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Catholic Saints
St. Athanasius
00:20:05
Join Dr. Ben Akers and Dr. Elizabeth Klein as they discuss the early Church Father, St. Athanasius. A bishop and Doctor of the Church, St. Athanasius is remembered as the great defender of the Nicene Creed. He was exiled five times from his own diocese under four different emperors. A great teacher, his writings are accessible to both beginners and experts in theology, writing works that serve different needs in the Church—intellectual, spiritual, and devotional. In this episode, Dr. Ben Akers and Dr. Elizabeth Klein dive into his biography and do a quick overview of his monumental work, On the Incarnation.
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Narrator
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Hello, and welcome to form now, my name is Dr. Ben Akers. I'm the chief content officer here at the Augusta Institute, and my special guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Klein, who's a professor of theology at the graduate school that we have here at the Augusta Institute. Thanks for joining me.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Thanks for having me.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Well, today we're going to be talking about one of our saints. A very popular series that we've had here on Form Nows is following the liturgical year of different saint days that we celebrate. Today. We're going to celebrate one of the great saints at the very beginning of May, Saint Athanasius.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. I'm so glad you asked me to talk about Saint Athanasius. I love Athanasius. He's one of the first early church fathers I read when I was sort of getting interested in theology. And I still assigned Athanasius work, called on the Incarnation in my creed class every year.
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Dr. Ben Akers
It's not that thick. I have a copy of it here, but it's not thick with type of text. But the theology is so rich.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. So Athanasius wrote this work basically to explain the reason for the Incarnation. Why did God become man? And he really lays it out in a very systematic way, a way that I think is inviting and easy to follow. And we don't know necessarily the date that Athanasius wrote it, but a lot of people think that this is one of his first works, is that he might have written it in his 20s. And so it's very impressive. I always say to my students who are in their 20s that, you know, this is the bar. They have to be Athanasious by the time you read a, he was a.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Deacon and then was named Bishop of Alexandria. Let's go some of the historical context, and then we'll dive into the text. What are his dates, so we get a sense of where he goes.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. So Athanasius lived from around 297 to 387, in his 80s, and he lived through the great Aryan controversy. So some of our viewers might have heard about the Aryan controversy. So this was a really important early church controversy over the divinity of Christ. So is Jesus really, really God in the way that God the Father is God, or is he kind of a semi God, or is he an angel, or how does that kind of work? And so Athanasius lived through that, through that period, and he was bishop of Alexandria during the Arian controversy.
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Dr. Ben Akers
So this is in Egypt.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Egypt, Yep, this is in Egypt. And so, again, people may be familiar with the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325. And so we think that Athanasius was there, but he was not bishop of Alexandria. He was probably an assistant to the bishop at that time named Alexander, which was confusing Alexander of Alexandria. And so he was present. But as with other church councils, people may know that a council doesn't necessarily end in controversy. Sometimes it starts one. And so really, Nicaea was meant to be a kind of definitive statement about the divinity of Christ. And we still profess the Nicene Creed in Mass, but there was a huge debate after about sort of the interpretation and whether or not everyone was really happy with that proclamation of the council. And that's the period during which Athanasius really wrote as the great defender of the creed. So he had the reputation of being Athanasius contra mundum, Athanasius against the world, that he was really this heroic defender of the Nicene Creed and was exiled five times. While he was bishop of Alexandria from his own sort of diocese. He was exiled five times.
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Dr. Ben Akers
One of the stories I love about Athanasius tells his wit is that he was part on exile, was going down the river, and the imperial troops were coming after him to overtake him because they wanted to arrest him. And they yelled at him, he's rowing hard. They're rowing hard. And they said, we're looking for Athanasius. You know, do you know where Athanasius is? And so Athanasius is. Does he identify who he is? He said, if you rove quickly, you'll overtake him in this kind of this cryptic response. But if they rode hard, they would just get him right there. They took that to mean to go further down the river. So they passed him, and he was able to turn direction and go the other way. But I love this, you know, the creativity of the saints and his wit and his intelligence is not only in that story, but also the way that he taught theology.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. And I think one reason I really love Athanasius as a teacher of theology and sort of as an example for me as a theologian, is that he's really able to write theology on many different levels. You have on the Incarnation, which is really written to kind of students of the faith, sort of maybe more beginner level theology. But then he writes these three long tractates against the Arians, which is very much in the polemical mode, maybe not the most exciting for a beginner to read very detailed exposition of Scripture, very detailed sort of philosophical argumentation. But then Athanasius also wrote one of the foundational spiritual works, the Letter to Marcellinus, which is about the Psalms and praying the Psalms that was treasured throughout tradition. And he also wrote one of the first hagiographies that became extremely famous in the ancient world, the life of St. Anthony. And so he has all these different theological works that serve all these different needs in the church that he felt needed to be written for different purposes. And he's able to do those all. And those are all sort of classic, classic theological works.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Was he trained in a classical way before he enters like the life of the Church?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. So he was from a fairly wealthy family and received sort of a high level secular education, which is, you know, sort of often the case with many of these early saints. They sort of have the classical rhetorical scriptures.
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Dr. Ben Akers
It's great they use it. I mean, like Moses training was allowed him to be able to write, you know, parts of the Pentateuch and the law and.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yes, yeah, totally. I remember this isn't about Saint Athanasius, but about Saint Basil the Great similarly had this Egyptian high class education and his sister Macrina kind of chastised him and said, you could put that learning to the service of secular law and be famous for a generation, or you could put it to the service of the church and be famous forever. And very prophetic.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Basil the Great.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. Also true for Athanasius. And it also gives us some perspective in our own time, like what we think sort of matters today and seems so important and pressing now. If we really make sure we're trying to do things that matter for eternity and do things that matter for God, that's what's going to make that legacy or have the sort of, greatest, greatest effect on the Church.
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Dr. Ben Akers
One of the things that is so striking is when you said he was exiled five times and you know, the world is a famous line. I think it's from Newman or St. Jerome, where the world wakes up and finds itself Arian.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right.
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Dr. Ben Akers
And so that's what makes him against. He's the one and only kind of holding the faith. And is that in that time of persecution and exile, he's able to write all these different types of theological works. So his pastoral.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah, there you go. Maybe bishops should get exiled more often.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Exactly. They'd be productive.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
They have free time to be productive. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, obviously there were people who were Nicene Christians. I think one of the reasons why Athanasius was exiled was really because who has the ear of the emperor, right? So he's exiled five times under four different emperors who kind of have Arian leanings during those times. And so that's part of the sort of political landscape. But if the histories are to be believed, sort of people on the street were very involved in the Aryan controversy, and people sort of knew what was happening. And one of Athanasius critiques of his opponent, Arius, was that he would invent like, sort of jingles, like songs for people to learn that were like Aryan theological songs. And so this was. This was very much a sort of popular level thing that people. People were concerned about, because it really does, at the end of the day, touch the heart of piety, right? Because Athanasius, one of his main arguments for the divinity of Christ was simply that we worship him. And so he's like, if we worship Christ, he has to be God, otherwise we're all idolaters, right? So he has to be God. He can't be one step away from God. He can't be an angel. He can't be the world's most supreme prophet that ever lived. If we worship him, he has to be God. He has to be God in exactly the same way that God the Father is God. If we baptize in his name, he has to be God. And so you can see how that really does, you know, affect the everyday of Christian life, whether how you should be regarding Christ.
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Dr. Ben Akers
We're so different now. I mean, I think of, you know, people complaining because Father Homily goes five minutes over than what they hoped it to go over nowadays. But now they're actually debating, is Jesus God or not? And everybody in the pews in the churches is discussing this.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
That is true, although I think that controversies change and what sort of councils are about change. Though there are controversies in the church now that are certainly household problems that people talk about. Often they're more moral issues today than maybe doctrinal theological ones. But that is interesting because people often ask me, what would Athanasius say about what's going on in the church today? Or what would Augustine say about the controversy in the church today? And in some ways, it's a difficult question to answer because the controversies were so doctrinal and now they're very different. And so there's some analogs to maybe how they would have dealt with it. But there are other things that are always, of course, very different about what we're experiencing in terms of the sort of what's controversial.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Well, I want to dive into on the Incarnation and if you give us a, you know, a 30,000 foot view of kind of the argument he's made making against Arius, but would be helpful for us for every Joe, you know, every Jane, every Joe Catholic that's in the pew watching this unformed, but also wants to kind of have a primer to get into Athanasius.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah, absolutely. And what so I use on the Incarnation, actually in. I have a short course, if you're interested in more Athanasius. The short course that I did on God really draws on the Incarnation is kind of the fundamental kind of thing I'm drawing on to explain it. So basically the kind of two parts of. On the Incarnation. So the first part is kind of like, why did God have to become man? And the second part is like, why did God have to die? Right. So those are kind of the two stages. So him to become man is one thing that's kind of already embarrassing enough. But then why does he have to die on a cross? And so he really starts in, in this text from the very beginning. And so he says, okay, if you're going to understand the Incarnation, you have to understand creation. You have to understand that God created everything good and God really created everything to sort of freely respond to Him. That's. That's the sort of stage for creation. And if you don't understand that, you're not gonna understand why God freely entered in order to save it. So he kind of sets the stage for that. And then he talks about the Fall and how that sort of distorts creation. And one thing he really emphasizes is we're created from nothing. And so then when we, when we turn away from God, we go back to nothing. Yeah, we go back to the nothing from which he came. He calls this corruption. So we tend to think of the word corruption as like moral corruption, political corruption. But he's talking about as a kind of like being a state of corruption where we're going back to nothing.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Yeah, I mean, he's just following the biblical text that you are dust into dust you shall return.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right. So almost like corrosion of a metal or something, it's going away to nothing. And so he says, how do you, how do you reverse that process? Right. The only person who's capable of reversing that process is God, because life comes from him and he creates. Okay, great. So why didn't he just sort of like, do it by fiat? Say, like get back into those people life? Well, he says because from in the beginning, he created Us in his image with his very own impress of himself. And so unless he wanted to kind of like destroy us or do something from. With outside of that creation, he had to enter into it and put that impress of his image. So he really emphasizes Christ as the perfect image of the invisible God, also scriptural. And so that the image, capital I, the perfect representation of the Father, who himself is God, enters and puts that image back onto humanity by becoming human. And so that's kind of the first half. He emphasizes this renewal of the image of God.
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Dr. Ben Akers
So God creates us. And so God has to. If we need recreation, he needs to also be the one who recreates us.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Exactly. So he creates us and then comes to recreate us from within. And he uses this beautiful analogy that I love of a painting. So he says if an artist paints a self portrait and then something happens to it and it gets, like, damaged and stuff on it, you would have, like, a restorationist, right, Come and restore it. But he said, but you can only truly restore the likeness if you had the person of the portrait sitting right there, right? So he says Christ comes to kind of sit again for the portrait of God on humankind. But he's both the artist, of course, and he's the subject. And so he has this perfect renewal, renewal of the image. So that's why he says God has to become man. So that's kind of the first part, and then the second part, why God had to die. So it's like, okay, great, we're. We're renewed. God came, so why does he have to die? So the second part of that also, again, back to this idea of corruption and the fall, where God said that if we sin, that we would surely die. And that this is. This is a just penalty. And this is also, like, natural, in a sense, because we're super. Nature preserved us from death, but by nature we're nothing, right? So we're returning to death. So God doesn't violate sort of the laws of nature. He doesn't violate the laws of justice. And so in some sense, that needs to be fulfilled. And so Christ fulfills that death in himself. And what I love about what Athanasius shows is it's not that Christ dies so that we don't have to die, because obviously we actually still do die, right? So the penalty is in no way ignored, right? We all suffer that death, but Christ makes it the gate to eternal life. And so death is overturned in that sense that it's still fulfilled. But when we unify our death to Christ, die A death like his, we have a resurrection like his. And so then the last part is about sort of the fittingness of the resurrection.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Which is the fittingness of the resurrection. Thank you for that great summary. The fittingness of the resurrection, this is. You know, Paul encounters this when he goes and he preaches in Corinth about, you know, the resurrection still is a hard truth for people to get their minds around.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Oh, absolutely. Actually, in the early church, I would say that the resurrection of the body is probably the most scandalous doctrine because it went against what you would call the science of the day. Right. So we often think about, like, scientific problems as being, like, kids seem to.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Say, like, wait, I get this body back. Like, they're thinking about, like, how does resurrection work?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right. And so it is a difficult truth. And Athanasius doesn't talk so much about the kind of mechanics of resurrection. You could go look at the end of City of God. Augustine is basically answering all these questions, like, what about fingernails? What about, you know, all these. These kinds of questions. But I think it's. It's good to remember that the challenges of the faith vis a vis science have. Are not like a totally new thing. That sort of Platonic philosophy, which was also the science of the day, said that, like, bodies can't go into heaven because bodies are heavy and, like, heaven is, like, light and airy, and people don't have bodies in heaven. And so that was very contrary to kind of a basic understanding of physics, you know, and so that had to be kind of kind of combated and really challenge people in terms of, like, the mystery that it presented.
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Dr. Ben Akers
When was Athanasius text on the Incarnation? Was it well received? Do we know how it was received in the Church?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
I don't know if I know much about it. Stood the test of test, certainly stood the test of time is a kind of classic, you know, theological text, and it certainly sets the terms for understanding the causes of the Incarnation. So if you look at the catechism, the catechism gives four reasons for the Incarnation. And you can find. You can find them all in Athanasius, but in particular the last one, God became man, that man might become God. That's a very famous line. Yeah.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Explain that, because that is. It is. It's shocking when people hear that. Like, what does he mean by that?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. And I found with teaching that maybe a lot of Catholics haven't heard this term as much, and people associate it maybe more with Eastern theology. This idea of deification is what they call it, that we're going to become like God. And so what's meant by that God became man, that man might become God? It doesn't mean that we become like the divine first principle of the universe or we take a hunk out of God or something. It means that we truly will be like God and participate in his inner life in the Trinity. And so that's sort of the basic fact of the Incarnation. Right. That God, by uniting himself to human nature, makes human nature capable of uniting itself to God. And that's sort of the whole sum of salvation. And really, that's what you get in something like the Gospel of John. Like, what's Christ's goal? Right. To join yourself to me and from me to the Father. Like, that's like the whole thing, you know? And so even though it is, you know, Athanasius is famous for tagging this line, God came in that man might become God. I actually don't think it appears in that way anywhere in Athanasius, but it does in Augustine. So those in the west should not despair of deification because it's certainly very, very strong in the Eastern tradition in terms of that as part of why Christ became incarnate. And in fact, some medieval theologians hypothesize that maybe even without sin, Christ would have become incarnate for this reason. Right. Because the principle of the Incarnation is what allows us to even supersede where Adam was. Right. We're even in a better place than Adam after we die. And we're hopefully in the beatific vision because we actually have that union with God and seeing him face to face.
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Dr. Ben Akers
That's beautiful. Do you have any thoughts about. I'm sure you have many thoughts, but about his letter to the Psalms, because I know that a lot of people that are watching, informed, are also, and maybe listening to this on podcast, pray the Psalms pretty regularly. Does he have any insight, you know, something that we could draw from his letter?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. I mean, you could pick up the letter from Arsalinus and read it. I think a lot of things will be familiar to you because it's so influential in the tradition, because probably already stuff that you have read before, but he does talk a lot about how the Psalms really shape our affections, how they help us understand how to put ourselves before God and how they help us really work through all these different emotional states. I love the Psalms because it means I can complain to God. It's in the Bible.
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Dr. Ben Akers
That's right.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
And that sort of. That whatever kind of mood you're in, so to speak, whatever kind of spiritual trouble you're facing that the psalms can give your voice to teach you how to pray to God and how to seek him. But yeah, it's pretty accessible. It's not super long letter to Marcellinus. I'm sure you can find it on something like New Advent if you want to.
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Dr. Ben Akers
If you're interested in learning more about Athanasius and his texts are in public domain, New Adventures is a wonderful resource. You click on the top navigation bar to Fathers of the Church, and it's alphabetical, so you can find Athanasius.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
That'll be right near the top.
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Dr. Ben Akers
He'll be right near the top. What does his name mean? Athanasius.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
The name Athanasius seems immortal. So I was actually joking with Dr. Ickers before the show that I was gonna make a pitch for the new baby name to be Athanasius. Because that's just a really awesome name. Set your kid up for eternal life. Name them the immortal one. You know, I love it.
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Dr. Ben Akers
If you name your child Athanasius after hearing this, we will send you a free Bible. Just send us your address. Cause that is an amazing name to reclaim these saint name, these great heroes and heroines of our faith. And even right after his death, St. Gregory Nazianzes, another great theologian, called him a pillar of the church. So he was recognized even in his own time. And soon after that, this man was something special.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. I mean, to endure the kind of hardships he did and still to be so confident in the truth, you know, it's really, really remarkable.
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Dr. Ben Akers
No, so he's a great challenge for us to not only to know the Lord and love him, to know him, but also to love him. He's a saint and a great father of the church. The fathers of the church are these men who lived in the early decades, the early centuries after the time of Christ that give us really authoritative, interpreting part of that living tradition that we look at, helping us understand scripture and the life of Christ and the deeds of Christ. So, Dr. Klein, thank you for joining me. If you'd like to Learn more from Dr. Klein, especially with regards to Saint Athanasius, I encourage you to to check out her short course, one of her short courses on our platform. Just look up short courses, Augusta Institute, and you'll discover it there. Every month we send out a new class and we're updating every month so you can learn things on scripture, you can learn things of saints, spirituality. What are the other things like topics?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Basically anything you can do.
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Dr. Ben Akers
Any theological topics. Yeah, we are covered in that so thank you for joining us and God Bless.
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Narrator
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