On the Incarnation

A bishop of Alexandria

Athanasius was born around 296, probably in Alexandria, the great port of Roman Egypt. As a young deacon he went with his bishop, Alexander, to the Council of Nicaea in 325, and in 328 he succeeded him. For forty-five years, until his death in 373, he held to Nicaea's confession that the Son is God as the Father is God, and as emperors and parties changed he was driven into exile five times. He also wrote the Life of Antony, the desert monk, and in 367 an Easter letter that is the earliest surviving list of exactly our twenty-seven New Testament books Athanasius, Festal Letter 39. His story is told in Nicaea: is the Son truly God?.

On the Incarnation is the second half of a two-part work. The first, Against the Heathen, traced how idolatry arose; this one turns to "what relates to the Word’s becoming Man" 1.1. It is addressed to a friend, a "true lover of Christ" 1.1, whom the translation calls Macarius, though the Greek may simply mean ‘blessed one’. Athanasius writes of the Word's appearing "which Jews traduce and Greeks laugh to scorn, but we worship" 1.1, so that the lower the Word seems to stoop, the more his friend's devotion may grow. Paul knew the same scorn:

we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

1 Corinthians 1:23-24

When he wrote it is uncertain. The book never names Arius, so it was long dated to about 318, before the Arian controversy spread; many scholars now place it in the 330s, after he became bishop. Either way, the conviction that carried him through it is already here: only the one who made us can make us new.

Fifty-seven short sections

The library holds the whole book, in five parts; its fifty-seven sections are the editors' division, and the summary heading each is the translator's. §1–10 begin with creation and the fall and give the first reason for the incarnation, to rescue us from death and corruption; §11–19 give the second, to restore the knowledge of God. §20–32 ask why Christ died as he did and rose on the third day. §33–45 answer the unbelief of Jews (§33–40) and the laughter of Greeks (§41–45). §46–57 point to what Christ was doing in Athanasius's own day, and close with counsel on reading Scripture. Against the Heathen is not in the library, but this book seldom leans on it.

One question drives the whole: "what was God in His goodness to do?" 6.7 Athanasius answers by weighing what is fitting to God's goodness and truth. His "must" is not a law above God but God acting like himself; the argument is reason at worship.

Why the Word became man

He begins with creation, so that we may see that "the renewal of creation has been the work of the self-same Word that made it at the beginning" 1.4. As John says, "Through Him all things were made" (John 1:3). God made the world out of nothing 3.1, and he made us in his image, "giving them a portion even of the power of His own Word" 3.3. The image of God is a gift of grace, not a power we hold by nature.

But we turned from God. The Lord had warned, "in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die" (Genesis 2:17), and now "death had the mastery over them as king" 4.4. In this English, corruption means decay as well as moral rot: creatures made out of nothing slipping back toward nothing. Kept in the knowledge of God, man "would stay his natural corruption, and remain incorrupt" 4.6, that is, halt it; turned from God, our very being bends toward death. See The fall.

Then comes the dilemma. To let his creatures perish would be "unworthy of God’s goodness" 6.10; to cancel his warning would be for "God, the Father of truth, to appear a liar" 7.1. Repentance "merely stays them from acts of sin" 7.3; it cannot undo a nature sliding into corruption. Only the Word who made all things out of nothing "was both able to recreate everything, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be ambassador for all with the Father" 7.5.

So the Word, though "he was not far from us before" 8.1, took from the Virgin a body "of no different sort from ours" 8.2, and "He gave it over to death in the stead of all" 8.4. All were counted to have died in him, the law of death was spent on his body, and because Life dwelt in it, death was banished "like straw from the fire" 8.4. Twice Athanasius sums it up with Hebrews:

Now since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity, so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

Hebrews 2:14-15

The second reason is knowledge. Given the image, the creation, the law and the prophets, people still turned to idols §12, and neither men nor angels could renew the image, "since they are but made after an image" 13.7. When a portrait on a panel is spoiled, its subject must sit again so that "the outline is renewed upon it" 14.1; so the Father's own Image came. Like a teacher who "comes down to their level" 15.1, he showed himself to sense-bound people in a body; yet "so far from being contained by anything, He rather contained all things Himself" 17.1. See Truly God and truly man.

The cross, the tomb and our hope

Why not a quiet death in bed? A death by sickness would have looked like weakness in the healer 22.5, and a death in secret would have left the resurrection without witnesses 23.1. Like a wrestler who lets the onlookers choose his opponents 24.3, he accepted the death his enemies thought most shameful, and "the death, which they thought to inflict as a disgrace, was actually a monument of victory against death itself" 24.4.

To believers who ask "not from love of debate, but from love of learning" 25.1 why it was a cross, he answers that Christ came to bear our curse: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us" (Galatians 3:13). And "it is only on the cross that a man dies with his hands spread out" 25.3, one hand drawing the ancient people and the other the Gentiles: "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw everyone to Myself" (John 12:32).

The proof Athanasius presses hardest is the church before his eyes: "death is no longer terrible" 27.2, and young men and women choose to die rather than deny Christ. The dead do nothing, yet Christ changes lives every day; so he is alive, "or rather is Himself the Life" 30.4.

Near the end he gathers it all into one sentence: "For He was made man that we might be made God" 54.3. Peter says we may "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). Athanasius does not mean that we become God by nature, but that creatures made from nothing share by grace in the life and incorruption that are God's; so he reads "You are gods" (Psalm 82:6) at 4.6.

Christians hear this sentence in different keys. The Orthodox read it as the classic statement of theosis, and describe salvation above all as healing from corruption and death and union with the life of God. The Catholic Church, which honours Athanasius as a Doctor of the Church, quotes it in its Catechism. Protestants more often speak of union with Christ, adoption and glorification, and many are wary of words that might blur Creator and creature; yet all share the hope that "when Christ appears, we will be like Him" (1 John 3:2).

Readers differ on the cross, too. Gustaf Aulén, the Swedish Lutheran, set Athanasius beside Irenaeus (Against Heresies) as a witness to the Fathers' ‘classic’ view of the atonement, Christ's victory over sin, death and the devil Aulén, Christus Victor. Many Western readers, evangelicals especially, find here also a death "in the stead of all" that pays the debt all owed 20.2, and an argument that God's word must stand 7.1: a thread that runs on to Anselm's Why God Became Man and the Reformers' penal substitution. Athanasius uses these pictures together without choosing among them. See The cross and atonement.

Reading it well

The church has read this little book for sixteen centuries because it holds the faith together: creation and redemption are one Word's work, and incarnation, cross and resurrection one act of love. When a new English translation appeared in 1944, C. S. Lewis introduced it, urging readers to take an old book between new ones.

The English here is Archibald Robertson's (1885, revised 1891). To shew is to show, to quicken is to give life, an Artificer is a maker, a sojourn is a stay, peers are fellow men, usward is toward us, and to traduce is to slander; Esaias is Isaiah, and Jesus son of Naue is Joshua son of Nun. Do not mind the repetition: "it is better to submit to the blame of repetition than to leave out anything that ought to be set down" 20.3. Linger instead with his pictures: the king in the city 9.3, the portrait, the wrestler, the asbestos that fire cannot burn 44.7.

He read the Old Testament in Greek, so his texts do not always match ours. He quotes Deuteronomy as "Ye shall see your Life hanging before your eyes, and shall not believe" 35.2 and reads it of the cross; the BSB has "your life will hang in doubt before you" (Deuteronomy 28:66). He quotes the Wisdom of Solomon 4.6 and the Shepherd of Hermas 3.1, which in 367 he would list outside the canon, as books for those newly joining the church to read; the Catholic and Orthodox churches now read Wisdom within their Old Testament. See The canon: which books are Scripture and How the Fathers read Scripture.

Some pages are hard. In §33–40 he argues from the prophets, as the apostles did, but harshly: "So the Jews are trifling" 40.1. In the light of the long history of Christian contempt for the Jewish people, such words call for humility, and for Paul's grief and hope: "did God reject His people? Certainly not!" (Romans 11:1); "God’s gifts and His call are irrevocable" (Romans 11:29). The proofs of §46–55 (silent oracles, demons fleeing the sign of the cross, warring peoples at peace) are best read as a fourth-century bishop's witness to the fading of the old gods.

He calls his book "a rudimentary sketch and outline" 56.1 and sends us to the Scriptures, which also teach of Christ's coming in glory to judge 56.3, and which are understood only by a life made clean: "without a pure mind and a modelling of the life after the saints, a man could not possibly comprehend the words of the saints" 57.2. Meanwhile Christ's people pass death like a tyrant in chains and "scoff at death" 27.4 with Paul:

When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come to pass: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O Death, is your victory? Where, O Death, is your sting?”

1 Corinthians 15:54-55