Friday, 5/2/14
St. Athanasius,
whose feast we celebrate today, was at the very center of early Church History.
Born in Alexandria in 298, he was an eager learner who in time became a
proficient author in both the Greek and Egypt’s Coptic languages. As a
twelve-year-old, playing with other boys on the beach in Alexandria, and
showing them just how a bishop administers Baptism and Confirmation, it
happened that he caught the eye of
Alexandria’s bishop, who then brought Alex into his household.
At age twenty-two he
was in the bishop’s house when a Father Arius, an old pastor in Alexandria,
began telling his people that Jesus was a very good man, but no more than a
good man. As word of that got around, the other pastors petitioned the bishop
to call together a synod to decide whether or not to let Father Arius stay in
his parish.
At that synod young
Athanasius impressed the pastors with his thorough knowledge of the Scriptures.
He quoted St. John as saying, “The Word was God,” and “The Word became flesh.”
That established the Catholic
teaching that Jesus was the Son of God.
Father Arius, exiled
from Alexandria,found support in Syria and Byzantium where tradesmen and churchmen had all been traditional rivals
of Alexandria. There, the followers of Arius became known as Arians. When they
became as numerous as the Christians, Emperor Constantine, angered over a split
in the Roman Empire, told the two sides to shake and makeup.
But the split just widened.
So, in 325 Constantine summoned all the church’s bishops to Nicea, near
Byzantium. There he forced them all to swear to the Nicean Creed which calls
God’s Son of one substance with the Father. (I’m am making this as short as I
can.)
In 328 the old
bishop of Alexandria died, and Athanasius became the new archbishop. In 330
Constantine did the unthinkable by moving the capitol of the Roman Empire from
Rome to Byzantium, renaming it Constantinople. He died in 337, leaving his
empire to his oldest son, Constantius, who had gone over to Arianism
Although Athanasius
was Archbishop of Alexandria from 328 to his death in 373, for seventeen of
those years he was banished from there by Arian emperors. (Really, I am trying
to make this short.) Often he took refuge in the desert with the hermit St.
Anthony, and also with the first Catholic monks who had St. Pachomius as abbot.
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