Athanasius of Alexandria

Background

Athanasius (296–373) was bishop of Alexandria from 328 and the principal architect and lifelong defender of the homoousios formula canonized at Nicaea (325), which he attended as a deacon. Exiled five times under four emperors for refusing communion with the Arian party, he became the fourth century's emblem of doctrinal tenacity. His theology is soteriological before it is metaphysical: only God can save, so the Word who saves must be fully God — "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" (Athanasius, De Inc. §54).

Positions held in this wiki

• Tawhid vs Trinity — architect of the Nicene confession that the Son is homoousios with the Father; the article's historical survey locates the doctrine's canonical articulation in the controversy of 325–381 that Athanasius anchored.
• Mormon Christology vs Nicene Orthodoxy — his creation doctrine, that God framed all things "out of nothing" (De Inc. §3), and his insistence that the incarnate Word "was not, as might be imagined, circumscribed in the body" (De Inc. §17) supply the classical rebuttals of eternal intelligences and essential divine embodiment; his theosis dictum (§54) is the contested patristic proof-text in the exaltation debate.
• Canon Formation — New Testament — the list-issuing endpoint of the canon process: his Festal Letter of 367 is the first document to enumerate exactly the twenty-seven New Testament books — "the four Gospels… the Acts of the Apostles and Epistles (called Catholic), seven… fourteen Epistles of Paul… And besides, the Revelation of John" — calling them "fountains of salvation" to which none may add and from which none may take (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 §5–6).

Key works in our corpus

• On the Incarnation of the Word — in corpus in full. Creation ex nihilo (§3), the un-circumscribed Word (§17), and the deification formula (§54) verified in the body text. (An earlier stub note that this file was chrome-only is obsolete.)
• Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter (367) — in corpus (new ingestion). The first exact 27-book NT list (§5), plus the two-tier distinction between canonical books and books "appointed by the Fathers to be read" by catechumens (§7).
• Orations Against the Arians, Life of Antony — not in corpus.

Principal critics

• Arius of Alexandria — the adversary whose subordinationism the homoousios was framed to exclude.
• Adolf von Harnack — the development view treats the Nicene settlement Athanasius championed, and the canon he codified, as products of the second-through-fourth-century church rather than apostolic inheritance (Canon Formation — New Testament, view 2).
• Latter-day Saint appropriation of De Inc. §54 contests whether theosis means participation by grace or promotion within a divine species (Mormon Christology vs Nicene Orthodoxy).

See also

• Basil of Caesarea — Cappadocian co-defender of pro-Nicene trinitarianism.
• Augustine of Hippo — the Western heir who systematized the Nicene grammar.
• Eusebius of Caesarea — contemporary historian; his canon catalogue precedes Athanasius' closed list.