[In the following essay, Hardy provides an overview of On the Incarnation of the Word and explains why it is a Christian classic of great influence.]

BACKGROUND AND IDEAS

For forty-five years Bishop of Alexandria, for fifty a central figure in the exposition and defense of orthodox theology, Athanasius is one of the dominating personalities in the history of the Church. Yet practically all his writings were produced in response to some immediate need, or as a blow for the faith in one of the crises of his long struggle with successive emperors. Even the Life of Antony, the preparation of which seems to have been a kind of recreation in his laborious days, serves the immediately practical purpose of depicting the pattern of life of the loyal and orthodox hermit. The writings that we think of as historical are in fact personal defenses. The Defense Against the Arians is Athanasius' vindication against the personal charges that had been the pretext for his first and second exiles under Constantine and Constantius (335-337 and 339-346). The third exile, which followed when Constantius finally had a free hand in ecclesiastical as well as civil affairs (356-361), is the occasion of the Defense to Constantius, Defense of His Flight, and History of the Arians. Shortly before this exile came the defense of Nicaea and its Creed in the treatise On the Decrees, and during it the attack on rival creeds and councils in the treatise On the Synods, and the more formally theological but still basically occasional Orations Against the Arians. The last exiles under Julian and Valens were pinpricks in comparison with what the old warrior had gone through, but by this time he was an old warrior. His final contributions to the clarification of orthodox thought were made in slighter though important documents such as the synodal Tome to the Antiochenes and the theological letters addressed to Serapion and Epictetus. In these writings Athanasius gave his blessing to newer and more balanced formulas, the detailed exposition of which he left to others, such as his own assistant in the School at Alexandria, Didymus the Blind, and the rising Cappadocian group of theologians.

Only in the masterly two-volume work of his youth do we see Athanasius expressing himself apart from the attacks of heretics and politicians. What Jerome describes as Adversus gentes libri duo¹ are commonly treated as two separated though related works: Against the Heathen and On the Incarnation of the Word. As the references to current conditions in the latter show, they date from 316-318: persecution is ended, but still vividly remembered (28, 29; 48); the Arian heresy has not yet arisen to trouble the Church, although there is a hint at the schisms that were an aftermath of the Great Persecution (24). Most significant perhaps, and mournful reading for Christians of all later generations, are the passages where as in a continuous song of triumph Athanasius proclaims the visible victory of the cross, which is now bringing, not only holiness to individuals and destruction to idols, but peace to the world (51-55). From these works, says Athanasius, we may see the power of the Redeemer as from the harmony of the universe we see the wisdom of the Creator. Such assurance was possible only in the few years of confidence that followed the victory of Constantine. Later generations of believers can only sadly reflect that, though knowing in many ways the power of the same Lord, “we see not yet all things put under him” (Heb. 2:8).

The combination of the enthusiasm of a youthful mind with the wisdom of a great one has given the treatise On the Incarnation its place among those Christian classics which are read not only as documents in the history of Christian thought but as treatments of the subjects with which they deal. Historically it stands at the meeting point between the work of the Apologists and that of the theologians of the age of the councils. In Against the Heathen, Athanasius attacks, as Jews and Christians at Alexandria had for centuries, the absurdity of popular paganism, and defends on rational grounds the principle that a unified and orderly universe is the work of one Creator, who rules it by his Logos (Word, or Reason). The universe continues to move as the Word, conductor of the universal chorus, directs, but man has abused his privilege of freedom by turning away to his own irrational courses. The second treatise takes up the argument at this point, and shows how the Word through whom we were made is also the Redeemer by whom we are reclaimed. This is a threefold action: the life-giving power of the Word heals our illness of soul as well as of body, his teaching by word and deed restores to us the true knowledge of God, and his sacrifice pays the debt of justice which man could never pay (7, 19, 20). Indeed, nothing less can be said than that he became man so that we might become divine (54).

Like all Apologies, On the Incarnation is not so much an exercise in speculative reasoning as an appeal for personal decision. Macarius—and I think the person addressed at the beginning of each treatise is the prospective reader, whoever he may be, and not a particular person—is not treated as a neutral student, but as one drawn to the faith, yet needing to have his decision for it encouraged by assurance of its rationality and presentation of its power. At the end he is told that there is indeed more to learn, which he can find by reading the Scriptures and by associating with the saints—or, in other words, in the fellowship of the Church, although the secrecy made customary in the days of persecution prevents Athanasius from saying this in so many words. It is typically Alexandrian that he thinks of the Church as a successful rival of the schools of the philosophers (50), and speaks of the prophets as having been a school of the knowledge of God for the world (12). Macarius may be considered as a specimen of the kind of prospective convert with whom the Alexandrian Church was accustomed to deal, an educated pagan prepared to become an intelligent Christian. Not that Athanasius was unaware of the appeal of Christianity to the common man and the significance of the gospel preached to the poor and to what a Greek would call barbarous nations (29, 30, 50, 51), but he is at the moment writing immediately for the educated and even sophisticated world of Alexandria. He was probably already in touch with the Coptic monk Antony, whose life he was later to write—at least no later period can be found for the extensive contacts claimed in the preface to the Life of Antony. It was only, however, after the duties of his episcopate took him into all parts of Egypt that Athanasius developed fully his sympathies with the simple Coptic as well as with the more sophisticated Greek Christian.² An important point of contact was the common ground between the Greek philosophical ascetic, such as Origen had been, and the straightforward Egyptian devotee. In On the Incarnation Athanasius points to the new virtue of voluntary continence as a sign of the triumph of the Word (51), and at his election to the episcopate in 328 he was himself to be hailed as “one of the ascetics.”³

To some extent the treatise On the Incarnation is an educational exercise—Athanasius' B.D. thesis, so to speak—a brilliant restatement of what he had learned from martyr teachers (56) such as the bishop Peter who had passed from the teacher's chair to the bishop's seat, guided the Church of Alexandria through the persecution of Diocletian, and died himself as one of its last victims in 311. Here is the prospectus, as it were, of the young graduate who was now about to embark on his career as a Christian teacher himself. In an interesting way its illustrations reflect the interests of a young man whose native town was Alexandria, the cosmopolitan city which was also the capital of Greco-Roman Egypt. The world-city, the great cosmopolis, is a familiar figure of late Greek philosophy—Marcus Aurelius' “dear city of Zeus.”⁴ But Athanasius' use of the figure does seem to take on a special coloring from the scenes of his own city—the Word governs the universe like the conductor of a chorus, or a royal founder supervising the public and private life of a great town (Against the Heathen 43). Alas, the world-city has rebelled and nothing less than a personal visit from the true prince will be enough to bring it back to its true allegiance (On the Incarnation 10, 55). Athanasius must often have heard in his childhood of the rebellion of a Roman official who had been set up as a rival emperor about the time of his birth. In 297-298, Diocletian had come in person to reconquer the city, destroying it in part. So also, but in grace more than in vengeance, the Word of God has come to his own, bringing to nought the usurpation of the wicked spirits who have set themselves up as gods (55). Greco-Roman Egypt was used to the solemn visits of high officials to inspect the administration and render judicial decisions; such associations lie behind the use of parousia and epidēmia for the solemn visit of the Word to his own (13, 27). Or again, the Original has appeared so that the defaced portrait may be restored; the figure in Athanasius' mind is evidently the portrait on wood, such as Greco-Egyptians attached to their mummies of their dead, as we may see in our museums today (14).

Intellectually Athanasius was certainly a Greek of Alexandria rather than an Egyptian—though he had enough Egyptian feeling to thrill at the thought that the infant Saviour had been brought into his own land and, as legend evidently already told, the idols of Egypt had fallen before him (36, 37). The philosophical ideas which he easily takes as common ground are those of eclectic Greek thought, partly Stoic, partly Platonic—the unity of the universe and the presence of an Orderer behind its order, whose status and relation to the world is the point of difference between the schools. On the doctrine of the Creator, Jew and Christian at Alexandria agreed. They could even go farther together, asserting the fact of a fall from the divine plan into idolatry and wickedness and the need of divine redemption. Here Athanasius was following a tradition of theistic apologetic which goes back to such Hellenistic Jewish works as the Wisdom of Solomon, which he was accustomed to read for edification, along with Scripture.⁵ Against their pagan surroundings Jews and Christians at Alexandria were still in many ways sects of one religion. Athanasius' arguments against Judaism have a practical as well as historical character, and deal with texts in a manner that Christian teachers inherited from their rabbinical predecessors. Few Christian Apologists would now proceed in quite the same manner. But this section of On the Incarnation ought not to be skipped by the student, since the Old Testament is an important part of Athanasius' thought and devotion. Nor can the Christian ever forget safely this part of the claims of Christ, that in him we see the glory of Israel as well as the light of the Gentiles.

As the treatise On the Incarnation comes to terms with the Jewish and pagan background of Christianity, so it also lays down lines for the future development of Christian thought. This is all the more true because it is an apologetic and missionary appeal and not a systematic treatise on theology. It concentrates on its theme, the redemption of the world by the incarnate Word, to the exclusion of much else in which Athanasius certainly believed. There is nothing about the Spirit; nothing except incidentally about the Church; nothing about the life of prayer and sacrament which was certainly for Athanasius the means by which the new life brought to the world by Christ was shared by the individual Christian. Some of these things were omitted because Macarius could not be told them until he received his final instruction as a Christian neophyte; some because they were not in place in this particular book.

As Athanasius does not expound the whole faith, even less does he engage in speculation for its own sake, though he touches in passing on a number of matters of interest to theological experts. Man's original state, apparently, was one of natural perfection as the near image of God to which, had he not fallen, the gift of immortality would easily have been added—as in the book of Wisdom, it is by the envy of the devil that death came into the world (3-6; Wisdom 2:23, 24). We are not told how the old deceiver fell into his deception; he is not worth so much attention. The coming of the Word is a victory over the usurper and his angels. As part of it the Word, being man, pays for man and as man the sacrifice which fallen man could never pay, but there is no special statement as to why this is necessary. It is certainly not a price paid to the devil—probably a reparation due in justice to God (7, 20). But for Athanasius, cross and resurrection go together (as in his Church calendar there was probably no Good Friday apart from Easter), and the chief meaning of the cross is that there “the powers of death have done their worst” and have been defeated. So the cross is above all the trophy of victory, that victory which is first Christ's and then also ours as we live in him. As his own Christian name indicated, he was brought up in circles for which the gift of immortality was a main interest in religion—Athanasios, the man of immortality. For man this will be more than a restoration to the incorruption (moral and metaphysical) and immortality for which man was created; it is a state so high that in union with the divine Word we are indeed in some sense divine (54; cf. II Peter 1:4). As to what happens to those who do not enter the realm of redemption, Athanasius sees no need to be explicit. Sin and corruption is the loss of true being, and there seems to be a hint that its final terminus will be the complete loss of being, but the end of evil like its origin is not discussed in detail (6).

Athanasius would probably have agreed with the definition of our modern conferences that take the confession of Christ as God and Saviour as a convenient statement of the heart of the gospel—especially if we remember that Sōtēr in Greek means healer and life giver. He was also aware that much else was implied in this confession or required by it; in this sense On the Incarnation is the point of departure of later patristic thought. The Arians in their blatant early statements shortly challenged its central convictions by asserting that the Word was not God but only the greatest of God's creatures. It was, as it were, a viceroy and not the King who had come to earth after all. Against this reversion to the idea of great and lesser deities Athanasius stood, sometimes bitterly, always bravely, for the rest of his life. This is the central proclamation of the Nicene Creed, that one who was of the same stuff as God the Father became man for our salvation. In On the Incarnation and the early Nicene controversy Athanasius stood for the true deity of the divinity of Christ. In his later writings he develops the balancing truth, always present in his thought though in On the Incarnation not clearly defined, of the true humanity of his manhood. Around these terms the further discussion proceeded until the Church had clarified its faith in one Christ, perfect God and perfect Man.

TEXT, STRUCTURE, AND TRANSLATION

The preservation and study of the writings of Athanasius is itself a long and not uninteresting story. The very success of his ideas led to their incorporation in more systematic works than he had himself produced, and for some centuries after his death his works seem to have been preserved mainly for the light that some of his phrases threw on matters currently in dispute. Two collections, of apologetic-historical and doctrinal treatises, seem to be the basis of the various selections found in Greek manuscripts. On the Incarnation falls into the latter class, and sometimes also appears separately in collections of miscellaneous edifying matter. The ideas of Athanasius entered into the general stock of Western theology, and one of his central thoughts inspired one of the loveliest of old Latin prayers:

“O God who didst wonderfully create and yet more wonderfully renew the dignity of human nature, grant that (by this mystery of water and wine) we may be partakers of his divinity who vouchsafed to share our humanity, Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord.”⁶

But there was little interest in his writings until the Renaissance. On the Incarnation was translated into Latin in the fifteenth century and printed with some other works at Vicenza in 1482. The Greek was first printed by Commelin at Heidelberg in 1600 in an edition for which the manuscripts were studied, rather confusingly, by Felckmann. In 1698 appeared the edition by the great French Benedictine scholar Montfaucon, which marks the beginning of modern scientific study of both life and works of Athanasius. The Benedictine text is still the latest critical edition of On the Incarnation, since the Berlin edition by Optiz begun in 1935 has not reached this work.

In the nineteenth century the great importance of the writings of Athanasius for both general Church history and the history of Christian thought was increasingly recognized, and, then and since, new discoveries of documents have clarified our knowledge of his career. The prominent place given to On the Incarnation in the Honours School of Theology at Oxford since 1870 has been both a result and a cause of further study. The first English translation appeared in 1880. Robertson, who edited the volume of Athanasius in the Post-Nicene Fathers, also published two editions of the text of On the Incarnation; the first (1882) followed the Benedictine edition, while in the second (1893) he decided instead to follow a single outstanding manuscript, S (Codex Seguerianus). The same text has been used by Cross (1936), and as the basis of the textual studies of Ryan and Casey (1945-1946). At present the increasing knowledge of manuscripts seems rather to postpone than to bring nearer the day when a definitive edition can be produced.

However, these uncertainties of text do not affect the general sense of On the Incarnation. But in 1925, Professor Lebon of Louvain identified a “Short Recension” of the work, of which several manuscripts are now known. Apart from a number of slight variations it has several interesting substitutions, usually definitely shorter than the passages they replace. Though all possible views of the relation of the two recensions seem to have been suggested, comparison seems to show that the Short Recension is intelligible as a revision of the Long Recension and not vice versa, and that it comes from the later years of Athanasius, or at least from his circle.⁷ The principal alterations are indicated in the notes below; they seem generally to replace the more speculative interpretations by a more theological interest, and show Athanasius (or his editor) a little more careful and less exuberant. Both texts are probably Athanasian, but the first thoughts of the Long Recension are still the primary text.

The translation here reprinted is that of Robertson, 1885, as in the Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. IV. However, the use of capitals has been reduced, the editor's chapter summaries are omitted, and the spelling of proper names is regularized, with Biblical names in their usual English forms. The chapter divisions (which apparently go back to Montfaucon) are retained for convenience, but the deceptive division into verses is not.

As Athanasius wrote it, On the Incarnation was one continuous discourse, in which, however, he fairly clearly indicated the main divisions, approximately as follows:

• I Prologue (1-3)
• II The Coming of the Word (4-19)
• III The Victory of the Cross (20-32)
• IV Reply to Criticisms of:
  • A. Jews (33-40)
  • B. Greeks (41-54)
• V Epilogue (55-57)

From a literary point of view this is crossed by another arrangement: the Prologue summarizes the discussion of Against the Heathen and leads naturally into the exposition of “II,” based on general considerations; the sections I have listed as “III” and “IV. A.” are primarily Biblical in their references, “IV. B.” is again more general, and its closing sections, though formally a refutation of opponents, become more and more a paean of victory for Christ, picking up what was begun in “III,” and leading into the quieter conclusion which directs the reader to prepare himself for further instruction. In an age in which literature was still thought of basically as prepared for oral presentation such an interlocking arrangement was more natural than the sharper divisions that we should expect in a written document.

Notes

1. De viris illustribus, 87.

2. Cf. the visitations listed in Festal Index 2-6 (Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. IV, p. 503).

3. Defense Against the Arians, 6.

4. Meditations, IV, 23; cf. Philo, De opificio mundi, 17-20, 24

5. Festal Epistles, 39.

6. Leonine Sacramentary, Christmas (and at the blessing of the water in the Roman Mass).

7. Some of its special readings may reflect an Apollinarian edition of On the Incarnation, e.g., the addition at the end of Ch. 26: “When this took place there was no doubt that he who worked in the body and dwelt there was not man but God's Word. Faith in such demonstrations is not obscure but confident.”