Athanasian Creed

The Athanasian Creed is named after a man who did not write it, in a language he did not write in, about controversies that had not finished when he died. Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in Greek; this is a Latin composition, and the Greek East did not know it for centuries. The attribution collapsed under scholarly examination in the seventeenth century and has not been revived, but the name has stayed attached to the text, which is why the atlas records both.

Where it did come from is less certain. The usual placing is southern Gaul around the year 500, argued from its vocabulary, its theological affinities and its use in the circle around Caesarius of Arles. Other dates and places have been proposed, and the text names no author, no council and no occasion. It is the only widely received Christian creed with no known parentage at all.

It is also unlike the others in form. Where the conciliar creeds narrate and confess, this one analyses. Its two halves, on the Trinity and on the Incarnation, work through the possible errors in balanced rhythmic clauses, asserting each truth and immediately excluding the misreading beside it. The result reads less like a confession than like a carefully drawn boundary, and it is best understood as a teaching instrument for clergy in a period when the Christological arguments were still live in the West.

For most of a thousand years this creed was said regularly in the Western church, at the office on Sundays in many uses, and the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 appointed it on thirteen feast days of the year. Lutheran and Anglican formularies count it with the Apostles and Nicene creeds among the three ecumenical creeds, and confessional Lutheran bodies still subscribe to it. Yet it is now heard in very few congregations.

The reason usually given is the damnatory clauses. The creed opens by saying that whoever wishes to be saved must hold the catholic faith, adds that whoever does not hold it whole and undefiled will perish everlastingly, and repeats the warning at the end. Nineteenth-century Anglican controversy over precisely those sentences was fierce enough to produce commissions and resignations, and the result in most revised prayer books was to make its use optional or to drop it.

There is a second reason that gets less attention. The creed is difficult. Its balanced clauses on the Trinity are exact, and read aloud at speed they can sound like a series of contradictions rather than a set of careful distinctions. A text designed to prevent clergy from misstating the doctrine is not necessarily one a congregation can follow. Its survival in the confessional books, alongside its disappearance from services, is a fair summary of what it is now: a standard that is subscribed rather than sung.