6. End

6. End

6

End

God Made Man, Man Made God

The grace of God is inherent in creation, because God is a God of goodness and kindness. God is not proud. He is a God of little things, who does not disdain to bring non-existents into being, who, with the gentleness of infinite power, sustains them in their fragility. But for Athanasius, creation is not the starting point of grace. Grace precedes creation. Even the incarnation, he intimates, has an origin before the creation, in that the Son was “founded” as incarnate Son before the foundation of the world (Discourses 2.75).^[247] If the Son was “founded” before the foundation of the world, we too were “founded” in him. Athanasius deploys Paul’s hymn to the electing God (Eph. 1) in an anti-Arian argument: “How then has He chosen us, before we came into existence, but that, as he says himself, in Him we were represented beforehand?” Further,

How at all, before men were created, did He predestinate us unto adoption, but that the Son Himself was “founded before the world,” taking on Him that economy which was for our sake? Or how, as the Apostle goes on to say, have we “an inheritance being predestinated,” but that the Lord Himself was founded “before the world,” inasmuch as He had a purpose, for our sakes, to take on Him through the flesh all that inheritance of judgment which lay against us, and we henceforth were made sons in Him? And how did we receive it “before the world was,” when we were not yet in being, but afterwards in time, but that in Christ was stored the grace which has reached us? (Discourses 2.76)

The language of Proverbs 8 about the Son being “founded” is thus not about the creation of the Son, but about the determination of the Father to send the Word in human flesh, a determination arrived at before the mountains or the deep were formed.

Therefore reason is there that the Word, on coming into our flesh, and being created in it as “a beginning of ways for His works,” is laid as a foundation according as the Father’s will was in Him before the world, as has been said, and before land was, and before the mountains were settled, and before the fountains burst forth; that, though the earth and the mountains and the shapes of visible nature pass away in the fullness of the present age, we on the contrary may not grow old after their pattern, but may be able to live after them, having the spiritual life and blessing which before these things have been prepared for us in the Word Himself according to election. For thus we shall be capable of a life not temporary, but ever afterwards abide and live in Christ; since even before this our life had been founded and prepared in Christ Jesus. (Discourses 2.76)

As we saw in chapter 4, this precreation grace of predestination is manifest from the beginning of creation. Creation itself is an act of grace; existence is a gift and depends on the continuing sustenance of the Word and the Spirit. Adam was the recipient of grace from the beginning, the grace of participation in the Spirit, the grace of the ordering Word, and the grace of the spoken word of a loving Father. Even in the midst of a world of death and sin, Israel remained in that grace throughout the history of the Old Testament. This grace is evident not only in the call of Abram and the promises given to the patriarchs, to Moses and to David, but also evident in the Lord’s providential oversight of Israel’s history. The Triune God orchestrated the history of Israel so that, like the creation itself, everything happened at just the right time. Just as God created things at just the right time, even so each event of the biblical history happened just when it was best: “Though He was able, even from the beginning in the time of Adam, or Noah, or Moses, to send His own Word, yet He sent Him not until the consummation of the ages (for this He saw to be good for the whole creation), so also things originated did He make when He would, and as was good for them” (Discourses 1.29).

God could have reversed the effects of sin by fiat, immediately after the fall, but this would not have been expedient. God does what is best for humanity. Not only in the incarnation but in all his actions in history, God has humanity’s best interests in view. “We must consider what was expedient for mankind,” Athanasius says, “and not what simply is possible with God.” To be sure, he could have sent a flood before instructing Noah to build an ark, but he did it after the ark was ready. He might have brought Israel out of Egypt with a word; he had no need of Moses, “but it profited to do it through Moses.” So too at the climax of the ages in the gift of the Son: “The Savior too might have come among us from the beginning, or on His coming might not have been delivered to Pilate; but He came ‘at the fullness of the ages’ (Gal. 4:4), and when sought for said, ‘I am He’ (John 18:5). For what He does, that is profitable for men, and was not fitting in any other way; and what is profitable and fitting, for that He provides.” Jesus is merely doing what his Father does when he insists that he ministers to people rather than seeking their ministry. With regard to the incarnation, the rationale of God’s timing is evident: “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” (Discourses 2.68). As we have seen in previous chapters, the grace of the new covenant is given “from within” the human race, and before this grace could be given intrinsically, Israel and the world had to be prepared for the human epiphany of the Word.

End of the Ages

For Athanasius, the incarnation marks the beginning of a new creation, the beginning of a new path for the world and for humanity. Explaining the phrase “beginning of ways” in Proverbs 8, he argues that it refers to the incarnation. “If a new creation has come to pass,” he observes, “some one must be first of this creation; now a man, made of earth only, such as we have become from the transgression, he could not be.” As there was a first man who set the world on the wrong track, there is one man who sets the world back to rights. The first creation had fallen into unfaithfulness, “and there was need of some one else to renew the first creation, and preserve the new which had come to be.” The “beginning” of the new creation, the archē, is Jesus, sent from the love of the Father, to create a new way. Because of Jesus, it becomes possible that “man might walk no longer according to that first creation, but there being as it were a beginning of a new creation, and with the Christ ‘a beginning of its ways,’ we might follow Him henceforth, who says to us, ‘I am the Way’” (Discourses 2.65).

The incarnation is not simply a remedy for human sin. It is truly the coming of a new creation, superior to the original creation. The Son is “created” in the incarnation, to share in the creature’s lot, in order to restore everything. “Before the works were made, the Son was ever, nor was there yet need that He should be created,” yet he became created after God’s works were created and “need arose afterwards of the Economy for their restoration.” Scripture points to this “condescension and assimilation to the works” in Proverbs 8, which says that the uncreated Wisdom was “created.” Isaiah prophesies the same: “And now thus says the Lord, who formed me from the womb to be His servant, to gather together Jacob unto Him and Israel, I shall be brought together and be glorified before the Lord” (Discourses 2.51). The Son is the fitting agent of this renewal, since “He Himself is Framer of the creation, and His works are evidently later than Himself.” Thus, “it became Him, being other than the works, nay rather their Framer, to take upon Himself their renovation, that, whereas He is created for us, all things may be now created in Him. For when He said ‘He created,’ He immediately added the reason, naming ‘the works,’ that His creation for the works might signify His becoming man for their renovation” (Discourses 2.53).

This new beginning involves a transition from shadowy types to the truth. Again, Athanasius’s argument is set in an anti-Arian polemic. If the Son is merely another among the originated things, he had no more authority or power to make this new way, to be the beginning of ways, than angels. Since he is the Son of the Father, he is “better and His acts better and transcendent.” What was revealed earlier was merely a “type,” but “now the truth has been manifested.” Hebrews provides Athanasius with many of the proof texts for the superiority of the new covenant: “‘By so much was Jesus made a surety of a better testament’ [7:22]; and again, ‘But now has He obtained a more excellent ministry, by how much also He is the Mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises’ [8:6]. And, ‘For the Law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did’ [7:19]. And again he says, ‘It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these’ [9:23].” If the covenant is so far better, it is because the mediator of the covenant is better than Moses and all the rest: “In the verse before us, then, and throughout, does he ascribe the word ‘better’ to the Lord, who is better and other than originated things. For better is the sacrifice through Him, better the hope in Him; and also the promises through Him, not merely as great compared with small, but the one differing from the other in nature, because He who conducts this economy, is ‘better’ than things originated” (Discourses 1.59).

The change effected by the incarnation is, for Athanasius, something that we might call an ontological change. Because the Son comes in a body and joins himself inseparably to human flesh that he makes his own, the new covenant is as much “better” than the old as the Son is “better” than earlier mediators. The first covenant came through angels, but “regarding the Word’s visitation in the flesh, and the Economy which He then sustained, he wished to show that He was not like those who had gone before Him.” Just as much as “He excelled in nature those who were sent afore by Him, by so much also the grace which came from and through Him was better than the ministry through Angels.” Angels came to demand fruit from Israel, but the Son comes to “forgive the debts and to transfer the vineyard.” Again the thrust of the argument is anti-Arian. If the covenant is so much better, the mediator must be too: “Certainly what the Apostle proceeds to say shows the excellence of the Son over things originate” (Discourses 1.59). But the argument works in reverse as well: since the mediator is better, the hope and achievement are so much the greater.

Human beings in the new covenant are capable of transcending the original Adamic nature in which they were made. As we have seen, Athanasius believes that Adam was created with a corruptible, unstable body directed by a mobile, equally unstable soul. Both soul and body were created ex nihilo, and so Adam was susceptible to change and decay, a decay that became all the more radical and insurmountable because of Adam’s sin. Bodies are good, but since human beings are created with bodies, they have the potential to turn from contemplation and love of God toward sensible things, and to seek gratification of bodily pleasure more than obedience to the Creator. Now, however, the Son has come in the flesh and has lent human flesh some of his own power and stability. Human beings can be delivered from corruption through the work of the Son.

Athanasius often describes this change in terms of the Johannine image of adoption. The Son is the only begotten Son, uniquely Son, God existing as Son, but through the incarnate Son, creatures created as men are made into sons, begotten of God, not merely formed by him. As Athanasius notes, “the term ‘begot’ is here as elsewhere expressive of a Son, as He says by the Prophet, ‘I begot sons and exalted them’; and generally, when the Scripture wishes to signify a son, it does so, not by the term ‘created,’ but undoubtedly by that of ‘begot.’” This is what John means when he writes, “‘He gave to them power to become children of God, even to them that believe in His Name; which were begotten not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God’” (Discourses 2.59). Athanasius highlights a remarkable Johannine formulation: the same John who declares that the Word is eternal God with God, only begotten God (or Son), utterly unique, uses the same language of “begetting” to describe the sonship of those who are joined to the flesh of the Son. One might gloss John in an Athanasian idiom: the Son who is begotten by nature took flesh so that human beings might participate by grace in his begotten-ness.

The Son who is the “only-begotten” of the Father from all eternity becomes the “firstborn,” not the first one created but the firstborn of a new creation:

He is called “First-born among many brethren,” because of the relationship of the flesh, and “First-born from the dead,” because the resurrection of the dead is from Him and after Him; and “First-born of the whole creation,” because of the Father’s love to man, which brought it to pass that in His Word not only “all things consist,” but the creation itself, of which the Apostle speaks, “waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God, shall be delivered” one time “from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” Of this creation thus delivered, the Lord will be First-born, both of it and of all those who are made children, that by His being called first, those that come after Him may abide, as depending on the Word as a beginning. (Discourses 2.63)

Athanasius thus identifies the neat chiasm of redemptive history, not only in his well-known notion that “God became man that man might become God” and the Son was created body so that body could be renewed and deified (Discourses 2.47), but in his play with “being” and “being-made.” The Son exists first, then is made man. But human beings are made first and then are raised up to become sons in the Son (Discourses 2.53).

And here too the cautious distinction is well kept up, for first he says “become,” because they are not called sons by nature but by adoption; then he says “were begotten,” because they too had received at any rate the name of son. But the people, as says the Prophet, “despised” their Benefactor. But this is God’s kindness to man, that of whom He is Maker, of them according to grace He afterwards becomes Father also; becomes, that is, when men, His creatures, receive into their hearts, as the Apostle says, “the Spirit of His Son, crying, Abba, Father.” And these are they who, having received the Word, gained power from Him to become sons of God; for they could not become sons, being by nature creatures, otherwise than by receiving the Spirit of the natural and true Son. Wherefore, that this might be, “The Word became flesh,” that He might make man capable of Godhead. This same meaning may be gained also from the Prophet Malachi, who says, “Hath not One God created us? Have we not all one Father?” (Mal. 2:10). For first he puts “created,” next “Father,” to show, as the other writers, that from the beginning we were creatures by nature, and God is our Creator through the Word; but afterwards we were made sons, and thenceforward God the Creator becomes our Father also. (Discourses 2.59)

This radical new beginning in the midst of history is the deeper point behind Athanasius’s frequent insult that the Arians are “Jews,” which in many instances looks like sheer name-calling. As noted in chapter 1, when he talks about Jews, Athanasius frequently employs the harsh unchristian rhetoric of his time. But he is making a serious theological point. The theological root of the charge is that the Arians cannot account for the new beginning of the world. Since they do not believe that the Son is God himself, they cannot believe that Jesus’s appearance makes all that much difference. They are “Jews” in the sense that they remain trapped in a world before incarnation, the “lesser” world of created mediators and extrinsic grace (cf. Discourses 3.28).

Christ Died for Us

As we have noted in earlier chapters, there are hints that Athanasius sees this advance for humanity as a completion of the original destiny of Adam and creation, rather than as an extrinsic telos super-added to the original creation. Humanity deviated from that destiny because of sin, but the impassible God never wavered, and in the incarnation the Son comes to complete the creation and to complete the deification of man, not merely to deliver it from evil. Picking up a reference to John 17:14, Athanasius explains:

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)

Created being is fragile and unstable, and can be made stable and persevere in the grace given if it is more deeply rooted, internally rooted, in God’s own life. That is what the incarnation accomplishes: those created by God become founded by God; those already sustained by their participation in the Spirit now share in the Spirit of the risen Christ; and those who are in the flesh are joined to the flesh that is joined to the eternal Son, who will lose nothing of what he has been given.^[248]

As was noted in the previous chapter, on Athanasius’s account, the incarnation is entirely for us. The flesh of the Son does not promote or exalt the Son, since he shared the glory of the Father from the beginning. Rather, the Son takes flesh to promote the flesh, to give it a new origin and new life, to make a new beginning for humanity in the world. The Son became man not so that God could become more God; he became man in order to make men gods. Since the Son had all glory before the creation, “it follows that He had not promotion from His descent, but rather Himself promoted the things which needed promotion; and if He descended to effect their promotion, therefore He did not receive in reward the name of the Son and God, but rather He Himself has made us sons of the Father, and deified men by becoming Himself man” (Discourses 1.38). The Word had no need, and so he does not humble himself for the sake of any reward that he might receive (Discourses 1.40). Thus “the Word was not impaired in receiving a body, that He should seek to receive a grace, but rather He deified that which He put on, and more than that, ‘gave’ it graciously to the race of man” (Discourses 1.42). “As Christ died and was exalted as man,” Athanasius writes, “so, as man, is He said to take what, as God, He ever had, that even such a grant of grace might reach to us” (Discourses 1.42).

This deification of humanity is not possible unless the Son is truly proper to the Father, and the flesh truly proper to him. No “external” (ouk ontos ektos) flesh could do the trick (Discourses 1.45). Virginia Burrus has suggested that for Athanasius the incarnation functions as a blood transfusion into the human race. The human race is corruptible, and under the dominion of death and sin is heading toward utter dissolution. Divine medication is injected through the flesh of the Son, and this begins to solidify the race and put things back together.^[249] It is true that Athanasius sometimes writes this way. Yet this does not reflect the key features of his thought. It is not merely the Son’s assumption of flesh that deifies but the whole set of actions performed by the Son in the flesh. Everything he does, he does for us, and the restoration of the human race is the end point of his life, death, and resurrection.

Expounding on Psalm 45, Athanasius insists that the Son is anointed with the Spirit for us (Discourses 1.46), so that his body could be sanctified by the Spirit, the body that is his: “He who, as the Word and Radiance of the Father, gives to others, now is said to be sanctified, because now He has become man, and the Body that is sanctified is His. From Him then we have begun to receive the unction and the seal” (Discourses 1.47). The incarnation is an ordination to priesthood analogous to the ordination of Aaron, but this ordination by itself does not accomplish atonement unless the priest offers sacrifice (Discourses 2.7–9). The uncreated Son was created as man, created for us, so that we might be recreated in him.

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, as 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 climax of this series of actions “for us” was the Son’s ascent on the cross, equally for us. Through the cross he defeated death and defanged the serpent, removing his poison. “The Word being clothed in the flesh,” Athanasius writes, “every bite of the serpent began to be utterly staunched from out it; and whatever evil sprung from the motions of the flesh, to be cut away, and with these death also was abolished, the companion of sin.” This is what Jesus meant when he declared of his death, “The prince of this world comes, and finds nothing in Me” (John 14:30) and what John meant when he explains, “For this end was He manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8) (Discourses 2.69).

How does the cross achieve this? Athanasius’s answer to that question does not easily fit into the traditional categories of atonement theology. He certainly sees Jesus as a representative of the human race and as a substitute for Adamic humanity. Yet he does not express this in terms of Jesus vicariously receiving the punishment we deserve. Instead, he tends to think in liturgical categories. Seeing that humanity was under the dominion of death, the Son was full of pity and compassion and so took on a body. His body was like all human bodies mortal, and so he too “surrendered His body to death in place of all, and offered to the Father” (On the Incarnation 8).^[250] Like a king who comes to the rescue of a city that has been attacked by robbers, the Son “by the offering of His own body . . . abolished the death which they had incurred, and corrected their neglect by His own teaching” (On the Incarnation 10).

When we read On the Incarnation with its companion treatise, Against the Pagans, it becomes evident that the contrast of Adamic and redeemed humanity is a contrast between idolatry and true worship. As human beings turn from God toward sensible things, they begin to worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator, and this turn to the creature is manifested most plainly in the practice of idolatry, literally, worship of created objects—stones, statues, golden calves. Jesus is the new Adam, the beginning of a new race, because he offers the first act of true worship to the Father. By the Spirit communicated through baptism, men and women are caught up in that great liturgical offering, pulled from their obsession with the creation and their worship of idols and turned again to the living God. The Son, we might say, seizes humanity in the incarnation and in the cross entices it toward the heavenly sanctuary to worship the Father.

At times Athanasius explains the cross in terms of debt. The Son “assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all” (On the Incarnation 9). All men owe a debt of death: “All men were due to die,” and the Word came in mortal flesh in order to “settle man’s account with death and free him from the primal transgression.” Because the Word’s body was capable of death, he offered it in death, but because it was the body of the incorruptible Word, it could not remain in corruption. Thus “it happened that two opposite marvels took place at once: the death of all was consummated in the Lord’s body; yet, because the Word was in it, death and corruption were in the same act utterly abolished.” Death was unavoidable “that the due of all might be paid” (On the Incarnation 20).^[251]

Whatever the “mechanics” of the transaction of the cross, the effect is evident. By his death, the Son overcomes death, and he overcomes death precisely in the flesh. As noted, because the Word is “in” the flesh that is offered on the cross, “death and corruption were . . . utterly abolished” (On the Incarnation 20). Hebrews 2:14–15 plays a crucial role in Athanasius’s treatment of the effects of the cross. In the condition of sin and corruption, the human race is dominated by the fear of death. But through the cross, the Son has destroyed the one who has power over death, the devil, and thus delivered “them who all their lifetime were enslaved by the fear of death” (On the Incarnation 20). As Hebrews 2:14–15 makes clear, the triumph of the Son over death and his liberation of the human race from fear of death is accomplished by the Son’s triumph over the devil, the one with power over death. Following Johannine hints (John 12:32), Athanasius argues that the very form of Jesus’s execution signifies its purpose. He is lifted up into the air, the realm of fallen angels and demons and devils, so that he can conquer them on their own ground. By being lifted up in the air and defeating the demons, Jesus is also making a way for us, a way of return to the Father.

Athanasius gives a great deal of attention to the cross and its effects, but he does not neglect the rest of the story of the gospel. Jesus went to the cross as the incarnate Word, with flesh subject to death, but also as the Word, who was the Lord of life. Death could not hold him. In fact, the resurrection was already implicit in the cross: “Our resurrection is stored up” in the cross (anastasis hēmōn en autō apokeitai; Discourses 1.43). Rather than a transfusion, Athanasius sees the incarnation of the Son as the beginning of a rescue operation, the Son taking flesh to take it to the grave and raise it up again. It is

as if some son, when the servants were lost, and in the hands of the enemy by their own carelessness, and need was urgent, were sent by his father to succor and recover them, and on setting out were to put over him the like dress with them, and should fashion himself as they, lest the capturers, recognizing him as the master, should take to flight and prevent his descending to those who were hidden under the earth by them; and then were any one to inquire of him, why he did so, were to make answer, “My Father thus formed and prepared me for his works,” while in thus speaking, he neither implies that he is a servant nor one of the works, nor speaks of the beginning of His origination, but of the subsequent charge given him over the works—in the same way the Lord also, having put over Him our flesh, and “being found in fashion as a man,” if He were questioned by those who saw Him thus and marveled, would say, “The Lord created Me the beginning of His ways for His works,” and “He formed Me to gather together Israel.” (Discourses 2.52)

Athanasius thinks that the exaltation of the Son in Philippians 2 might refer to the resurrection. All other men are born in Adam and under the dominion of death. Jesus, however, the man from heaven, was “not held under death.” Thus, “though He humbled Himself, yielding His own Body to come unto death, in that it was capable of death, yet He was highly exalted from earth, because He was God’s Son in a body” (en sōmati huion tou theou; Discourses 1.44). Death is proper (idios) to human nature, and the Son put on flesh to be put to death in flesh, so that he could quicken all men by his proper power (Discourses 1.44).

This humiliation is the beginning of a process of exaltation and deification. The Word humbled himself so that he could raise up our humanity. Due to death and sin, “man’s nature [was] in want, because of the humble estate of the flesh and of death.” Just as he took our flesh and offered himself to the Father, so also “as man, He is said because of us and for us to be highly exalted, that as by His death we all died in Christ, so again in the Christ Himself we might be highly exalted, being raised from the dead, and ascending into heaven.” He goes as our forerunner, better than Aaron and the priests of old. For the Son, this is just a return to where he had been, as “Lord and Framer of the heavens.” For us, though, everything changes: “For us therefore is that present exaltation written” (Discourses 1.41). In his ascension, the Son took our flesh into heavenly places. Angels continuously worship the Triune God, but they are astonished when human flesh is exalted to heaven and placed at the right hand of the Father: “Whereas the powers in heaven, both Angels and Archangels, were ever worshipping the Lord, as they are now worshipping Him in the Name of Jesus, this is our grace and high exaltation, that even when He became man, the Son of God is worshipped, and the heavenly powers will not be astonished at seeing all of us, who are of one body with Him, introduced into their realms” (Discourses 1.42).

Temples of the Spirit

Pentecost is as crucial to Athanasius’s account as the cross and the resurrection. The Son receives the Spirit for us, as man, anointed so that we can come to share in the Spirit. He is not anointed to become God, nor to become king, since “He had the Kingdom eternally, existing as God’s Image.” He was anointed for us. Athanasius draws a typological analogy between the “becoming king” that happened with the coronation and anointing of Israel’s kings and the “becoming Savior” that occurs when Jesus is anointed with the antitypical anointing of the Spirit: “The Israelitish kings, upon their being anointed, then became kings, not being so before, as David, as Hezekiah, as Josiah, and the rest; but the Savior on the contrary, being God, and ever ruling in the Father’s Kingdom, and being Himself He that supplies the Holy Ghost, nevertheless is here said to be anointed, that, as before, being said as man to be anointed with the Spirit, He might provide for us men, not only exaltation and resurrection, but the indwelling and intimacy of the Spirit” (Discourses 1.46). As the Old Testament types are fulfilled in the antitype of Christ, so the great archetype and antitype impresses his character on us.

With the presence of the Spirit, redemption is a trinitarian action. We are made children of God by the incarnation of the Son, who comes from the Father, but this is not realized except as we participate in the grace of the Spirit. Creatures participate in the Spirit “naturally,” but Athanasius insists that there is a different and full share in the Spirit that comes through the agency of the incarnate Son. We come to share in the perichoretic fellowship of the Triune God and know that we share in that life through the gift of the Spirit (1 John 4:13). Thus, “because of the grace of the Spirit which has been given to us, in Him we come to be, and He in us; and since it is the Spirit of God, therefore through His becoming in us, reasonably are we, as having the Spirit, considered to be in God, and thus is God in us” (Discourses 3.24). In our corruption and sin, we are strangers and far off (xenoi kai makran), but through sharing in the Spirit we are brought near and “knit into the Godhead” (Discourses 3.24). Through the Spirit, we come to love Christ, and as lovers of Christ we become Christ-bearers, a point that Athanasius makes in a cleverly chiastic formula: we are “lovers of Christ and Christ-bearers” (hoi philochristoi kai christophoroi; Discourses 3.45). Again, the emphasis is on the transition from an “extrinsic” to an “intrinsic” gift of grace. All things share in the Spirit, or they would have no being at all. But not all creatures are indwelt by the Son through the Spirit. All things are animated by the Spirit; not all things are filled with the Spirit.

Through the gift of the Spirit, Jesus himself is a human temple, bearing the indwelling Spirit, and so prepares our flesh also to be a temple of the Spirit: “It is very plain that the Spirit’s descent on Him in Jordan was a descent upon us, because of His bearing our body. And it did not take place for promotion of the Word, but again for our sanctification, that we might share His anointing, and of us it might be said, ‘Do you not know that you are God’s Temple, and the Spirit of God dwells in you’” (Discourses 1.47). Because of the Son, we have become temples, that is, places of true worship of the true God. “The fact that the Lord, even when come in human body and called Jesus, was worshipped and believed to be God’s Son, and that through Him the Father was known, shows,” Athanasius believes, “that not the Word, considered as the Word, received this so great grace, but we.” Given “our relationship to His Body we too have become God’s temple, and in consequence are made God’s sons, so that even in us the Lord is now worshipped, and beholders report, as the Apostle says, that God is in them of a truth” (Discourses 1.43). Human beings in sin turn to idols and become “places” of false worship. By the work of the Son and the Spirit, we are reconstituted as temples of the living God, turned in worship to the Father.

More specifically, the Spirit is the power by which the incarnate Son casts out demons. In themselves, humans do not have dominion over the demons but rather are subject to them. But through the Spirit that comes to us through the incarnate Son, we are given this divine power to cast out demons and trample them. In the Psalms, David teaches that “no otherwise should we have partaken the Spirit and been sanctified, but that the Giver of the Spirit, the Word Himself, has spoken of Himself as anointed with the Spirit for us.” As a result, we “securely received it, He being said to be anointed in the flesh; for the flesh being first sanctified in Him, and He being said, as man, to have received for its sake, we have the sequel of the Spirit grace, receiving ‘out of His fullness’” (Discourses 1.50). This Spirit gives us a share in the Son’s conquest of demons. The Son always had power over demons, a power that Satan recognized in the first encounters between Jesus and the devil in the wilderness. The Son did not have to gain such power, except as he gains it for us:

And again, that what He said that He had received, that He possessed before receiving it, appears from 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 sins, 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. And all this He did, not waiting till He should receive, but being “possessed of power.” From all this it is plain that 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)

In a sense, the Son takes on flesh to make flesh capacious enough to receive the Spirit. Because of the incarnation, human flesh is stretched enough to hold the Word, and by union with that flesh, our flesh is stretched to hold the flood of the Spirit that flows from him. By taking flesh, the Word made flesh capable of bearing the Word. Because “the ministry through Him has become better” than the law (Rom. 8:3), he made “the flesh capable of the Word; He made us walk, no longer according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (Discourses 1.60).

Theopoiesis

This is the reality that Athanasius describes as “deification,” or “making-God” (theopoiēsis), something he also calls “son-making” (huiopoioumetha; Discourses 1.34). This has nothing to do with overturning the Creator-creature distinction or erasing the difference between the eternal Son and human beings, between the Son by nature and children by grace. Athanasius expended much of his theological energy erecting and maintaining the necessary walls between God and creation. It is not plausible that he would suddenly dispense with this labor in his doctrine of deification. For Athanasius, theopoiesis means that human beings are brought into the communion of Father, Son, and Spirit by the incarnation of the Son and the gift of the Spirit, and having been introduced into that communion we begin to share divine attributes in a creaturely fashion. Fragmented human beings are given integrity; changeable human beings are made stable; mortal human beings are made immortal; human beings subjected to passions transcend their passions. Through the incarnation and the gift of the Spirit from the exalted and still incarnate Son, human flesh takes on the qualities of divinity, and human beings created after the image of God become ever more transparent images of God.

Again, Athanasius’s doctrine is typically set within a polemical context. The Arian Christ is incapable of deifying creatures. If the Son is not eternal Son, he cannot make sons; if he is not eternal God, he cannot be the god-maker: “What then was before this, if then He was exalted, and then began to be worshipped, and then was called Son, when He became man? For He seems Himself not to have promoted the flesh at all, but rather to have been Himself promoted through it, if, according to their perverseness, He was then exalted and called Son, when He became man” (Discourses 1.38). Arianism amounts to an affirmation of the apotheosis of man, rather than the condescension and grace of God. The gospel is not about a Son who is rewarded with godhood but is about the God who becomes man to deify us (Discourses 1.39). Arian Christology fails here because it undermines the trajectory of the gospel narrative. The gospel is this: God became man so that man might become God; the Creator was created so that creatures might be joined to the Creator. Arian Christology cannot tell such a story but tells only a story of the Creator sending a high creature to rescue creatures and place them somewhat nearer to the Creator. The Arian Son cannot lead creatures behind the veil and into the divine fellowship because he is not part of it, since, in the end, there is no divine fellowship to be part of. The Arian Christ might look accessible and cuddly, but in fact, he exists precisely to keep the Creator God at a distance from us. The true living Word of the Father, though, is proper to the Father and makes flesh proper to himself so that we might become, by grace, “proper” to the life of God, internal to the divine fellowship, human beings fulfilled in our humanity by deification.

Deification in Athanasius’s telling does not involve an ascent beyond embodied existence any more than it involves transcendence of creatureliness. Deification is about proper use of flesh, not about the destruction of flesh. Though he does not rely on it, Athanasius’s thinking here is consistent with Paul’s emphasis in Romans 6, where he moves from a declaration of baptismal union with Christ in his death and resurrection to the exhortation to offer the members of our bodies as instruments of righteousness. That is what Athanasius is after: embodied human beings whose bodily parts are used for righteous purposes. Just as the Word took on flesh, so by the Spirit the flesh of Christians is devoted to right action. We are able to share in these divine perfections because he took a body and because we have become his body.

For the grace which the Son gives from the Father, that the Son Himself is said to receive; and the exaltation, which the Son bestows from the Father, with that the Son is Himself exalted. For He who is the Son of God, became Himself the Son of Man; and, as Word, He gives from the Father, for all things which the Father does and gives, He does and supplies through Him; and as the Son of Man, He Himself is said after the manner of men to receive what proceeds from Him, because His Body is none other than His, and is a natural recipient of grace, as has been said. For He received it as far as His man’s nature was exalted; which exaltation was its being deified. But such an exaltation the Word Himself always had according to the Father’s Godhead and perfection, which was His. (Discourses 1.45)

Through the Son’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, and through our union with his risen flesh, we are made—in a remarkable formulation—“natural recipients of grace” (to physin echon tou dechesthai tēn charin; Discourses 1.45). Grace is not alien and “supernatural.” It comes from outside, that is, from the Word, who is not a creature; but it comes from outside in and so becomes constitutive of our existence as creatures. Because the Spirit and his gifts have been poured out within us, we are naturalized to grace.

Athanasius’s use of the light-radiance paradigm provides another description of deification. The Son is the radiance of the Father, proper to the eternal light, and thus the grace of the Father must be bestowed through the Son. This is evident in the baptismal formula, since we are baptized not only into the name of the Father, but also into a share in the Son and the Spirit.

Since the course of the discussion has led us also to mention holy Baptism, it is necessary to state, as I think and believe, that the Son is named with the Father, not as if the Father were not all-sufficient, not without meaning, and by accident; but, since He is God’s Word and own Wisdom, and being His Radiance, is ever with the Father, therefore it is impossible, if the Father bestows grace, that He should not give it in the Son, for the Son is in the Father as the radiance in the light. For, not as if in need, but as a Father in His own Wisdom has God founded the earth, and made all things in the Word which is from Him, and in the Son confirms the Holy Laver. For where the Father is, there is the Son, and where the light, there the radiance; and as what the Father works, He works through the Son, and the Lord Himself says, “What I see the Father do, that do I also”; so also when baptism is given, whom the Father baptizes, him the Son baptizes; and whom the Son baptizes, he is consecrated in the Holy Ghost. And again as when the sun shines, one might say that the radiance illuminates, for the light is one and indivisible, nor can be detached, so where the Father is or is named, there plainly is the Son also; and is the Father named in Baptism? Then must the Son be named with Him. (Discourses 2.41)

The grace of the Father’s light and the Son’s radiance form one grace, and this grace is the one grace that dwells in those who are united to the flesh of the Son. The Son comes with the Father and makes “Our abode” in him (John 14:23). That is how it must be, since “the light must be with the ray, and the radiance must be contemplated together with its own light” (Discourses 2.42). Deification is thus illumination—“illumination” not only in the sense that our darkened intellects become illuminated but also in the sense that our flesh begins to shine with the light of God. Illumination means that we are made into the image of the Image, the Image that is the radiant image of the light that is the Father. In the Radiance, we are made radiant. Drawing on the account of Moses “horned” with the reflected glory of the Lord, Athanasius says that one who has studied the Scriptures “glitters with the sublime beams of the most high God.”^[252]

Deification is also completion, realization of the created destiny of humanity and creation. The Son “simply and without any condition is in the Father,” a position he has “by nature.” For human beings, though, “it is not natural,” and therefore we need “an image and example.” The Father and the Son provide that model of human perfection. When Jesus compares the perichoretic unity of Father and Son to that of the disciples (“You, Father, are in Me, and I in You”; John 17:21), he is saying that “unless I had come and borne this their body, no one of them had been perfected, but one and all had remained corruptible.” Jesus’s prayer to the Father is that he would “grant to them Your Spirit, that they too in It may become one, and may be perfected in Me.” Through the perfecting of believers, it becomes apparent that the Father’s “Word has sojourned among them; and the world seeing them perfect and full of God, will believe altogether that You have sent Me, and I have sojourned here.” In short, Jesus works and prays so that “men, redeemed from sin, no longer remain dead; but being deified, have in each other, by looking at Me, the bond of charity” (Discourses 3.23).

Deification does involve gaining knowledge. The Son, as we have seen, shared in the ignorance of the flesh so that he could bring flesh to know God, to share in God’s knowledge (Discourses 3.48). Through the incarnation, the body becomes a body of wisdom, an organ of wisdom through being made god. When Luke and Hebrews speak of the advance in the wisdom and knowledge of the eternal Wisdom and Knowledge, that advance cannot be the Word’s as Word. He takes flesh and advances the flesh, so that the flesh takes on the Wisdom that He is, and participates in it. “Neither then was the advance the Word’s, nor was the flesh Wisdom, but the flesh became the body of Wisdom.” Wisdom did not advance “in respect of Itself; but the manhood advanced in Wisdom, transcending by degrees human nature, and being deified, and becoming and appearing to all as the organ of Wisdom for the operation and the shining forth of the Godhead.” Thus “the advance is of the human nature” (Discourses 3.53).

Through all this, Athanasius says, human beings transcend their humanity. That might sound as if we are elevated beyond creaturehood, as if to “become gods” we must cease to be men. That is not what Athanasius means. He means, on the one hand, deliverance from sin, but, on the other hand, he is also talking about the maturation and completion of humanity. Creation is good from the beginning, but creation is not perfected from the beginning. Creatures are made temporal and hence changeable, precisely so they can advance beyond the childish state in which they were first created.

Concretely, what is involved in this “transcendence” of Adamic human nature through deification? Human beings are created passible, subject to external forces, liable to be derailed from lives of faithful obedience by fear of pain and death or expectation of pleasure. Deification is a triumph over human passions, which is possible because the Son took our passions on himself and delivered flesh from them (Discourses 3.32). The Son delivered us from the passions and limits of flesh in taking those passions and limits as his own, so that we might come to resemble the impassible God. Since the Word “appropriated [idiopoieisthai] what pertains to the flesh, no longer do these things touch the body, because of the Word who has come in it.” Instead, “they are destroyed by Him, and henceforth men no longer remain sinners and dead according to their proper affections, but having risen according to the Word’s power, they abide ever immortal and incorruptible” (Discourses 3.33). Again, Athanasius develops this in the context of an anti-Arian polemic. Only an impassible, divine Son can make us impassible in the flesh: “While He Himself, being impassible in nature, remains as He is, not harmed by these affections, but rather obliterating and destroying them, men, their passions as if changed and abolished in the Impassible, henceforth become themselves also impassible and free from them for ever” (Discourses 3.34).

This does not mean that deified humans lack feeling. It means that they are not subjected to and enslaved by their feelings. They are determined by their soul’s fixed orientation to the unchangeable God, which directs the bodily actions toward God. It means that, like their Creator, no obstacle can frustrate their burning love for God and for others. They are impassible because of the overwhelming force of their passion to love and serve the Father and his Word. What does an impassible human look like? For Athanasius, he or she looks like a martyr.

Humans were created mutable. Human beings are never still, never one thing for very long. As a result, anything offered and given to human beings is likely to be forgotten and lost, as Adam lost the graces given to him at the beginning. If grace is not only to be given but to be retained, it requires a more stable foundation than human nature as such. In this sense too, the incarnation and work of the Son have “deified” man, providing the basis for human beings to mimic the divine immutability and faithfulness: “And as we said that He suffered in the flesh, and hungered in the flesh, and was fatigued in the flesh, so also reasonably may He be said to have advanced in the flesh; for neither did the advance, such as we have described it, take place with the Word external to the flesh, for in Him was the flesh which advanced and His is it called, and that as before, that man’s advance might abide and fail not, because of the Word which is with it” (Discourses 3.53).

Finally, human nature is mortal, and in the condition of sin is fearful of its mortality. Deification is liberation from the fear of death, which is essentially a human form of immortality, to be consummated at the resurrection. Deliverance from death manifests itself in human overcoming of the passions of fear and timidity, a triumph that must, on Athanasius’s premises, be manifest in flesh, in bodily action, and not simply in intellectual ascent. On the Incarnation points to the lives and deaths of martyrs as evidence that the Spirit of the incarnate Son, the Spirit of the crucified and risen deliverer, is beginning to pervade the human race: “Is it a slight indication of the Savior’s victory over [death], when boys and young girls who are in Christ look beyond this present life and train themselves to die? Every one is by nature afraid of death and of bodily dissolution; the marvel of marvels is that he who is enfolded in the faith of the cross despises this natural fear and for the sake of the cross is no longer cowardly in the face of it” (On the Incarnation 28). Is it possible to doubt Christ’s “conquest of death” after “so many martyrdoms in Christ and such daily scorn of death by His truest servants” (On the Incarnation 28)?

Whole societies had been devoted to death, violence, and murderous competition. Now all the deathliness that has corrupted human existence from within is being overcome in the Spirit. Barbarians “are naturally savage in their habits,” and while they sacrifice to idols, “they rage furiously against each other.” As soon as they hear the teaching of Christ, “they turn from fighting to farming, and instead of arming themselves with swords extend their hands in prayer” (On the Incarnation 52). Bodily actions change, as Christ, the one who fulfills the typoi of the prophets, impresses his image back onto the human race: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into sickles, and nation shall not take sword against nation, neither shall they learn any more to wage war” (Isa. 2:4, quoted in On the Incarnation 52).

Remade according to the Pattern

To be a Christian is to be joined in the Spirit to the flesh appropriated by the Son of God. Because the Son offered human flesh as a suitable sacrifice to the Father, he has overcome death, the demons, and everything else that stands in the way of human perfection. Jesus has dispelled death and demons, and hence he has dispersed the fear of death that made slaves of the human race before the incarnation. The demons who occupied the air have been cast down, and now we have the liberty to pass by them and ascend to heaven. Human flesh has been taken up into the life of God, and the life and light of God now dwell in flesh, so it is now possible for those who share in the life of the incarnate Son to overcome fleshly desires, to turn from the creation to the Creator, and to suppress fleshly passions. We can make all these same points in terms of “typology.” Christ is the image of God, and as the Father imprinted that image on creation and humanity at the beginning, so he is re-impressing that image from the inside through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The typos is imprinted on us again. There is an aesthetic dimension to this: God, the great artist of creation, who impresses his beautiful image everywhere and in everything, does not give up when creation gets marred by sin and decay. He returns to reshape the world, especially the human race, in his image.

Human beings are not remade and fulfilled through sheer passive reception. According to Athanasius, the Christian life is a life of strenuous effort, renunciation, and voluntary self-control, as well as a grateful reception of a gift. Though he nowhere works out the details of this process, he would likely express the pattern in the words of Paul: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12–13). Because of the work of the Spirit of the Son, we are to labor toward perfection. The Son is Son by nature and thus does what he sees the Father doing as an expression of his essential being. We become sons by grace, and our growth in sonship comes about through grace-empowered effort, through imitation (mimēsis).^[253]

Athanasius inherited an ascetic Alexandrian spirituality that emphasized the priority of contemplation and knowledge.^[254] Sin produced ignorance of God, and the life of the Christian was seen as a life of contemplation in order to restore the knowledge lost in the fall. As might be expected, this highly intellectual spirituality was not for everyone, and earlier Alexandrian theologians accordingly mixed their intellectual asceticism with a gradation and ranking of Christian living. For the Alexandrians, there were several ranks of Christians, from the contemplatives at the height to the comparatively ignorant and incurious laypersons at the bottom.

Athanasius works within this framework but modifies it considerably on both of these points. In place of knowledge, Athanasius emphasizes the development of virtue. This is partly based on anthropological differences. Origen had taught that human beings were initially sheer minds that were later infused into bodies, but for Athanasius, the body is of the essence of being human. Bodies should be controlled by the mind, and the body’s passions must be overcome. But bodies themselves—including, as we have seen, bodily emissions—are part of God’s original, good creation. Given his emphasis on bodies and on the development of virtue, it is natural that Athanasius would also modify the hierarchy that he inherited from earlier Alexandrian teachers. There is still a hierarchy, with ascetic athletes like Antony at the top, but the difference between an Antony and a lay member of the church of Alexandria is “only in degree, not in fundamental character.” Ascetic perfection is not mandatory for all Christians; “a life of moderate virtue was sufficient.”^[255]

In the first of his Festal Letters, which we examined in chapter 1, Athanasius expounds on this point by meditating on the different purposes of the trumpets that called Israel to worship. The trumpets of Israel were typical of the apostolic summons, which

call us, at one time to war, as the blessed Paul says; “We wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with principalities, with powers, with the rulers of this dark world, with wicked spirits in heaven” (Eph. 6:12). At another time the call is made to virginity, and self-denial, and conjugal harmony, saying, to virgins, the things of virgins; and to those who love the way of abstinence, the things of abstinence; and to those who are married, the things of an honorable marriage; thus assigning to each its own virtues and an honorable recompense. Sometimes the call is made to fasting, and sometimes to a feast. Hear again the same [Apostle] blowing the trumpet, and proclaiming, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed; therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness.” If you would listen to a trumpet much greater than all these, hear our Savior saying; “In that last and great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink” (John 7:37). For it became the Savior not simply to call us to a feast, but to “the great feast,” if only we will be prepared to hear, and to conform to the proclamation of every trumpet. (Festal Letter 1.3)^[256]

The same trumpet calls different people to different actions and may even call the same person to different forms of Christian living at different times of his or her life.

The basic pattern of Christian living is, for Athanasius, a life of “inner-worldly asceticism.” Lay Christians need not renounce sex, as monks, virgins, and solitaries do, nor are they required to reject food and wealth with the same thoroughness as ascetics. Yet they are to practice a form of asceticism within the life that the Lord calls them to. Festival times provide common Christians with an opportunity to practice the disciplines of “true feasting,” not the feast of malice and wickedness but a feast on the unleavened bread of charity and truth. Partly for reasons of ritual purity, Athanasius urges his congregation to refrain from sexual activity during the time leading up to the feast. If sexual intercourse was defiling in the old era (Lev. 15), how much more, Athanasius reasons, should Christians refuse to have sex “thoughtlessly” on the same day as a feast? In the time of grace, “a greater diligence in our way of life (politeia) is required.” Consequently, Athanasius urges us to “purify ourselves when we are going to share in such awesome mysteries.”^[257] Christians should also use the festival times as opportunities to discipline themselves in their consumption of food and pleasures.

More than with food or sex, Athanasius is concerned with the temptation that wealth and property pose to Christian faithfulness. In The Life of Antony, Antony faces down sexual temptation and temptations regarding other pleasures and food; he confronts demons in various guises. But the temptation that lies on the boundary between the city and the desert is the temptation of wealth. Antony has to renounce his possessions in order to take up his life as an ascetic hero, and as he travels toward his home in the desert, he sees first “the apparition of a great silver dish” and then “no illusion, but actual gold thrown in his path.” Though Antony “marveled at the amount,” he passed on “as one stepping over fire” and soon came to his mountain fortress.^[258] Here Athanasius’s instructions are not simply negative; he not only teaches his congregation to renounce greed but exhorts them to practice hospitality and generosity: “Since, therefore, this occasion for discipline is set before us [the Easter feast], and such a day as this is come, and the prophetic voice has gone forth that the feast should be celebrated, let us give all diligence to this good proclamation, and like those who contend in the stadium, let us compete with one another in the purity of the fast, in the watchfulness of prayers, in the study of the Scriptures, in distributing to the poor, and let us be at peace with our enemies” (Festal Letter 3).^[259]

Disciplinary practices such as periodic fasting, almsgiving, and abstention from sex were a central part of Athanasius’s program of discipleship, but at the very center of the program was the study of Scripture. The living Word, eternally with the Father, was communicated to Christians through the written word. The eternal image was impressed through meditation on the words of Scripture, and the original typos took shape in concrete human life as the Scriptures had their impact on Christians.

Athanasius provides a detailed overview of the book of Psalms and its right use in his epistle to the otherwise unknown Marcellinus.^[260] In part, the letter is a review of the contents of Psalms, a book that contains all the parts of Scripture within it. The account of creation in Genesis 1–2 echoes in Psalm 18; Exodus and Numbers are summarized in Psalms 77 and 113; the cry of beleaguered Israel in the book of Judges appears in the Psalms of Ascent; prophecies fill the psalms, and the psalms celebrate the coming of the Savior, the “Word” who comes to heal and deliver (Ps. 106). Jesus’s career is foreshadowed in some detail: the eternal nature of the Son is declared in Psalm 44, the joy that greets his birth in 86, the plot of the Jews in Psalm 2, and the attack of “dogs,” the piercing of the Christ’s hands and feet, the division of his garments in Psalm 21. The psalms do not leave Jesus in the grave, but describe his exaltation and his entry as “king of glory” into heaven (Psalm 23), where he sits at the right hand of his Father (Ps. 109). The psalms are a “garden containing things of all these kinds,” from the Pentateuch, the prophets, and the Old and New Testaments.^[261]

If the book of Psalms is a microcosm of the rest of Scripture, it is equally true that the contents of the book of Psalms are found everywhere else. All Scripture indwells the psalms; the psalms in turn indwell all of Scripture. Moses, Isaiah, and Habakkuk wrote hymns, just as David, Asaph, and others did. Prophecies and narratives are summarized poetically in the psalms, and the rest of Scripture expounds those same prophecies and narratives. There is one Spirit, and the Scriptures inspired by that Spirit manifest his unity. At the same time, all distinctions are from the Spirit, and the unity of Scripture is a differentiated unity, so that “the whole is in each” and the “distinctions of the Spirit pertain to all and to each severally.” The psalms contain all the rest of Scripture, and yet the psalms add something unique to the full revelation of God in his written work: “The Book of Psalms thus has a certain grace of its own, and a distinctive exactitude of expression.” Athanasius focuses on several of the distinctive features of Psalms. Most importantly, in contrast to other books, which record events, prophecies, laws, and institutions, Psalms records “the emotions of each soul,” so that, in addition to learning from prophets about the coming of Christ or from the narratives about the deeds of kings, the hearer of the psalms “also comprehends and is taught in it the emotions of the soul.”^[262]

Hearing the psalms thus not only reveals events and prophecies, not only reveals the emotions of the soul, but is uniquely powerful for healing the soul, since the psalms show “how one must heal passion through speaking and acting.” By providing words for each circumstance of life, the psalms give articulation and pattern to experience and the feelings of experience.

In the Psalms it is written and inscribed how one must bear sufferings, what one must say to one suffering afflictions, what to say after afflictions, how each person is tested, and what the words of those who hope in God are. . . . There is a command to give thanks in all circumstances, but the Psalms also teach what one must say when giving thanks. Then hearing from others that as many as wish to live a godly life must be persecuted, from these we are taught how one must call out while fleeing, and what words must be offered to God while being persecuted and after being delivered subsequent to persecution.^[263]

Beyond that, the book of Psalms, in contrast to other books, is designed to be sung by the faithful, not merely to be heard. Those who listen see themselves as “other than those about whom the passage speaks” and are inspired to imitation. The one who sings psalms takes on the words of Scripture as his or her own words and is “affected by the words of the Songs, as if they were his own songs.” No one would dare utter the words of Abraham or Moses as his own, but “each sings [the psalms] as if they were written concerning him, and he accepts them and recites them not as if another were speaking, nor as if speaking about someone else. But he handles them as if he were speaking about himself.” The words of the psalms become a “mirror” to the soul, in which each singer “perceive[s] himself and the emotions of his soul.”^[264]

The psalms are a mirror of the soul because they are a mirror of human experience—of suffering, desperation, exultation, thanksgiving, prosperity, adversity, garden and wilderness, isolation and communion, and on and on. They are a mirror of the soul also because they are a mirror of our emotional life, including every permutation of passion. More than a mirror, though: through our singing the psalms, the diverse passions of the soul, Athanasius argues, are trained and harmonized. Praising God “in well-tuned cymbals and harp and ten-stringed instrument was again a figure and sign of the parts of the body coming into natural concord like harp strings, and of the thoughts of the soul becoming like cymbals, and then all of these being moved and living through the grand sound and through the command of the Spirit so that, as it is written, the man lives in the Spirit and mortifies the deeds of the body.” By “beautifully singing praises, he brings rhythm to his soul and leads it, so to speak, from disproportion to proportion.”^[265] The perfected soul is a symphony, harmonized by the Spirit through the discipline of psalm-singing. The psalms are expressions of deep passion, of anguish and fear, and soaring elation. Yet singing the psalms is actually a discipline in impassibility, for through the psalms we are trained to turn all circumstances and moods into worship. Those who sing and absorb the psalms will have a rich emotional life, but none of their passions will cause them to deviate from following the crucified Messiah. Through singing the psalms, we are conformed to the impassible sufferer, the Word made flesh.

Throughout this exposition of the meaning and power of the psalms, Athanasius is engaging in “typological” exegesis, but of a kind that combines christocentric allegory with christomimetic tropology. Christ is the perfect exemplar of virtue, a virtue that he “typified” (etypōsen) in his own life. Humans are unstable, since we are created from nothing and tend to be more fascinated by changeable creatures than by the unchangeable God. Stability comes only through conformity to Christ: “The Christian life requires ‘continual formation [typoun] of the self through imitation’ of the ‘eternally consistent form or pattern [typos] provided by the divine Word.’”^[266] By healing the passions of the soul and bringing it to harmony, the psalms are also molding the singer to the “mind of Christ.”^[267]

As we have seen, Athanasius believes that the incarnate Son has conquered the devil and demons. He was lifted into the air on the cross in order to defeat the demons whose power lodged there, and thus through the cross he weakened the demons and constructed a path, the path of the cross, back to the Father. Demons are now pathetic figures, like the shabby devil who makes his pitiful appeals to Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. In Antony’s lengthy discourse, recorded by Athanasius, he mocks the demons. If they had real power, they would not have to create “phantasms” or “work their fraud by being transfigured.” Since they cannot do much of anything, they “play parts as if they were on stage, changing their forms and striking fear in children by the illusion of the hordes and their shapes”—child’s play, Antony thinks, “antics” that earn them only ridicule as “weaklings” (Life of Antony 28).

Yet Antony’s own encounters with demons are more intense than he lets on. He warns his disciples that demons will attack them with evil thoughts, then with “conspicuous and filthy pleasure,” and then attempt to “frighten . . . by fabricating phantasms, transforming themselves, and imitating women, beasts, reptiles, and huge bodies of thousands of soldiers” (Life of Antony 23). Their final assault on Antony is a theater of horror worthy of Hieronymus Bosch or Cormac McCarthy. Seeing that they could not frustrate Antony’s resolve by sexual temptation or beatings, they let loose.

When it was nighttime they made such a crashing noise that the whole place seemed to be shaken by a quake. The demons, as if breaking through the building’s four walls, and seeming to enter them, were changed into the forms of beasts and reptiles. The place immediately was filled with the appearances of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, and serpents, asps, scorpions, wolves, and each of these moved in accordance with its form. The lion roared, wanting to spring at him; the bull seemed intent on goring; the creeping snake did not quite reach him; the onrushing wolf made straight for him—and altogether the sounds of all the creatures that appeared were terrible, and their ragings were fierce. (Life of Antony 9)

Wounded, Antony “groaned because of the pain felt in his body” but rebuked them: “It is a mark of your weakness that you mimic the shapes of irrational beasts” (Life of Antony 9). God suddenly appeared, as “the roof opened, as it seemed, and a certain beam of light descend[ed] toward him.” The demons fled, his wounds healed, and the building was brought back to normal. When Antony asked God what had taken him so long, he received this answer: “I was here, Antony, but I waited to watch your struggle. And now, since you persevered and were not defeated, I will be your helper forever, and I will make you famous everywhere” (Life of Antony 10).

Antony was of course unique, Athanasius’s supreme ascetic hero, and his battles with demons were accordingly unique. Yet Athanasius intends Antony’s life to be a model, not only for monks and hermits, but for Christians in Alexandria, throughout Egypt, and beyond. They can learn to imitate, in a more moderate fashion, the heroic renunciations of the great hermit, and they should also learn from Antony’s example that even defeated demons can mount their terrors. Christian living is an aesthetic project, God reshaping the human soul and body as each believer cares for himself or herself through the disciplines of Christian living. It is also warfare, a continuing battle, not only against temptation but also against demons and spiritual powers who, though weakened and destined for defeat, remain threatening to the slothful and unprepared. Be alert, be vigilant, Athanasius tells his congregation.

Through these disciples the Christian is being deified and progresses in being made god. For Athanasius, deification involves taking on divine attributes in a human way. God is impassible, and the deified Christian approaches impassibility so that he is not thrown about by his whims and feelings. God is deathless, and the deified believer no longer fears death. He will, at the resurrection, triumph over death. God is incorruptible, and Christians are deified as they overcome, in union with the eternal Son by the Spirit, the instability that is part of created human nature. And they overcome corruption ultimately when they attain the incorruptibility of the resurrection. This does not happen all at once. But already now, and increasingly through the practice of Christian disciplines, this mortal is putting on immortality, this corruptible putting on incorruption, as the Christian strives in hope of the fullness of deified life at the end.

Conclusion

For Athanasius, deification is not an isolated individual process. To be sure, he celebrates the isolated hermetic life of Antony, but he also recognizes that the end point of the incarnation and redemption accomplished by Christ is the formation of a community. Christians engage in their deifying disciplines together—together enjoying the true feast of fasting and the true fast of charity, together being molded according to the pattern of the Word through study of the Word. Christian living is a collective “way of life,” a politeia. David Brakke points out that Athanasius uses the term frequently to describe “both the individual Christian life and the Church” as “the heavenly civic life.”^[268] The Christian way of civic life was prepared by the law and the prophets, the latter of whom were sent to the Jews but were “for all the world a holy school of the knowledge of God and the conduct of the soul” (tēs kata psychēn politeias; On the Incarnation 12.5). Monastic communities particularly express this pattern. As soon as Antony enters the wilderness, others come to take up what is no longer quite a solitary life: “From then on, there were monasteries in the mountains, and the desert was made a city by monks, who left their own people and registered themselves for the citizenship in the heavens” (Life of Antony 14).^[269] But this citizenship is not confined to those who have renounced earthly citizenship. God’s gifts in Christ are great: power over demons, adoption of children, knowledge of the Father and of the Son, the gift of the Spirit, and the “pattern of heavenly conversation” (ouranou . . . politeias typos; Bishops of Egypt 1.1).

In the incarnate Word, the type of heavenly society has come to earth and is being imprinted on the life of the church. Moses and Solomon built houses according to the pattern (typos) that they witnessed in heaven. Jesus has entered that heavenly sanctuary, the archetype of all human sanctuaries, and having entered brings that type to earth, in the form of a church celebrating a new and true feast:

And this is a great proof that, whereas we were strangers, we are called friends; from being formerly aliens, we have become fellow citizens with the saints, and are called children of the Jerusalem which is above, whereof that which Solomon built was a type. For if Moses made all things according to the pattern showed him in the mount, it is clear that the service performed in the tabernacle was a type of the heavenly mysteries, whereto the Lord, desirous that we should enter, prepared for us the new and abiding way. And as all the old things were a type of the new, so the festival that now is, is a type of the joy which is above, to which coming with psalms and spiritual songs, let us begin the feast. (Festal Letter 45)

One of the key features of this Christian politeia is unity, and Athanasius stresses the link between the triune unity and the unity of the church. By looking to and contemplating the unity of Father and Son, the church is unified, since contemplation of a thing shapes the one contemplating to resemble that thing (Discourses 3.21). The unity of the church is part of its perfection as the people of God, in the sense that “perfection” means “full realization” or “eschatological completion.”

Wherefore the Son Himself, simply and without any condition is in the Father; for this attribute He has by nature; but for us, to whom it is not natural, there is needed an image and example, that He may say of us, “As Thou in Me, and I in You.” “And when they shall be so perfected,” He says, “then the world knows that You have sent Me, for unless I had come and borne this their body, no one of them had been perfected, but one and all had remained corruptible. Work Thou then in them, O Father, and as You have given to Me to bear this, grant to them Your Spirit, that they too in It may become one, and may be perfected in Me. For their perfecting shows that Your Word has sojourned among them; and the world seeing them perfect and full of God, will believe altogether that You have sent Me, and I have sojourned here. For whence is this their perfecting, but that I, Your Word, having borne their body, and become man, have perfected the work, which You gave Me, O Father? And the work is perfected, because men, redeemed from sin, no longer remain dead; but being deified, have in each other, by looking at Me, the bond of charity.” (Discourses 3.23)

Athanasius sees this unification of the church as part of the eschatological work of the Son, the completion of the story of Israel. The Son exists first and is afterward created as man. His formation as man is not the “beginning of his being” but rather the beginning of his manhood, “where also He collects together the tribes of Israel” (Discourses 2.53; cf. 2.52). From Ephesians Athanasius draws the conclusion that the recreation of humanity in the Son involves the reunion of Jew and gentile:

But if in Him the two are created, and these are in His body, reasonably then, bearing the two in Himself, He is as if Himself created; for those who were created in Himself He made one, and He was in them, as they. And thus, the two being created in Him, He may say suitably, “The Lord created me.” For as by receiving our infirmities, He is said to be infirm Himself, though not Himself infirm, for He is the Power of God, and He became sin for us and a curse, though not having sinned Himself, but because He Himself bore our sins and our curse, so, by creating us in Him, let Him say, “He created me for the works,” though not Himself a creature. (Discourses 2.55)

Renovating creation is like renovating a house, and the Lord who made the world at the beginning also made provision for its repair. The Son comes into the flesh as a temple, and through his death and resurrection transforms the community he gathers into a temple of the Spirit. Thus the Lord proves to be “as a wise architect, proposing to build a house, consults also about repairing it, should it at any time become dilapidated after building, and, as counseling about this, makes preparation and gives to the workmen materials for a repair; and thus the means of the repair are provided before the house; in the same way prior to us is the repair of our salvation founded in Christ, that in Him we might even be new-created. And the will and the purpose were made ready ‘before the world,’ but have taken effect when the need required, and the Savior came among us” (Discourses 2.77).

This Christian politeia is, for Athanasius, Christ’s means for remaking the world. Though writing in the first flush of Constantine’s conversion, Athanasius kept his sights on the incarnate Word as the one who would put down idolatry, overturn death, and stabilize humanity. On the Incarnation presents a “triumphalist” Christology, whose main proof of the rationality, the logikē, of the cross is the fact that it produces people who have no fear of death, who are “impassibly” determined to do good and serve and worship their Lord, no matter what the cost or what they suffer. Athanasius’s great proof of the power of the cross is the martyr church. Some scholars have seen in this an implicit critique of imperial ideology, which, even in its Christian guise, offered a false gospel of salvation through political power.^[270] Whether that was intentional or not, Athanasius is clear: there is only one Savior, one Lord, only one “way of life” that leads to life, and that is the way of the cross, the way of following the one who took flesh and trampled death by death.

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