Athanasius
of Alexandria (c.293-373) – a Christian theologian and early Church father –
was a key figure in the Christological debates of the Patristic period. He was
a champion of orthodoxy, high Christology, and Trinitarianism against the
heresies of Arius (256-336). Where Arius had emphasized the supremacy of God
the Father and ontological subordination of the Son, Athanasius defended their
co-equality in being, power, and substance as distinct persons. Athanasius’
treatise On the Incarnation of the Word was a powerful defence of the
idea of incarnation – the belief that God assumed a human nature in the person
of Jesus Christ to redeem lost humanity. Athanasius defends the doctrine of
‘the Word becoming Man and His divine Appearing in our midst’ as a
soteriological necessity. Only the God-man could redeem lost humanity. For Athanasius, the love and goodness of the Father
are supremely manifested in the sending of his only-begotten Son to rescue lost mankind. The person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ – his
incarnation, death, and resurrection – are the supreme demonstration of God's love to sinners. These themes are taken up below as
expounded in Athanasius’ treatise On the
Incarnation.
Creation and the Fall
Athanasius
begins with a consideration of the doctrines of creation and the fall. Christ,
accordingly, is viewed as the creator of all things. And the renewal of
creation in the work of redemption ‘has been wrought by the Self-same Word who
made it in the beginning’. There is for Athanasius a definite link between the
work of Logos in creating the world and redeeming the world. Arius had viewed
Christ in a creaturely capacity, but Athanasius assigns to the Logos nothing
less than divine status as the creator of heaven and earth. Where the Epicureans
deny any teleology behind the universe, the argument from design suggests to
Athanasius ‘not a spontaneous generation but a prevenient Cause, and from that
Cause we can apprehend God, the Designer and Maker of all’. At the back of all
created reality stands the Word of God. In distinction from Plato whose Demiurge
fashioned the world out of pre-existing matter ‘as the carpenter makes things
out of wood that already exists’, Athanasius’ God is himself the creator of
matter. For Athanasius, there is a divine Mind behind the universe, an infinite
God who brought the universe into being out of 'absolute non-existence' – the doctrine of creation ex nihilo.
According
to Athanasius, human beings were originally created according to the image and
likeness of God and participated in ‘the reasonable being of the very Word
Himself … reflecting Him … and expressing the Mind of God even as He does’.
Nonetheless, the graces given by God in creation were robbed of humankind by
the fall. This fall is the reason why the Logos became incarnate and assumed a
human nature: ‘It was our sorry case that caused the Word to come down, our
transgressions that called out His love for us, so that He made haste to help
us and to appear among us. It is we who were the cause of His taking human form,
and for our salvation that in His great love He was both born and manifested in
a human body’. Human sin is seen as the privation of good anticipating the views
of Augustine, and because of sin humanity tends toward death and non-being:
‘when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is
God alone who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good’.
In the fall, humanity lost not only graces, but the highest good, even God
Himself.
The Divine Dilemma
God
being good could not allow the devil to seize victory in allowing mankind to
perish; yet mankind deserved justice for sinning against God. What then was
God, being good, to do? The solution to this dilemma is found in the person of
Christ assuming a human nature: ‘His part it was … to bring again the
corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the father His consistency of
character with all. For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was
in consequence both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all,
and to be an ambassador for all with the Father’. In other words, Christ by
assuming a human nature was able to represent and suffer for the transgressions
of lost humankind in order to bring about redemption. This suffering on behalf
of humankind is viewed terms of substitutionary atonement: ‘Thus, taking a body
like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He
surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father.
This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die and
the law of death thereby be abolished’. For Athanasius, there is a definite
link between incarnation and atonement – Christ not only had to assume a human
body, he had also to die. He assumed a human body ‘capable of death’ in order
that He might become ‘in dying a sufficient exchange for all’. Drawing upon
Pauline language, Athanasius states that ‘by man death has gained its power
over men; [but] by the Word made Man death has been destroyed and life raised
up anew’.
Athanasius
restates the divine dilemma in relation to the ignorance of mankind concerning
the existence of God as creator: ‘was [God] to keep silence before so great a
wrong and let men go on being thus deceived and kept in ignorance of Himself?’
To rectify this problem, God determined to recreate His image in lost mankind
‘by the coming of the very Image Himself, our Saviour Jesus Christ’. Only the
image of God incarnate could recreate the knowledge of God in humankind. The
Saviour graciously reveals Himself to the sense perception of humankind to restore
the knowledge of God. Where human beings had turned from the contemplation of
God above and were looking amiss among created things, the Saviour condescends
and takes to Himself a human body. He moved as a man among men, meeting
humanity in terms of sense experience, coming into human reality. Though
assuming a human body, Athanasius is careful to observe that Jesus Christ
retains full divinity as the God-man – as one who continued to direct the
universe by His divine mind and might. ‘Existing in a human body, to which He
Himself gives life, He is still the Source of life to all the universe, present
in every part of it, yet outside the whole’. The wonder of the incarnation is
revealed in the one who as a man was living a human life, yet as God was
sustaining the whole life of the universe. Even upon the cross, He was upholding
all things by the word of His power.
The Death & Resurrection of
Christ
At
the death of Christ, the very creation is said to have broken silence and
confessed with one voice that He who suffered upon the cross in the body was
not a man only, but the Son of God and Saviour of the world: ‘The sun veiled
His face, the earth quaked, the mountains were rent asunder, and all men were
stricken with awe. These things showed that the Christ upon the cross was God’.
The reason Athanasius gives for Christ death was the payment of a debt to God.
Upon the cross, Christ is said to have offered Himself as a sacrifice on behalf
of all to ‘settle man’s account … and free him from the primal transgression’.
Given the nature of Christ as the God-man, the death of all was consummated in
the death of Christ; yet death and corruption were at once abolished because of
His divine immortality. ‘For though He died as a ransom to all, He did not see
corruption. His body rose in perfect soundness, for it was the body of none
other than the Life Himself’.
As
for the nature of his death as a public spectacle upon a cross, Athanasius
argues that this was a necessary proof of his resurrection. If his death were a
private affair, he would have been regarded as a teller of tales because there
was no witness of his death, and nobody would have believed in His
resurrection. For Athanasius, ‘Death had to precede resurrection, for there
could be no resurrection without it. A secret and unwitnessed death would have
left the resurrection without any proof or evidence to support it’. Having once
let it be seen that he was truly dead, on the third day Jesus Christ rose from
the dead in a body ‘impassable and incorruptible’. His resurrection gives
Christians an assurance that death is not the end of all being, but the
beginning of new life – a promise inviting hope and courage from Christians in
the face of death, persecution, and martyrdom. And the evidence of His
resurrection life is seen in the way He continually ‘works mightily’ in
‘drawing men to religion, persuading them to virtue, teaching them about
immortality, quickening their thirst for heavenly things, revealing the
knowledge of the Father, inspiring strength in the face of death … and
displacing the irreligion of idols’.
The Breeze of the Centuries
In
his introduction to On the Incarnation,
C. S. Lewis suggests at the importance of keeping the past in mind and not
merely being preoccupied with the concerns of the present. For Lewis, the only
palliative to ignorance of the past is to ‘keep the clean sea breeze of the
centuries blowing through our minds’. This is certainly the case with
Athanasius. In reading his treatise On
the Incarnation, one is impressed with the great importance of orthodox
Christology in the scheme of salvation. It must be said that Athanasius’
arguments for the deity and humanity of Christ remain as vital as ever in the
faith and worship of the Christian church. The doctrinal themes of the
hypostatic union and the life, death and resurrection of Christ are subjects of
continual relevance to christians everywhere. And into modern Christological debates,
Athanasius is a breath of fresh air.
Sources
Athanasius
of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/athanasius/incarnation
[accessed Jan 2019]
C. S.
Lewis, Introduction to ‘On the Incarnation’, https://www.uniontheology.org/resources/doctrine/jesus/introduction-to-on-the-incarnation
[accessed Jan 2019].