable conclusions on the basis of a critical examination of the documentary evidence at hand in order to assess the probability of the truthfulness of the accounts contained within such materials. . . . If this rigorous standard of judgment is applied, it must be admitted that the more vituperative critics of Athanasius have failed to provide clear and convincing evidence for a revisionist portrait of the bishop of Alexandria.^[59]

Arnold judges the two extreme positions on Athanasius to be uncritical: one is too accepting, the other too partisan. He admits that Athanasius “is not at first sight a wholly attractive personality. Intrigue seems to have surrounded him from the earliest days of his episcopate. ..... He shared many of the aggressive qualities of his age.”^[60] He further proposes that “the application of modern standards of conduct upon fourth-century personalities is sometimes less helpful in any enquiry of this sort.”^[61] Nevertheless, he arrives at the conclusion that

there is far less evidence for the violent and duplicitous character of Athanasius than might be supposed from a cursory reading of Hanson, Barnes, or the other current critics. . . . If the many accusations against Athanasius during the early years of his episcopate cannot be dismissed out of hand, they must at least be considered unproved.^[62]

Khaled Anatolios follows Arnold in sounding a cautionary note on the ability of historical research to make firm judgments on past controversies: “We also have to concede that the application of historiography to rendering moral judgments of personal character is a complex and perilous matter, especially if it ignores the historicity and variability of norms of conduct in different cultures and different times.”^[63] He concludes, however, with a positive appreciation of Athanasius’s character: “Above all, a judicious evaluation of Athanasius’s character must give due weight to the undeniable fact, conceded even by his most vehement of his modern critics, that he eventually gained the overwhelming support and admiration of his own people.”^[64]

Conclusion

Athanasius possesses a rich legacy in the Christian tradition. But from first to last this legacy has been contested. In his own lifetime, a fierce battle was fought over his fitness for episcopal office and the adequacy of his teaching on the Son of God, with allies and opponents outspoken on either side. With the triumph of Nicene orthodoxy, Athanasius became an iconic figure who stood for the truth against all odds and preserved the biblical doctrine of the full divinity of the Son. Gregory of Nazianzen’s panegyric to Athanasius superbly captures this deep appreciation for both the teaching and character of the great Alexandrian bishop. This view of Athanasius is the dominant picture that remains in the churches of the East and West today.

The story of the reception of Athanasius is one in which a selection of his teaching is appropriated and applied to new questions. In the East, a generous portion of his writings was readily available; he was revered, respected, and often cited, even though his theology, per se, does not appear to have played a primary, foundational role in the formation of Byzantine thought. In the West, a narrower portion of his genuine works was available; ironically, he was best known for a work that he did not compose, the Athanasian Creed. In the early modern period, as his writings became more readily available in the West, a new appropriation of his thought occurred, but critics of both his theology and his character reemerged. This critical scouring of the career and writings of Athanasius has marked the contemporary era and renewed the debate over his theological and personal legacy. As he was in his own time, he remains today a sharply contested figure.

Whatever one may conclude about the charges levelled against his episcopal conduct, the theological legacy of Athanasius remains impressive. In the words of John Behr, “this shadow side to the legendary figure does not do much to reduce his significance for Christian history and theology: Nicene Christianity exists by virtue of his constancy and vision.”^[65] Khaled Anatolios expands on the significance of Athanasius for the Christian tradition:

What is of enduring significance for the Christian tradition, however, is not ultimately so much the personality of Athanasius—which cannot be wholly reconstructed with any objective certainty—as his central conviction that genuine Christianity stands or falls by the confession of the full divinity of the Word. It is as a theologian who gave consistent and tireless expression to this claim of faith, and not as a paragon of meekness, mildness, and politesse in debate (conceived according to modern standards!), that Athanasius continues to be a towering figure among the pioneering architects of the Christian tradition.^[66]

What I find most striking is that Athanasius consistently landed, often as a pioneer, on the “orthodox” side of many important questions and issues. It was Athanasius who in the later part of his career untiringly explained the significance of Nicaea’s confession that the Son is homoousion with the Father and helped to forge an alliance that eventually resulted in the pro-Nicene consensus. It was Athanasius who offered a first draft of a defense of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, showing not only that the Spirit is fully God but also that through the Spirit human beings can attain holiness and deification. It was Athanasius who, late in life, offered an account of the person of Christ, how the single person of the Word was through the incarnation both divine and human at once. And it was Athanasius who, through the Life of Antony and his own alliance with the Egyptian desert, shaped an ascetical theology for both East and West and set a pattern for cooperative partnership between the desert and the city. Even when we take into account the limitations, omissions, and inadequacies of Athanasius’s thought, this legacy amounts to a remarkable accomplishment, aptly summed up by Frances Young:

He was to become known as the “Father of Orthodoxy,” and deserved this title not merely because of his stubborn resistance to every attack upon his person and the principles for which he stood, but also because of his careful closeness to the nuances of theological development so that the orthodox tradition owes an enormous debt to his theological writings. In the later theological controversies, he will be the one all sides seek to own; and he alone of the Eastern Fathers had an immediate, direct, and lasting influence in the West.^[67]

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