- Athanasius
Khaled Anatolios, the author of the brilliant book, Athanasius: The Coherence of his Thought, the best recent book on Athanasius, was the ideal person to contribute the volume on Athanasius to the Routledge series, Early Church Fathers. The resulting volume is one of the best in what has become a distinguished series. Following the format of the series, the first third of the book consists of Anatolios's introduction and the rest of substantial passages from Athanasius, specially translated for the book. Anatolios's introduction is masterly, picking his way carefully through the minefield that interpretation of the fourth century has become, well aware of the critical problems that remain but concentrating, as he must, on Athanasius himself without being sucked into the great archbishop's own understanding of the sequence of events that he successfully persuaded most subsequent writers to think of as the "Arian" controversy. Without hagiography, Anatolios gives a clear account of Athanasius's astonishing career and then passes to a lucid and succinct account of his theology. In barely forty pages, we are given a brilliant sketch of Athanasius's theological vision, showing how it sets the Incarnation in the context of a profoundly thought-through doctrine of creation out of nothing, which underlies an anthropology in which the human stands on the frontier between God and the created order. Athanasius's understanding of the Incarnation and the Word's overcoming of death and corruption through cross and resurrection is explored, and the implications of this for the doctrine of the Trinity are drawn out; Anatolios closes by bringing out Athanasius's emphasis on holiness as the foundation of theological insight.
Anatolios is thoroughly acquainted with the scholarship on Athanasius, but draws on it with a lightness of touch that keeps the central figure of Athanasius and what Anatolios himself called the "coherence of his thought" in focus. The author seems to have slightly revised his view of Athanasius since the monograph, giving more prominence to what one might call the existential character [End Page 283] of Athanasius's theology and pushing to the background the dialectic between transcendence and immanence that perhaps gave his earlier picture of Athanasius too philosophical a coloring.
The selection of passages is to some extent affected by what is already available: nothing from Contra Gentes–De Incarnatione or the Vita Antonii, for example, an omission compensated for in his introduction. There are two substantial chunks from Contra Arianos, in which Athanasius deals with the idea that the Word of God is changeable (treptos) and presents his highly original interpretation of Prov 8.22 and the "creation" of Wisdom. We are given the whole of Athanasius's defense of Nicaea in De Decretis, the central argument of the correspondence with Serapion on the divinity of the Holy Spirit (on which argument Athanasius weaves variations in the rest of the correspondence), and the late letter of Adelphius on the emerging new forms of what Athanasius continued to see as "Arianism."
Anatolius then focuses, very properly, on Athanasius's theological arguments, for it is on these that Athanasius's distinction as a "Church Father" depends. In the introduction, he has made clear to the reader other dimensions of Athanasius's thought, and the bibliography shows the reader where to go to follow this up. Each of the translated pieces has a preface that places the work chronologically and introduces its theological significance. This volume is an adornment to a fine series and certainly the best introduction to St. Athanasius the Great and his theology.