You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints.

This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Hello, and to Form Now. My name is Dr. Ben Acres. I'm the chief content officer here at the Augustin Institute.

And my special guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Klein, who's a professor of theology at the graduate school that we have here at the Augustin Institute. Thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

Well, today we're going to be talking about one of our saints. A very popular

series that we've had here on Form Now's is following the liturgical year of different saint

days that we celebrate. Today we're going to celebrate one of the great saints at the very beginning

of May, St. Athanasius. Yeah, I'm so glad you asked me to talk about St.

Athanasius. I love Athanasius. He's one of the first early church fathers I read when I was sort of getting interested in theology, and I still assign Athanasius' work called On the

Incarnation in my creed class every year. It's not that thick. I have a copy of it here, but it's not thick with type of text, but the theology is so rich.

Yeah, so Athanasius wrote this work basically to explain the reason for the incarnation,

why did God become man?

And he really lays it out in a very systematic way, a way that I think is inviting and easy to follow.

And we don't know necessarily the date that Athanasius wrote it,

but a lot of people think that this is one of his first works, is that he might have written it in his 20s.

And so it's very impressive. I always say to my students who are in their 20s that, you know,

this is the bar. It's right. Yeah, Adonationsius. By the time he was a deacon, and then was named Bishop of Alexandria. Let's go ahead. Let's go some of the historical context,

and then we'll dive into the text. What are his dates? So we get a sense of what we're living.

Yeah, so Athanasius lived from around 297 to 387 in his 80s.

Yep. And he lived through the great Aryan controversy. So some of our viewers might have heard about the

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