Athanasius of Tarsus

Bishop of a hunted church

Tarsus, on the Cilician plain under the Taurus passes, was an old and populous city, the birthplace of St Paul and a natural centre of the faith in the south-east of Asia Minor; its bishop ranked as metropolitan of Cilicia Prima and belonged, in the settled order of the following century, to the Antiochian patriarchate. Of Athanasius's origins, family, election and length of episcopate nothing has come down. What the synaxarion transmits is his office, his ministry of baptism, and his death — and, in the manner of the third-century notices, it transmits them chiefly because they intersect with the story of a convert.

The persecution under which he served is variously identified: the Greek tradition and the account followed by the Orthodox Church in America set his ministry in the reign of Valerian (253–260), the persecutor of Cyprian and of Sixtus of Rome; the Russian menologion assigns him and the two boy-martyrs to Aurelian (270–275). Either way he was a bishop who could be found by an enquirer but not by the magistrates — the account has him living apart from the city, in the way of hunted third-century hierarchs, receiving those who came to him.

The baptism of Anthusa

The one episode preserved of his pastorate is the arrival of a girl from Seleucia, the daughter of the wealthy pagans Antoninus and Martyria, who had heard of the Christian faith, was determined to receive it, and had persuaded her mother to let her travel on the pretext of visiting her old nurse. Athanasius examined her, baptised her, and — at her own asking, for she had no intention of returning to the marriage her house intended for her — tonsured her to the monastic life, sending her into the wilderness where she lived out twenty-three years. Her two servants, Charisimus and Neophytus, who had come with her, were baptised at the same hands.

That a bishop should baptise and immediately veil a runaway heiress is exactly the kind of act for which the third-century church was hated by respectable pagan families, and the narrative connects it directly with his arrest: the flight was discovered, and the man who had received her was known.

Martyrdom

Athanasius was seized and brought before the emperor, who required of him the ordinary imperial test — a sacrifice to the gods. He refused, confessed Christ, and was beheaded. The two servants were examined after him, confessed in their turn, and were likewise beheaded, so that the master and the two youths he had baptised were crowned together. The Church numbers Athanasius among the hieromartyrs, the bishops and priests who died for the faith, and gives him the first place in the day's notice, before the venerable Anthusa whom he begot in the font.