Page:Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature (1911).djvu/82

64 66). He wanted Athanasius to promote the recognition by the Westerns of Meletius as rightful bp. of Antioch, and to induce Paulinus to negotiate. In the autumn Basil wrote again (Ep. 69), and the tone which he adopts towards Athanasius is very remarkable. He calls him the foremost person (literally, the summit) of the whole church, the man of "truly grand and apostolic soul, who from boyhood had been an athlete in the cause of religion"—"a spiritual father," whom he longed earnestly to see, and whose conversation would amply compensate for all the sufferings of a lifetime (Ep. 69, 80, 82). But although Athanasius consented to act as a medium between Basil and the Westerns (Ep. 90), he could not take any direct part in favour of Meletius, whose rival's position he had unequivocally recognized. Nothing came of the application.

Athanasius was far from tolerating, in these latter years of his life, any theories which seemed definitely heterodox respecting what may be called the human side of the Incarnation. If, in his Letter to Adelphius, he condemned a certain class of Arians, and vindicated against their cavils the adoration paid to Christ's Manhood, that is, to His one Person Incarnate; if, in his Letter to Maximus, he denounced those who spoke of the man Christ as simply a saint with whom the Word had become associated; he was also, in his Letter to Epictetus, bp. of Corinth—a tract called forth by a communication from Epictetus—most earnest against some who, while "glorying in the Nicene confession, represented Christ's body as not truly human, but formed out of the essence of Godhead." This was, in fact, the second proposition of the heresy called Apollinarian; the first being that which had attracted the attention of the council of 362, and had been disclaimed by those whom the council could examine—as to the non-existence, in Christ, of a rational soul, the Word being supposed to supply its place. These views had grown out of an unbalanced eagerness to exalt the Saviour's dignity: but the great upholders of Nicene faith saw that they were incompatible with His Manhood and His Headship, that they virtually brought back Docetism, and that one of them, at any rate, involved a debased conception of Deity. In the next year, 372, he combated both these propositions with "the keenness and richness of thought which distinguish his writings generally" (see Newman, Church of the Fathers, p. 162; Praef. ed. Benson, ii. 7) in two books entitled Against Apollinaris. These books are remarkable for the masterly distinctness with which the one Christ is set forth as "perfect God and perfect Man" (i. 16): if words occur in ii. 10 which seem at first sight to favour Monothelitism, the context shews their meaning to be that the Divine will in Christ was dominant over the human; if in the next chapter the phrase "God suffered through the flesh" is called unscriptural, the whole argument shews that he is contending against the passibility of the Saviour's Godhead. Inexact as might be some of his phrases, the general purport of his teaching on this great subject is unmistakable; it is, as he says in

Orat. iii. 41, that Christ was "very God in the flesh, and very Flesh in the Word." In truth, these later treatises, like the great Discourses, exclude by anticipation both the forms of heresy, in reference to the Person and Natures of Christ, which troubled the church in the next three centuries (see especially i. 11, ii. 10). Athanasius, in the fruits of his work, was "in truth the Immortal" (Christ. Remembr. xxxvii. 206): he was continually "planting trees under which men of a later age might sit." It might indeed be said that he "waxed old in his work" (Ecclus. xi. 20).

But the time of work for him came to an end in the spring of 373. The discussions about the year of his death may be considered as practically closed; the Festal Index, although its chronology is sometimes faulty, may be considered as confirming the date of 373, given in the Maffeian Fragment, supported by other ancient authorities, and accepted by various writers. The exact day, we may believe, was Thursday, May 2, on which day of the month Athanasius is venerated in the Western church. He had sat on the Alexandrian throne, as his great successor Cyril says in a letter to the monks of Egypt, "forty-six complete years"; had he lived a few weeks longer, the years of his episcopate would have been forty-seven. Having recommended Peter, one of his presbyters, for election in his place, he died tranquilly in his own house, "after many struggles," as Rufinus says (ii. 3), "and after his endurance had won many a crown," amid troubles which Tillemont ventures to call a continual martyrdom.

Such was the career of Athanasius the Great, as he began to be called in the next generation. Four points, perhaps, ought especially to dwell in our remembrance: (a) the deep religiousness which illuminated all his studies and controversies by a sense of his relations as a Christian to his Redeemer; (b) the persistency, so remarkable in one whose natural temperament was acutely sensitive; (c) the combination of gifts, "firmness with discretion and discrimination," as Newman expresses it, which enabled him, while never turning aside from his great object, to be, as Gregory Nazianzen applies the apostolic phrase, "all things to all men"; and in close connexion with this, (d) the affectionateness which made him so tender as a friend, and so active as a peacemaker—which won for him such enthusiastic loyalty, and endowed the great theologian and church ruler with the powers peculiar to a truly lovable man. That he was not flawless, that his words could be somewhat too sharp in controversy, or somewhat unreal in addressing a despot, that he was not always charitable in his interpretation of his adversaries' conduct, or that his casuistry, on one occasion, seems to have lacked the healthy severity of St. Augustine's—this may be, and has been, admitted; but it is not extravagant to pronounce his name the greatest in the church's post-apostolic history.

In 1698 appeared the great Benedictine ed. of his works, enriched by the Life from the pen of Montfaucon, who in 1707 published, in one of the volumes of his Nova Patrum et Scriptorum Graecorum Collectio, additional remains collected by his industry. The work 