_Lat._ S. Athanasius, Pater Orthodoxiæ. _Ital._ Sant’ Atanasio. _Fr._
St. Athanase. (May 2, A.D. 373.)
St. Athanasius, whose famous Creed remains a stumbling-block in
Christendom, was born at Alexandria, about the year 298; he was
consequently the eldest of the Greek Fathers, though he does not in
that Church take the first rank. He, like the others, began his career
by the study of profane literature, science, and eloquence; but, seized
by the religious spirit of the age, he, too, fled to the desert,
and became, for a time, the pupil of St. Anthony. He returned to
Alexandria, and was ordained deacon. His first appearance as a public
character was at the celebrated council of Nice (A.D. 325), where he
opposed Arius and his partisans with so much zeal and eloquence, that
he was thenceforth regarded as the great pillar of orthodoxy. He became
Bishop of Alexandria the following year; and the rest of his life was a
perpetual contest with the Arians. The great schism of the early Church
blazed at this time in the East and in the West, and Athanasius, by his
invincible perseverance and intrepidity, procured the victory for the
Catholic party. He died in 372, after having been Bishop of Alexandria
forty-six years, of which twenty years had been spent in exile and
tribulation.
* * * * *
It is curious that, notwithstanding his fame and his importance in the
Church, St. Athanasius should be, as a patron and a subject of Art,
of all saints the most unpopular. He figures, of course, as one of
the series of Greek Doctors; but I have never met with any separate
representation of him, and I know not any church dedicated to him, nor
any picture representing the vicissitudes of his unquiet life, fraught
as it was with strange reverses and picturesque incidents. Such _may_
exist, but in Western Art, at least, they have never been prominent.
According to the Greek formula, he ought to be represented old,
bald-headed, and with a long white beard, as in the etching.