later commentators to hail Athanasius for the fidelity of his convictions. “He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, ‘whole and undefiled,’ when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those ‘sensible’ synthetic religions … which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen.”7 Very much in keeping with Athanasius’s rejection of Arianism, but based more on lived experience than a direct theological