Home + Chapter
1 + Chapter 2 + Chapter 3 + Chapter
4 + Chapter 5 + Chapter
6 + Chapter 7 + Chapter
8 + Chapter 9
Saint Athanasius' "On the Incarnation" CHAPTER II
The Divine Dilemma and its solution in the Incarnation(6) We saw in the last chapter that,
because death and corruption were gaining ever firmer hold on
them, the human race was in process of destruction. Man, who
was created in God's image and in his possession of reason reflected
the very Word Himself, was disappearing, and the work of God
was being undone. The law of death, which followed from the Transgression,
prevailed upon us, and from it there was no escape. The thing
that was happening was in truth both monstrous and unfitting.
It would, of course, have been unthinkable that God should go
back upon His word and that man, having transgressed, should
not die; but it was equally monstrous that beings which once
had shared the nature of the Word should perish and turn back
again into non-existence through corruption. It was unworthy
of the goodness of God that creatures made by Him should be brought
to nothing through the deceit wrought upon man by the devil;
and it was supremely unfitting that the work of God in mankind
should is appear, either through their own negligence or through
the deceit of evil spirits. As, then, the creatures whom He had
created reasonable, like the Word, were in fact perishing, and
such noble works were on the road to ruin, what then was God,
being Good, to do? Was He to let corruption and death have their
way with them? In that case, what was the use of having made
them in the beginning? Surely it would have been better never
to have been created at all than, having been created, to be
neglected and perish; and, besides that, such indifference to
the ruin of His own work before His very eyes would argue not
goodness in God but limitation, and that far more than if He
had never created men at all. It was impossible, therefore, that
God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because
it would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself.
(7) Yet, true though this is, it is not
the whole matter. As we have already noted, it was unthinkable
that God, the Father of Truth, should go back upon His word regarding
death in order to ensure our continued existence. He could not
falsify Himself; what, then, was God to do? Was He to demand
repentance from men for their transgression? You might say that
that was worthy of God, and argue further that, as through the
Transgression they became subject to corruption, so through repentance
they might return to incorruption again. But repentance would
not guard the Divine consistency, for, if death did not hold
dominion over men, God would still remain untrue. Nor does repentance
recall men from what is according to their nature; all that it
does is to make them cease from sinning. Had it been a case of
a trespass only, and not of a subsequent corruption, repentance
would have been well enough; but when once transgression had
begun men came under the power of the corruption proper to their
nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as
creatures in the Image of God. No, repentance could not meet
the case. What--or rather Who was it that was needed for such
grace and such recall as we required? Who, save the Word of God
Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things out of
nothing? His part it was, and His alone, both to bring again
the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father
His consistency of character with all. For He alone, being Word
of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to
recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be
an ambassador for all with the Father.
(8) For this purpose, then, the incorporeal
and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world.
In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for no part
of creation had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding
in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are. But
now He entered the world in a new way, stooping to our level
in His love and Self-revealing to us. He saw the reasonable race,
the race of men that, like Himself, expressed the Father's Mind,
wasting out of existence, and death reigning over all in corruption.
He saw that corruption held us all the closer, because it was
the penalty for the Transgression; He saw, too, how unthinkable
it would be for the law to be repealed before it was fulfilled.
He saw how unseemly it was that the very things of which He Himself
was the Artificer should be disappearing. He saw how the surpassing
wickedness of men was mounting up against them; He saw also their
universal liability to death. All this He saw and, pitying our
race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure
that death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures
should perish and the work of His Father for us men come to nought,
He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own. Nor
did He will merely to become embodied or merely to appear; had
that been so, He could have revealed His divine majesty in some
other and better way. No, He took our body, and not only so,
but He took it directly from a spotless, stainless virgin, without
the agency of human father--a pure body, untainted by intercourse
with man. He, the Mighty One, the Artificer of all, Himself prepared
this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself, and took it
for His very own, as the instrument through which He was known
and in which He dwelt. Thus, taking a body like our own, because
all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered
His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father.
This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all
might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because,
having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed,
it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that
He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to
corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation
of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would
make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.
(9) The Word perceived that corruption
could not be got rid of otherwise than through death; yet He
Himself, as the Word, being immortal and the Father's Son, was
such as could not die. For this reason, therefore, He assumed
a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging
to the Word Who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient
exchange for all, and, itself remaining incorruptible through
His indwelling, might thereafter put an end to corruption for
all others as well, by the grace of the resurrection. It was
by surrendering to death the body which He had taken, as an offering
and sacrifice free from every stain, that He forthwith abolished
death for His human brethren by the offering of the equivalent.
For naturally, since the Word of God was above all, when He offered
His own temple and bodily instrument as a substitute for the
life of all, He fulfilled in death all that was required. Naturally
also, through this union of the immortal Son of God with our
human nature, all men were clothed with incorruption in the promise
of the resurrection. For the solidarity of mankind is such that,
by virtue of the Word's indwelling in a single human body, the
corruption which goes with death has lost its power over all.
You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and
dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that
single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers
cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has
come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many,
and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have
been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held
them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race
would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all
the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death.
(10) This great work was, indeed, supremely
worthy of the goodness of God. A king who has founded a city,
so far from neglecting it when through the carelessness of the
inhabitants it is attacked by robbers, avenges it and saves it
from destruction, having regard rather to his own honor than
to the people's neglect. Much more, then, the Word of the All-good
Father was not unmindful of the human race that He had called
to be; but rather, by the offering of His own body He abolished
the death which they had incurred, and corrected their neglect
by His own teaching. Thus by His own power He restored the whole
nature of man. The Savior's own inspired disciples assure us
of this. We read in one place: " For the love of Christ constraineth
us, because we thus judge that, if One died on behalf of all,
then all died, and He died for all that we should no longer live
unto ourselves, but unto Him who died and rose again from the
dead, even our Lord Jesus Christ."[1]
And again another says: "But we behold Him Who hath been made a little lower
than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death
crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God He should
taste of death on behalf of every man."
The same writer goes on to point Our why it was necessary
for God the Word and none other to become Man: "For it became Him, for Whom are all
things and through Whom are all things, in bringing many sons
unto glory, to make the Author of their salvation perfect through
suffering.[2]
He means that the rescue of mankind from corruption was the
proper part only of Him Who made them in the beginning. He points
out also that the Word assumed a human body, expressly in order
that He might offer it in sacrifice for other like bodies: "Since then the children are sharers
in flesh and blood, He also Himself assumed the same, in order
that through death He might bring to nought Him that hath the
power of death, that is to say, the Devil, and might rescue those
who all their lives were enslaved by the fear of death."[3]
For by the sacrifice of His own body He did two things: He
put an end to the law of death which barred our way; and He made
a new beginning of life for us, by giving us the hope of resurrection.
By man death has gained its power over men; by the Word made
Man death has been destroyed and life raised up anew. That is
what Paul says, that true servant of Christ: "For since by man came death, by man
came also the resurrection of the dead. Just as in Adam all die,
even so in Christ shall all be made alive,"[4]
and so forth. Now, therefore, when we die we no longer do
so as men condemned to death, but as those who are even now in
process of rising we await the general resurrection of all, "which in its own times He shall show,"[5] even God Who wrought it and
bestowed it on us.
This, then, is the first cause of the Savior's becoming Man.
There are, however, other things which show how wholly fitting
is His blessed presence in our midst; and these we must now go
on to consider. |