St Athanasius, whose feast we celebrate today, is well-known as a champion of the divinity of  Christ. He is less well-known as an example of how agreement can sometimes be an unexpected source of division. Few Christians remember today (though Fr Andrew Louth brilliantly reminds us in his The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition) that in the early Church, the doctrine of creation was hotly debated. During that period, neoplatonic philosophy provided an invaluable framework in which to think Christian ideas through and, in typical neoplatonic fashion, many Christians then believed in the preexistence of souls and even of some kind of primordial matter. In their view, God did not create the universe out of nothing, but formed it from materials that had always been there and populated it with souls who shared God’s eternity. The idea of creation ex nihilo – out of nothing – was a novelty. Interestingly enough, this novel view was shared by St Athanasius and by his sparring partner (eventually denounced as a heretic), Arius. They both agreed that God had created the world out of nothing. Arius held that the divine Logos was also created out of nothing and adopted into divinity; Athanasius insisted that that the Logos existed eternally as a person of the Godhead. The debate between these two was fierce, sometimes, in historical hindsight, to an unedifying degree. But it began from a place of agreement. The debate between Athanasius and Arius, and its eventual resolution at the Council of Nicaea, proved to be of definitive importance in the development of the Church’s understanding of Jesus. But one wonders if it might have been less acrimoniously resolved if those involved had realized more palpably that their disagreement arose from prior concord – and from concord in a rather novel concept, at that. When we face disputes, it might help to trace them back to what led up to them; this pattern is less unusual than one might imagine, and discovering latent or presupposed shared views might actually help in resolving disagreement.