In less than a month, on 26 May, Christians will celebrate the Feast of the Ascension, marking the moment the incarnate Christ ascended into heaven, taking his seat at the right hand of the Father. It is, among other things, a time to reflect on the Incarnation of the Word, fully divine and fully human, and the role He played in salvation history. One of the greatest expositors of the theological narrative of the Incarnation was Saint Athanasius of Alexandria (298-373 A.D.) in On the Incarnation. It was through the Incarnation that Christ entered into human history in physical form, appearing to man in a perceptible manner, re-instilling knowledge of the one, true God that had been lost since the Fall. The Word’s becoming flesh was necessary to liberate man from the chains of sin and to return him to a state of immortality, recreated in the Image of God.
Athanasius’ description of the Incarnation had a very different purpose – and was of a divergent construction – than the metaphysical Christology that was the product of the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon. Whereas the Councils expounded upon – in the rich philosophical tradition of the Greeks – the coeternal existence of Christ and the Father and the divine and human natures of Christ respectively, Athanasius sought to fit the Incarnation into the wider Economy of Salvation (Anatolios 32-33). His was a theology that aimed at explicating the importance of the incarnation rather than working out the precise philosophy (which is equally important). It was a functional explanation that gave color and vibrancy to the Christological formulations of the Councils (Anatolios 33). For Athanasius, the miracle of the Incarnation is dynamic, continually evidenced through the actions of the faithful (Behr 93; Athanasius 50).
Christ came to save man from corruption and death, doing so to prevent the creature whom God created in His Image from collapsing into its original state. Central to Athanasius’ theology of the Incarnation is understanding creation as having arisen ex nihilo, out of nothing (Behr 92). This must be so, for God’s power is illimitable. If matter already existed, and Creation was merely a reordering of this matter, God would be tied to a finite resource, limited insofar as the eternal matter was limited. Athanasius uses the analogy of the carpenter: he is limited by the supply of wood; if there is no wood, the carpenter is useless (Athanasius 18-19).
The corollary to Creation coming from nothing but the Will of God is that Creation can lapse back into nothingness (Behr 91-92). This was the state of man after the Fall and before the Incarnation of Christ. God “bestowed a special grace” upon mankind, allowing man to “share in the reasonable being of the very Word Himself (Athanasius 20).” In this, man has the capacity to reason, he has free will to choose, as he did in the Fall. This free will is essential for Athanasius: man, created in God’s Image, has an innate desire to know God, his Creator. In making the choice to follow God, man is performing the Will of God: to enter into eternal communion with Him. In this sense, “God’s Will and the human will are inherently complimentary (Douglas 63).” Communion with God granted man, despite his inherent corruptibility, the capacity to “[escape] from the natural law [mortality] (Athanasius 22).” But man must contend with varying desires, including those of the flesh, the earthly wants that cloud his judgment and distract him from what is truly important (Douglas 63). Succumbing to his earthly desires – the Fall – man became corrupted and hence condemned to suffer under death, unable to comprehend God, distracted by sinful passions (Athanasius 21-22; Behr 86). With the Image of God being a central facet of man’s existence, the desire to know his Creator inherent but beyond his corrupted capacity, man turned to idolatry (Behr, 84). Corruption engendered a spiral of sin, leading to ever greater corruption, driving man towards destruction and a return to nothingness (Athanasius 24; 32).
Athanasius believes that God could not countenance such a result as the destruction of His greatest creation, that which He made in His Image. God faced what Athanasius calls “the divine dilemma,” whereby God would not simply lift the reign of death from man, for that would make God untruthful, but neither would He allow man, made in His Image, to perish into nothing (Athanasius 24-25). If God were to let man destroy himself, there would have been no purpose to his existence in the first place, indeed, Athanasius asserts, it would have been better if man had never existed at all (Athanasius 24-25). Further, allowing man to collapse into corruption would seem to limit God, who is of infinite goodness; yet God is illimitable. Athanasius is effectively reading “back into the framework of creation as a whole the pattern established by the Savior Jesus Christ in his work of salvation (Behr 89).” God, having made man in His Image at the time of creation, was tied to man by His love, necessitating, in essence, the saving of man. Necessitating does not mean constraining God, but rather, it is looking backwards and seeing that His love for man made saving man part of His plan for the world, for salvation. God cannot be constrained, so it is in this sense alone that it was ‘necessary.’
It was the divine dilemma that called for the incarnation of the Word, for it was the incarnate Word that could re-instill knowledge of God and save man from the reign of death. Man could not be relied upon to bring knowledge of God to men, for there would be nothing to provide credence to his preaching (Athanasius 34). Moreover, because all men were corrupted, there would be little hope that they would be capable of “convert[ing] the minds and souls of others (Athanasius 34).” Nor could God rely on Creation to teach man of His existence, for Creation had existed for as long as man and had failed to be sufficient (Athanasius 34). The Word would have to enter into the world, taking on the human body, for man had been seeking God in earthly things, in idols, and the only way to reach him was to “[meet his] senses, so to speak, half way (Athanasius 35).” By working the power of God through a human body, man could be convinced of the transcendence of God, and brought back to knowledge of Him (Athanasius 35).
The crux of Christianity, however, is the redemption from sin that was bestowed by the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of the Word in the form of Christ. For man to be justified, he would first have to be freed from the rule of death that he incurred in the Fall, and then, no longer doomed to corruption, re-created in God’s Image to elevate him to the stature of God (Behr 97). Only the incarnate Word would be appropriate to save man from the reign of death, for the curse was placed upon man, necessitating that a human suffer (Athanasius 40). The union of the Word, the Lord of all, to a human body allowed for Him to fulfill the law, “[settling] man’s account with death, and free[ing] him from the primal transgression (Athanasius 40).”
This union was an equal one, whereby neither the human body nor the Word overpowered or dominated the other. The body was truly His body, and truly a human body, for the body was born of woman and mortal, capable of suffering and death (Athanasius 40). Neither was the Word marred by His union with a human body, rather, Athanasius asserts, the Word “sanctified the body by being in it (Athanasius 37).” Further, the body was “free from every stain (Athanasius 27),” “prepared… in the virgin as a temple for Himself (Athanasius 26).” His union did not mean, however, that He, as Word, took on the nature of humanity as a replacement of His divinity (Athanasius 37), but rather that the two coexisted. Both had the independence consequent to their natures, the Word was not trapped by the body, for He was still “in all things, and outside all things, resting in the Father alone (Athanasius 36-37).” Because of this coexistence, the Word did indeed suffer in His human nature, enabling Him to be “sufficient exchange for us all (Athanasius 27),” but the Word qua Word remained incorrupt (Athanasius 40). The power of such an exchange, the end of the reign of death, carried over to all men because of His union with humanity, “[f]or the solidarity of mankind is such that, by virtue of the Word’s indwelling in a single human body, the corruption which goes with death has lost its power over all (Athanasius 27).” In becoming flesh, the Word “adopted [all humanity], and [instituted] a new humanity (Douglas 64).”
Further, it could have been no other than the Word to have dethroned death, for the Word created man in His Image, and hence only He could recreate that Image (Athanasius 33). Athanasius uses the analogy of the blighted painting: if a portrait is damaged, the only way to recreate it is to have the original subject return and be repainted. The damaged painting is man, the subject, God. No other Image but that of God would suffice (Athanasius 33).
Man, however, was not truly saved until the resurrection of Christ. Indeed, Christ had to die on the cross so that He could rise, as it was the Resurrection that “was to be the monument to His victory over death, the assurance to all that He had Himself conquered corruption and that their own bodies also would eventually be incorrupt (Athanasius 42).” Athanasius argues that man can empirically determine that Christ had indeed conquered death in His Resurrection simply by observing those of faith. The faithful “[hasten] to death, unafraid at the prospect of corruption… [or] descent into Hades… indeed with eager soul provoking it (Athanasius 50).” In lacking fear of death, those with faith are small monuments to Christ’s victory over death, just as His Resurrection was a great monument to the same (Athanasius 42; 50). Indeed, the faithful also indicate an important facet of man’s salvation through Christ: it was not an event relegated to the past, but rather of a continuing nature. The Word and man are in union, and the Word maintains His presence among men in the form of the Church, and the actions of the faithful who “put on the faith of the cross and live in creation (Behr 96).”
With the end of death, man was recreated in the Word’s Image, and his will re-centered. Man had become adopted by the Word in His becoming flesh, reentering communion with Him (Douglas 65). In this, the will of man is able to mirror the Will of the embodied Word. Christ’s human will was in complete harmony with His divine will (Douglas 64), which is the ideal, the “deepest desire,”of humanity (Douglas 63), but which was impossible in the corrupt state of man before the Incarnation. Through the Resurrection, man was given the ability to choose to follow Christ, to accept and satisfy his “deepest desire, [his] telos,”and enter “eternal communion with God (Douglas 65).”
Athanasius’ theology of the Incarnation was an attempt to create a coherent, functional explanation of how the Incarnation fits into salvation history. It is functional in that it avoids the philosophical complexity of the Councils, the products of which, such as the Nicene Creed, while descriptive and undoubtedly essential in a metaphysical and doctrinal sense, do not fully elucidate the importance of the Incarnation in salvation (Anatolios 33). The Incarnation was God’s response to the self-destruction of man after the Fall, the corruption that was leading man back into the nothingness from which the Word created him. The path to free man from the curse of death was through the Word – and it had to be the Word – becoming flesh. Only the Creator could recreate man in His Image and only the sacrifice of He who was in all men could save all men. Through the death and resurrection of the Word incarnate, man was liberated from corruption and given the capacity to once again be in eternal communion with the Lord. Men and women throughout history died in defense of the Creed not simply as words on a page, but in defense of the great truth of Creation and salvation that those very words signaled. Indeed, their willingness to die for Christ was (and still is), as Athanasius explained, proof of Christ’s victory over death.
Bibliography:
Anatolios, Khaled. “Athanasius’s Christology Today: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ in On the Incarnation.” In In the Shadow of the Incarnation, edited by Peter W. Martens, 29-49. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
Athanasius. On the Incarnation. Translated by A Religious of C.S.M.V. S.Th. Louisville, KY: GLH Publishing, 2018.
Behr, John. “Saint Athanasius on ‘Incarnation’.” In Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, edited by Niels Henrik Gregersen, 79-98. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015.
Douglas, Mary. “God and Humanity Brought Together: The Incarnation as Gospel.” Evangelical Review of Theology 45, no. 1 (2021): 61-68.
