Saints Athanasius and Cyril, Archbishops of Alexandria

Date: 17 January 2005 22:49:30

You shone forth with works of Orthodoxy and quenched all heresy,
and became victorious trophy-bearers, hierarchs Athanasius and Cyril.
You enriched all things with piety and greatly adorned the Church,
and worthily found Christ God,
who grants His great mercy to all.

Troparion

Athanasius and Cyril, great hierarchs of true piety,
and noble champions of the Church of Christ,
preserve all who sing:
"O Compassionate Lord, save those who honour You."

Kontakion

Today is the Feast Day of Saints Athanasius (+ 373) and Cyril (+ 444), Archbishops of Alexandria, both teachers of the truth and defenders against heresy.

I do not know much about St Cyril [I shall rectify that today]. St Athanasius fought against the Arian heresy [that said Jesus Christ was not the divine Son of God, but rather merely a creature created by God], which had become a very popular belief in the early Church. Thanks be to God for raising up a leader such as St Athanasius to fight for the truth.

St Athanasius' On the Incarnation is a book I can well recommend. A great defence of Christ's Incarnation, and quite readable. I am ever-more illumined and informed, and thrown into pondering the great mystery of God becoming Man, whenever I read On the Incarnation.

I once stayed away from early Church Fathers' writings, thinking they must have been far simpler and not-as-informed as we in the wonderful and intelligent 21st Century. What a fool I was! The Church Fathers often write with an eloquence and truth I find unmatched, and I cannot get enough of their work. Thanks be to God for opening my eyes.

Not the most popular names now-a-days ;-), but Happy Feast Day to all the Athanasiuses and Cyrils out there! God grant you many years!

For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for no part of creation had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are. But now He entered the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us. He saw the reasonable race, the race of men that, like Himself, expressed the Father's Mind, wasting out of existence, and death reigning over all in corruption. He saw that corruption held us all the closer, because it was the penalty for the Transgression; He saw, too, how unthinkable it would be for the law to be repealed before it was fulfilled. He saw how unseemly it was that the very things of which He Himself was the Artificer should be disappearing. He saw how the surpassing wickedness of men was mounting up against them; He saw also their universal liability to death. All this He saw and, pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures should perish and the work of His Father for us men come to nought, He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own. Nor did He will merely to become embodied or merely to appear; had that been so, He could have revealed His divine majesty in some other and better way. No, He took our body, and not only so, but He took it directly from a spotless, stainless virgin, without the agency of human father--a pure body, untainted by intercourse with man. He, the Mighty One, the Artificer of all, Himself prepared this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself, and took it for His very own, as the instrument through which He was known and in which He dwelt. Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.

St Athanasius, On the Incarnation