Late antiquity (4th century)
Feast: May 2
The bishop who was exiled five times for insisting Christ is God — and kept coming back.
Five times they exiled him. Five times he came back. Athanasius became Bishop of Alexandria in 328 AD, just three years after the Council of Nicaea declared that Christ is ‘of one substance with the Father.’ The Arians — who taught that Christ was a created being, not fully God — had the ear of multiple emperors, and they wanted Athanasius gone. He was banished to Trier, then to Rome, then to the Egyptian desert, then twice more, spending a total of seventeen years in exile. Each time, he returned to Alexandria and picked up where he left off. The phrase ‘Athanasius contra mundum’ — Athanasius against the world — was coined because at several points he seemed to be the only bishop in the empire willing to die on this hill. He was short, dark-skinned, and so tenacious that his enemies called him a dwarf. He wrote On the Incarnation when he was barely twenty, arguing that God became human so that humans might become divine. He also wrote the Life of Anthony, the biography of the desert hermit that sparked the monastic movement across Europe. He died in his bed in 373 AD — one of the few times he was actually in Alexandria when he was supposed to be. The Creed you recite at Mass exists in part because this man refused to shut up.