Athanasius and the Logic of the Exchange

On the Incarnation is the classical statement of the Orthodox logic of salvation, and it is more rigorous — and more willing to argue from necessity — than sympathetic summaries usually allow. St. Athanasius poses a genuine dilemma internal to God’s own consistency, answers it by the assumption of a mortal body, and concludes with the exchange formula. This file follows that argument as an argument, and marks honestly where it resembles and where it differs from the Latin argument of Cur Deus Homo.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Work

On the Incarnation of the Word (De Incarnatione Verbi Dei) is the second part of a double treatise whose first part is Against the Gentiles; it was written early, conventionally dated around 318 though the dating is debated, and it is the most-read patristic text on the subject in the modern Orthodox world (see Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione).

Its subject is announced as the reason for the Incarnation, and the argument runs in five movements: creation out of nothing; the fall as a return toward nothing; the divine dilemma; its resolution in a body capable of death; and the consequences.

Movement One: Creation from Nothing, and Its Fragility

Athanasius begins with a metaphysical premise that governs everything after it. Creatures are made out of nothing — not out of pre-existing matter, not out of God’s substance — and they therefore have no independent hold on being. Existence is a gift continuously received, and the human being was given a further gift beyond the natural: the grace of being in the image, by which he could remain incorrupt so long as he remained turned toward God (On the Incarnation 3–4; trans. NPNF II/4).

The consequence is that turning away from God is not merely an offence but a loss of the source of existence. Having “set their minds on things not existing,” human beings began “to be corrupted and to remain in death and corruption,” returning by nature toward the nothing from which they came (On the Incarnation 4–5).

This is the diagnosis on which everything rests, and it is not juridical. The problem is not a debit but dissolution (see Death, Corruption, and the Ancestral Wound).

Movement Two: The Dilemma

Athanasius then poses a genuine difficulty, and it is worth setting out carefully because the honest reader will notice that it has a formal resemblance to the difficulty Anselm poses seven centuries later.

God had said, “In the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:17). The sentence stands. But it would be “monstrous and unfitting” that creatures made in his image should perish, and equally “unworthy of the goodness of God” that what he had made should come to nothing through the deceit of the devil. Yet it would be “unseemly that what had once been spoken by God should be proved false” — that having pronounced death, God should let the word fail (On the Incarnation 6; trans. NPNF II/4).

Repentance alone, Athanasius argues, cannot resolve it. Repentance “would have been well enough if the matter were guilt only and not the consequence of corruption” — but repentance addresses the transgression and does nothing about the disease: “what was the profit to God, or what advantage to men, if they repented but nature remained the same?” (On the Incarnation 7). This sentence is the hinge of the whole treatise and the sharpest single statement in patristic literature of why a forgiveness that leaves the human condition unchanged is not salvation.

So there is a real aporia: God’s truthfulness requires that the sentence of death stand; God’s goodness requires that his image not be annihilated. Neither can be waived.

Movement Three: The Resolution

The resolution is that the Word takes a body from a spotless Virgin, “a body capable of death,” and offers it:

“He surrendered his body to death in place of all, and offered it to the Father — doing this, moreover, of his loving-kindness, to the end that, firstly, all being held to have died in him, the law involving the ruin of men might be undone (inasmuch as its power was fully spent in the Lord’s body, and had no longer holding-ground against men, his peers), and, secondly, that whereas men had turned toward corruption, he might turn them again toward incorruption, and quicken them from death by the appropriation of his body and by the grace of the resurrection.”
(Athanasius, On the Incarnation 8; trans. NPNF II/4)

The sentence of death is not set aside; it is executed and exhausted. The law “had no longer holding-ground” because its power was spent. And because the body in which it was spent belonged to the Word, and because all human beings share one nature with that body, what happened in it reaches them.

Athanasius states this a second time in the commercial register, and the passage is the one usually quoted against the claim that the Greek Fathers avoid debt language:

“Death there had to be, and death for all, so that the due of all might be paid… For there was need of death, and death must needs have taken place on behalf of all, that the debt owing from all might be paid.”
(On the Incarnation 20; trans. NPNF II/4)

The debt is named. But the treatise has already defined what the debt is: it is the sentence of Genesis 2:17, the corruption owed by a nature that turned from being. It is owed to God’s own word, not to his wounded dignity, and it is paid by being undergone.

Movement Four: The Exchange

The famous conclusion is the exchange formula:

“He was made man that we might be made God.”
(On the Incarnation 54 [PG 25:192B]; trans. Behr, PPS 44a)

Athanasius did not invent it — St. Irenaeus has it in Against Heresies V, preface — but his is the form the tradition repeats (see The Exchange Formula; Theosis in Athanasius).

The placement matters. The formula stands at the end of a treatise about death and corruption, which means that in Athanasius deification is not a separate topic added to the atonement but its outcome. The Cross does not merely restore Adam’s condition; it opens a communion Adam had not attained. This is why the present collection defers the goal of salvation to the collection on deification and treats the Cross as the door (see Theosis).

Movement Five: The Evidence

Athanasius closes with an argument from observable fact that is rare in patristic literature. If death has really been defeated, he says, it should be visible that human beings have stopped fearing it — and it is: men and women, and even children, despise death and hasten to martyrdom; the sign of the Cross drives out what people once dreaded; the oracles have fallen silent (On the Incarnation 27–32).

The argument is empirical in intent, and it is offered as a test the reader can apply. That it can be applied is exactly what makes it interesting, and it connects the doctrine directly to the freedom described in Hebrews 2:15 (see The Bondage of the Fear of Death).

Where This Resembles Anselm, and Where It Does Not

An honest reading has to notice a structural similarity, because pretending it is absent weakens the account.

The resemblance. Both Athanasius and Anselm argue from necessity — from what it would be unfitting or impossible for God to do. Both hold that the transgression could not simply be waived: Athanasius because God’s word would be falsified, Anselm because the order of the universe would be left disordered (Cur Deus Homo I.12–13). Both conclude that only a God-man can resolve the difficulty, and both frame this as a demonstration rather than an appeal to authority. Anyone who says the Greek Fathers never reason about the necessity of the Incarnation has not read On the Incarnation 6–7.

The differences, which are decisive.

What is at stake. For Athanasius the difficulty is that a sentence of death has been pronounced and that God’s word cannot fail while his image perishes. For Anselm the difficulty is that honour has been withheld and that the order of the universe cannot be left with the theft unrepaired. Death is a condition; honour is a relation. The two arguments are about different things.

What resolves it. For Athanasius the resolution is that the sentence is undergone and exhausted in a body that cannot be held. For Anselm it is that a compensation of sufficient weight is offered and accepted. In the first the problem is destroyed; in the second it is discharged.

Whether the resurrection is required by the argument. Athanasius’s argument does not work without it: the sentence is exhausted only because the body rises. Anselm’s argument, as constructed, reaches its conclusion at the death — the reward and its transfer are then reasoned out in Cur Deus Homo II.19 without the resurrection doing structural work. This is the single clearest structural difference between the two, and it is the reason Section 07 says that Pascha rather than Calvary is the term of the movement.

Whether repentance would have sufficed. Both say no, and for opposite reasons. Anselm: because the debt would remain unpaid. Athanasius: because “nature would remain the same” — the disease would be untreated even if the guilt were remitted. Set side by side, these two “no”s are a compact statement of the whole difference between the two soteriologies.

None of this is a charge against Anselm, who is reported in his own terms elsewhere (see Anselm and Cur Deus Homo). It is a statement of where the arguments actually part company, and the parting is at the diagnosis, not at the temperature.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation (De Incarnatione Verbi Dei) 3–9, 20, 27–32, 54 [PG 25:192B]. Translated in NPNF II/4; also trans. John Behr, On the Incarnation, Popular Patristics Series 44a, Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies V, preface. Translated in ANF I.
Anselm of Canterbury. Cur Deus Homo I.12–13, II.19. Trans. Sidney Norton Deane. Chicago: Open Court, 1903.
Behr, John. The Nicene Faith. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004. (On the argument and dating of the double treatise.)
Anatolios, Khaled. Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought. London: Routledge, 1998.