Observations on St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation

Apropos of nothing in particular, here are some thoughts of mine on St. Athanasius’ classic work On the Incarnation, which I sat down with the other night.

Athanasius has a rather noetic understanding of sin (and, consequently of salvation). This really isn’t that surprising considering that many of the Fathers were deeply influenced by Platonic philosophy. According to Athanasius, sin consists in turning our gaze away from God, in ceasing to contemplate him. As a result we are attracted by finite goods and come to be mired in our attachment to them, which leads to all kinds of sin. Nevertheless, the original turning away is an act of will, so sin is not attributable to ignorance, as it seems to be in some versions of Platonism.

And since God is the source of all being, to turn away from the contemplation of God is to turn toward non-being or corruption and death:

For God had made man thus (that is, as an embodied spirit), and had willed that he should remain in incorruption. But men, having turned from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which God had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion. For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore 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.

As a result, a large part of Christ’s work for Athanasius is to restore fallen humanity’s knowledge of God. You might say that he comes in the flesh to paint a picture for us of what God is like so we will turn back to contemplation of and communion with God.

There are, he thinks, other sources whereby we can come to know God:

God knew the limitation of mankind, you see; and though the grace of being made in His Image was sufficient to give them knowledge of the Word and through Him of the Father, as a safeguard against their neglect of this grace, He provided the works of creation also as means by which the Maker might be known. Nor was this all. Man’s neglect of the indwelling grace tends ever to increase; and against this further frailty also God made provision by giving them a law, and by sending prophets, men whom they knew. Thus, if they were tardy in looking up to heaven, they might still gain knowledge of their Maker from those close at hand; for men can learn directly about higher things from other men. Three ways thus lay open to them, by which they might obtain the knowledge of God. They could look up into the immensity of heaven, and by pondering the harmony of creation come to know its Ruler, the Word of the Father, Whose all-ruling providence makes known the Father to all. Or, if this was beyond them, they could converse with holy men, and through them learn to know God, the Artificer of all things, the Father of Christ, and to recognize the worship of idols as the negation of the truth and full of all impiety. Or else, in the third place, they could cease from lukewarmness and lead a good life merely by knowing the law. For the law was not given only for the Jews, nor was it solely for their sake that God sent the prophets, though it was to the Jews that they were sent and by the Jews that they were persecuted. The law and the prophets were a sacred school of the knowledge of God and the conduct of the spiritual life for the whole world.

However, our sin was so great that even this isn’t sufficient to bring us to knowledge of God:

Yet men, bowed down by the pleasures of the moment and by the frauds and illusions of the evil spirits, did not lift up their heads towards the truth. So burdened were they with their wickednesses that they seemed rather to be brute beasts than reasonable men, reflecting the very Likeness of the Word.

[…]

What, then, was God to do? What else could He possibly do, being God, but renew His Image in mankind, so that through it men might once more come to know Him? And how could this be done save by the coming of the very Image Himself, our Savior Jesus Christ? Men could not have done it, for they are only made after the Image; nor could angels have done it, for they are not the images of God. The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father Who could recreate man made after the Image.

But sin and salvation are not strictly matters of knowledge, because in turning away from God we incur guilt and fall under the law of death. Yet it’s not entirely clear to me whether Athanasius understands death as a punishment for turning away from God, or just the natural and inevitable consequence of our sin. Maybe the best way to resolve the tension is to say that becasue in God there can be no division between his will and his nature that the distinction between punishment and inevitable consequence disappears?

Here’s what Athanasius says:

We saw in the last chapter that, because death and corruption were gaining ever firmer hold on them, the human race was in process of destruction. Man, who was created in God’s image and in his possession of reason reflected the very Word Himself, was disappearing, and the work of God was being undone. The law of death, which followed from the Transgression, prevailed upon us, and from it there was no escape. The thing that was happening was in truth both monstrous and unfitting. It would, of course, have been unthinkable that God should go back upon His word and that man, having transgressed, should not die; but it was equally monstrous that beings which once had shared the nature of the Word should perish and turn back again into non-existence through corruption.

This makes it sound like God is bound to sentence humankind to death because that was the consequence he stipulated for eating the forbidden fruit. Again though, does the consequence only contingently follow from man’s disobedience, or is it a necessary consequence? To say that it would “have been unthinkable that God should go back upon His word and that man, having transgressed, should not die” makes it sound contingent since it is a matter of God not going back on his word. But of course, in some sense, God can’t go back on his word since that would presumably violate the divine nature.

In any event, the fact that humankind is now under the law of death makes it necessary, according to Athanasius, that someone else has to die in man’s place. We’re so used to the familiar typology of atonement theories that attributes the “Christus Victor” view to the early church that it’s somewhat surprising to see Athanasius use language that sounds a lot like penal subsitution:

The Word perceived that corruption could not be got rid of otherwise than through death; yet He Himself, as the Word, being immortal and the Father’s Son, was such as could not die. For this reason, therefore, He assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word Who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all, and, itself remaining incorruptible through His indwelling, might thereafter put an end to corruption for all others as well, by the grace of the resurrection. It was by surrendering to death the body which He had taken, as an offering and sacrifice free from every stain, that He forthwith abolished death for His human brethren by the offering of the equivalent. For naturally, since the Word of God was above all, when He offered His own temple and bodily instrument as a substitute for the life of all, He fulfilled in death all that was required.

But for Athanasius, this is not just a matter of accepting the punishment due to humankind for their transgressions, it’s also a matter of effecting an ontological change in human nature. For human nature, by turning away from God, has become corruptible. It doesn’t just need forgiveness, but needs healing:

Naturally also, through this union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature, all men were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrection. For 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. You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death.

By becoming united to our human nature, the Word of God heals the corruption and proneness-to-death that followed as a result of sin. (We might ask if this implies a kind of universalism. If human nature as such has been healed of corruption, how can the benefits not accrue to all individual humans?) And Athanasius is careful to point out that it is the love of God which impels the Incarnation and Atonement. There is no hint of an angry God who has to be appeased by the sacrifice of his Son.

This great work was, indeed, supremely worthy of the goodness of God. A king who has founded a city, so far from neglecting it when through the carelessness of the inhabitants it is attacked by robbers, avenges it and saves it from destruction, having regard rather to his own honor than to the people’s neglect. Much more, then, the Word of the All-good Father was not unmindful of the human race that He had called to be; but rather, by the offering of His own body He abolished the death which they had incurred, and corrected their neglect by His own teaching. Thus by His own power He restored the whole nature of man.

Of course, for the contemporary reader this raises some problems. Most of us don’t think of “human nature” as a substantial thing in which individuals “participate.” So for us it’s hard to see how the Word becoming united to “human nature” can effect a change that makes a difference for us. We tend to think more in relational and moral, rather than ontological, terms about these things. This may be why, despite objections, the penal substitution and moral influnce theories remain popular (though usually with different people). Neither one requires us to think in terms of the Incarnation and Atonement directed primarily toward an abstract human nature, and it’s easier to see how it affects individuals (whether through removing our guilt, or providing us with a powerful revelation of God’s love).

Addendum. I should add that whatever misgivings we might have about some of Athanasius’ metaphysical baggage, I do think his emphasis on contemplation of/communion with God is something we could stand to recover. So much of modern Christianity (especially Protestantism) seems to have an almost exclusively moralisitc understanding of sin and salvation. The beatific vision seems to have largely faded into the background in our thinking and piety.