Athanasius’s Incarnational Soteriology

We have seen in the previous two chapters that Athanasius championed the full divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit and, in so doing, confirmed that the one God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Athanasius did so believing that such was the authentic faith of the church founded upon the apostles, professed in the Scriptures, and confirmed within the subsequent theological tradition. In the midst of all this, soteriology was not far from Athanasius’s mind. Only if the Son was truly God did God truly become a human being and, in so doing, secure our salvation through his human life, death, and resurrection. Moreover, only if the fruit of the Son’s redemption was the truly divine Holy Spirit could human beings actually be taken into the very life and love of the Father and the Son and so be genuinely divinized. In this chapter, we will examine Athanasius’s soteriological Christology. Within the incarnation, Athanasius perceives the full significance of the divinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, for in the Son becoming a human being and obtaining humankind’s salvation, we see the saving love of God the Father, the salvific work of his Son, and the abundant outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

Athanasius and the Three Incarnational Truths

By way of introducing Athanasius’s soteriological Christology, we need to understand clearly the inherent incarnational issues at hand so as to grasp the importance of his response to them. Athanasius instinctively knew through faith that to conceive and articulate the incarnation properly, one needed to uphold three truths simultaneously. While he would not have stated them in this manner, the following are these three incarnational truths. First, it must truly be God who came to exist in the flesh. We already observed this in Athanasius’s defense of the Nicene doctrine that the Son is God as the Father is God. Second, the divine Son must be fully human. Here, the emphasis is on the full and authentic humanity of Jesus. As we will see, some scholars believe that Athanasius failed to uphold this incarnational truth. However, we will find that this interpretation is not in keeping with Athanasius’s actual thought. Third, the divine Son of God must truly be a genuine human being. This truth highlights that the union between the Son’s divinity and his true humanity must be such that the Son actually exists as one of us. The union cannot be a moral union such as is found in the proposal that the Son only adopted the man Jesus through the Holy Spirit. Jesus would then be similar to other holy people and prophets, even if he is the paramount holy person and the supreme prophet. Athanasius recognizes that Jesus is the Son of God existing in a human manner, and, as we will see, he does so in a very significant manner—his use of what is termed “the communication of idioms.”

By way of commencing his soteriological Christology, the following quotation exemplifies Athanasius articulating these three incarnational truths:

For man, if joined to a creature, was not deified, unless the Son were truly God; nor was man brought into the Father’s presence unless he had been his natural and true Word who had put on the body. And as we would not have been delivered from sin and the curse, unless it had been human flesh by nature that the Word put on (for there should be nothing common to us with what is foreign), so also the man would not have been deified unless the Word who became flesh had been by nature from the Father and true and proper to him. Therefore the union was of this kind, that he might unite what is man by nature to him who is of the nature of the Godhead, and his salvation and deification might be sure. Therefore let those who deny that the Son is from the Father by nature and proper to his ousia, deny also that he took true human flesh from the ever-virgin Mary; for in neither case would it have been of profit to us men, whether the Word were not true and naturally Son of God, or the flesh not true which he assumed.^[1]

Athanasius ardently wishes to ensure that human beings are truly divinized. To ensure this, he emphasizes that the Son must be truly God, for only if such is the case can genuine divinization take place. Moreover, the Son must assume an authentic humanity, for only in such an assumption is the assumed full humanity divinized. Likewise, the union between the Son’s divinity and his humanity must be such that they are one, for only if the Son exists humanly can his humanity, and thus all human beings, be actually taken up into the divine life of his Father. With the above in mind, we can now proceed to examine more closely Athanasius’s soteriological Christology.

What Does It Mean for the Word to “Become” Flesh?

To possess a proper understanding of the incarnation, it is essential, for Athanasius, to grasp the proper meaning of John 1:14: “The Word became flesh.” The crucial task here is to define the word become. Athanasius is very clear on what become does not mean.

He became man, and did not come into man; for this is necessary to know, lest these irreligious men fall into this notion also, and beguile any into thinking that, as in former times the Word was used to come into each of the saints, so now he sojourned in a man, hallowing him also, and manifesting himself as he had in others. . . . Of old he came to the saints individually, and hallowed those who rightly received him; but neither was it said that when they were begotten that he had become man, nor, when they suffered that he himself suffered.^[2]

Athanasius insists that the Word of God actually came to exist in a human manner and did not simply come to dwell in a human being as the Word of God came upon and dwelt in previous holy people. In these former manifestations of the Word, the Word merely inspired people who lived holy lives and spoke his word. For Athanasius, the terminus of the incarnational “becoming” was his actual existence in the flesh, and it is precisely because he existed humanly that all that pertained to his humanity can be attributed to him, such as human suffering. Thus, the incarnational “becoming” expresses an ontological “becoming,” that is, that the Word, in “becoming” flesh, “comes to exist” as a human being.

If the Son of God did not simply “come into a man” but actually “became man,” does that not mean that the Word of God changed in so becoming human as the Arians supposed, confirming that the Word/Son is not truly divine, for God cannot change? Does not the concept of becoming by its very nature demand change? Athanasius insists that the Son of God, being God, did not change in becoming flesh, nor, in becoming flesh, did he change into flesh. In order to avoid becoming meaning some form of change, Athanasius consistently adds such phrases as “taking on flesh,” “putting on flesh,” and “entering into flesh.”^[3] The incarnational becoming is not the Word changing in some manner, much less changing into something that he previously was not. Rather, in becoming human, the Son positively takes on a new manner of existence; that is, while remaining God, he now comes to exist as a human being by ontologically “taking on” or “putting on” human flesh. In his letter to Epictetus, bishop of Corinth, Athanasius maintains that “he [the Son] has become flesh not by being changed into flesh, but because he assumed living flesh on our behalf, and has become man.”^[4]

There are two theological, interrelated reasons for why the incarnational notion of become does not mean “change into.” First, Athanasius realizes that to attribute change to God would mean that he could either become better or worse through the changes he undergoes, such as changes that occur within human beings. But God, by definition, is perfect in every way and so he cannot change for the better, nor could he, being perfectly good and loving, change for the worse. Therefore, the Son of God cannot change if he is to be perfectly God as the Father is God. Second, Athanasius recognizes that the Son of God must remain perfectly who he is as the all-good and loving God in becoming a human being for the sake of the incarnation. If the Son of God changed in becoming a human being, then it would no longer be the perfect Son of God who now existed as one of us, but a lesser form of himself. Moreover, if the Son of God actually did change into flesh, then it would no longer be the Son of God who is flesh but simply a human being who once was the Son of God. For Athanasius, the incarnational becoming is not like the caterpillar changing into a butterfly, whereby the caterpillar ceases to be and the butterfly comes to be.^[5]

The Communications of Idioms

Arius and his followers assembled a battery of scriptural passages that appear to confirm that the Son/Word was a creature. Proverbs 8:22 is the most legendary: “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.”^[6] But there are many others they appealed to in order to make their point, for example: “the firstborn within a large family” (Rom 8:29); “the first born of all creation” (Col 1:15); “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). They also marshalled all of the passages that ascribed ignorance, weakness, suffering, and growth to Jesus, the Son of God. While Athanasius, in various ways, addressed all of these passages in his anti-Arian writings, his predominant method in refuting them, especially those that attributed various forms of weakness and growth to Jesus, was to make a critical distinction. Following the already existing tradition, Athanasius insisted that such characteristics as suffering, ignorance, and growth were predicated of the Son not insofar as he is God but insofar as he is human. What the Arians failed to grasp was the truth of the incarnation, and so, in Athanasius’s view, they were similar to the Jews. “For the Jews said; ‘How, being man, can he be God?’ And the Arians, ‘If he were very God from God, how could he become man?’. . . Thus both parties deny the eternity and Godhead of the Word in consequence of those human attributes which the Savior took to him by reason of the flesh which he bore.”^[7] For Athanasius, “all these texts have the same force and meaning, a religious one, demonstrative of the divinity of the Word, even those of them which speak humanly concerning him, as having become the Son of man.”^[8] The Arians were “ignorant” of the “scope of faith which Christians hold, and using it as a rule, apply themselves . . . to reading the inspired Word.”^[9]

Now the scope and character of Scripture, as we have often said, is this: it contains a double account of the Savior, that he is ever God and is Son, the Father’s Word and Radiance and Wisdom; and that afterwards he took flesh for us of the Virgin, Mary the Bearer of God (Theotokos), and was made man. This scope is to be found throughout the God-inspired Scripture.^[10]

For Athanasius, it is one and the same divine Son who exists eternally as God and who came to exist in time as a human being, and, therefore, both divine and human predicates can properly be attributed to him. This is the rule of what has come to be called the communication of idioms.

Indeed, one [being] is signified from both, for “the Word was made flesh.” But the expressions employed regarding his Godhead, and those regarding his becoming man, are to be interpreted with discrimination and suitably to the particular context. He that writes of the human attributes of the Word knows also what concerns his Godhead, and he who exegetes concerning his Godhead is not ignorant of what belongs to his coming in the flesh.^[11]

Because the incarnational become means neither the Son’s dwelling in a human person nor his changing into human flesh but his coming to exist in a truly human manner, all that is truly proper to being a human being can rightly be predicated of him. For Athanasius, the Son is ontologically united to his humanity and, therefore, lived an authentic human life.

And as we said that he [the Son/Word] suffered in the flesh, hungered in the flesh, and was fatigued in the flesh, so may he also reasonably be said to have advanced in the flesh; for neither did the advance, such as we have described it, take place with the Word external to the flesh, for in him was the flesh which advanced.^[12]

Significantly, for Athanasius, the above understanding is critical for our salvation. Because the Word assumed corruptible flesh from Mary, it is necessary that

suffering and weeping and toiling, these things which are proper to the flesh, are ascribed to him together with the body. If then he wept and was troubled, it was not the Word, as being the Word who wept and was troubled, but it was proper to the flesh. If he also pleaded that “the cup might pass away,” it was not the Godhead that was in terror, but this passion too was proper to the manhood. And the words “Why hast thou forsaken me?” are his, according to the explanation offered above, though he suffered nothing, for the Word was impassible. This is nonetheless declared by the evangelists, since the Lord became man and these things are done and said as from a man, that he might himself lighten these sufferings of the flesh, and free it from them.^[13]

While the Son of God was impassible as God, and so could not suffer and die, for our sake and for our salvation the Son became a human being, taking upon himself humankind’s suffering and death so that he might free humankind from the suffering of sin and death. For Athanasius, to deny that the divine Son of God truly suffered and died as one of us, as an authentic human being, is to deprive us of salvation.

Athanasius’s ardent defense and his clear exposition of the legitimacy of communications of idioms demonstrate that he fully grasped the three theological truths necessary for a proper understanding of the incarnation, for the communication of idioms entails these very truths. First, to predicate weakness, ignorance, suffering, and death to the Son of God demands that it actually be the divine Son of God who became human, for if it was not actually the Father’s only-begotten Son who became flesh, such truths could not be predicated of him. Second, to predicate undisputable human attributes to the Son demands that the Son existed in a fully, genuinely human manner, for if he was not truly human, he could not be born of Mary, suffer, and die. Third, only if the Son of God actually ontologically existed as a human being, and did not merely dwell in a human being, could the Son actually experience all that was indisputably human and act in an authentic human manner. For Athanasius, only in upholding these three incarnational truths is one able to sustain the salvation that the incarnation achieved.

However, at this point, one of the most controverted contemporary issues surrounding Athanasius’s understanding of the incarnation arises. Did Athanasius believe that Jesus possessed a human soul, and so did he really sustain the full humanity of the Son of God?

The Human Soul of Christ

Many contemporary theologians argue that Athanasius did not posit a human soul in Jesus. While a few have defended Athanasius, the consensus has been that his Christology does not make any provision for a soul, and if he later does admit a soul after the Synod of Alexandria in 362, he gives it no soteriological significance. Such a criticism is unwarranted  and  misses  one  of  the  fundamental  points  of  Athanasius’s Christology.^[14]

While he often uses the term flesh, following the prologue of John’s Gospel, Athanasius specifies that it is “the custom of Scripture to call man by the name ‘flesh,’” citing Joel 2:28 and Daniel 14:5.^[15] He also acknowledges that “to say ‘the Word became flesh’ is equivalent to saying ‘the Word became man.’”^[16] Moreover, in accordance with the Greek understanding of sarx (flesh), Athanasius perceives all of the weaknesses and frailties that pertain to human beings. He does so precisely to accentuate the frail and weak humanity of the divine Son, and so his likeness to all other human beings. Soteriologically this is essential, for only if the Son lives an authentic human life, even unto suffering and death, is humankind saved.

Critics admit that Athanasius never denies that Christ had a soul, but they note that in arguing against the Arians, who deny the Son’s divinity precisely because of these human weaknesses, Athanasius never argues that such frailties reside in his soul and not within his impassible divinity. Such an argument, the critics claim, would have helped Athanasius’s cause. This may be true, but what the critics miss is Athanasius’s deeper christological and soteriological concerns. For Athanasius, while the Son of God did not suffer defects, such as ignorance and fear, within his divinity, a true understanding of the incarnation did demand, for soteriological reasons, that it was truly the Son of God who suffered the weaknesses of his humanity. Athanasius held that the incarnation demanded that the Son “in putting on human flesh . . . put it on whole with the passions proper to it.”^[17] In putting on the whole flesh, the Son assumed all that was proper to the whole of his humanity, not simply the passions that pertained to the body but those that pertained to the body and soul, the complete nature—“hunger,” “fatigue,” “terror,” and “abandonment.” Such passions are not merely physical but also contain the emotions of the intellect and will. This is why Athanasius laid such great stress on the communication of idioms. “When the flesh suffered the Word was not external to it . . . and when he did his Father’s works divinely, the flesh was not external to him, but in the body itself did the Lord do them.”^[18] Athanasius was not fearful, then, of attributing ignorance to Jesus—clearly a defect of the intellectual soul.

The Word as man was ignorant of [the last day], for ignorance is proper to man, and especially ignorance of these things. Moreover, this is proper to the Saviour’s love of man, for since he was made man he was not ashamed, on account of the flesh which is ignorant, to say “I know not,” so that he may show that while knowing as God, he is ignorant according to the flesh.^[19]

What needs to be noticed in this selection is that Athanasius not only affirms that the Son suffers humanly but that when he performs his divine deeds, his miracles, the Son performs them humanly as well. As the incarnate Son, Jesus did not do divine deeds in a human being, as if some actions were merely human and some actions, the important ones, were done divinely apart from his humanity. When Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law, “he stretched forth his hand humanly, but he stopped the illness divinely.”^[20] What Athanasius is accentuating is what later would be called Jesus’s theandric acts, that is, divine deeds done humanly. This is soteriologically significant. For Athanasius, Jesus achieved our salvation precisely as the Son of God, but he performed his saving acts in a human manner, humanly offering his human life on the cross for our salvation.

When we see him doing or saying anything divinely, through the instrument of his own body, we may know that being God he [Jesus] so works, and also, if we see him speaking and suffering humanly, we may not be ignorant that bearing flesh he became man, and hence so acts and speaks. For if we recognize what is proper to each, we see and understand that both these things are done by one.^[21]

For Athanasius, Jesus is the “one” incarnate divine Son who is the sole actor within all of the human salvific deeds he performs, whether he is preaching to the crowds or multiplying the loaves.

In the light of all of the above, it is not surprising that Athanasius endorses, contrary to his critics, the Council of Alexandria in 362, which condemned the notion that Jesus did not have a soul and affirmed that he was fully human as we are human, constituted as a human being with both a body and a soul.

For they [the fathers of the council] confessed also that the Saviour had not only a body without a soul, nor without sense or intelligence; for it was impossible, when the Lord had become man for us, that his body should be without intelligence; nor was salvation effected in the Word himself a salvation of body only, but of soul as well.^[22]

In a similar manner, Athanasius writes to Epictetus, saying that the Son assumed a whole humanity, for “the salvation of the whole man was brought about. . . . [And salvation does not] extend to the body only, but the whole man, body and soul.”^[23] In both passages, Athanasius is significantly anticipating the maxim of Gregory of Nazianzus that “what is not assumed is not healed,” and, therefore, the Son of God had to assume the whole of human nature, body and soul, if he was to save the whole of our humanity.^[24]

Athanasius’s Christology, founded upon the teaching of Scripture and the tradition of the church, was immensely influential. Cyril of Alexandria would appropriate and develop all of Athanasius’s principal incarnational tenets. When confronted with Nestorius’s denial that Mary should be called the Mother of God, Theotokos, with the implication that the Son of God was not truly born of her, Cyril championed the validity of the communication of idioms. If the Son of God was truly conceived within Mary’s womb as a human being through the power of the Holy Spirit, and thus truly born of her, then she can rightly and truly be called the Mother of God. To deny that Mary is the Mother of God is tantamount, for Cyril, to denying the incarnation. Cyril realized, as did his mentor Athanasius, that the communication of idioms embodied all three incarnational truths—that it was truly the divine Son who truly existed as an authentic human being, and thus that divine and human attributes are rightly predicated of him who is the Son of God. Cyril’s Christology, in turn, resides at the heart of the Council of Chalcedon (451). Within the creed of the council, then, one can distinctly perceive the evident echo of Athanasius. The council, in upholding the full divinity and humanity of Jesus as the Son of God incarnate, professed in its first paragraph:

Following therefore the holy Fathers [of the Council of Nicaea], we unanimously teach to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man composed of rational soul and body, the same one in being [homoousion] with the Father as to his divinity and one in being [homoousion] with us as to the humanity, like unto us in all things but sin. The same begotten from the Father before the ages as to the divinity and in the latter days for us and our salvation was born as to his humanity from Mary the Virgin Mother of God [Theotokos].^[25]

For Chalcedon, as it was for Athanasius, it is “one and the same” Son who exists perfectly as God as the Father is God and exists perfectly as a human being as we do, and therefore, that “same” divine Son was truly born of Mary for our salvation. This profession of faith continues to be proclaimed to this day, and in consequence, Athanasius’s soteriological Christology still resounds.

Salvation—Being Deified in Christ

We have seen throughout our examination of Athanasius’s Christology that soteriology resides at its heart. Only if Jesus is truly the Son of God who truly exists as an authentic human being is salvation assured. This is witnessed to profoundly in the following passage:

For he [the Son] suffered to prepare freedom from suffering for those who suffer in him. He descended that he might raise up, he went down to corruption, that corruption might put on immortality, he became weak for us, that we might rise with power, he descended to death, that he might bestow on us immortality, and gave life to the dead. Finally, he became man, that we who die as men might live again, and that death should no more reign over us.^[26]

For Athanasius, the Father foresaw this work of salvation though his Son from before the foundation of the world, and so his Son’s incarnation was eternally predestined. The Father not only created humankind through his Word but also “prior to us is the repair of our salvation founded in Christ, that in him we might be new-created.”^[27] Moreover, in becoming incarnate, Jesus himself must first progress in perfection and so be deified so that, by our being united to him, we might be deified in him. Jesus’s “manhood advanced in wisdom, transcending by degrees human nature, being deified and becoming and appearing to all as the organ of wisdom for the operation and the shining forth of the Godhead.”^[28] For Athanasius, Jesus’s baptism was an event whereby Jesus was further sanctified, and in being so, he was able to make us holy. “When he is baptised, we it is who are baptised . . . for he sanctifies himself that we might be sanctified in him.”^[29] This process of deification finds its culmination in Jesus’s death and resurrection, for in these saving acts Jesus conquers all that is not of God, as well as sin and death, and assumes the fullness of the divine life of the Holy Spirit. The Son came to dwell in Adam’s sinful flesh so that “sin might be perfectly expelled from the flesh.”^[30] “Therefore, the perfect Word of God puts around himself an imperfect body, and is said to be ‘created for the works’; that paying the debt in our stead, he might in himself perfect what was wanting in man.”^[31] Jesus becomes, in his resurrection, the “firstborn” of many brothers and sisters, for he is the first to reap the fruit of his own redemption and, in so doing, is able to share this fruit with those who abide in him.

His flesh was saved and liberated before all others, as being the Word’s body; henceforth we, becoming incorporated with it, are saved after that pattern. . . . He was the first to rise, as man, raising his body for our sakes. Henceforth, since he is risen, we, too, from him and through him rise in due course from the dead.^[32]

In Christ, humankind is restored not only to the dignity it possessed at the dawn of creation but now, through Christ, “with yet greater grace,” for it will now reign with him forever in the heavens.^[33] As Jesus became incorruptible at his resurrection, so “it is clear that the resurrection of all of us will take place; and since his body remained without corruption, there can be no doubt regarding our incorruption.”^[34] The risen Jesus accomplishes this incorruptible deification through the Holy Spirit for he became Lord “in order to hallow all by the Spirit.”^[35] In Christ through his Spirit human beings become “sons and gods,” for they “were adopted and deified through the Word.”^[36] To be deified is then to be taken into, and so to share in, the very interrelational life of the Trinity.

For since the Word is in the Father, and the Spirit is given from the Word, he wills that we should receive the Spirit, that when we receive it, thus having the Spirit of the Word which is in the Father, we too may be found, on account of the Spirit, to become one with the Word, and through him in the Father.^[37]

For Athanasius, this is the whole purpose of the incarnation. The Son of God ultimately became “man that he might deify us in himself . . . and [so make us] ‘partakers of the divine nature,’ as Peter wrote.”^[38] Early in his theological career, Athanasius already summarized the whole of his soteriological Christology. “He [the Son] was made man that we might be made God; and he manifested himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and he endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality.”^[39]

Antony—the Perfect Image of Christ

In closing our study of Athanasius’s soteriological Christology, we should briefly consider his Life of Antony, because in Athanasius’s view Antony was the epitome of what it means to live a deified life in Christ. In abandoning his life in the world and hiding himself in the desert, Antony gradually assumed the image of Christ. He did this through constant prayer, turning away from sin, acquiring the holy life of virtue through fasting and discipline, and, above all, through growing in love for his neighbor and for the Lord Jesus himself. In the midst of his Spirit-filled striving, the devil was ever close at hand, tempting Antony with the allurements of the world and the flesh. “But the enemy saw his own weakness in the face of Anthony’s resolve. . . . Working with Anthony was the Lord, who bore flesh for us, and gave to the body victory over the devil, so that each of those who truly struggle can say, it is not I, but the grace of God which is in me.”^[40]

When people later came to Antony, they found a man who had been recreated in Christ, the new Adam, for he truly knew and loved God and his neighbor. He lived a truly rational life, having been renewed in the Spirit, with all of his emotional and intellectual desires attuned to truth and love.

The state of his was one of purity, for it was not constrained by grief, nor relaxed by pleasure, nor affected by either laughter or dejection. Moreover, when he saw the crowd, he was not annoyed any more than he was elated at being embraced by so many people. He maintained utter equilibrium, like one guided by reason and steadfast in that which accords with nature. Through him the Lord healed many of those present who suffered from bodily ailments; others purged of demons, and to Anthony he gave the grace of speech. Thus he consoled many who mourned, and others hostile to each other he reconciled in friendship, urging everyone to prefer nothing in the world above the love of Christ.^[41]

For Athanasius, Antony had become truly deified in Christ and thus lived in full communion with the Father through the Holy Spirit. In so doing, he lived in love with all of his brothers and sisters in Christ.

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