On the Incarnation: Saint Athanasius (Popular Patristics Series Book 44)

by Athanasius of Alexandria

It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.

Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others.

I believe that many who find that “nothing happens” when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

For if they had really applied their minds to his divinity they would not have mocked at so great a thing, but would rather have recognized that he was the Savior of the universe and that the cross was not the ruin but the healing of creation.

Evil has not existed from the beginning, nor even now is it found among the holy ones nor does it exist at all with them. But it was human beings who later began to conceive of it and imagine it in their own likeness.

As God is good, Athanasius affirms, he created all things “by his Word our Savior Jesus Christ,” so that through likeness to him knowledge of their Creator might be granted to human beings;

Athanasius characterizes the proper state of human existence from the point of view of what has been revealed by Christ in his work of salvation: human beings were created for communion with God through contemplation of his Word and Image, the Savior Jesus Christ.

But human beings, contemptuous of the better things and shrinking from their apprehension, sought rather what was closer to themselves—and what was closer to them was the body and its sensations.

So they turned their minds away from intelligible reality and began to consider themselves. And by considering themselves and holding to the body and the other senses, and deceived as it were in their own things, they fell into desire for themselves, preferring their own things to the contemplation of divine things.

With their souls directed towards the body, in, by, and for itself, the body is now the very point of human separation from God, not because of its materiality, but because it has become an idol.

For if the movement of creation was meaningless (alogos) and the universe was carried about haphazardly, one could well disbelieve our statements.

But if it was created with reason (logos), wisdom, and understanding, and has been arranged with complete order, then he who governs and ordered it can be none other than the Word (Logos) of God. (Gent. 40)

Created from nothing, creation rests upon nothing; it depends totally for its existence upon the will of God alone, by which it was called into being.

All the attributes usually only applied to the one God—wisdom, truth, light, righteousness, virtue—the Son is, not as properties that he has acquired from “outside” himself nor as if he were himself merely an attribute of God, but he is these things in himself: He is what it is to be God, and so is the exact image of the Father, his perfect fruit.

This is, in fact, the central affirmation of the Council of Nicaea, that the Son is himself true God of true God by being the Father’s own Son.

For it will appear not at all contradictory if the Father works its salvation in the same one by whom he created it.

Such order indicates that they did not come into being spontaneously, but shows that a cause preceded them, from which one can apprehend the God who ordered and created all things.

according to them God is only a craftsman and not the Creator of being, if he fashions underlying matter but is not himself the cause of matter.

Among these things, of all things upon earth he had mercy upon the human race, and seeing that by the principle of its own coming into being it would not be able to endure eternally, he granted them a further gift, creating human beings not simply like all the irrational animals upon the earth but making them according to his own image

giving them a share of the power of his own Word, so that having as it were shadows of the Word and being made rational, they might be able to abide in blessedness, living the true life which is really that of the holy ones in paradise.

And knowing again that free choice of human beings could turn either way, he secured beforehand, by a law an...

This “you shall die by death,” what else might it be except not merely to die, but to remain in the corruption of death?

For God has not only created us from nothing, but also granted us by the grace of the Word to live a life according to God.

But human beings, turning away from things eternal and by the counsel of the devil turning us towards things of corruption, were themselves the cause of corruption in death, being, as we already said, corruptible by nature but escaping their natural state by the grace of participation in the Word, had they remained good.

For these reasons, then, with death holding greater sway and corruption remaining fast against human beings, the race of humans was perishing, and the human being, made rational and in the image, was disappearing, and the work made by God was being obliterated.

For as I said earlier, by the law death thereafter prevailed against us, and it was impossible to escape the law, since this had been established by God on account of the transgression.

It was absurd, on the one hand, that, having spoken, God should prove to be lying: that is, having legislated that the human being would die by death if he were to transgress the commandment, yet after the transgress...

On the other hand, it was improper that what had once been made rational and partakers of his Word should perish, and once again re...

It was not worthy of the goodness of God that those created by him should be corrupted through the deceit wrought...

And it was supremely improper that the workmanship of God in human beings should disappear either through their own negligence ...

The weakness, rather than the goodness, of God is made known by neglect, if, after creating, he abandoned his own work to be corrupted, rather than if he had not created the human being in the beginning.

It was therefore right not to permit human beings to be carried away by corruption, because this would be improper to and unworthy of the goodness of God.

But just as this had to be, so also on the other hand the consistency of God lies against it, so that God should appear true in his legislation concerning death.

For it was absurd that God, the Father of truth, should appear a liar for our profit and preservation.

But repentance would neither have preserved the consistency of God, for he again would not have remained true if human beings were not held fast by death, nor does repentance recall human beings from what is natural, but merely halts sins.

But if, once the transgression had taken off, human beings were now held fast in natural corruption and were deprived of the grace of being in the image, what else needed to happen?

Or who was needed for such grace and recalling except the God Word who in the beginning made the universe from non-being?

For his it was once more both to bring the corruptible to incorruptibility and to save the superlati...

Being the Word of the Father and above all, he alone consequently was both able to recreate the universe and was worthy to suffer on behalf of all an...

For seeing the rational race perishing, and death reigning over them through corruption, and seeing also the threat of the transgression giving firm hold to the corruption which was upon us, and that it was absurd for the law to be dissolved before being fulfilled, and seeing the impropriety in what had happened, that the very things of which he himself was the Creator were disappearing, and seeing the excessive wickedness of human beings, that they gradually increased it to an intolerable pitch against themselves, and seeing the liability of all human beings to death—having mercy upon our race, and having pity upon our weakness, and condescending to our corruption, and not enduring the dominion of death, lest what had been created should perish and the work of the Father himself for human beings should be in vain, he takes for himself a body and that not foreign to our own.

And thus, taking from ours that which is like, since all were liable to the corruption of death, delivering it over to death on behalf of all, he offered it to the Father, doing this in his love for human beings, so that, on the one hand, with all dying in him the law concerning corruption in human beings might be undone

(its power being fully expended in the lordly body and no longer having any ground against similar human beings),

and, on the other hand, that as human beings had turned towards corruption he might turn them again to incorruptibility and give them life from death, by making the body his own and by the grace of the resurr...

For the Word, realizing that in no other way would the corruption of human beings be undone except, simply, by dying, yet being immortal and the Son of the Father the Word was not able to die, for this reason he takes to himself a body capable of death, in order that it, participating in the Word who is above all, might be sufficient for death on behalf of all, and through the indwelling Word would remain incorruptible, and so corruption might henceforth cease from all by the grace of the resurrection.

Whence, by offering to death the body he had taken to himself, as an offering holy and free of all spot, he immediately abolished death from all like him,

For being above all, the Word of God consequently, by offering his own temple and his bodily instrument as a substitute for all, fulfilled in death that which was required; and, being with all through the like [body], the incorruptible Son of God consequently clothe...