St. Athanasius the Great (c. 296-373)

Patriarch of Alexandria for forty-five years, of which seventeen were spent in five exiles under four emperors, and the man more than any other who held the Church to Nicaea when the empire had decided otherwise. As a young deacon he was at the council; as a bishop he refused to readmit Arius, and was deposed, banished to Trier, hidden by monks in the Egyptian desert, and restored, again and again. His On the Incarnation, written while still young, gives the reason the whole fight mattered: God became man so that man might become god. A Saviour who was a creature could not give us what He did not have. His Life of Antony spread monasticism through the empire, and his thirty-ninth Festal Letter is the first list of the New Testament that matches the one in use now. The phrase Athanasius against the world was meant as praise. Feast: January 18.