ataraxia See EPICUREANISM, SEXTUS EMPIRICUS,. SKEPTIC. Athanasius (c.297–373), early Christian father, bishop in Alexandria (though frequently exiled), and a leading protagonist in the fourth-century disputes concerning Christ’s relationship to God. Through major works like On the Incarnation, Against the Arians, and Letters on the Holy Spirit, Athanasius contributed greatly to the classical doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Opposing all forms of Arianism, which denied Christ’s divinity and reduced him to a creature, Athanasius taught, in the language of the Nicene Creed, that Christ the Son, and likewise the Holy Spirit, were of the same being as God the Father (homoousios). Thus with terminology and concepts drawn from Greek philosophy, he helped to forge the distinctly Christian and un-Hellenistic doctrine of the eternal triune God, who became enfleshed in time and matter and restored humanity to immortality, forfeited through sin, by involvement in its condition of corruption and decay. See also ARIANIS. A.E.L. atheism (from Greek a-, ‘not’, and theos, ‘god’), the view that there are no gods. A widely used sense denotes merely not believing in God and is consistent with agnosticism. A stricter sense denotes a belief that there is no God; this use has become the standard one. In the Apology Socrates is accused of atheism for not believing in the official Athenian gods. Some distinguish between theoretical atheism and practical atheism. A theoretical atheist is one who self-consciously denies the existence of a supreme being, whereas a practical atheist may believe that a supreme being exists but lives as though there were no god.
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