Historical Context

The world in which St. Athanasius the Great worked: the Constantinian revolution that bound the Church to the Roman state, the Melitian schism that divided the Egyptian Church, and Alexandria as the intellectual capital of Christendom — heir to the catechetical school of Clement and Origen. This file lays out the political, ecclesial, and intellectual board on which Athanasius’ forty-five-year episcopate was played.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Constantinian Revolution

Athanasius’ entire public life fell within the first century of the Church’s transformation from a persecuted body into a favored — and increasingly governed — institution of the Roman state. He was born under the Tetrarchy, during or just before the Great Persecution launched by Diocletian (303), and his earliest memory of the Church would have been of martyrdom. Within his lifetime that situation reversed completely: Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge (312) and the toleration secured by the so-called Edict of Milan (313) made Christianity a legal, then a privileged, religion; by Athanasius’ death in 373 it was effectively the religion of the imperial house.

This revolution created the very conditions of Athanasius’ career, and its ambiguity defined it. The emperor now had a direct interest in the unity and the doctrine of the Church, because the Church’s unity had become a matter of state. It was Constantine who summoned the Council of Nicaea (325) and pressed the bishops toward consensus; it was Constantine and his successors — above all his son Constantius II — who exiled and recalled bishops, convened councils, and tried to legislate creeds. Athanasius was exiled five times, and in every case the imperial power, not a purely ecclesiastical court, was the decisive agent (see Exiles and Councils). Barnes’ study of the period takes precisely this entanglement of theology and imperial politics as its subject: Athanasius operated in a world where doctrine and the favor of the court could not be separated, and where the bishop of a great see was unavoidably a political actor (Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius, Harvard, 1993).

The Melitian Schism

When Athanasius became bishop, the Egyptian Church he inherited was already fractured by a schism that long predated the Arian controversy and that his enemies would exploit against him for decades.

The Melitian schism arose out of the Great Persecution. Melitius, bishop of Lycopolis in Upper Egypt, broke with Peter, bishop of Alexandria (martyred 311), over the treatment of the lapsi — Christians who had denied the faith or obtained certificates of sacrifice under persecution. Peter favored a moderate path of readmission after penance; Melitius held that the Church must be a “Church of the Martyrs” and took a rigorist line, refusing to readmit the lapsed easily and, when Egyptian sees fell vacant under persecution, ordaining his own clergy without the consent of Alexandria. The result was a rival hierarchy, concentrated in Upper Egypt, that challenged the Alexandrian bishop’s jurisdiction.

The Council of Nicaea attempted to heal the schism by a generous settlement, allowing existing Melitian clergy to retain their orders in a subordinate capacity, and reaffirming Alexandria’s authority over all of Egypt (Nicaea 325, Canon 6). The settlement did not hold. The Melitians remained a distinct and aggrieved party, and after 328 they allied with the enemies of Athanasius — and increasingly with the Arian and Eusebian interest — supplying many of the specific charges (over the affairs of Ischyras and Arsenius) on which Athanasius was eventually arraigned and condemned at the Council of Tyre (335). The schism that began as a dispute over penitential discipline thus became one of the chief instruments used against the Nicene cause in Egypt. It persisted as a sect in Egypt for centuries (Hauben, Studies on the Melitian Schism in Egypt, Routledge/Ashgate, 2012).

Alexandria as Intellectual Capital

Alexandria was the intellectual capital of the ancient world and, by the late third century, of Christian thought. Its great library and museum, its tradition of philosophy and philology, and its position at the crossroads of Greek, Jewish, and Egyptian culture had made it the natural home of the most ambitious Christian theology.

That theology had institutional shape in the catechetical school of Alexandria, the line of Christian teachers that tradition traces from Pantaenus through Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215) and, most consequentially, Origen (c. 185–c. 253). The Alexandrian tradition was marked by a confident engagement with Greek philosophy, an allegorical and spiritual method of reading Scripture, and a vision of the soul’s ascent to God — the heritage of which is described more fully in this repository’s treatment of the Church Fathers and of Origen in particular. As bishop, Athanasius continued to appoint the head of the catechetical school; his appointee Didymus the Blind was a brilliant exegete who worked in an avowedly Origenist idiom even as he stood firmly with Athanasius on the divinity of the Son.

Athanasius and the Origenist Legacy

Athanasius’ relation to this Origenist inheritance is genuinely complex, and it is easy to flatten in either direction.

On one hand, Athanasius is not an “Origenist” theologian in the manner of Origen himself or of the later Cappadocians. His characteristic mode is not the speculative system of De Principiis but a tightly focused, soteriological, and biblical argument; he shows comparatively little interest in the cosmological speculations (the pre-existence of souls, the great cycles of fall and restoration) that would later be condemned under Origen’s name. His theology is, in this sense, a narrowing and a hardening of the Alexandrian tradition around the single question of the status of the Word.

On the other hand, Athanasius is unmistakably an heir of the Alexandrian theological culture. His conception of the Word as the rational and creative principle through whom God made and sustains the world, his reading of Scripture as a unified witness to Christ, and his vision of salvation as the deification (theopoiesis) of the human creature all stand in continuity with the Alexandrian tradition that Origen did so much to shape. Crucially, the controversy of his lifetime ran through the ambiguities of that very tradition: Arius could appeal to subordinationist strands in the inherited theology, and so could his opponents appeal to its high doctrine of the Word. Anatolios situates Athanasius precisely here — as a theologian who receives the Alexandrian and broadly Origenist framework but reorders it around the absolute distinction between the uncreated God (Father, Son, and Spirit) and everything created, the distinction on which his whole anti-Arian case would turn (Anatolios, Athanasius, Routledge ECF, 2004; cf. Behr, The Nicene Faith, SVS, 2004).

The Board on Which His Career Was Played

These three forces — an imperial power newly invested in the Church’s doctrine, a schism that fractured his own province and armed his enemies, and an intellectual tradition both rich and dangerously ambiguous — together constitute the board on which Athanasius’ episcopate unfolded. His genius was to fight on all three at once: to defend a single theological boundary (uncreated Creator versus created creature) against the Arians, while managing the Melitian schism within Egypt and surviving the favor and disfavor of a succession of emperors. The doctrinal struggle that this context produced is the subject of the next section (see Arius and Nicaea).

See Also

• Early Life and Alexandria — Athanasius’ own formation in this setting
• Arius and Nicaea — the doctrinal controversy this context produced
• Exiles and Councils — how imperial politics shaped his life
• Church Fathers — Clement, Origen, and the Alexandrian tradition
• Ecumenical Councils — Nicaea and the conciliar response
• The Holy Trinity — the doctrine at stake

References

• 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.
• Hauben, Hans. Studies on the Melitian Schism in Egypt (AD 306–335). Edited by Peter Van Nuffelen. Farnham: Ashgate/Routledge, 2012.
• The First Council of Nicaea (325), Canon 6, and the Synodal Letter on the Melitians. In NPNF II/14.
• Athanasius. Apologia contra Arianos (on the charges of Ischyras and Arsenius). PG 25; trans. NPNF II/4.