other · 338 · Alexandria
Anthony had been in the desert for decades and was known throughout the empire without having gone anywhere. The Life says he came down to Alexandria at the bishops' request, denounced the Arians as the last heresy and the forerunner of Antichrist, refused to speak with them at all, and told the crowds that the Son is not a creature. Athanasius adds that in the few days he stayed, more pagans asked for baptism than usually did in a year, and that people touched him in the street. It is also, plainly, a scene written by the man it vindicates: Athanasius was fighting for his see, and a hermit whom nobody could accuse of ambition walking into the city on his side was worth a great deal to him. Both things are true at once, and the curation note says so. What is not in dispute is the shape it left behind — from here on the Egyptian monks are a force in the Alexandrian church's quarrels, and every later patriarch knows it.
To say in public, in the city, what he had been saying in the desert: that the Arians were wrong.
A hermit's authority spent deliberately on a bishop's quarrel, and the moment monasticism entered church politics.