Mother of God of Belozersk, Fr. Silouan Justiniano
2012. Egg tempera and gold on gessoed panel, 18 x 32 in.
Given the season, I’ve decided to re-read St. Athanasius “On the Incarnation.” While doing this, the structure of his argument opened up for me in a way it hadn’t before and led to some thoughts on Galatians, Pope Benedict, and Origen. Benedict's certainly been on my mind lately. God rest his soul.
I was struck by the way Athansius begins, not with the incarnation, but with creation. He sees the incarnation as a re-creation accomplished by the same means used to create heaven and earth. He argues this by making clear the logical order of God to creation, and thus Christ to the world. By his lights, God is logically prior to creation, and Christ is logically prior to his body in such a way that the ontology of both (creation and body) are ordered by that which is prior to it.
Here’s how that fleshes out (pun unintentional, believe it or not). When speaking about creation, Athanasius argues that the complexity of it leads us to logically deduce a creator which is prior to it. He argues that if nature spontaneously emerged, it would be identical with itself, and thus, without parts. It would be
identical… [and] everything would have been as a single body, sun or moon, and regarding human beings, the whole would have been a hand or eye or foot.” (50)
He thinks the diversity and complexity of creation, its composed nature, leads us to conclude that there is a prior order which composes it, a separate thing which is order itself, the Logos.
Of course, he baptizes the argument, seeing the order as God’s Word, Christ. He quotes Hebrews 11:3 as a proof text. But other texts suggest themselves in my mind too—John 1:1, Colossians 1:17, Revelations 22:13—which find in Christ the constituting logic of creation.
He takes this notion and pushes it into anthropology. If all creation is an ordered composition, human beings are unique in their nature. They are in themselves a microcosm of the Word which creates the world. Where the world reflects aspects of the order of the Logos, humans are a type of the Logos, the image of God—he uses the term “shadows of the Word,” which I like. It's as if we are silhouettes of the preincarnate Christ.
That which proves this for Athanasius is our rationality, our ability to see things as they really are. It was our (prelapsarian) ability to behold the Word, and know Him as He is, which would have allowed us to “dwell in blessedness.” However, part of that rationality is our freedom, which allowed us to reject Christ, thus the fall.
He develops this in a very interesting way. He argues that in sinning, man rejected that which made him metaphysically coherent, that which makes the world metaphysically coherent. It was an un-Logos-ing, a sort of disintegration. He says,
for the transgression of the commandment returned them to the natural state, so that just as they, not being, (before they were created) came to be, so also they might rightly endure in time, the corruption unto non-being.
Before we sinned, that which sustained our being was our likeness to
the one who is, which, if [we] had guarded through…comprehension of Him, would have blunted natural corruption.” (53)
He then applies this to the incarnation. Christ, by taking
that which is ours…from a spotless, stainless virgin…the body as a temple and made it as his own…he might turn us again to incorruptibility…by making the body his own and by the grace of the resurrection banishing death from them as straw from fire.” (57)
Here it is in a nutshell. Christ is the order of creation. We are the microcosm of that order. We rejected it (Him) and fell into material disintegration. Christ then entered that which was disintegrating (our body/nature/being) and by his power, resurrected it, returning our nature to the order of its cause. By receiving Him we are returned to our nature and saved. It’s a metaphysical explanation of salvation wherein people are given the opportunity to participate in Christ’s nature, and therefore be rescued on the ontological level.
A natural question arises from this. If salvation is fundamentally metaphysical, saving us at the level of being, how does the forensic aspect of sin and salvation work? Are we not law breakers and therefore stand before God as a judge? Death is the punishment for this infraction, right? Doesn’t that framework sound basically different from all this stuff about loss of being, et cetera? DId we break a law or commit metaphysical suicide?
If we like both explanations some synthesis is in order. Athanasius gestures to one in an offhand remark. After grounding our being in
the One who Is, which, if [we] had guarded through…comprehension of Him, would have blunted natural corruption.
He quotes from the book of Wisdom as justification, that “attention to the law is the confirmation of incorruptibility. (Wisdom 6:18) What’s going on here? In context he is conflating our attention to the One who is with our attention to the law. In the first half of the quote he is saying that our attention to Christ in the garden maintained our being and kept us from death, and then ties in the law’s ability to keep us from corruptibility. So is it Christ who maintains our being? Or is it the law?
In thinking about this, I turned back to Pope Benedict's great little book, his second installment in the Jesus of Nazareth Trilogy. He talks about this tension in the Gospels and Paul's resolution of it. I’ll quote it at length here,
You have heard that it was said…
But I say to You…
The messiah was expected to bring the renewed Torah—his Torah. Paul may be alluding to this in the Letter to The Galatians when he speaks of the “law of Christ” (Gal 6:2). His great passionate defense of freedom from the Law culminates in the following statement in chapter 5: “For freedom Christ set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal 5:1). But when he goes on to repeat at 5:13 the claim that “you were called to freedom,” he adds, “only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another.” (Gal 5:13) And now he explains what freedom is—namely freedom in service of good, freedom that allows itself to be led by the Spirit of God. It is precisely by letting oneself be led by God’s spirit, moreover, that one becomes free from the Law. Immediately after this Paul details what the freedom of the Spirit actually consists in and what is incompatible with it.
The law of Christ is freedom…that is the paradox of Paul's message to the Galatians. This freedom has content, then, it has direction, and it therefore contradicts what only apparently liberates man, but in truth makes him a slave. The “Torah of the Messiah” is totally new and different—but it is precisely by being such that it fulfills the Torah of Moses. (105)
Benedict goes on to show how Jesus, in parroting Moses by gathering the 12 on a Mountain and giving the law in a series of you have heard that it was said… statements, is giving the Messiah’s new law, what Paul calls “the law of the spirit of life.” Seen this way, we find the new law to be, not less stringent than the old, but more so. Instead of forbidding adultery, Christ forbids lust, and so on. This is how Christ fulfills the law and the prophets, by revealing their heart, the cause of its righteousness. In so doing he obliterates the old law and brings in a new one.
Benedict then moves through the sermon, dialoguing with a Jewish scholar, Rabbi Jacob Neussner. Neussner, of course, takes issue with three examples of this obliteration—Christ’s contradiction of the fourth commandment (to obey one’s parents, Luke 12:53), his contradiction of the third commandment (to keep the sabbath holy, Mark 2:24-28), and finally, his command to be holy as God is holy. Benedict notes that
Neussner comes to the disturbing conclusion that Jesus is evidently trying to persuade him to cease following these three fundamental commandments of God and to adhere to Jesus instead. (106)
Putting all this together, we have this notion here of the law being a type of Christ himself. The law is a shadow, or an impression of Jesus’ righteous person. Which is why, when Jesus appears, the law is fulfilled. To put this in Athanasian terms, the law was ordered to Christ, and when we participate in Christ, we find the depths of righteousness only gestured at by the law. Therefore, the messiah’s Torah is one of freedom. In receiving Christ we imbibe directly the law’s logic.
These insights reminded me of Origen and his commentary on Matthew, where again, Christ is conflated with His rule, and our participation with it.
For He is the King of the heavens, and as He is absolute Wisdom and absolute Righteousness and absolute Truth, is He not also absolute Kingdom? But it is not a kingdom of any of those below, nor of a part of those above, but of all the things above, which were called heavens. But if you enquire into the meaning of the words, “Theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” you may say that Christ is theirs in so far as He is absolute Kingdom, reigning in every thought of the man who is no longer under the reign of sin which reigns in the mortal body of those who have subjected themselves to it. (Commentary on Matthew, Book 16:17)
Here, Origen seems to tie many threads together. He defines the Kingdom of God as the rule of God. And yet, to participate in that rule one must be, in a sense, participating in Him. We must be in Christ to be in The Kingdom. Benedict comments on this and says, “By the way in which [Jesus] speaks of The Kingdom of God, [he] leads men to realize the overwhelming fact that in him God himself is present among them, that he is God’s presence.” (49)
Now, bringing all this back to Athanasius, what can we say? Considered from Benedict’s, Origen’s, Paul’s, and even Neussner’s perspective, there isn’t much tension between the forensic account and the metaphysical account. This is why Athansius can quote Wisdom and equate beholding Christ with beholding the law. As it turns out, our moral failures are actually a failure to participate in the one who sustains our being. And that is why his coming, his nativity, is the great undoing of all that was set against us. As Athanasius says, “...wherever one looks, seeing there the divinity of the Word, one is struck with exceeding awe.” (107)
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