Coptic Church & Ecumenical Movement - Saint Mina Coptic ...

How propitious is today’s liturgical reflection, celebrating as it does the glorious
memory, as we have said, of Saint Athanasius, the intrepid and undaunted defender of
the faith! Saint Athanasius is a Father and Doctor of the universal Church and thus
merits our common commemoration.
The best way of commemorating a Saint who made an extraordinary contribution to the
life of the Church at a decisive moment of her history, when heretics denied the very
consubstantial divinity of the Word and hence of Christ, seems to us to be by reflecting
on the heritage which he has left us, the witness of faith in his life and in his thought.
When we reflect on his life, we see a believer solidly founded on evangelical faith, a
convinced defender and champion of truth and one who was ready to endure every
calumny, persecution and violence. Of the forty-six years of his episcopate, he spent
twenty in repeated exile; this very city of Rome gave him shelter for three years during
his second exile, from April 339 till October 342, in the time of Pope Julius I (337-352).
Always and everywhere and before all men, before the powerful and those in error, he
professed faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ, true God and true man; therefore the
Eastern liturgical tradition describes him as a “column of the true faith” (Apolytikion of
2 May) and the Catholic Church numbers him among the Doctors of the Church.
He was indeed a man of the Church, a vigilant and attentive pastor. He dedicated his
entire life to the service of the Church, not only his own Church of Alexandria but the
whole Church, bringing everywhere the warmth of his faith, the edifying example of his
unswervingly consistent life and the call to prayer which he had learned from the monks
of the desert, amongst whom he was several times obliged to take refuge.
The divinity of Christ is the central point of Saint Athanasius’ preaching to the men of
his time, who were tempted by the Arian crisis. The definition of the first Ecumenical
Council of Nicaea (325), according to which Jesus Christ is the Son of God, of the same
substance as the Father, true God from true God, was the constant point of reference of
his teaching. Only if one accepts this doctrine can one speak of redemption, of salvation
and of the re-establishment of communion between man and God. Only the Word of
God perfectly redeems; without the Incarnation, man would remain in the state of corrupt
nature, from which penance itself could not free him (De Incarnatione, pp, 25,144,119).
Freed by Christ from corruption and saved from death, man is reborn to new life and
acquires once more the pristine image of God, in which he had been created in the
beginning and which sin had corrupted. “The Word of God”, declares Saint Athanasius,
“came Himself, so that, being the Image of the Father, He might create man anew in the
image of God” (ibid.).
Saint Athanasius evolves this theology, centring it on the sharing of redeemed man in the
very life of God, through baptism and sacramental life. He even declares, in a forceful
expression, that the Word of God “became man so that we might be divinised” (ibid.).
This new creation restores what sin had compromised: the knowledge of God and a
radical change of life.
Jesus Christ reveals the Father to us and makes Him knowable: “The Word of God
became visible with a body so that we might be able to form an idea of the invisible
Father” (ibid.).
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