Tyson John R. - The Great Athanasius

An Introduction to His Life and Work

John R. Tyson

T he Egyptian metropolis Alexandria was laid out and named by Alexander the Great sometime in BC. Plutarch reports that the idea of Alexanders new capital city came to him in a dream one night. He probably chose its location because, situated on the Nile Delta, it had access to the Mediterranean, the Nile River, and the Red Sea. It had two natural harbors, one on the eastern and one on the western side of the city. A third harbor, fed by a man-made canal on the landward side of the city, linked Alexandria to Lake Mariout and gave access to the Nile from the Mediterranean Sea, and hence also to upper Egypt and north central Africa. The harbors famous Pharos Lighthouse, which was built circa BC, was esteemed as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It served as a guiding light for travelers and sailors, just as the city itself became a beacon for merchants, travelers, religious pilgrims, and the finest intellectual minds of the ancient world.

Alexandria was a wealthy and bustling mercantile city when Athanasius was born there around AD . It was the heart of the empires grain trade. Corn and grain, vital to the empires well-being, were grown up and down central Egypt because of the annual flooding and irrigation of the Nile River; Egyptian grain was the lifeblood of distant cities like Rome and Constantinople. And indeed, the political stability of those distant capitals often depended upon the arrival of the Alexandrian grain fleet. It is estimated that between four and a half million bushels of grain (a poor year) and eight and a half million bushels (a bounty year) flowed through Alexandria annually. Western merchants also found that going through Alexandria, down the Nile, and across the imperial roads that linked the Nile with the Egyptian ports on the southeastern coast gave them rapid access to the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and important trading centers in the Eastwithout going through the arduous overland route and expensive Arab middlemen.

The city of Alexandria was divided into five wards, which were populated by various ethnic groups. One, called Rakotis , was made up predominantly of native Egyptians; another was almost exclusively Jewish; others were diversely populated by Egyptians, merchants, foreigners and dignitaries. Hence, Alexandria had a rich heritage of religious, cultural, and ethnic diversity. It was, in the finest sense of its Hellenistic founders ideal, a cosmopolitian place, which both represented and embraced the entire world.

The city had a rich intellectual and religious history, reaching back to the pre-Christian era, when the expansive library of more than five hundred thousand volumes and legendary museumwhere the muses disseminated learning through the efforts of poets, philosophers, and scientistswere the crown jewels of the ancient intellectual world. These were ultimately destroyed by fire in AD , but were symbols of the citys proud and diverse intellectual history. Alexandria was also the undisputed religious center of Egypt during this same period. It was a haven of Hellenism, as well as of native Egyptian religion. Shrines to many pagan cults were located there, as were Jewish and Christian places of worship. Christianity was said (by Eusebius) to have come to Alexandria early, through the efforts of St. Mark, the evangelist. The work of Clement and Origen, in particular, was richly textured by their appreciation for the Greek philosophy known as Platonism, which brought with it a spirit-body dualism and offered a predominantly spiritual understanding of the world as emanating directly from God.

Alexandrian Christian theology was christocentric (Christ-centered) and focused largely on the role of Jesus Christ as the Logos (Word) of God. It drew upon aesthetic and philosophical impulses, as well as Scripturewhich was often interpreted symbolically through the means of allegory. Knowledge or gnosis was also an important feature of Alexandrian theology; God-given knowledge came through Christ, who both taught and empowered one to imitate the life of God. The holy life of believers was thought (as in much of Eastern Orthodox theology) to enable persons to become partakers of the divine nature ( Pet :). This process, called theosis (deification), focused upon the goal of Christian life as transformation, holiness, and sanctification; it longed for restoration of the Divine nature within humans (Gen :) and not merely forgiveness or pardon.

But what was most typical of Alexandrian religion, perhaps, was the religious synthesis that occurred there. In a synthesis between the Egyptian gods Osiris and Apis, along with Greek Hellenistic influence, Emperor Ptolemy I ( BC) invented a new god named Serapis. He was depicted as a bearded king upon a regal throne and called the source of all things. In a similar way, during the beginnings of Christianity, apostolic Christianity merged with Greek and Egyptian mystery religions to form various Gnostic-Christian sects, like those led by Valentinus and Basilides. These eclectic faiths included Jesus Christ in their pantheon but viewed him through the lens of the Greek spirit-body dualism. The spirit was seen as good and the body as evil. This meant that the Incarnation of Christ, when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John :), came to be reinterpreted in ways that deviated from traditional Christology. Two Gnostic christological options emerged: the one, called Docetism (from the Greek word for appear), held that Christ only appeared to have a physical, human bodyreally he was a being comprised entirely of spirit; the other, called Adoptionism, suggested that Jesus and Christ were actually two separate beings, Jesus having been a devout human who was taken over and possessed by a Divine Spirit named Christ. Noncanonical documents like the Gospel of the Egyptians and the Gospel of the Hebrews are thought to have stemmed from these Egyptian Gnostic communities.

The Christian church was well established in Alexandria by the time Athanasius was born there in the late third century AD. The city was the citadel of Christian Egypt, and the bishop of Alexandria was more like an archbishop or metropolitan who had responsibility for more than one hundred other bishops in Egypt, Libya, the Thebaid, and surrounding regions.

The Roman Empire was in the able hands of Diocletian, who had reorganized the administration and brought renewed economic and political stability to the empire. He put the government in the hands of a tetrarchya leadership team of four rulers, each of whom was responsible for a particular region. The empire was divided into East (Greek-speaking) and West (Latin-speaking) regions. Each region had a supreme ruler called Augustus, as well as a lieutenant-emperor called Caesar. Diocletian himself was Augustus of the East, with Galerius under him; Maximian was Augustus of the West, with Constantius Chlorus ruling as his Caesar. The genius of this division of labor was, in part, that it provided for a stable line of succession to the leadership role; each Caesar was, in fact, an Augustus in training.

Diocletians wife, Prisca, and their daughter, Valeria, were both Christians, and this development seemed as though it would provide the Christian church with a modicum of protection and peaceful development under his rule. But this was not to be the case. As Christians refused to serve in the Roman army, and soldiers who became Christians mutinied in the field (ca. ), a series of significant tensions arose between the Christian church and Diocletians government. As these tensions escalated, Diocletian became convinced that the Christians were conspiring against him and his government. In retaliation, he decreed that church leaders should be arrested, and subsequently he demanded that all Christians must offer sacrifice to the traditional Roman gods. Following the strict monotheism (worshiping only one God) of the Judaic-Christian heritage, many Christians refused. This resulted in the government unleashing the most severe persecution the Christian church had ever experienced. Cruel punishments and tortures were used as inducements to try to force Christians to give up their scriptures, renounce their faith, and embrace the gods of Rome.