St. Athanasius the Great

On Alexander's repose in 328, Athanasius, barely thirty, was elevated to the patriarchal throne of Alexandria. He would hold it for forty-five years, but spend seventeen of them in exile.

Five times he was driven from his see by emperors who sought peace with the Arian party: to Trier, to Rome, to the desert of the Egyptian monks, and to the catacombs and house-roofs of his own city. Each time he returned, and each time he taught the same thing: that if the Son is not what the Father is, no man is saved. From his pen in those years came the Four Discourses Against the Arians, the Defence of the Nicene Definition, and On the Councils, the great arsenal of Nicene theology.

In the Egyptian desert he found not only refuge but friendship. He knew St. Anthony the Great, and after the hermit's repose he wrote the Life of Antony, the book that carried the monastic ideal across the whole Empire and set countless souls, Augustine among them, on the path to God.

Against him stood the power of emperors and the eloquence of the learned; for him stood the Scriptures, the monks, and the faith of the simple. Twice St. Anthony himself came down from the mountain to stand publicly at his side. The age would later remember the lonely struggle in a single phrase: Athanasius against the world.

He outlived nearly every emperor who exiled him. He reposed in peace in Alexandria on May 2, 373, having seen the faith of Nicaea publicly confirmed once more before his death. The Church keeps him as the Pillar of Orthodoxy and a Father of the Fathers, and reads his treatise On the Incarnation still as the clearest brief statement of why God became man.