Advent with Athanasius – Part 2

In part 2 (read part 1 here) of our contemplation of the Incarnation with Athanasius, chapters 11-19 are in focus. It is important to remember that Athanasius is framing the Incarnation as God’s gracious response to Adam’s disobedience which has resulted in his “being held fast in natural corruption and were deprived of the grace of being in the image” (chapter 7). Through the Incarnation, the Son is united to humanity in His person such that the image of God is restored. While the focus in part one was on the devastating effects of death through this corruption, in part two the focus turns towards man’s knowledge.

Athanasius acknowledges that man is insufficient in himself to know God, since man is created and God is uncreated. Yet God has gifted His image to man such that man is rational and thus able to know God (see chapter 3 and 11). As he writes, “The grace of being in the image was sufficient to know the God Word, and through him the Father” (chapter 12). Prior to the fall, the image of God in man meant that man’s rationality attended to its proper object, God Himself. But the inherent weakness of man as a creature meant that he could attend to lower things and thus experience a darkening or further weakening (see chapter 12). Not only was this possible, Athanasius adds that God “anticipated [man’s] carelessness” and sought to provide instruction to lift their attention towards “higher things” (i.e. God Himself).This is what provides Athanasius with the framework for understanding the gracious provision of the law and prophets as precursors to the Incarnation. He writes:

For the law was not only for the Jews, nor on their account only were the prophets sent: they were sent to the Jews, and persecuted by the Jews, but they were for the whole inhabited world a sacred school of the knowledge of God and the conduct of the soul. Such then being God’s goodness and love for human beings, nevertheless human beings, beaten by the pleasures of the moment and the illusions and deceits of the demons, did not raise their gaze to the truth, but sated themselves even more with evils and sins, so that they no longer appeared rational, but from their ways of life were reckoned irrational (chapter 12).

The gaze of man being fixed, as it were, upon sensible things in the created world, God sees fit to become to them sensible as a human being.The profound undoing of the fall is thus itself undone through this gratuitous act of God. Click To Tweet

For Athanasius, the Incarnation makes sense because man was originally created in the image of God, which he considers to be properly the image of the Son, Who is the “image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). In the incarnation, He through Whom all things were created is united to humanity in such a way that the image of God is once again restored unto human nature. The profound undoing of the fall is thus itself undone through this gratuitous act of God.

A point that Athanasius stresses when discussing the unity of humanity and Divinity in the Incarnation is that the Son does not become isolated in a body, such that He does not remain everywhere present as the Creator and Sustainer of all that is not God. For Athanasius this is paramount. The Word became flesh and in so doing did not become “polluted” by that which is corruptible, but rather “vivified and purified even the mortal body” (Chapter 17). This is the power of the Incarnation. God, Who is everywhere witnessed through the work of creation, manifests Himself through the works of the Son in the flesh (see chapter 17).

Commenting on Ephesians 3:17-19, Athanasius writes, “For the Word unfolded himself everywhere, above and below and in the depths and in the breadth: above, in creation; below, in the incarnation; in the depths, in hell; in breadth, in the world” (Chapter 16). While man ought to have known God through His creation, that we worshipped creation rather than the Creator (Rom 1:25) demonstrates the devastating effects of sin. “Human beings had neglected this (Evidence of God in creation) before, and no longer were their eyes held upwards but downwards” (Chapter 14). The downward gaze is the worship of creation, most notably the creation of man’s own hands (see chapter 11).

He in Whose image we were originally created must come and restore what has been tarnished by sin (see chapter 14). This is the hope of the Incarnation. This is also why we must be “born again” (Jn 3:3). We are born naturally into Adam, the one in whom the image of God became marred by sin, and thus we are sinners by virtue of our birth (Rom 3:23, 5:12-21). The nature of our problem is what necessitated the Incarnation. Athanasius powerfully explains this when he writes:

Or what should be done, except to renew again the “in the image,” so that through it human beings would be able once again to know him? But how could this have occurred except by the coming of the very image of God, our Savior Jesus Christ? For neither by human beings was it possible, since they were created “in the image”; but neither by angels, for they were not even images. So the Word of God came himself, in order that he being the image of the Father (cf. Col 1.15), the human being “in the image” might be recreated (chapter 13).

This Advent, allow the Incarnation to evoke your worship of God. Out of nothing but love (He did not lack anything such that He needed to save) He came. Let us not move too quickly past this: He came. He Who was not far, for “in him all things hold together” (Col 1:17), came near in flesh. He came for us. As the Nicene Creed puts it, “Who for us men, and our salvation came down from heaven.”[1]  Being unwilling to allow us to perish, He came. He came to us united to a creaturely nature, in order that we who are creatures might be united to Him eternally. This is the wonder of the Incarnation. “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (Rom 15:13).

 

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Notes:

[1] Nicene-Constantinople Creed, 381.