5. Middle
5
Middle
God for Us
Athanasius’s treatise On the Incarnation bears few traces of the controversy with Arius. This has led some to conclude that he wrote the treatise very early, before the Arian controversy became intense, or at least before the Arians had been condemned at Nicaea. Alternately, the treatise has been dated in the mid-320s, after Nicaea and around the time of Athanasius’s elevation to the see of Alexandria. It is, according to some scholars, young Athanasius’s attempt to prove his theological mettle as a successor to Alexander.[188] Whatever the date or circumstances of the treatise, On the Incarnation has rightly become a theological classic, and, because of its generally nonpolemical format, it gives us insight into the basic motives and themes of Athanasius’s theology. It provides a framework for considering Athanasius’s more technical, metaphysical, and polemical treatment of the incarnation in the Discourses against the Arians.
What is immediately striking about On the Incarnation is that it remains almost completely within the frame of redemptive history.[189] Athanasius does not avoid metaphysical questions. He does not hesitate to describe the Word as eternal God. The “Word of the Father” takes a body that is not “proper to His own nature” since “as the Word He is without body” (asōmatos ōn tē physei) (On the Incarnation 1).[190] In creating the world, the Father gave human beings “a grace which other creatures lacked,” that is, “the impress of His own image, a share in the reasonable being of the very Word Himself” (On the Incarnation 3). Such metaphysical hints are sprinkled through the treatise, but the main thrust and structure are taken from the history of redemption. Adam was created mutable and, like every other creature, with a susceptibility to decay and death (On the Incarnation 4), “by nature subject to corruption” (On the Incarnation 5). As a result of Adam’s sin, humans are plunged into a chaos of violence, betrayal, greed, and pleasure-seeking. Human evil was perversely progressive, ingeniously and creatively wicked: “They had gone on gradually from bad to worse, not stopped at any one kind of evil, but continually, as with insatiable appetite, devising new kinds of sins” (On the Incarnation 5). Human beings were undone, slipping slowly back to the nothingness from which they came.[191]
Not only did Adam’s sin and the mayhem it produced throw the human race into misery, but it also presented a challenge to the Creator. Athanasius presents this as a double challenge to the faithfulness and reliability of God.[192] On the one hand, the Creator had threatened Adam with death—dying, you shall die—and it was not possible for him simply to withdraw the threat. God took humans, and human sin, too seriously for that solution. On the other hand, for Athanasius, it was equally unthinkable that the Lord Creator should leave death and chaos, corruption and nothingness, to have their way in his world. He had said Yes in creating the universe at the beginning, and sin and death could not turn his divine Yes to No. What was the point of giving existence to the universe in the first place if he was simply going to turn his back on it? “Surely,” Athanasius argues, “it would have been better never to have been created at all than, having been created, to be neglected and perish.” Besides, it would tarnish the goodness of God if the “ruin of His own work” were allowed to win out. Athanasius puts it strongly: “It was impossible [oukoun edei] . . . that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because it would be unfitting and unworthy [aprepes kai anaxion] of Himself” (On the Incarnation 6).[193] This is not an impossibility imposed by external limits on God’s action. It is instead an impossibility rooted in the character of God. God is good; he created out of that goodness, and if he is going to be and prove himself good, he must see that through to the end. He must bring creation to the perfection he planned for it.
It is also fitting for God to rescue the creation because humanity is impressed with his own image. If he was going to allow that image to be defaced and destroyed, what was the use of having made human beings in his own image originally? It was not right that those who share God’s image become nothing, and so God could only “renew His image in mankind, so that through it men might once more come to know Him” (On the Incarnation 13). It was equally fitting that this restoration be carried out by the one who is eternally and unchangeably the Father’s image and Son: “He, the Image of the Father, came and dwelt in our midst, in order that He might renew mankind made after Himself” (On the Incarnation 14). As we saw in the last chapter, Athanasius works with a “relational” understanding of the image of God. It is not identical to the soul, or to any quality of man, but points to the relation of humans to the Creator, a relation of archetype and copy, reality and image. Restoring the image of God, then, means restoring humanity’s relation to God so that human beings become accurate images of the God they are created to reveal.
God will rescue his creation, and especially the human race. It is fitting that the demiurgical Word himself, the Word who is proper to the Father, carry out this task, since he is the image. The question is, how is it to be done? What is the fitting “method” of redemption? Repentance alone would not do. Repentance is a change of direction and behavior, but it leaves man’s basic corruption untouched. To restore creation, God must not only turn human beings to himself but must also arrest the process of decay and death to which they are enslaved. Only an incorruptible Savior can liberate the human race from corruption, and he must do it from the inside. Thus it is the Word’s part, “His alone, both to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father His consistency of character with all.” Since he is the Word of the Father, the Word by which the Father created, he is “both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father” (On the Incarnation 7). So the Word comes in a new way to the world he already inhabited, the world he upheld from the beginning (On the Incarnation 8), uniting to human nature in unprecedented intimacy, so that divine life might be infused into human existence, so that the corrupt might put on incorruption, and the mortal immortality, and the instable creation become permanent.[194]
In assuming and appropriating our flesh, the Son does not cease to be what he always was. Athanasius emphasizes this point in various ways. On the one hand, he insists—in a way that anticipates Barth’s profound meditations on the lordly incarnation of the Lord—that the body of the Son is “not a limitation” but instead an instrument. Anticipating what is wrongly called the “extra-Calvinisticum,” he also argues that the Son continues to fill all things even as he exists in the body: “Existing in a human body, to which He Himself gives life, He is still source of life to all the universe, present in every part of it, yet outside the whole.” At the same time he was “in” the body, he was both “in all things, and outside all things, resting in the Father alone” (On the Incarnation 17).
At the same time, Athanasius rejects all docetic dodges. Out of his pity for the human race,
He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own. Nor did He will merely to become embodied or merely to appear; had that been so, He could have revealed His divine majesty in some other and better way. No, He took our body, and not only so, but He took it directly from a spotless, stainless virgin, without the agency of human father—a pure body, untainted by intercourse with man. He, the Mighty One, the Artificer of all, Himself prepared this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself, and took it for His very own, as an instrument through which he was known and in which He dwelt. (On the Incarnation 8)
His emphasis on the reality of the body (sōma) or flesh (sarx) and his comparative silence about the soul of the incarnate Son have led some to conclude that Athanasius’s Christology was Apollinarian. Apollinaris of Laodicea, a friend of Athanasius, taught that the Logos occupied the “place” of the human soul in the soulless human nature of Christ. The Cappadocians later condemned this view on the presupposition that “what is not assumed is not redeemed.” If the Son’s humanity lacked a soul, then the soul is not delivered from corruption and death, and since, for Athanasius, the soul is one of the basic sources of the instability of human life, a human with an unredeemed soul is simply unredeemed. Two treatises attributed to Athanasius take an explicitly anti-Apollinarian stance, but their authenticity is doubtful.[195] An authentic anti-Apollinarian statement, though, comes from the Tome to the People of Antioch (chap. 7). The Savior “had not a body without a soul, nor without sense or intelligence.” In fact, it is “not possible, when the Lord had become man for us.” Athanasius’s gives two reasons for this impossibility. First, his body could not be “without intelligence.” Second, salvation is salvation of the whole person, body and soul: “Nor was the salvation effected in the Word Himself a salvation of body only, but of soul also.”[196] Still, it is true that Athanasius says little about the human soul of Christ, doubtless because he puts so much stress on the activity of the Word that he leaves little room for an active human soul. For Athanasius, Christ had a human soul, and it is redeemed and deified, but he has trouble figuring out what it might do. Stressing the union of the Word with the flesh is also a way of stressing the depth of the Word’s condescension in the incarnation. Our bodies are closest to what we are as humans, and by taking the body the Word embraces human nature in its totality.[197] For some, the relative absence of reflection on the incarnate Son’s human soul is evidence of Athanasius’s adherence to what has come to be characterized as a “Word-flesh” model of the incarnation, supposedly prevalent at Alexandria.[198] Word-flesh Christologies maximize the confession that the eternal Word is the personal subject of the incarnate Son and minimize his full humanity. At the heretical extreme, this model is Apollinarian.
Athanasius does use the word “flesh” (sarx) to describe the humanity that the Son assumes and makes his own, but this, in my judgment, has less to do with any hedging on the full humanity of the Son and more to do with Athanasius’s adherence to biblical categories. “Soul” and “flesh” in Scripture, after all, do not match up with the way these terms are used either in popular Christian piety or in much historical theology. In Genesis 1, “soul” (Heb. nephesh) is simply an animating principle for all living and mobile things. Adam is created a living soul when the dust is infused with divine breath (Gen. 2:7), but before Adam was created the world was already full of “souls”—water creatures (1:20–21), cattle and creeping things and beasts on earth (1:24), whatever eats plants and moves on the earth or in the sea (1:30).[199] On this understanding, “soul” is simply whatever it is that gives a creature life, not the mind or some sort of Cartesian “thinking substance” within a human being. More striking is Athanasius’s use of the word “flesh.” This stands for him as a global description of the humanity that the Son assumes and carries connotations of weakness, frailty, possibility, corruptibility, and so on. That is precisely the character of “flesh” in Scripture, where sarx describes the condition of man fallen in Adam, including both the decaying human body and the concupiscent human soul. Aloys Grillmeier finds it bizarre that Athanasius makes “the ‘flesh’ of Christ the physical subject of experiences which normally have their place in the soul,”[200] but Paul would have understood Athanasius perfectly well. “Deeds of the flesh,” after all, include not only sexual immorality and idolatry, but anger, jealousy, envy, and other evils that typically “have their place in the soul” (Gal. 5:19–21).
This is not at all to suggest that Athanasius had a fully worked out, analytical, systematic biblical anthropology that is applied to the specific example of Jesus Christ. His use of “flesh” and, to a lesser extent, “soul” is much more instinctive and loose. Yet we see in that usage one aspect of the project of the church fathers—the project of evangelizing and, we might say, “biblicizing” metaphysics.
God in a Space Suit?
In the third of his Discourses against the Arians, Athanasius addresses the problems surrounding the incarnation in a more polemical context. Though his main goal is to refute Arian confusions about the eternal Son, along the way he makes some salient points about issues that later theologians addressed under the rubric of “Person of Christ.”
Arians stumble, Athanasius argues, when they come to the human attributes of Jesus. They demand to know, If he is the Son and exhibits such human attributes, how can he be equal to the Father? They point to passages where Jesus speaks of his reception of all things from the Father, and the Arians ask how a Son who receives all from the Father can possibly be equal to the Father. Jesus says, “All authority . . . has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18), and the Father judges no man, “but He has given all judgment to the Son” (John 5:22). He also says, “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hand” (John 3:35), and “all things have been handed over to me by my Father” (Matt. 11:27). How then can the Son be from the Father by nature (Discourses 3.26)?
Athanasius’s general response to these questions is in terms of what he calls the skopos of Scripture, the double teaching concerning the Son. Scripture speaks of the Son in terms of his eternal and essential nature and also in terms of his assumed humanity. Assuming this double teaching concerning the Son, he argues that if the Arians were consistent, they would have to raise questions about incarnation itself. If the Son can become flesh, certainly he can become receptive flesh (Discourses 3.27). In doubting the eternal sonship of the Son, they are casting doubt on the central claim of the gospel, that the Word became flesh. Arians are mistaken to have “low thoughts concerning the Son of God” because of his human attributes. If they think the Son lowly from his appearance and body, they could just as well consider him the Word from the Father on account of his works. If they recognize the humanity of his form, they should acknowledge the divinity of his actions (Discourses 3.55).
Athanasius also works out his understanding of the relation of the Word and His flesh by comparing it with apparently similar events in the Old Testament. Incarnation, he insists, is something new. The Word came “into” men in the past, but in the incarnation he becomes flesh. The Word became man and did not simply come into man. This distinction is necessary to prevent the leveling of old and new, of Jesus and the prophets. It is the only interpretation of Jesus’s life and death that makes sense of the gospel story. The Jewish reaction to Jesus’s claims to sonship shows that he is claiming something new. If “He only appeared in a man, it were nothing strange, nor had those who saw Him been startled, saying, Whence is He? And wherefore do You, being a man, make Yourself God? For they were familiar with the idea, from the words, ‘And the Word of the Lord came’ to this or that of the Prophets” (Discourses 3.30). In the past, the Word came “individually” to men, but in the incarnation we have the unique instance of the Word himself said to become man, to suffer, to be begotten as a man. “Of old time He was wont to come to the Saints individually, and to hallow those who rightly received Him; but neither, when they were begotten was it said that He had become man, nor, when they suffered, was it said that He Himself suffered” (Discourses 3.31). Athanasius thus shows a deep sense of the eschatological character of the incarnation. Christ takes flesh “at the end of the ages for the abolition of sin” (Discourses 3.31).
At times, he speaks of the flesh as an “instrument” (organon) of the Son (cf. On the Incarnation 17, 44) by which the Son accomplishes his work.[201] He comes to die, but he cannot die in his own divine nature; therefore, he takes flesh, which exists functionally to enable the Son to accomplish redemption. These sorts of statements have led some to conclude that Athanasius offers a semi-docetic account of the incarnation. R. P. C. Hanson compares Athanasius’s incarnate Christ to “God in a space suit”: “Just as the astronaut, in order to operate in a part of the universe where there is no air and where he has to experience weightlessness, puts on an elaborate space-suit which enables him to live and act in this new, unfamiliar environment, so the Logos put on a body which enabled him to behave as a human being among human beings. But his relation to this body was no closer than that of an astronaut to his space-suit.”[202] Athanasius also frequently seems to be hedging his christological statements by describing them as linguistic protocols. The Word “is said to be” flesh, “said” to hunger, “said” to suffer. To which one is tempted to reply, “Perhaps we can ‘say’ it; but is it true?”
Athanasius’s treatment of the Gospel narratives also appears to border on a Christology that would later be condemned as “Nestorian,” as his hesitations about attributing any limitations to the eternal Word force his readings of the specifics of the biblical text. When Jesus heals Peter’s mother, Athanasius says, we must distinguish between the human action and the divine power. Jesus stretched out his hand humanly (anthrōpinōs) but healed divinely (theikōs; Discourses 3.32). Redemption and glorification are human and therefore they are attributed to the humanity of the Word and not the Word as Word: “If then (as has many times been said) the Word has not become man, then ascribe to the Word, as you would have it, to receive, and to need glory, and to be ignorant; but if He has become man (and He has become), and it is man’s to receive, and to need, and to be ignorant, wherefore do we consider the Giver as receiver, and the Dispenser to others do we suspect to be in need, and divide the Word from the Father as imperfect and needy, while we strip human nature of grace?” (Discourses 3.39). Jesus fears death not as God but as man (Discourses 3.55). In sum, the “human things” must be imputed to the humanness and not to the Godhood (Discourses 3.41). The Word’s affections (pathē) are not proper to the nature of the Word (physis tou logou) “as far as He is word,” but instead the Word was “in the flesh which was thus affected” (Discourses 3.55).
This apparent Nestorian “two-step” leads Athanasius into some tortured exegesis, particularly when dealing with the problem of Jesus’s questions and professed ignorance. Jesus asks where Lazarus is entombed (John 11:34), but asking questions, Athanasius is quick to point out, does not necessarily imply ignorance. One may ask questions for other reasons—to teach, for instance, rather than to learn. Though he asks about Lazarus, he already knows where Lazarus is and what he will do, and from this incident Athanasius draws more general conclusions. “When the Lord asks, He does not ask in ignorance, where Lazarus lies, nor again, who men do say that He is; but knowing the thing which He was asking, aware what He was about to do.” This is sufficient to explode the “clever point” made by the Arians. If they insist on saying Jesus was ignorant, then “they must be told that in the Godhead indeed ignorance is not, but to the flesh ignorance is proper, as has been said” (Discourses 3.37). The Word did not cease to be God when he became flesh, and as Word (autos ho logos), he knew even those things he claimed not to know: “Therefore this is plain to every one, that the flesh indeed is ignorant, but the Word Himself, considered as the Word, knows all things even before they come to be. For He did not, when He became man, cease to be God; nor, whereas He is God does He shrink from what is man’s; perish the thought; but rather, being God, He has taken to Him the flesh, and being in the flesh deifies the flesh” (Discourses 3.38).
Jesus’s explicit profession of ignorance about the day of his coming (Matt. 24:36) raises more difficult questions. This is not a question, so Athanasius cannot deal with this as he deals with Jesus’s questions at the grave of Lazarus. Instead, Athanasius insists in several ways that Jesus cannot be taken at face value. Despite his explicit profession of ignorance, Jesus must have known. After all, he predicted the signs that would precede his coming, and “He who speaks of what precedes the day, knows certainly the day also, which shall be manifested subsequently to the things foretold.” Athanasius compares Jesus’s professions of ignorance to a man “who, by way of pointing out a house or city to those who were ignorant of it, gave an account of what comes before the house or city, and having described all, said, ‘then immediately comes the city or the house,’ would know of course where the house or the city was (for had he not known, he had not described what comes before lest from ignorance he should throw his hearers far out of the way, or in speaking he should unawares go beyond the object).” In the same way, “the Lord saying what precedes that day and that hour, knows exactly, nor is ignorant, when the hour and the day are at hand” (Discourses 3.42).
Not only does Jesus give specific predictions about the day of his coming, but he must, as the demiurgical Word of the Father, the Lord of all ages and the measure of all intervals, have determined that day along with his Father. As “Framer of the universe,” he “knows of what nature, and of what magnitude, and with what limits, the Father has willed it to be made; and in the how much and how far is included its period.” The relation of Father and Son also argues for Jesus’s knowledge of the day: “If all that is the Father’s, is the Son’s (and this He Himself has said), and it is the Father’s attribute to know the day, it is plain that the Son too knows it, having this proper to Him from the Father” (Discourses 3.44). Citing Matthew 11, Athanasius says, with mounting exasperation, “If the Son knows the Father, how can He be ignorant of the day of His coming? And if the Son, who knows the Father so intimately, is Himself ignorant, what does that say about the Father? Is the Father also ignorant of the day?” (Discourses 3.44). In short, Jesus knows as God, though he is ignorant as man: “In like manner also about Lazarus He asks humanly, who was on His way to raise him, and knew whence He should recall Lazarus’s soul; and it was a greater thing to know where the soul was, than to know where the body lay; but He asked humanly, that He might raise divinely” (Discourses 3.46).
Athanasius’s most egregious forced reading on this point is an interpretation of 2 Corinthians 12:2, where Paul also professes ignorance of something that Athanasius thinks he too must have known.
What now say ye? Knew the Apostle what had happened to him in the vision, though he says “I know not,” or knew he not? If he knew not, see to it, lest, being familiar with error, you err in the trespass of the Phrygians, who say that the Prophets and the other ministers of the Word know neither what they do nor concerning what they announce. But if he knew when he said “I know not,” for he had Christ within him revealing to him all things, is not the heart of God’s enemies indeed perverted and “self-condemned?” for when the Apostle says, “I know not,” they say that he knows; but when the Lord says, “I know not,” they say that He does not know. For if since Christ was within him, Paul knew that of which he says, “I know not,” does not much more Christ Himself know, though He say, “I know not?” The Apostle then, the Lord revealing it to him, knew what happened to him; for on this account he says, “I knew a man in Christ.” And knowing the man, he knew also how the man was caught away. (Discourses 3.47)
Paul cannot be truly ignorant, not only because Paul himself experienced the visions he describes, but also because Christ is in him. If Paul was ignorant, and if he received his revelation from the Son, then the Son would be ignorant too. But the Son cannot be ignorant, and therefore Paul knows. Somehow, Paul’s professed ignorance is inverted by appeal to the certain fact that Jesus knows—but this is precisely the point in debate! By some hermeneutical magic, Jesus’s profession of ignorance, combined with Paul’s own profession of ignorance, produces the certainty that both knew what they claimed not to know. Two negatives, apparently, yield a positive.
There is a fair bit of playacting here. Paul is not genuinely ignorant but only pretends to be. He knows that Jesus professed ignorance, and he knows that the disciples cannot be above the master, so he acts ignorant in order to teach a lesson in discipleship. In fact, Paul is imitating Jesus very closely when he pretends to be ignorant, since Jesus pretended to be ignorant too. Jesus was not really ignorant either but professed ignorance “as showing His manhood.” Since ignorance is proper to the flesh, the Son put on a show of ignorance to demonstrate that he had really taken flesh (Discourses 3.45). In addition to violating the plain sense of Jesus’s statement, Athanasius’s explanation ends up in convoluted contradictions. After all, if the Word had to pretend ignorance to prove that he was truly human, then he was not really sharing the ignorance that flesh is heir to. Perhaps his assumption of flesh was mere pretense as well?
“His Own” Flesh
Despite such statements used to support Hanson’s interpretation, Athanasius’s fundamental Christology is far more robust.[203] For starters, we should remind ourselves of the framework that Athanasius employs and the intention of his work. As we noted in the last chapter, Athanasius conceives the relation of Creator to creation in the context of creatio ex nihilo and the affirmation that the Word of the Father is “proper” to the Father’s being. This, rather than the notion of the Son’s body as organon, or commitment to a “Word-flesh” model of the incarnation, is the key to Athanasius’s Christology.[204] According to Athanasius, the Creator is immediately present to the creation, always and necessarily. Without the immediate presence of the sustaining Logos, creation could not persist (menein). In a sense, Athanasius dispenses with all manner of “mediations” between God and creation. That relation to creation does not change in the incarnation. God remains in direct contact with the creation, and in fact deepens that contact by assuming flesh, by making flesh “His own” (see further below). Through the incarnation, a human race that is inclined toward death comes to know God through the “immediate mediation” of the incarnate Word. The flesh of the Word is thus no screen between God and his creation; there has never been such a screen, and there is no need for one. Rather, the flesh is the medium through which he touches and embraces creation, and it brings the Word into such close relation to the world that the incarnation can be described as an epiphaneia of God.[205] When Athanasius says that the Word acted “through the body,” the body might be taken as a distancing instrument—an eternal extender that enables a God who is too prissy to touch matter to interact with his creation and yet keep his distance; or it can mean that the body has become transparent to the Word, who is the power and Wisdom of the Father. Clearly, Athanasius means the latter, for, as he never tires of reminding his readers, God is not proud.[206]
Athanasius’s intentions must also be specified. His aim is not to provide a technical analysis of the relation of Word and flesh in the incarnate Son,[207] any more (as we shall see in the next chapter) than he intends to provide a technical analysis of the mechanics of atonement. He is far more interested in the fact of the incarnation and the results of the death and resurrection of Jesus than he is in explaining how it could all happen. When he writes about the incarnation, in fact, he is not merely speaking about the fact that the Word assumed flesh. For Athanasius, “incarnation” is the person and the work, the person who is known to be the incarnate Word precisely by what he can do. John Behr writes, “Assuming, anachronistically, that ‘Incarnation’ refers solely to the birth from Mary of the divine Word in or as Jesus tends to lead . . . to an approach which holds that the proper task of Christology is to analyze the composition of the being of Jesus Christ, to determine whether he has the requisite elements of a true human being, or whether the divine Word has replaced the soul, the question which has beset modern scholarship on Athanasius.”[208] For Athanasius, “incarnation” describes not merely the event of the Son becoming flesh but the whole life and work of Jesus. We will distort Athanasius if we understand the term too narrowly.
Finally, the question has been skewed through projecting an “Antiochene” or even Nestorian framework onto Athanasius. Athanasius does insist on the skopos of Scripture, as we have seen, the “double” account of the Savior. But this is not the same as saying that he follows a dualist reading of the Gospel narratives. Frances Young notes,
While it is true that the Antiochenes would use Athanasian passages . . . to good effect to defend their own dualistic exegesis . . . Cyril’s appeal to Athanasius reflects his mind better: the Alexandrian way was to distinguish the Being or Essence of the Word from what the Word accepted in the “Economy,” that is, the providential saving plan of God worked out in the incarnation. So undergirding Athanasius’s exegesis is the unitive story or plot which is the mind of scripture expressed in its many words and images, and of which the one “Son” is the subject.[209]
When Athanasius sees a “double” reality in the Gospel story, it is not because some actions are done by the humanity and some events happen to the humanity, while divine actions are done by the divine nature. Rather, all that Jesus does is what the Word does, and the Word does all that he does through and in and by the organon of the flesh. The Word of the Father, who is the Father’s Power and Wisdom, heals through the flesh and hungers in the flesh, walks on water in the flesh and thirsts in the flesh. Athanasius’s distinction is not between the Word and the human nature that accompanies and does the creaturely business. The distinction is between the single subject of all the Gospel narratives—which is always the Word—and the actions that he performs in the economy.
Athanasius insists, in short, that the humanity of the Son is the Son’s own (idios). He writes, “Whereas He was ever God, and hallowed those to whom He came, and ordered all things according to the Father’s will, afterwards for our sakes He became man, and ‘bodily’ (Col. 2:9), as the Apostle says, the Godhead dwelt in the flesh; as much as to say, ‘Being God, He had His own body, and using this as an instrument, He became man for our sakes.’” And he then adds,
On account of this, the properties of the flesh are said to be His, since He was in it, such as to hunger, to thirst, to suffer, to weary, and the like, of which the flesh is capable; while on the other hand the works proper [idios] to the Word Himself, such as to raise the dead, to restore sight to the blind, and to cure the woman with an issue of blood, He did through His own body. And the Word bore the infirmities of the flesh, as His own, for His was the flesh; and the flesh ministered to the works of the Godhead, because the Godhead was in it, for the body was God’s. (Discourses 3.31, emphasis added)
The terminology used here is similar to that used to describe the Son’s relation to the Father. The Son is the Father’s own, proper (idios) Word and Wisdom, not an extrinsic or attached word or wisdom. To say that the Son is “proper” to the Father is to say that the Son is as necessary to the Father’s existence as any of the Father’s “attributes” or “properties.” The Son is not an extraneous added accident but is of the substance of the Father. Similarly, the Son’s flesh is the Son’s own flesh (idia sarx), and the intimacy of the relation is such that Athanasius can state, with pithy power, “God’s was the body” (theou ēn sōma). Flesh is now joined to the Word with something like the intimacy that the Word eternally has with the Father.
Because the Son takes flesh and makes that flesh “his own,” he carries our infirmities. Citing Isaiah 53:4 (“He remedied our infirmities”), Athanasius argues that this healing is only possible on the basis of the incarnation. The Son had always healed, but he healed “as being external to the body” and thus left men “subject still to death.” If he is going to overcome death and the infirmity of flesh once and for all, then he must be as we are: “He carries our infirmities, and He Himself bears our sins, that it might be shown that He has become man for us, and that the body which in Him bore them, was His own body; and, while He received no hurt Himself by ‘bearing our sins in His body on the tree,’ as Peter speaks, we men were redeemed from our own affections, and were filled with the righteousness of the Word” (Discourses 3.31). The direction of Athanasius’s argument here is determined by the anti-Arian polemic; it sounds as if the Word carries infirmities in order to provide support for orthodox Christology and to refute the Arians. But the fundamental theology is still clear: the eternal Word, without ceasing to be eternal Word and divine in his own nature, takes on flesh and truly makes it his flesh.
Even the sufferings of the flesh are as much his own as the flesh itself: “When the flesh suffered, the Word was not external to it [ouk ēn ektos]; and therefore is the passion said to be His [autou legetai kai to pathos]: and when He did divinely His Father’s works, the flesh was not external to Him, but in the body itself did the Lord do them” (Discourses 3.32). The passions (pathē) of the Son’s flesh are his, since passions are proper to the flesh and the flesh is proper to the Son: “For on this account has the Apostle himself said, ‘Christ then having suffered,’ not in His Godhead, but ‘for us in the flesh,’ that these affections may be acknowledged as, not proper to the very Word by nature, but proper by nature to the very flesh” (Discourses 3.34). “It became the Lord,” he writes, “in putting on human flesh, to put it on whole with the affections proper to it.” On account of this, “as we say that the body was His own, so also we may say that the affections of the body were proper [idios] to Him alone, though they did not touch Him according to His Godhead [ei kai mē hēpteto kata tēn theotēta autou].” Since “the flesh is the Word’s (for ‘the Word became flesh’), of necessity then the affections also of the flesh are ascribed to Him, whose the flesh is.” In the flesh, and because the flesh is his, we ascribe affections to him, “such namely as to be condemned, to be scourged, to thirst, and the cross, and death, and the other infirmities of the body.” These are just as much his as “the triumph and the grace.” It is consistent and fitting that “such affections are ascribed not to another, but to the Lord” (Discourses 3.32).[210] The Son’s exaltation as well as his passion are “his own” because the body to which the suffering and exaltation happen is “proper” to him. “When the flesh advanced,” he writes, “He is said to have advanced, because the body was His own, so also what is said at the season of His death, that He was troubled, that He wept, must be taken in the same sense” (Discourses 3.54). Again, the similarity to the language of the trinitarian discussions is remarkable: there Athanasius insists that the Son is not “external” (ektos) to the Father’s ousia, and here the flesh is not external to the Son. It is an analogy, but the analogy holds: the Son is to the Father as the flesh of the Son is to the Son. Both are intrinsic relations, not extrinsic ones, though one is an eternal “natural” intrinsic relation and the other a temporal “graced” intrinsic relation.
The analogy of Trinity and incarnation extends to the pattern of perichoresis. Just as the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father in the eternal divine life, so in the incarnation, the flesh is in the Son and the Son is in the flesh. “When the flesh receives,” Athanasius writes, “since that which receives is in Him, and by taking it He has become man, therefore He is said Himself to have received” (Discourses 3.38). As he writes,
For these belong not to the Word, as the Word; but are proper to men and, as when He spat, and stretched forth the hand, and called Lazarus, we did not say that the triumphs were human, though they were done through the body, but were God’s, so, on the other hand, though human things are ascribed to the Savior in the Gospel, let us, considering the nature of what is said and that they are foreign to God, not impute them to the Word’s Godhead, but to His manhood. For though “the Word became flesh,” yet to the flesh are the affections proper; and though the flesh is possessed by God in the Word, yet to the Word belong the grace and the power. (Discourses 3.41)
That statement bears repeating: the flesh is in him because the flesh is divinely possessed in the Word (theophoreitai en tō logō). In sum, “He was Very God in the flesh, and He was true flesh in the Word” (alēthēs sarx ēn en tō logō; Discourses 3.41). Again, the analogy is striking. In trinitarian theology, perichoresis expresses the exhaustive mutual relation of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, their exhaustive mutual infinitely intimate indwelling. Through the incarnation, human flesh has been graciously assumed into that intimate communion.
Pressing Athanasius’s point, we can put it in these terms: since the Word is in the flesh and the flesh in the Word, and since the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father, so the flesh is in the Father and the Father in the flesh. Flesh is taken up into God, and this is the ground not only for Athanasius’s doctrine of deification (see chap. 6) but also the background for Jesus’s own awe-inspiring promises: “I in them and you in me” and “that they also may be in us” (John 17:21–23). Through the incarnation, human beings are assumed within the intimate joy and delight of the Father and the Son and become objects of that delight.
God for Us
Despite some “God in a space suit” twists and turns, Athanasius’s fundamental Christology is very different, providing thoroughly theological explanations for the limits and passions of Jesus in the Gospel story. At the heart of this account, Athanasius insists that the Son’s every action and limitation in the incarnation are undertaken for our sake. Because of this, even the human statements about Christ have a proper “religious” (eusebēs) meaning (Discourses 3.37).
For instance, Athanasius describes the purpose of the incarnation as an exchange of origin. The Son has an eternal heavenly origin; we originate from the earth and are of the earth, that is, earthy. By assuming our nature and our origin in flesh, he intends to take us to heaven with him so that we can be born again from above:
Whence also, whereas the flesh is born of Mary Bearer of God, He Himself is said to have been born, who furnishes to others an origin of being; in order that He may transfer our origin into Himself, and we may no longer, as mere earth, return to earth, but as being knit into the Word from heaven, may be carried to heaven by Him. Therefore in like manner not without reason has He transferred to Himself the other affections of the body also; that we, no longer as being men, but as proper to the Word, may have share in eternal life. For no longer according to our former origin in Adam do we die; but henceforward our origin and all infirmity of flesh being transferred to the Word, we rise from the earth, the curse from sin being removed, because of Him who is in us, and who has become a curse for us. And with reason; for as we are all from earth and die in Adam, so being regenerated from above of water and Spirit, in the Christ we are all quickened; the flesh being no longer earthly, but being henceforth made Word, by reason of God’s Word who for our sake “became flesh.” (Discourses 3.33)
This “for us” guides Athanasius’s explanation of passages that speak of the Son’s receptiveness as well. Jesus says that “power is given to me” and asks the Father to glorify him. All this is said “humanly because of the body.” In his divine nature, he had “no need,” but he is said to receive humanly for our sake, to ensure that the grace of God remains (menein) with us: “The grant is lodged with Him, the grace may remain sure.” When man receives grace, “he is liable to lose again (as was shown in the case of Adam, for he received and he lost), but that the grace may be irrevocable, and may be kept sure by men, therefore He Himself appropriates the gift” (Discourses 3.38). Similarly, the power Jesus receives after the resurrection is not new to him, since he had already demonstrated his authority over Satan during his ministry. That power is already apparent in “His driving away the demons, and from His unbinding what Satan had bound, as He did in the case of the daughter of Abraham; and from His remitting sin, saying to the paralytic, and to the woman who washed His feet, ‘Your sins be forgiven you;’ and from His both raising the dead, and repairing the first nature of the blind, granting to him to see.” What is new is that he receives the power “humanly,” and this power is now exercised for us and even by us: “What He had as Word, that when He had become man and was risen again, He says that He received humanly; that for His sake men might henceforward upon earth have power against demons, as having become partakers of a divine nature; and in heaven, as being delivered from corruption, might reign everlastingly” (Discourses 3.40). He took flesh, died in the flesh, rose to new life in the flesh, so that the power of God might become now a power of the flesh, so that we who are in the flesh can trample Satan beneath our feet, so that we can triumph over death in him.
In On the Incarnation, Athanasius describes the Word as a “good teacher with his pupils,” who comes “down to their level” and uses “simple” and suitable means. In sin, the human race had turned from the invisible God to sensible things, devoting themselves to idols, which can bring not stability and incorruption but only further decay. To deliver them from this infatuation and slavery to sensible things, the Word became sensible: “The Savior of us all, the Word of God, in His great love took to Himself a body and moved as Man among men, meeting their senses, so to speak, halfway. He became Himself an object for the senses, so that those who were seeking God in sensible things might apprehend the Father through the works which He, the Word of God, did in the body” (On the Incarnation 15).
Creation, as we saw in chapter 4, is already imprinted by the Word of the Father, its harmony of opposites a pointer to a divine Orchestrator. That is not enough for God. He fills the creation with himself, then speaks to Israel, and then comes in his Son, so that God himself becomes “an object of our senses.” This is to show forth the Word in every dimension of creation: “Above, in creation; below, in the Incarnation; in the depth, in Hades; in the breadth, throughout the world. All things have been filled with the knowledge of God” (On the Incarnation 16). Since God is complete in himself—the Father with his proper Son and Spirit has always already reached his telos—the accolades of creation do not add to God’s glory or pleasure. But it is for the good of creatures, since praising God is what creation is designed for. Humans are formed for doxology, with hands to lift in prayer, tongues to sing, knees to bow. The incarnation re-tunes bodies for praise so that we can fulfill our telos as well. Thus, even when the Father acts through his Word to elicit praise for himself, he is not proud. Even then, he acts for us.[211]
Specific actions of Jesus were also designed to meet human needs and address the myriad forms of human rebellion, disobedience, and ignorance. For those who were “awe-struck by creation,” the Son came as a creature who was also Lord of the creation. Humanists who exalt human capacity find a unique man in Jesus, whose “works marked Him, alone of men, as Son of God.” Those who are misled by evil spirits learn from Jesus’s mastery of the demons that these spirits are no gods. Those who devote themselves to “hero-worship and the cult of the dead” find that faith inverted by the resurrection. Whatever deities men have adopted are exposed and undone by the Word made flesh (On the Incarnation 15).
At times, Athanasius applies this logic to his explanation of Jesus’s ignorance. When the Son takes our flesh, he takes all the limits of flesh to himself, shares in them, in order to burst through them. He assumes our ignorance to reveal to us the knowledge of the Father: “Carrying our ignorance, He might vouchsafe to us the knowledge of His own only and true Father, and of Himself, sent because of us for the salvation of all, than which no grace could be greater” (Discourses 3.38). Of course, for this to work, the ignorance has to be the Son’s own ignorance, as much his own as his flesh in general.
Some of the “for-us” reasons Athanasius gives for Jesus’s ignorance are moralistic, even quaint. Jesus’s profession of ignorance prevents his disciples from inquiring too curiously into the times and seasons of things to come. Where God has been silent, curiosity should cease and we should accept God’s silence (Discourses 3.43). We also get a glimpse of God’s condescending love, demonstrating that God descends from the brightness of his knowledge into fleshly ignorance for us. The timing of the Word’s ignorance is important. He is not said to be ignorant “when the heaven was made by Him, nor when He was with the Father Himself, the Word ‘disposing all things,’ nor before He became man did He say it, but when ‘the Word became flesh.’” Since ignorance is proper to humans, Jesus’s ignorance is “proper to the Savior’s love of man.” Having been made human, “He is not ashamed, because of the flesh which is ignorance, to say ‘I know not,’ that He may show that knowing as God, He is but ignorant according to the flesh” (Discourses 3.43). He also suggests that the ignorance of the Son is eschatologically qualified. That is, the ignorance pertains to the state of Jesus prior to the resurrection. Though he takes our ignorance when he takes flesh, the goal of that assumption is not to remain in ignorance but to transform ignorance into knowledge. Athanasius points to the difference between Jesus’s words in the Olivet Discourse and his response to the disciples’ question about the restoration of the kingdom to Israel (Acts 1). In the latter passage, Jesus does not say that he is ignorant of the timing but instead tells the disciples that it is not expedient for them to know. This implies that Jesus knows the answer but refuses to give it for the sake of his disciples: “Now the flesh had risen and put off its mortality and been deified; and no longer did it become Him to answer after the flesh when He was going into the heavens; but henceforth to teach after a divine manner” (Discourses 3.48).
Athanasius insists that the ignorance of the Son is the best thing for his people. Jesus said, “I know not,” even though he did know, but he did it “for our profit.” Both his knowledge and his ignorance secure “our advantage.” On the one hand, he told us enough so that when apocalyptic signs appear “we might not be startled nor scared, when they happen, but from them may expect the end after them.” At the same time, he kept us in the dark about the day and hour, “lest [the disciples] should ask him further, and then either he should have to pain the disciples by not speaking, or by speaking might act to the prejudice of them and us all” (Discourses 3.48).
Jesus’s ignorance is consistent with the entire aim of the incarnation: “Whatever He does, that altogether He does for our sakes, since also for us ‘the Word became flesh’” (Discourses 3.48). All the limits that the Son assumes, he assumes for us:
And further, not to know when the end is, or when the day of the end, is expedient for man, lest knowing, they might become negligent of the time between, awaiting the days near the end; for they will argue that then only must they attend to themselves. Therefore also has He been silent of the time when each shall die, lest men, being elated on the ground of knowledge, should immediately neglect themselves for the greater part of their time. Both then, the end of all things and the limit of each of us has the Word concealed from us (for in the end of all is the end of each, and in the end of each the end of all is comprehended), that, whereas it is uncertain and always in prospect, we may advance day by day as if summoned, reaching forward to the things before us and forgetting the things behind. For who, knowing the day of the end, would not be dilatory with the interval? But, if ignorant, would not be ready day by day? It was on this account that the Savior added, “Watch therefore, for you know not what hour your Lord does come”; and, “In such an hour as you think not, the Son of man comes” (Matt. 24:42; Luke 12:40). For the advantage then which comes of ignorance has He said this. (Discourses 3.49)
In addition to passages that speak of Christ’s ignorance, the Arians highlighted passages describing the advancement of Jesus in glory, wisdom, or obedience. If the Son is equal to the Father, how can he grow? If he has had all glory with the Father from eternity and by virtue of his divine nature, how can he receive glory from the Father? If he is the eternal Wisdom of the Father, how can he be said to increase in wisdom? Part of Athanasius’s answer is to agree that the Word and Wisdom of God cannot advance at all, insofar as we isolate him as the Word proper to the substance of the Father. Athanasius also appeals again to the skopos of Scripture, the hermeneutical rule that the Scriptures speak in a “double way” about the Son. When Scripture speaks of the Son’s advance, it cannot be talking about his divine nature, since he eternally is all that he is. It must be speaking about the Son in the flesh.
The deeper point of Athanasius’s response, though, again highlights the central thrust of his Christology, which is rooted in his theology proper. On Arian premises, Athanasius argues, the Son is elevated through taking flesh, living, dying, and rising again. The Son is more at the end of that series of events than he was at the beginning.[212] To Athanasius, this precisely reverses the intention of the incarnation. The flesh of Jesus is not an instrument of the Son’s self-advancement. Rather, the Son takes flesh in order to advance the flesh:
But if He be God bearing flesh, as He truly is, and “the Word became flesh,” and being God descended upon earth, what advance had He who existed equal to God? Or how had the Son increase, being ever in the Father? For if He who was ever in the Father, advanced, what, I ask, is there beyond the Father from which His advance might be made? Next it is suitable here to repeat what was said upon the point of His receiving and being glorified. If He advanced when He became man, it is plain that, before He became man, He was imperfect; and rather the flesh became to Him a cause of perfection, than He to the flesh. And again, if, as being the Word, He advances, what has He more to become than Word and Wisdom and Son and God’s Power? (Discourses 3.51)
God is not proud, and God does not act in history for his self-advancement. He cannot advance, being the perfection of all perfections. Rather, he assumes flesh and acts so that we might be advanced, so that our humanity might be perfected: “The Son of God, since He could not advance, being perfect in the Father, humbled Himself for us, that in His humbling we on the other hand might be able to increase” (Discourses 3.52). The principle of double teaching about the Son is not simply a way of protecting the full divinity of the Son. It has direct soteriological import. The double teaching highlights the fact that the Son takes our condition to change our condition.
The Son’s humanity advances “humanly,” but there is also an advance in how fully the Son’s flesh glows with the radiance of the Radiance who assumes it. The New Testament speaks of the body’s advance, in order to emphasize that “in it advanced also the manifestation of the Godhead to those who saw it. And, as the Godhead was more and more revealed, by so much more did His grace as man increase before all men.” As the Word advances in wisdom and stature, there is an advance in the “Word manifesting Himself” in the body (proekopten en autō kai hē phanerōsis tēs thotētos tois hōrōsin; Discourses 3.52). Athanasius sometimes works this out in the context of a temple Christology. The human flesh of the Son advances, and this is a deifying advance, which increasingly shows the body as a temple: “The body increasing in stature, there developed in it the manifestation of the Godhead also, and to all was it displayed that the body was God’s Temple [hē tēs theotētos phanerōsis . . . hoti naos theou esti], and that God was in the body [theos ēn en tō sōmati]” (Discourses 3.53). “He grew” means that the flesh of Jesus becomes ever more transparent to the Word and Wisdom that assumed it, and as we shall see in the next chapter, the Son does this also for us, as he makes our human flesh also transparent to divine light.
Impassible Sufferer
For contemporary theology and for fourth-century theology as well, the crux of the incarnation is the literal crux, the cross. Who is suffering on the cross? Does God suffer and die? Does only the humanity of Jesus die? How can we make sense of the cross and the Jesus who dies there? For many contemporary theologians, Athanasius cannot make sense of it, because he assumes that the Word is impassible. For many theologians, impassibility stands as a roadblock to a full appreciation of the gospel. On this point, it is claimed, Athanasius fails his own test: having made the crucified Christ the measure of theological and metaphysical truth, Athanasius flinches, and on the central point.
For Athanasius, it is axiomatic that God is impassible, just as and just because God is unchangeable and eternal, so axiomatic that Athanasius never takes time to defend it. It is, after all, an assumption shared by Athanasius and Arius, and by everyone else in the early church, and thus requires no defense. Armed with this assumption, Athanasius sometimes appears to be engaged in an effort to distance the Son from the suffering of the body. The impassible Word seems to be the astronaut in the passible space suit of human flesh: “In the Body which was circumcised, and carried, and ate and drank, and was weary, and was nailed on the tree and suffered, there was the impassible and incorporeal Word of God. This Body it was that was laid in a grave, when the Word had left it” (Letter to Epictetus 5). When he is not hemming and hawing to insist on the impassibility of the incarnate Word, Athanasius, like the other fathers, seems to engage in a kind of double-talk: the impassible one suffered, yet did not suffer (Letter to Epictetus 6). The Word did not suffer in his own nature, but the suffering of the flesh is “ascribed” to him (Letter to Epictetus 6). Arians have an easier time of it. They share Athanasius’s assumption about God’s impassibility but resolve the issue by distancing not the suffering from Jesus, but the suffering Savior from the impassible God. For Arians, the passibility of the Savior is a crucial issue. They argue that only a suffering Savior could redeem, and this Savior could not be merely human. Since God himself cannot suffer, the suffering Christ must be someone less than God. Athanasius cannot resort to this expedient, but where he is incapable of creating a buffer between Son and Father, he creates a buffer between flesh and Word. So it seems.
Few patristic assumptions have come in for more extended and severe criticism in recent theology than the assumption of impassibility. Objections to impassibility have arisen in part from the scriptural portrait of God. Yahweh pities his people in their distress and comes to their assistance. He grieves and mourns over the sins of Israel and even of gentiles. He is so passionate in his love for his people that he says that his name is “Jealous” (Exod. 34:14).
Philosophical concerns also have pressured theologians toward divine passibility, and these concerns are most elaborately expressed by Hegel. To make sense of creation and incarnation, Hegel thinks we must presuppose some internal self-differentiation within God himself.[213] Creation and incarnation thus require a new sort of philosophy, a new basis. For Hegel, a substance philosophy cannot make sense of a God who remains unchanged and at the same time enters into a world of change without losing himself or alienating himself. Substance philosophies must be replaced by a philosophy of “spirit.” Substance philosophies cannot incorporate relation and otherness as inherent qualities of a thing; for substance philosophies, relation is always extrinsic. A philosophy organized around spirit, however, places otherness and relationality at the center. As Anselm Min says, “What is required is a shift from a philosophy of ‘substance,’ which stresses simple self-identity, self-sufficiency, and essential immutability of being and allows activity, relation, and otherness only as something external to itself, to a philosophy of ‘spirit,’ which regards active mediation by otherness as internal to the constitution of self-identity in its concrete unity.”[214]
Since God is Spirit, he is inherently, primordially relational. The Father “self-others” himself as the Son, and since the Son is the Father’s own self-expression the Son “shares the totality of divine being.” The Son, in Hegel’s words, “unites the two qualities of being the totality in itself and of being posited as other.”[215] The Father’s infinity is not just the infinity of an infinite substance, which would mean his persistence as infinite in himself. Rather, “the Father is both Himself, that is, Father in his distinct self-identity and related and present to the Son in his distinct Otherness to the Father.” This otherness and relation are not “external to the divine essence” but rather “something posited by the Father in his divine nature.” The Father’s identity and self-identity are thus “an identity mediated to itself by Otherness or a unity of identity and disidentity.”[216] The same is true of the Son: his identity is “internally mediated by his relation to the Father.” Further, the Father not only self-others himself and expresses himself in the Son, but also returns to himself as Spirit, as “concrete, dynamic, mediated identity.” The Father “does not merely posit an Other but also has the power to sublate the Otherness of the Son, that is, to preserve that Otherness as Other, and at the same time transcend that Other as something posited by himself, whereby he mediates himself to himself.” Thus the “Other is not a brute datum separating the Father from himself but a medium thoroughly open and transparent to the self-mediating action of the Father.”[217] Creation is possible because of this self-othering, but for Hegel, the creation is not a free act of a God who is perfect and complete in himself. Rather, it is the necessary extreme self-othering of the God who is necessarily self-othering.
Hegel’s conception of the incarnation builds on his account of the immanent Trinity “with its inner multiplicity and finality.” Hegel does not consider the incarnation to be an afterthought, or even a “second” event successive to creation and necessary only because of the intervention of the fall. Human beings must be created to receive God, with a teleological orientation to union with God, otherwise the incarnation would be impossible: “Were created human nature simply other, alien, and opposed to the divine, the Incarnation would not mean genuine unity but mere juxtaposition of two heterogeneous elements. Unless human nature were created with an inner teleological relation to the divine, the Incarnation would mean only an external imposition of the divine on the human, which on its part would not need the divine and for which, therefore, the Incarnation would have no redemptive, reconciling significance.”[218] The reconciliation and identification of God and man cannot take place outside the world that humanity inhabits. Humans are not pure spirits but embodied spirits, and so God must enter into this natural consciousness and follow the contours of human nature. In short, “the logic of reconciliation requires God’s self-manifestation in a form that combines sensibility and self-consciousness, which can be found only in a particular, sensible individual.”[219]
The incarnational and trinitarian aspects of Hegel’s thought coalesce in an emphasis on the death of God on the cross, which in some ways is the center of his entire philosophy, the “speculative Good Friday.” “As ‘God in human form’ or ‘the concrete God,’ Jesus is not ‘the mere organ of revelation but is himself the content of revelation,’ the ontological congeniality of human and divine.”[220] In a more “Alexandrian” fashion, Hegel emphasizes that the gospel story is a story about God himself, but since he has already posited that God is in a relation of mutual conditioning with his creation, the history of the Son in the flesh is a history that modifies and fulfills God. “The history of Jesus is the history of God himself, and he alone is ‘utterly adequate to the Idea.’ In his death on the cross, ‘God himself is dead,’ and in subjecting himself to death, ‘the uttermost pinnacle of finitude,’ God experiences the sting of otherness at its most radical and proves his own humanity and his love for humanity.”[221] In the cross, the God who self-othered himself in the Son, the God who created a world other than himself and entered that world in the incarnation, reaches the pinnacle of his self-othering self.
But the othering move is only one moment in the process, a moment that is sublated by the moment of resurrection:
God does not remain dead in Jesus but has the power to sublate the otherness of death, that is, God has the power of Resurrection. No longer limited to the physical boundaries of a particular historical individual, God himself rises as the Holy Spirit from the particularity of finitude in a negation of negation and becomes a universal spiritual presence in the depth of human history, where he reconciles humanity with himself. For Hegel, otherness, negation, finitude—which is a moment of divine nature itself—is not the final word; reconciliation is. It is precisely the infinite power of God to subject himself to finitude and to overcome and triumph over that finitude and achieve reconciliation between himself and his Other.[222]
Understood in this way, the death and resurrection of Jesus is, for Hegel, “the whole of history,” but it is essentially a “theology of Resurrection.” Though Hegel says that finitude, negation, otherness are a moment within the divine life itself, it is not the final moment; rather, reconciliation and resurrection are the final word of God, which means that Hegel’s theology is finally not tragic but a “theology of hope.” God’s infinity is not his immunity to suffering and negation and evil but the infinity of a “God who suffers yet overcomes.”[223]
The death of God is the death of this kind of abstraction. It is the death of abstract transcendence, the infinite that, opposed to the finite, is itself finite. The death of God means that God is not opposed to the finite but incorporates the finite as a moment in his own being, his own realization. As Hegel writes,
The death of this picture-thought contains, therefore, at the same time the death of the abstraction of the divine Being, which is not posited as Self. That death is the painful feeling of the Unhappy Consciousness, that God himself is dead. This hard saying is the expression of the innermost simple self-knowledge, the return of consciousness into the depths of the night of the “I” = “I,” which no longer distinguishes or knows anything outside of it. . . . This Knowing is the inbreathing of the Spirit, whereby Substance becomes Subject, by which its abstraction and lifelessness have died, and Substance therefore has become actual and simple and universal Self-consciousness.[224]
What dies is classical theism’s unrelated God, the God of substance philosophy. The absolute itself “must undergo a process of mediation with other, that is, become subject.” That means that conflict and tragedy become “theological possibilities,” and therefore he rejects the classical notion of God’s impassibility. Death of God becomes a theological reality as pain, suffering, and tragedy are taken up in the life of God. In his 1827 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel says, “‘God himself is dead,’ it says in a Lutheran hymn, expressing an awareness that the human, the finite, the weak, the negative, are themselves a moment of the divine, that they are within God himself, that finitude, negativity, otherness are not outside of God and do not, as otherness, hinder unity with God. Otherness, the negative, is known to be a moment of the divine nature itself. This involves the highest idea of spirit.” Love cannot be separated from “the infinite anguish of good Friday.”[225]
Hegel’s emphasis on God’s passibility has been taken up most famously by Jürgen Moltmann. Moltmann has been deeply concerned with theodicy, but his theodicy renounces philosophical explanations and focuses on the cross. The cross does not explain suffering or evil; it manifests God’s “loving solidarity with the world in its suffering” and manifests God’s triumph over all that contradicts him. Radically, Moltmann “brings the dialectic of cross and resurrection within God’s own experience.”[226] Moltmann thus puts the cross at the center of his understanding of God: “The cross of the Son stands from eternity in the centre of the Trinity.”[227] God identifies himself over against all other gods at the cross; at the cross, he shows himself to be the God who is revealed in his opposite, in godforsakenness. And it is not the Son only whose co-suffering with the world is evident on the cross, but the Father as well: “The grief of the Father is here as important as the death of the Son.” He insists that “what happened on the cross was an event between God and God. It was a deep division in God himself, in so far as God abandoned God and contradicted himself, and at the same time a unity in God, in so far as God was at one with God and corresponded to himself.”[228] Moltmann also describes this as a loss and restoration of personal identity for the persons. The Son loses sonship by subjecting himself to abandonment, and the Father loses his fatherhood in losing the Son. But in the midst of that contradiction, they are united in love for the creation, a love that proceeds as the Spirit.[229]
Moltmann teaches that the persons of the Trinity are dependent on one another, and that they are mutually constituted by one another. As Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen points out, Moltmann denies that person can be reduced to relation, insisting instead that there “are no persons without relations, but there are no relations without persons.”[230] The persons of the Trinity “ex-ist totally in the other: the Father ex-ists by virtue of his love, as himself entirely in the Son; the Son, by virtue of his self-surrender, ex-ists as himself totally in the Father.”[231] Only in this way can trinitarian theology outwit the static categories of classical theism, too much hellenized: “Then only does the eternal life of the triune God become conceivable; its eternal vitality becomes conceivable too.”[232]
God must be co-sufferer because he is love: “He suffers from the love which is the superabundance and overflowing of his being.” Moreover, “a God who cannot suffer is poorer than any man. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering an injustice does not affect him. . . . But the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So he is also a loveless being.”[233] Moltmann addresses the problem of God’s freedom in terms of love: “God’s freedom can never contradict the truth which he himself is,” and that truth is love. The traditional idea of divine freedom is, Moltmann argues, based on the notion of domination and lordship, rather than the fundamental Christian revelation that God is love. God’s freedom consists in the friendship that he offers creatures, and in this sense Moltmann says, “God ‘needs’ the world and man. If God is love, then he neither will nor can be without the one who is his beloved.” More fully, “creation is the fruit of God’s longing for his Other and for that Other’s free response to the divine love. That is why the idea of the world is inherent in the nature of God himself from eternity. . . . And if God’s eternal being is love, then the divine love is also more blessed in giving than in receiving. God cannot find bliss in eternal self-love if selflessness is part of love’s very nature. God is in all eternity self-communicating love.”[234] For Moltmann, creation is an act of self-humiliation and self-limitation. God clears out to create space for the world to be: to make something “‘outside’ himself, the infinite God must have made room for this finitude beforehand, ‘in himself.’”[235] There is a sense in which creation itself is the zone of godforsakenness. The cross contradicts everything God is, and yet God is present there, embracing the godforsaken reality “to deliver from sin, suffering, and death.” The cross is an intratrinitarian event “in which Jesus suffers dying in abandonment by his Father and the Father suffers in grief the death of his Son.” At the point of their “deepest separation,” the Father and the Son are yet “united in love for the world,” and this love “spans the gulf which separates the godless and godforsaken from God and overcomes it.”[236]
Hegel and Moltmann both charge that the axiom of impassibility is indebted to Hellenism, a sign of the hellenization of the church and a departure from the radical personalism of the biblical portrait of God. Yet there are powerful arguments in favor of impassibility. For the fathers and medieval theologians, impassibility is of a piece with God’s unchangeability. God is not affected by things outside himself because God is unchangeably God, unchangeably himself. Unchangeability is not a limitation on God’s life, nor does it imply that God is lifeless and inert. Quite the contrary: just because God is full of life and energy, he is unchanging. Creatures can only do this, and then that, and then that. We have to “die” to one activity in order to take up another. God is living, and indeed he is life, and thus cannot not be doing all that he does and is. Because God is simple, his being is identical to all his attributes, and since his being is always in act, his attributes are always fully engaged. God does not lay aside doing justice in order to take up the task of mercy. He is always doing and being all that he is. How can a being who is always doing all, always being all, “change”?
When the fathers speak of “impassibility,” they are not claiming that God is incapable of action, that God’s life is “uneventful.” On the contrary, they are highlighting the sheer eventfulness of divine life. And, as a result, they are also emphasizing the responsiveness of God. God is not changeless in the sense that he is inert and unresponsive. He is changeless because he is infinitely responsive, because he is always and forever responding to everyone and everything. Humans can respond dexterously to visual and audible cues; we can sense the unsaid and the unseen and can act accordingly. But our sensitivity to these cues is limited and finite; God’s is infinite. We never experience a momentary shift in mood without God being involved and responding accordingly. In our anguish, he is there; and when in the next moment anguish turns to elation, he is still there. But this is not because he has changed; if he is always all that he is, then he is always responding to everything and everyone.[237]
Word on the Cross
Yet, this does not yet get to the heart of the theological issue. Plato, Parmenides, and the Stoics, after all, believed that God, or whatever they called their ultimate principle, was timeless and passionless, but they had not heard Yahweh’s grief over Israel’s rebellions in the wilderness nor learned of the incarnation of the Son. If the Son of God came in the flesh and was raised on a cross, and if the Son of God is all that Athanasius says he is, then God’s relation to time and flesh, his relation to creation and his ability to be acted upon, must be something different from anything the Greeks could have conceived. The defense of impassibility above to some extent infuses biblical conceptualities into the subject, but it does not yet arrive at an evangelization of metaphysics. We need to attend specifically to the cross. Christ, and him crucified, is the measure of metaphysics and theology, the measure of all.
Fortunately, the cross is just where Athanasius focuses his attention. His affirmation of impassibility is an evangelical affirmation. He does not flinch at the last moment. He assumes impassibility precisely in order to elucidate and preach the good news about the cross of the Word made flesh.
We can begin to see how by taking note of another recent theologian’s objections to impassibility. Robert Jenson has also objected to the axiom of impassibility and seen it to some degree as a product of a residual Hellenism. At the same time, Jenson works from and within Nicene orthodoxy rather than abandoning it. He notes that the creeds of the church gradually closed off all avenues of escape from the evangelical claim that God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself on the cross. Nicaea shut down the Arian effort to separate the suffering Christ from God, and Chalcedon closed off the Nestorian escape hatch, which would have made the Sufferer on the cross the “humanity” in isolation from the divinity. For his own part, Jenson starts from a “simpleminded beginning”: “If indeed the Christology is true whose slogan is that ‘one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh,’ then the God here referred to by ‘the Trinity’ is not impassible, in any use of the adjective that would occur to a native user of Greek, Latin, or English—or at least not to any such user who had mastered the relation of subject and predicate.” The qualifying phrase “in the flesh” is “indeed important,” but Jenson points out that it “does not displace the subject-object relation: with or without ‘in the flesh’ the subject of ‘suffered’ is God the Son/Logos.”[238] On the other hand, Jenson insists that it will not do to say that “the biblical God is ‘passible.’” According to Jenson, Moltmann follows Hegel down a blind alley. Luther’s righteous “outrage at Erasmus was in considerable part driven by insistence that God is not going to react to our bad behavior by withdrawing his promises, that he cannot be affected in this way.”[239]
Jenson argues that the question of passibility and impassibility must be asked and answered at different levels. Drawing on Origen’s exposition of Yahweh’s pity for Israel in Ezekiel 16 (in which Origen says, “ipse Pater non est impassibilis”), he asks, “Was God passible when he felt pity for the exposed newborn Jerusalem?” Yes, Jenson says, “since in fact he was affected and so manifested this dispositional property.” Was God also “impassible in his commitment to the wayward foundling?” Yes again; borrowing a musical analogy from Jeremy Begbie, Jenson argues that God is impassible even when he shows pity “since at this level of the narrative’s hyperbars he simply overrides all challenges to that commitment.” What about more generally: “Is God, considered as the subject of his total history with us, impassible? By the testimony of Scripture, he is indeed—in any plausible sense of the word.” But “happening upon a lost sheep” God is at the same time passible “in any plausible sense of the word.” What about God in himself, “abstracted from all such tales”? Is he, considered thus abstractly, passible or not? Here Jenson sniffs out a “pseudo-question, since the abstraction cannot be performed on the biblical God.” While we can reason about an immanent Trinity from the economy, we cannot “abstract” from the economic to the immanent, since one person of the immanent Trinity is identical to the person of Jesus, a person within the saving history. Thus we “cannot deny the hypostatic identity of the inner-triune relations, all of which have the Son as a pole, with narrative relations of the saving history.”[240] It is not that Jesus is a particular illustration of a more general principle of divine life. Because he is Word made flesh, Jesus displays divine life within a human life. Jesus is the key to answering the question of the impassible God.
Though Jenson rejects impassibility and Athanasius affirms it, in my judgment they have much the same aim. Jenson wants to redefine impassibility, unchangeability, and other “metaphysical” attributes of God as descriptions of his commitment to redeem and fulfill his creation. Athanasius, I think, already does something similar.
In part, many of the objections to impassibility arise from a fundamental misunderstanding of what is meant by impassibility in the Christian tradition and in Athanasius in particular. John Behr writes,
What is at stake for Athanasius is not whether Christ “felt” hunger, fear, and pain, whether he “really experienced” being human as we do, but the relationship between activity and passivity: Is Christ the active agent in this or the passive subject? “Suffering” here is to be understood in terms of “passivity,” being acted upon, rather than in terms of “feeling” or “experiencing.” In reverse, “impassibility” is not a lack of involvement, or an inability to change; if God is impassible, this means that he is not subject to anything, that he cannot be compelled.[241]
Thus the impassibility is “best understood in terms of the Word’s active, willing acceptance of our human condition.” Precisely because he is impassible, and willingly suffers all that we inescapably do, Jesus can “overturn the hold that it has on human beings.”[242] For Athanasius, the Word must experience passions to overcome them, but he must do it freely.[243]
Thus, according to Athanasius, the Word takes on flesh and the sufferings of the flesh that come along with it. He is not touched by them in his divine nature, but they are as much his own as the body is his own. The eternal Son, who is one with the Father, “appropriates” (idiopoieisthai) flesh, and because of this one may legitimately apply “human predications to the subject of ‘God the Word.’”[244] This is not merely “a manner of speaking.” We can say that the Word suffered in the flesh because the Word did in fact take flesh. In his fullest statement of this point, Athanasius writes,
When the flesh suffered, the Word was not external [ektos] to it; and therefore is the passion said to be His [autou legetai kai to pathos]: and when He did divinely His Father’s works, the flesh was not external to Him, but in the body itself did the Lord do them. . . . These things were so done, were so manifested, because He had a body, not in appearance, but in truth; and it became the Lord, in putting on human flesh, to put it on whole with the affections proper to it [tautēn meta tōn idiōn pathōn autēs holēn endysasthai]; that, as we say that the body was His own, so also we may say that the affections of the body were proper to Him alone, though they did not touch Him according to His Godhead. If then the body had been another’s, to him too had been the affections attributed; but if the flesh is the Word’s (for “the Word became flesh”), of necessity then the affections also of the flesh are ascribed to Him, whose the flesh is. And to whom the affections are ascribed, such namely as to be condemned, to be scourged, to thirst, and the cross, and death, and the other infirmities of the body, of Him too is the triumph and the grace. For this cause then, consistently and fittingly such affections are ascribed not to another, but to the Lord; that the grace also may be from Him, and that we may become, not worshippers of any other, but truly devout toward God, because we invoke no originate thing, no ordinary man, but the natural and true Son from God, who has become man, yet is not the less Lord and God and Savior. (Discourses 3.32)
As with everything pertaining to the incarnation, the Word takes on these sufferings for us, to make our sufferings lighter. Referring specifically to Jesus’s anguish in Gethsemane, Athanasius writes,
Wherefore of necessity when He was in a body 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, considered as the Word, who wept and was troubled, but it was proper to the flesh; and if too He besought that the cup might pass away, it was not the Godhead that was in terror, but this affection too was proper to the manhood. And that the words “Why have You forsaken Me?” are His, according to the foregoing explanations (though He suffered nothing, for the Word was impassible), is notwithstanding 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 very sufferings of the flesh, and free it from them. Whence neither can the Lord be forsaken by the Father, who is ever in the Father, both before He spoke, and when He uttered this cry. (Discourses 3.56)
The apparent double-talk of Athanasius is not double-talk at all. On the contrary, as Jenson recognizes, the Word is the subject of the sentence, “The Word suffered in the flesh,” and Athanasius knows that
what the human Body of the Word suffered, this the Word, dwelling in the body, ascribed to Himself, in order that we might be enabled to be partakers of the Godhead of the Word. And verily it is strange that He it was Who suffered and yet suffered not. Suffered, because His own Body suffered, and He was in it, which thus suffered; suffered not, because the Word, being by Nature God, is impassible. And while He, the incorporeal, was in the passible Body, the Body had in it the impassible Word, which was destroying the infirmities inherent in the Body. But this He did, and so it was, in order that Himself taking what was ours and offering it as a sacrifice, He might do away with it, and conversely might invest us with what was His, and cause the Apostle to say: “This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality.” (Letter to Epictetus 6)
He takes on flesh, which suffers terrors like all flesh. But he does not suffer these terrors in his divine nature, nor does he suffer them fruitlessly. He does not suffer simply to demonstrate his sympathy, his willingness to come alongside as co-sufferer. He suffers terrors so that we might be delivered from terror: “When He had become man, He had a flesh that was in terror. For the sake of this flesh He combined His own will with human weakness, that destroying this affection He might in turn make man undaunted in face of death” (Discourses 3.57). Though Jesus requests that the cup be removed, it is not, and he bows to the Father’s will, receiving the terrors of the flesh. By suffering that terror in the flesh, he overcame terror, a fact demonstrable in the lives and deaths of the martyrs. Flesh no longer shrinks from the cup of woe. Jesus’s flesh did not shrink, and that is the flesh the martyrs share (Discourses 3.57).
Athanasius’s account of the cross follows precisely these lines. One of the sharp Arian protests against the orthodox arose from Jesus’s cry of dereliction: “How can He be the own Word of the Father, without whom the Father never was, through whom He makes all things, as you think, who said upon the Cross ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’” (Discourses 3.26). Isaiah spoke accurately when he prophesied that the Savior would “carry” infirmities (Isa. 53:4). That is a stronger claim than the promise that the Lord would “heal.” Healing can be done from a distance, while the Word is “external to the body.” But bearing infirmity and sin requires that he “become man for us,” and more, “that the body which in Him bore them, was His own body; and, while He received no hurt Himself by ‘bearing our sins in His body on the tree,’ as Peter speaks, we men were redeemed from our own affections, and were filled with the righteousness of the Word” (Discourses 3.31).
In the final analysis, Athanasius responds to the Arian view of the incarnation with the argument he uses at the beginning of On the Incarnation. Jews and Greeks scorn the incarnation, but for Christians it is the power and wisdom of God at work. Attending to the human attributes of the incarnate Son leads the Arians to “low thoughts” of the Son, but the result should be the opposite. The incarnation shows that God is even more fully God, more fully Lord of his creation, than we might have dared to believe. Through the incarnation, “the thing which they, as men, rule out as impossible, He plainly shows to be possible; that which they deride as unfitting, his goodness makes most fit; and things which these wise-acres laugh at as ‘human’ He by His inherent might declares divine” (On the Incarnation 1). In the cross, God, the living God, the creating Word, demonstrates what it means to be God, the God of life whom death cannot hold or stop or even slow. Jesus could suffer triumphantly only because his flesh was God’s, only because the flesh was the proper flesh of the Word who is incapable of being terrified or defeated by pain or suffering. It was the flesh of the Word whose love no obstacle can block or frustrate, and thus in his suffering and death Jesus triumphs over death and suffering.
Conclusion
What is the world like? What is the ultimate nature of things? For Athanasius, I have argued throughout this volume, the answer to that metaphysical question always returns to Christ, the eternal Word of the Father who became flesh. The ultimate reality is the Creator God, the Father who creates and maintains all things through his own proper Word and Spirit. The ultimate reality of creation is from nothing, sustained and maintained only by the power of the Father’s Word. And the ultimate meaning and crux of history is the incarnation, the Word taking flesh to do the works that the Father sent him to do.
Athanasius, despite some infelicitous turns of phrase and tendentious arguments, does not think that the Son is playacting when he enters the world he created and sustains it in order to become a creature among creatures. The little word idios—proper—tells it all. The Word is idios to the Father, proper to him, as intimate and intrinsic to the Father’s being as any attributes of the Father. Nothing can be more intrinsic to the Father than his Word, Wisdom, radiance, expression. And then this Word, willingly and graciously, makes humanity idios to himself. Flesh is not eternally intrinsic to the Son’s being in the way that the Son is eternally intrinsic to the Father. The assumption, the “making-proper” (idiopoieisthai), of flesh is a free act and a product of will in a way that the existence of the Word is not a product of will. With that qualification, however, we can say that the flesh of the Word is now intrinsic to the Word’s being Word. Having assumed flesh for us, that flesh becomes a property of the Word, not an external possession or detached instrument, but as proper to the Word as his being the Word of the Father. That is what Athanasius means when he writes of an “impassible sufferer,” the impassible Word on the cross. Jesus’s death on the cross is the voluntary act of the Word who has taken all our anguish to himself and made it his.
Objections to impassibility often represent efforts to equalize the Word and the creature.[245] That is, to Athanasius, only another form of Arianism, a backdoor denial of the Word’s nature as Word of the Father. As such, it is also a threat to the gospel. Unless the Word is God come to us in flesh, then we are still in our sins, then there is no “it is finished” at the cross and no triumph over death. A Christ who is merely equal to us is not a saving Christ, and the Arian “gospel” is no gospel. The true gospel is a “rhetoric of reversal.”[246] That is, it reverses the terms of the Creator-creature distinction: the Creator becomes creature, the impassible suffers, so that passible creatures might triumph over death and suffering, so that the creature might be deified. For Athanasius, to say that “the impassible suffered” is simply to state the good news, that death has been trampled by this one death, that the corruptible has put on incorruption, the weak has put on strength, the dishonorable has been swallowed up in glory.