4. Beginnings

4. Beginnings

4

Beginnings

Word and World

“I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.”

The second half of the first article of the Apostles’ Creed is arguably as central to Athanasius’s theology as his formulations of trinitarian theology or Christology. Creation gave him a number of his most fundamental metaphysical convictions. The doctrine of creation implied an ontological distinction between Creator and creature, a distinction that remains intact, no matter how intimately God unites himself with human nature or how elevated human beings are in grace. God remains God and creation remains created. To be created is to be dependent, and creation manifests its own dependence, thus providing a kind of negative proof for the existence of an independent Creator. God created out of his goodness,^[116] not from need, so that creation is a pointer to God’s generosity. Creation is orderly and thus manifests not just God in general but the “logic” of God, that is, the eternal divine Logos. The good God creates a world that is good, and all that is participates in his goodness. Body and soul are both created, both equally contingent and dependent, both equally susceptible to change and decay. Bodies are not evil. Evil, for Athanasius as much as for Augustine, is no substance, but a breach with the source of existence and therefore a move toward non-existence. Sin is “decreation.”^[117] If the doctrine of the Trinity is at the center of the patristic “evangelization of metaphysics,” the doctrine of creation is close by its side. The doctrine of the Trinity is about the character of ultimate reality; creation is the fundamental statement about the metaphysics of visible and contingent reality. For Athanasius, the two doctrines are intimately related: only a Triune God can create.

Creation might appear to be common ground between Athanasius and his opponents, but Athanasius certainly does not think so. Arius makes creation impossible, because he distances the Creator from the creature through a “throng” of mediators: if the Son is a created mediator, he is created through another created mediator, and that mediator through another, and another, receding to infinity (Discourses 2.26). Athanasius insists that God himself creates, the Father working through the eternal divine Son and the eternal divine Spirit. For Athanasius, this is an assertion not only about the creation but also about God, a God who is not proud, a God who is not so high and mighty that he disdains little things. If the Arians “assign the toil of making all things as the reason why God made the Son only, the whole creation will cry out against them as saying unworthy things of God.” But if “God made the Son alone, as not deigning to make the rest, but committed them to the Son as an assistant, this on the other hand is unworthy of God, for in Him there is no pride.” On the contrary, Jesus himself points to the Father’s care for the smallest detail of his creation: “Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father” (Matt. 10:29). The Father is concerned with food and clothing; he feeds the birds of the air and invests the grass with clothing more glorious than Solomon’s. “If then it be not unworthy of God to exercise His Providence, even down to things so small, a hair of the head, and a sparrow, and the grass of the field, also it was not unworthy of Him to make them.” Providence and creation go together: “What things are the subjects of His Providence, of those He is Maker through His proper Word” (Discourses 2.25).

Far from agreeing with each other about creation, Athanasius and the Arians even disagree about who the Creator is. In contrast to the Arians, who believe that the creating Word is made by the Father, Athanasius insists that the Son is in “no wise a thing originate”; rather, he is the one who “changes everything else, and is Himself not changed” (see Heb. 1:12). He is different from all “things originate,” which “being from nothing, and not being before their origination, because, in truth, they come to be after not being, have a nature which is changeable” (Discourses 1.36). The Son is begotten, and this is not a coming-to-be; it is an eternal begetting.

The creatures began to be made; but the Word of God, not having beginning of being, certainly did not begin to be, nor begin to come to be, but was ever. And the works have their beginning in their making, and their beginning precedes their coming to be; but the Word, not being of things which come to be, rather comes to be Himself the Framer of those which have a beginning. And the being of things originate is measured by their becoming, and from some beginning does God begin to make them through the Word, that it may be known that they were not before their origination; but the Word has His being, in no other beginning than the Father, whom they allow to be without beginning, so that He too exists without beginning in the Father, being His Offspring, not His creature. (Discourses 2.57)

Because the Son is eternal and does not come-to-be, he is capable of creation. Athanasius recognizes that, in a certain sense, human beings make, but they cannot be “efficient” or “making causes” (poiētikon aition). They cannot be such because they are “separate and divided from the only God, and other in nature,” so that “being works, they can neither work what God works” nor “give grace with Him” (Discourses 3.14). Human beings cannot make things that are not, but can only arrange and put together matter into different forms: “None of things which are brought to be is an efficient cause, but all things were made through the Word: who would not have wrought all things, were He Himself in the number of the creatures” (oude poiēsei pote to mē on eis to einai . . . tautēn tēn hylēn syntithēsi kai emetarrythmizei). Not even angels can create, since they are creatures, nor the sun nor any other created thing. Rather, “God is He who fashions man in the womb, and fixes the mountains, and makes wood grow; whereas man, as being capable of science, puts together and arranges that material, and works things that are, as he has learned; and is satisfied if they are but brought to be, and being conscious of what his nature is, if he needs anything, knows to ask it of God” (Discourses 2.21). Even Moses was only a minister of words. He did not create the people of God: “To minister is of things originate as of servants, but to frame and create is of God alone, and of His proper Word and His Wisdom” (Discourses 2.27). Human words, in contrast to divine words, do not make, and human wisdom is not creative either (Discourses 2.35; 2.79). Since the Word is the Truth that is at the heart of created things, “it follows that the Word is not a creature, but alone proper to the Father, in whom all things are disposed, and He is celebrated by all, as Framer” (Discourses 2.20).

Athanasius’s view of the Son and Word as eternal God, “proper” to the being of the Father, leads him to a view of the relation of Creator and creation different from that of the Arians. Arians teach or imply that the Father cannot have any direct relation with his creation, since finite things cannot withstand the touch of the infinite Creator. The Father begets or creates the Son in order to have a mediator, a sidekick who can carry out his purposes safely. The Son serves as a buffer between God and creation. In Athanasius’s view, there is no such buffer. God is immediate to the creation. Though he is utterly beyond creation, and even beyond thought, that Plotinian apophatic point does not, for Athanasius, rob God of his contact with the world. On the contrary, because God is truly transcendent, he is immediate to the world.^[118]

As the work of the Father through the Word, the creation is “enfolded” in the Father-Son relation, the common object of their delight.^[119] It is the common object of delight, however, because the world bears the imprint of the Son. As the Word of the Father, the Father’s living will and “image,” the Word is also the pattern and “archetype” of creation.^[120] There is a logic, a rationality to the creation, and that rationality is the work of the Word and the impress of the Word on the creation. The Father loves the world because it is made in the image of his image, the Son.

Many of the basic themes of Athanasius’s creation theology appear in his work Against the Pagans, originally written in tandem with the treatise On the Incarnation. Against the Pagans is Athanasius’s one extant contribution to the literature of apologetics that was popular in the first four centuries of the Christian church. The book divides into two large sections, the first section a refutation of paganism, and the second an outline of Athanasius’s understanding of the Christian view of reality.^[121] Athanasius treats creation in a christological and trinitarian context in Discourses against the Arians. Together, these treatises provide us with a sketch of Athanasius’s understanding of the nature of things.

It is the nearest thing to overt metaphysics that Athanasius ever wrote, but Athanasius claims at the beginning of Against the Pagans that the whole treatise, not only the companion piece on the incarnation, is an apology for the cross of Jesus.^[122] As John Behr explains it, Athanasius responds to criticism that the Christian faith is alogon, “irrational,” by showing that the cross is the revelation of the Logos of God. Idolatry is the true irrationality, and by expelling idolatry the logic of the cross is vindicated:

Athanasius thus uses idolatry, especially that of the body, as a kind of barometer, measuring the perversity into which humans have fallen, the degree to which their knowledge of God has been lost, and the extent to which the image of God in them has been obscured, the consequence of which is corruption and death. The prevalence of such idolatry, to which the bulk of Against the Pagans is given over to describing, demands the drastic solution presented in On the Incarnation. The death of idolatry since the advent of Christ demonstrates the power of Christ and the Cross. . . . The Christian faith therefore does indeed have its own Logos.^[123]

It is all about Christ. It is a Christic metaphysics. Even when Athanasius is exploring the nature of created reality, the cross and the Christ of the cross remain in the forefront of his mind.

From Nothing

According to Athanasius, creation is ex nihilo. For Athanasius, origin determines nature. Nature, physis, is simply the way something comes-to-be, the way it is born. God has an eternal nature because he is without beginning, and the Son has the specific character as Son because he is begotten from the Father. Creation, arising from nothing, arises from transition; before it is, it becomes, and it becomes in order to be. Becoming, movement, changeability, corruptibility are thus the fundamental character of created existence.^[124] Anything that has once not existed might pass away, like the syllables of an utterance: “And man’s word is composed of syllables, and neither lives nor operates anything, but is only significant of the speaker’s intention, and does but go forth and go by, no more to appear, since it was not at all before it was spoken; wherefore the word of man neither lives nor operates anything, nor in short is man. And this happens to it, as I said before, because man who begets it, has his nature out of nothing” (Discourses 2.35).

Athanasius acknowledges, based on the text of Genesis 1–2, that God created some things by using preexisting matter. Adam was formed from the dust of the ground, but it is still the case that Adam was not before he originated:

He that is, can make things which are not, and which are, and which were before. For instance, carpenter, and goldsmith, and potter, each, according to his own art, works upon materials previously existing, making what vessels he pleases; and the God of all Himself, having taken the dust of the earth existing and already brought to be, fashions man; that very earth, however, whereas it was not once, He has at one time made by His own Word. If then this is the meaning of their question, the creature on the one hand plainly was not before its origination, and men, on the other, work the existing material; and thus their reasoning is inconsequent, since both “what is” becomes, and “what is not” becomes, as these instances show. (Discourses 1.24)

This line of thought is the basis for Athanasius’s explanation of why the creation is not eternal. The point is not the simple, logical one that creation is not eternal if it originated; rather, his argument is from the nature of originated things. Because originated things arise from nothing and are more fundamentally becoming than being, they do not possess the stable nature of eternal things. Thus, “if they curiously inquire why God, though always with the power to make, does not always make . . . they must be told, that although God always had the power to make, yet the things originated had not the power of being eternal.” Since created things “are out of nothing, and therefore were not before their origination,” they cannot logically “coexist with the ever-existing God.” Thus God, considering what was good for them, then made them all when he saw that, when originated, they were able to abide (Discourses 1.29). God in his wisdom, through his living Wisdom, brought things into being when it was best for them, and beyond that we can say nothing.

Created things are all essentially the same in that they came-to-be, but Athanasius also recognizes the vast diversity of the creation. Reviewing the days of creation, he notes that each thing has its essence and remains in the essence in which it was made:

For is any one of the creatures just what another is, that you should predicate this of the Son as some prerogative? And all the visible creation was made in six days:—in the first, the light which He called day; in the second the firmament; in the third, gathering together the waters, He bared the dry land, and brought out the various fruits that are in it; and in the fourth, He made the sun and the moon and all the host of the stars; and on the fifth, He created the race of living things in the sea, and of birds in the air; and on the sixth, He made the quadrupeds on the earth, and at length man. And the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made (Rom. 1:20), and neither the light is as the night, nor the sun as the moon; nor the irrational as rational man; nor the Angels as the Thrones, nor the Thrones as the Authorities, yet they are all creatures, but each of the things made according to its kind exists and remains in its own essence, as it was made. (Discourses 2.29)

Created things must be multiple because they are limited and lacking, so that each one makes up the limits and weaknesses of the other. Through this differentiation and mutual support, the universe forms a single entity, a “body” made of many members, the body of the world.^[125] When we look at creation, we find “many lights, and not the sun only, nor the moon only, but each is one in essence.” Each light shines so that their service is “one and common” and so that “what each lacks, is supplied by the other, and the office of lighting is performed by all.” Mutual service and limitation go hand in hand: “The sun has authority to shine throughout the day and no more; and the moon through the night; and the stars together with them accomplish the seasons and years, and become for signs, each according to the need that calls for it.” Similarly, the earth does not provide everything that other creatures need. It provides fruits, but it provides no light. So too “the firmament is to divide between waters and waters, and to be a place to set the stars in. So also fire and water, with other things, have been brought into being to be the constituent parts of bodies; and in short no one thing is alone, but all things that are made, as if members of each other, make up as it were one body, namely, the world” (Discourses 2.28). Differentiated created things harmonize into a cosmic liturgy (mia de kai koinē pantōn estin hē leitourgia).^[126] For Athanasius, creation’s diversity is not a defect. It is part of the glory of creation to be constituted by limited and dependent parts, all of which have their place and contribute to the whole, like the organs of the body of Christ.

These created things are differentiated, but these differences are not such that created things are lords over other created things. Some are greater than others. Following Paul (1 Cor. 15), Athanasius notes that “star . . . differs from star in glory, and the rest have all of them their mutual differences when compared together,” but for all this differentiation, it is not the case that “some are lords, and others servants to the superior.” Nor is it the case that some are “efficient causes” by which “others . . . come into being.” It is the nature of created things to be created, and that means they all owe their existence to the Creator and to him alone: “All have a nature which comes to be and is created, confessing in their own selves their Framer” (Discourses 2.20). Creation is not made up of lords and servants but exists in all its bounteous differentiation to sing in harmony the praises of its one Lord, the Son through whom the Father made the world. David says that “the heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands” (Ps. 19:1), and that means that “the whole earth hymns the Framer and the Truth” (Discourses 2.20).^[127] There is only one Lord.

Createdness is multiplicity, and createdness also means mutability and fragility. Even souls are mobile (Against the Pagans 4), and human beings are created in such a way that the soul can move, and move the body, toward God. That is God’s purpose in creating. He makes human beings good, but also makes them mutable, so that they can progress in godlikeness, advance toward deification. This involves a “transcendence” of the body, not because the body is evil but because the body is what is “nearest” to humans, the locus of personal identity and the means for attachment to the things of this world. The soul transcends the body not by becoming detached from it but by driving it, like a charioteer, toward God, by turning the body from idolatrous infatuation with creation to bow and kneel and sing before the Creator, blessed forever. It is in this context that Athanasius speaks of human beings made in the image of God. The image is not a thing or substance, but has to do with participation in God. So long as a man participates in God, his soul moves toward, and moves the body toward, union with God. Sin breaks that participation and thus damages the image.^[128]

Yet, for all its mutability and instability, creation is good. Athanasius’s Letter to Amun (354) is a striking meditation on purity and defilement that affirms with surprising bluntness the goodness of bodily processes. Defilement, he argues, occurs “when we commit sin, that foulest of things.” That is what Jesus meant when he said that we are defiled by what comes out—out of the heart. Bodily functions, by contrast, do not defile in the least. Athanasius rivals Luther in his unabashed affirmation of the goodness of bodies and bodily secretions: “What sin or uncleanness,” he asks, is there “in any natural secretion—as though a man were minded to make a culpable matter out of the cleanings of the nose or the sputa from the mouth. And we may add also the secretions of the belly, such as are a physical necessity of animal life.” There can be no sin in natural bodily functions if “the Master who made the body willed and made these parts to have such passages.” We are made by God’s hands, and “how could any defiled work proceed from a pure power?”

Because creation comes from nothing, it inherently drifts toward non-being. This raises a question about the goodness of creation: is a creation that threatens to snuff itself out at every moment a good creation? It appears to imply that the creation has some power that is not dependent upon a participation in the life of the Creator. That is, if creation tends toward non-being, and God has to continuously rescue it from the precipice, creation must have its own negative power to undo itself. But the creation has no power except what it is given, and so any tendency toward non-being would have to be a gift of the Creator, and why would the Creator give such a power to creatures? A drift toward non-being also suggests a fairly impersonal framework for understanding God’s relation to creation. Of course, creation is utterly dependent upon the sustaining power of God, but since he is good he will not withdraw that power. And that leads us back again to the first point: if God does not withdraw his sustaining gift of existence, how can the world be straining against him?^[129] Most likely, speaking of the creation’s tendency toward “non-being” is, for Athanasius, a dramatic way to underline the fact that creation persists only through the continuous overflowing goodness of the Creator.

Sin and evil are a contingent intrusion into the creation, not an essential aspect of the creation’s makeup. But they do feed on the inherent mutability of creation. As a result of Adam’s fall, mutable and fragile humans turn away from God to the sensible world around us. The mobile soul is increasingly bound up with the physical and material creation, which, although good, is not God. Through sin, human beings are “divested of the contemplation of the Divine” and turn to created things (Against the Pagans 3). Souls devoted to created things are “subject to anxiety, fear, pleasure and thoughts of mortality,” and human society descends to “murder” and “injustice” (Against the Pagans 3). Since God is the only stability in a world that is inherently unstable, human beings who turn from God lose all fixity and slip toward non-being.

Turning away from the good [the soul] necessarily considers the opposite. For it cannot completely strip its motion, since it is, as I said before, in its nature easily moved. And knowing its free will, it sees that it can use its bodily members in both directions toward what is and toward what is not. What is is the good, and what is not is the evil. And I call the good what is, since it has its exemplars from God who is. And I call the evil what is not, since, having no reality, it has been fashioned by the imagination alone. (Against the Pagans 4)^[130]

As the soul becomes fixed on creation, it becomes fixed on things that are slipping toward nothing, toward death. Idolatry of the creation is a form of necrophilia, and the soul takes death into itself. Death becomes the “way of life” of the soul in sin, and dead souls drive bodies to murder and the grave.

This account of the fall is open to question. The fall is an act of disobedience, but Athanasius seems to ontologize it. Has Athanasius confused an ethical lapse—sin—with a metaphysical drift, that is, tendency toward non-being? Athanasius can be defended by suggesting that by “non-being” he simply means a defection from true or full humanity, or a true or full fulfillment of created purpose. When war and vengeance and hatred fill social and political life, there is a movement toward “non-being” in the sense that more and more human beings are not—since they are dead. When human beings bow down to idols and come to resemble the senseless pieces of metal (or paper, or pieces of ideology) they worship, that too is a movement toward non-being: humans are meant to be sentient beings, and idolaters lose their sentience (cf. Ps. 115:8). And so on. Human beings under the dominion of death and sin, Athanasius says, move toward non-being, that is, they become “brute beasts.” Here, non-being is not non-existence, but a fall from the fullness and abundance of human life under the Lord Jesus.

Further, Athanasius is emphasizing the fact that human beings are not created in their complete and final state. There is nothing inherently wrong with the creation. On the contrary, it is good. Yet creation as it comes from the mouth of God at the beginning is not yet fulfilled. It is created mobile and mutable, and thus designed to move from glory to glory. When church fathers like Athanasius say that the creation is fragile, balanced on the edge of existence, not stable, they are pointing to the fact that creation has a built-in eschatology.^[131]

Eternal Power and Divine Nature

Insofar as creation hymns the praises of God, it reveals his character. Athanasius begins Against the Pagans with the premise that the truth about God and the universe is not so much taught as “made known” by the universe itself: “Every day it almost loudly proclaims itself through its works.” To be sure, the truth about God “displays itself more clearly than the sun through the doctrine of Christ,” but that is not because God has refused to show himself (Against the Pagans 1). In countless ways, God has shown himself in creation.

Humanity itself displays the Creator’s “goodness” and “supreme beauty,” since God created human beings in his likeness so that we “may rejoice in and communicate with the Divine living the true immortal life which knows no sorrows and is blessed” (Against the Pagans 2). God created human beings to know and delight in him, and he made them mobile so that they can move toward him, and this mobility reveals the stable and eternal Creator. The human mind’s ability to ascend beyond and outside bodies is a specific hint of God’s transcendence as Creator (Against the Pagans 2). More pointedly, Athanasius insists that humanity manifests the Logos of the Father in the fact that man is created logikē, rational. Only human beings reason about sensible objects. Only human beings think about the past and the future in addition to the present. Only human beings are capable of passing judgment on the things that present themselves to their senses (Against the Pagans 31). Human senses are like the strikes of a lyre: “When the senses of the body are put into harmony like a lyre when the understanding mind rules them, then the soul determines and knows what it makes and does” (Against the Pagans 31). Sociability is also a reflex of the divine Logos in man: “How does the body, having turned away from its nature, turn toward the counsels of somebody else and drive according to the nod of that other being?” (Against the Pagans 32).

Not only in man, but in the whole creation, the Son is known from his Father’s works (Discourses 2.22). Like an artist who, “even if he is not seen, is known from his works,” so the Maker and Creator is known “from the order of the cosmos . . . even if he is not seen by the bodily eyes” (Against the Pagans 35). The interdependence of creation is a sign of its overall dependence. No part of the creation can exist on its own, and it is unreasonable to believe that collective action by utterly dependent parts could produce an independent creation. The mutual dependency of parts points to the contingency and dependency of the whole.

Given the overpowering diversity and rich multiplicity of creation, one might expect it to be fragmentary and liable to dissolution. Instead one observes an intricate harmony everywhere, and in that “common order” we find a sign that “there is another Maker who orders them” (Against the Pagans 35). This is most dramatically seen in the fact that creation is not just a harmony but a harmony of opposites. Fire and water, dry and wet are united in “concordant harmony” and “make one thing as if the body consisted of one substance” (Against the Pagans 36). This not only reveals the existence of a harmonizer but also manifests his power: “That which is by nature conflicting and opposite by nature would not have been brought itself together, if He who had bound them together were not stronger than they and their master” (Against the Pagans 37). Why is not creation a scene of battle, “a great fight” between the opposing forces and elements? It must be the case that the stronger man has bound the strong elements.

God must be strong: his “eternal power” is manifest in creation (Rom. 1:18–20). God must also be one: “If there were many gods, there ought to be many worlds” since “it would not be becoming that the many produced only one world nor that the one world were made by many gods” (Against the Pagans 39). How can the world go in one direction without a single pilot? How can creation produce its harmonious sound unless it is played by a single artist? (Against the Pagans 39). In short, “because the world which has been made is one, one must also believe that its Maker is one” (Against the Pagans 39).

Through the order (taxis) and harmony (harmonia) of creation, we are able to see God as the Lord and Maker of all. “As the creation contains abundant matter for the knowledge of the being of a God,” Athanasius writes, “and we learn from them without asking for voices, but hearing the Scriptures we believe, and surveying the very order and the harmony of all things, we acknowledge that He is Maker and Lord and God of all, and apprehend His marvelous Providence and governance over all things” (Discourses 2.32). The impress of God’s wisdom, the living Wisdom that is the Son, is evident in everything that he has made:

Such an impress then of Wisdom being created in us, and being in all the works, with reason does the true and framing Wisdom take to Itself what belongs to its own impress, and say, “The Lord created me for His works;” for what the wisdom in us says, that the Lord Himself speaks as if it were His own; and, whereas He is not Himself created, being Creator, yet because of the image of Him created in the works, He says this as if of Himself. And as the Lord Himself has said, “He that receives you, receives Me” (Matt. 10:40), because His impress is in us, so, though He be not among the creatures, yet because His image and impress is created in the works, He says, as if in His own person, “The Lord created me a beginning of His ways for His works.” And therefore has this impress of Wisdom in the works been brought into being, that, as I said before, the world might recognize in it its own Creator the Word, and through Him the Father. (Discourses 2.78)

The Son is like a king who imprints his own name on every building in a new city. He is the “true Wisdom” speaking in Proverbs, who answers “those who admire the wisdom in the creatures” with “‘the Lord created me for the works,’ for my impress is in them; and I have thus condescended for the framing of all things” (Discourses 2.79).

Athanasius reaches for analogies that express the Word’s orchestration of creation. The multiple and fragile originated things are harmonized like members of a choir: “As the choir consists of different men, children, women, old people and people who are still young, and as when the leader conducts each sings according to his nature and power, the man as a man, the child as a child, the old man as an old man, the young man as a young man, and all produce one harmony,” so it is with the order of creation. Creation too is like a city whose citizens go about their diverse tasks for the betterment of the whole, “because of the presence of the one ruler and his orders” (Against the Pagans 43).

In contrast to some versions of neo-orthodoxy, Athanasius clearly teaches that the world manifests God’s character and power, but in contrast to most modern natural theology, Athanasius insists that the creation reveals not some generic “deity” but specifically the Son. As Logos, the Son is the framer and arranger of the creation, and the fact that there is harmony in the creation is testimony that it was framed “logically,” that is, by the Logos. Athanasius regularly interprets Romans 1:20 in the light of 1 Corinthians 1:24. The “power” and “divine nature” manifest in creation are not some generic divine energy, but the “wisdom” and “power” of God that is Christ, the theotēs that is the Father begetting the Son.

In some passages, Athanasius says that what is specifically evident in the creation is the difference and relation of the Father and the Son: “He is the Word of the Creator God and is known from the Father’s works which He Himself works, to be ‘in the Father and the Father in Him,’ and ‘He that has seen Him has seen the Father,’ because the Son’s Essence is proper to the Father, and He in all points like Him” (Discourses 2.22). The Son is not only known from the Father’s works but is known “to be ‘in the Father and the Father in Him.’” The perichoretic relation of Father and Son is evident in the creation. Looking at the glories of the heavens, Athanasius says, we must “form an idea of the Word who orders this,” but at the same time we must also “think of God His Father proceeding from whom He is rightly called Interpreter and Messenger of His Father” (Against the Pagans 45). If there is harmony in the universe, that points to a Harmonizer, a Logos; but the Logos must be the Logos of someone, the speech of the speaker who speaks forth the Word.

Athanasius also claims that creation itself is an act of grace. That is a controversial position, so before expounding Athanasius’s own views on the subject, it will be useful to review the state of the debate in the early twenty-first century.^[132]

Nature and Grace

Disputes about nature and grace, about the natural and supernatural realms, have been at the center of much of the theology of the past century. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Catholic Church was disrupted by interconnected and sometimes acrimonious debates concerning the interpretation of Aquinas and scholasticism, the nature of the church, the theology of the Eucharist, the interpretation of Scripture, the relation between patristic and later Catholic tradition, and the problem of relating Catholic dogma to contemporary cultural and intellectual trends. At the center of these disputes were conflicting answers to the question of how nature and grace are related. This set of debates led to Vatican II and shaped the contours of contemporary Catholic thought.^[133]

As a Protestant, this is my debate too. Within my own tribe, Michael Horton projects a particular version of the law-gospel distinction back into Eden, and this produces a Reformed version of the nature/grace dichotomy. According to Horton, Adam was not a recipient of grace at his creation. God’s creation of Adam was an expression of “divine goodness,” but Horton refuses to call it “divine grace.”^[134] Horton criticizes other Reformed theologians for suggesting that “grace is fundamental to any divine-human relationship,”^[135] arguing that grace cannot “retain its force as divine clemency toward those who deserve condemnation” if the Adamic covenant is described as gracious.^[136] Adam was created under law, not under grace. Law is “natural” and human beings are “simply ‘wired’ for it.” Grace, however, is not natural and comes onto the stage only after Adam’s sin.^[137] It is not surprising that Horton claims that “Adam is created in a state of integrity with the ability to render God complete obedience,” by which he could earn what Horton describes as his “right” to receive the tree of life.^[138] Defending the proposition that the Adamic arrangements are rightly described as “covenantal,” Horton says,

Every covenant in Scripture is constituted by a series of formulae, most notably, oaths taken by both parties with stipulations and sanctions (blessings and curses). These elements appear to be present, albeit implicitly, in the creation narrative. Adam is created in a state of integrity with the ability to render God complete obedience, thus qualifying as a suitable human partner. Further, God commands such complete obedience, and he promises, upon that condition, the right (not the gift) to eat from the Tree of Life. While creation itself is a gift, the entrance into God’s Sabbath rest was held out as the promise for loyal obedience in the period of testing.^[139]

Lest anyone think that Adam’s obedience was itself a gift of God, Horton insists that Adam’s ability to obey comes from himself alone: “Created for obedience, he was entirely capable of maintaining himself in a state of integrity”;^[140] “Adam . . . was in a state of rectitude, perfectly capable of acceding to the divine mandate.”^[141] Adam was not created with free access to life but had all he needed to earn this access, working from his own natural capacities, apparently without any reliance on God’s continuing assistance. His obedience was not the obedience of faith but the obedience of nature. For Horton, we might say that humanity begins Pelagian and falls into Augustinianism.

Among the ironies here is the fact that Horton is a strongly anti–Roman Catholic Protestant who formulates his views of the Adamic order in order to protect the gratuity of grace, against, so he thinks, a Catholic subversion of grace. Yet in the very act of maintaining an anti-Catholic view of the covenant, Horton offers a view of Adamic nature that separates nature and grace in a way that the Catholic Church has only recently questioned. In fact, Horton goes much further than many Catholics, for whom creation is a gift of grace and for whom a state of natura pura is hypothetical rather than actual. Horton’s Adam existed in an actual state of pure nature, running on his own fuel and earning his access to the tree of life. Horton considers any deviation from this formulation a betrayal of the Reformation.

A more subtle duality of nature and grace is typical of Protestant soteriology. This is evident when we compare Protestant accounts of justification to that of Augustine. In book 19 of City of God, Augustine discusses the nature of justice and answers the question whether the city of man can be described as a just commonwealth. He concludes it cannot, arguing that the only just city is the one that gives God his due. Though he recognizes the order of the city of man as a good, he refuses to separate the relative justice of earthly polities and the absolute justice of the city of God. The reason, according to Oliver O’Donovan, is that in Augustine’s work iustitia has a theological and not merely a political meaning; it is God’s justice manifested in making people just. For Augustine, in other words, iustificare is embedded in a theology of ius and iustitia, and these themes are so intricately intertwined that Augustine pauses to digress at length about the Pelagian controversy in book 19, a section of the City of God primarily devoted to moral and political theology.^[142] Though the Reformers were arguably closer to Augustine on this, the Augustinian integration of justice and justification is today virtually absent from much Protestant theology. For many Protestants, justification is concerned with the spiritual reality of our standing with God, while justice is a civic/natural concern outside the proper region of theology.^[143] A nature/grace duality confines the Protestant doctrine of justification to a specifically “religious” realm.

So a discussion of nature and the supernatural, or nature and grace, is a catholic debate in the largest and loosest sense of that word. Still, Roman Catholic theologians after the Reformation and in the twentieth century have doubtless devoted more direct, sustained, and careful attention to these questions than anyone else. This is not surprising. In post-Reformation Catholic theology, the nature/grace scheme became a cornerstone of anti-Protestant polemics and dogmatics, offering a middle way that avoided the dangerous shoals of both Pelagianism and Lutheranism,^[144] and revisions of the neoscholastic consensus concerning nature and the supernatural were at the root of the tumult of twentieth-century Catholicism that produced Vatican II. Protestants and Orthodox, therefore, do well to pay attention to what Catholics have had to say on this subject.^[145]

In what follows, I use Matthias Joseph Scheeben as a representative of the type of theology to which twentieth-century theologians such as Henri de Lubac were responding. Scheeben is in some ways a revisionist in this tradition, in that he integrated the pneumatological emphasis of the Eastern fathers into a Western scholastic framework and arrived at formulations that burst out of the Aristotelian idiom he adopted. Yet twentieth-century theologians like de Lubac looked to Scheeben as a key representative of the tradition they challenged. After looking at Scheeben’s theology of nature and grace, I will summarize the main contours of de Lubac’s position, before returning to Athanasius to shed fourth-century light on a twentieth-century debate.

Scheeben on Nature and Grace^[146]

The overriding concern of Matthias Joseph Scheeben’s 1861 treatise, Nature and Grace,^[147] is to counter what he identifies as the Pelagianism inherent in modern rationalism. For rationalists, “man’s nature carried within itself at least the seed of all good which he could ever reach, including the Christian good.” Scheeben concludes that the “crisis” of rationalism “will not be settled until the supernatural order is frankly, adequately, and radically distinguished from the natural order.” On the other side, he rejects Protestantism and Jansenism, which claimed that grace “displaces and destroys nature,” thus impossibly separating God as Redeemer from God as Creator. Scheeben strives for a theology in which the “praise of God’s grace does not require any depreciation of nature.”^[148] Scheeben believes that combating these dangers requires a much more detailed and precise delineation of the differences between nature and supernature than most theologians had offered. Scholastics employed metaphysical categories to explain the natural order, but he argues that “in the supernatural order this point is often neglected.” As a result “no foundation analogous to nature is looked for, and that is the reason why a clear, sound idea of the supernatural order is so rarely achieved.”^[149]

According to R. R. Reno, Scheeben’s strategy for elaborating a more precise account of supernature is one of “separation” of human nature as such from the supernatural faculties and powers that come by grace. Scheeben thinks he can enume0rate the faculties and powers that belong to supernature by siphoning off natural powers and examining what remains:

With respect to the rule for determining what belongs to nature or to supernature, the general norm is to observe which powers nature has, how far these powers extend, and what end must be appointed for them if nature is to reach its suitable development and achieve rest and perfection . . . whatever is outside this list—hence the powers that do not emanate from the essence, and in general all that is unattainable by the unelevated powers from the essence—is supernatural, and if it pertains to a symmetrically organized life, counts as supernature.^[150]

What powers does a “nature” have? Beginning with an etymology of Greek and Latin words for nature, Scheeben argues that “nature” includes everything that a being receives by its origin. One might almost identify “nature” with “essence,” but more precisely nature is essence regarded from a particular angle, as the vital moving principle of a thing, the principle that impels a being toward its perfection and end. Natural faculties, powers, and acts are those acts, powers, and faculties that arise from the being’s own essence, left to itself. “Supernatural” realities, by contrast, are those that surpass the capacities of nature itself, “everything that does not belong to the essence of a thing or is not found on the essence.”^[151] A supernatural “cause,” for instance, is one “not tied down to the laws of matter,” and a supernatural “effect” is an effect directly caused by God.”^[152] Following Suárez, Scheeben also uses the noun “supernature” to describe a complete transformation of human nature. Human beings can receive supernatural “adornments” that go beyond nature and are given directly by God, but “supernature” is human nature transfigured from top to bottom through sharing in divine essence, a “second nature” analogous to acquired habits that we describe as “second nature.”^[153] Though supernatural abilities and transfigured supernature are not natural in the sense that they arise from human nature in itself, they are not unnatural. Humans are created with obediential potentiality that makes them fit beings to receive supernatural endowments and to be transfigured into supernature.

Scheeben gives only passing attention to human natural endowments, focusing mainly on limitations. Existence itself, he says, is a gift of grace,^[154] but the gifts of natural existence are not sufficient to bring human beings to their supernatural end. Left to themselves, people can know God only through God’s works, and this knowledge is very imperfect. Scheeben devotes much fuller attention to the character of the supernatural and supernature. Supernatural life is sharing in the very life of God,^[155] a participation impossible for human beings in their purely natural state. Before humans can share in the divine life in this way, they must receive a new nature, a nature above nature, a supernature. Supernature does not evacuate nature but is added to it in order to fulfill it.^[156] Scheeben movingly expounds on the character of supernature in terms of divine begetting and adoption. Adam was created as a menial servant of God, but by supernatural grace he was to be transformed into a son, begotten in a manner similar to the begetting of the divine Son. By adoption and divine begetting, human beings share in the essence of God to the extent that they are capable of doing so. As fire enters into iron and communicates its essence without destroying the essence of the iron, so God’s divine light and heat enter us and divinize us without destroying our humanity.

Scheeben develops his understanding of adoption in biblical and mystical terminology, but he also provides a more precise metaphysical description of supernatural existence. He insists that supernature is more than an intensification of natural moral and personal capacities, like knowledge and love, but involves a “physical” participation in God’s own life and being. Supernatural effects like faith, hope, and love are caused directly by God, and they are possible because when nature is transfigured into supernature, God’s essence becomes something like the “nature” or “substance” of the transfigured human being. God’s essence itself becomes a quasi-substantial “substratum” that produces effects for which human nature has no capacity if left to itself.

Scheeben’s detailed treatment of supernatural spirituality gives a glimpse of how this works. Human beings are composite beings, constituted of matter and form, of body and spirit. Though we are spiritual beings by nature, the development of our spiritual capacities is hampered by the confining shackles of matter, whose massiveness and ponderousness exert a kind of gravitational pull toward animality. Further, by comparison with the pure spirituality of God, created spirit has a certain “materiality” because created spirits are composed of act and potency, existence and essence. In the condition of supernature, however, the Holy Spirit becomes our spirit, and as a result the obstacles and obstructions of spiritual nature are “abolished”:

All these imperfections, which are the reason why the created spirit is related to God somewhat as animal life is related to natural, spiritual life, will be abolished by the higher spirituality that is imparted to the soul when it is admitted to participation in the divine nature. This higher spirituality will endow the soul with the simplicity and the immortality of eternal life; with light and glory in a higher degree, in the way that God possesses them; with freedom and spiritual desire in the noblest sense of the word . . . the spirit will become truly spiritual, that is, simple and immortal, intelligent and free, when it is raised above its quasi-materiality and is given a share in God’s spirituality, which alone is spirituality in the truest and fullest sense of the term.^[157]

Scheeben devotes much of his work to the task of distinguishing natural and supernatural, nature and supernature, but in the end he divides in order to reunite, and in brokering this reunion he breaks out of the confines of his metaphysical apparatus. Reno notes that Scheeben cannot account for human participation in supernature without abandoning the Aristotelian framework that he wishes to maintain.^[158] Scheeben sticks to the theological intention to describe a “mixed” existence—with both natural and supernatural features—and abandons Aristotle. In the closing chapters of his book, he examines the union of nature and supernature in marital and Marian terms. “Can there be a greater similarity,” he asks, “can a more perfect parallel be drawn out, than between the marriage of the Virgin with the Holy Spirit and that of nature with grace?”^[159]

Scheeben thinks that only this construction can counter rationalism and Lutheranism. By maintaining the integrity of nature, he counters Lutheran pessimism; by insisting that nature has limited capacities, he counters Pelagian optimism. The natural/supernatural scheme offers a middle way through the contested terrain of nineteenth-century Christianity.

De Lubac and the Nouvelle Théologie

In his Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, French Jesuit and eventual cardinal Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) cites Scheeben’s use of “supernature” as the linguistic climax of a centuries-long “deviation of thought.”^[160] In de Lubac’s reading, the neoscholastic view represented by Scheeben juxtaposes two realities, or levels of reality, in such a way that each is impenetrable to the other. It is questionable whether this is a fair representation of Scheeben’s theology as a whole.^[161] Fair or not, de Lubac claims that Scheeben’s separation of nature and supernature is a typical example of the destructive dualisms that had plagued neoscholastic theology.^[162] De Lubac’s early work, Surnaturel, later clarified in The Mystery of the Supernatural and Augustinianism and Modern Theology,^[163] assaults what became known as the “extrinsicism” or “extrinsicity” of neoscholastic thought, the notion that grace is alien to human nature rather than a fulfillment of it.

Like Scheeben, de Lubac is concerned with rebutting rationalism and secular atheism, but in de Lubac’s view, neoscholasticism’s notions of “pure nature” and its extrinsic view of the supernatural had contributed to the triumph of atheism by making the supernatural superfluous to man’s existence. Scheeben’s strategy of separation is part of the problem, not a solution, and only a more integral yoking of natural and supernatural can really combat the twin errors Scheeben has identified.

Much of de Lubac’s response to the extrinsicism of neoscholasticism takes the form of historical investigation, though his historical research is theologically motivated and presses toward theological conclusions. De Lubac deals with three interconnected concerns: the natural desire for the supernatural, the notion of pure nature, and the notion of double finality. He argues that during the post-Reformation period and in response to Protestantism, Thomists abandoned Thomas Aquinas on all three points, all the while claiming the mantle of Thomas.^[164]

Thomas Aquinas repeatedly affirms that intelligent beings have a natural desire for the vision of God (omnis intellectus naturaliter desiderat divinae substantiae visionem).^[165] Thomists after Cajetan denied this or, like Scheeben, acknowledged the fact that Thomas taught it but explained it in a way that conformed with a preconceived dualistic framework.^[166] When de Lubac tipped over the domino of natural desire, it fell onto the domino of pure nature.

“Pure nature” is human nature devoid of revelation or supernatural influence of any kind. Originally, scholastics developed the notion of pure nature to rebut Protestant views concerning original depravity and the “extrinsicism of the idea of imputed alien righteousness.” (Dominic Soto writes of considering human nature “in puris naturabilis mente concepto.”) What started as a “thought-experiment” became a “material principle at the heart of revived Scholastic theology.”^[167] For post-Reformation scholastics, “pure nature” became not just a hypothetical, possible state of man, but an actual state of man. De Lubac argues that if human beings naturally desire a supernatural end, their nature cannot be “pure nature,” since it was already shot through with the disposition toward the supernatural.

De Lubac’s position on natura pura is partly motivated by an existential orientation to the concrete and actual character of human life, human life in the world as it really now is. He admits the possibility that “a universe might have existed in which man, though without necessarily excluding any other desire, would have his rational ambitions limited to some lower, purely human, beatitude.”^[168] If Christianity is true, however, this is not the world that we have: “In me, a real and personal human being, in my concrete nature—that nature I have in common with all real men, to judge by what my faith teaches me, and regardless of what is or is not revealed to me either by reflective analysis or by reasoning—the ‘desire to see God’ cannot be permanently frustrated without an essential suffering.”^[169] A hypothetical man without a supernatural end cannot teach us anything about the kind of beings we actually are, since the difference between the two is not “one of individuation, but one of nature itself.”^[170] In other words, once doubts about natural desire and affirmation of pure nature collapse, the whole edifice of double finality is bound to topple as well. Again at this point, Thomists often stood against Thomas. Where Thomas believed that man has a single finality in the vision of God, Thomists spoke of a double finality, one natural and one transcending nature. But this whole paradigm collapses if human nature as created is oriented toward a supernatural finality.

Dualism is de Lubac’s main target. He does not deny the distinction of nature and the supernatural, nor does he abandon what he calls the “ancient concept of natura pura.”^[171] He does, however, deplore the “system which has grown up around it,”^[172] not least because it fails to achieve its stated aims. The notion of a double finality does not preserve the supernatural; it destroys it. Once a double end is introduced, then “everything, from the first beginning, from the very appetite for happiness, is thus seen in a kind of double way.” Doubleness runs from beginning to end, so that some neoscholastics speak of a double beatitude: “Duplex est beatitudo hominis.”^[173] But if nature has its own finality, then men can lead fulfilled human lives while ignoring their Creator. The dualism of neoscholasticism makes the supernatural superfluous.

Worse, it aids and abets secular atheism. On neoscholastic premises, natural human life is detached from grace and the supernatural, and human nature is presented in a way little different from “rationalist philosophies—both ancient and modern: a being sufficient to himself, and wishing to be so; a being who does not pray, who expects no graces, who relies on no Providence; a being who, depending on one’s point of view, either wants to continue as he is, or seeks to transcend himself, but in either case stands boldly before God . . . in a proud and jealous determination to be happy in himself and by his own powers.”^[174] In Catholicism, de Lubac writes:

For about three centuries, faced by the naturalist trends of modern thought on the one hand and the confusions of a bastard Augustinianism on the other, many could see salvation only in a complete severance between the natural and the supernatural. Such a policy ran doubly counter to the end which they had in view. For on the one hand they failed to observe that the more you separate the less do you really distinguish. . . . Thus the supernatural, deprived of its organic links with nature, tended to be understood by some as a mere “super-nature,” a “double” of nature. Furthermore, after such a complete separation what misgivings could the supernatural cause to naturalism? For the latter no longer found it at any point in its path, and could shut itself up in a corresponding isolation, with the added advantage that it claimed to be complete. No hidden dissatisfaction could disturb the claim of its splendid equilibrium. . . . Such a dualism, just when it imagined that it was most successfully opposing the negations of naturalism, was most strongly influenced by it, and the transcendence in which it hoped to preserve the supernatural with such jealous care was, in fact, a banishment. The most confirmed secularists found in it, in spite of itself, an ally.^[175]

De Lubac’s interpretation of Thomas leaves him open, however, to the charge that he has undermined the graciousness of grace, which is the whole point of the neoscholastics’ use of pure nature and their denial of the natural desire for the vision of God. If human beings have a natural desire for a supernatural end, then, it was argued, it would be unjust for God to refuse to fulfill that desire. The supernatural finality of human existence would be “owed” or “exacted,” since God could not leave that desire unfulfilled without denying the nature that he had made. To protect the gratuity of grace, it is necessary to separate nature and grace, or nature and the supernatural, as rigorously as possible.

De Lubac works hard to parry this charge. Negatively, he argues that neoscholastic dualism undermines gratuity as much as it undermined the supernatural itself:

Those . . . who have decided that it is necessary to posit first of all a certain “purely natural” human order in which that call is not heard, go on to admit, not realizing that by doing so they are destroying the essential of what they want to save, that in the actual, historical and concrete order, this call places God under an obligation in our regard by actually giving us a right—leaving aside the intervening problem of sin—to demand that he give us grace, and, eventually, if we are faithful, the light of glory. Thus, not content with having imagined an order of things in which our relationship with the Creator might have been ruled solely by the laws of commutative justice, they seem to imagine those same laws as being the basis for the order we actually have, since God has made the decision to “raise us up.” Surely, for all they may say of gratuitousness, this in fact does away with it completely. Surely, too, it abolishes hope, or at last makes it relate only to our present sinful state—for anyone who thinks a thing is his due does not hope, but simply demands.^[176]

De Lubac also tries to show that his position is compatible with the fundamental truth of God’s freedom in grace. He affirms the gratuity of the original creation but distinguishes “the fact of the creation of a spiritual being” from “the supernatural finality imprinted upon that being’s nature” and both of these from “the offer presented to his free choice to share in the divine life.” The three gifts are to be distinguished in order to avoid hindering “God’s utter independence.”^[177]

With this debate before us we can return to Athanasius: what does he teach about nature and grace?

Grace, Creation, and Participation

According to Athanasius, the Father’s Wisdom is imprinted on the creation so that the Father may be found by his creatures, specifically by human beings who are involved in the creation but destined for communion with the Creator. Creation is thus itself an act of “condescension” and grace. Apart from the Son, who shares the nature of the Father, everything is “unlike in essence” and “external” to the Father, and thus made “at His grace” and can cease to be if he pleases (Discourses 1.20). This is necessarily the case. It cannot be that God needed creation, nor that the creation is an extension of the essence of God. If the Word made it “possible for [things originate] to come to be,” it must have been an act of grace (Discourses 2.64). In creating the world, Wisdom condescends to impress himself on creation, giving it unity and concord (homonoein), so that the creation can be a single body. Coming-to-be is, in short, the gracious existence from the Father through the Son:

For if there were no unity, nor the Word the own Offspring of the Father’s Essence, as the radiance of the light, but the Son were divided in nature from the Father, it were sufficient that the Father alone should give, since none of originate things is a partner with his Maker in His givings; but, as it is, such a mode of giving shows the oneness of the Father and the Son. No one, for instance, would pray to receive from God and the Angels, or from any other creature, nor would any one say, “May God and the Angel give you”; but from Father and the Son, because of Their oneness and the oneness of Their giving. For through the Son is given what is given; and there is nothing but the Father operates it through the Son; for thus is grace secure to him who receives it. (Discourses 3.12)

Creation must be through the Son because the Father’s light can be spread only by its radiance, which is the Son. And the same can be said of the Father’s providential oversight of the creation once made. Deploying his light-radiance paradigm, Athanasius gives a trinitarian account of Providence. “If the radiance itself should say,” he writes, “‘All places the light has given me to enlighten, and I do not enlighten from myself, but as the light wills,’ yet, in saying this, it does not imply that it once had not, but it means, ‘I am proper to the light, and all things of the light are mine’; so, and much more, must we understand in the instance of the Son.” This is because “the Father, having given all things to the Son, in the Son still has all things; and the Son having, still the Father has them; for the Son’s Godhead is the Father’s Godhead, and thus the Father in the Son exercises His Providence over all things” (Discourses 3.36). The Father providentially guides his creation in that he shares all things with his Son.

What is true of creation as a whole is true also of the creation of human beings, the crown of creation. Originating from nothing, humans are changeable, corruptible creatures, as inherently mortal as any other created thing, kept in existence only by the Word of the Father (Discourses 2.33). They are created in the image of the Father, or more accurately, according to the image of the Father. They are images of the Image, the eternal Image that is the Father’s Word and Wisdom and radiance. They are children not by nature, as the Son is, but by imitation. For Athanasius, the nature/grace distinction is not a line that runs through the creation, distinguishing one created reality from another.^[178] All created reality is a product of condescension; all existence is a gift of sheer grace. “Nature” describes instead what is proper to God (Discourses 3.19).

Given this account of creation as a whole, it is not surprising that Athanasius would claim that Adam was primordially in a state of grace. Adam “received grace from the first, and upon his creation was at once placed in paradise, differed in no respect either from Enoch, who was translated there after some time from his birth on his pleasing God, or from the Apostle, who likewise was caught up to paradise after his actions; nay, not from him who once was a thief, who on the ground of his confession, received a promise that he should be immediately in paradise” (Defense of the Nicene Definition 3.6). Not only human beings, but everything is and persists in existence by its participation in the life-giving Spirit:

If then, as you say, “the Son is from nothing,” and “was not before His generation,” He, of course, as well as others, must be called Son and God and Wisdom only by participation; for thus all other creatures consist, and by sanctification are glorified. You have to tell us then, of what He is partaker. All other things partake of the Spirit, but He, according to you, of what is He partaker? Of the Spirit? Nay, rather the Spirit Himself takes from the Son, as He Himself says. (Discourses 1.15)

All things “partake according to the grace of the Spirit” that comes from the Son (Discourses 1.16). Things originated “by partaking of Him . . . are sanctified by the Spirit” (Discourses 3.1). There is no hint of extrinsicism here, not a whiff of the idea that grace is alien to human life. Grace is operative as soon as Adam is in the garden. Created existence is originated existence, and thus corruptible and changeable existence; it is also, essentially and necessarily, graced existence.

The risk Athanasius runs, of course, is that this position will minimize the newness of redemptive grace, and particularly the newness of the incarnation and the redemption achieved in Christ. But here is one of Athanasius’s most important and brilliant theological moves. While he insists that grace is inherent in the human situation from the first fiat of creation, he also recognizes the difference between the grace of participation enjoyed by Adam in the garden and the grace that is now bestowed through the Last Adam, the Son made flesh. Arguing, as always, against the Arians, he notes that if the Son is not “proper” to the Father, then the grace we receive through him is still “external.” The Son is not one with the Father in the same way that other creatures are one with the Father. A Son who is one only in that sense has only the “grace in common with all” (Discourses 3.3).

The Son becomes a creature, is created for us, so that we might be recreated in him. Expounding on Proverbs 8, Athanasius writes,

He says, “The Lord created me,” being a creature, He was not created for us; but if He was not created for us, we are not created in Him; and, if not created in Him, we have Him not in ourselves but externally; as, for instance, receiving instruction from Him as from a teacher. And it being so with us, sin has not lost its reign over the flesh, being inherent and not cast out of it. But the Apostle opposes such a doctrine a little before, when he says, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:10), and if in Christ we are created, then it is not He who is created, but we in Him; and thus the words “He created” are for our sake. For because of our need, the Word, though being Creator, endured words which are used of creatures; which are not proper to Him, as being the Word, but are ours who are created in Him. (Discourses 2.56)

The trinitarian and incarnational logic examined in other chapters of this book is essential here. The Son is intrinsic to the Father’s being; he is “proper” to the Father’s essence. So too the flesh is “proper” to the Son in the incarnation; it is his own flesh.^[179] Both steps of this double intrinsicism are essential for grasping the gospel. What the gospel announces is not the first movement of grace. The Father moved in grace from the moment he spoke his Word and light appeared. In fact, grace was shown even before the first word of the creation. Rebutting the Arian interpretation of Proverbs 8, Athanasius insists that the “founded” Word refers to the incarnation, but to an incarnation that was “founded” before the foundation of the world. “Founded” and “created” in Proverbs 8 refer not to the ultimate origin of the Son but “to the Economy according to the flesh.” Athanasius finds in this text evidence that the grace of the incarnation, while recent in realization, is yet prepared from before the world (Discourses 2.75).

But the incarnation offers greater grace, the grace of deeper participation in the communion of the Triune God, because the proper Son of the Father takes our flesh and makes it his own. God offers grace from “inside.”^[180] As Athanasius puts it,

When then received He the works to perfect, O God’s enemies? For from this also “He created” will be understood. If you say, “At the beginning when He brought them into being out of what was not,” it is an untruth; for they were not yet made; whereas He appears to speak as taking what was already in being. Nor is it pious to refer to the time which preceded the Word’s becoming flesh, lest His coming should thereupon seem superfluous, since for the sake of these works that coming took place. Therefore it remains for us to say that when He has become man, then He took the works. For then He perfected them, by healing our wounds and vouchsafing to us the resurrection from the dead. But if, when the Word became flesh, then were given to Him the works, plainly when He became man, then also is He created for the works. Not of His essence then is “He created” indicative, as has many times been said, but of His bodily generation. For then, because the works had become imperfect and mutilated from the transgression, He is said in respect to the body to be created; that by perfecting them and making them whole, He might present the Church unto the Father, as the Apostle says, “not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but holy and without blemish” (Eph. 5:27). Mankind then is perfected in Him and restored, as it was made at the beginning, nay, with greater grace. (Discourses 2.67)

The movement of redemptive history is the movement from the “extrinsic” grace of creation and of Adamic humanity to the “intrinsic” grace of the incarnation and the humanity of the new Adam.

In response to Arian questions, Athanasius explains that this is why the incarnation was necessary in the first place. It was not enough for God to speak again, to give a new command that would undo the effects of Adam’s sin, the reign of death, the corruption of the human race. That would simply have restored us to the position of Adam:

Accordingly He came, not “that He might be ministered unto, but that He might minister,” and might work our salvation. Certainly He was able to speak the Law from heaven, but He saw that it was expedient to men for Him to speak from Sinai; and that He has done, that it might be possible for Moses to go up, and for them hearing the word near them the rather to believe. Moreover, the good reason of what He did may be seen thus; if God had but spoken, because it was in His power, and so the curse had been undone, the power had been shown of Him who gave the word, but man had become such as Adam was before the transgression, having received grace from without, and not having it united to the body; (for he was such when he was placed in Paradise) nay, perhaps had become worse, because he had learned to transgress. Such then being his condition, had he been seduced by the serpent, there had been fresh need for God to give command and undo the curse; and thus the need had become interminable, and men had remained under guilt not less than before, as being enslaved to sin; and, ever sinning, would have ever needed one to pardon them, and had never become free, being in themselves flesh, and ever worsted by the Law because of the infirmity of the flesh. (Discourses 2.68, emphasis added)

Athanasius and Residual Extrinsicism

De Lubac attempts to maintain both poles of what he calls a “paradox.” On the one hand, human beings have an inherent, natural desire for and orientation toward the supernatural fulfillment. At the same time, the fulfillment of this desire is not owed or exacted. Rather, it comes as a gift of sheer grace, fulfilling the natural desire in a transcendently supernatural fashion. This paradox moves Christian faith out of the realm of any philosophy. As de Lubac sees it, ancient philosophy treated nature as a kind of boundary; the potencies of any being are the potencies of its nature, no more. It has within itself all that it needs for its own fulfillment. Of humankind, however, Christianity asserts that humanity’s fulfillment is a fulfillment that surpasses anything we might have in ourselves. To be ourselves is to be drawn out of ourselves; to gain life we must lose it.

In my view, the new account of nature and the supernatural does not quite achieve what it aims to achieve. De Lubac’s laudable goal is to overcome the “extrinsicism” of neoscholasticism, but he himself speaks of nature and the supernatural as being in a relation of “opposition.”^[181] This appears to be an effort to preserve the gratuity of the supernatural, but it has the effect of reverting to extrinsicism. If nature stands in an oppositional relation with the supernatural, then they must be external to each other, and how is this externality distinguishable from extrinsicism? Rahner complains that the nouvelle théologie collapses into an intrincisism that endangers the gratuity of grace, but my complaint is the opposite: the nouvelle théologie does not escape a residual extrinsicism. John Milbank mounts a similar complaint against Rahner. The supernatural existential provides “another level of grace-given desire for grace,” but Milbank says this “does absolutely nothing to reconcile gratuity with non-extrinsicism.” He charges that Rahner simply restores “the neo-scholastic scheme of two parallel supernatural systems,” and that Rahner’s combination of natura pura and the supernatural existential leaves us “with extrinsicist doctrinal formulas confronting an account of human aspirations and human ethical norms which is thoroughly naturalized.”^[182]

Rahner’s discussion of the gratuity of grace in relation to created spirit supports this conclusion. He distinguishes between “being ordered to grace” and “being directed to grace in such a way that without the actual gift of this grace it would all be meaningless.” He affirms the first, not the second. A created spirit “is essentially impossible without this transcendence, whose absolute fulfillment is grace, yet this fulfillment does not thereby become due.”^[183] But the italics (which are Rahner’s) indicate that there is a more relative fulfillment, a fulfillment of created spirit that does not involve grace. For Rahner, human beings who are created with an orientation to supernatural fulfillment can still have a meaningful existence even if this supernatural fulfillment is never reached. Hypothetically, if not actually, there is a rest other than rest in God. This is different from neoscholastic extrinsicity, but it is not clear how it avoids extrinsicity as such.

This residual extrinsicism raises a problem concerning God’s relation to creation. De Lubac and Rahner, and even their neoscholastic opponents, acknowledge that existence is a completely unearned gift, but this is sometimes expressed in erroneous ways. De Lubac and Rahner have improved on Scheeben, who describes material reality as a set of shackles, a constraint, an obstacle and obstruction, a confinement of spirit from which created spirit seeks escape. Still, their formulations do not completely dispel the sense that man as a created being is distant from God and somehow flawed simply by virtue of being created. Citing Blondel, de Lubac says that there is a “natural heterogeneity” and an “abyss” between God and humans, an abyss that must be bridged by the supernatural fulfillment.^[184] But this is not true. Augustine was right to recognize that God is more deeply in us, more near to us, than we are to ourselves, and Athanasius would have agreed. Scheeben recognizes this, and de Lubac and Rahner would not deny it. But if this is true, then it is simply incoherent to describe the relation of God to creation as if God were “foreign” or “alien” or on the other edge of an “abyss” from creation.

This raises the more general complaint that natural/supernatural constructions often tend to treat God as “external” to creation. While it is certainly true that God is “above” and “in heaven” and “exalted,” it is also the case that he is immanent to every creature in every moment of time. Again, Athanasius has something to offer here, with his profound grasp of the proximity and intimacy of the Creator’s presence to his creation. His theology is able to say, with Paul, “in Him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28). On the other hand, Yahweh forms the world as a temple to dwell in, so that we not only live and move in him but he also lives and moves among us. Creation is in perichoretic relation with the Triune God, indwelling and indwelt by the Creator.

Explicitly in Scheeben and more implicitly elsewhere, “nature” is a boundary, a limitation. A “nature” is a principle of movement or a set of capacities and ends that belong to that thing from its origin as a member of a species. Humanity has a nature because it can do thus and such and no more, because it can receive this much and nothing in addition, because it can go this far and no farther. But is this compatible with the Christian doctrine of creation? It would seem not. Created beings have only the limits that God places on them; created beings have no “independent” boundaries, no autonomous limits. David Bentley Hart is on the right track when he emphasizes (following Gregory of Nyssa) that each of us is “a vessel endlessly expanding as it receives what flows into it inexhaustibly,” so that we become “ever more capacious and receptive” of God.^[185] If this is what human “nature” is, then we are no longer using the word “nature” in its classical sense, and—as de Lubac admits—the terminology of nature and supernatural is misleading. To suggest that humanity has a “nature” that limits its capacities and ends suggests that humans have some independent capacity to resist, some power to push back against what God intends to do with it and, to be other than God decrees, some power that does not come from God. This impression is strengthened by the notion that “nature” is what humans are capable of “if left to themselves.” Since we are never left to ourselves, and would cease to exist if we were, this notion of nature is empty. It appears implicitly nihilist.

If human “nature” expands to receive the increasing inflow of God’s self-communication, then we no longer need something additional to nature, something “supernatural,” to reach the beatific vision. The beatific vision is an infinite expansion of our capacity to receive God but does not require the replacement of our existing “nature” with another “nature.” It demands not an “exaltation” above nature but the fulfillment of the “nature” that we have been given. Rahner actually defines “created spirit” as “openness to infinite being,” a definition that eliminates definition.^[186] By virtue of being the nature that he is, man is flexibly capacious enough to receive the Spirit of God. Again, Athanasius is on firmer ground in his thoroughly participationist conception of created and especially of human existence. Nature for him is not a confining boundary but involves participation in the life and energy of the Father and his proper Son and Spirit.

The fact that the natural/supernatural scheme does not move in this direction suggests that it operates with assumptions that are alien to the Christian doctrine of creation. Why can we not simply say that God created man in such a way as to be receptive to his Word, presence, love? Why could God not create man as a being capable of being indwelt by the Spirit more and more fully? If this option is refused, perhaps it is because there is something inherent in creaturehood that prohibits it. Perhaps the underlying assumption is that there is some limitation, perhaps a limitation inherent in matter, that makes this impossible. Such an assumption is explicit in Scheeben, but it does not appear to me that de Lubac and Rahner, for all their anti-dualism, have entirely escaped it.

The natural/supernatural distinction, for all its interest in dynamism and movement toward finality, works in a more spatial than temporal framework. The very term “supernatural” suggests a realm “above” nature, and this spatial metaphor is reinforced by language of “exaltation” and “raising,” used by neoscholastics, de Lubac, and Rahner alike. The spatial metaphor again implies boundary, a built-in limit to the capacities of created nature—but built in by whom or what? Following hints from Irenaeus, Athanasius’s conception of nature and grace is thoroughly historical. God and his creation coinhabit each other; God is within his creation and his creation is “within” the divine fellowship of Father and Son. But what might be described as “supernatural” grace is the deeper grace of the incarnation. It is not grace coming so much from the outside in or from the top down. The grace of the incarnation is later grace. Once we put the question of nature and grace into a temporal framework, it looks very different. God graciously creates man as a mobile and changeable being, and man begins to grow (or, as it turns out, degenerate). The “supernatural” end is just what is at the end of this temporal progression, the final word that God speaks to a creature to whom he has spoken from the beginning, the final self-communication to a being that, as image of God, is built from the outset to receive God’s self-communication.^[187]

Conclusion

Athanasius provides the tools for a more satisfying treatment of nature and grace, since he offers a biblicization and evangelization of the metaphysics of creation. Everything is created from nothing and is therefore inherently fluid, unstable, and utterly dependent on the Creator. Creation is an act of gratuitous generosity, a product of the sheer goodness of God. Adam too received grace, the grace of existence and the grace of sharing in the divine image. Yet this was not the ultimate grace to which humanity was destined. In the incarnation, and in the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, the extrinsic grace offered and given to Adam is rooted in the depths of human nature. Adam participated in the Holy Spirit, the grace of creation; we are destined to a higher achievement, the grace of deification, which depends on the incarnation.

To see the fundamental drive of Athanasius’s understanding of grace, however, we need to return to our theme: creation is all about Christ as much as Trinity, incarnation, and redemption. It is all about Christ, not only in the sense that the Word of the Father is the Creator and that the creation is organized according to his logic. It is about Christ because Athanasius’s standard for cosmological truth is not conformity to scientific discovery or metaphysical principles. We arrive at the truth about the cosmos when we test it by the measure of Christ and him crucified. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Athanasius’s discussion of creation is part of an apology for the cross. The fittingness of a cosmological scheme, of an understanding of the nature of created reality, of an understanding of the Creator-creature relation, is tested by the incarnation, by the gospel story of the enfleshment of the Word, his death on the cross, and his resurrection in glory. Christ, that man, is the measure of all things.

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