Classroom · Orientation · lesson 1 of 5
Who Athanasius was
A young deacon at a famous council, a bishop for forty-five years, and an exile for seventeen of them.
Athanasius was born in Alexandria around 296 and died there in 373. He attended the Council of Nicaea in 325 as a deacon and secretary to his bishop, not as a bishop himself, and he was elected bishop of Alexandria about three years later, at roughly thirty years old. He held that see for forty-five years and spent about seventeen of them in exile, banished five separate times as the empire's religious politics turned against him and back again.
This book comes from before nearly all of that. It is early work, written by a man who had not yet become the figure the later controversies made him, and it does not read like the writing of a partisan. It reads like a young man setting out an argument to a friend.
That friend is named in the text. The book is addressed to "blessed Macarius, true lover of Christ" — a real person being written to, which is why the book keeps anticipating what its reader will object to.
From the book itself
A line to keep
Come now, blessed Macarius, true lover of Christ, and let us follow the faith of our religion to what comes next.