A Beginner’s Guide to "On the Incarnation" (Part 1)

When I was an English teacher, I was often reluctant to assign introductory essays to my students at the outset of a new work. Invariably, when the time came for discussion and an honest assaying of a question arising from our reading, a well-meaning student would start quoting the introduction at length and as though it were gospel truth. The conversation would diminish in the presence of what purported to be a collection of simplifying answers to all of the work’s ponderous complexities. Even so, we sometimes lack the confidence to read something that is quite readable with a bit of help in seeing the big picture. In these cases, having someone provide a kind of map will help us to avoid getting unhelpfully lost and will, by comparison, reveal the genius of the ancient author as a more quotidian writer comes alongside to encourage a new reader. To this end, you should go read C.S. Lewis’ immortal introduction to Athanasius, included in most available versions. But if that still feels too daunting, what follows is a brief guide to St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, a beautiful piece of theology that I would commend to you as you pray through the Advent season. 

Let’s start with the big picture. In his work On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius defends the full divinity of Christ through a treatise on the unique dilemma posed to human nature after the Fall, how unassisted humanity was incapable of resolving the problem, and how God Himself, and particularly the second Person of the Holy Trinity, are necessarily the solution. Athanasius grounds soteriology (a theology of salvation) in the Incarnation (God becoming flesh), establishing that only God can save and therefore concluding that Christ must be God. This theological conclusion emerges, though, in an analysis of sin’s effects over human nature, specifically in the banishment of the power of death and in the remaking of humanity as the Image of God after the likeness of that God-Man.

St. Athanasius begins his argument by defining the problem of sin, which he describes as a  regression of human nature from a state of incorruption to one of corruption. Sin ultimately is the complicity of good creatures with evil, which is a deprivation or distortion of good. Evil is ultimately nothing itself, but creatures of substance can consent to give their substance to evil, and the ensuing sub-creation is a manifestation of that evil nothing that both uses and consumes the good something. According to him, sin denigrates the power of human nature to portray properly the image of God. This leads him to speak at length about the nature of God and its likeness in the human creature.

Athanasius characterizes the goodness of God revealed in His creativity: “For God is good--or rather, of all goodness He is Fountainhead, and it is impossible for one who is good to be mean or grudging about anything” (28). Anchoring all subsequent assertions, Athanasius forbids from the outset any notion that sin is a result of an inherent poverty in human nature deriving from a flawed creation. Transitioning to the nature of mankind, the author applies the doctrine of God’s basic goodness: “But since the will of man could turn either way, God secured this grace that He had given by making it conditional from the first upon two things--namely a law and a place” (28). One observes the author’s careful move from a simple goodness in God to a conditional goodness in the creatures made after the divine Image. Returning to sin, Athanasius continues: “But if they [the humans] went astray and became vile, throwing away their birthright of beauty, then they would come under the natural law of death and live no longer in paradise” (29). So begins the rhetorical frame from which will proceed the thrust of the argument about the Incarnation--the problem of sin is that it would cause a loss of the “birthright of beauty” and the coming under “the natural law of death.” 

The problem of corruption and corruptibility pervades even the most foundational levels of human existence: “For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it, for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good” (30). Sin dissolves human nature into nonexistence. This regression into corruption from the incorruptibility that God intended means that our ethical (that which is concerned with goodness) choices have ontological (that which is concerned with existence) effects. Regarded from God’s perspective, Athanasius describes the Fall in Genesis: “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 had once shared the nature of the Word should perish and turn back into non-existence through corruption” (32). It would not do for the Lord to permit the creature of His own likeness, made from the dust, to become mere dust again.

It is striking how in Athanasius’ writing, the offense of sin to God is that something so uniquely beautiful as human nature–partaker of the divine image–should cease to exist. At the same time, God’s own integrity of word and action are put on the line in following through with his original moral law and the consequences of failing the test of the tree. Together, these notions rhetorically supercharge the problem of sin as they combine to form a seemingly irresolvable dilemma. Athanasius brings this part of the book to a point of perplexity, asking a profound pastoral question suggesting the hopelessness of the human condition. Yet he does so in order that he might immediately assert the much hoped-for answer of the Incarnation. Athanasius makes inevitable the union of human and divine natures to bring about the solution to sin:  “Had it been a case of 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 meet the case. What--or rather Who was it that was needed...save the Word of God Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things out of nothing?” (33). Next week, we will turn and look at Athanasius’ answer to this question.

Works Cited

St. Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation. Translated by a Religious of C.S.M.V. New 

York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996.