Athanasius and the Nicene Faith

The Arian crisis made the fourth century the crucible of patristic authority, and Athanasius of Alexandria — exiled five times for the homoousios — its defining Father. This file surveys the Nicene struggle through its central figure, and sets beside him two witnesses who show the same faith in other registers: Cyril of Jerusalem teaching it to catechumens in the Holy Sepulchre, and Ephrem the Syrian singing it in Syriac — proof that the golden age was never merely Greek.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Crisis

Around 318, the Alexandrian presbyter Arius began teaching that the Son of God is a creature — the first and highest of creatures, but a creature: “there was when he was not” (the slogan reported in Athanasius, Orations against the Arians I.5; trans. NPNF II/4; on the controversy’s course, Behr, The Nicene Faith, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004, part 1). The Council of Nicaea (325), the First Ecumenical, answered with the confession that the Son is “of the essence of the Father… true God of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father” (the Creed of Nicaea 325; text and history in Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed., London: Longman, 1972, ch. 8; see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). The word homoousios was unscriptural and previously suspect — its defense would consume half a century, through imperial reversals, rival councils, and a bewildering taxonomy of parties (Homoiousians, Homoians, Anomoians), before the Council of Constantinople (381) confirmed the Nicene faith in the creed the Orthodox Church recites at every Liturgy (Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 1972, chs. 9–10; Behr, The Nicene Faith, 2004).

For the theme of this guide the crisis matters doubly. It produced the classic Fathers; and it demonstrated, once for all, that the consensus patrum is not arithmetic. Through much of the mid-century the numerical weight of bishops and councils leaned against Nicaea — Jerome’s famous sentence catches the morning after the Council of Ariminum (359): “the whole world groaned and marveled to find itself Arian” (Jerome, Dialogue against the Luciferians 19; trans. NPNF II/6). The faith was carried not by majorities but by witnesses whom the Church afterwards recognized as her own voice — which is precisely what “Father” means (Florovsky, “The Authority of the Ancient Councils and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972; see The Consensus Patrum Rightly Understood).

Athanasius: Contra Mundum

Athanasius (c. 296–373) attended Nicaea as a young deacon, became bishop of Alexandria in 328, and spent seventeen of his forty-five episcopal years in five exiles under four emperors rather than yield the homoousios — the career that earned the tag Athanasius contra mundum (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3: The Golden Age of Greek Patristic Literature, Utrecht/Westminster: Spectrum/Newman, 1960, on the life; Anatolios, Athanasius, London: Routledge, 2004). His significance is soteriological before it is terminological. The early diptych Against the Pagans / On the Incarnation already contains the whole argument: only the Creator can restore the creature; in Christ God the Word himself took a body, “for He was made man that we might be made god” (autos gar enenthropesen, hina hemeis theopoiethomen) (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54 [PG 25:192B]; trans. Behr, PPS 44a, Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011). If the Son were a creature, worship of him would be idolatry and salvation — deification, communion with God himself — impossible; the Orations against the Arians prosecute this logic through the disputed scriptural texts (Athanasius, Orations against the Arians I–III; trans. NPNF II/4; Anatolios, Athanasius, 2004, on the soteriological structure).

Three further services mark him. His Life of Antony (c. 357) created monastic hagiography and carried the desert into the whole Church’s imagination — Augustine heard of it at the crisis of his conversion (Athanasius, Life of Antony; trans. Gregg, CWS, New York: Paulist, 1980; Augustine, Confessions VIII.6.14–15; see The Desert, Cassian, and the Ladder). His 39th Festal Letter (367) gives the first extant list of the twenty-seven New Testament books exactly as the Church receives them (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39; trans. NPNF II/4; see The Orthodox Church and Holy Scripture). And his later willingness, at the synod of Alexandria (362), to recognize that those who said “three hypostaseis” and those who said “one hypostasis” could mean the same faith, opened the door to the Cappadocian settlement (Athanasius, Tomus ad Antiochenos; trans. NPNF II/4; Behr, The Nicene Faith, 2004, on the Tome). The full treatment is deferred to St. Athanasius.

Cyril of Jerusalem: The Faith Taught

Cyril (c. 313–386), bishop of Jerusalem through three exiles of his own, shows the Nicene age from the catechist’s chair rather than the polemicist’s desk. His twenty-four Catechetical Lectures, delivered c. 350 in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to candidates for baptism, walk the creed of Jerusalem article by article — the fullest surviving picture of how an ordinary fourth-century Christian actually learned the faith, the sacraments, and the reading of Scripture (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures; trans. NPNF II/7; Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3, on Cyril). The five concluding Mystagogical Catecheses, explaining baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist to the newly illumined — with their unambiguous confession that the bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood by the invocation of the Holy Spirit (Mystagogical Catechesis 5) — carry a famous source-critical question [Disputed: the manuscripts variously ascribe the Mystagogical Catecheses to Cyril, to his successor John II of Jerusalem, or to both; scholarship remains divided between Cyril’s authorship late in life and John’s — see the survey in Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3, and Doval, Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue, Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2001, defending Cyril]. Cyril long hesitated over the word homoousios while teaching its content — a reminder that the Nicene faith was a reality before it was a settled vocabulary — and he ended among the confessors of 381 (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3). Full treatment: St. Cyril of Jerusalem.

Ephrem: The Faith Sung

The golden age was not monolingual, and its greatest poet wrote no Greek at all. Ephrem (c. 306–373), deacon of Nisibis and then of Edessa after Rome ceded his city to Persia in 363, composed hundreds of madrashe — stanzaic teaching-hymns sung by choirs, including choirs of women — on faith, paradise, the Nativity, and against heresies; Sebastian Brock has made him accessible to English readers as the supreme representative of a genuinely Semitic Christianity, thinking in paradox and symbol rather than definition (Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem, rev. ed., Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992; McVey, trans., Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns, CWS, New York: Paulist, 1989; Quasten’s survey ends before the Syriac tradition, which is treated in Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). His Hymns on Faith are the Syriac front of the same Arian war — a sustained polemic against the presumption of “prying” (b’ata) into the Godhead by Arian and Anomoian dialectic, insisting that God is known in his self-lowering into names and images, supremely in the Incarnation (Ephrem, Hymns on Faith; trans. Wickes, FC 130, Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2015). The Greek church canonized the foreigner almost immediately — Jerome already lists him and reports his works “read publicly after the Scriptures in some churches” (Jerome, De viris illustribus 115) — though the reader must know that the vast “Greek Ephrem” corpus, including the beloved Lenten “Prayer of St. Ephrem,” is largely pseudonymous, a fact the repository flags rather than hides [Disputed: the Prayer of St. Ephrem and most of the Ephraem Graecus corpus cannot be traced to the genuine Syriac works; attribution is traditional, not critical — see Brock, The Luminous Eye, 1992, on the two Ephrems]. Full treatment: St. Ephrem the Syrian.

The Paradigm Generation

Why does this generation define the very category “Father”? Because in it every element of the classical definition is visible at maximum intensity: doctrine confessed at personal cost (Athanasius’ exiles; Cyril’s depositions); sanctity of life in the new monastic key (Antony behind Athanasius; Ephrem’s diaconal asceticism); ecclesiastical reception sealed by an Ecumenical Council whose creed the whole Church still sings; and — decisive against every reduction of tradition to majority opinion — the demonstration that the Fathers are the Church’s witnesses, not her committee. When later councils said “following the holy Fathers,” this is the generation they meant first (Chalcedon 451, Definition; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005, vol. 2; Florovsky, The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century, Collected Works vol. 7, Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987, whose whole volume is the Orthodox portrait of this age; Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, ch. 4).

References

Quasten, Johannes. Patrology. Vol. 3: The Golden Age of Greek Patristic Literature. Utrecht/Westminster, MD: Spectrum/Newman Press, 1960. (Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem: lives, works, the Mystagogical Catecheses question.)
Athanasius. On the Incarnation 54 [PG 25:192B]; trans. John Behr, PPS 44a. Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011. Orations against the Arians I–III; Festal Letter 39; Tomus ad Antiochenos; trans. NPNF II/4. Life of Antony, trans. Robert C. Gregg, Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2 (2 parts). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004. (The controversy’s course; Athanasius; the Tome of 362.)
Anatolios, Khaled. Athanasius. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2004. (The soteriological structure of his theology.)
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Creeds. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 1972. (Chs. 8–10: Nicaea 325, the mid-century councils, Constantinople 381.)
Jerome. Dialogue against the Luciferians 19; De viris illustribus 115. Trans. NPNF II/6, II/3. (“The whole world groaned”; Ephrem read in churches.)
Cyril of Jerusalem. Catechetical Lectures; Mystagogical Catecheses. Trans. NPNF II/7.
Doval, Alexis. Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue: The Authorship of the Mystagogic Catecheses. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001.
Brock, Sebastian. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992. (Ephrem’s symbolic theology; the Ephraem Graecus problem.)
McVey, Kathleen, trans. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1989.
Wickes, Jeffrey, trans. St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith. Fathers of the Church 130. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015.
Murray, Robert. Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Augustine. Confessions VIII.6.14–15. (The Life of Antony at his conversion.)
Florovsky, Georges. The Eastern Fathers of the Fourth Century. Collected Works vol. 7. Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987; Bible, Church, Tradition. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. (Ch. 4: the Arian crisis and its settlement.)
Price, Richard, and Michael Gaddis, trans. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.