Contra Gentes — De Incarnatione: The Double Treatise

Athanasius’s earliest sustained work is a single argument in two books — Contra Gentes (Against the Greeks) and De Incarnatione (On the Incarnation of the Word) — moving from a critique of pagan idolatry and a defense of knowledge of God to the saving descent of the Word. This file treats the work as a historical and literary object: its disputed date, its two-part structure, the “divine dilemma” that drives its logic, the famous deification formula of chapter 54, and the reception it found in C. S. Lewis’s introduction to the modern SVS translation.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

One Work in Two Books

The two treatises are conceived as halves of a single project. Contra Gentes opens by announcing that the author will set out “the faith concerning Christ” and treat “the error of the heathen” so that the reader may understand “the divinity of the Word” (Athanasius, Contra Gentes 1; trans. NPNF II/4). De Incarnatione opens by referring back explicitly: “in our former book… we dealt fully enough with a few of the chief points of the heathen worship of idols… let us now, O lover of Christ, treat of the Incarnation of the Word” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 1; trans. NPNF II/4). The two books are therefore best read together as a continuous apology, which is how Robert W. Thomson edited and translated them in the standard critical edition (Thomson, Athanasius: Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione, Oxford: Clarendon, 1971).

The shape of the whole moves in two directions. Contra Gentes is largely apologetic and protreptic: it diagnoses idolatry as a fall of the soul away from the contemplation of God into the worship of created things, then argues that God can be known both through the ordered harmony of creation and through the soul made in His image. De Incarnatione is constructive and soteriological: it explains why the Word of God, through whom all things were made, took a human body, died, and rose. The hinge between the books is the doctrine of the image — defaced by sin in the first book, restored by the Word in the second.

The Dating Debate

The date of the double treatise is genuinely unsettled, and the scholarship divides along a clear fault line.

The early dating (c. 318, before the Arian controversy). The traditional position, defended at length in the older literature and still influential, places the work around 318, before Arius’s teaching had broken out into open controversy. The decisive argument is internal: the treatise contains no trace of the Arian dispute, no use of the technical vocabulary (homoousios, the language of the Council of Nicaea, 325) that dominates everything Athanasius wrote later, and no awareness of the questions about the Son’s relation to the Father that defined his career. On this reading the work is the product of a brilliant young man — Athanasius would have been roughly in his early twenties — written before he succeeded Alexander as bishop of Alexandria in 328 (the early dating is set out in the introduction to the NPNF II/4 edition).

The later dating (c. 328–335, or in a post-Nicene lull). Other scholars argue for composition after the Council of Nicaea. T. D. Barnes, whose chronology is widely followed, has proposed that Athanasius wrote the two books shortly after Nicaea, in a period when the controversy briefly seemed settled and Arius was in exile — so that refuting Arianism explicitly would have looked superfluous, and a young cleric anticipating the episcopate had reason to display his theological range (Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). A further argument turns on Athanasius’s apparent dependence on Eusebius of Caesarea, which some take to require a date no earlier than the late 320s.

[Disputed: the early dating (c. 318, pre-Arian) rests on the complete absence of anti-Arian polemic and Nicene vocabulary and is given in the NPNF II/4 introduction and much older scholarship; the later dating (c. 328–335, or shortly after Nicaea) is argued by Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius, and by scholars who stress Athanasius’s dependence on Eusebius. Khaled Anatolios reviews the question without treating either date as decisive (Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought, London: Routledge, 1998). The point on which the work’s interpretation turns is not the precise year but the silence about Arianism, which both camps acknowledge and explain differently.]

What is not disputed is that this is an early work, written before the great anti-Arian Orations, and that its theology already contains the soteriological logic Athanasius would later deploy against Arius (see Theology of the Incarnation).

Structure of De Incarnatione

The second book proceeds in a recognizable order:

Creation and the Fall (chs. 1–5). God made the world out of nothing through His Word, and made humanity in His own image, capable of knowing Him. By turning to non-being through sin, humanity fell back toward the corruption and death from which it had been called.
The Divine Dilemma (chs. 6–10). This is the argumentative heart of the apologetic. God’s truthfulness required that the sentence of death stand; God’s goodness made it unthinkable that the rational creature made in His image should perish. “It was unseemly that what had once been created rational, and had partaken of His Word, should perish” (On the Incarnation 6; trans. NPNF II/4). The dilemma is resolved only by the Word’s taking a body He could offer in death.
The work of the body of the Word (chs. 8–32). The incarnate Word pays the debt of death on behalf of all, abolishes corruption by the resurrection, and restores the knowledge of God by revealing the Father in a human life.
Refutation of Jews and Greeks (chs. 33–53). Athanasius defends the incarnation and the Cross against Jewish objections from the Scriptures and against Greek objections from philosophy, and points to the moral and missionary effects of Christ’s victory over death as evidence of His divinity.
Conclusion (chs. 54–57). The summary of the whole economy, including the deification formula, and an exhortation to a pure life and the study of the Scriptures.

The Divine Dilemma

The “divine dilemma” — the phrase used in the chapter titles of the standard English editions — is the structural argument of the treatise. Creation ex nihilo means that creatures have no native hold on existence; left to themselves they tend back toward the nothing out of which they were called. Humanity, made in the image of the Word and meant to be preserved in being by contemplating Him, forfeited that grace through sin and so came under “the law of death” and the threat of dissolving back into non-being (On the Incarnation 4–5; trans. NPNF II/4).

This sets two of God’s attributes in apparent tension. His truthfulness cannot simply revoke the sentence “you shall die” attached to the commandment; mere repentance could not undo the corruption already at work in human nature. Yet His goodness cannot allow the work of His own hands, the rational creature made in His image, to be defeated by the devil and lost. Repentance alone is insufficient because the problem is not only guilt but corruption — an ontological wound in the nature itself. The resolution is the incarnation: the Word, who alone is incorruptible and who made all things, takes a mortal body, surrenders it to death on behalf of all to satisfy the debt, and by His own incorruptibility raises it, abolishing death for the whole nature He has assumed (On the Incarnation 6–9). The argument is examined doctrinally in Theology of the Incarnation.

The Exchange Formula of Chapter 54

The treatise’s most quoted sentence comes in its summary chapter. Having reviewed the whole economy, Athanasius states the purpose of the incarnation in a compressed antithesis:

“For He was made man that we might be made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality.” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54 [PG 25:192B]; trans. NPNF II/4)

The Greek of the key clause is Autos gar enēnthrōpēsen, hina hēmeis theopoiēthōmen — “He became man that we might become god” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54.3 [PG 25:192B]). This is the repository’s verified anchor for the deification formula; the Migne reference (PG 25, column 192B) is documented and stable. The verb theopoiēthōmen (“be made god / be deified”) is deliberate: Athanasius is naming theosis, the deification of the human person by grace and participation, not by nature.

John Behr renders the clause in the modern SVS translation as “he became human that we might become god,” preserving Athanasius’s deliberate lowercase — we become “god” by grace and participation, never God by essence (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. John Behr, Popular Patristics Series 44a, Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011). The formula belongs to a patristic family of “exchange” statements: Irenaeus had written that the Word “became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself” (Against Heresies V, preface), and Gregory the Theologian would later write “God became man that man might become God.” The full lineage and the careful distinction between deification by grace and deification by nature are treated in Theosis.

Reception: C. S. Lewis’s Introduction

The modern English-speaking reception of De Incarnatione owes a great deal to a single essay. C. S. Lewis wrote an introduction for the 1944 English translation by “a religious of C.S.M.V.” (Sister Penelope), and that introduction — also published separately as “On the Reading of Old Books” — was carried over into the St Vladimir’s Seminary Press edition that pairs the Greek original with the English (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, with an introduction by C. S. Lewis, Popular Patristics Series 44a/B, Yonkers, NY: SVS Press).

Lewis used the occasion to argue against “the strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books.” His remedy is to “keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” The ancient authors, he argues, “will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us” (C. S. Lewis, “Introduction,” in Athanasius, On the Incarnation, SVS Press; the essay also appears as “On the Reading of Old Books”). Lewis singles out the De Incarnatione as “a masterpiece” whose limpid theological prose belies the reputation of patristics as forbidding. This introduction is one reason the treatise remains, for many readers, the gateway into the Fathers.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione [On the Incarnation of the Word], especially chs. 1–10 and 54 [PG 25; ch. 54 at PG 25:192B]. Translated in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 4 (NPNF II/4), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace.
Athanasius. On the Incarnation. Translated by John Behr, with an introduction by C. S. Lewis. Popular Patristics Series 44a. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011.
Athanasius. Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione. Edited and translated by Robert W. Thomson. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
Anatolios, Khaled. Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought. Routledge Early Church Monographs. London: Routledge, 1998.
Barnes, Timothy D. Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Irenaeus of Lyon. Against Heresies, Book V, preface.
Lewis, C. S. “Introduction” to Athanasius, On the Incarnation (1944; SVS Press edition); also published as “On the Reading of Old Books.”