Justified True Belief

(●) The bishop who spent seventeen and a half of his forty-five years as bishop in exile rather than let the church call the Son of God a creature. + Imagine a man who is thrown out of his job five separate times by four different governments, who spends two of every five years on the run or in foreign cities, and who each time comes home to the same post and picks up where he left off. That was the career of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria from 328 until his death in 373. What he would not do was sign. In 325 the Council of Nicaea had settled on a single Greek word for how the Son stands to the Father, homoousios, usually rendered "of one substance" or "of one essence." It means that whatever it is to be God, the Son is that, and not some lesser thing made to look like it. For the rest of his life a long succession of emperors, councils and bishops tried to get that word softened, replaced, or quietly dropped, and the signature they most wanted on the replacement was his. Athanasius outlasted them all. He was not the only defender of the Nicene faith, and for stretches of his life he was not even a very popular one, but he was the one who never moved. Two other things came from his desk that a reader may know without knowing his name. He wrote a short biography of an Egyptian hermit, and it launched monasticism into the Latin West. And in a routine Easter letter of 367 he listed the books the churches of Egypt should read as Scripture, and named exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament that Christians read today: the earliest surviving list that matches ours.

(●) c. 296 AD: He was born in Egypt while it was still dangerous to be a Christian, and grew up inside the bishop’s household. + Nobody wrote down the year Athanasius was born, so the date has to be worked backward from scraps. When he was made bishop on 8 June 328, his opponents complained that he was under thirty, which was the minimum age church rule set for the office. That is a complaint worth making only if a man is somewhere near the line, so it tells us roughly where he was. His parents were still living in the late 350s, which points the same way. Scholars therefore place his birth somewhere between about 296 and 298, and every date in his early life is an estimate rather than a record. What is certain is the weather of his childhood. The last and worst imperial persecution of Christians began in 303, when he was a boy, and Egypt suffered it more heavily than most provinces. He was old enough to be taught by people who had been tortured for the faith, and he says so himself. That is worth holding on to when the later controversies start to look like a quarrel over a single Greek letter: the men arguing had grown up watching neighbours die for the name of Christ. He was educated in Greek grammar and rhetoric, learned his theology in Alexandria, and became a deacon and secretary to Bishop Alexander. A later story, first told by Rufinus and repeated by Socrates and Sozomen, has Alexander noticing him as a boy playing at baptisms on the beach and taking him into his household, which is a charming tale and probably no more than that. Sometime before he was thirty he wrote a linked pair of books, Against the Gentiles and On the Incarnation, that still get read. The traditional date is around 318; a good many modern scholars put them a decade or more later.

(●) 325 AD: He went to Nicaea as a young deacon and watched the church answer Arius with a word that is not in the Bible. + The quarrel had started in his own city. Around 318 a senior Alexandrian priest named Arius began teaching that the Son of God, though the first and highest of all beings, was himself made: there was, in his famous phrase, a "when" at which the Son was not. Bishop Alexander condemned him, Arius found powerful friends in the East, and the dispute spread until the emperor Constantine summoned bishops from across the empire to Nicaea in Bithynia to settle it. Athanasius went as Alexander’s deacon and secretary. He had no vote and no seat; deacons did not sign the acts of councils. What he had was a place at his bishop’s elbow while more than two hundred and fifty bishops, many of them men who still carried the scars of persecution, worked through draft after draft looking for language that Arius’ supporters could not sign in their own sense. Every scriptural phrase they tried, the Arian party accepted with a smile and a private reservation. So the council reached for a word that was not in the Bible at all, homoousios, "of one substance." It was a strange thing for a council to do, and it was resented for decades afterward on exactly that ground. But it had the merit of being unmistakable, and Athanasius spent the rest of his life explaining why an unbiblical word was needed to defend a biblical faith.

(●) 328 AD: At about thirty he became bishop of Alexandria, and the quarrel became his to carry. + Alexander died in the spring of 328, and on 8 June the church of Alexandria consecrated Athanasius in his place. What he inherited was the second most important see in the Christian world, a see being the church and territory a bishop is answerable for, and Alexandria’s ranked behind Rome’s alone. With it came close to a hundred Egyptian bishops who looked to him, and two organized bodies of enemies: the followers of Arius, and the Meletians, an Egyptian faction that had broken away a generation earlier in a dispute over how to readmit Christians who had cracked under persecution. The two groups had little in common except a grievance against the bishop of Alexandria, which turned out to be enough. The pressure came from an unexpected direction. Constantine, having called the very council that condemned Arius, spent his later years trying to bring him back into communion, which is to say restored to the fellowship of the church and welcome again at its table, and he expected the bishop of Alexandria to cooperate. Athanasius refused. Arius had been condemned by an ecumenical council, a gathering of bishops drawn from the whole church rather than from one province, and what a council of that kind had decided was not undone, he said, by a letter from a palace. It is the refusal that shaped the next forty years, and notice what sort of refusal it was. Not a private theological opinion held quietly, but a bishop in his first years of office declining a direct instruction from the man who had made Christianity legal. He also did the ordinary work of the office, which is easy to lose behind the controversies. He toured his enormous province, including the Mareotis district and the monastic settlements of the desert, wrote an Easter letter to the Egyptian churches in almost every year of his episcopate, the forty-five years he held the office, and consecrated Frumentius as the first bishop for the kingdom of Aksum in what is now Ethiopia, a mission Rufinus places early in his years as bishop.

(●) 335 AD: A council at Tyre convicted him on charges that fell apart, and the first of five banishments began. + His opponents had learned something useful: a bishop is much easier to remove for a crime than for a doctrine. So the accusations that reached Constantine were not about the Son of God at all. Athanasius was said to have sent a priest named Macarius to smash the communion cup of a rural clergyman called Ischyras and overturn his altar. He was said to have murdered a Meletian bishop named Arsenius and cut off his hand for use in magic. The Arsenius charge collapsed in the most theatrical way available. Arsenius was found alive, brought to the council, and produced there in front of the men who had been saying Athanasius murdered him. The chalice charge was murkier, and murk is harder to answer. Ischyras had at one point signed a written statement of his own, admitting that the story was false and that he had been pushed into telling it, and then he went back on the retraction and made the accusation again. Athanasius, watching how the council at Tyre in 335 was handling all this, left it and sailed for Constantinople to appeal to the emperor in person. What finished him was a charge nobody could disprove. His opponents told Constantine that Athanasius had threatened to hold up the grain fleet that fed the capital from Alexandria. Athanasius names the five bishops who heard them do it. Constantine, who had defended him a few weeks earlier, was furious at once, and without a hearing sent him to Trier, on the Moselle in northern Gaul, about as far from Egypt as the empire reached. He left Alexandria on 11 July 335 and did not see it again until 23 November 337, after Constantine was dead.

(●) 339 AD: A second banishment gave him seven years among the Latins, and made Nicaea a Western cause as well as an Egyptian one. + The peace lasted sixteen months. On 19 March 339 he slipped out of the church of Theonas ahead of the soldiers; three days later a Cappadocian named Gregory was installed in his place, and on 16 April Athanasius sailed for Rome. He stayed in the West for seven years, three of them in Rome itself, and the exile did more for his cause than any council had. Latin-speaking Christians had watched the Eastern quarrel from a distance and mostly failed to see what the fuss was about. Now the most controversial bishop in the East was living among them, preaching in their churches, answering their questions, and turning out to be neither a monster nor a fanatic. Bishop Julius of Rome examined the charges from Tyre and declared them baseless. The Council of Sardica in 343, called to reunite East and West, split instead, but its Western half cleared Athanasius by name. There was a personal cost that the documents record almost in passing. He was away from his church for seven and a half years, moving between Rome, Milan, Trier, Naissus and Aquileia at the convenience of emperors, and he was in no position to know from one season to the next whether he would ever go home. He did, on 21 October 346, to a welcome the crowds were still talking about a generation later.

(●) 356 AD: Soldiers stormed his church at night, and from six years of hiding in the desert he wrote his greatest books. + On the night of 8 February 356 a general named Syrianus surrounded the church of Theonas with soldiers while Athanasius was leading a night service. He tells the story himself: he refused to leave until the congregation had been dismissed, and in the confusion the clergy got him out. He was nearly sixty years old, and he vanished. For six years the imperial government could not find him. He moved among the monasteries and cells of Upper and Lower Egypt, protected by monks who would say nothing under questioning, and supplied with couriers who carried his letters across the empire while the authorities hunted for him. A later story that he spent the whole six years hidden in a dry cistern is probably a garbled memory of this. Hunted men do not usually write well, and this is the strange thing about the third exile: it was the most productive stretch of his life. The Orations against the Arians, the History of the Arians, the Defence of His Flight, the letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit, On the Councils, and almost certainly the Life of Antony all belong to these years. A movement whose leader had been removed found that his voice reached further from the desert than it had from his cathedral.

(●) 362 AD: Two more emperors banished him, Alexandria took him back both times, and he died at home in 373. + Constantius died in 361, and his successor Julian, who had abandoned Christianity for the old gods, recalled the exiled bishops in February 362. The calculation behind the amnesty was that they would come home and tear one another apart. Athanasius came home on 21 February and did the opposite. That summer he convened a small council in Alexandria, and it is one of the finest things in his record. Of bishops who had drifted and now wanted to be received back it asked three things: renounce the Arian heresy, confess the faith of Nicaea, and refuse to call the Holy Spirit a creature. It added the old anathemas on Sabellius, Paul of Samosata and the rest that nobody in the quarrel was defending anyway, and asked nothing further. Then it took up a dispute in which two groups of Nicene Christians at Antioch had begun to suspect each other of heresy over a word they were using in two different senses. The word doing most of the damage was hypostasis. It could mean the one being that God is, and it could equally mean the distinct someone that each of the three is, so one party was saying God is three hypostases and the other was saying God is one, and each heard in the other’s formula a heresy it had spent thirty years fighting. The council let both sides keep their own phrase once they had shown what they meant by it. Anyone who has watched two people argue hard for an hour and then discover they had been using one word in two senses will recognise the shape of that afternoon. By October Julian had seen enough and ordered him out again. He went up the Nile until Julian died in Persia in June 363, and was formally back in his church on 14 February 364. The fifth banishment, under the Arian emperor Valens, was almost an anticlimax. The order arrived in 365, Athanasius retired to a country house outside the city on 5 October, the city became ungovernable, and on 1 February 366 he was officially restored. He was about seventy. The last seven years were quiet ones, and he used them. In his Easter letter for 367 he set out the canon of Scripture for the Egyptian churches, the canon being the settled list of books a church receives as Scripture and measures its teaching by. He wrote against a new suggestion, floated by his old friend Apollinaris, that in Christ the divine Word took the place of a human mind. Then, feeling the end near, he named Peter as his successor, exactly as Alexander had once named him, and on 2 May 373 he died in his own city, in the forty-fifth year of an episcopate that had kept him out of it for seventeen and a half. The date is the one given by the Festal Index, the ancient year-by-year table attached to his Easter letters that supplies the backbone of his chronology. Another ancient list has 3 May. He may well have died after midnight, which would account for both.

What He Taught

(T1) Only God can join a creature to God, so a created Son could not have saved anybody. + Suppose you are in the water a mile offshore and going under. A second swimmer in the same condition is no use to you, however strong. What is needed is somebody standing on solid ground, and the whole question about a rescuer is whether he is in the water with you or not. That is the shape of the argument Athanasius made for forty years, and it is worth noticing where he starts. He does not begin with philosophy about divine substance. He begins with what Christians were already doing every Sunday: praying to Christ, being baptized into his name, trusting him to forgive sins and raise the dead. Then he asks what has to be true of Christ for any of that to make sense. Arius’ answer was that the Son is the greatest of all creatures, made before time, through whom God made everything else. Athanasius’ reply was that this leaves us exactly where we were. A creature is a thing that needed making and can be unmade; it is on the wrong side of the line. If the one who joins us to God is himself on our side of the gap, then the gap has not been crossed, and the church has been worshipping a very impressive fellow creature. There is a second edge to the argument, and Athanasius pressed it hard. The Arians did worship Christ; nobody suggested otherwise. So either Christ is God and the worship is right, or Christ is a creature and every Christian in the world is an idolater. Those were the only two doors, and his opponents wanted to stand in between them.

(Q) "For man had not been deified if joined to a creature, or unless the Son were very God." + Source: Athanasius, Orations against the Arians II.70 (Newman’s translation, revised for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). "Very God" is old English for "truly God," the same use as in the Nicene Creed’s "very God of very God." The section just before this one puts the point negatively: if the Son were a creature, "man had remained mortal as before, not being joined to God; for a creature had not joined creatures to God, as seeking itself one to join it."

(T2) God became man so that men might be made sons of God. + This is the other half of the same thought, and it is the sentence Athanasius is most quoted for. It sounds shocking in English, so it is worth slowing down over what he means and what he does not. The technical name for it is deification, or in Greek theosis: God shares with human beings, as a gift, the life that belongs to him by nature. Athanasius never means that a Christian turns into a god, or gets absorbed into God, or stops being a creature. He takes the word from Scripture, and the New Testament passage behind it is Peter’s promise that believers "may become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). Think of an iron poker left in a fire. It glows, it burns, it does everything fire does, and it is still iron. It has not become the fire; the fire has given itself to it. What the incarnation deals with, in On the Incarnation, is a genuine dilemma, and it is worth setting out slowly. Human beings were made out of nothing, and they hold together only by holding on to the God who made them. Turn away from him and you are turning back toward the nothing you came from. That drift is what Athanasius means by corruption, and he means it in the ordinary sense as well, the sense in which anything left to itself comes apart. Now God could hardly stand and watch his own handiwork dissolve. But neither could he simply cancel the sentence, because he had said that death would follow, and his word is not a bluff to be withdrawn when it becomes inconvenient. So the Word who made us took a body of the same kind as ours, and let it die. The logic runs both directions, which is the point. Because the Word is truly God, the life he shares is God’s own life and not a smaller substitute. Because he truly became man, that life reaches us where we actually are, in bodies that get sick and die (John 1:14).

(Q) "For He was made man that we might be made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality." + Source: Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54.3 (Robertson’s translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). The verb behind "made God" is theopoieo, "to make God," and Athanasius puts it in the passive here, so that the making is something done to us. His own generation heard the word against the background of Psalm 82:6 and 2 Peter 1:4 rather than against pagan tales of men becoming gods. The sentence closes the argument of the whole book: having spent fifty chapters on why the Word had to take a body, he states in one line what the taking of it was for.

(T3) God was never without his Word, so the Trinity did not grow into a Trinity. + Here is the question that shows what is at stake. If there was a time when the Son did not exist, then there was a time when God was alone, and became a Father later. So the God Christians worship would have started out as one and turned into three, which means that either God changed, or the Trinity is a stage in his history rather than what he is. Athanasius saw that this is not a footnote. A God who acquires a Son is a God who was once incomplete, and a God who can be added to can presumably be subtracted from. Worse, the three would then be made of unlike stuff: an eternal Father and two later arrivals, which is not a Trinity but a hierarchy with the top job permanently filled. His alternative is the one Christians ended up confessing. The Son is not made but begotten, which is a distinction worth learning because it does the heavy lifting in the creed. A carpenter makes a chair, and the chair is wood, not carpenter. A father begets a son, and the son is human just as his father is. Whatever else that analogy fails to carry, and Athanasius knew it failed at several points, it holds the one thing needed: what is begotten shares the nature of the begetter. And because God is not in time and does not develop, the begetting is not an event in his past. There is no "before" in which the Father sat waiting. He was equally firm that this is not three Gods, and equally firm that it is not one God wearing three costumes, the error called Sabellianism after a third-century teacher who reduced Father, Son and Spirit to three roles played by one actor. The Word is God’s own Word, eternally with him and genuinely other than him (John 1:1).

(Q) "The Triad is not originated; but there is an eternal and one Godhead in a Triad, and there is one Glory of the Holy Triad." + Source: Athanasius, Orations against the Arians I.18 (Newman’s translation, revised for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). "Triad" is the Greek word trias, the ordinary early term for what Latin Christians called the Trinity; "originated" means brought into being. In the sentences just before, Athanasius spells out what he takes the Arian position to imply: "a Monad was first, and afterwards by addition it became a Triad; and so as time went on, it seems what we know concerning God grew and took shape."

(T4) The Holy Spirit is no more a creature than the Son is. + While Athanasius was hiding in the desert, his friend Serapion, bishop of Thmuis, wrote to him about a new group in Egypt. They had accepted everything Nicaea said about the Son, and then drawn a line one step lower: the Spirit, they held, was a creature, the highest of the angels. Athanasius called them the Tropici, the "figurists," because they got there by reading the Scripture texts about the Spirit as figures of speech. His reply, four letters written from hiding, is the first sustained argument in Christian literature for the deity of the Holy Spirit, and the argument is the one he had already used about the Son. Christians are baptized into one name, Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19), which is a strange formula if the third member is a creature. The Spirit is what makes believers sharers in God’s life; a creature cannot hand out what it does not have. And a Trinity with a creature inside it is not a Trinity at all but a pair with an attendant. This was never a debating point for him, and the first public chance he had to make it stick, he took. When the Alexandrian council of 362 set the terms on which bishops who had drifted into Arianism could be received back, Athanasius kept the list of requirements short, which meant that every item left on it was load-bearing. The Spirit was on it. The Cappadocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea and the two Gregorys, would develop the doctrine much further in the fifteen years after his death, and the Council of Constantinople in 381 would write the Spirit into the creed. Athanasius is the one who said it first, in writing, while it was still costly.

(Q) "For this is in truth a complete renunciation of the abominable heresy of the Arians, to refuse to divide the Holy Trinity, or to say that any part of it is a creature." + Source: Athanasius, Tomus ad Antiochenos 3 (Robertson’s translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). The Tome to the People of Antioch is the letter Athanasius wrote for the Alexandrian council of 362, laying down what should be required of bishops seeking reunion. The terms he sets are deliberately light: anathematize the Arian heresy, which is to pronounce it condemned and put it outside the fellowship of the church, confess the faith of Nicaea, and refuse to call the Holy Spirit a creature, with the standing anathemas on Sabellius and the older heresies alongside them.

(T5) These twenty-seven books are the New Testament, and nothing is to be added to them. + Every year the bishop of Alexandria wrote to the churches of Egypt announcing the date of Easter, and the letter usually carried some pastoral instruction alongside the arithmetic. The thirty-ninth of these letters, for Easter 367, took up a problem the bishop had been hearing about: teachers were circulating books "termed apocryphal," meaning writings of unknown or false origin passed off as apostolic, and mixing them in with Scripture. His remedy was not an argument. It was a list. Twenty-two books of the Old Testament, counted the Hebrew way, so that Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and Ezra each come to one book and the twelve minor prophets to one between them. Then the New Testament: the four Gospels, Acts, the seven catholic epistles, meaning the letters written to the church at large rather than to one town or one man, which are James, the two of Peter, the three of John and Jude, then fourteen letters of Paul with Hebrews counted among them, and the Revelation of John. That is twenty-seven, and they are the twenty-seven in every New Testament in print today. A few details are worth having straight, because the letter is not quite the same shape as a modern table of contents. His Old Testament count leaves out Esther and includes Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah alongside Jeremiah. He also adds a second and lower shelf, and the distinction he is drawing there is one worth keeping. On the first shelf stand the books he has just listed, the ones a church may build on. On the second are books not in the canon but "appointed by the Fathers to be read" by new converts, among them the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, the Teaching of the Apostles and the Shepherd of Hermas. Useful, he is saying, and not Scripture. What the letter is not is an act of invention. Athanasius is not choosing the New Testament; he is writing down what the churches had long been reading, and drawing a line against additions. The four Gospels and Paul had been beyond dispute for well over a century, and the argument at the edges concerned a handful of books, not the shape of the whole.

(Q) "These are fountains of salvation, that they who thirst may be satisfied with the living words they contain. In these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of godliness. Let no man add to these, neither let him take ought from these." + Source: Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.6, for Easter 367 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation). "Take ought from" is old English for "take anything away from," and the warning echoes Deuteronomy 4:2. The sentence comes immediately after the list of books, and the letter goes on to name the second shelf of writings that may be read without being counted as Scripture.

(Q) "And thus it happened in the end that cells arose even in the mountains, and the desert was colonised by monks, who came forth from their own people, and enrolled themselves for the citizenship in the heavens." + Source: Athanasius, Life of Antony 14 (Ellershaw’s translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). Antony of Egypt had gone into the desert alone; the sentence describes what happened when he came back out after twenty years and people saw him. Athanasius wrote the Life for monks abroad who had asked him what the Egyptian discipline actually looked like, and the book travelled a great deal further than they did.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The word he refused to give up became the church’s word, and congregations still recite it. + For most of Athanasius’ life the Nicene party was losing. Councils at Arles and Milan made his condemnation a test of loyalty, councils at Sirmium, Ariminum and Seleucia produced creed after creed that avoided homoousios, imperial pressure removed the bishops who would not sign, and Jerome later wrote of that period that the whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian. The Latin tag Athanasius contra mundum, "Athanasius against the world," is a later coinage rather than anything he or his contemporaries said, but it fairly describes several stretches of those decades. The recovery came through people he had spent his last years cultivating. Basil of Caesarea and the two Gregorys, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, took the Nicene position and did the philosophical work Athanasius had never much cared for, settling the vocabulary of one essence in three persons. Eight years after his death, the Council of Constantinople in 381 confirmed Nicaea and added the article on the Holy Spirit. The creed recited in churches on Sunday mornings, from Orthodox liturgies to Anglican prayer books to Reformed congregations, is that revised Nicene creed. Gregory of Nazianzus preached his memorial oration in Constantinople around 380, and it is the warmest assessment we have from someone who lived through the same fight. "Such was Athanasius to us," he said, "when present, the pillar of the Church" (Oration 21.26).

(†) A short book he wrote about a desert hermit carried monasticism into the West and helped convert Augustine. + The Life of Antony is barely a hundred pages, and it did more to shape Christian practice than most theological treatises. Athanasius wrote it for monks outside Egypt who wanted to know how the Egyptian discipline worked, probably during his third exile, when he was living among the people he was describing. It was translated into Latin within about a decade, and it invented a genre: the saint’s life, told as a spiritual biography, which the Middle Ages would copy thousands of times. The best evidence of what it did is a scene in Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine, then a professor of rhetoric in Milan and stuck fast between belief and his own habits, is visited by a countryman named Ponticianus, who tells him a story from Trier: two imperial officials, walking in the gardens outside the walls, wandered into a cottage where they found "a little book containing the life of Antony." One of them read it, and neither of them went back to his career. Augustine heard it, saw himself, and describes the shame that followed as the thing that broke him open (Confessions VIII.6). Trier, as it happens, is where Athanasius had spent his own first exile fifty years before. Athanasius did not invent monasticism, and he was careful to present Antony as a Christian under a bishop rather than a spiritual freelancer. But the alliance he formed with the Egyptian monks, who hid him for six years and were beaten for it, ran both ways, and one of its results is that the West learned about the desert from him.

(†) His Easter letter of 367 is the earliest surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven New Testament books. + Lists of Christian Scripture had been made before. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing around 325, sorted the books into the acknowledged, the disputed and the rejected, and left several in the middle column. Earlier lists such as the Muratorian fragment differ from ours at the edges. What is distinctive about Festal Letter 39 is that its New Testament column contains our twenty-seven books, no more and no fewer. Councils followed rather than led. Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397, both in Latin North Africa and both with Augustine present, ratified the same New Testament list. The letter was not a decree binding the whole church, and Athanasius had no power to make it one; it was a bishop telling his own province what to read. That it matched what the rest of the church settled on is the interesting part. The habit of mind behind the letter is the same one at work everywhere else in his career. His opponents, in the doctrinal fight and now in the question of what could be read out in church, did well out of vagueness, because a boundary nobody has written down can always be nudged a little further. So he wrote the boundary down. Nicaea had done that with the creed he spent his life defending, and here he did it with the list.

(†) He wrote about his opponents in terms that his own admirers still wince at. + The other column of the ledger has entries in it, and with Athanasius nearly all of them are about temperament rather than doctrine. He was a hard man in a hard fight, and it shows in what he wrote. - The polemic. "Ariomaniacs" is his standard word for his opponents, used dozens of times. In the History of the Arians he compares the emperor Constantius to Belshazzar, calls him more cruel than Pilate, and works through the marks of Antichrist with the emperor in view. Some of this is a hunted man writing for monks who had sheltered him, and none of it is worse than what was written about him. It is still not the way Paul tells a pastor to correct opponents, and readers who love the man have said so for centuries. - Painting with one brush. For years he treated bishops who accepted everything at Nicaea except the one unbiblical word as though they were Arians, which they were not. Many of them were conservatives who feared that homoousios collapsed Father and Son into one person, a fear that Sabellianism made reasonable. The generosity came late, in On the Councils in about 359, and it is one of the finest things he wrote: such men "must not be treated as enemies," he says; "we discuss the matter with them as brothers with brothers, who mean what we mean, and dispute only about the word." - How Alexandria was governed. The criminal charges brought at Tyre in 335 mostly collapsed, and the man he was accused of murdering was produced alive. But complaints from Egyptian Meletians that his supporters used force did not stop coming, and a Meletian letter on papyrus, written from Alexandria in May 335, reports Meletian monks locked up, their bishop held under guard, and the man who had given them lodging beaten for it. The sources on both sides are partisan and the historians remain divided; that his hands were entirely clean is more than the evidence will carry, and less than his enemies alleged. None of this touches what he was right about, and he was right about the thing that mattered most. It is worth saying plainly all the same, because a portrait that made him faultless would be describing somebody else.