The Reception of Athanasius in the Western Tradition

Later generations of Latin Christianity, like their counterparts in the Greek East, remembered Athanasius as the heroic champion of orthodoxy and as a propagator of asceticism.^[1]

—David Gwynn

As in the East, Athanasius was received in the West with great enthusiasm as the champion of Nicene orthodoxy. In both conduct and teaching, he stood as the exemplar of the faithful bishop and servant of God.^[2] Building upon a longstanding medieval tradition, in 1568 Pope Pius V declared Athanasius—along with Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen, and John Chrysostom—one of the four great Eastern doctors of the church.

Two features characterize the Western reception of Athanasius: his texts were not as widely known in the West as they were in the East, and he was best known for a text transmitted in his name that he did not author. David Gwynn sums up the situation:

To a greater degree than in the east . . . the western memory of Athanasius became increasingly separated from the bishop’s original writings and historical context. Relatively few of Athanasius’ Greek works were widely read or translated into Latin. . . . It is therefore unsurprising that throughout the Middle Ages Athanasius would be best known in the west for a creed that he did not write.^[3]

Frank Cross concurs, pointing to the few genuine texts translated and known in the West up to the end of the middle ages:

In the West, however, apart from the Vita Antonii in its almost contemporary translation by Evagrius, St. Athanasius’s writings were little esteemed in the Middle Ages. It would seem that few, if any, of his treatises were translated until a quite late date, and that the references to his genuine works which occur in St. Thomas Aquinas were derived ultimately from Greek catenae.^[4]

We will begin the account of the Western reception of Athanasius by gathering up testimony from the Latin fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries. These give an indication of how Athanasius was perceived by the great teachers and authorities in the West shortly after his death. Then we will turn to an examination of the Athanasian Creed: its origin, content, and compatibility with the teaching of Athanasius. Finally, we will briefly consider Athanasius’s reception among the Reformers of the sixteenth century as a platform for the later controversies over Athanasius’s legacy in the West.

Athanasius in the Western Fathers

The major Western fathers of the late fourth and early fifth centuries—Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Leo the Great—all acknowledge Athanasius by name and express appreciation for his life and teaching in a variety of ways. Hilary of Poitiers (d. ca. 368), like Basil the Great, was a contemporary of Athanasius. He has been given the epithet “Athanasius of the West” because of his defense of the Nicene faith, expressed in the twelve-book work De Trinitate, and “his career does bear a certain resemblance to that of the Alexandrian.”^[5] In a work composed in 356, the first year of his exile in the Eastern empire, Hilary testifies directly to Athanasius’s faithfulness in defense of the Creed of Nicaea: “Holding fast to truth he had vanquished the Arian plague in the whole of Egypt and when witnesses conspired against him on that account, a false set of charges was prepared.”^[6] But despite this admiration for Athanasius, Hilary never cites him or refers to him in the De Trinitate, and scholars tend to align his theology more closely with Basil than with Athanasius. David Gwynn sums up Hilary’s relationship to Athanasius as a paradigm for the Western tradition’s reception of the great Alexandrian: “Hilary’s writings set a pattern for Athanasius’ legacy in the West, admiration for the Alexandrian’s defence of Nicaea but little detailed knowledge of this thought and writings.”^[7]

Ambrose, an avid reader of Greek, probably had most direct contact with Athanasius’s writings of all the Western fathers and seems to draw upon them directly for his treatise on virginity and his anti-Arian work, De Fide.^[8] Jerome refers to Athanasius on several occasions, mostly in a general way having to do with his faithfulness to the truth, to his flights, and especially to his connection with St. Antony of the Desert.^[9] In a letter to Laeta instructing her on the details of her daughter’s education, Jerome commends all the works of Athanasius for reading, along with those of Cyprian and Hilary of Poitiers.^[10] Notably, Athanasius finds a place in Jerome’s Lives of Illustrious Men (written after 393). In that account, Jerome supplies a list of the writings of Athanasius then currently in circulation:

Athanasius bishop of Alexandria, hard pressed by the wiles of the Arians, fled to Constans emperor of Gaul. Returning thence with letters and, after the death of the emperor, again taking refuge in flight, he kept in hiding until the accession of Jovian, when he returned to the church and died in the reign of Valens. Various works by him are in circulation; two books Against the nations, one Against Valens and Ursacius, On virginity, very many On the persecutions of the Arians, also On the titles of the Psalms and Life of Anthony the monk, also Festal epistles and other works too numerous to mention.”^[11]

Though we could wish Jerome had filled in this list in greater detail, he gives evidence that numerous of Athanasius’s works were circulating at the end of the fourth century, at least in the East where Jerome was living.

The few references to Athanasius in Augustine’s vast corpus show his basic awareness of Athanasius’s career, flights, and stout defense of the faith.^[12] Augustine also acknowledges reading Athanasius directly but does not name specific works.^[13] In a fleeting but intriguing reference in the Confessions, Augustine conveys Athanasius’s advice on how to sing the psalms with simplicity, possibly indicating some knowledge of Athanasius’s Letter to Marcellinus on the Psalms.^[14] But according to David Gwynn, it was Augustine’s encounter with Athanasius’s Life of Antony, recounted in the Confessions,^[15] that had the greatest impact on Augustine: “It is no small tribute to the legacy of Athanasius that this work played such a role in the formation of one of the leading minds of Latin Christianity.”^[16]

From Leo the Great we possess just one reference to Athanasius. In a letter written to Julian of Cos in 452, Leo informs Julian that he is sending him a copy of Athanasius’s Letter to Epictetus, because “in it [Athanasius] has explained the Incarnation of the Word so clearly and carefully that he already beat down both Nestorius and Eutyches by anticipation in the heresies of those times. Let the followers of Eutyches and Dioscorus dare to accuse this man of such great authority of either ignorance or heresy.”^[17] Leo finds ample support in Athanasius for his own teaching on the full humanity and divinity of Christ.

The testimony of these Western fathers displays a basic knowledge of Athanasius’s life, a deep appreciation for his witness and teaching, and a recognition of his unquestioned authority in matters of faith. Evidence for knowledge of his written works varies; several of his works are referenced and he is claimed on occasion as an authority, but perhaps only in Ambrose does Athanasius serve as a primary theological source. For them all, Athanasius functions as the undoubted touchstone of orthodoxy, but he does not function as a primary theological well from which they drink. What is conspicuously absent from these Western writers (up to 450 CE) is any reference to the Athanasian Creed, for the simple reason that it had not yet been composed.

The Athanasian Creed

The Athanasian Creed, also known as the Quicunque vult (from its opening words), served as the primary written testimony to Athanasius in the West. For more than a thousand years this eloquent confession, alongside the Life of Antony, was the dominant written work through which Western Christians believed they heard the voice of Athanasius.^[18]The Life of Antony communicated the spiritual teaching of the Egyptian desert; the Athanasian Creed conveyed authoritative teaching on the Trinity and the incarnation.^[19] As David Gwynn maintains, “it is a document of fundamental importance to the Western legacy of Athanasius.”^[20]

The Creed first appears in the extant sources in the writings of Caesarius of Arles, whose tenure as bishop ran from 502 to 542. In a collection of Caesarius’s sermons, identified only in 1931, the text of the Quicunque appears in full under the title Fides Sancti Athanasii (The Faith of St. Athanasius).^[21] Caesarius prefaces the Creed with the following description: “We have first of all written out in this collection the Catholic faith itself as the holy fathers defined it, for we ought both ourselves frequently to read it and to instruct others in it.”^[22] Though scholars have long assumed that Athanasius’s name was attached to the Creed at a much later date, J. N. D. Kelly believes there is good reason to conclude that Caesarius himself may have entitled it “the faith of Athanasius.” The evidence of the manuscript itself points in this direction, but in addition Caesarius made a habit of compiling work drawn from the fathers and publishing it under their names; in two cases, certain manuscripts indicate that he published his own work under the name of Athanasius.^[23] Whether or not Caesarius himself is the actual author of the Athanasian Creed, he may have been responsible for its title and wide circulation.

The popularity of the Quicunque grew apace in the Middle Ages. In the seventh century, it appears in the formal declarations of the fourth Council of Toledo (633) and the Synod of Autun (670); by the eighth century, commentaries on the Creed begin to appear, and the Creed begins to find its way into the liturgy, first within psalters and then as a canticle sung by priests. From the ninth century onward, “we find the Athanasian Creed in regular use throughout Europe in the office.”^[24] At what point the Athanasian Creed became linked with the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed as the “three creeds” of the church remains unclear, but certainly by the thirteenth century this linkage of the three creeds was firmly in place.^[25]

Thomas Aquinas illustrates how the Athanasian Creed was viewed and used in the high scholastic period. Of the approximately thirty references to Athanasius by name in the Summa Theologiae, two-thirds refer to the Athanasian Creed, which Thomas receives as coming from Athanasius himself. In one instance, Thomas asks whether it belongs to the Sovereign Pontiff (the pope) to draw up a symbol of faith. The third objection points to Athanasius as a bishop who also drew up a symbol of the faith: “Athanasius was not the Sovereign Pontiff, but patriarch of Alexandria, and yet he published a symbol which is sung in the Church.”^[26] Responding to this objection, Thomas proposes that

Athanasius drew up a declaration of faith, not under the form of a symbol, but rather by way of an exposition of doctrine, as appears from his way of speaking. But since it contained briefly the whole truth of faith, it was accepted by the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff, so as to be considered as a rule of faith.^[27]

Thomas rightly grasps the expository quality of the Quicunque, and though he was mistaken in attributing the Creed to Athanasius, he accurately describes its origin and evolution: it was drawn up originally as a concise exposition of the faith and only gradually attained the status of a formal liturgical creed sung in the church.^[28]

The medieval tradition of the three creeds was largely accepted by both sides in the Reformation debate. Pope Pius V confirmed the use of the Athanasian Creed in the revised breviary (1568), to be sung at the office of prime on Sundays. The Reformers by and large welcomed the Athanasian Creed as a faithful and useful statement of scriptural truth. In the Lutheran Book of Concord (1580), the Quicunque is given equal honor with the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds; the Belgic Confession of the Reformed church (1566) accords it authoritative status; and the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles declare it as one of the creeds that ought to be received and believed.^[29] As we shall see, this reception by the Reformation of a resolutely Trinitarian creed, ostensibly from the pen of Athanasius, would lead to a firm rejection of this Creed when the doctrine of the Trinity came under fire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and would put the figure of Athanasius directly in the crosshairs.

Doubts about Athanasius’s authorship of the Creed surfaced in the sixteenth century but had little immediate impact on its reception. But by the seventeenth century, the arguments against Athanasian authorship proved overwhelming, not least because the Creed’s confession that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son could not be credibly attributed to Athanasius. “The collapse of the conservative defence was as complete as it was sudden. Henceforth it was taken as settled, in all circles where scholarship prevailed, that Athanasius could not have written the creed.”^[30] Though use of the Quicunque continued especially in the Lutheran and Anglican traditions, from the seventeenth century forward it was no longer received as representing the exact faith of Athanasius.

Given its importance for the reception of Athanasius in the West, some attention to the theology of the Athanasian Creed and its probable sources is warranted. The text of forty-two verses is neatly bound by an introduction and conclusion that act as parallel bookends. They announce the content of the text as “the catholic faith” (fides catholica) and caution readers that one’s salvation depends on holding to this faith fully and securely. The main text is divided into two parts that treat the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation respectively, with a bridge between them that sums up the Trinitarian section and introduces the incarnational section (vv. 28–29).^[31] The opening verses of the Trinitarian section display the basic theology of the Creed:

This, then, is the Catholic faith: We worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity, without confusing the Persons or separating the substance; for indeed the Person of the Father is one, [the Person] of the Son another, [the Person] of the Holy Spirit another; but the divinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is one, their glory equal, and their majesty coeternal.^[32]

A striking feature of these lines is the carefully balanced handling of Trinity and unity, of threeness and oneness. The distinctness of the persons receives significant emphasis but is matched by attention to the oneness of the Godhead and the attributes that pertain to it. There is no evidence here of the supposed Western Trinitarian approach that begins with the common essence and then derives the persons.^[33] As the exposition unfolds, this neat balance between Trinity and unity continues. As Kelly observes, the Creed refutes two primary heresies, Sabellianism and Arianism, without naming either.^[34] The first confused or merged the persons; the second failed to accord full divinity to the Son (and the Spirit). Through careful and balanced phrases, the Quicunque upholds the distinction of the persons and the entire divinity of each and, at the same time, the oneness of God. The Trinitarian section ends where it began, by holding in balance Trinity and unity: “Thus in all things, as has been stated above, both Trinity in unity and unity in Trinity must be worshipped.” By repeating the terms in reverse order, the Creed refuses to give precedence to either aspect.

A brief section on the incarnation follows (vv. 29–37). Again, the balance of truths marks the text: there is one Lord Jesus Christ but he is both God and a human being at once. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is both “perfect man” and “perfect God,” equal to the Father in divinity, less than the Father in humanity. Emphasis on the single subject in Christ shines through: “Although he is God and man, [he] is nevertheless not two but one Christ.”^[35] Kelly persuasively shows that this section is tacitly anti-Nestorian, and so must have been composed after Ephesus and Chalcedon; though the Creed lacks the term nature when speaking of Christ’s divinity and humanity, it reflects the Christology of the Chalcedonian definition.^[36]

Once it was established that the Athanasian Creed was not penned by Athanasius, the hunt was on to detect the real author by means of internal evidence and external attestation.^[37] The leading hypotheses have identified three primary candidates: Ambrose of Milan, Vincent of Lérins, and Caesarius of Arles. The parallels with Ambrose are impressive, and at first blush the case for his authorship appears strong. His corpus contains many parallels to the phrases in the Quicunque, like the following: “Both the Father is Lord, and the Son is Lord. . . . Yet there are not two Lords, but one Lord. Because both the Father is God and the Son is God; but there is one God.”^[38] The prime difficulty with this hypothesis is that the parallels with Augustine are even more impressive, as indicated in the following passage from Augustine’s De Trinitate:

The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God; and the Father is good, the Son is good, the Holy Spirit is good; and the Father is omnipotent, the Son is omnipotent, the Holy Spirit is omnipotent: yet there are not three Gods, nor three good, nor three omnipotent, but one who is God, good, omnipotent, the Trinity itself.^[39]

For a host of reasons, the search for the author has narrowed the focus to the school of Lérins in Gaul; the Athanasian Creed not only mirrors the writings of the leading lights of this school but the internal evidence involving style, vocabulary, and rhythm confirms the strong likelihood that the Creed was composed in this milieu. Kelly examines in detail the case for both Vincent and Caesarius, concluding that neither was the author but that both probably contributed to the formation of the Creed.^[40]

Actual authorship aside, the crucial question remains: Does the Athanasian Creed amount to a kind of deceit whereby a theology foreign to Athanasius’s thought was smuggled in under his name? Or does the Creed reasonably represent the thought and theology of Athanasius, even if not his precise way of stating it? In other words, did the Western tradition, by receiving this Creed, imbibe a false understanding of Athanasius’s “faith,” or was his thought fairly represented in the eloquent, balanced cadences that were sung in choir week after week?

If Caesarius of Arles is, in fact, responsible for the title of the Creed, “The Faith of Athanasius,” there is no reason to suppose that he was attempting to dupe people by means of a forged authorship. Athanasius was plainly the great hero of Trinitarian faith, the icon who contended for the orthodox understanding of the Triune God. His Letter to Epictetus was also recognized in the West as a crucial testimony to the truth of the incarnation. By entitling the Quicunque “The Faith of Athanasius,” Caesarius may have intended nothing more than to identify “the Catholic faith” concerning the Trinity and the incarnation with the faith of Athanasius, the giant who had contended for both.

But does the Athanasian Creed, in fact, line up with the “faith of Athanasius”? Though the phrasing is different, it is not difficult to see the same faith expressed in the following selection from Athanasius’s oration against the Arians: “But they are two, because the Father is Father and is not the Son, and the Son is Son and not the Father, but the nature is one, for the offspring is like its parent, for it is his image. And all that is the Father’s is the Son’s. Wherefore the Son is not another God.”^[41] Nearly the same form of expression appears in Athanasius’s successor, Cyril of Alexandria:

The holy and consubstantial Trinity is distinguished by the differences in names and the qualities and attributes of the persons. The Father is the Father and not the Son; the Son is the Son and not the Father; and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit, belonging to the divine nature. Yet the Trinity is summed up in the same essence, giving us not three but one God.^[42]

Likewise, the burden of Athanasius’s Letter to Epictetus is to uphold the real humanity of the Word himself but at the same time to distinguish the divinity of the Word from the human body that he assumed.

But the Saviour having in very truth become man, the salvation of the whole man was brought about. For if the Word were in the Body putatively, as they say, and by putative is meant imaginary, it follows that both the salvation and the resurrection of man is apparent only. . . . But truly our salvation is not merely apparent, nor does it extend to the body only, but the whole man, body and soul alike, has truly obtained salvation in the Word Himself.^[43]

Though the terms are different, Athanasius, like the Quicunque, seeks to uphold the single subject in the incarnation (the Word) and, at the same, maintain the full divinity and humanity of the Word.

The inclusion of the phrase “and the Son” (et filio) in the Athanasian Creed is more difficult to square with the faith of Athanasius. He did not speculate on the procession of the Spirit and nowhere in his extant works does he assert that the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son. But nevertheless, in Athanasius (and even more in Cyril) we encounter a conviction that the Spirit is in some way dependent on the Son and that he shines forth “from the Son.”

The language of the Athanasian Creed is well downstream from Athanasius: the terminology is for the most part characteristically Western and the author has thoroughly digested the fruits of the christological controversies of the early fifth century. But as Duane Arnold proposes, the Athanasian Creed is in the main faithful to the teaching of Athanasius: “It is perhaps ironic that a work that he did not write helped to preserve Athanasius’ legacy [in the West] and indeed to promote many of the theological values that he had fought to defend. The fundamental doctrines of the Quicunque are teachings that Athanasius upheld.”^[44] If there is one thing missing from the Quicunque that characteristically marks “the faith of Athanasius,” it is the lack of any mention of salvation and deification. The Athanasian Creed simply sums up the orthodox teaching on the Trinity and incarnation; Athanasius nearly always linked this confession with its goal: the transformation and divinization of the human being.

Conclusion: Athanasius and the Reformers

A wide translation of Athanasius’s works from Greek into Latin occurred in the fifteenth century, fueled by the Renaissance ideal to recover ancient texts.^[45] In general, the reception of Athanasius in the early Reformation was shaped by the late medieval Latin tradition; Athanasius was appealed to especially for defense of the doctrine of the Trinity (and in later centuries, in defense against the anti-Trinitarians).^[46] Unsurprisingly, given their sharp critique of medieval monasticism, the Reformers paid far less attention to the Life of Antony and the call to the ascetic-monastic life. For them, Athanasius was preeminently the great teacher and defender of the doctrine of the Trinity.

For Martin Luther, who engaged in an intensive reading of Athanasius in Erfurt, Athanasius represents above all the authentic witness of faith against heresy; he was the archetype of orthodoxy. Athanasius also serves as an important authority for Philip Melanchthon, who frequently cites On the Incarnation as a witness to true Trinitarian and christological thinking.^[47] We already noted the acknowledgement of the Athanasian Creed as a true witness to the faith in the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican confessions. The one notable exception to this warm reception of Athanasius is John Calvin. He makes no positive use of Athanasius and when pressed about whether he subscribed to the three creeds, replied that he “had pledged his faith to the one God, not to Athanasius whose creed had never been approved by any true church.”^[48]

For the Reformers, the translation of Athanasius’s corpus into Latin was not a landmark event as was the publication of the Greek New Testament. They were not so much captivated by a rediscovery of the fathers for their own sake as they were interested in gathering from the patristic texts testimony to the truths of the faith and the reforms of the church they sought to enact. They largely received the teaching and portrait of Athanasius handed on to them by the medieval tradition, and so viewed him as a beacon of orthodox teaching who taught and contended for the biblical revelation of the Triune God and the incarnation  of  the  Son  of  God.  Others  would  follow,  however, who would, with close inspection, work through the texts of Athanasius, and  who  would  identify  him  either  as  the  champion of  Christian orthodoxy or the arch-heretic who turned the church in the wrong direction.

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