ABSTRACT
The fact that Athanasius is one of the great pivotal figures in the development of Christian doctrine has had ambivalent consequences for the study of his work. Attention tends to be too narrowly centered on the Arian controversy and Athanasius is considered, largely in function of that complex and crucially significant process, as the great defender of the Nicene homoousios. The result is that there exist surprisingly few attempts at a truly comprehensive treatment of Athanasius’s theology considered as a coherent and tightly interrelated account of the Christian faith. Instead, Athanasian scholarship may be divided into two general categories. Firstly, there are the histories of doctrine, in which Athanasius is usually considered in light of the development of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine. Understandably, the hermeneutical framework that governs such works is provided by the classic formulations in which the respective doctrines are considered to have received a certain consummation; earlier theologians are thus studied by way of comparison with these formulations. What is missing from such studies, from the standpoint of Athanasian scholarship, is a systematic account of the overall inner logic of the Athanasian vision that shows how the various aspects of his doctrine are mutually related.
