When was athanasius born

Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Mary Fairchild. Christianity Expert. Mary Fairchild is a full-time Christian minister, writer, and editor of two Christian anthologies, including "Stories of Cavalry.

Facebook Facebook Twitter Twitter. Athanasius the Apostolic Occupation : Bishop, theologian, writer Born : c. Died : A. Cite this Article Format. Fairchild, Mary. Biography of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria. Coptic Christian Beliefs and Practices. The Great Schism of and the Split of Christianity. Compare Major Beliefs of 7 Christian Denominations. Biography of Eusebius, Father of Church History. Biography of Tertullian, Father of Latin Theology.

Origen: Biography of the Man of Steel. Who Was Saint Augustine? What Is Jansenism? Definition, Principles, and Legacy. Christian Symbols Illustrated Glossary.

Your Privacy Rights. Though other such lists had been and would still be proposed, it is Athanasius's list that the church eventually adopted, and it is the one we use to this day. Sections Home.

Bible Coronavirus Prayer. Subscribe Member Benefits Give a Gift. Subscribers receive full access to the archives. Christian History Archives Eras Home. More People Theologians. Current Issue November Subscribe. Read This Issue. Subscribe to Christianity Today and get instant access to past issues of Christian History! Get the best from CT editors, delivered straight to your inbox! Tags: Athanasius Heresy Trinity. An earlier date, , is sometimes assigned as the more certain year of his birth; and it is supported apparently by the authority of the "Coptic Fragment" published by Dr.

It must be remembered, however, that in two distinct passages of his writings Hist. Such reserve would scarcely be intelligible, if, on the hypothesis of the earlier date, the Saint had been then a boy fully ten years old. Besides, there must have been some semblance of a foundation in fact for the charge brought against him by his accusers in after-life Index to the Festal Letters that at the times of his consecration to the episcopate in he had not yet attained the canonical age of thirty years.

These considerations, therefore, even if they are found to be not entirely convincing, would seem to make it likely that he was born not earlier than nor later than It is impossible to speak more than conjecturally of his family. Of the claim that it was both prominent and well-to-do, we can only observe that the tradition to the effect is not contradicted by such scanty details as can be gleaned from the saint's writings. Those writings undoubtedly betray evidences of the sort of education that was given, for the most part, only to children and youths of a better class.

It began with grammar, went on to rhetoric, and received its final touches under some one of the more fashionable lecturers in the philosophic schools. It is possible, of course, that he owed his remarkable training in letters to his saintly predecessor's favour, if not to his personal care.

But Athanasius was one of those rare personalities that derive incomparably more from their own native gifts of intellect and character than from the fortuitousness of descent or environment. His career almost personifies a crisis in the history of Christianity ; and he may be said rather to have shaped the events in which he took part than to have been shaped by them.

Yet it would be misleading to urge that he was in no notable sense a debtor to the time and place of his birth. The Alexandria of his boyhood was an epitome, intellectually, morally, and politically, of that ethnically many-coloured Graeco-Roman world, over which the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries was beginning at last, with undismayed consciousness, after nearly three hundred years of unwearying propagandism, to realize its supremacy.

It was, moreover, the most important centre of trade in the whole empire; and its primacy as an emporium of ideas was more commanding than that of Rome or Constantinople, Antioch or Marseilles. To have been born and brought up in such an atmosphere of philosophizing Christianity was, in spite of the dangers it involved, the timeliest and most liberal of educations ; and there is, as we have intimated, abundant evidence in the saint's writings to testify to the ready response which all the better influences of the place must have found in the heart and mind of the growing boy.

Athanasius seems to have been brought early in life under the immediate supervision of the ecclesiastical authorities of his native city. Whether his long intimacy with Bishop Alexander began in childhood, we have no means of judging; but a story which pretends to describe the circumstances of his first introduction to that prelate has been preserved for us by Rufinus Hist. The bishop , so the tale runs, had invited a number of brother prelates to meet him at breakfast after a great religious function on the anniversary of the martyrdom of St.

Peter, a recent predecessor in the See of Alexandria. While Alexander was waiting for his guests to arrive, he stood by a window, watching a group of boys at play on the seashore below the house. He had not observed them long before he discovered that they were imitating, evidently with no thought of irreverence, the elaborate ritual of Christian baptism. He therefore sent for the children and had them brought into his presence. In the investigation that followed it was discovered that one of the boys, who was no other than the future Primate of Alexandria, had acted the part of the bishop , and in that character had actually baptized several of his companions in the course of their play.

Alexander, who seems to have been unaccountably puzzled over the answers he received to his inquiries, determined to recognize the make-believe baptisms as genuine; and decided that Athanasius and his playfellows should go into training in order to fit themselves for a clerical career. The Bollandists deal gravely with this story; and writers as difficult to satisfy as Archdeacon Farrar and the late Dean Stanley are ready to accept it as bearing on its face "every indication of truth " Farrar, "Lives of the Fathers", I, ; Stanley, "East.

But whether in its present form, or in the modified version to be found in Socrates I, xv , who omits all reference to the baptism and says that the game was "an imitation of the priesthood and the order of consecrated persons", the tale raises a number of chronological difficulties and suggests even graver questions.

Perhaps a not impossible explanation of its origin may be found in the theory that it was one of the many floating myths set in movement by popular imagination to account for the marked bias towards an ecclesiastical career which seems to have characterized the early boyhood of the future champion of the Faith. Sozomen speaks of his "fitness for the priesthood", and calls attention to the significant circumstance that he was "from his tenderest years practically self-taught".

He had been well educated , and was versed in grammar and rhetoric, and had already, while still a young man, and before reaching the episcopate, given proof to those who dwelt with him of his wisdom and acumen" Soz.

That "wisdom and acumen" manifested themselves in a various environment. While still a levite under Alexander's care, he seems to have been brought for a while into close relations with some of the solitaries of the Egyptian desert , and in particular with the great St.

Anthony , whose life he is said to have written. The evidence both of the intimacy and for the authorship of the life in question has been challenged, chiefly by non-Catholic writers, on the ground that the famous "Vita" shows signs of interpolation. Whatever we may think of the arguments on the subject, it is impossible to deny that the monastic idea appealed powerfully to the young cleric's temperament, and that he himself in after years was not only at home when duty or accident threw him among the solitaries, but was so monastically self-disciplined in his habits as to be spoken of as an "ascetic" Apol.

In fourth-century usage the word would have a definiteness of connotation not easily determinable today. It is not surprising that one who was called to fill so large a place in the history of his time should have impressed the very form and feature of his personality , so to say, upon the imagination of his contemporaries.

Gregory Nazianzen is not the only writer who has described him for us Orat. A contemptuous phrase of the Emperor Julian's Epist. He was slightly below the middle height, spare in build, but well-knit, and intensely energetic. He had a finely shaped head, set off with a thin growth of auburn hair, a small but sensitively mobile mouth, an aquiline nose, and eyes of intense but kindly brilliancy.

He had a ready wit, was quick in intuition , easy and affable in manner, pleasant in conversation, keen, and, perhaps, somewhat too unsparing in debate. Besides the references already cited, see the detailed description given in the January Menaion quotes in the Bollandist life.

In addition to these qualities, he was conspicuous for two others to which even his enemies bore unwilling testimony. There is one other note in this highly gifted and many-sided personality to which everything else in his nature literally ministered, and which must be kept steadily in view, if we would possess the key to his character and writing and understand the extraordinary significance of his career in the history of the Christian Church.

He was by instinct neither a liberal nor a conservative in theology. Indeed the terms have a singular inappropriateness as applied to a temperament like his. From first to last he cared greatly for one thing and one thing only; the integrity of his Catholic creed. It began and ended in devotion to the Divinity of Jesus Christ. He was scarcely out of his teens, and certainly not in more than deacon's orders, when he published two treatises, in which his mind seemed to strike the keynote of all its riper after-utterances on the subject of the Catholic Faith.

Jerome De Viris Illust. As a plea for the Christian position, addressed chiefly to both Gentiles and Jews , the young deacon's apology, while undoubtedly reminiscential in methods and ideas of Origen and the earlier Alexandrians, is, nevertheless, strongly individual and almost pietistic in tone.

Though it deals with the Incarnation, it is silent on most of those ulterior problems in defence of which Athanasius was soon to be summoned by the force of events and the fervour of his own faith to devote the best energies of his life. The work contains no explicit discussion of the nature of the Word's Sonship, for instance; no attempt to draw out the character of Our Lord's relation to the Father; nothing, in short, of those Christological questions upon which he was to speak with such splendid and courageous clearness in time of shifting formularies and undetermined views.

Yet those ideas must have been in the air Soz. Peter, and whose teachings had succeeded in making dangerous headway, even among "the consecrated virgins" of St. This means that the Christian's union with Christ the Saviour is union with God, who alone can bestow immortal life.

It means, too, that the traditional Christian belief in the Holy Spirit is belief in one who also is unequivocally God because he performs the activity of God in bringing man's salvation to completion. Second, Athanasius played a role as conciliatory orthodox leader. He was able to see that a large body of conservative Eastern bishops, who were uncomfortable over the Nicene formula and who preferred to say that the Son was "of like essence" to the Father, were not in fact Arians.

He did important preparatory work toward a reconciliation and coalition, which he did not live to see. Third, he was a warmly enthusiastic supporter of the Christian monastic movement emanating from Egypt and wrote a widely read biography of the monastic organizer St.

Athanasius died in Alexandria in The best study of St. Athanasius is in French. In English see F. Cross, The Study of St.