Athanasius Versus Everyone

An introduction to On the Incarnation

Recently I was asked to give an introduction to Saint Athanasius and On the Incarnation for a church study involving the Fathers. It was supposed to be a capsule biography but things got out of hand. I thought the story would interest you all for a simple reason: Athanasius is exceedingly interesting.

The place to begin is with an apostate Caesar: In 361 AD Constantine the Great’s nephew Julian ascended to govern Rome. In spite of (or perhaps on account of) his family’s influence, Julian disliked Christianity. He preferred the mystical neoplatonists, the old gods, and theurgy—he was, in fact, tutored by a major magician. But magic or not Julian was a remarkable emperor. He purged the bureaucracy, rebuilt the army, and killed many opponents.

It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that Julian would envy the influence not of a general or prefect but a priest. But that is how it was. In 363 Julian revised an earlier edict of clemency and excluded one man. “Pythiodorus, of Thebes,” wrote the Bishop in question, “a celebrated Philosopher, brought a decree of Julianus…and produced it before the Bishop and committed many acts of violence.”

Indeed: when that writ was produced there were riots in Alexandria. The city would have gone ballistic except that the Bishop was able, in the end, to subdue the crowd. He left at night and lived in exile. But even when Julian finally died, the Bishop returned to the city in secret. He knew, by then, that his presence could attract the ire of emperors and light cities on fire. His name was Athanasius.

Saint Athanasius.

My goodness. Some people are hard to introduce.

They’re just too big.

What I mean is Athanasius attracted the attention of no less than four emperors. He was exiled five times. He led the Trinitarian element in the Church for almost 50 years. Between 338 and 343 alone he occasioned four synods spanning three continents enlisting hundreds of bishops. Athanasius was a friend of the desert fathers. He knew Pachomius; he wrote Antony’s biography. In his work on Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus referenced “Men like Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the twelve Patriarchs, Moses, Aaron, Joshua,” and so on, and then said “With some of these Athanasius vied, by some he was slightly excelled, and others, if it is not bold to say so, he surpassed.”

“Various works by him are in circulation,” admitted Jerome, “works too numerous to mention.”

That about says it: Athanasius is one of the greats of the Church. His intellect was extraordinary; his criticisms could be absolutely scathing; he knew how to deploy and did not hesitate to enlist the powers of the Church and the empire.

“To speak of and admire him fully,” wrote Gregory, “would perhaps be too long a task for the present purpose of my discourse.”

I agree and so this will be a short introduction to a complicated man. That said, if you’d like to understand Athanasius, you have to start your quest sixtyish years before his birth because Athanasius inherited a situation crisis created.

In 235 AD Rome almost died early. It faced the usual suspects: bad weather, large-scale migration, plague, economic downturn, war. Historians call the period from 235-284 the “Crisis of the Third Century” or—and I like this one better—the “Military Anarchy.” It is hard to adequately convey the scale of that crisis. During the Plague of Cyprian, which lasted from 250-260, roughly, 50% of the population of Alexandria died. The European armies that kept appearing on Rome’s border weren’t guerilla bands: they were tens of thousands strong. The empire split into three parts. Fifty years saw 26 caesars. It was a Mediterranean dumpster fire.

During that time Rome’s short-lived emperors became increasingly vicious. That can happen, during a crisis, and many became less tolerant of Christianity in particular. Starting in 249, the Church in the Roman Empire came under serious fire.

In that year a gifted politician named Decian became emperor. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Decian knew how the game was played. He’d been a consul, senator, governor, and prefect, he was canny and merciless. Decian killed his predecessor and dominated the empire and, in 250 AD, he ordered all Roman subjects to make a sacrifice to the emperor and to sign a paper indicating they had done so. Those papers were called libelli and many survive.

Some Christians resisted the order—Pope Fabian of Rome was killed, as were the patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem. Others did not—in Carthage, for example, the provincial office ran out of libelli. Those that signed the papers were called lapsi, or fallen.

Now, it is important to note that while persecution strengthens the faith it disrupts Church unity for at least two reasons.

On a personal level, persecution can hamper and even destroy trust. If your neighbor signed a libellus, got out of prison, ran a business, and fed his starving children while yours perished it would be hard to forgive that man.

On a practical level, persecution confounds administration. Local church leaders often replace, as a matter of expediency, leaders who have been exiled, imprisoned, or killed. After all, somebody has to keep the lights on. What happens when the old leaders return?

In both cases, persecution creates factions.

But there’s more.

In general the Church can recover from an isolated persecution. In 64 AD Nero did his thing and Christians managed. The big problems come when one persecution follows another. It’s like being caught inside the break before a wave train: no sooner does the Church come up, sputtering, from the first foaming breaker than She gets smashed again. And again. And again.

Decian died, others ruled. In 257 a man Valerian resumed the formal persecution; in 258, he turned up the heat to an acetylene burn.

Valerian died, others ruled, and for a while things improved. Then, in 284, Diocletian became emperor. In 303, he initiated the Great Persecution.

Ask a historian, and you’ll hear that Diocletian saved the Roman empire, which he did. Edward Gibbon, summarizing the situation before Diocletian ascended, wrote “Such were the barbarians, and such the tyrants, who, under the reigns of Valerian and Gallienus, dismembered the provinces, and reduced the empire to the lowest pitch of disgrace and ruin, from whence it seemed impossible that it should ever emerge.”

But it did emerge. Diocletian pulled things together. He did not, it is fair to say, pull things together with diplomacy or goodwill. Instead, Diocletian saved Rome with an iron fist.

The Diocletianic persecution was not like the earlier tribulations: the Diocletianic Persecution was Rome’s final solution. It was an attempt not to suppress but to erase Christianity. Churches were burned, Christians were executed, sacred texts were destroyed, and the greats of the faith languished in prison or else died in the fire. St. Nicholas was imprisoned; Eutius of Nicomedia was burned alive. Christians could not petition in courts; they could not gather; many were enslaved. To pray was a crime and to possess Scripture was damning.

It lasted ten years.

When Diocletian finally resigned (an oddity in itself) there followed a war which a man named Constantine the Great won. You’ve probably heard of Constantine: at Milvian Bridge he saw a Chi-Rho in the sky and heard a voice declare “In this sign, conquer.” In 313, Constantine ended the Great Persecution. The Church, at last, could emerge from Her troubles.

Her wounds, however, would not be healed overnight.

Now, that is a lot to remember but at this point we can name two things.

First, Athanasius was born between 296 and 298: He grew up during the Great Persecution. Though I have never seen this claimed, I can’t help but wonder if his parents died in the persecution, because they are absent in the story. Not even the hagiographies name them, which is conspicuous. Athanasius is a child of hard times; he can vanish into the desert, live for years on water and bread, and come back swinging.

Second, when Rome went Christian and Constantine called the Council of Nicea in 325, the Church had been under the gun for three quarters of a century.

I mention that because too many accounts miss both the emotional intensity and the relational complexity of Athanasius’s career. Athanasius opposed Arianism, is what you’ll hear. Or, recently, that Athanasius was brutal on the attack. That doesn’t tell you enough, because in the fourth century issues of doctrine and Church administration were confoundingly linked to remembered hurts. “So you think Jesus was God’s first creation? So did the men who killed my father.” “Oh, you think the Son and the Father are consubstantial? So did the priest who let my sister starve.” Those complexities did not fade with time—miss them, and you’ll have a hard time grasping Athanasius.

Athanaius, by Rubens. That’s Arius he’s trampling.

Now for a word on his childhood.

Athanasius was born in or near Alexandria, greatest of the cities of Egypt. Apart from that one fact his early years are mysterious. By his early adulthood Athanasius possessed an extraordinary command of Greek, a knowledge of technical philosophical language, and familiarity with Homer, Plato, the Gnostics, and the Epicureans (among others)—he also spoke Coptic. From this, scholars conclude he must have been educated in (or at least had contact with) the great institutions of Alexandria, and that is almost certain. In the early 300s a resident of Alexandria could no more escape the influence of the Museum, the Library, and the Catechetical School than a resident of Berkeley California can now escape the influence of Berkeley University. “Athanasius received his philosophical and theological training at Alexandria,” says the Encyclopedia Britannica, and that’s about it.

Somehow, Athanasius befriended Alexander, a Church leader who became the Bishop of Alexandria. When Alexander ascended he asked Athanasius to be his scribe and secretary. In 319 Alexander made Athanasius a deacon and six years later Athanasius went with Alexander to the Council of Nicea.

But, before any of that happened, Athanasius wrote On the Incarnation. He was about twenty years old and the work probably made Athanasius famous.

On the Incarnation is fascinating. Though a long debate with Arius would define Athanasius’s life that debate is (almost) entirely absent from On the Incarnation. Instead, Against the Heathen and On the Incarnation have Diocletian and the Great Persecution in view; they are written to pagans and philosophers, not Christians, and they represent both an apology and a polemic.

In any biography it is easy to overlook the presence of the Holy Spirit but it is wrong to do so. Athanasius knew God. On the Incarnation in particular shimmers with an evangelistic awe, a sheer enjoyment of God at work in history:

“For the more He is mocked among the unbelieving, the more witness does He give of His own Godhead; inasmuch as He not only Himself demonstrates as possible what men mistake, thinking impossible, but what men deride as unseemly, this by His own goodness He clothes with seemliness, and what men, in their conceit of wisdom, laugh at as merely human, He by His own power demonstrates to be divine.”

Goodness—that smacks of Paul the Apostle, doesn’t it? Or this one:

“For God is good, or rather, is essentially the source of goodness…grudging existence to none, He has made all things out of nothing by His own Word, Jesus Christ our Lord.”

“Grudging existence.” What a phrase! In Athanasius, we glimpse the far-off Dionysius the Areopagite who will see creation leaping from the fountain of God’s good heart. That’s a shot aimed at the Gnostics, I think, as is this: “He did not barely create man…but made them after His own image, giving them a portion even of the power of His own Word.”

“Barely create.” Again, it’s language that thrills. Creation is not poor and destitute, not “barely” or “nakedly” created, but replete with divine life. In On the Incarnation, Athanasius tells the story of God, adding theological commentary: The interpretation is done, and the language is pointed at the Greek philosopher, at the smoky cafes and crowded atria of Alexandria.

There is a doctrine of the fall, expressed in terms on loan from Greek philosophy:

“For if, out of a former normal state of non-existence, they were called into being by the Presence and loving-kindness of the Word, it followed naturally that when men were bereft of the knowledge of God and were turned back to what was not…they should, since they derive their being from God who is, be everlastingly bereft even of being.”

There is a definition of discipleship:

“...while He blotted out the death which had ensued by the offering of His own body, He corrected their neglect by His own teaching, restoring all that was man's by His own power.”

There is an early Trinitarian Christology, unpolished, certainly, but present:

“He might, as Man, transfer men to Himself, and centre their senses on Himself, and, men seeing Him thenceforth as Man, persuade them by the works He did that He is not Man only, but also God.”

Of course, Athanasius wrote On the Incarnation before the great ecumenical councils. The two-natures of Chalcedon had not been articulated; there were no Nestorians or Monotheletes to argue with. In some places, young Athanasius seems to be working out his thinking; in others, his preferences take center stage. But still: The work moves. It is not the work of a young scholar so much as the work of a young evangelist.

“Now, if they ask, Why then did He not appear by means of other and nobler parts of creation, and use some nobler instrument, as the sun, or moon, or stars, or fire, or air, instead of man merely? Let them know that the Lord came not to make a display, but to heal and teach those who were suffering.”

That is perhaps the best introduction to On the Incarnation: A child of the persecutions and a student of Plato falls in love with Jesus; that love grows until he is moved to proclaim, over and against the philosophies of his friends, the Word of God made Flesh. But it doesn’t stop with proclamation. “The whole book,” wrote CS Lewis, “is a picture of the Tree of Life—a sappy and golden book, full of buoyancy and confidence.” Yes, it is. On the Incarnation invites. And here is the invitation: Come and know the God who first made Himself known, not generally, but in a person, taking to himself a fully human nature so that through his life, death, resurrection and ascension the sad history of humanity might be redeemed, the devil destroyed, and that the riches of the kingdom, which include but are not limited to life everlasting, opened to all takers:

“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, whatsoever things are prepared for them that live a virtuous life,” wrote Athanasius, “and love the God and Father, in Christ Jesus our Lord: through Whom and with Whom be to the Father Himself, with the Son Himself, in the Holy Spirit, honour and might and glory for ever and ever. Amen.”