The Theological Vision Of Athanasius

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INTRODUCTION

Life and times

When Athanasius became bishop of Alexandria in 328 CE, at around the age of 30, he assumed leadership of the Christian community in one of the most prominent cities of the Roman empire. With its two great harbors, the Portus Magnus and the Eunostus, Alexandria was the major gateway of trade in the Mediterranean world, linking together the Roman empire with the markets of India, China, and Arabia. It was also a great manufacturing and producing center in its own right, famous, among other things, for its shipbuilding and for the production of papyrus, the most common writing material of the ancient world. Egypt, of which Alexandria was the administrative center, was virtually the breadbasket of the empire, its grain representing a significant portion of the food supply of Rome and Constantinople. Egypt was not governed by a “proconsul,” as was the case in other provinces of the empire, but by a “prefect,” a viceregal governor appointed by the emperor as his direct representative. The prefect of Egypt resided in Alexandria, his authority undergirded by a military commander, or “dux.” As well as being Egypt's administrative center, Alexandria was also a major center of culture for the whole Roman empire. It had been the site of the majestic “Great Library,” which was reputed to have contained half a million papyrus rolls, and which was likely destroyed by a fire in the early 270s. Closely associated with the Great Library was “the Museum,” a society of scholars who shared erudition and common meals, and had a “Priest of the Muses.” All the major schools of philosophy were well represented there, and the city was famed for its contribution to the arts and sciences of the day. Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth-century historian, lauds the intellectual vitality of the city, noting that “a doctor who wishes to establish his standing in the profession can dispense with the need for any proof of it by saying (granted that his work itself obviously smacks of it) that he was trained at Alexandria.”

Sociologically, Alexandria was a melting pot of native Egyptians, Greeks, and Jews, as well as other immigrants. The combination was not always harmonious. The Alexandrian Jewish theologian Philo paints a lurid picture of a violent persecution of the Alexandrian Jews by the Greeks, during the reigns of Tiberius and Gaius, and the Jews themselves were involved in a violent revolt in 115– 117, which greatly reduced their presence in Egypt. Relations between the local populace and the Roman authorities were strained and sometimes bloody. In 215, the emperor Caracalla ordered a massacre of Alexandrian youth, in response to a rumor which had gained ground in the city that he was involved in plotting the murder of his brother. On the other hand, Alexandrians had a reputation for being independent and rebellious; we are told that governors entered the city in fear of its reputation. Riots and urban violence were not infrequent, and were often associated not only with religious and political motives but also with the theater, chariot races, and the public spectacles, to which Alexandrians were notoriously reputed to be addicted. The struggle between Athanasius and his opponents in Egypt would sometimes manifest this streak of violence; we are told of prefects inciting violent riots against Athanasius's supporters and of the lynching of an unpopular rival bishop, George of Cappadocia, by Athanasius's supporters.

Alexandria was also the ecclesiastical center of Egypt. By Athanasius's time, it was a well-established custom, which came to be ratified by the Council of Nicaea in 325, that the Patriarch of Alexandria had direct authority over the whole Egyptian Church and was responsible for appointing bishops throughout Egypt, Libya, and the Pentapolis. The bishop of Alexandria was custodian of a rich and complex tradition. Egyptian early Christianity had a strongly Jewish character, as would be expected given that Alexandria contained the largest Jewish population outside of Palestine. It was also eclectic, manifesting “gnostic” variations under the leadership of Valentinus and Basilides, as well as Manichaean communities, and the early importation of the writings of Irenaeus, the great antagonist of the Valentinians. We also hear of a catechetical school of Alexandria which at one time was headed by the great Origen, and, in Athanasius's own time, by Didymus the Blind. Athanasius's lifetime also saw the beginning and dramatic rise of the monastic movement in Egypt, and it would be part of the achievement of his episcopate to transform this conglomeration of desert-dwellers who were suspicious of authority and its pomp into a fairly cohesive group who were intensely loyal to him and zealous for doctrinal orthodoxy.

Athanasius, the man who was destined to maintain a tumultuously intermittent reign over the Egyptian Church for almost half of the fourth century, was born ca. 295–299 CE. We know very little about his early years. The Arabic History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, composed by the tenth-century Egyptian bishop Severus Ibn al-Muqaffa, indicates that his parents were not Christians, describing the young Athanasius as “the son of an eminent woman who was a worshipper of idols and very rich.” The same text contains an account of how Athanasius as a young man was baptized along with his mother and taken under the tutelage of the bishop Alexander. It speaks of the efforts of his mother to try to procure for her son a suitable bride, which were continually rebuffed, whereupon she arranged for him to have the opportunity of being persuaded by “a wise man”:

She brought an Alexandrian who was a wise magician, from among the wise men of Saba, and she told him about how things stood with her son. He said to her, “Let me dine with him today.” So she was overjoyed and prepared a great feast and the man met with her son and they ate and drank. But the next day the philosopher came to her and said, “Do not trouble yourself. You have no control over your son for he has become a Galilean and subscribes to the views of the Galileans, and he will become a great man.” She said, “Who are the Galileans?” He said to her, “They are the ones who belong to the Church, who have destroyed the temples and demolished the statues. When she heard this, she said to herself, “If I distance myself from him, he will leave me and I will be left alone.” So she immediately got up and took him with her and went to Alexander and related to him the situation of Athanasius her son and his whole story. Then she and her son were baptized. After some time, she died and Athanasius remained like a son with the Father Alexander, who educated him with gentleness in every art. He memorized the gospels and read the divine scriptures and when he was mature, Alexander ordained him a deacon and made him his scribe and he became like an interpreter of the father and a minister of the word which he wished to speak.

Leaving to one side the question of the historical veracity of all the details of this story, it is valuable nevertheless to note some of its features which bear tangible correspondence with more direct evidence. The tradition that Athanasius was of “pagan” parents might partly explain his concern with the theme of Christianity vs. “the Greeks,” taken up in his first major doctrinal work, Against the Greeks— On the Incarnation. It would also explain the indirectness of his testimony, in his History of the Arians, about the persecution of Maximin in 311–312. The story also strikingly conveys the close relationship between Athanasius and Alexander, a relationship that by all accounts must have begun while the former was a very young man. Particularly intriguing is the designation of the young Athanasius as Alexander's “scribe,” “interpreter,” and “minister of the word which he wished to speak.” Such a characterization not only emphasizes the clear continuity in the theological perspectives of the two Patriarchs but seems to lend some credence to the theory that at least one of the important doctrinal letters of Alexander was actually written by Athanasius.

That Athanasius was “educated” by Alexander at least indicates the lack of a formal course of education, which is also conceded by the panegyric of Gregory of Nazianzus. This is not to say that a man of Athanasius's intelligence did not avail himself of whatever store of knowledge was readily available to him. Especially his early writing displays at least a colloquial familiarity with philosophical concepts of the various schools, in particular a Stoic cosmology which is employed to speak of the Word as the principle of harmony in the cosmos, and a Middle Platonic ontology in which God is characterized as true being, to which creaturely being is linked by participation. His use of classical rhetorical techniques has also been noted. The reference to Athanasius's familiarity with and study of the Scriptures represents an enduring portrait of Athanasius as a theologian steeped in the Scriptures. Gregory of Nazianzus speaks of him in a similar vein as “meditating on every book of the Old and New Testament with a depth which no one else has reached with even one of them.” Quite naturally, a formation under the shadow of the bishop of Alexandria would include a substantial diet of the principal texts of the Alexandrian tradition. In his later debates with the “Arians,” Athanasius would refer respectfully to “the diligent Origen,” and he quotes his episcopal predecessors Dionysius and Alexander, as well as Theognostus. Some close textual parallels and similarity of perspective would also indicate a close familiarity with the theology of Irenaeus, whose writings, as we noted above, were readily available in Egypt soon after their composition.

As evidence of his precocious abilities, we find Athanasius already a deacon and the principal secretary of Bishop Alexander at the Council of Nicaea of 325, when he was barely 30 years old, if not younger. Three years after the Council of Nicaea, on 17 April 328, Alexander died and Athanasius was elected bishop. His consecration was immediately contested. There were accusations that he was under the canonical age of 30, that he was consecrated by a group of seven bishops who withdrew from a larger synod in order to ordain Athanasius secretly, and, according to one version, that Athanasius himself lured two bishops into a church, shut the door behind him, and forced them to consecrate him as bishop. These accusations come from Athanasius's opponents, of which there was never a lack, and they were to be roundly refuted by an Egyptian synod in 338. The historical context of these charges and their rebuttal partly predates Athanasius's ecclesiastical career and stems from internal conflicts within the Egyptian Church that began during the Diocletian persecution and were then complicated and intermingled with the doctrinal debates associated with the Council of Nicaea. Thus, from the moment of his consecration, the biography of Athanasius is inseparable from doctrinal and ecclesiastical issues in a way that bears out Harnack's characterization of him as “a man whose biography coincides with the history of dogma of the fourth century.”

The Melitian schism

The fourth-century historian Epiphanius tells us that the source of the Melitian schism was a disagreement between a newly appointed bishop, Melitius of Lycopolis, and the bishop of Alexandria, Peter, over the status of those who lapsed during the Diocletian persecution. According to this account, Peter was disposed to a more lenient stance, which was rejected by the more rigorist Melitius. Melitius's ordaining of presbyters sympathetic to his views in dioceses which were not under his jurisdiction then led to his excommunication by Peter. More recently, it has been persuasively argued that the issue of the proper disposition toward the lapsed was not a central one in the Melitian schism, and that Melitius was simply responding—whether out of ambition or pastoral concern—to the void created by imprisoned bishops who were unavailable to administer their own dioceses. The real issue, according to this rendering of the matter, was the challenge represented by Melitius to the traditional authority of the bishop of Alexandria, “the refusal, by a dissident bishop, of Alexandrian oversight and the monopoly exercised by the capital over the rest of the country.” But whatever be the original circumstances, the result was a split in the Egyptian Church that persevered after the end of the persecution in 313, and resulted in two parallel Church bodies tensely juxtaposed. In a synodal letter addressed to the Churches of Egypt, Libya, and the Pentapolis, the Council of Nicaea attempted to resolve this schism by allowing Melitian clergy to continue to serve, albeit “after being confirmed by a holier imposition of hands,” but prohibited Melitius himself from administering any more ordinations, and stipulated that Melitian clergy be subject to the jurisdiction of the “catholic bishop,” Alexander. These terms, along with the reaffirmation of the authority of the bishop of Alexandria over Egypt, Libya, and the Penatapolis, constituted a resolution that was decidedly more favorable to Alexander than it was to the Melitians. Nevertheless, it seems that after some resistance which drew the intervention of the emperor Constantine himself, Melitius was able to persuade his supporters to accept the terms of Nicaea, and presented his clergy in person to Alexander. Shortly afterwards, however, Alexander died, and the ensuing process of choosing a successor again alienated the Melitians, who were excluded from the proceedings, perhaps after trying to consecrate one of their own number. The accession of Athanasius to the episcopal throne of Alexandria thus led to a reopening of the Melitian schism, though the Melitians themselves seem to have fragmented into various factions. One of these factions, led by John Arcaph, eventually forged an alliance with the sympathizers of Arius that would lead to Athanasius's first exile.

Origins of the Nicene crisis

We do not have any reliable records to indicate the precise date and exact order of the events that initiated the doctrinal debates of the fourth century. We know that sometime between 318 and 320 a crisis erupted within the Egyptian Church, which quickly spread outwards and eventually enveloped the whole empire in a controversy that was arguably the most significant moment in the development of Christian doctrine. The original parties in the controversy were Arius and Alexander, the former an ascetic and charismatic priest of Alexandria, and the latter Patriarch of Alexandria. At this early stage of the controversy, Arius's position was associated with the provocative slogan “there was once when the Son was not,” while Alexander strongly insisted on the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. The early Church historians Socrates (ca. 380–450) and Sozomen (fifth century) give somewhat divergent accounts as to the impetus of the controversy. Socrates seems to assign the initiative to Alexander, whom he describes as attempting “too ambitious a discourse” on the subject of Triune unity, to which Arius reacts out of a fear of Sabellianism, a modalist reduction of the Trinity into a singular unity. Sozomen, on the other hand, characterizes Arius as “a most expert logician” who initiated investigations into hitherto unexamined questions and thus came up with a novel doctrine which “no one before him had ever suggested.” Of these two accounts, the more plausible is surely that of Socrates. Given that Christian piety has always centered on the worship and exaltation of the figure of Christ, it is highly unlikely that an ecclesiastical figure would simply come up with a doctrine that would seem to militate against that momentum unless it were as a reaction to a perceived exaggeration. So the more natural scenario is that Alexander delivered a sermon that put emphatic stress on the correlational unity of the Father and the Son, which Arius construed as endangering both the clear distinction between the Father and the Son as well as the monarchy of the Father. To Arius's ears, Alexander's doctrine then would have seemed to obfuscate both divine unity and trinity, collapsing the Trinity into a modalism and violating the unity by “portioning” the divine essence.

What Socrates’ and Sozomen's accounts have in common, however, is a recognition that the controversy, from its opening stage, was moving into somewhat uncharted waters. Whether it was Alexander who was “too ambitious” or Arius who began to enquire into “what had not until then been examined,” a clarification of the nature of the relation between the Father and the Son was rather overdue, and both Arius and Alexander pushed the question considerably further than their predecessors. The underlying ambiguity that proved to be such fertile ground for the ensuing controversy can perhaps best be illustrated by reference to another great Alexandrian theologian, Origen (ca. 185–ca. 251). On the one hand, Origen taught that the Son was eternally generated by the Father, although his doctrine in even that regard was placed in an ambivalent context, since he also asserted that creation was always coexistent with God. On the other hand, Origen maintained subordinationist language in speaking of the relative status of the Father and the Son, saying, for example, that while the Son transcends creation, he is himself transcended by the Father, who is “better and greater than the Word.” Such ambivalence could not endure for long. As the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo became an accepted element of Christian doctrine, it became increasingly necessary to clarify the status of the Son relative both to creation and to the Father. The process of such clarification was likely already an ongoing project in Alexandrian theology before things came to a head with the confrontation between Alexander and Arius. Later fourth-century debates between Athanasius and his opponents would advert to a tense exchange of letters in the mid-third century between Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, and his namesake, the bishop of Rome. The bishop of Alexandria is reported to have been upbraided by Dionysius of Rome for rejecting the application of the term “homoousios” (of one being) to the Son. In controversy with a group of Libyan Christians whom he considered to be Sabellian in their lack of differentiation between the Father and the Son, Dionysius is said to have referred to the Son as “something made (poiēma) which came into being (genēton)” and “not belonging (idios) by nature but alien in being (ousia) from the Father.” According to this account, Dionysius likens the relation of the Father and the Son to that between the planter of the vine and the vine, or the shipbuilder and the ship, adding that the Son “was not before he came into being.” Athanasius defended Dionysius by emphasizing the anti-Sabellian context in which Dionysius was expressing himself and by citing supposedly later texts in which Dionysius of Alexandria modified and defended his views to his namesake in Rome and clarified that there was never a time when God was not Father. According to Athanasius, the compromising analogies were replaced by others that sought to underline the correlational coexistence of Father and Son, such as the example of the light and its radiance.

Athanasius also cites another Alexandrian contemporary of Dionysius and previous head of the catechetical school, Theognostus (d. 282). Theognostus's articulations are much more readily conformable to Athanasius's own position. The being of the Son, says Theognostus, is not “external” and not procured from non-existence but is from the Father's being. The analogies he uses include that of the sun and the ray, as well as water and vapor. On the other hand, it is reported by the ninth-century Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius, that Theognostus spoke of the Son as a creature, ktisma. But in the context of Origenian theology, which is the proper framework for understanding Theognostus, such an affirmation does not equate to derivation from nothing, but simply to the fact of derivation. The construction of a difference between “creation” and “generation” is a later development, which owes much to Athanasius himself and the problematic of the Arian controversy.

In the figure of Theognostus (as well as Dionysius, if his exchange with Dionysius of Rome is indeed authentic), we see attempts to hold in tandem both the affirmation of a correlational coexistence between Father and Son, as well as an acknowledgment of the derivative status of the Son. This tension, whose Alexandrian history is traceable, as we have seen, at least as far back as Origen, comes to somewhat of a breaking point in the original controversy between Arius and Alexander. Alexander emphasized especially Origen's doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son and of the Son's being a perfect “Image” of the Father. As the Father's perfect image, the Son is eternally present with the Father and is not derived from non-existence, and there is no “interval” between Son and Father. Arius, on the other hand, radicalized a subordinationist streak that could also base itself on one tendency in Origen's theology, now viewed from the perspective of a doctrine of creation that unambiguously posited its origination from nothing. If the Son is derived from the Father, then he also comes into being from non-existence; hence the infamous slogan “there was once when the Son was not.” Arius did not hesitate to draw out the implications of this statement in order to make his doctrine consistent. Thus, God is described as “supremely unique”; he was not always “Father” of the Son, but existed “before” the Son. Conversely, the Son belongs to (idios) the category of things which have come into being and are created, although he is of a pre-eminently higher rank than all other creatures. He comes into being, by the will of the Father, for the sake of accomplishing God's act of creating. The divine Trinity therefore is constituted of dissimilar entities (hypostases). Moreover, as a creature whose glory is infinitely transcended by that of the Father, the Son does not fully comprehend the Father, nor indeed his own essence. Again, as a creature, the Word is by nature changeable, though he is rendered de facto unchangeable by God's grace, in anticipation of his merits.

By Athanasius's report, Arius popularized his theology by casting it in poetic form and setting it to a melody, while his supporters preached it vigorously in the marketplace, accosting dock-workers and pregnant women to engage them in questions of human and divine generation. Responding to Arius's teachings, Alexander summoned a council of Egyptian bishops, which drew up a “confession of orthodoxy” to which Arius was asked to give his assent. He refused to sign and was excommunicated by Alexander. With the departure of Arius from Alexandria, the Arian controversy was exported beyond the confines of the Egyptian Church. He and his supporters traveled to other sees in search of support, and their efforts met with some success, most notably in their gaining the sympathy of Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, the city where the emperor lived. Eusebius was a powerful ally and could boast of connections and influence at the imperial court. He would become the emperor Constantine's primary ecclesiastical advisor and the one who administered his baptism when the emperor was on his deathbed.

The result of Arius's protestations to other bishops and his alliance with Eusebius of Nicomedia was a council held in Bithynia in 320 which validated his views as orthodox and demanded his reinstatement by Alexander, only to be rebuffed by the latter. In 324, the emperor Constantine, until then emperor of the Western part of the empire, defeated his rival in the East, Licinius, and became sole emperor. He then directly intervened in the matter, sending a blustering letter to both Alexander and Arius, urging them to stop their public quibbling over “a matter of futile irrelevance.” In the absence of this desired outcome, Constantine appointed the bishop of Cordoba, Hosius, to deal with the controversy. Hosius summoned a synod in Antioch, which denounced the doctrine of Arius and announced a wider council to deal with the issue. Originally to be held in Ancyra, the council was moved at the last minute to Nicaea, with the explanation that the air there was nicer, although the fact that Nicaea was closer to the emperor's residence in Nicomedia was probably not irrelevant. While by far the greater majority of participants were Easterners, the Council of Nicaea nevertheless represented the first attempt to convene a general council of the whole Church of the Roman empire. Thanks to the subsequent reception of its doctrine, this council was to become known in the Christian tradition as the first “ecumenical” council.

The Council of Nicaea

We do not have exact figures for the number of bishops attending the Council of Nicaea. By the end of the fourth century, the prestige accorded to it is indicated by the midrashic headcount of 318, the number of men led by Abraham to rescue Lot (Gen 14:14). Among those in attendance was the young deacon Athanasius, acting as secretary to Bishop Alexander. The council opened in May 325 and continued its deliberations until July of that year. Among the secondary issues on the agenda, it pronounced on the date of Easter, forbade the translation of bishops from one diocese to another, and tried to address the rupture of the Egyptian Church due to the Melitian schism. But its primary concern was the controversy between Alexander and Arius. As recounted by Athanasius, the main challenge for those who wanted to decisively refute Arius's doctrine was to find a way to articulate the relationship between the Son and the Father that could not be co-opted by Arius and his supporters and interpreted in a sense consonant with the belief that the Son had a beginning of his existence. Such biblical terms as “Image,” for example, could be accepted by Arius's supporters, with the caveat that even human beings are God's image, despite being creatures. Eventually, it became necessary to resort to the unscriptural term “homoousios” (of one being), in order to rule out any suggestion of the Son's being a creature. Those who opposed Arius's doctrine prevailed, and so a creed was drawn up which included the litmus test of the “homoousios” formula, and anathematized anyone who would say that “there was once when [the Son] did not exist, and that he did not exist before he came into being and who allege that he came into being from nonexistence, or that he is from another subsistence (hypostasis) or substance (ousia), or is alterable or changeable. Arius was exiled and Athanasius's mentor, Alexander, seemed to be vindicated.

The aftermath of Nicaea

The declaration of Nicaea, however, by no means put an end to the controversy. In many quarters, the employment of the term “homoousios” to describe the relation between the Father and the Son was frowned upon both because it was an unscriptural term and because it seemed vulnerable to a “Sabellian,” or modalist, interpretation. Arius was recalled from exile by Constantine himself, and pressure was brought to bear on Alexander to readmit him to communion in the Egyptian Church. This he steadfastly refused to do. When Alexander died three years after the council, in 328, the young Athanasius became his successor, to the evident displeasure of some Melitians. In strict continuity with both the theology and ecclesiastical policy of his mentor, Athanasius also staunchly refused any compromise in the opposition to Arius and his doctrine, rejecting overtures on Arius's behalf by both the emperor Constantine and Eusebius of Nicomedia. Instead, the new bishop moved quickly to consolidate his position, traveling throughout Egypt with a large entourage and fostering his association with the growing monastic movement in the Thebaid. It is perhaps to this period, in the aftermath of his controversial episcopal ordination, that we should attribute his first doctrinal treatise, Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation (ca. 328–335). While making no mention of Arius, this work clearly defends the full divinity of the Word who became incarnate in Jesus Christ. Only one who fully shares in the reality of the Father can save us from ignorance, corruptibility, and death, which are the fruits of human sinfulness. Integral to the apologetic argument of the work is a triumphalist strain that points to the holiness and peace of the Church as concrete evidence that the crucified Christ is risen and active, and manifests through the Church a mode of activity that can only derive from genuine divinity. Such a triumphalist reading of the current state of the Church makes it implausible that Athanasius wrote this work during his first exile, as has been suggested. It rather invokes the situation of a young embattled bishop who is discreetly avoiding direct mention of his opponents, but who wishes to implicitly convey the message that the judgment of Nicaea on behalf of the full divinity of the Word is part of the manifest victory of Christ through the Church. Despite the strategic adoption of such a triumphalist posture, the new bishop of Alexandria soon found himself in a precarious position, with enemies among both the Egyptian Melitians and the supporters of Arius. The ranks of the latter group now included powerful figures outside of Egypt. Eusebius of Nicomedia, who had been advocating on behalf of Arius, forged an alliance with the Egyptian Melitians, which enabled them to bring their case against Athanasius to the emperor's court. This would set off a course of events that would lead to Athanasius's first exile.

The Council of Tyre and Athanasius's first exile (335–337)

The Melitians’ charges against Athanasius were serious: that he had ordered Macarius, one of his priests, to break the chalice and over turn the altar of a Melitian priest, Isychras; that he had arranged for the murder of a bishop by the name of Arsenius; and that he had facilitated his own election, below the canonical age, through bribery. Athanasius's defense, which involved an audience with the emperor and the finding of the allegedly murdered Arsenius quite alive and hiding in Tyre, persuaded Constantine to dismiss the charges brought against the Alexandrian.

Athanasius appeared before Constantine and defended himself adequately enough to have the charges against him dismissed. But under the leadership of Eusebius of Nicomedia, the persistence of the protestations against Athanasius on the part of the defenders of Melitius and Arius eventually persuaded the emperor to call a council, in Tyre, to put the issue to a close. This council set up the “Mareotic” commission to go to Egypt and investigate the charges brought against Athanasius. The membership of the commission was immediately protested by the Egyptian bishops on the grounds that it was biased. Nevertheless, the composition of the commission was maintained and it proceeded to the judgment that the charge that Macarius had broken the chalice of Isychras was legitimate. The Council of Tyre thereupon affirmed Arius's views as orthodox, admitted the Melitians to communion, and deposed Athanasius, who had already fled, having become convinced that he was not getting a fair hearing. Departing from Tyre, Athanasius made his way to Constantinople to make an appeal to the emperor. According to Athanasius's telling, Constantine, initially sympathetic to his cause, became alarmed when Athanasius's opponents produced the further charge that he had threatened to withhold the exportation of grain shipments from Egypt. On this matter, which involved the vital livelihood of the empire, Constantine was less disposed to give Athanasius the benefit of the doubt. Whether due to this new accusation or simply Constantine's desire to consolidate the unity of the empire by neutralizing Athanasius's dogmatic opposition to Arius, the Alexandrian bishop was exiled to Trier, in Gaul, in 335. The removal of Athanasius from his see was protested by riots in the streets of Egypt, and pleas on his behalf by the popular monk Antony. But Constantine's resolve was not shaken, and Athanasius's exile persisted until the emperor s death, two years later, in 337.

Athanasius's homecoming and second exile (339–346)

Upon the death of Constantine, government of the empire was divided among his three sons, Constantinus, Constans, and Constantius. During his exile, Athanasius had already developed a friendship with Constantinus, who was residing in Trier. Constantinus accepted Athanasius's account of the Council of Tyre as a partisan affair conducted by the Alexandrian's enemies and tried to smooth over his father's exile of Athanasius by interpreting it as an imperial intervention on behalf of the bishop's safety. Following the death of Constantine, Constantinus prevailed upon his brothers to issue an imperial edict, in the name of all three emperors, stipulating that exiled blshops be allowed to return to their sees. Athanasius made his way back to Alexandria in 337, by a roundabout route, stopping to plead his cause with Constantius, the new emperor of the East.

In Alexandria, the returning bishop was met with cheering crowds, but his triumph was to be short-lived. The “Eusebians,” as Athanasius styled his opponents who were headed by Eusebius of Nicomedia, were not about to dispense with their efforts to rid Egypt of him. Within the year, they convened a council which reiterated the accusations of the council of Tyre and appointed a certain Pistus as the bishop of Alexandria. Pressing their case against Athanasius to all three emperors, they brought a new accusation against him, that of personally appropriating funds that were generated by the sale of wheat and intended for the benefit of widows. Athanasius's self-defense was waged both on the domestic and international fronts. Both the Egyptian bishops and Athansius's opponents sent delegations to Pope Julius in Rome, who discountenanced the appointment of Pistus on the ground of his earlier support of Arius. Athanasius also undertook a trip to Cappadocia to defend himself personally before Constantius. Inside Egypt, Athanasius convened a council in 338, which, in a published encyclical, defended Athanasius from the charges brought against him, and rejected the appointment of a rival bishop. He also persisted in his efforts to consolidate monastic support, arranging for the popular monk Antony to come to Alexandria to enlist the weight of his now prodigious esteem on the side of the Nicene cause. A later account, penned by Athanasius, of this appearance by Antony hints at rival claims by Arians to enlist monastic support and manifests Athanasius's ability to condense the complex issues of Nicea to core themes that are popularly digestible. Athanasius has Antony make the crucial point, which was already clearly implicit in Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, that to impute anything less than the fullness of divinity to the Son is a regression to “paganism,” and renders Christian devotion to Christ a form of idolatry:

When the Arians lied, claiming that he {Antony} held the same views as they, he became indignant and astonished when he heard about it. Then, on the request of the bishops and all the brothers, he came down from the mountain to Alexandria. He publicly condemned the Arian heresy, saying that this heresy was the last and the precursor to the Anti-Christ. He taught the people that the Son of God is not a creature and did not come into being from nothing but is the eternal Word and Wisdom of the being of the Father: “So it is impious to say that ‘there was when He was not’. The Word exists eternally with the Father. So do not have any thing to do with these most impious Arians. ‘For light has no fellowship with darkness’ (2 Cor 6:14). You are pious Christians but they, who say of the Son who is from the Father and is the Word of God that He is a creature, differ in no way from the pagans, worshipping a creature instead of God the Creator (cf. Rom 1:25). Rest assured that the whole creation itself is indignant at them, because they number among created beings the Creator and Lord of all, in whom all things came into being.” So all the people rejoiced to hear so great a man anathematizing the heresy which fights against Christ.

(Life of Antony 69–70)

However, Athanasius's successes at home and in enlisting the support of Pope Julius in Rome were offset by the tide of events in the East, which was decisively moving in the direction of his opponents. Stationed in Antioch, in the course of a campaign against the Persians, the Eastern emperor Constantius was prevailed upon to be present at a synod of bishops gathered there during the winter of 338– 339. This synod included the members of the investigatory commission that had previously condemned Athanasius at the Council of Tyre. The Council of Antioch of 339 reiterated the charges that had been brought against Athanasius in Tyre and they also brought against him the new charges that he was responsible for violence that had ensued in the course of his return to Egypt, and that his return to Alexandria was itself illegitimate, since the decision of Tyre was still binding and had not been overturned by another Church council. This council then set about to find a replacement for Athanasius, whose reinstatement in Alexandria they considered to be illegitimate. With Pistus discredited, they offered the Alexandrian see to a Eusebius, future bishop of Emesa, who declined it, apparently citing the attachment of the Alexandrian people to their bishop. They finally settled upon a cleric from Cappadocia, by the name of Gregory. Athanasius would later press the point that if he were to be replaced, it should at least have been done by a properly constituted Egyptian synod, “and not that a person brought by the Arians from a distance, as if trafficking in the title of bishop, and with the patronage and strong arm of pagan magistrates, should assert himself over those who neither requested nor desired his presence.” Athanasius's remarks here are indicative of his strategy to exploit the fact that the opposition to him inside Egypt constituted a negligible minority relative to the support for him which only steadily increased throughout his episcopal career. Increasingly, Athanasius could characterize the forces arrayed against him as an external imposition on the internal affairs of the Egyptian Church.

The deposition of Athanasius and his replacement by Gregory of Cappadocia was facilitated by the reappointment of the prefect Philagrius, who had assisted the investigatory commission of the Council of Tyre, but had since been replaced by another prefect, Theodorus, who was considered to be a supporter of Athanasius. Philagrius took the unprecedented step of publishing an imperial edict declaring Gregory of Cappadocia to be the bishop of Alexandria. On 23 March 339, Gregory entered the city and forcibly assumed the episcopal see of Alexandria. The prefect Philagrius energetically pursued his mission of seizing churches and handing them over to Gregory. The resultant plundering apparently drew even crowds of non-Christians who participated in the mayhem. Athanasius cites a litany of outrages: a church and baptistry set on fire, virgins and monks subjected to physical abuse, and the offering of pagan sacrifices at the altar. The danger to his own person was such that Athanasius was forced to go into hiding. A month later, he left Egypt and, on the invitation of Pope Julius, went to Rome. Thus began his second exile, less than two years after his return from the first. His festal letter for 339, addressed to his flock in preparation for the celebration of Easter, is revelatory both of Athanasius's sense of anxiety and of his characteristic determination to adopt a stance of indefatigable, even triumphal perseverance. Manifesting a theme that is clearly a cornerstone of both his personal spirituality and his preaching, that of the imitation of the biblical saints, he exhorts his flock to persevere in confessing the unqualified divinity of the Son and to imitate the steadfastness of the “righteous and faithful servants of the Lord”:

Although they may be surrounded by external trials and tribulations, they conform themselves to the words of the apostle and “enduring in tribulations and persevering in prayers” (Rom 12:12), and in contemplation of the law, they endure everything which happen to them. They are pleasing to God and recite what is written, “Though afflictions and anguish have come upon me, your commandments are my meditations” (Ps 119:

143).

(Festal Letter XI:6)

Let us make a joyful sound, along with the saints, and let no one neglect his duty. Especially at this time, let us consider as nothing the afflictions or the tribulations which the party of Eusebius has caused us because of their jealousy. Even now they still want to harm us and to achieve our death by their accusations, because we cling to that piety whose sustenance, however, is provided by the Lord. But, as God's faithful servants, we know that he is our salvation in time of trouble—for our Lord gave us this promise when he said “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me. Rejoice and be very glad, for your reward is great in heaven” (Mt 5:11–12). The Redeemer's own words are that afflictions are not for every one in this world, but only for those who have a holy fear of him—therefore, the more we are cornered in by our enemies, the more free we should be; although they abuse us, let us maintain our gatherings; and the more they try to dissuade us from piety, the more boldly we should preach it, saying: “‘Although all this has come upon us, we have not forgotten you’ (Ps 44: 18); and we have not shared in the evil of the Arian fanatics, who say that you have your being from non-being. The Word who is eternally with the Father is also from the Father.”

(Festal Letter XI:12)

In the same festal letter, the Alexandrian bishop makes it clear to his flock that the theological issues involved in the controversy with the “Arians” are not a matter of arcane speculation but have everything to do with the authentic celebration of the great feast of Christ's Resurrection, which they are about to liturgically commemorate: “They say that he is not the Creator but a creature. If he was a creature, he would have been captured by death; but if, according to the Scriptures, he was not captured by death, then he is not a creature but the Lord of the creatures and the subject of this immortal feast.”

While exiled in Rome, Athanasius had occasion to make the acquaintance of another staunch opponent of Arius and his supporters, Marcellus of Ancyra. Marcellus, who had been deposed by a synod at Constantinople in 336, refused all talk that seemed to ascribe to God numerical differentiation and was widely regarded among Eastern bishops as a “Sabellian,” who held that “Father” and “Son” were simply identical. Marcellus had written a treatise directed against another supporter of Arius, Asterius “the Sophist.” Asterius, who hailed from Cappadocia, had capitulated and offered sacrifice to pagan gods during the persecution of Diocletian. He was thus ineligible for ecclesial office but was a prolific lay theologian and exegete. Asterius had written his Syntagmation some time before the Council of Nicaea. In it, he followed Arius in asserting that the Son is a creature and inferior to the Father, not integral to the divine essence of “the God” (ho theos) but produced as an effect of the Father's will and for the sake of being a “mediator” of God's creative agency. Because the Scriptures identify Jesus Christ as the Son of God and also as the “power,” “wisdom,” and “Word” of God —terms that in the scriptural idiom seem integral to divinity— Asterius also adopted Arius's distinction between the innate wisdom and Word of God which is integral to the divine essence, and the created word and wisdom which is the created “Son.” At the same time, Asterius decisively modified the tenor and sometimes the substance of Arius's doctrine in some important respects. No longer is there any mention of the Son's creation “from nothing,” and the notion that God was not always Father is replaced with the explanation that “the God” was always Father in the sense that his generative capacity is eternal and precedes the generation of the Son. Even more strikingly, Asterius speaks of the Son as “the exact image of the substance, will, glory and power of the Father,” although Arius himself had struck a much different note in asserting that Father, Son, and Spirit are “wholly and infinitely unlike each other in substance and splendor.” In general, the strongly apophatic character of Arius's theology, which led him to state that even the Son does not know the Father or his own essence, is very much attenuated in the theology of Asterius. The latter placed greater stress on the title of “Unbegotten” as revelatory of the divine being, and on the Incarnate Son as fulfilling the mediatorial role of positively manifesting divinity to creation.

The theology of Asterius, along with that of Arius, is the target of a comprehensive refutation of various strands of anti-Nicene theology that Athanasius undertook while in exile, in Rome. In the three Orations against the Arians, Athanasius's defense of Nicene theology is for the most part confined to the scriptural domain. He largely eschews the Nicene formulation of the relation between the Father and the Son as “homoousios,” whose lack of scriptural provenance was one of its central liabilities, and concerns himself instead with attacking the scriptural bases of anti-Nicene theology. This anti- Nicene theology found support in scriptural references that seemed to indicate that the Son's divinity was not something natural, eternal, and equal to that of the Father. Such were references to Jesus Christ as having “received” exaltation and divine prerogatives, suggesting that his divinity was attained “by grace” or divine favor, rather than “by nature.” A central example was Phil 2:9, which seemed to indicate that the exaltation of Christ and his gaining of “the name that is above every name” was something that was bestowed upon him by God as a reward for his salvific labors. References to the Son's human weaknesses (his hunger, fear, lack of knowledge, etc.) were also taken as indicative of the subordinate rank of his deity. At the heart of the scriptural debate was the key text of Prov 8:22, “He created me as the beginning of his ways for his works,” which was taken as referring to the originated rather than eternal being of the Word. On the other hand, the anti-Nicene positions that Athanasius is countering were challenged by such scriptural titles of the Son as “God,” “Lord,” “Wisdom,” “Light,” “Truth,” and “Image,” the very titles that were incorporated in the “Dedication” creed of Antioch. Athanasius's theological opponents dealt with these scriptural titles by asserting that they belonged to the Son not by nature but by participation “as a grace.” In response, Athanasius constructs a Trinitarian hermeneutics which seeks to ground Nicene Trinitarian theology firmly in the narrativity and linguistic intertextuality of the scriptural witness. His three Orations against the Arians, which were likely penned between 339 and 343, during his exile in Rome, represent the doctrinal substance of Athanasius's mature reflections “which would serve as a main literary reference during the next three decades of his long episcopate.”

Meanwhile, Pope Julius had been trying for some time to convene a council which would gather together Athanasius and his supporters as well as the “Eusebians,” with the aim of adjudicating the charges brought against Athanasius at the Council of Tyre. After being rebuffed by the Eusebians, Julius proceeded to summon a local council in Rome, early in 341, which judged in favor of Athanasius and determined the accession of his replacement, Gregory, to be uncanonical. Marcellus produced a confession of faith which apparently couched his modalist views such that they were acceptable to the Roman synod, and he too was reinstated. This proved to be a fateful step which considerably complicated matters, for it gave the Eastern bishops some ground for asserting that the Nicene formula was at least susceptible or even hospitable to a “Sabellian” interpretation. Pope Julius's intervention, far from bringing the matter to a resolution, had the effect merely of intensifying the breach between East and West. The Eastern bishops declined his invitation to participate in a council dealing with the charges against Athanasius on the principle that Athanasius had already been condemned at the Council of Tyre, and that the judgment of one Church council cannot be re-examined by another. In an indignant and dismissive response, Julius questioned how this reasoning can be consistent with the readmission of Arians to communion and the appointment to the Alexandrian see of Pistus, whom Julius reports to have been condemned by the Council of Nicaea as a supporter of Arius. Julius asserted his firm belief in the innocence of Athanasius and, adhering to Athanasius's own reading of the situation, noted that the predominantly external pressure to dispose of Athanasius cannot be privileged over the supportive testimony of the Egyptian bishops themselves, “especially considering that you are far away while they are on the scene and they know the man and the events that took place there and write in testimony to his manner of life and clearly confirm that he has been the victim of a conspiracy all along” (Defence against the Arians 27). At this point, the issue of the legitimacy of the intervention of the bishop of Rome in matters relating to other churches becomes intricately interwoven with that of the intervention of other bishops in the affairs of the Egyptian Church. It is to be gathered from Julius's letter that the Eastern bishops saw his intervention as meddling in manners that had been decisively settled and were not open to re examination, while he saw himself as coming to the defense of a local church whose integrity was being violated:

And yet after all this you fault us for departing from the canons?… Consider, then, who it is who is acting in transgression of the canons: we, who have received this man after so many proofs {of his innocence}, or those in Antioch, who from the distance of a thirty-six days’ journey, named a foreigner as bishop and sent him to Alexandria with military force?… What ecclesiastical canon or which apostolic tradition is this, that while a church was at peace and there were so many bishops in unanimity with Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, Gregory should be sent there, a foreigner to the city, who was neither baptized there nor known to the people, nor requested by the presbyters or the bishops or the people—someone who was appointed in Antioch but then sent to Alexandria, accompanied not by priests nor by deacons of that city nor by the bishops of Egypt but by soldiers?

(Defence against the Arians 29–30)

The estrangement between Rome and the Eastern churches was further confirmed by the Easterners’ meeting separately in Antioch, later in the same year of 341. Gathered in order to dedicate the “Golden-Domed” church, built by Constantius, the Eastern bishops took the opportunity to convene a council in response to Julius's council in Rome and his trenchant missive. In addressing the doctrinal concerns underlying the conflict, this “Council of the Dedication,” of which Asterius was a participant, inaugurated attempts to conjure up a doctrinal alternative to the “homoousios” of Nicaea with its Sabellian evocation. It produced three creeds, while a fourth was issued a few months later by yet another gathering in Antioch. Most significant of these, as indicative of a rather “mainstream” Eastern response to the Nicene Council, is the second, or “Dedication,” creed, which shows unmistakable signs of the influence of Asterius. This creed tries to carve out a middle way, shunning both the “homoousios” and the assertion that the Son is from non-being. It simply abstracts from the problematic of making a precise distinction between the Son's ontological status and that of creation, and refers to the Son mainly by his key scriptural titles: “living Wisdom, true Light, Way, Truth, unchanging and unaltering, the exact image of the Godhead and the substance, will, power, and glory of the Father.” With an anti-Sabellian, anti-Marcellan thrust, it is emphatic in its assertion that the Trinity is three in hypostasies, but one in “agreement” (symphonia).

On the political front, both Pope Julius and Athanasius were pleading the latter's case to the Western emperor Constans. In sympathetic response, Constans called a council in Sardica (now Sophia, Bulgaria) in 343. This time, the Easterners sent a delegation of bishops which included five of the six members of the original Mareotic Commission that had condemned Athanasius at the Council of Tyre. On seeing that the Western contingent included Athanasius, Marcellus, and other exiled bishops, the Easterners refused to participate unless those who were the object of accusations were excluded from the proceedings. On the other hand, the Westerners insisted that since the purpose of this council was to re-examine these very accusations, the accused must be allowed to be present. In light of this stalemate, the news of Constantius's victory over the Persians provided an opportune occasion for the Eastern bishops to withdraw, explaining that they must return to congratulate the emperor on his victory. Making their way back into the Eastern part of the kingdom and the jurisdiction of Constantius, they stopped at Philoppolis, where they excommunicated Athanasius, Marcellus, and Pope Julius, as well as Hosius of Cordoba, who had convened the Antiochian council which anticipated the Council of Nicaea in denouncing Arius. They published a document, which singled out Marcellus of Ancyra for heretical views and reiterated accusations that Athanasius engaged in violent behavior both before the Council of Tyre and after his return from exile. The attempts to exonerate Athanasius from the condemnation of Tyre were interpreted as inaugurating the unacceptable precedent that Eastern bishops are to be judged by Western. On the other hand, the Western bishops gathered among themselves and reasserted their support of both Athanasius and, once again, Marcellus, and, for their part, announced the deposition of a number of Eastern bishops whom they considered to be Arian. Moreover, with an eye to the troubles of Athanasius and other deposed bishops, it was decided that bishops deposed from their sees could appeal to the see of Rome. They also published a profession of faith which took aim at what they considered to be an equivocation on the question of the unqualified divinity of the Son: “We disqualify and expel from the catholic church those who assert that Christ is indeed God, but that he is not true God, that he is Son, but not true Son; that he is begotten and at the same time has come into existence; for this is the way in which they regularly interpret ‘begotten,’ professing, as we have said above, that ‘begotten’ is ‘having come into existence.’”

The rupture between East and West was thus broadened, with the Western bishops tending to interpret the anti-Sabellian caution of the Eastern bishops as “Arian”, while the Eastern bishops were disposed to see the strongly anti-Arian stance of the West as tending to Sabellianism. This ecclesiastical divide between East and West was reflected in the opposing postures of the emperors Constantius in the East and Constans in the West. But in the aftermath of the Council of Sardica, some rapprochement between the two emperors seemed to be in the offing. The Western Constans sent a delegation to his brother in the East requesting the reinstatement of the pro-Nicene exiles. This mission seems to have softened Constantius somewhat, and he wrote a public letter forbidding the persecution of Athanasius's supporters in Alexandria. The momentum toward reconciliation was further reflected in yet another council in Antioch, in 344, which attempted to arrive at a mediating position by issuing a creed (the “Macrostich” or “Long-lined” creed) rejecting the teaching that the Son is from “non-being,” while maintaining that the Son is to be “subordinated” to the Father, as deriving from the Father “by intention and will.” Certainly, by the standards of Athanasius's theology, such a statement would not have passed muster. Nevertheless, a delegation was sent to Milan with this creed in order to present it to the Western bishops. The Western bishops were unwilling to consider the Eastern creed unless the Antiochian delegation passed the litmus test of condemning Arius. This the Antiochenes indignantly refused to do, and so the attempted reconciliation was aborted.

However, a reconciliation of sorts between Athanasius and the Eastern emperor Constantius was still in the making. Constantius invited Athanasius personally to plead his own cause before him and, with his replacement, Gregory of Cappadocia, now recently dead (d. 345), intimated that Athanasius would be restored to his see. After some hesitation and delay, Athanasius eventually made his way to Constantius, where he was given assurances that the emperor's disfavor of him was now to be reversed. After what seems to have been an unexpectedly cordial meeting, Athanasius was allowed to return to Alexandria, to jubilant welcome. He was able to spend the next decade in his own see, the longest period of uninterrupted residency in his 46 years as bishop.

“The Golden Decade”: 346–356

The return of Athanasius to Alexandria was an event of great public celebration and personal triumph. A modern historian comments that “his triumphant progress into Alexandria resembled less the return of an exiled bishop than the adventus of a Roman emperor.” It is consistent with Athanasius's own psychological disposition, pastoral deportment, and apologetic strategy that he himself interprets his own deliverance as a triumph for the whole Egyptian Church, and he depicts this ecclesial triumph in terms of a joyful renaissance of Christian discipleship. Signaling his steadily growing engagement with the monastic movement and his consolidation of it under his own tutelage, Athanasius would later associate his triumphant re-entry upon the epsicopal throne of Alexandria particularly with a renaissance of asceticism:

I hardly need to speak of the bishops of Egypt and Libya and of the people of these lands and of Alexandria. They all assembled together and their joy was unspeakable, for not only had they received their friends back alive, which was beyond all their hope, but they were delivered from the heretics, who were like tyrants and raging dogs. Great was the delight of the people as they gathered in worship and incited each other to virtue. How many single women who were previously preparing themselves for marriage remained virgins for Christ! How many young men, witnessing the examples of others, fell in love with the monastic life! How many fathers urged their children and how many were persuaded by their children not to shirk back from the ascetic discipline in Christ! How many wives convinced their husbands and how many were persuaded by their husbands to “devote themselves to prayer,” as the apostle said (1 Cor 7:5)! How many widows and orphans, who were previously hungry and unclothed, received both food and clothing through the great zeal of the people. In short, the contest for virtue was such that one would have thought every family and household to be a church, on account of the virtuous nobility of its members and their prayers offered to God. There was a deep and wonderful peace among the churches, as the bishops wrote from everywhere to Athanasius and received from him the customary letters of peace.

(History of the Arians 25)

Such an idealized picture doubtless reflects Athanasius's fond memories of the relatively peaceful times that immediately followed his return. But the first intimation that this peace was about to end came in 350, with the death of Constans, the Western emperor and supporter of Athanasius. Constans was killed by his general, Magnentius, who then took over control of the Western empire. In the East, Constantius initiated a campaign against his brother's usurper, which by 353 had succeeded to the point where Magnentius acknowledged defeat by committing suicide. As long as the outcome of the rivalry between Constantius and Magnentius was in doubt, both vied for the support of Athanasius, coveting the weight of his authority and popularity among the Egyptian people. The situation became quite different when Constantius attained sole control of the Roman empire. Not having to reckon with his brother's restraining presence, Constantius could now pursue his anti-Nicene policies with far more rigor, a state of affairs that would not bode well for Athanasius.

An ominous sign of the turning tide was a council held in Sirmium, in 351, with Constantius himself present. The resultant “First Sirmian” creed now discountenanced the Nicene doctrine of the relation between the Father and the Son as “one in essence” (homoousios), which it interprets as implying that the Son is an “extension” of the Father's being. In response, Athanasius's own position became even more entrenched. Up to this point, he had largely avoided the controversial term “homoousios,” and tried to articulate the Nicene theology of the full divinity of the Son in strictly scriptural terms. Beginning with the writing of On the Council of Nicaea (De Decretis; ca. 352–353), his position henceforth becomes increasingly defined by an insistence on the unimpeachable authority of the Council of Nicaea and the necessity for adhering to its definition of the relationship between the Father and the Son.

At the same time, Constantius's policy was becoming more aggressive. In 353, he summoned a council in Arles, and in 355 yet another in Milan. In these two councils, imperial pressure was brought to bear on the Western bishops to depose Athanasius and accept a doctrinal formula antithetical to Nicene doctrine. Subjected to intimidation and threats, the bishops largely capitulated; the few who withstood imperial coercion were deposed from their sees and exiled. As opposition to the Nicene formulation grew under the tutelage of Constantius, he prepared to make his move directly on Athanasius. He sent his secretary, Diogenes, to seize Athanasius by force, an attempt which proved unsuccessful in the face of public support for the bishop. Diogenes’ mission, however, was merely transferred into the hands of the dux Syrianus, who began concentrating imperial forces from around the area into Alexandria. Alarmed, Athanasius and his supporters recalled to Syrianus the past overtures of goodwill on the part of Constantius, and were assured by Syrianus that he would not take any action until the matter was adjudicated by the emperor. But any sense of security generated by this apparent concession merely gave Syrianus the advantage of surprise. Just past midnight, on 8 February 356, Syrianus and his troops stormed the church of Theonas, where Athanasius was celebrating with his congregation. Athanasius's account of the incident, which in its substance can hardly be dismissed as fallacious given the public setting of the event, dramatizes a classic instance of his capacity for self-possession in times of danger:

It was now already night and some of the people were keeping vigil, in anticipation of the coming service. The general Syrianus suddenly appeared with more than five thousand soldiers bearing arms and drawn swords, bows, spears, and clubs, as I said before. He surrounded the church and stationed the soldiers nearby so that no one would be able to pass by them and leave the church. I considered it unreasonable to abandon the people in the midst of such turmoil, and not rather to endanger myself for their sakes. So I sat upon the throne and urged that first the deacon should read a psalm and the people respond, “For his mercy is forever” (Ps 136), and then everyone should leave and go away to their homes. But the general then entered by force and the soldiers surrounded the altar in order to arrest us. The clergy and the people who were there shouted and demanded that we also depart. But I refused, saying that I would not leave until each and every one of them had left. And so, getting up and exhorting everyone to prayer, I commanded that everyone else leave first, saying, “It is better for me to endanger myself than to have any of you come to harm.” When most of the people had gone out and the remaining were following them, the monks who were with us and some of the clergy came up and dragged us away. And so, as truth is my witness, while some of the soldiers were standing around the altar and others were going around the church, we passed through. Guided and protected by the Lord, we escaped their notice and went away, greatly glorifying God in that we had not abandoned the people, but had first sent them off and were then enabled to save ourselves and flee from the hands of our pursuers.

(Defence of his Flight 24)

The third exile: 356–362

Now in hiding, Athanasius at first sought to defend himself and attempt a rapprochement with the emperor in his Defence before Constantius. He had originally intended to present his defense personally to the emperor in Milan, but the notion of a direct encounter with the emperor was abandoned upon his hearing of the banishment of the prominent pro-Nicene bishops Hosius of Cordoba and Pope Liberius, as well as that of a considerable number of Egyptian bishops. Constantius had also sent a letter to the Egyptian people, full of invective against Athanasius, excoriating him as “a man who had come from the lowest pits,” who had won over the simple people by deceit and demagoguery, and who deserves to be killed “ten times over.” In the same letter, Constantius announced Athanasius's replacement, another Cappadocian named George, who was recommended by Constantius as a “learned man” but of whom Athanasius disdainfully noted that he had amassed a fortune by selling pork to the army. Although the supporters of Athanasius maintained control over the churches of Alexandria for the next several months, an intensified policy of coercion eventually resulted in their being transferred over to the control of the imported George. George presided over a violent persecution of Athanasius's supporters, with the aid of the dux Sebastianus, a policy which would later provide motive for his own violent execution at the hands of an Egyptian mob.

During the 350s, the doctrinal controversy became considerably more complicated with the appearance of Aetius and Eunomius, who advocated the position that the Son was simply “unlike” (anomios) the Father. The materialization of this “Anomian” position seems to have been an attempt, from an anti-Nicene perspective, to resolve the inherent ambiguity of the “homoian” position. The latter maintained that the Son was “like” (homoios) the Father, but then had to differentiate itself from Nicene doctrine precisely by setting limits to this likeness, by insisting, for example, that only the Father was “unoriginated.” Unlike the earlier opponents of Nicene theology, these “anomeans” were prepared to use ousia-language to unambiguously assert the secondary status of the Son and the tertiary status of the Spirit. The “Anomians” thus represented both a radicalization and a critique of the original position of Arius. In particular, they rejected his teaching that the Son does not know the Father and espoused the principle that names were revelatory of essences. The essence of the Father is indicated by the name of “Unoriginate/Unbegotten” (agen(n)ētos), and therefore is unlike the essence of the Son, which is signified by the name of “Begotten” (gen(n)ētos). The Holy Spirit was considered to be a creature of the Son, sent by him for the work of sanctification.

Yet another manifestation of the trend away from cautious ambiguity was the Council of Sirmium of 357. This council issued a statement which came to be known pejoratively among its opponents as the “Blasphemy of Sirmium.” While it eschews the original slogans of Arius, such as “there was once when the Son was not,” the creed of Sirmium manifests its Arian sympathies quite clearly in its denial of Nicaea and its strong and explicit emphasis on the subordination of the Son and the unique glory of the Father. Such an extreme statement prompted a reaction in the East, which was led by Basil of Ancyra, who had succeeded the deposed Marcellus in 336, and had been a member of the Eastern delegation at the Council of Sardica in 343. In 358, a year after the Council of Sirmium, Basil assembled his own council in Ancyra. The result was a doctrinal statement (likely penned by Basil himself) which bore significant similarities to the Athanasian logic. As a central point, Basil makes the argument that the relation between Father and Son must be distinguished from that between creatures and the Creator, and that the only way to safeguard that distinction is to speak of the likeness between Father and Son, as a likeness of being, or essence (ousia). Thus, he advocated the designation homoiousios, “like according to essence,” as a way of asserting the essential likeness of the Father and the Son without reverting to the Nicene “homoousios. ”

Basil of Ancyra's council sent a delegation to personally deliver this doctrinal statement to the emperor Constantius. Constantius seemed to have rapidly concluded that this position could be the breakthrough in finding a consensus. He immediately championed this new position, maintaining that it had always been his own view, and sent Aetius and Eunomius into exile. He then called for an ecumenical council to rally around Basil of Ancyra's proposal. Constantius's attitude at this point shows some signs of battle-fatigue on the ecclesiastical front, expressed in a tendency to tightly control and predetermine the outcome of such a council. It was arranged that the Western and Eastern bishops would meet separately. Moreover, even before this divided “meeting” was to occur, a document was drawn up to be presented to the respective synods. The creed that was produced announced its date as 22 May 359, and thus became known as the “Dated” creed. A small number of bishops were invited to compose this declaration, including Basil of Ancyra. The result was a compromise statement that aimed to appease both the “homoians” who wished to avoid language of being and the “homoiousians,” led by Basil of Ancyra. A compromise was reached by rejecting reference to likeness of being and replacing it with the designation of “like in every way”:

The word ousia, because when it was naively inserted by our fathers though not familiar to the masses, it caused disturbance, and because the Scriptures do not contain it, we have decided should be removed, and that there should be absolutely no mention of ousia in relation to God for the future, because the Scriptures make no mention at all of the ousia of the Father and the Son. But we declare that the Son is like the Father in all respects, as the holy Scriptures also declare and teach.

This declaration was placed before the Eastern bishops, who met in Seleucia. The homoians and homoiousians could not come to any common understanding and the Eastern contingent dismantled without any significant results. The Western contingent, meanwhile, asserted its fidelity to Nicaea and its resistance to the production of any new creed. They sent a letter to the emperor, followed by a delegation of ten from their number, beseeching him to allow them to return to their sees. The emperor declined to meet with the Western delegation and kept them waiting. With the winter approaching, the Western bishops reiterated their request to be allowed back to their sees, but to no avail. Eventually, the waiting game of the emperor proved to be efficacious and, after being removed from Ariminum to Nice, in Thrace, the Western contingent were cajoled into signing a document that was practically equivalent to the Dated creed. The significant difference was that it spoke of the likeness between Father and Son in even more diluted form, omitting the phrase “in all respects.” After the Western delegation signed this creed (“the creed of Nice”), the Eastern delegation followed suit. It was in response to this event that Jerome uttered his famous cry: “ingemuit totus orbis, et se Arianum esse miratus est” (“the whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian”). In 360, the homoian Acacius convened another council in Constantinople, and ratified the creed of Nice, which thus became the official creed of the Church. Basil of Ancyra and most of his homoiousian supporters were deposed and exiled.

At this time, Athanasius was still hiding out in the desert of Egypt, sheltered by his monastic supporters. This, his third exile, was his most prolific, resulting in more than half of his extant writings. He defended his conduct and formulated his own account of the Nicene controversy in a series of treatises, including the Defence before Constantius, Defence of his Flight, and the compendious History of the Arians, all completed in 357, as well as On the Councils of Ariminum and Seleucia, written in 359. His consolidation of the monastic contingent of the Egyptian Church is evidenced by the Life of Antony (ca. 356), in which the great Egyptian monk is presented as a model of Athanasius's own conception of Nicene orthodoxy. It is also during this period that Athanasius undertakes a defense of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, along similar lines to his efforts on behalf of the divinity of the Son. There had apparently risen up a group of Christians in Egypt who acknowledged the divinity of the Son but considered the Holy Spirit to be a creature. In response to these Tropici (“the Metaphoricals”), so styled because of their manner of interpreting the scriptural passages in question, Athanasius penned his Letters to Serapion (357–359), which notably apply the designation “homoousios” to the Holy Spirit. On this score, Gregory of Nazianzus, who had chided his friend Basil of Caesarea for not being bold enough to do the same, lauded Athanasius as the first complete theologian of the Trinity: “He was the first and only one, or with the concurrence of but a few, to venture to confess in writing and with entire clearness and distinctness the unity of Godhead and essence of the three Persons and thus to attain in later days, under the influence of inspiration, to the same faith in regard to the Holy Spirit as had been bestowed at an earlier time on most of the Fathers in regard to the Son.”

In 360, Constantius died and the government of the empire passed to his cousin, Julian. Once again, the death of an emperor changed the atmosphere of Church politics. With the death of Constantius, Athanasius's prospects immediately brightened. In 361, his replacement, George, whose tenure had been steadfastly opposed by the Egyptian people and whose authority was maintained only by the ruthless coercion of imperial forces, was brutally attacked and killed by a vengeful Egyptian mob. In 362, Julian issued an edict allowing all bishops banished by Constantius to return to their sees. Twelve days later, Athanasius appeared in Alexandria, though his stay would last only eight months.

The final decade: 362–373

Anxious to consolidate the ranks of those who confessed the full divinity of the Son, Athanasius quickly convened a council to deal with a terminological controversy that had arisen in Antioch but which was reflective of terminological and conceptual divergences that were significant and pervasive. One side, of homoiousian (“like in essence”) sympathies, wished to speak of Father, Son, and Spirit as three hypostases; the other (steadfastly pro-Nicaea) spoke of one hypostasis. The latter group's terminology was more consistent with the linguistic usage of Athanasius himself, as well as that of the Council of Nicaea and its Western supporters. The former group represented the Eastern usage and the Origenist concern to safeguard the distinct subsistences of the three in God. Characteristically, Athanasius is less concerned with terminological usage than he is with the substantive signification which such usage is meant to convey. The Council of Alexandria of 362 declared that both usages were legitimate, provided that those who spoke of three hypostases did not thereby deny the unity of the Godhead, while those who spoke of one hypostasis also acknowledged a real distinction among the three. It also anathematized those who maintained that the Holy Spirit was a creature, and affirmed that the Logos did not lack a human soul and mind.

However, Athanasius's activities in Alexandria were soon to be once again interrupted. Emperor Julian, called by his Christian opponents “the apostate” for having renounced Christianity, was intent upon propagating a revival of the Greek and Roman religions. Displeased and alarmed by the towering figure that Athanasius now assumed in Egypt, Julian issued an unlikely interpretation of his original decree, explaining that he meant only to allow bishops back to their country of residence, rather than to the resumption of their episcopal duties. He insisted that Athanasius in particular (“that contemptible little fellow”), who has been so often deposed, cannot be allowed to remain in Alexandria. As Athanasius and his supporters protested, Julian became more obdurate, now insisting that Athanasius depart not only from Alexandria but from Egypt altogether. Having re-entered Alexandria on 21 February 362, Athanasius was thus forced to make his way out again on 23 October of the same year, his fourth exile. He retired to the desert, where he was received by the monks with much fanfare. This time, his exile would last only a little over a year, whereupon the death of Julian in the course of battle with the Persians provided another respite for the Alexandrian bishop.

Upon his return, Athanasius quickly took the initiative and traveled to Edessa to present himself to the new emperor, Jovian, who was returning from Persia to Antioch. Jovian proved amenable to Athanasius 's cause and gave him a letter assenting to the resumption of his episcopal duties, despite the protestations of Athanasius's opponents. Responding to Jovian's request that he submit a doctrinal statement, Athanasius enjoined him simply to adhere to the creed of Nicaea, and warned against any compromise with the “homoian” party, stressing that the Council Fathers of Nicaea “did not merely say that the Son is like (homoios) the Father, so that it should be believed that he is merely like God instead of true God from true God. But they wrote ‘homoousios’ which is what properly applies to a genuine and true Son, who belongs to the Father truly and by nature.”

Imperial support, which Athanasius had so long lacked, proved to be short-lived. Jovian died on 20 February 364, to be succeeded by Valentinian, a general. Valentinian governed the Western part of the empire, and appointed in the East his brother Valens, a sympathizer of the anti-Nicene “homoians.” Valens set about reversing the policy of his predecessor and sent out an edict demanding that all the bishops who had been recalled to their sees by Jovian resume their exile. For a time, Athanasius demurred, his supporters contending that the edict did not apply to the complex past circumstances of their bishop. But Valens persisted, and when his commander finally stormed the Church of Dionysius to arrest Athanasius, the latter had already made his getaway. He had set off for his fifth exile, which was also his shortest and last. A few months later, the tide of imperial politics turned again, this time in favor of Athanasius. The authority of Valens was challenged by a rebellion led by a relative of the deceased emperor Julian. Anxious to contain the unrest in Egypt during this time of instability, Valens reversed his position and announced that Athanasius was to be recalled to his episcopal duties in Alexandria. He was escorted back to the Church of Dionysius by the imperial notarius, Brasidas.

Athanasius spent the remaining years of his life in relative tranquility in Alexandria. His support among the Egyptian people was now so widespread and fervent that when another anti-Nicene bishop was sent to Alexandria from Antioch, he had to be directly escorted back under imperial guard to avoid the fate that had earlier befallen George. In the last years of his life, Athanasius's doctrinal writings engage emerging Christological debates about the nature of Christ's humanity and its relation to the divinity. In response to these questions, Athanasius penned several doctrinal letters which were to carry great authority in the subsequent Christological debates of the fifth century, among which are the Letter to Adelphius and the Letter to Epictetus. The latter was considered to be one of the benchmarks of Christological orthodoxy at both the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451). Referring to it, Pope Leo the Great, one of the principal figures at the Council of Chalcedon, wrote of Athanasius that “he construed the Incarnation of the Word so clearly and carefully that he defeated Nestorius and Eutyches in the persons of the heretics of his own time.”

Athanasius died on 2 May 373. Having attained to the epsicopal throne of Alexandria as a young man approximately 30 years old, he had spent 17 of his 46 years as a bishop in exile. With the triumph of Nicene theology at the Council of Constantinople, Athanasius would be looked upon henceforth as a standard of orthodoxy. In his funeral oration, Gregory of Nazianzus declares: “His life and conduct form the ideal of an episcopate and his teaching the law of orthodoxy.” Cyril, Athanasius's eventual successor to the throne of Alexandria, had an even greater regard for Athanasius's authority and based his own Christological reflections in large part along the lines of his predecessor. Traditionally considered in both the Eastern and Western Churches as a premiere authority in Christological and Trinitarian doctrine, he continues to be especially venerated by the Coptic Orthodox Church of his native Egypt.

Judgments of Athanasius's character

For the greater part of the Christian tradition, the triumph of Nicene theology has gone hand in hand with a lionization of Athanasius as the stalwart and inspired defender of the orthodox Christian faith. Athanasius's uncompromising stance toward his opponents and his indefatigable persistence were seen as illustrious reflections of his inalterable and incorruptible faith in the fullness of the Son's divinity. Into the modern era, the figure of Athanasius has been championed by such notable theologians as the English Cardinal John Henry Newman and the German Johan Möhler. In his journal entry for 14 April 1838, the great Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard can still reflect the traditional fascination with an Athanasius drawn in heroic proportions: “These last few days I have been reading Görres’ Athanasius not only with my eyes but with my whole body— with a throbbing heart.” However, the traditionally high estimate of Athanasius's person has been increasingly brought into question since the nineteenth century. One extreme portrait presents him as a vicious tyrant, the equivalent of a modern American gangster, and a “Pharaoh” who only lusted for power and used doctrinal debates as a means to that end. Given the fact that our predominant access to Athanasius's personality is that writ large over the tumultuous events of the Nicene crisis, it is hard to escape the inclination either to concur completely in Athanasius's own tendency to identify his person entirely with the Nicene cause or to dismiss such a strategy as a sham ploy for power. Clearly, Athanasius was sincerely dedicated to Nicene theology as he interpreted it and was willing to incur great personal cost as the price for upholding it. Nevertheless, this does not of itself sanction all his words and actions as if they were merely a direct extension of the presumed validity of Nicene theology, to the point where Athanasius's own personality is construed as “consubstantial” with Nicene orthodoxy. On the other hand, we also have to concede that the application of historiography to rendering moral judgments of personal character is a complex and perilous matter, especially if it ignores the historicity and variability of norms of conduct in different cultures and times. In this regard, one modern commentator wisely exhorts, “we should be very cautious in drawing large conclusions about a figure as strange to us as a fourth-century Coptic patriarch.” Perhaps such conclusions are after all inevitable, but then we should acknowledge the inevitability of our own prejudices in rendering such judgments. It is striking, for example, that a typical modern complaint about Athanasius lays special stress on his intransigence, his undeniable aura of being sure of himself and his position. But this complaint has its own culturally bound history, having at least as much to do with the Western post- Kantian construction of a virtue of epistemological humility as it does with Athanasius himself. For his closer contemporaries, this “intransigence” was interpreted as a courageous steadfastness and an inspired perception of what was radically at stake. Moreover, his withering ridicule of opponents and sometimes bombastic rhetoric, objectionable (though far from non-existent) according to the academic standards of our day, was rather standard fare for the times. Above all, a judicious evaluation of Athanasius's character must give due weight to the undeniable fact, conceded even by the most vehement of his modern critics, that he eventually gained the overwhelming support and admiration of his own people.

It is true, nevertheless, that Athanasius was accused even during his own time of employing violent means to assert and maintain his authority. But it is very hard to evaluate these accusations objectively, especially considering that some of the most egregious of them (such as the “murder” of Arsenius) were proven, as we have seen, to be artificially contrived by his enemies. There can be no doubt, however, that outbreaks of violence occurred throughout the conflicts between Athanasius's supporters and their Melitian and anti-Nicene opponents. One testimony to this state of affairs was the finding of a papyrus, LP 1914, dating from 335 and comprising a letter sent by a Melitian, Callistus, to two Melitian priests. In this letter, Callistus complains bitterly of the sufferings of his fellow Melitians at the hands of the “adherents of Athanasius.” While certain corruptions in the manuscript make the exact construal somewhat in doubt, the document seems to provide clear evidence of violence perpetuated by Athanasius's supporters. For his own part, Athanasius ‘s public pronouncements on the use of violence tend to repudiate it as a distinctly Arian mode of behavior. In recounting the imperially sponsored atrocities of his opponents, he contends:

This is how the devil acts, since there is no truth in him. With “axe and hammer” (Ps 74:6), he breaks down the doors of those who do not receive him. But our Savior is so gentle that he teaches by saying: “If any one wishes to come after me…” and “whoever wishes to be my disciple” (Mt 16:24). When he comes to someone, he does not force them but knocks at the door and says, “Open to me, my sister, my bride” (Song 5:2). If they open, he enters but if they delay and do not wish him to enter, he leaves them. For the truth is not proclaimed with swords or darts or soldiers; but by persuasion and advice.

(History of the Arians 33)

It is true enough that imperial forces hostile to Athanasius and his supporters were given to quashing them with a heavy hand. As one eminent historian who was no admirer of Athanasius conceded: “Even allowing for exaggerations, we must accept that Constantius's troops never had any hesitation in forcing their way into churches and suppressing popular demonstrations ruthlessly.” Nevertheless, it is somewhat implausible to assume that Athanasius's Egyptian supporters, who eventually constituted by far the majority of Egyptian Christians and who associated their “Arian” opponents with imperial force, persevered in an unbroken stance of non-violence. For one infamous instance, the public lynching of the unpopular George, is terrible evidence to the contrary. While there is no extant evidence of Athanasius's explicit authorization of such violence, it must be conceded that the general tenor of his language was not so strictly pacific as the above quote would seem to imply. Even if he did not attempt to proclaim the truth “with swords or darts or soldiers,” neither were his efforts at “persuasion and advice” free from continual recourse to verbal abuse and insult. Indeed, just as he could find scriptural warrant for shunning the use of physical violence, he was no less industrious and considerably more prolific in extricating from the Scriptures a seemingly endless supply of insults to hurl at his opponents.

To modern ears, far from the heat and tumult of the actual events, such a haranguing style can easily seem gratuitous and heavy-handed. However, from the point of view of Athanasius's own self-understanding, he is a persecuted shepherd of an embattled flock who is not only at pains to provide his people with cogent and persuasive reasons for denying “Arian” doctrine, but who is also quite desperate to coach them in the appropriate affective repugnance which they ought to feel toward such “blasphemy.” We find Athanasius to be manifestly shaken by the observation that the “Arian heresy” has deceived many Christians who have either adopted it or seemingly concede that it is a permissible interpretation of the Christian faith, while he is quite convinced that the denial of the full divinity of the Son simply deconstructs the whole edifice of Christian faith: “For how can he who denies the Son be truthful about the Father who is revealed by the Son? Or how can he who speaks falsely about the Son think rightly about the Spirit who is given by the Son? Who will give credence to one who speaks of the Resurrection but denies that it is the Lord who became ‘firstborn of the dead’ (Col 1:18) for us? Or how can one who is ignorant of the genuine and true generation of the Son from the Father not be manifestly mistaken about his presence in the flesh?” (Or. Ar. 1:8). Here, as in many other places, Athanasius is at pains to disqualify those who do not accept the full divinity of the Son from any claim to the name of “Christians,” and he clearly considers it to be his pastoral duty to do so.

For Athanasius, this confession of the unqualified divinity of the Son was the cornerstone of genuine Christian “piety” (eusebeia), a term which he evokes frequently. Such a confession is also the only authentically “pious” interpretation of Scripture. His opponents, on the other hand, are not only portrayed as “inept” and “impious” interpreters of Scripture but are also assimilated to biblical personages who deny the lordship of Christ; they are like the Jews and Pontius Pilate. They are also generally assimilated to every scriptural image of villainy. Such a polemical strategy, whatever its unattractive features, must be seen in its integral context as indicative of a central feature of Athanasius's own approach to Christian piety. In his Letter to Marcellinus, Athanasius applies a rudimentary “form-criticism” by categorizing the psalms according to their different subject matter and type; such categorization is then employed in service of the practice of reciting the psalm that properly applies to one's current situation. This practice of applying the Scriptures to the various circumstances of one's life seems to have been a mainstay of Athanasius's spirituality. Nothing is more characteristic of his approach than the tendency to render every situation and every question into scriptural categories, and to assimilate contemporary persons with scriptural personages. In this way, the struggle with his “Arian” opponents was itself subsumed into and assimilated to the scriptural language-world and thus conceived as a struggle between the supporters of the Word and the “Christ-fighters,” “whose father is the devil,” and whose patron is the “most impious” Constantius, “precursor to the Antichrist.”

More positively, this practice of reading his situation into the scriptural world provided Athanasius with a foundational principle in his own moral code and spirituality, that of the imitation of Christ and the biblical saints. When he is forced to give an explanation of his own actions, as in the Defence of his Flight, Athanasius s consistent standard is the biblically recounted actions of Jesus Christ and “the saints” (hoi hagioi), a term which in his vocabulary is generally reserved for biblical personages. It is this same principle which he employs pastorally in order to fortify his flock and which is centrally constitutive of his own celebrated resilience. By way of example, we find him reminding his flock from exile in Rome, in 341, that tribulations and afflictions are simply the allotted portion of those who seek to reverently follow the Lord. He bases this outlook on various scriptural texts and persons, from Job to Jesus himself, and he urges his flock to train themselves in perseverance by contemplating the examples of the scriptural saints who endured affliction. Inevitably, all of this is cast within a stark dichotomy between “those who revere God” and the “Christ fighters” who “deny the Lord”:

What does this mean, my beloved, but that we also should “glory in afflictions” (Rom 5:3) when enemies cause us suffering and that we should not become downcast in spirit when we are persecuted but should rather press forward toward the crown of the upward calling in Jesus Christ our Lord (Phil 3:14)? I entreat you, therefore, that when we are afflicted and injured, we should not be troubled but rather give our cheek to the one who strikes us (Mt 5:29) and stoop the shoulder (Gen 49:14, LXX). For the lovers of pleasure and strife are subjected to temptation “when they are lured and enticed by their own desires,” as the blessed apostle James says (Jas 1:14). But as for us, we know that we suffer for the truth and that it is those who deny the Lord who attack and persecute us. Therefore, according to the words of James, we have hope that we shall attain to “the fullness of joy when we encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of our faith produces patience” (Jas 1:2). Let us, then, rejoice in spirit, my brothers, knowing that our salvation is being stored up for us in the midst of the time of affliction. For our Savior did not redeem us by resting but destroyed death by suffering for us. Therefore, he told us beforehand, “In the world you shall have affliction” (Jn 16:33). He did not say this to everyone but to those who serve him in constancy of faith, for he knew beforehand that those who revere God will be persecuted.

(Festal Letter XIII:6)

The above exhortation provides something of a snapshot of Athanasius's typical self-portrait and self-understanding: embattled and persecuted by those who are betrayers of Christ, struggling to be constant in defending the orthodox faith, and fortifying his flock as well as himself by attending to the imitation of Christ and the biblical saints. There has always been a competing image of Athanasius painted by his ancient opponents and modern critics: an unscrupulous, heavy-handed, tyrannical, and unbearably arrogant addict of power. What is of enduring significance for the Christian tradition, however, is not ultimately so much the personality of Athanasius—which cannot be wholly reconstructed with any objective certainty—as his central conviction that genuine Christianity stands or falls by the confession of the full divinity of the Word. It is as a theologian who gave consistent and tireless expression to this claim of faith, and not as a paragon of meekness, mildness, and politesse in debate (conceived according to modern standards!), that Athanasius continues to be a towering figure among the pioneering architects of the Christian tradition.

The theological vision of Athanasius

Athanasius's theological writings span a period of over four decades permeated with intense doctrinal debate. Throughout this tumultuous time, he maintains a remarkable consistency in his theological vision and even vocabulary, albeit with some notable developments and variance of emphasis. The most obvious division in Athanasius's corpus of doctrinal writings is between the early Against the Greeks— On the Incarnation, in which he makes no explicit mention of Arius, and the later works which are manifestly preoccupied with defending Nicene doctrine and refuting the “Arians”. Compared to Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, the later writings tend to be more properly theo-logical, concerned in a sustained and focused way with the ontological status of the relations between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They also tend to be more closely exegetical, preoccupied with refuting anti-Nicene proof-texts and devising “right-minded” interpretations of these texts that are consistent with Nicene doctrine. But the theological-Trinitarian arguments of Athanasius, which are sometimes focused specifically on a linguistic analysis of the vocabulary which the Scriptures apply to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are always aligned with a particular vision of the nature and character of Christian salvation. This soteriological vision, in turn, is based on a particular conception of the relation between God and creation which is given foundational systematic expression in Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation and then seems to be presumed throughout Athanasius's theological career. His conception of the relation between God and creation may thus be considered as the architectonic center of Athanasius's theological vision; his account of this relation provides the overarching framework in which his various doctrines acquire their distinctive resonance. Yet it must be remembered that this central focus on the relation between God and creation is at the same time always a Christological focus. Precisely because Athanasius was deeply immersed in debate on whether the Son is a creature, the issue of the relative status of God and creation was always directly a Christological issue for him. His account of the relation between God and creation is thus ultimately a Christology conceived in the most universal terms.

God and creation: the correlation of theology and anthropology in Athanasius

In Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, the relation between God and creation is conceived in terms of the interlocking of two sets of dialectics: the one, theological; the other, anthropological. In terms of the doctrine of God, Athanasius places dramatic emphasis on the simultaneous contrast and interplay between the “beyondness” of divine nature (physis) and God's goodness and loving-kindness (philanthropia):

God, the creator of the universe and king of all, who is beyond all being (hyperekeina pasēs ousias) and human conception, inasmuch as he is also good and utterly noble, has made humanity in his own image through his own Word, our Savior Jesus Christ.

(Against the Greeks 2)

God, being good and the lover of humanity, cares for the souls that he has fashioned. Since he is invisible and incomprehensible by nature and beyond all created being, the human race would have failed to achieve knowledge of him insofar as they were made from nothing while he was without origin (agenētos). Therefore, God arranged creation through his Word so that, although his nature is invisible, he might nevertheless become known to humanity from his works.

(Against the Greeks 35)

Thus, the dialectical simultaneity of God's beyondness and the divine love that mitigates this beyondness characterizes God's relation with created humanity from the very beginning of creation. Creation is understood as the act whereby the one who is “beyond all being” becomes the generous source of created being, and desires to grant humanity knowledge of and communion with himself.

This divine dialectic is reflected in an anthropological dialectic between human “nature” and “grace.” According to its nature (physis), humanity is incapable of knowing and relating to God. This aspect of the human being corresponds to the utter “beyondness,” or transcendence, of God and the incommensurability of divine and human beings; if God's nature is that of true being, who is utterly self-sufficient and inaccessible, human nature is characterized by its origination from nothing. This ex nihilo is by no means merely a historical datum or a punctiliar “moment” in the story of humanity's beginning; it is an ontological determination that characterizes humanity's existence, and that of creation in general, as deriving from and thus inherently tending toward non-being: “for the nature of the things that come to be (genēta), inasmuch as they exist out of non-being, is unstable, weak, and mortal when considered in itself” (Against the Greeks 41). However, this aspect of human “nature,” or physis, cannot, by definition, characterize the actual constitution of the human being as such. It merely refers to the radical nothingness which underlies human existence and indicates humanity's inherent lack of self-possessed being and thus its radical incapacity to preserve itself in being through its own power. For human beings to actually exist, human “nature” must be radically complemented by the dynamic of “grace”, charis, which corresponds to the divine philanthropia. The aspect of “grace” in the human being is the gift that is granted to humanity of participation in God the Word, in whom all created things have their consistence. Thus, humanity is conceived simultaneously as being of a corruptible nature that tends toward nothingness, in contrast to the perfect and transcendent nature of God, and yet as possessing the grace of participating in divine life, because of the divine philanthropia which overcomes the natural disparity between the God who is and the creation that comes to be from nothing:

God is good—or rather, he is the source of goodness. But the good is not begrudging of anything. Because he does not begrudge being to anything, he made all things from non-being through his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ. Among all the things upon the earth, he was especially merciful toward the human race. Seeing that by the logic of its own origin it would not be capable of always remaining, he granted it a further gift. He did not create human beings merely like all the irrational animals upon the earth, but made them according to his own Image, and shared with them the power of his own Word, so that having a kind of reflection of the Word and thus becoming rational, they may be enabled to remain in blessedness and live the true life of the saints in paradise.

(On the Incarnation 3)

It is vital to distinguish this dramatically dialectical conception from later schematizations of “nature” and “grace” in the later Western tradition, where “nature” refers to the inherent structure of the human being as created by God, while “grace” is associated with the unmerited gifts which are granted by God over and above the original act of creation. For Athanasius, the aspects of “nature” and “grace” are both constitutive of the human being as created by God, “nature” referring to the whence of creation's being, which is also an intrinsic orientation to nothingness, and “grace” to the reality of its establishment in being through the Word. It might seem that Athanasius lays extreme stress on humanity 's fragility, which indeed he does. But it would be a mistake to construe this as a “pessimistic” account of the human condition. Ultimately, it is a conception of the human being as an entity whose very existence is radically gifted. Precisely because its whole being is gifted, humanity has no hold on being apart from that irreducibly radical gift. The reality of its being nothing apart from the gift of participation in God is humanity's nature, or physis. That it does exist, and even shares in the life of God himself, is due to the grace, or charis, that reflects the divine philanthropy. Although all creation partakes of this dialectic of the simultaneity of intrinsic nothingness and participation in the Word, humanity's participation is unique, as the above passage asserts. Whereas all other creatures participate in the Word's power in the strictly passive mode of being “governed” by the Word, humanity's participation is in the mode of a conscious sharing in the active “rationality” of the Word; among all creatures, only humanity possesses the “greater grace” of being logikos. As such, humanity actively and intentionally shares in the power of the Logos and rejoices in this participation.

In his later writings, Athanasius does not maintain an articulation of the human being by recourse to the terminological contrast of “physis” and “charis. ” Nevertheless, the essential content of this framework perseveres. On the Council of Nicaea asserts that human beings are “incapable of existence in their own right” because of the fact of their origination from nothing, whereas the reality of their existence is grounded in the gift of their participation in the Word. Athanasius's theological anthropology, as already laid out in Against the Greeks —On the Incarnation, also looms quite large, albeit implicitly, in his arguments for the unqualified divinity of the Son. As we have seen, the fact of being created from nothing means for Athanasius a radical ontological instability and a need for the “grace (charis)” of divine assistance. Against his theological opponents, Athanasius insists untiringly that the Word is the one who sustains humanity and compensates for the ontological poverty of its origination from nothing and is not himself susceptible to the radical weakness of created being. The Word is the giver and not the receiver of charis.

The divine dialectic between transcendence and accessibility also remains as a consistent motif in Athanasius's later writings: God is “in all things according to his own goodness and power and outside all according to his proper nature (physis).” In these later polemical writings, Athanasius often employs the Platonic framework of “participation” (metochē) to articulate the simultaneity of God's transcendence and accessibility. God is altogether other than creation precisely as the one who generously grants creation a participation in the divine Word. The Word is participated and does not participate; he is “external to”

creation precisely as the one in whom creation comes to be and subsists. By contrast, Athanasius reports the “Arians” as maintaining that the Word is himself made divine “by participation.” In one significant case, Athanasius allows the conception that the Son himself participates the Father, provided that this be understood in the unique sense of a “whole participation” in which the very being of the Son is coextensive with his participation of the Father. But this unique case simply underscores the contrasting fact that creation's participation in God has its point of departure in nothingness. Athanasius thus rejects the Origenian as well as “Arian” notion that the Father is in any sense “beyond” the Son, while affirming that the Son himself is both beyond creation and yet provides creation with access to God and thereby to existence itself.

Divine condescension and human ascent

In Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, we find a dynamic complementarity between the movements of divine condescension and human ascent, which corresponds to the dialectic of distance and nearness between God and humanity. The ontological distance between God and humanity is overcome by God's stooping down to humanity and humanity's rising up to God. The climactic termini of the movements of both divine condescension and human ascent converge in the event of the Incarnation of the Word, whose condescension to the point of suffering death effects humanity's deification. This characterization of the central Christian mystery of the Word's Incarnation, life, and death is also read by Athanasius into the doctrine of creation. Thus, the creation of humanity is itself characterized as an act of divine condescension and mercy. On the other hand, the fundamental human stance, which constitutes the very integrity of the human being, is one of conscious ascent toward God. Humanity is ordained, by the radical logic of its constitution, to rise up above itself and maintain its being by virtue of its “conversation” (sunomilia) with God, whence its being is derived and sustained. This framework is consistently central to Athanasius's theological vision throughout his career. It is given systematic expression in Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, where Athanasius sketches a comprehensive portrait of the ascending structure of the human being according to the original creation, the inversion of this structure of ascent by humanity's descent into sin, and the salvific descent of the Word that effects humanity's renewed ascent unto deification.

The ascending structure of the human being and its inversion through sin

In Against the Greeks, Athanasius sketches an image of the primordial vocation of the human being to Godward contemplation which mingles Platonic and biblical vocabulary:

He fashioned humanity to be capable of contemplating and understanding reality through its likeness to him, giving it also a knowledge and conception of its own eternity, so that as long as it retained this likeness, it might never fall away from the conception of God or forsake the fellowship of the saints. But holding on to the grace of the Giver and the power which is granted to it as its own and which is from the Father's Word, it might rejoice and converse with God (sunomile to theio), living a secure and truly blessed and immortal life. For having no impediment to its knowledge of the divine, through its purity it always contemplates God the Word, the Image of the Father, in whose image it came into being. It is filled with great admiration when it perceives the providence exercised by him toward the universe. It is above sensible realities and all bodily images as it binds itself to the divine and intelligible realities in heaven by the power of its mind. For when the human mind is not engaged with bodily things and has no bodily desires mingled with itself from outside but is completely above that and engaged with itself, as it was created from the beginning, then it transcends what is sensible and all human things and it rises to sublime heights, and seeing the Word, it sees also in him the Father of the Word.

(Against the Greeks 2)

Although Athanasius here sounds the characteristically Platonic note of contemplation as the forsaking of the sensible for the sake of the intelligible, his framework is not one of a dualistic opposition between the corporeal and incorporeal. Whereas the Platonic tradition tends to portray the body as representing an estrangement from the true intelligible self, for Athanasius the significance of the body is precisely that it is “what is closest” to us and thus represents the danger not so much of self-estrangement as of self-indulgence. The body is meant to be the point of departure, as it were, for the ascent of self-transcendence. When it becomes instead the endpoint of an orientation to self-indulgence, its proper ontological dynamism is inverted. This is one model by which Athanasius conceives of human fallenness:

But human beings, despising better things and becoming reluctant to comprehend them, pursued rather what was closer to themselves. But what was closer to them was the body and its sensations. Thus they averted their minds from intelligible realities and began to be concerned with themselves. By being concerned with themselves and seizing upon the body and other sensible realities, they became deceived about their own identity and they succumbed to their desires, preferring what is their own to the contemplation of divine things.

(Against the Greeks 3)

Athanasius also speaks of the structure of the human being in terms of “soul” (psyche) and “mind” (nous). In distinguishing between the “soul” and “mind,” he appears to presume the Platonic tripartition of the soul into appetitive, reasonable, and spirited parts. Yet these are analytical categories for Plato, delineating parts of the soul, whereas for Athanasius, the distinction between “soul” and “mind” refers more to determinations of the self in its relation to God. If the body is conceived as the starting point of the Godward ascent, the “mind,” or nous, conceived along the lines of the biblical notion of the “heart,” is the locus of communion with God. The “soul,” on the other hand, is an intermediate category, generally correlated by Athanasius to the body as its “pilot” or governor. It governs the body precisely by orienting it toward the divine contemplation whose locus is the “mind.” “Mind” therefore refers to the determination of the soul which is properly ordered toward communion with God. Thus, body, soul, and mind are hierarchically ordered within a continuum of self-transcending ascent.

Sin, however, is a movement in the “opposite direction,” in which the mind orients itself toward the body; similarly, the soul, instead of piloting the body in conformity with the ascent of the mind, becomes enmeshed in the desires and fears of the body, inverting the proper teleology of the human structure and replacing it with a sheer indulgence in its own undirected and self-intoxicating movement. The result is that the body also then performs actions that are “the opposite” of its natural movements of self-transcending ascent. Athanasius depicts this derailment of the natural motion of the soul in terms that combine the traditionally Platonic image of the soul as “charioteer” with biblical vocabulary. In the course of this description, Athanasius also makes explicit the positive role of the body in humanity's communion with the divine:

The body has eyes in order to see creation and to recognize the Creator through this harmonious order, and it has hearing in order to listen to the divine sayings and the laws of God, and it has hands in order to accomplish necessary actions and in order to extend them toward God in prayer. But when the soul turned away from contemplation of the good and from movement within the good, it was henceforth deceived and moved toward the opposite. Then, having in view its own power, as we said before, and abusing it, it realized that it can also move its bodily members in the opposite direction. So instead of looking at creation, it turned its eyes toward desires, showing that it can do that too. It thought that as long as it was in motion it would preserve its own dignity and would not be in error in actualizing its capabilities. It did not realize that it was brought into being not merely to be in motion but to move toward what it should. Therefore, the apostolic saying commands, “All things are possible but not all are expedient” (1 Cor 6:12). But human presumption, not regarding what is appropriate and fitting but only its own power, began to do the opposite. So it moved the hands toward the opposite of what they should do and people committed murder; it led the hearing into disobedience and the other members into adultery instead of lawful procreation, the tongue into blasphemy, invective, and perjury instead of fair speech, the hands, to stealing and striking fellow human beings, the sense of smell to all kinds of erotic perfumes, the feet toward the hasty shedding of blood, and the stomach to drunkenness and insatiable gluttony. All these are evils and sins of the soul. They have no other cause but the turning away from what is better.

It is like a charioteer who mounts his horse in the stadium and then pays no attention to the goal toward which he is supposed to be heading; turning away from it, he simply drives the horse whichever way he can—and his capacity corresponds to his wishes. So he would often crash into people he comes across and drive out of bounds, carried wherever the speed of the horses carries him and thinking that by racing like this he will not miss the goal, for he only looks at the track and does not see that in fact he has got away from the goal. So it is with the soul when it has turned from the path to God and moves the members of the body to what is improper, or rather is itself moved by itself along with them. Thus it sins and creates evil for itself, not seeing that it has strayed from the path and missed the goal of truth, in regard to which the blessed Paul, that Christ-bearing man, said: “I press onward toward the goal, the prize of the upward call of Jesus Christ” (Phil 3:14).

(Against the Greeks 4–5)

The climactic stage of this inversion of the intrinsic structure of human ascent is when the soul, having departed from its proper task of assimilating the body to the divine realities which it perceives through the mind, ends by projecting onto divine realities the desires, fears, and impressions of the body. That is what happens in the case of idolatry, which is employed by Athanasius as a paradigm of the inversion of the divinely ordained human ascent to God.

Thus, the alternative to the intrinsic human vocation to Godward ascent is not, for Athanasius, some neutral state of “being human” apart from God. No such possibility exists in his conception, given humanity's inherent lack of hold on being. Instead, the only alternative to the ascent toward God is a rapid descent into the nothingness which is humanity's only natural possession apart from God. What determines humanity's actual situation relative to these opposing movements—upwards, toward communion with God, or downwards, toward nothingness—is the exercise of free will. But free will is itself pre-determined in the scope of its movement by the fundamental ontological dialectic of the contrast between God and nothingness. So long as humanity chooses to exercise its free will in assenting to the Godward pull effected by the philanthropia of divine condescension, its participation in God is assured. However, if humanity exercises its free will by choosing to turn away from God and toward itself, it finds itself inexorably drawn toward corruption and nothingness. For Athanasius, the history of humanity since the fall of Adam is the story of an accumulating momentum of decline which was bound to lead to humanity's utter destruction. Because sin inverts the divinely ordained anthropological dialectic whereby humanity is created from nothing (physis) and constituted by participation in divine power (charis), and replaces it with the opposing momentum of humanity's decline from divine participation into the corruption of nothingness, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, within the Athanasian framework, sin is quite literally a process of “de-creation.”

Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation presents the most detailed depiction by Athanasius of the ascending structure of the human being and its inversion through sin. Such detailed anthropological reflection became considerably more sparse as his theology became more explicitly polemical and preoccupied with more specifically Christological and Trinitarian concerns. Yet, his Christological and soteriological assertions about the necessity for the Son's not being a creature presume this anthropology. And when he does have occasion in his later works to return to the sort of anthropological reflections articulated in Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, his perspective and vocabulary remain largely unchanged. Thus, his idealized picture of the monk Antony presents the latter as enunciating an exhortation to align the will with the ascending momentum ordained by creation and subverted by sin. As in Against the Greeks, Athanasius here mingles a philosophical vocabulary of contemplation with biblical language. But whereas in a Platonic or Stoic anthropology, the existence of virtue “within” the self is an indication of the natural divinity of the soul, for Athanasius it is the result of the divine creative act whose benefits we receive. Human virtue, then, is a matter of protecting and maintaining the “deposit” entrusted to us of God's creative work:

For the Lord already told us, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17: 21). Therefore, virtue requires only our willing, since it is in us and issues from us. For virtue exists when the soul maintains its intellectual aspect according to nature. It does this in accordance with nature to the extent that it remains as it was made, and it was made to be beautiful and perfectly straight. Therefore, Joshua, the son of Nun gave this exhortation to the people, saying, “Set your heart straight toward the Lord God of Israel” (Josh 24:23). And John said, “Make your paths straight” (Mt 3:3). The rectitude of the soul consists in its intellectual aspect being according to nature, as it was created. But when it strays and deviates from what is according to nature, then we speak of the vice of the soul. So it is not a difficult task. For if we remain as we were made, then we are in virtue; but if we turn our thoughts to what is worthless, then we are condemned as evil. If it was something that we had to procure from outside of us, it would be a difficult thing. But if it is within us, let us guard ourselves against contemptible thoughts. Having received the soul as a deposit, let us preserve it for the Lord so that he may recognize it as his own work, being the same as he had made it.

(Life of Antony 20)

The drama of divine descent

If, for Athanasius, human virtue consists in intentionally maintaining the gifts granted by God's creative work, God's ongoing providence and interaction with humanity also has for its goal the maintenance of the divine—human communion established in the act of creation. Like Irenaeus before him, Athanasius's theology is focused on the unity of creation and redemption. In On the Incarnation, Athanasius explains the necessity of beginning his discourse about the humanization of the Word by speaking of creation: “First we must speak of creation so that we may consider it fitting that its renewal was effected by the Word who created it in the beginning. For it will prove to be not the least bit contradictory if the Father worked its salvation through the same one by whom he created it.” Thus, before elaborating on the fittingness of the Incarnation of the Word, he deals with different theories of creation in order to make the point that a correct conception of creation will make it manifest that the Word's humanization is in keeping with the ethos of the divine work of creation. Among other false conceptions, Athanasius counters the Platonic notion of creation from pre-existent matter and the Manichaean belief that the true God is not the creator of this world. The former conception compromises divine power and makes God to be “weak” by denying that he is the source of all being; the latter offends against the divine goodness, shown forth in the liberality of bringing this world into existence. On the other hand, as we have already seen, the divine act of creation manifests both divine power and goodness. Sin, however, which we have characterized as “de-creation,” renders ineffectual both God's capacity and God's desire to bring humanity into communion with himself. On the Incarnation does not shy away from presenting this “de-creation” effected by sin as posing a dilemma also for God the Creator. Humanity's destruction would seem to signal a defeat not only for human welfare but even for divine glory:

What use was it then for humanity to have been created in God's image from the beginning? For either it should have been created simply as irrational or else, once it has been made rational, it should not live the life of irrational beings. Or what use was it at all for humanity to be endowed with the conception of God from the beginning? For if it is now unworthy of this endowment, it should not have been given it from the beginning. And of what benefit would this be to the God who made humanity, or what kind of glory would there be for him if the humanity which was made by him did not worship him, but thought that others had created it? It would then turn out that God had made them for others and not for himself.

(Inc. 13)

God's very glory is thus implicated in the fate of creation, especially in the fate of humanity. The divine traits manifested in the act of creation, God's strength and love, are undermined by the decreation of sin and need to be reasserted by God himself. If sin is a de-creation by which humanity reverts toward nothingness, redemption requires a “re-creation,” or a “renewal” of creation, that can be effected only by the same philanthropic creative power of the Word, a power that is not vulnerable to the inherent nothingness of all created nature. For Athanasius, it is therefore self-evident that the definitive redemption from sin can only be the work of the Creator-Word.

The Incarnation is the divine act which supremely manifests the very same attributes manifested by God in the act of creation, strength and love, and displays their overcoming of the challenge presented by human sinfulness. In Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, a motif that unifies the depiction of the divine work of both creation and redemption is that of the “condescension” of the Word. As Creator, the Word “strengthened all things into existence” (Against the Greeks 46) and “condescends (sunkatabainon) to created beings” (Against the Greeks 47). While human sinfulness is articulated through the terminology of fall (pepto) and descent (katabaino), the Incarnation, which culminates in Christ's salvific death, is represented as an act of powerful and loving divine solidarity with human abasement, a divine descent that accompanies, supplants, and reverses human fallenness, even while reasserting the divine glory that was manifest in the act of creation.

This contrast of sinful human descent and saving divine descent is woven into the structural contrast drawn by the work between idolatry and deification. Idolatry inverts the divinely ordained ascent of humanity from nothingness to communion with God, insofar as it involves human beings in claiming for themselves a rank lower than animals and non-existents by ascribing worship to them:

When human minds strayed from God, and human thoughts and reasonings began their descent, they first ascribed the honor of divinity to the heaven and the sun, moon, and stars… Then, descending further in their dark reasonings, they called the ether and air and the things in the air “gods”. Advancing yet further in evil, they praised as gods the elements and the principles of the constitutions of bodies… As those who have completely fallen down crawl on the ground like snails, so also these most impious people fell down and fell away from the contemplation of God and came to the point of ascribing divinity even to human beings and to the images of human beings—to some, while they were still alive and to others, after their deaths. Attaining to even worse things in their wills and reasonings, they now transferred the divine and transcendent title of “God” to stone and wood and to reptiles on sea and land, paying them every divine honor while rejecting the true and really existing God, the Father of Christ.

(Against the Greeks 9)

The definitive response of God to humanity's accumulating fall is the sinless “fall” of God himself, through the Incarnation and human death of the Word. In Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, the reversal of human fallenness by the divine fall is a theme that is associated with that of Christ's redemption as bringing about the restoration of humanity's knowledge of God. The conception of humanity's relation to God in terms of knowledge (gnosis), albeit a knowledge that is based on divine revelation and grounded in a life of virtue and ecclesial participation, is a marked feature of the Alexandrian tradition. Athanasius appropriates this tradition, but within the terms of his own kenotic theology of divine descent. In Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, Athanasius speaks of four ways in which God has made knowledge of himself accessible to humanity: the structure of the human being itself, which is constituted by its participation in and accessibility to the Word; the order and harmony of creation, which “cries out” that its governor and harmonizer is the divine Logos; the law and prophets (the Old Testament), which safeguard the life of participation in the Word; and, finally, when these three ways proved insufficient to quell the tide of human iniquity, the humanization of the Word. The Incarnation is conceived as the nadir point of divine condescension, wherein God encounters humanity at the very place to which it had fallen:

As a good teacher cares for his students and comes down to the level of those who cannot take advantage of more advanced things in order to teach them by simpler means, so does the Word of God. As Paul says, “For since in the wisdom of God the world did not come to know God through wisdom, it pleased God to save those who have faith through the foolishness of the gospel” (1 Cor 1:21). For since human beings had turned away from the contemplation of God and become mired in the depths, with their eyes cast down, looking for God among created things and the realm of the senses and contriving gods for themselves from among mortal men and demons, the Savior of all and Word of God, who loves humanity, took to himself a body and lived as a human being among humanity… Since people's reasoning had fallen to the level of sensible things, the Word submitted himself to being revealed through a body so that, as a human being, he might carry human beings over to himself and direct their senses to himself, and so that, although they saw him as a man, he might persuade them by the works which he accomplished that he is not only a man but God, and Word and Wisdom of the true God. This also Paul wished to signify when he said, “that you, being rooted and grounded in love may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph 3: 17–19). For the Word extended himself everywhere: above and below, in depth and in breadth—above, in creation; below in his humanization; in the depth of Hades; in the breadth of the cosmos. Everything has been filled with the knowledge of God.

(Inc. 15–16)

While in Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation the characterization of Christ's salvific work as a loving “condescension” is a structural motif that is played against that of humanity's sinful descent into idolatry, it is used in an explicitly “anti-Arian” context as a defining characteristic of the genuine proclamation of the gospel, over and against the inverted proclamation of the “Arians”. In his Orations against the Arians, Athanasius characterizes the choice between his theological position and that of his opponents as reducible to that between a self-humbling God and a self-promoting “god.” As Athanasius presents it, the debate concerns two alternative readings of salvation which respectively identify two very different characterizations of the nature of the Son in relation to the benefits of his work. Either the Son is by nature the true God who humbled himself in order to bring about our exaltation, so that his salvific work is the result of the abasement that he undertakes for our benefit; or he was himself “promoted” to divinity as a reward for his work in the flesh. The choice then is between the God of loving condescension and the self-promoting, upwardly mobile God! In one instance, this question comes up in the context of debate over the text of Phil 2:9–10: “Therefore, God greatly exalted him, and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.” The “Arian” interpretation, according to Athanasius's rendering, sees this verse as indicating the “progress” of the Son and his attainment of a privileged status and a graced divinity. Athanasius's counter-exegesis manifests the inevitable intertwining of Christological and Trinitarian issues involved in the Arian controversy. He does not deny that the humanity of Christ was promoted and exalted, but he insists that the exaltation belongs exclusively to the humanity, whereas the humiliation pertains to the divine Word's appropriation of the human condition. But the principal underlying question, for Athanasius, is the overall thrust of the whole Christian kerygma in its characterization of Christ as God: Is it of a God who promotes humanity by his self-humbling or of a God who is himself promoted through his dealings with humanity? Is it of a God who is the giver of grace and condescends for our benefit or of a God who himself attains grace? Clearly, it is the first set of alternatives that represents the thrust of the Christian kerygma for Athanasius. But, in that case, “He was not human, and then became God, but he was God, and then became human, in order to deify us” (Or. Ar. 1:39); for “the advance belongs to humanity but the Son of God humbled himself so that in his humbling we may be able to advance” (Or. Ar. 3:52).

A similar reasoning is used by Athanasius to argue for the Son's divinity in the context of his discussion of the Word's role in the act of creation. Arius and Asterius conceived the Word as a created mediator of God's creative activity. Such a conception is unacceptable to Athanasius on at least two fundamental counts. First, the notion that God needs any intervening mediator in order to relate himself to creation is repugnant to him, and he expresses this repugnance in a way that seems indebted to Irenaeus, the second-century bishop of Lyons. In countering the “gnostic” systems in which the creator of this world is a defective or evil being, different from the true God, Irenaeus insisted that the true God is no other than the Creator of this world, whose majesty is manifest in his presence to and loving solicitude for creation. Athanasius shows clear dependence on Irenaeus when he insists that creative activity belongs only to God and cannot be exercised by any subordinate or intermediate level of divinity. Thus, if the Word is Creator, as the Scriptures intimate and as the “Arians concur, then he must be fully God and not a creature. The divine condescension which brings creation into existence and sustains it is not exercised by a lower level of divinity but is a joint work of Father and Son, for creation “would not have withstood his nature, being that of the unmitigated splendor of the Father, if he had not condescended (sunkatabas) by the Father's love for humanity and supported, strengthened and carried them into being” (Or. Ar. 2:64). Thus, Athanasius transposes Asterius's theology of the Son as mediating the transcendence of the Father by speaking of the Son's condescension as mediating the transcendence of the Son's own nature, which he shares with the Father.

Secondly, according to Athanasius, the “Arian” conception of “a created Creator” again reverses the fundamental ethos of the Christian message, which is gratitude for God's gratuitous condescension. If, according to this conception, the Word himself came to be in order to facilitate our creation, then “he owes thanks to us, not we to him” (Or. Ar. 2:30). Again, we see that Athanasius leads the argument to the question of whether Jesus Christ embodies the gracious God, the God who is giver of grace, to whom we owe a radical debt of gratitude, or whether he represents merely the instrumental means which a transcendent God employs because creation cannot withstand immediate contact with such a God. In the first case, according to Athanasius, Jesus Christ is the natural Son of the Father who creates us out of loving condescension then redeems us to the point that we become divine by grace, sharing in the divine sonship of the Son. In the second case, however, Jesus Christ does not directly represent divine condescension and gratuity, since he himself owes his being to us—as if our existence is a sufficient end in itself, but the Son's existence is functionally oriented toward our existence (Or. Ar. 2:29). In his conception of the Christian accounts of creation and salvation, Athanasius thus ties the natural and ontological “belonging” of the Son to the Father to an account of the gratuitous descending love of God which is manifested in the life and death of Christ. The Son is the fully divine Creator who is other than creation, to whom creation is indebted for its being. The Son is also the fully divine Savior, as the God who humbled himself for the sake of our advancement. In Athanasius's theological vision, Trinitarian theology and a kenotic Christology are closely intertwined and mutually correlative; both are consistent with a core emphasis on the divine posture toward humanity as one of philanthropia, the divine love that bridges the transcendent natural inaccessibility of the divine essence.

The body and death of Christ

The centrality of the motif of divine condescension is also the appropriate context for noting Athanasius's emphasis on Christ's body and Christ's death, inasmuch as both themes indicate the extremity of the Word's descent into our condition. If, according to Athanasius, the human body is “what is closest to ourselves,” the assumption of the human body by the Word indicates the point at which the Word becomes “closest” to us. Athanasius's Christology has been subjected to modern criticism particularly in reference to his typical manner of speaking of the Word and his body (or flesh), and for not figuring Christ's human soul into the equation. For this reason, he is sometimes associated with his admirer Apollinarius, who explicitly rejected the doctrine that Christ had a human soul and asserted that the Logos replaces the human soul in Christ and directly animates Christ's human body. However, such an analytical approach to the inner constitution of Christ's person is altogether absent from Athanasius. A much more fruitful approach to his Christology is one that seeks to discern the framework and intentionality of his use of Christological terms in the context of his understanding of Christ's saving work. We have already seen him articulate the significance of Christ's body in terms of its being the locus of Christ's descent to the sensible level to which humanity had become bound. Even more primarily, the significance of Christ's body, for Athanasius, is its being the medium by which the Word encounters and triumphs over human death:

So the Word of God himself came in order that he who is the image of the Father might be able to renew the creation of the humanity which is in the image. But this could not have been done apart from the destruction of death and corruption. Therefore, it was fitting that he took a mortal body, in order that henceforth death could be destroyed in it and humanity might be renewed in the image.

(Inc. 13)

As this passage intimates, and contrary to some misperceptions, the death of Christ thus occupies a central place in Athanasius's presentation of the rationale and salvific efficacy of the humanization of the Word. He refers to Christ's death as “the capstone of our faith” (Inc. 19), and the significance which he attaches to it in large part explains his emphasis on the bodiliness of Christ. It is the death of Christ and its culmination in resurrection that undoes humanity's subjection to sin and death, which are the consequences of the transgression of Adam. This subjection is elaborated by Athanasius both in terms of the biblically depicted divine judgment (Gen 2:16–17) and in terms of the ontological dialectic by which humanity, once having turned away from participation in divine life, inevitably is reduced back to its intrinsic nothingness. But it was also fitting that the divine creative power undo the “decreation” of sin, consistently with God's glory as manifested in his love for humanity. Moreover, for humanity to be truly and intrinsically free from subjection to death, the victory of sin and death must take place from within the human being, and not simply be ordained by God as an “external” commandment. All these conditions were met when the Word took a mortal human body and offered it to death on behalf of all, thus repaying the debt incurred by our transgression:

Knowing that the corruption of humanity could not be undone except by the death of all, and being unable to die, inasmuch as he is the Word and Son of the Father, he took to himself a body that was capable of death so that this body, which participated in the Word who is above all, could suffice for death on behalf of all and remain incorruptible because of the Word's indwelling of it, and so that henceforth all corruption in humanity might be stopped by the grace of the resurrection.

(Inc. 9)

Associated with the centrality of Christ's death in Athanasius's soteriology is the sacrificial terminology which he tends to use in this context, and which gives another indication of the significance of his emphasis on the bodiliness of Christ. Once again, Athanasius is not concerned with the analytical question of how the human body is animated by the Logos, but with the soteriological dynamics of what the Logos does with the human body in order to save us. Most primarily, for Athanasius, what the Logos does with his human body for our salvation is to die on our behalf. Moreover, Athanasius's employment of sacrificial language in this context resonates with Eucharistic overtones. While much has been made of a single instance in which Athanasius defends the plausibility of the Incarnation by alluding to the Stoic conception of the universe as “a body” animated by the Logos, a much more typical conception is that in which Christ's body is conceived as an offering (prosphora) presented by the Incarnate Word to the Father. Thus, he speaks of the Word's “interceding” (presbeuo) for all before the Father, primarily by “offering” (prosphero) his own body as a sacrifice (thusia) and ransom (lutron, antipsychon) for human sins, thus liberating humanity from its “descent” into death and reasserting the divine goodness whose efficacy was threatened by human sin:

For the human race would have been destroyed if the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, had not come to bring about the end of death. Truly, this great work was particularly suited to the goodness of God. For if a king builds a house or city, which is then besieged by bandits on account of the negligence of its inhabitants, he by no means abandons it but avenges and rescues it, regarding not the negligence of the inhabitants but what is becoming for himself. By so much the more did God, the Word of the all-good Father, not neglect the human race which was made through him, when it descended into corruption. Instead, he brought to dissolution the death that had come about, by the offering (prosphora) of his own body; by his own teaching, he corrected their negligence; and he reformed everything that pertains to humanity by his own power.

One can be assured of these things if one avails oneself of the writings of the Savior's own theologians, in which they say: “For the love of Christ impels us, once we have come to the conviction that one died for all; therefore, all have died. He indeed died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” from the dead, our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Cor 5:14–15). And again, “We see Jesus crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, he who for a little while was made lower than the angels, that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb 2:9). And then he indicates the reason why no other than God the Word himself should have become human by saying, “For it was fitting that he, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the leader of their salvation perfect through suffering” (Heb 2:10). In saying this, he means that it belonged to none other to bring back human beings from the corruption that had come about except the Word of God, who had also made them in the beginning. He also indicates that the Word himself took to himself a body as a sacrifice (thusia) on behalf of similar bodies, when he says: “Now since the children share in blood and flesh, he likewise shared in them, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who through fear of death had been subject to slavery all their life” (Heb 2:14–15). For by the sacrifice (thusia) of his own body, he put an end to the law that was against us and made a new beginning of life for us, granting us the hope of resurrection. For since it was through human beings that death had assumed power over humanity, so it was through the humanization of the Word of God that the dissolution of death and the resurrection of life came to be. And this is what that Christ-bearing man says: “Since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead came also through a human being; for just as in Adam all die, so too in Christ all shall be brought to life” (1 Cor 15:21–22), and so forth. For now we no longer die in condemnation but, as those who rise from the dead, we await the universal resurrection of all which God has accomplished and granted to us and which “He will reveal in his own time” (1 Tim 6:15). This then is the first reason for the humanization of the Savior.

(Inc. 9–10)

This implicitly Eucharistic framework, evoked by the language of “offering” and “sacrifice” and much indebted to the Letter to the Hebrews, remains constant and becomes if anything more explicit in Athanasius's later works. In the Orations against the Arians, he explicates the reference to Jesus as the “apostle and high priest of our confession” (Heb 3:1) by weaving together Christ's Incarnation, death, resurrection, and atoning priesthood:

When did he become “apostle” except when he put on our flesh? And when did he become “High Priest of our confession” except when he offered himself for us and raised his body from the dead, and now brings near and offers to the Father those who approach him in faith, redeeming all and making expiation to God on behalf of all?… “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (Jn 1:1). But when the Father willed that ransoms should be paid for all and grace given to all, then the Word took flesh from the earth, as Aaron put on his robe, and Mary, like untilled earth, became the mother of his body, so that having an offering as a high priest he may offer himself to the Father and cleanse us all from sins in his own blood, and raise us from the dead.

(Or. Ar. 2:7)

Athanasius's much-noted emphasis on the Incarnation should not be seen therefore as a de-emphasis on the death and resurrection of Christ, which are cited by Athanasius as the very purpose of the Incarnation: “He came for this reason: that in the flesh he might suffer and the flesh be made impassible and immortal” (Or. Ar. 3:58).

Another possible misreading of Athanasius is to suggest that he construes the universal efficacy of the Word's Incarnation and death in Platonic terms—as if the Word became incarnate in the universal “form” of humanity. However, Athanasius never actually says anything near to that effect. In fact, he tends to place considerable stress on the similitude of Christ's body to ours; a recurrent refrain is that his body is “like” (homoios) ours. The salvific efficacy of Christ 's body is explained not in terms of its idiosyncratic structure, but rather in terms of its similitude to ours and its unique relation to the Word—its being the Word's body. When Athanasius tries to explain why the offering and sanctification of the Word's body should have a universal effect, he resorts not to a Platonic conception of Christ's body as a universal but to an evocative analogy that is much more relational and, as it were, environmental:

When a great king has entered a large city and taken up residence in one of the houses in it, such a city becomes worthy of great honor and is no longer assaulted by any enemy or bandit descending upon it, but is rather deemed worthy of every attention because of the king residing in one of its houses. Such is the case with the King of all. As soon as he came to our realm and took up residence in one body, like our own, the whole conspiracy against humanity by its enemies has been stopped and the corruption of death which had formerly ruled over them has been obliterated.

(Inc. 9)

But in the last analysis, the Alexandrian's strong conception of the applicability of Christ's salvific Incarnation to all humanity is based on a strict adherence to scriptural assertions of the universal applicability of Christ's death, as is witnessed by his reference to such scriptural testimony as 2 Cor 5:14, “For the love of Christ impels us, when we consider that if one died for all, then all have died,” and Heb 2:9, “that by the grace of God he might taste death on behalf of all.” Moreover, once again we cannot ignore the implicit Eucharistic overtones of his assertion that Christ's offering of his own body as a sacrifice applies to us through our “kinship” (Or. Ar. 1:43) with his body and our being “co-bodied” (sussomoi) with him (Or. Ar. 2:74).

The renewal of the relation between God and creation through Christ

While Athanasius does speak of the salvation wrought by Christ as a “renewal” of creation, it is clear that this renewal does not entail for him simply a return to the original condition of the prelapsarian Adam. In order to characterize the new relation between God and creation that obtains through Christ's work of redemption, Athanasius has recourse to a series of structural motifs that pervade his writings. Among the most important of these are: (1) the definitive stability and security worked by Christ; (2) the climactic “internality” of divine grace through the work of Christ; and (3) the transformative “appropriation” of the human condition by the divine Word.

Stability, security, and “remaining”

Athanasius had inherited from his Alexandrian predecessor Origen a concern for the inherent instability of the human condition, and a correlative emphasis on salvation as the attainment of stability and immutability. The provenance of this notion, however, extends beyond Origen and has roots in both the biblical and the Greek philosophical traditions. The Hebrew Scriptures speak of the election of Israel, its anointed king, and the just person in terms of the promise that they “shall not be moved.” The Epistle to the Hebrews, hearkening back to Isa 66:22, refers to Christ's establishing an “unshakeable kingdom” which “remains” (menei). The Platonic philosophical tradition posits a fundamental dualism between the world of becoming which is “easily movable” (eukinētos) and the immutable stability of the world of forms. Athanasius evokes these various resonances but integrates them into his own theological vision. In the context of creation and divine providence, he speaks of the active agency of the Word in terms of granting “protection” and “security” to an inherently unstable creation. Correspondingly, one of the principal ways in which he highlights the transformed relation between God and creation through Christ is to assert that it is only through Christ's saving work that humanity attains an ultimate security, bebaiotēs, in its communion with God.

Often, this understanding is articulated through the allied terminology of “remaining” (menein/diamenein). The latter is as key a structural motif in Athanasius's theology as it is for the Gospel of John, in which the “remaining” and “abiding” in Christ is a central image. Athanasius's characterization of humanity's relation to God is expressed in saying that humanity cannot “remain” in existence apart from divine assistance and participation in the Word. As part of created reality, humanity is subject to the double pull by which it is intrinsically drawn to “remain” either in nothingness or in God. The economy of salvation is correspondingly characterized in terms of God's pedagogic efforts to orient humanity away from “remaining” in its own nothingness and toward “remaining” in the life of communion with him:

He led them into his paradise, and gave them a law, so that if they guarded the grace and remained (menoien) good, they would possess the life in paradise that is without sorrow or pain or care, as well as the promise of incorruptible life in heaven. But if they transgressed and turned back and became evil, they would know that they would suffer in death the corruption that is according to their nature and that they would no longer live in Paradise but would henceforth die outside it and remain (menein) in death and corruption. The divine Scripture also foretells this, saying in the person of God: “You shall eat of every tree in Paradise. But do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. On the day that you eat of it, you shall die by death” (Gen 2:16–17). This “dying by death”: what else could it be than not only to die but to remain (diamenein) in the corruption of death.

(Inc. 3)

The finality and irreversibility of sin, as far as the powers of merely human agency are concerned, is that in depriving humanity of the “grace” (charis) of participation in the Word, it merely confirms the intrinsic tendency of their “nature” (physis) to revert to nothingness. But if the power of sin lies in its capacity to lead humanity into the condition of “remaining” in its orientation to nothingness and so exploits humanity's inherent ontological weakness, the final and definitive “remaining” in the “grace” of participation in the Word happens only through the humanization, death, and resurrection of the Word. Only the divine Word, who is not subject to the “remaining in death” that comes through sin's confirmation of humanity's inherent nothingness, can definitively liberate humanity and cause it to “remain” with God. While we find a fairly systematic presentation of this understanding already in Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, the point is also made on behalf of the full divinity of the Son in Athanasius's explicitly anti-Arian polemic:

If the Son was a creature, humanity would have remained (emenen) none the less mortal and not united to God. It was not a creature that united creatures to God, for in that case this creature would be itself in search of one to unite it to God. Nor would a part of creation be the salvation of creation, that part itself being in need of salvation. To prevent this, God sends his own Son who becomes the Son of Man by taking created flesh, so that he may offer his own body to death on behalf of all, since all were sentenced to death but he was other than all. Henceforth, the utterance of that sentence is fulfilled, in so far as all have died through him—for “all have died” in Christ (2 Cor 5:14)— and henceforth all can be freed through him from sin and the curse that comes from it and may truly remain (diamenosin) forever as risen from the dead and as putting on immortality and incorruptibility.

(Or. Ar. 2:69)

The “internality” of grace through Christ

Alongside the explication of the newness of Christ's redemption in terms of its effecting a definitive “remaining” and security for humanity, Athanasius also lays emphasis on our access to communion with God as becoming “intrinsic” to the human condition through Christ. It is typical of Athanasius to think in categories of “internality” and “externality,” often making the point in his anti- Arian polemic that the world is “external” to the divine being, and that the divine Word is, by nature, “outside” creation. With reference to the Incarnation, however, he is concerned to maintain that the salvation worked by Jesus Christ does not take place “outside” us or extrinsically, by divine decree, but is a transformation from “within” the human being. Linking the motif of “remaining” with that of “internality,” he asserts that the reign of sin would “remain within” us unless it were superseded by the internality of the divine agency which renders sin “external” to us. This is what occurs in the Incarnation of the Word:

Even Plato, who is so esteemed by the Greeks, says that when the one who created the world saw it in distress and in danger of lapsing into the realm of disharmony, he sat at the helm of the soul and lent it his aid and corrected all its defects. So then what is so unbelievable in our saying that when humanity had gone astray, the Word sat at its helm and appeared as a human being, so that, through his guidance and goodness, he might save distressed humanity? But perhaps, being shamed into agreeing with this, they will then wish to say that when God wanted to rehabilitate and save humanity, he should not have brought his Word into contact with a body but should have done it with a mere command, just as he had done before, when he fashioned humanity from non-being. But against this objection of theirs, it would be appropriate to respond as follows: Before, when nothing existed at all, all that was required for the creation of the universe was a command and an act of will. But once humanity came into being, there was a need to cure not what did not yet exist but what had already come into being. So it was fitting and appropriate for the Healer and Savior to make himself present among those who were already in existence, in order to heal these existent beings. Therefore, he became a human being and made use of the body as a human medium. But if it should not have happened in this way, then by what medium should the Word have appeared when he wished to do so? And from where should he have received it if not from those who already existed and needed access to his divinity through what had similitude with them? For it was not the non-existent that had need of salvation, so that a mere command would suffice, but humanity, which was already in existence and beset by corruption and ruin.

Then also, it must be understood that the corruption which had taken place was not outside the body, but attached to it. So it was necessary for life to cleave to the body in the place of corruption, so that just as death had come to be in the body, so now life would come to be in it. If death had come to be outside the body, life also would have come to be outside the body. But if death had become intertwined with the body, and in being joined with the body was in fact ruling over it, it was necessary for life to be intertwined with it, so that the body could put on life and cast off corruption. Otherwise, if the Word had come outside the body and not in it, death would still have been defeated by him—which is most natural, since death cannot overpower life—but the corruption attached to the body would nevertheless remain in the body. Therefore it was fitting that the Savior put on a body, so that the body might be permeated with life and would no longer, as mortal, remain in death, but as putting on immortality, would henceforth rise up and remain immortal. For once it had put on corruption, it would not have risen unless it had come to put on life. Moreover, death does not appear by itself but only in the body. Therefore, he put on a body, so that he might find death in the body and banish it. How indeed was the Lord manifested as Life, if not by vivifying what was mortal?

(Inc. 43–44)

While Athanasius's doctrine of creation emphasizes that humanity's ontological vulnerability is due to its origination from nothing, his articulation of Christian salvation indicates that the definitive “remaining” in divine grace and humanity's new access to this grace “from within” constitutes nothing less than a “new origin” for humanity. Humanity's origin from nothing is now “transferred” into the humanity of the Word himself, whose sacrificial death has destroyed the intrinsic bond, confirmed by sin, between humanity and nothingness: “For by the sacrifice of his own body he both put an end to the law which lay over us, and renewed for us the origin of life by giving hope of the resurrection” (Inc. 10).Thus, whereas apart from the Incarnation, human existence is a movement of receptivity from nothingness to God, a movement that always threatens to relapse into nothingness, those who are united to Christ “now have the origin of their receiving in him and through him” (Or. Ar. 1:48). While this conception resonates strongly with Athanasius's exposition of the metaphysics of creatio ex nihilo, he is also able to render it according to the biblical motif of the First and Second Adam:

When his flesh is born of Mary the Mother of God, he who provides others with their birth into being is himself said to be born so that he may transfer our origin into himself. Thus we are no longer merely earth which returns to earth (cf. Gen 3:19), but being intertwined with the Word who is from heaven, we are raised up by him into heaven. Therefore, it was not unfitting for him to transfer also the other passibilities of the body into himself, so that we may participate in eternal life, being no longer merely human but belonging to the Word. We no longer die in Adam in accordance with our first birth (cf. 1 Cor 15:22) but because our birth and all the weakness of the flesh are henceforth transferred into the Word, we are raised from the earth and loosed from the curse of sin by him who is in us and who was made a curse for our sake (cf. Gal 3:13). And rightly so! For, just as we all die in Adam, being from earth, so are we all made alive in Christ (1 Cor 15:22) when we are reborn from above by water and the Spirit (cf. Jn 3:5). Henceforth, our flesh is no longer earthly but becomes Worded through the Word of God, who became flesh for our sake (cf. Jn 1:14).

(Or. Ar. 3:33)

“Appropriation”

It is likely that Athanasius's predecessor Alexander referred to the Son as idios, “belonging to” or “proper to” the Father. Although we have no extant records of his use of this term, Arius's explicit repu diation of it in the course of his rejection of Alexander's theology indicates its prior use by the latter. Athanasius also cites Theognostus, head of the catechetical school of Alexandria in the mid-third century, who speaks of the Son as “not external” (ouk exothen) to the essence of the Father. The combination of the affirmation that the Son is idios to the being of the Father and the negation that he is “from outside” the Father's being became a cornerstone of Athanasius's own Trinitarian terminology. To say that the Son is idios to the Father indicated the substantial correlativity of the Father and Son; both eternally exist in relation to one another. Conversely, the irreducible contrast between the Triune God and all creation is indicated by saying that creatures are “external” to the Father's being. But Athanasius's depiction of the radical newness in the relation between God and creation that is secured by Christ's salvific work includes a reversal of this contrast. The startling novum of the Incarnation is that the eternal divine Word whose nature is “outside” the created order “appropriated” created human nature so that henceforth humanity was not “external” to his being but has become his very “own.”

Athanasius's use of the category of “appropriation” (idiopoieo) issues from a soteriological focus on the ontological transformation of humanity which the Word, in unity with his human body, effects. While it is true that Athanasius does not concern himself with an analytical exposition of how the constitutive elements of Christ (i.e. human body, human soul, divinity) fit together, his language of “appropriation” does indicate a kind of unity in which a subject brings an “external” reality into his own sphere of reality, influence, and agency. In the case of the enfleshed Word, such a unity is linguistically signified by the application of human predication to the subject of the Word. But this linguistic maneuver mirrors the salvific reality that the properties of the human condition are transformed and deified when they are thus appropriated by the Word, to the point where humanity becomes “incorruptible” and “impassible.” It is this appropriation by the Word that finally enables humanity to pass over from the “remaining” in the corruption of sin to the “remaining” in incorruptible communion with God:

If the works of the Word's divinity were not accomplished through the body, humanity would not have been divinized. On the other hand, if the properties (idia) of the flesh were not attributed to the Word, humanity would not have been completely freed from them. Even if they had abated for a little while, as I said before, sin and corruption would still remain in humanity, as is shown to be the case with human beings before him. For there have been many holy people who were pure of all sin. Jeremiah was sanctified from the womb (Jer 1:5) and John, while still in the womb, leaped with joy at the voice of Mary, the Mother of God (Lk 1:44). And yet “death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin after the pattern of Adam's transgression” (Rom 5:14). Thus did humanity remain no less mortal and corruptible, being vulnerable to the passibilities that pertain to its nature (physis). But now that the Word has become a human being and appropriated the properties of the flesh, these no longer harm the body, on account of the Word who has come to be in the body. They are rather destroyed by him, so that henceforth human beings may no longer remain in sin and death, in accordance with their own passibilities, but may attain to resurrection, in accordance with the power of the Word, remaining always immortal and incorruptible.

(Or. Ar. 3:33)

Conceived within this transformative perspective, the relation between the Word and his humanity constitutes a unity that is decidedly asymmetrical. For Athanasius, as for classic Patristic Christology in general and later Alexandrian (Cyrillian) Christology in particular, the fact that Jesus Christ is equally human and divine does not at all imply that his humanity and divinity are in fact equal. The inequality between the divinity and humanity of Christ is typically emphasized by Athanasius in terms of the active agency of the divinity in relation to the humanity. This Christological framework is consistent with Athanasius's cosmology in which the universe as a whole is sustained by its receptivity to the creative and providential agency of the Word. It also evokes the contrast in Stoic cosmology between the active (poioun) and passive (paschon) principles by which the universe is constituted, as well as the Platonic framework of participation in which entities in the realm of becoming are constituted by their participation in the forms of the realm of being. In Athanasius's usage, these evocations are used to illustrate the soteriological principle that the unity of humanity and divinity in Christ is not a mere juxtaposition but an active transformation of the humanity by the divinity. Thus, when the Word becomes flesh, the divinity and lordship of the Word is not reduced but “extended,” so that the sovereignty of the Word may be salvifically manifest within human flesh. Against the “Arians”, Athanasius insists that the “new origin” thereby granted to humanity should not be seen as applying to the essence of the Word but to the extension of the eternal lordship of the Word into the realm of sinful flesh. The saving condescension of the Word is ultimately a glorious affirmation of his irreducible and irreducibly active sovereignty:

It was not he who attained an origin of his being then {at the time of the Incarnation}, but it was we who attained to the beginning of having him as our Lord. God, who is good and the Father of our Lord took pity on us and, wishing to be known by all, he made his own Son put on a human body and become a human being called Jesus, so that in this body he may make an offering of himself on behalf of all and liberate all from their estrangement from God and from corruption and so that he may become Lord and king of all. That he became in this way the Lord and king of all is what Peter says: “He has made him Lord” (Acts 2:36) and “he has sent Christ” (cf. Acts 3:20). This is the same as saying that the Father has made him a human being—for to be made is something that pertains to human beings. But he did not merely make him as a human being but as one who is Lord of all and who sanctifies all by his own anointing. For even if “being in the form of God, he took the form of a servant” (Phil 2:6–7), the reception of the form of a servant did not render servile the Word who is Lord by nature but rather brought liberation from the Lord for all humanity. He who is Word and Lord by nature was made a human being through the form of a servant as well as Lord of all and “Christ”—that is to say, the one who anoints all by the Spirit.

(Or. Ar. 2:14)

As can be seen from this passage, Athanasius's emphasis in the loving “descent” of the Word does not entail any speculation in the direction of a kenoticism of the divine essence or a passible God. While modern speculation on the notion of divine passibility frequently concerns itself with the question of what happens to the divine essence when the Word takes on human suffering, Athanasius's much more concrete perspective is preoccupied with what happens to human suffering and corruptibility when they are assumed by the divine Word. The descent of the Word does not diminish the divine nature or amount to a reversal of divine sovereignty; rather, it is the negativities of the fallen human condition that are reversed by the Word's appropriation of them:

For he suffered to prepare freedom from suffering for those who suffer in him. He descended so that he may raise us up. He took upon himself the ordeal of being born that we might love him who is unbegotten; He went down to corruption that corruption might put on immortality. He became weak for us that we might rise with power. He descended to death that He might grant us immortality and give life to the dead. Finally he became human that we who die as human beings might live again and that death may no longer have sovereignty over us; for the apostolic word proclaims, “Death shall not have dominion over us.”

(Festal Letter X:8)

Athanasius's creative use of this model of “appropriation” allows him to handle issues of Christological predication with a sophistication that is precocious, given its pre-Chalcedonian setting. Such sophistication can be easily missed if one focuses one-sidedly on his denial of the predication of human attributes to the Word—in saying, for example, that it was not the Word who suffered. Or else, his paradoxically simultaneous affirmations and negations of such attributes (that Christ “suffered and did not suffer” or was “weak himself though not himself weak”) may easily appear to be nonsensical. However, within the framework supplied by his model of “appropriation,” we can discern in Athanasius a double concern to distinguish the reality of the Word qua Word from the reality of the human condition which he appropriates, while simultaneously affirming the fact that the human condition has in fact been appropriated by the Word to the extent that it has become “his” reality. Typically, Athanasius is concretely concerned with the intelligibility of biblical language which refers human predications to the subject of the Word:

Therefore, when the scriptural authors who speak of him say that he ate and drank and was born, you should understand that it was the body, as body, which was born and fed with appropriate nourishment. But God the Word, who was united to the body while ordering all things, made it known through the works which he accomplished in the body that he was not a human being, but God the Word. Yet these things were said of him because indeed the body which ate and was born and suffered was not another's but the Lord's.

(Inc. 18)

The Orations against the Arians provide a wider context for interpreting Athanasius's meaning when he uses such paradoxical language. There, Athanasius is dealing with the “Arian” interpretation of Prov 8:22, wherein Wisdom (Sophia) declares: “He created me as the beginning of his ways for his works.” The interpretation against which he is contending is that the figure of Wisdom in this passage, understood by both sides to be the pre-existent Christ, is “created” and therefore not co-eternal with the Father. One of the ways in which Athanasius deals with this text is to make the linguistic-logical point that predications of creatureliness do not necessarily apply to the very essence of the subject of whom these predications are made. Characteristically, he makes the point by scriptural examples: “A clean heart create in me, O God” (Ps 51:12) is not a petition to have one heart replaced by another one that is different in its very essence. Rather, it is an appeal to have one 's heart undergo a change and conversion. Similarly, according to Athanasius's interpretation, when Wisdom says, “He created me,” the predication of creatureliness does not define the subject of Wisdom but speaks of an event which is nevertheless truly predicated of that subject: “The phrase, ‘He created,’ does not of itself simply signify the being or the generation, but can indicate that something else comes to be in reference to the one of whom it speaks” (Or. Ar. 2:45). It is in the context of arguing this very point that Athanasius presents one of his articulations of the theme of the paradoxical applicability and non-applicability of human attributions to the Word: “By receiving our weaknesses, he himself is said to be weak— though not weak in himself, 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” (ibid.). The logic propounded here is that the predication refers to an “event” that is correctly attributed to the subject and thus belongs (idios) to the subject, but that such predications do not define the subject as such, independently of that event. Thus, all creaturely predications properly belong to the subject of the Word, through the Incarnation, but do not essentially define the Word as subject, independently of the Incarnation: “Let it be known that while the Word himself is impassible in his nature, these things are said of him because of the flesh that he put on, since they belong to the flesh and the body itself belongs to the Savior” (Or. Ar. 3:34). While Athanasius is clearly concerned to guard the divine impassibility of the Word, he also stresses that what is specifically unique and salvific about the Incarnation is precisely that these human attributes are predicated of the Word himself:

In earlier times, the Word came to each of the saints and sanctified those who received him rightly. But neither when they were born was it said that he had become a human being, nor when they suffered was it said that he himself had suffered. But once he came from Mary to dwell among us, at the end of the ages for the remission of sins (for so it was pleasing to the Father to send his own Son, born from woman, born under the law) (Gal 4: 4), then it was that it was said of him that he had taken flesh and become a human being and that in this flesh he suffered for us, as Peter says: “Christ suffered for us in the flesh” (1 Pet 4:1).

These things are said so that it might be shown and so that we all might believe that, being always God and sanctifying those to whom he came while also ordering all things according to the Father's will, he later became a human being for our sakes and divinity dwelt bodily in the flesh, as the apostle says (cf. Col 2:9). This is as much as to say: Being God, he took possession of a body as his own and employed it as a means by which he became a human being for our sakes. Therefore, since he was in the flesh, the properties of the flesh are attributed to him—such as hunger, thirst, suffering, fatigue, and so on—to which the flesh is susceptible. But through his own body he also accomplished the characteristic works of the Word himself, such as raising the dead, making the blind to see again, and healing the hemorrhaging woman. While the Word bore the weaknesses of the flesh as his own—for the flesh was his own—the flesh itself rendered service to the activities of the divinity—for the divinity was in the flesh and the body belonged to God. Thus, the prophet spoke well when he said, “He bore {our weaknesses}” (Isa 53:4); he did not say, “He healed our weaknesses,” as if he merely healed the body, as he had always done, while being outside it, thus leaving humanity still subject to death. But he bears our weaknesses and sins, so that it may be manifest that he has become a human being and that the body which bears these in him, is his own. He himself was not harmed by “bearing our sins in his body upon the tree,” as Peter says (1 Pet 2:24), but we human beings were redeemed from our own passibilities and filled with the righteousness of the Word.

(Or. Ar. 3:31)

Athanasius's handling of issues of Christological predication was highly influential on his episcopal successor, Cyril of Alexandria, whose own work was so foundational for the Christological Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451). In the Christological controversies that erupted between Cyril and his Antiochian opponent Nestorius, Cyril argued on behalf of the application of human attributes to the Word by recourse to much of Athanasius's logic and to the language of “appropriation” and internality. He insisted that it is legitimate and necessary to say that Mary was the “Mother of God” (Theotokos), and that the eternal Word was born, suffered, and died. While the human attributes are not directly applicable to the Word's nature, they are nevertheless appropriately predicated of the Word himself, insofar as the Word has made the humanity “his” and inasmuch as this humanity is not “external” to the Word:

This is how we speak of him as suffering and rising again; not as if the Word of God suffered blows or nail-piercings or any of the other injuries in his own (idian) nature (for divinity is impassible because it is incorporeal). But since the body that had become his own (idion) suffered these things, he himself is said to have suffered for our sake. For the Impassible was within the passible body.

The essential core of Cyril's Christology, and indeed of Chalcedonian Christology, is that there are two distinct sets of predications that are applicable to the single subject of the Word. That is the linguistic and scriptural model that underlies the philosophical vocabulary of two natures and one person. It is a model which is already given fairly mature expression by Athanasius:

For while he is Word of God, so afterwards “the Word became flesh” (Jn 1: 14); and though “in the beginning was the Word” (Jn 1:1), in the fullness of time the virgin came to be with child (Isa 7:14, Mt 1:23) and the Lord became a human being. It is one who is thus doubly signified, for “the Word became flesh” (Jn 1:14). But what is said concerning the divinity is distinct from what is said concerning the humanity; each of the sayings has its appropriate interpretation. The one who writes concerning the human attributes of the Word knows also of those that pertain to his divinity and the one who explicates what pertains to the divinity is not ignorant of the characteristics of his advent in the flesh; like an expert and reputable auditor he distinguishes each from the other and so walks in the way of piety. So, in speaking of the Lord's weeping, he knows that, since the Lord has become human, he manifests his humanity by weeping, although he raises Lazarus, as God. He knows also that while he hungered and thirsted in the body, he divinely fed five thousand with five loaves of bread and that while it was a human body that lay in the tomb, it was raised as God's body by the Word himself.

(On the Thought of Dionysius 9)

Trinitarian doctrine

The range and development of Athanasius's Trinitarian theology can be gleaned by a brief overview of his thought in three important works: Against the Greeks— On the Incarnation (328–333), Orations against the Arians (339–341), and Letters to Serapion. In his early work Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, Athanasius places primary stress on the economic activity of the Father and the Son and largely abstracts from mention of the Holy Spirit. Insofar as the work is constructed as an apologia crucis which seeks to fortify the claim that the same one who died on the cross is God, it identifies God the Creator and Savior in terms of the mutual relation between the divine Word who became incarnate and the Father. As Creator, “the true and real God” is “the Father of Christ,” and our approach to God is an access to the Father through his Word, in whom the Father is seen, known, and worshipped. The first part of the treatise presents God the Creator in terms of this correlation between Father and Son, though the underlying logic of this posi tion requires the further argument of the second part of the treatise, On the Incarnation. On the Incarnation tries to show that the fruits of Christ's life, death, and resurrection, as manifest in the life of the Christian community, demonstrate the truth of Christ's genuine divinity. If that is so, then the true God and Creator is none other than the “Father of Christ,” to whom we only have access through his Son and Word.

The economic co-activity of Father and Son is equally evident in Athanasius's presentation of Christ's work of redemption. While we have already noted some of the terms in which Athanasius explicates the contents of Christian salvation (e.g. “appropriation,” “internality,” “remaining” in grace), all of these can be subsumed within the central conception that Christ “brought all humanity to himself and through him to the Father” (Inc. 37). On the Incarnation presents two ways in which Christ saved humanity: his sacrificial death, and his showing forth the knowledge of God in the material human realm. Both of these are explicated dialogically in terms of the relation between Father and Son: Christ's sacrificial death is a priestly offering to the Father, and his pedagogic condescension to the realm of the material shows forth in sensible terms the knowledge of the Father.

While focusing primarily on the common activity of Father and Son in the realms of creation and salvation, Athanasius's early double treatise also makes some ventures toward an articulation of the ontological status of the relation between Father and Son. At one point, Athanasius has recourse to a “psychological analogy” to depict the correlativity of Father and Son, though he bases this analogy on a perception of God's providential power in the universe:

Just as when one looks up to heaven and see its order and the light of the stars, one becomes aware of the Word who brings these into order, so when we contemplate the Word of God, we must think of God his Father, from whom he proceeds and who is thus fittingly called the Father's interpreter and messenger. We can see this by reference to ourselves. For when a word is uttered by human beings, we understand that its source is the mind and, by attending to the word, we attain by thought to the perception of the mind that is thereby expressed. All the more, by a greater imagination and an incomparable preeminence, when we see the power of the Word, we attain to the apprehension of the good Father, as the Savior himself says: “The one who has seen me has seen the Father.”

(Against the Greeks 45)

There is also the attempt, in Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, to express the correlativity of Father and Son by drawing together the different scriptural titles (such as Word, Wisdom, Power, Image) by which Christ is identified in his relation to the Father, a strategy that will become much more prominent in his later explicitly anti-Arian polemic:

Being with him as Wisdom and beholding the Father, as Word he created and formed and ordered the universe. And being the power of the Father, he endowed all things with the strength to exist. As the Savior says, “Everything which I see the Father doing, I also do likewise” (Jn 5:19). And his holy disciples teach that everything was created through him and for him (cf. Col 1:16) and that he is the good offspring of the good Father and true Son and power of the Father and his Wisdom and Word. He is these things not by participation, nor as if they were added to him from outside of himself, as is the case with those who participate in him and are made wise through him and are empowered and made rational in him. But he is Wisdom itself, Word itself, the very Power which is the Father's own, Light itself, Truth itself, Righteousness itself, Virtue itself, and indeed the imprint and radiance (cf. Heb 1:3— character, apaugasma) and Image of the Father. To sum up, he is the perfect offshoot of the Father; He alone is Son, the precise Image of the Father (cf. 2 Cor 4:4, Col 1:15).

(Against the Greeks 46)

Finally, the ontological mutuality of the Son and the Father is expressed by saying that the Son is “proper to” or intrinsically belongs to (idios) the Father. The natural and ontological “belonging” of the Son to the Father is thus distinguished from the Son's making humanity “his own” through the Incarnation.

Perhaps the starkest development in Athanasius's thought from the time of the writing of Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation to Orations against the Arians is in his presentation of the role of the Holy Spirit. We have already noted that Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation shows a rather surprising neglect of the work of the Spirit in Christian salvation. Like the early apologists, this work identifies the Spirit as the inspirer of the Scriptures but abstracts from the role of the Spirit in the divine work of redemption. In contrast, the Orations against the Arians indicate an implicit acknowledgment of the full divinity of the Spirit and manifest a much more integrated conception of the Spirit's role in redemption. As to the first point, Athanasius argues that the Son is equal to the Spirit in order to demonstrate that the Son is equal to the Father, thus clearly implying the premise that the Spirit himself is equal to the Father. With regard to the Spirit's role in redemption, he now aligns Christ's divinity with the role of giving the Spirit, and Christ's humanity with the role of receiving the Spirit on our behalf. By receiving the Spirit derivatively from Christ's human reception of it, we thus become conformed to his divinity. The Spirit is here conceived primarily as the Spirit of adoption, the one “in whom” we participate the Son, and thus become divinized.

As in Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, Athanasius depicts the divinity of the Son dialogically, in terms of his relation to the Father. He also retains and intensifies usage of the terminology whereby the Son is described as “proper to” or “belonging to” (idios) the Father's being. There are two important developments in his argumentation, however. First is the recourse to the argument from Christian worship, specifically the rite of baptism, and, secondly, we find a much more focused linguistic analysis of the specific titles by which the Scriptures characterize Christ. With regard to the first point, Athanasius argues that the characterization of the Son as a creature means that our initiation into divine life in baptism is actually into a hybrid mixture of Creator and creature. This is an important line of argument whose implicit logic of the necessary correlation of worship and faith will find mature and explicit expression in St. Basil's On the Holy Spirit. As to his linguistic analysis of scripture, Athanasius follows a line of development that hearkens back to his predecessor Origen's Christology of scriptural titles (epinoiai). Like Origen, Athanasius identifies a set of titles (Word, Wisdom, Power, Image, etc.) which scripturally converge around the figure of Jesus Christ, and which are thus used by him as providing an integral and mutually related “lexical field” for the identification of Christ. Typically, Athanasius justifies the individual constituents of these clusters by citing New Testament texts which apply these titles to Christ. From there, he is concerned to show that the scriptural titles applied to Christ are linguistically correlative to the scriptural designations of divinity. This linguistic correlativity of scriptural titles is then taken to be an authoritative disclosure of the ontological correlativity of Father and Son. For example, the Scriptures speak of God as the “fountain of life” (Ps 36:10), but Jesus in the gospel identifies himself as “the life”; thus Jesus is the life that issues from the fountain of life. Without this life issuing from the fountain, the fountain itself is barren, “destitute of life and wisdom” (Or. Ar. 1:19). Similarly, the same psalm says, “In your light we shall see light” (Ps 36:10), while Christ is also called the light and “the radiance of {God's} glory” (Heb 1:3). Christ, the Word, is therefore the radiance that issues from the Light.

In his anti-Arian polemic, Athanasius exploits the scriptural overlapping of predications applied to God and to Christ by pressing “Arian” propositions about the Son to yield discomfiting conclusions about the Father. Thus, if the Son is scripturally identified as “Truth,” then the proposition that the Son “once was not” must be reinserted into the scriptural language-world, yielding the conclusion that Truth was not always in God (Or. Ar. 1:21). Athanasius employed this strategy most forcefully with reference to the scriptural titles of Christ as Word and Wisdom. Contending against the slogan of Arius that “there was once when the Son was not,” Athanasius repeatedly accuses the “Arians” of “robbing God of his Word” and of asserting that God was once without Wisdom and Reason (Logos). On the face of it, these charges seem to be a willful distortion of his opponents’ doctrine and an example of faulty rhetoric. For they certainly would not agree that God was once without Wisdom; rather, they distinguished the Wisdom which was an essential attribute of the singular divine essence from the “Wisdom” who is the distinct hypostasis of the Son and who came into existence and is called “Wisdom” by virtue of his participation in God's essential Wisdom. However, it is essential to note that Athanasius is here not simply making an abstract theological argument on some neutral ground—as if he were saying that a God who does not eternally beget an Image as his Wisdom cannot be eternally wise. To interpret Athanasius's argument in its proper context, one must keep in mind the scriptural background that was determinative for him, and to which his opponents also claimed recourse. Within the context of the linguistic field of the Scriptures, Athanasius's deeper point is that there exists a correlation in the Scriptures between God and his Wisdom, wherein Christ is also identified as Wisdom. The force of Athanasius's point lies in his protestation that the “Arians” are tearing asunder that scriptural correlation. To say that “there was once when the Son was not” is to abstract from this scriptural correlation where the Son is aligned with Wisdom, and thus correlated to God. Therefore, when Athanasius asks, “when was God without his Wisdom?,” the context in which he says this indicates that his question is primarily anchored in the scriptural language-world, and bears direct reference to that world. This, of course, is not to say that he considered this biblical language-world in postmodern fashion, as being merely the play of signifiers without an external ontological reference. The Scriptures efficaciously mediate the truth of God and creation, but precisely for this reason, the mediation of the Scriptures cannot be bypassed, and so the way things are described, related, and distinguished in scriptural language is truly revelatory of the way these things are. For this reason, scriptural language and scriptural imagery are taken very seriously by Athanasius. He considers the images afforded by Scripture to represent paradigmatic illustrations or symbols (paradeigmata) of divine truths that are not directly accessible to human comprehension. Therefore, one has to be extremely attentive to the “exact” patterns of these images in order to glean the divine mysteries that underlie them. Thus, the scriptural dynamics of intertextuality by which there exists a series of linguistic correlations between the designations of the person of Christ and the characterizations of God are taken to be representative of the Trinitarian mystery of the ontological correlativity of the Father and the Son. Athanasius's consistent strategy is to press the scriptural linguistic correlation into an ontological correlation, and then to rhetorically represent the “Arian” position as a deconstruction of this ontological correlation.

On the other hand, Athanasius makes positive use of the sets of linguistic correlations that he draws up, not only to affirm the ontological correlation of the Father and the Son, but also to acknowledge the mutual distinction within that correlation. The “exactness (akribeia) of scriptural language” indicates a certain order within the correlation. Reason (logos), for example, is always from and proper to the being of the one whose reason it is; if the Father is the fountain of living water (Jer 2:13) and the “fountain of wisdom” (Bar 3:12), then the Son is the life (Jn 14:6) and the wisdom (1 Cor 1:24) that pours out from the fountain; if the Father is light (1 Jn 1:5), the Son is the “radiance” and “expression” of that light (Heb 1:3). All these relations are non-reversible, even while they designate equality. Thus, for Athanasius, these images indicate intrinsic correlationality as well as distinction: the outpouring is not the same as the fountain (“for what coexists does not coexist with itself but with another” (Or. Ar. 2:38)), but the fountain is not a fountain apart from the outpouring. Father and Son are irreducibly and eternally distinct, and while the Son is the exact image of the Father, he is, in a sense, a reverse image of the Father; he remains inalterably like the Father by remaining inalterably Son.

Conversely, Athanasius searches the Scriptures to make the point that the linguistic field by which both the Old and the New Testaments identify Christ not only correlates and distinguishes Christ and the Father, but also distinguishes the Son from the realm of creation. To make this point, Athanasius considers not only the attributions applied directly to the person of Jesus Christ, but those associated with “Word,” “Wisdom,” and divine “Power,” insofar as all these are themselves scripturally integrated into the identification of Jesus Christ. He contends, citing various examples, that the “Arian” vocabulary which applies to the Son language of temporal specificity, such as “when” and “before,” are applied by the Scriptures to creatures (Or. Ar. 1:13). On the other hand, affirmations of the divine attribute of eternity are applied generally to God, but also to Christ: “who is and who was and who is to come” (Rev 1:4); “who exists before the ages…by whom {God} made the ages” (Heb 1:2); “Christ who is over all, God blessed for ever” (Rom 9:5). Similarly, as against the doctrine that the Son, as creature, has a will that is changeable by nature, Athanasius marshals texts that contrast the impermanence of creation with the inalterability of God: “You, O Lord, established the earth and the heavens…they will perish but you remain” (Ps 102:26); “I do not alter” (Deut 32:39). Once again, Christ is shown to be scripturally associated with the latter kind of predication: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb 13:8).

Of course, Athanasius has to admit that not all predications referred to Jesus Christ can be assimilated directly to the scriptural patterns of identifying divinity. Some clearly belong to the realm of creaturely and human existence. But in this context, Athanasius's Trinitarian hermeneutics, which aims to probe the correlativity of the identifications of God (the Father) and Jesus Christ (as Word, Wisdom, Radiance, Image of the Father), becomes integrated with a Christological hermeneutics, which interprets the sayings about Christ-Word- Wisdom-Radiance-Image in light of the overarching plot (skopos) of the Word's becoming flesh. In this context, Athanasius lays down the main principles for executing a correct exegesis: one must be aware of the time, the person, and the occasion to which the text refers. The crucial distinction in scriptural “times” for Athanasius is before and after the enfleshment of the Word, a point he makes by inner-scriptural references, for example to the opening of the letter to the Hebrews: “In past times, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets. But in these last days, he has spoken to us through his Son, whom he made heir of all things and through whom he created the universe” (Heb 1:1–2). Thus, the overall “scope” or main storyline of Scripture, for Athanasius, is “a twofold proclamation of the Savior”:

Therefore the scope and characteristic feature of the holy Scripture, as we have often said, is its twofold proclamation of the Savior: that he was always God and Son, as being the Father's Word, Radiance, and Wisdom, and that afterwards he took flesh from Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, for our sake, and became a human being. One can find this indicated throughout the entire divinely inspired Scripture, as the Lord himself has said: “Search the Scriptures, for it is they which testify to me” (Jn 5:39). But so that I may not extend my writing excessively by collecting everything said on this point, it will suffice to recall the following representative passages. For John says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Everything was made through him and without him nothing was made” (Jn 1:13). Then: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father's only-begotten Son” (Jn 1:14). And Paul writes: “Who, being in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and coming in the likeness of human beings, he was found human in appearance. He humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6–8). Therefore, if one goes through the whole Scriptures on the basis of these passages and the sense indicated therein, one will see how in the beginning the Father said to him, “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3) and “Let there be a firmament” (Gen 1:6) and “Let us make human beings” (Gen 1:26). But at the consummation of the ages, he sent him into the world, not in order to judge the world but so that the world might be saved through him (cf. Jn 3:17). And so it is written: “Behold, the Virgin shall be with child and bear a son and they will call his name ‘Emmanuel’, which means ‘God with us’” (Isa 7:14, Mt 1:23)

(Against the Arians 3:29)

A proper reading of Scriptures, therefore, is one that discerns the overall scope of Scripture in terms of the central storyline of the Incarnation of the Word, which, as we have seen, represents for Athanasius the supreme and exhaustive expression of God's loving condescension. Read in this way, the Scriptures identify Jesus Christ as both fully God, existing in mutual correlation to the Father, and yet made a creature for the sake of human salvation.

Athanasius becomes the first person to write a treatise on the Holy Spirit in his Letters to Serapion, which are indicative of his mature Trinitarian theology. This writing is occasioned by the controversy with the Tropici, an Egyptian group who acknowledged the full divinity of the Son but denied that of the Spirit. At this stage, Athanasius presses his arguments on behalf of the divinity of the Son in the service of the Holy Spirit. The creative and sanctifying work of the Spirit, which extends to the point of effecting our deification, indicates that he can be nothing less than God. As in the Orations against the Arians, Athanasius here also makes use of the argument from worship and baptism to characterize as “idolatry” a worship that mixes together Creator and creature. Moreover, the arguments based on scriptural linguistic correlation are now also applied to the Spirit. The images or paradigmatic illustrations (paradigmata) by which the Scriptures identify the Spirit align the Spirit with the Father and the Son. For instance, the Son is the outpouring from the fountain, while we drink of the Spirit; or the Son is the radiance streaming from the light, while we are enlightened by the Spirit. As in certain conceptions in contemporary theology, these scripturally derived characterizations of the Spirit identify the Spirit with the actualization or application to humanity of the work of the Son: the Spirit is the “vital activity and gift whereby {the Son} sanctifies and enlightens”; “all creation partakes of the Word in the Spirit.” For Athanasius, these scriptural correlations indicate that the Spirit is integral to the organic unity of divine agency, while the inseparability of the activity of Son and Spirit indicates that the Spirit has the same ontological unity with the Son as the Son has with the Father. On the basis of this scriptural witness, Athanasius extends his own ontological vocabu lary which he had used to indicate the natural unity between the Father and the Son to the Spirit. The Spirit also is “proper to” and “belongs to” (idios) the Father and Son, by nature. At the same time, and contrary to some misinterpretations, Athanasius insists that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are truly distinct subsistents. Only the Father is the source; the Son and Spirit are distinguished from one another according to the biblical pattern of imagery, in which the Spirit seems to be the one in whom the work of the Son is actualized in humanity. In keeping with the apophatic tenor of the Greek Fathers, Athanasius is reluctant to go any further than strictly scriptural warrant in characterizing the distinction between the three. What the Scriptures indicate is that Father, Son, and Spirit all share in the divine work of creation and deifying salvation; their relations are indicated by the patterns of scriptural language; they are thus equally constituents of the divine realm and not creatures: “This much suffices for the faithful and this is the extent to which human knowledge attains, at which point the cherubim make a covering with their wings (cf. Isa 6:2)… For the things that are handed down by faith should be understood not by human wisdom (cf. 1 Cor 2:13) but by the hearing of faith (cf. Gal 3:2)” (Letters to Serapion 1: 17).

Eusebeia: theology and holiness

Athanasius occupies a central place in Christian tradition primarily because of his teachings on doctrinal matters. But for the Alexandrian himself, the true perception of the contents of Christian faith is inseparable from a life lived in intimate communion with God and modeled after the examples of the scriptural saints:

The investigation and true knowledge of the Scriptures requires a good life and pure soul and the virtue that is consonant with Christ, so that the mind, in following this path, may be enabled to reach and comprehend what it desires, as far as it is accessible to human nature to learn about the Word of God. For without a pure mind and the imitation of the life of the saints, one cannot comprehend the words of the saints. If someone wishes to see the light of the sun, he would certainly clean out and brighten his eye and purify it until it approaches a likeness of what he desires to see; when the eye becomes light in this way, it may see the light of the sun. Or, when someone wishes to see a city or country, he certainly goes to that place in order to see it. Likewise, the one who wishes to comprehend the mind of those who speak of God needs to begin by living the kind of life that washes and cleanses the soul and then go to the saints themselves, approaching them by imitation of their deeds, so that becoming aligned with them through a common way of life, he may come to understand the things that have been revealed to them by God. Henceforth, as being in a close bond with them, he may escape the peril of sinners and their fire at the day of judgment, and may receive what has been stored up for the saints in the Kingdom of Heaven, “which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has entered into human hearts” (1 Cor 2:9), whatsoever has been prepared for those who live virtuously and love the God and Father, in Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom and with whom to the Father himself with the Son and the Holy Spirit be honor and power and glory for ever and ever. Amen.

(Inc. 57)

The disposition described in this passage, which Athanasius elsewhere frequently calls “piety” (eusebeia), is thus considered by him to be constitutive of theological reasoning. Conversely, Athanasius never tired of accusing his theological opponents of “impiety,” of saying things that are unworthy of God and discordant with devotion to Christ. In this way, it is quite true, as some modern critics have pointed out, that Athanasius often begs the question in his debates with the “Arians”. It might seem maddeningly disingenuous and circular for Athanasius to demand rhetorically of his opponents, “Which of the two theologies manifest our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Son of God?” (Or. Ar. 1: 10). Yet, Athanasius's deeper point is that begging the question of the absolute lordship of Christ is a methodological a priori of Christian reflection. It is first of all the pattern of Christian life, with its unqualified dedication to the virtue “according to Christ,” which pre-empts any questioning of the absolute lordship, and hence authentic and absolute divinity, of Christ. The absolute lordship of Christ is thus simultaneously an implicit epistemological principle for Athanasius's theology and a foundational rule for Christian living, the two aspects mutually reinforcing one another. As a pastor, Athanasius exhorted his flock to organize their perception of time in accordance with the celebra tion of the Paschal mystery of Christ; he lauded the practice of pilgrimage to places sanctified by the Lord's presence and evocative of the “Father's house” which is beyond this earthly realm; and he insisted that both marriage and virginity are paths to genuine communion with God in Christ, although the path of virginity has special pre-eminence as an undivided offering to the divine Bridegroom. In general, Christians are always ordained to make their bodies and minds hospitable to the lordship of Christ. While it may be said that those who did not accept Nicene doctrine also followed these practices and aspirations, Athanasius's fundamental argument implied that there was a radical inconsistency to such a stance. If Christ is not truly God, the Christian's submission to the sovereignty and adoration of Christ would be mere idolatry, and humanity would still be alienated from God. In the end, Athanasius was quite incapable of entertaining with sobriety any doctrine that attenuated the Son's divinity, as if this was simply one plausible interpretation of Christian faith among others. Any such doctrine, whatever its qualifications and accoutrements, was reducible for him to an “Arian” betrayal of the cornerstone of Christian faith. While the modern reader may well cringe at his constant hammering away at the “senselessness” of the “Arians”, it is important to see at least that a Christian denial of the full divinity of Christ really did not make any sense at all for Athanasius himself.

Indeed, insofar as Athanasius was given to a global characterization of the Christian dispensation as one of divine condescension to which the appropriate human response is gratitude, he ultimately traces the anti-Nicene denial of the full divinity of the Son to the spiritual vice of ingratitude. In his estimation, such ingratitude is due to an incapacity to discern the true mystery of divine condescension, which leads these “Arians” to “look down upon” the Savior for the lowliness that he took upon himself out of love for humanity:

The Arian fanatics, being opponents of Christ and heretics, did not think upon these things and so they lash the one who brought them aid with their tongues and blaspheme the one who brought them freedom and entertain all kinds of strange notions about the Savior. They deny his substantial Godhead because he came down on behalf of humanity. They doubt that he is truly the Son of God because he came forth from the Virgin. They deny his eternity because they are aware that he has become incarnate in time. They do not confess him as the incorruptible Son of the incorruptible Father because they see that he has suffered for us. Finally, they reject the eternity of his substance because of what he endured for our sakes. In all this, they avail themselves of ingratitude, despising the Savior and insulting him instead of acknowledging his grace. Justly may we speak to them in these words: O ungrateful opponent of Christ…if you had understood the Scriptures and listened to the saints, who said, “May your face shine upon us and we will be saved” (Ps 43:3), or again, “Send out your light and your truth” (Ps 80:7), you would have known that the Lord did not come down for his own sake but for ours and so you would have admired his love for humanity all the more… If you had understood his love for us, you would not have estranged the Son from the Father and you would not have made him who reconciled us to his Father a foreigner {to the divine essence}.

(Festal Letter X:9)

To put the matter more positively, the emphasis on gratitude as central to Christian “piety” may be taken as the subjective correlative to Athanasius's fundamental characterization of the objective contents of Christian faith. We have noted the centrality for Athanasius of the characterization of the God revealed in Jesus Christ as a gracious “lover of humanity” whose merciful condescension overcomes the difference between his own transcendent nature and the inherent weakness of human nature which is exacerbated by sin. Eusebeia is a grateful acknowledgment of the descending love of the transcendent God, climactically manifest in the condescension of the Incarnate Word who “presents us to the Father” in the Spirit. For Athanasius, the foundation of such piety is the confession of the absolute and unqualified divinity of the Word who became flesh and died so that humanity may be rescued from death and deified.

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