A commenter at Castalia Library observes the relevance of Athanius to the pagans who call themselves seculars today.
“But though the builder had many of the qualities which go to make a religious reformer — pure in heart and life, full of sincere piety, manly and with a strong sense of duty — the edifice he reared was quite artificial, lacked the living principle of growth, and could not last. Athanasius gave its history in four words when he said ‘It will soon pass.’ The world had outgrown paganism.”
Athanasius speaks across the centuries to the makers of man-crafted religions. Will any one of them listen?
Of course they won’t. They are fools and ignorati, for all that they consider themselves intelligent and educated. They’re not the equals of the noble pagans of the 4th Century, they’re not even the equals of their Enlightenment-misled predecessors who created the Cambridge Medieval History in the early 20th Century.
Whatever faults the Christianity of the time exhibited, whatever ills had come to it from Imperial patronage and conformity with the world, it still retained within it the original simplicity and profundity of its message. Nothing in its environment could take that from it. It proclaimed a living God, Who had made man and all things and for Whom man was made. That God had manifested Himself in Jesus Christ and the centre of the manifestation was the Passion of our Lord — the Cross. Whatever special meanings attach themselves to the intellectual apprehension of this manifestation, it contains two plain thoughts which can be grasped as easily by the simplest as by the most cultured intelligence, and was therefore universal as no previous religion had ever been.
