Legacy and Reception

How St. Athanasius the Great came to be received as “Father of Orthodoxy” — his feast days and liturgical honor in the East and West; the theological inheritance that ran through the Cappadocians to Cyril of Alexandria and the later councils; the curious fact that the most famous text bearing his name, the so-called “Athanasian Creed,” is not his; and how modern critical scholarship has read, edited, and reassessed him.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

This section turns from Athanasius’s own works to his afterlife in the Church and in the academy. Two complementary stories are told. The first is the story of veneration and reception: how a bishop five times exiled became, within a century of his death, the touchstone of Nicene orthodoxy — invoked at Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451), inherited by Cyril, honored on January 18 (jointly with St. Cyril in the East) and May 2 (in the West), and fixed in Orthodox liturgy and iconography as the “pillar of Orthodoxy.” It also untangles the long Western misattribution of the Quicunque vult — the “Athanasian Creed” that Athanasius neither wrote nor could have written.

The second is the story of scholarship: the textual history that carried his corpus from Montfaucon’s 1698 Maurist edition into Migne’s Patrologia Graeca 25–28 and on to the modern critical Athanasius Werke; the twentieth-century revisionist debates over Athanasius’s politics and the use of force (Barnes and the responses of Brakke, Gwynn, and others); the authorship questions across the corpus (the Life of Antony, Contra Arianos IV, On Virginity); and the recent theological retrievals of Anatolios, Behr, and others. The aim throughout is to show how the Church’s veneration and the academy’s scrutiny coexist — and where Orthodox scholarship engages the critical questions on their own terms.

Section Contents

• Father of Orthodoxy — the title and its history; the feast days (January 18 with St. Cyril; May 2 in the West); reception in the East (the Cappadocian debt, Cyril’s inheritance, his conciliar authority) and in the West (Augustine; the pseudo-Athanasian Creed and its real Gallican origin); his place in Orthodox liturgy and iconography.
• Modern Scholarship — the editions story (Montfaucon → PG 25–28 → Athanasius Werke); the twentieth-century debates over politics and violence (Barnes and his critics); the authorship questions across the corpus; and the theological retrievals (Anatolios, Behr, Ayres) — with attention to how Orthodox scholarship engages the critical questions.

See Also

• Arius and Nicaea — the controversy that made Athanasius the touchstone of orthodoxy
• Letters to Serapion — the late pneumatology the Cappadocians inherited
• Tomus ad Antiochenos — Athanasius’s irenic reception of the homoousios in others’ words
• Theosis in Athanasius — the soteriological core later retrievals foreground
• The Ecumenical Councils — the conciliar tradition that received him
• The Church Fathers — the patristic frame in the broader guide

References

• Gwynn, David M. Athanasius of Alexandria: Bishop, Theologian, Ascetic, Father. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Anatolios, Khaled. Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought. London: Routledge, 1998; Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011.
• Behr, John. The Nicene Faith (Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.
• Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Athanasius the Great” (January 18; May 2), troparia and lives. oca.org.