Theology of the Incarnation

The constructive theology of Athanasius’s De Incarnatione: creation out of nothing and the Word’s role in sustaining the cosmos; the corruption of the divine image through sin; why the saving death had to be a public death on the Cross; the recapitulation themes Athanasius shares with and adapts from Irenaeus; deification as the goal of the whole economy; and the way this early treatise lays the foundation for the anti-Arian theology of Athanasius’s later career.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Creation Out of Nothing and the Sustaining Word

Athanasius makes creation ex nihilo the foundation of everything else. Against both the Platonist idea that God shaped pre-existing matter and the Gnostic idea of a lesser creator, he insists that God “out of nothing, and without its having any previous existence, made the universe to exist through His Word” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 3; trans. NPNF II/4). This is not an incidental cosmological point but the structural premise of his soteriology. If creatures are made from nothing, then they have no native hold on existence; existence is a gift continuously sustained, and a creature cut off from its source tends back toward the nothing from which it came.

The agent of both creation and conservation is the Word. The same Word “through whom the Father had ordered the universe” is the one who holds it together, “containing all things and giving them order” so that the cosmos does not dissolve into chaos (On the Incarnation 41–42; cf. Contra Gentes 41–44; trans. NPNF II/4). Humanity was made a special case: created in the image of the Word and given a share in His rationality, so that by contemplating the Word the human person might be preserved in incorruption and remain in the blessedness of paradise (On the Incarnation 3–4). This makes the human vocation participatory from the start — to be kept in being by communion with the Word — which is precisely what deification will later restore.

Corruption and the Defaced Image

The Fall, for Athanasius, is therefore less a legal transgression than an ontological catastrophe. By turning away from God toward created things and toward non-being, humanity forfeited the grace that held it in incorruption and came under “the law of death,” beginning to slide back toward the nothing out of which it had been made (On the Incarnation 4–5; trans. NPNF II/4). Two consequences follow, and the treatise pursues both.

First, corruption: human nature is now subject to death and dissolution, a corruption working from within that no amount of repentance can reverse, because the wound is in the nature itself and not merely in the will. Second, the defacing of the image: the knowledge of God for which humanity was made is obscured, so that human beings sink into idolatry and cannot read the witness to God written in creation and in their own souls (this is the subject of the companion book, Contra Gentes). The image is not destroyed — that would make redemption of this creature impossible — but it is overlaid and effaced, “like a portrait blotted out by stains from without” (cf. On the Incarnation 14). Only the original of the image, the Word who is the perfect Image of the Father, can renew it; “the likeness being effaced, the work was useless” until the Image Himself came to retrace it.

Why the Cross

Athanasius’s account of why the Word had to die, and to die in this particular way is among the most distinctive parts of the treatise. The incarnation was needed because only the Word, who is Life and incorruptible by nature, could overcome corruption from within human nature by uniting that nature to Himself and surrendering His own body to death on behalf of all, thereby satisfying the debt of death and abolishing it by His resurrection (On the Incarnation 8–9; trans. NPNF II/4).

But Athanasius presses further: why a public execution rather than a quiet or natural death? His answer is that the death had to be at others’ hands and openly witnessed, so that the resurrection could be a public victory over death and not be doubted. The Lord did not lay down His body by His own infirmity, “lest He should be thought weak”; He accepted the death inflicted by others, “that He might… utterly abolish it,” and chose the Cross — a death “in the air” with arms outstretched — as fitting for the one who would “draw all men to Himself” and reconcile heaven and earth (On the Incarnation 21–25; trans. NPNF II/4). The three days in the tomb were enough to prove death real and the resurrection real, neither so brief as to seem feigned nor so long as to corrupt the body. The Cross is thus not an embarrassment to be explained away but the very form of the victory.

Recapitulation Themes — With and Beyond Irenaeus

Athanasius stands in a tradition reaching back to Irenaeus of Lyon, for whom the Son “recapitulates” (sums up and restores) all humanity in Himself, undoing in His own life and obedience what Adam had undone, so that “He became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies V, preface). The exchange logic of On the Incarnation 54 is recognizably in this family (see Theosis for the full lineage).

But the accents differ. Irenaeus’s recapitulation is strongly narrative and Adamic: Christ retraces the stages of human life and reverses the disobedience of Adam point by point, often in a typological correspondence (the tree of the Cross answering the tree of Eden, Mary answering Eve). Athanasius’s emphasis is more ontological and cosmological: the problem is corruption and the threat of return to non-being, and the solution is the union of the incorruptible Word with mortal human nature, which heals the nature from within and restores the image. Where Irenaeus tells the story of the second Adam undoing the first, Athanasius argues from the metaphysics of creation ex nihilo and the renewal of the image by its Archetype. The two are complementary rather than opposed; Athanasius assumes the recapitulative framework but recasts it in the register of being and corruption (Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought, on the integration of creation, image, and salvation).

Deification as the Goal

The whole economy is oriented toward deification. The exchange formula — “He was made man that we might be made God” / “he became human that we might become god” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54 [PG 25:192B]; trans. NPNF II/4; trans. Behr, PPS 44a) — states the purpose of the incarnation as the elevation of human nature into communion with God. This is theosis: not a change of nature into the divine essence, but the renewal of the image and the restoration of incorruption, so that human beings, kept in being by the Word, share by grace in what the Word is by nature.

The continuity with the doctrine of creation is exact. Humanity was made to be preserved in incorruption by contemplating the Word; the Word incarnate restores precisely that, raising human nature beyond even its first condition by uniting it to Himself. The deification is by participation and grace, never by nature — the lowercase “god” in Athanasius’s Greek (theopoiēthōmen) and in Behr’s translation marks the distinction the later tradition would guard with the essence–energies vocabulary. The dogmatic development, including the safeguards against pantheism and absorption, is treated in Theosis.

How This Treatise Grounds the Anti-Arian Theology

Although De Incarnatione contains no explicit polemic against Arius — one of the reasons its date is disputed (see Contra Gentes — De Incarnatione) — its soteriology is the engine of everything Athanasius would later argue against Arianism. The decisive premise is already in place: only God can deify. If salvation is the deification of human nature, and if deification means real participation in the divine life, then the one who deifies must Himself be fully God, not a creature however exalted.

This is exactly the argument Athanasius turns against Arius in the Orations Against the Arians. If the Son were a creature made out of nothing, as Arius held, then He would share humanity’s own need to be deified and could not be its deifier; “He would not have deified man, being Himself deified” (cf. Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians II.70). The soteriological logic of On the Incarnation — creation ex nihilo, corruption, the renewal of the image, deification by the Word — thus supplies the criterion by which Athanasius judges Arianism to be not merely mistaken but soteriologically fatal: a created Son cannot save. In this sense the early treatise is the seed of the whole controversy that would occupy the rest of his life and send him into five exiles.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation of the Word, especially chs. 1–10, 14, 21–25, 41–44, 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. Popular Patristics Series 44a. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011.
Athanasius. Orations Against the Arians, esp. Oration II [PG 26]. Translated in NPNF II/4.
Irenaeus of Lyon. Against Heresies, Book V, preface.
Anatolios, Khaled. Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought. London: Routledge, 1998.
Barnes, Timothy D. Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Thomson, Robert W., ed. and trans. Athanasius: Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.