Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
I have many people to thank for their assistance on this project. Above all, I am grateful to Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering for their invitation to contribute to the series and for their helpful feedback on the first draft of this book. One of the pleasures of writing a volume in this series was that of being able to work again with Rodney Clapp and the rest of the staff at Baker Academic. Even before I had signed on to this project, I had worked through several Athanasius texts with graduate students in a seminar in Christology. Thanks to Brad Littlejohn, Justin Hughes, Anna van den Broek, Lisa Beyeler, and Ahn Jung Jin for their questions, challenges, and discussions. Anna also prepared indexes. Donny Linnemeyer proofed the first draft of the manuscript and caught many infelicities and errors; it is a better book because of his assistance. My oldest son, Woelke, hosted me during a research week in Durham, drove me to the Duke Divinity School library, and found productive ways to spend his time while I hunkered over a musty copy of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca and worked slowly and with exuberant delight through the Discourses against the Arians. Throughout the project, Woelke was an invaluable research aid, providing copies of articles to which I had no access in northern Idaho.
As I studied the life and treatises of Athanasius, I often marveled, and occasionally winced, at his violent intensity. On the whole, I think Athanasius was on the side of the angels, a salutary antidote to the wilting cowardice that has too often passed as piety in the modern world. Athanasius possessed, or was possessed by, zeal of biblical proportions, the zeal of an Elijah, a Moses, one of the judges. Matthias Ehud Leithart, Woelke’s second son and my second grandchild, bears the name of one of those zealous judges—Ehud, the left-handed assassin of Eglon of Moab—and I dedicate this book to him in the hope that he may grow to find Athanasius as inspiring as I have and so live up to his name.