Early Life and Alexandria

The formation of St. Athanasius the Great (c. 296–373) in Alexandria, from his obscure origins through his training under Bishop Alexander, his role as a deacon at the First Council of Nicaea (325), and the contested election that made him Patriarch of Alexandria in 328. This file separates what the sources document from what later tradition added, and it presents the evidence behind the disputes over his birth year and the legitimacy of his election.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Origins and Birth Date

Athanasius was born in or near Alexandria into a Christian family. The exact year is not recorded by any contemporary source and must be reconstructed from indirect evidence, which is why the scholarly literature gives a range rather than a date.

[Disputed: most modern scholars place his birth c. 296–298, narrowing the range from the constraint that he must have been below the canonical age of thirty-five at his consecration in 328 for that objection to have been raised against him (see below); some older treatments allow a date as early as c. 293–295. The range c. 296–298 is the one adopted in the standard reference works and in Anatolios, Athanasius (Routledge ECF, 2004), and is consistent with the c. 296–373 dating used elsewhere in this repository (see Church Fathers).]

Almost nothing is securely known of his childhood. Later hagiography supplies a famous anecdote — Bishop Alexander observing the boy Athanasius “baptizing” other children at play and judging the rite valid in form — but this story is first reported by the fifth-century historian Rufinus (Ecclesiastical History I.14) and the later Greek church historians, not by any contemporary witness; it is best treated as edifying tradition rather than documented biography. What the sources do establish is that he received a thorough Greek education and an immersion in the Scriptures, and that by his early twenties he had entered the household and service of Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria.

His command of Greek and of the Scriptures is everywhere visible in his writings; what is striking, by the standard of the Alexandrian intellectual world he came from, is how little he parades the secular learning of the schools. His native language was Greek, but tradition and the texture of his pastoral connections suggest a man at home with the Coptic-speaking Christianity of the Egyptian countryside and the monks of the desert as much as with the lettered Greek elite of the city — a double rootedness that would later give him, almost uniquely among the great bishops, a popular base capable of surviving repeated imperial attempts to dislodge him. His acquaintance with the monastic movement was personal: he is the author of the Life of Antony, written soon after the hermit’s death (c. 356), and whatever the degree of direct contact between them, the work presents Athanasius as the heir and publicist of the desert’s authority — a power he would draw on throughout his episcopate.

Formation under Bishop Alexander

Alexander, bishop of Alexandria from c. 313, became the decisive human influence on Athanasius’ formation. Athanasius served as Alexander’s deacon and personal secretary, and through that office he was present at the center of the Egyptian Church’s affairs precisely as the Arian dispute erupted within it. The young deacon thus learned the controversy not as an abstract question but as a crisis in his own bishop’s clergy: Arius was a presbyter of the Alexandrian church, and Alexander’s condemnation of him (in a local synod c. 318–321) was the act that opened the whole controversy (see Arius and Nicaea).

Athanasius’ two early apologetic works — the linked treatises Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione — are generally assigned to this formative period or shortly after, before the full heat of the post-Nicene conflict, and they already display the soteriological vision that would govern his anti-Arian polemic: the Word became man so that man might become god (De Incarnatione 54.3 [PG 25:192B]; trans. NPNF II/4). On these treatises see Contra Gentes – De Incarnatione.

The Deacon at Nicaea (325)

When Constantine summoned the bishops of the empire to Nicaea in 325 to settle the Arian dispute, Alexander attended as the bishop of the see most directly implicated, and he brought his deacon Athanasius with him.

It is important to separate the documented from the embellished here. What is well attested is that Athanasius accompanied Alexander to the council and assisted him there; later Orthodox tradition and Athanasius’ own retrospective authority have tended to magnify his role into that of a leading protagonist of the Nicene definition. But as a deacon he had no vote and no formal voice in a council of bishops, and the contemporary record does not credit him with authoring the creed or its key term. His significance at Nicaea is better understood as that of an exceptionally well-placed witness and participant in his bishop’s entourage — one who absorbed the theology of the council so deeply that he would spend the rest of his life as its interpreter and defender. Behr stresses that Athanasius’ later, programmatic identification of “the faith of Nicaea” with the single term homoousios is itself a theological achievement of the 350s and 360s, not simply a report of what the council of 325 understood itself to be doing (Behr, The Nicene Faith, SVS, 2004).

The Contested Election (328)

Bishop Alexander died in 328 (the traditional date is April of that year), and Athanasius was elected to succeed him. The election was contested at the time and has remained contested in the sources, and the charges raised against it are worth presenting as evidence rather than dismissing or accepting wholesale.

Two distinct objections circulated, both reported chiefly by parties hostile to Athanasius:

The canonical-age objection. It was alleged that Athanasius had not yet reached the canonical age (commonly given as thirty-five) required for consecration as a bishop. The very existence of this charge is the strongest single argument for placing his birth no earlier than the mid-290s: the objection only makes sense if he was, in fact, around thirty in 328. Athanasius himself, in his later Festal Letters and apologetic writings, refers to the accusations leveled against the legitimacy of his episcopate.
The Melitian objection (the disputed-election charge). The Melitian party — the rigorist schismatic body in Egypt (see Historical Context) — disputed both the procedure and the legitimacy of the election, alleging that Athanasius had been consecrated by too few bishops and against the will of a substantial part of the Egyptian episcopate. Athanasius’ supporters insisted that he was the choice of the great majority of the clergy and laity of Alexandria.

[Disputed: the legitimacy of the 328 election. Athanasius’ own account and the broad later tradition present him as the canonically and popularly elected successor of Alexander, chosen by the people and the bishops of Egypt; his Melitian opponents alleged a hasty and irregular consecration by a small minority, and Timothy Barnes, weighing the hostile documentary evidence (including the Melitian papyri), treats the charges of irregularity and of coercive conduct as more than mere slander (Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius, Harvard, 1993). The sources are partisan on both sides; what is certain is that the contested character of the election supplied his enemies with grievances they pressed for the rest of his life. The graver later allegations of violence against opponents are treated in Exiles and Councils.]

The Stature of the Alexandrian See

The intensity of the struggle over the Alexandrian throne cannot be understood apart from the rank of the see itself. Alexandria was, with Rome and Antioch, one of the three great sees of the ancient Church, and its bishop exercised a metropolitan authority over all of Egypt, Libya, and the Pentapolis far more centralized than that of any other patriarch — an authority the Council of Nicaea explicitly reaffirmed in its sixth canon, which confirmed that “the ancient customs” of Egypt, by which the bishop of Alexandria held jurisdiction over all these provinces, should prevail (Nicaea 325, Canon 6). The bishop of Alexandria appointed the bishops of Egypt, controlled the wealthy Egyptian Church, and commanded the loyalty of the city’s populace and of the rapidly multiplying monks of the desert. To hold that see was to wield a concentration of ecclesiastical power that made its occupant a figure of empire-wide consequence — which is exactly why control of it was worth a forty-five-year war, and why Athanasius’ enemies and the imperial court returned to it again and again.

References

Athanasius. On the Incarnation (De Incarnatione). PG 25; trans. NPNF II/4 (also in SVS Popular Patristics 44a, trans. Behr).
Athanasius. Festal Letters and Apologia contra Arianos. PG 25–26; trans. NPNF II/4.
Anatolios, Khaled. Athanasius. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2004.
Barnes, Timothy D. Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.
The First Council of Nicaea (325), Canon 6. In The Seven Ecumenical Councils, NPNF II/14.
Rufinus of Aquileia. Ecclesiastical History I.14 (the boyhood “baptism” anecdote — a later attestation, not contemporary).