Athenagoras of Athens

Saint Athenagoras the Philosopher of Athens, Apologist

Righteous · b. c. 133 — d. c. 190

Commemorated 24 July — Commemoration of the Athenian apologist

Athenagoras was a philosopher of Athens of the second century who, having studied the Platonism of his city, came to the faith and wrote in its defence — by his own account after setting out to write against it. His Embassy on behalf of the Christians, addressed about the year 177 to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, answers the three standing charges against the Church — atheism, cannibalism and incest — with a lawyer's order and a rhetorician's polish, and in doing so gives one of the earliest clear statements of the relation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the earliest sustained Christian argument against abortion, the exposure of infants, and the gladiatorial shows. A second treatise, On the Resurrection of the Dead, is transmitted under his name. He was not a martyr and left no cult in antiquity; his memory has been taken up in the modern Greek and American calendars on July 24, among the apologists whose books the Church has never ceased to read.

An Athenian philosopher

Almost nothing of his life is recorded, and what there is comes from the works themselves and from a single late notice. The title of the Embassy calls him "Athenagoras the Athenian, philosopher and Christian" — the two words together, and in that order, are the whole of his self-description, and they place him in the small class of second-century converts who kept the philosopher's cloak after baptism, as Justin the Philosopher did at Rome. The Greek of the Embassy is that of a man with a full rhetorical training: he quotes Homer, Euripides, Empedocles, Plato and the Stoics from memory and to the point, and constructs his defence as a formal legal plea, which is what the word πρεσβεία means.

The fifth-century church historian Philip of Side adds that Athenagoras headed the catechetical school of Alexandria, that he was the teacher of Clement of Alexandria, and that he began his career as a pagan intending to compose a refutation of Christianity and was converted by the Scriptures he read in order to attack them. Philip is a notoriously unreliable witness and the first two claims contradict the better-attested succession at Alexandria; the third, being a commonplace of conversion narrative, is equally suspect. It is repeated in the modern notices of the saint, and is repeated here as tradition.

The Embassy for the Christians

The Πρεσβεία περὶ Χριστιανῶν — Embassy or Supplication for the Christians — is addressed to Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Lucius Aurelius Commodus, "conquerors of Armenia and Sarmatia, and, what is more, philosophers." The joint titles date it closely to about 176–177, in the years of the persecution that produced the martyrs of Lyons.

Athenagoras's method is to take the three popular accusations one at a time and dispose of each on the accusers' own ground:

Atheism. Christians are called godless for refusing the images. Athenagoras replies that they worship one uncreated, eternal, invisible God who made all things by his Word and orders them by his Spirit — and that the poets and philosophers of Greece, whom the emperors honour, said very nearly the same thing without being prosecuted for it. His statement of the divine unity in Trinity is remarkably developed for the 170s: he speaks of the Son as the Word (Logos) of the Father, in idea and in operation, the first offspring of the Father yet not as a thing made, since God was from the beginning rational, logikos; and he ranges the Holy Spirit with them as an "effluence" of God, so that Christians are those who "know God and the Word which is from him, and what is the unity of the Son with the Father, what the communion of the Father with the Son, what the Spirit, and what the union and the distinction of those who are thus united."
Thyestean feasts. The charge of ritual cannibalism he answers by the moral evidence: people who will not watch a man killed in the arena, who hold that the foetus in the womb is already the object of God's care and that a woman who procures abortion is a murderer, and who count the exposure of unwanted infants as the killing of children, cannot credibly be supposed to eat human flesh. The passage is the earliest developed Christian statement on abortion and infanticide and the earliest to reject the games on the ground that watching a killing is a participation in it.
Oedipodean intercourse. Against the charge of incestuous unions he sets the Christian discipline of marriage: that a Christian marries in order to have children and for no other reason; that many among them grow old unmarried "in the hope of being closer to God"; and that a second marriage after the death of a spouse is, in his severe phrase, a "decent adultery." The rigour is his own and was not the mind of the whole Church even then, but the argument is characteristic of him — he answers a charge of licence by producing a discipline stricter than his accusers'.

On the Resurrection of the Dead

The second work transmitted under his name, Περὶ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν, argues the resurrection of the body philosophically and without appeal to Scripture: from the power and the will of God, from the constitution of man as a single being of body and soul who must therefore be judged as one, and from the end for which man was made. It is a carefully built piece of reasoning and was long read as the companion of the Embassy. Its authorship has been contested since the mid-twentieth century — Robert M. Grant argued from vocabulary and from its engagement with later controversies that it belongs to the third or fourth century, while others (notably Barnard and Pouderon) have defended it for Athenagoras. The question is open.

Transmission

Both works survive by the narrowest possible margin: in one manuscript, the Codex Parisinus Graecus 451 of the year 914, copied for Arethas of Caesarea and containing the second-century apologists together. Without Arethas's antiquarian interest neither text would exist. Athenagoras is nowhere quoted by Eusebius and is barely noticed in antiquity — which is itself the reason he left no cult: he was not martyred, no acts were written, and no city claimed his grave.

Feast and commemoration

July 24 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 6). The commemoration is carried by the Greek calendars and by the Orthodox Church in America, which prints a notice of him but appoints no troparion; the Slavonic and Antiochian books do not have him. He is kept on the day with the great martyr Christina of Tyre, who has the office, and among the several apologists of the second century who now appear on the calendar — Justin the Philosopher (June 1) and Quadratus of Athens (September 21), his fellow-townsman, who addressed the first apology of all to Hadrian.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 4

Trained in the wisdom of the Greeks, thou didst find the Wisdom that was before them, O Athenagoras; and standing as an ambassador before the rulers of the earth, thou didst plead the cause of the Church and confess the Father, the Word and the Spirit. Entreat Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Iconography

There is no ancient iconographic type of Athenagoras, and there could not be: he was not venerated in the centuries when the types were fixed. Where he is painted at all it is in modern Greek work, and the painters have given him the type of the philosopher-saint — the form used for Justin the Philosopher and for the wise men of the Church who were not bishops: a middle-aged man with a dark, pointed beard, bare-headed, in the himation of the ancient teacher rather than in monastic or episcopal dress, holding an open scroll or codex in which the opening of the Embassy may be written. The Athenian setting — the Acropolis or the Areopagus in the background — is sometimes added, on the model of the icons of Dionysius the Areopagite.

No storable image has been located. The one Commons candidate under his name is a twentieth-century Greek icon of unidentified authorship, taken from a devotional website and marked public domain by the uploader; a modern iconographer's rights are not disposed of by an uploader's tag, and the candidate was rejected under the icon policy. The other files returned by his name are photographs of the modern Patriarch Athenagoras I and are not this saint at all. He is listed among the wanted icons.

Disputed questions

Alexandria and Clement. Philip of Side's statement that Athenagoras led the Alexandrian catechetical school and taught Clement is rejected by nearly all modern scholarship, which finds no room for him in the Alexandrian succession and no trace of him in Clement. The connection survives in devotional notices and should be treated as legend.
The authorship of On the Resurrection. See above; the treatise may be a third- or fourth-century work attached to his name in the Arethas codex.
Whether he is a saint, and since when. He is not in the Synaxarion of Constantinople, not in the printed Greek Menaion of the older editions, and not in the Slavonic books; his commemoration on July 24 is a modern entry, promoted in the twentieth century along with the other apologists whom the Greek and American calendars have been recovering, and he is styled indifferently "the Apologist" and "the Confessor." Since he neither confessed before a tribunal nor died for the faith so far as is known, the second title is honorific. He is classed here as righteous — a layman glorified for a life lived in the world — which is the only term in this collection's vocabulary that fits him.
Not to be confused with any of the modern hierarchs of the name, above all Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople (1886–1972), who is not a canonised saint and whose photographs and portraits dominate the search for the name.