A Beginner’s Guide to On the Incarnation (Part 2)

If you haven’t had the chance to read part one of this series, you can find it here. 

For Athanasius, sin produces for mankind not just a guilt problem, but more foundationally a death problem. As he transitions from the problem of sin to its remedy in the Incarnation, he begins by elaborating on how the Incarnation makes us understand better the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ. He begins: “Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death in place of all, and offered it to the Father…” (34). Here we can see how the Lord’s mission to vicariously represent all mankind on the Cross and in the Resurrection is inextricable from His taking on the fullness of our humanity in the Incarnation. From the point of His conception in the womb of Mary, our Lord stands with us and for us. 

Athanasius continues: “[W]hen He had fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men...and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection” (34). In the Incarnation, our Lord begins to unmake the problem of death by uniting His deathless nature with our mortal nature. It is significant that this does not mean He takes on Himself, in becoming human, a specific guilt. Helpfully, this unravels a popular myth about what is called original sin. Rather, He makes Himself to experience the frailties of our nature and its potential for corruption, and yet does so to triumph over them. Vicariously, Jesus accomplishes victory over sin, death, and evil by filling all things with Himself–with His light, life, and love–effectively pushing sin and death themselves to the brink of annihilation. 

From that union of our humanity with His divinity in the Incarnation, the deathly principle in human nature flees before the lively principle. Even so, Athanasius’ treatment of the Incarnation is inextricable from his view of the Cross. He continues: “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” (35). As our Orthodox brethren sing at Easter,  Jesus ‘tramples down death by death.’ We can begin to detect here, if we have not already, how our meditation on the Incarnation deepens our meditation on the Paschal Mystery of Holy Week, which in turn deepens our meditation on the Incarnation. It is one of the reasons why the Church Calendar arrests us at so many feasts centered on the life of Christ; in celebrating any of them we are led into a deeper knowledge of all the others. 

Athanasius continues: “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 others as well…” (35). We can detect here the basis of seeing salvation as a vicarious act on behalf of all and for all, a quality of Athanasius’ theology of salvation. That vicarious quality of Christ’s death permits us to enter into His work of destroying death in human nature, as beneficiaries of that work. Corruption and death would confront the Son of God on the Cross, coming to claim Him as they do all true humans, but they would there meet the indwelling of the Word and fail to destroy that divine nature and so be voided of their power. 

Because the nature of the Word of God is deathless and cannot die, deathlessness has been reintroduced to human nature, creating a new possibility of life unqualified by death. Further, we see created a new fellowship in which this deathlessness might be enjoyed. As Athanasius concludes: “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...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” (35). Having brought to conclusion the first stage of the solution to the problem of sin, Athanasius then draws out the necessity of being united to the immortality of Christ through an invited indwelling, that the lively principle of Christ--the victor over death--becomes extended to and realized in all who partake of new life in Him.

Deathlessness, though, is not the end of Athanasius’ treatment of the solution to the problem of sin, as he pivots immediately from the banishment of death to the restoration of the Image of God in human nature. He begins: “There were thus two things which the Savior did for us by becoming Man. He banished death from us and made us anew…” (44). This two-pronged approach is crucial to understanding Athanasius’ understanding of salvation; it is not enough that Christ destroys death, but new life must take its place. He continues: “What else could He possibly do, being God, but renew His Image in mankind, so that through it men might once more come to know Him? [...] Men could not have done it, for they are only made after the Image; nor could angels have done it, for they are not the images of God.The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father, Who could recreate man made after the Image….The Image of the Father only was sufficient for this need” (41). Careful as always to bind salvation to the divinity of Christ in the Incarnation, Athanasius points us again the unique power of Christ to enact the remaking of the Image in human nature by uniting the two natures. 

In bringing this shorter second stage to a close, one observes the author re-cast two primary events in the life of Christ within this rhetorical structure centered on destroying death and reimagining life. First, Athanasius frames the Crucifixion: “He, the Life of all, our Lord and Savior, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind. No. He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by others, and those others His special enemies, a death which to them was supremely terrible and by no means to be faced; and He did this in order that, by destroying even this death, He might Himself be believed to be the Life, and the power of death be recognized as finally annulled” (54). The linguistic flourish here cements the author’s notion that all death has been banished by Christ’s death. Put another way, Athanasius asserts the finality of Christ’s Death by characterizing the crucifixion as the “deathiest” death to which a person could be subjected, and thus once destroyed, the most perfect abolition of corruption. 

Second, the author frames the Resurrection: “It was, of course, within His power thus to have raised HIs body and displayed it as alive directly after death...He waited one whole day to show that His body was really dead, and then on the third day showed it incorruptible to all” (56). Characterizing the Resurrection thusly, Athanasius subjects the event to the presiding principle of demonstrating Christ as the champion of mankind and the representative destroyer of death. In doing so, the author brings to a close the treatise on a rhetorically symmetrical note to its beginning: the Word of God manifests God’s goodness in bringing life out of not-life and extends the new life of deathlessness from His person to all Christians who partake of that life in Him. That is what it means for us to be saved. In this way, far more than rendering in beautiful metaphor and rhetorical structure the salvation wrought of the goodness of God in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, Athanasius continues to remind us through the ages the necessity of Jesus’ true divinity in any complete and orthodox understanding of His life and mission. 

As we approach the Feast of the Nativity, may we be led by the Spirit into a deeper meditation on the Person of Jesus Christ, and perceive in Him the goodwill of the Father to bring us from death to life by sending to us His only Son.

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.