The faces.

“For He was made man that we might be made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality.”

Athanasius became bishop of Alexandria in 328 and held the post 45 years — 17 of them spent in five separate exiles, driven out by emperors who sided with the Arian bishops he refused to yield to. He had stood at Nicaea as a young deacon, and his 367 Festal Letter is one of the earliest surviving lists matching the 27-book New Testament in use today.

Today: The church he led — the Coptic Orthodox Church, tracing itself to Mark the Evangelist's arrival in Alexandria around 42-49 AD — counts millions in Egypt and over a million more in diaspora, under Pope Tawadros II, 118th on the See of Saint Mark.

“In the year of our Lord 635 he arrived at Chang-an; the Emperor sent his Prime Minister, Duke Fang Hiuen-ling; who, carrying the official staff to the west border, conducted his guest into the interior; the sacred books were translated in the imperial library, the sovereign investigated the subject in his private apartments; when becoming deeply impressed with the rectitude and truth of the religion, he gave special orders for its dissemination.”

Alopen, a Syriac-speaking monk of the Church of the East, was the first recorded Christian missionary to reach China, arriving at the Tang capital Chang'an in 635 with sacred books the emperor had translated in the imperial library; by 638 an edict permitted the faith and China's first church was built. He is known only through the Nestorian Stele — carved in 781, buried around 845, rediscovered in 1625.

Today: The stele still stands on public display at the Beilin Museum in Xi'an, and the Assyrian Church of the East and Syriac communities worldwide hold its rubbings as the touchstone of Christianity's first arrival in China.

Frumentius arrived at Aksum a shipwrecked captive boy from Tyre and rose at the royal court, tutoring the young heir Ezana; consecrated by Athanasius as the first bishop of Aksum, he is credited with baptizing King Ezana — making Aksum one of the first states in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion. The Ethiopian church calls him Abba Salama, Father of Peace.

Today: The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the first indigenous Christian church of sub-Saharan Africa, remains the largest of the Oriental Orthodox churches — tens of millions strong, tracing itself directly to his mission at Aksum.

Gregory the Illuminator, son of the man who assassinated Armenia's king, was tortured and held for years in the pit-dungeon of Khor Virap when he refused King Tiridates III's order to sacrifice to the goddess Anahit. After his release he converted that same king — Armenia dates its adoption of Christianity as state religion to 301 AD, the first state to do so — and became the first Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

Today: The Armenian Apostolic Church is still Armenia's national church — roughly 94% of the country identifies with it — served by two Catholicosal sees, Holy Etchmiadzin and Cilicia in Antelias, reaching the diaspora across the former USSR, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas.

“But to whom do we do any harm by building a place of entertainment for strangers, both for those who are on a journey and for those who require medical treatment on account of sickness, and so establishing a means of giving these men the comfort they want, physicians, doctors, means of conveyance, and escort?”

Basil, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, led the generation that made Nicaea's faith speakable: with his brother Gregory of Nyssa and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus he gave the Trinity its lasting grammar — one essence, three persons — and would not bend when the Arian emperor Valens came to his liturgy to break him. At the city's edge he built the Basiliad, a 'new city' of hospice, hospital, and workshops for the poor.

Today: Cappadocia's Greek Christians kept the faith among its rock-cut churches until the 1923 population exchange scattered them; the tradition lives on across the Greek Orthodox world, which still serves the Liturgy of Saint Basil ten times a year and cuts the vasilopita in his name each New Year.

“Would you do honour to Christ's body? Neglect Him not when naked; do not while here you honour Him with silken garments, neglect Him perishing without of cold and nakedness.”

John Chrysostom — "golden-mouthed," for his preaching — was Archbishop of Constantinople from 397 to 407, and was exiled twice after sermons against luxury and vanity were taken by Empress Eudoxia as personal attacks; he died on forced travel toward a further exile. His homilies kept insisting that honoring Christ in the Eucharist meant caring for the poor.

Today: The Divine Liturgy that bears his name is still the standard Sunday eucharistic liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which venerates him as one of the Three Holy Hierarchs.

“Belatedly I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new, belatedly I loved thee.”

Augustine, born in Thagaste in North Africa, served as Bishop of Hippo Regius from 395/396 until his death — writing the Confessions, the account of his own conversion, and The City of God after Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410. He died in 430 with the Vandals besieging his city; when they burned it, only his cathedral and library were spared.

Today: His theology of grace, original sin, and the two cities still underpins Roman Catholic doctrine and shaped Luther and Calvin a millennium later — and in Annaba, Algeria, the modern city on the site of Hippo, the Basilica of Saint Augustine stands as a pilgrimage site near the ancient ruins.

“It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

An anchoress of St Julian’s Church in Norwich — her name comes from the church — who on 8 May 1373, during an illness she expected to die of, received sixteen showings of Christ’s passion. She wrote them out, first short, then expanded: the long text is the earliest surviving book in English known to be by a woman. Her cell had two windows, one opening on the church’s altar and one on the street, where she prayed with anyone who came — Margery Kempe sought her out there decades later.

Today: Her cell was lost, but St Julian’s Church still stands in Norwich — rebuilt after wartime bombing, a living parish and a place of pilgrimage. “All shall be well” has entered the language and the liturgies of more than one tradition.

“Everything comes from love, all is ordained for the salvation of man, God does nothing without this goal in mind.”

A dyer’s daughter from Siena who became a Dominican tertiary in her teens and, without office or rank, wrote to princes, cardinals, and popes as an equal. Her letters helped persuade Gregory XI to bring the papacy back from Avignon to Rome in 1377. She dictated The Dialogue — a conversation between the soul and God — and died in Rome at thirty-three.

Today: The Dominicans keep her memory; the Catholic Church declared her a Doctor of the Church in 1970 and John Paul II named her co-patroness of Europe in 1999. Her Dialogue and her letters are still read as masterworks of Italian prose.

“I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions.”

A Carmelite nun of Ávila who, in middle age, began the reform that became the Discalced Carmelites — small, poor houses of prayer, beginning with St Joseph’s in Ávila in 1562 and growing to seventeen convents in her lifetime, with John of the Cross carrying the reform to the friars. Her books — The Life, The Way of Perfection, The Interior Castle — map the road of prayer from ordinary meditation to union more plainly than any before her.

Today: The Discalced Carmelites — nuns, friars, and lay order — live her reform on every continent, and The Interior Castle remains the standard map of contemplative prayer across traditions. She was declared the first woman Doctor of the Church in 1970.