Athanasius against the world
Athanasius exiled for the first time
Ten years after Nicaea, Athanasius is bishop of Alexandria — the most important see in the eastern empire — and the political winds have shifted completely against him.
Constantine has become convinced, partly by his Arian advisors, that Athanasius is a troublemaker who is preventing the unity of the church. The charges brought against him at the Council of Tyre in 335 AD are not theological — his opponents know better than to relitigate Nicaea directly. Instead: he illegally levied a tax of linen vestments on Egypt. He broke a chalice used in the Eucharist. He had a man's hand cut off to use in magical rituals. He had a man murdered.
All of it fabricated. The murder victim walks into the council chamber alive. The man who supposedly lost his hand shows both his hands to the assembly.
But the council is stacked against him and the verdict is predetermined. Athanasius is condemned and exiled to Trier, in what is now Germany.
This is the first of five exiles. He will spend seventeen of the next forty-five years of his episcopate in exile — driven out by Constantius, by Julian the Apostate, by Valens. He will hide in the desert with Anthony's monks when necessary. He will write from hiding, argue from hiding, ordain bishops from hiding.
His enemies develop a phrase for his stubborn persistence: Athanasius against the world. He adopts it. The world, he points out, once crucified its creator. The world's majority opinion has not always been the guide.
He outlasts every emperor who exiles him. He dies in his own bed in 373 AD, bishop of Alexandria, the creed of Nicaea intact.
“Even if the whole world should be against me, I am not afraid.”
— Athanasius of Alexandria, c. 4th century
“What then will we say about these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”
Athanasius held his position not because he was certain he was right in some abstract sense but because he had traced the logic and followed it to its end and found that he could not move without losing something that could not be replaced.
He was not stubborn. He was rooted.
There is a difference between a person who refuses to change because change is uncomfortable and a person who refuses to change because they have gone deep enough to know what would be lost. Athanasius had gone that deep.
The world will always have a majority opinion about what the church should soften, relativize, or drop to make things easier. The question Athanasius forces on every generation is the same one he faced five times in exile:
The cloud passes. It always has. The thing worth holding is the thing that is still true when the cloud clears — and the person who held it through the cloud is the person who can say so with authority.