Saint Athanasius of Alexandria is a crucial figure in the early history of the Church for his heroically uncompromising defense of the mystery of the Trinity against Arianism in the fourth century. Today, non-Christians and secular people may wonder why Athanasius was so passionate and so persistent about what might seem to be an abstract theological point. Yet we can appreciate the energy of his zeal if we realize that he perceived the deep connection between the mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption.
Athanasius’s conviction about the Trinity is inseparable from his conviction regarding the central Christian event and its significance for the life of humans. Through the incarnation and redemption, God has made it possible for us to share in His very life. Our union with the Word made flesh gives us “a participation in the Divine nature” (see 2 Peter 1:4). This is the great patristic teaching on deification (“theosis”): God became man so that humans might become “gods”—that is, adopted children of the Father (see 1 John 3:2). Athanasius grasps the radical implications of Arius’s theories: if the one who became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary is not fully Divine, how could he possibly give us a participation in the Divine life?
In Arias’s reductionist view of the Son of God in the Trinity as merely an exalted creature, the magnificent destiny of the human person in Christ comes crashing to the ground. It means that the one who walked the earth, who became our friend, who gave us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink, was merely another creature like us. God has not shown us His face nor invited us into his friendship. He remains a stranger to us. Thus Athanasius declares: “the Son of God became Son of Man, so that the sons of man, that is, of Adam, might become sons of God."
Moreover, if the Holy Spirit is not fully God, how can he possibly transform us into the likeness of God? “If the Holy Spirit were a creature, there could be no communion of God with us through Him. On the contrary, we would be joined to a creature, and we would be foreign to the divine nature, as having nothing in common with it…If by participation in the Spirit we are made partakers in the divine nature…it cannot be doubted that His is the nature of God.”
For Athanasius, the full co-eternal divinity of the Word and the Holy Spirit with the Father is above all the truth about the mystery of the Triune God; at the same time this mystery is revealed as the decisive reality for the human vocation. Only the Divine Word-made-flesh divinizes His brothers and sisters in the flesh. If Christ is anything less than God, then the gates of heaven are closed and man is still in exile from his eternal home. The comfortable rationalism of Arius's theories is no small matter; it deconstructes the mystery of God, reducing the incarnation into a kind of gnostic mythology, and robbing human beings of their true destiny — of the ultimate hope stirred up by Spirit of God in their hearts, that they might be redeemed, raised up, and supernaturally recreated in the likeness of God, to “participate” in the Divine nature by being conformed by grace and glory to the Divine Person of God the Son, the Word made flesh.
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******* Quotations from Saint Athanasius *******
"Through this union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature, all humans were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrection. For the solidarity of humankind is such that, by virtue of the Word's indwelling in a single human body, the corruption which goes with death has lost its power over all" (Saint Athanasius, On The Incarnation 2:9).
"Thus taking from our bodies one of like nature, because all were under penalty of the corruption of death He gave it over to death in the stead 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 that, secondly, 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, banishing death from them like straw from the fire" (On The Incarnation 8:4).
"The Word begotten of the Father from on high, inexpressibly, inexplicably, incomprehensibly and eternally, is He that is born in time here below, of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, so that those who are in the first place born here below might have a second birth from on high, that is, of God” (On The Incarnation 8).
"God's love of man is such that to those for whom first He is Creator, He afterwards, according to grace, becomes a Father also. The latter He does when men, who are His creatures, receive into their hearts, as the Apostle says, the Spirit of His Son, crying 'Abba, Father'. It is these who, by their having received the Word, have gained from Him the power to become children of God; for, being creatures by nature, they could not otherwise become sons other than by receiving the Spirit of the natural and true Son. To bring this about, therefore, the Word became flesh - so that He might make man capable of divinity." (Discourses Against the Arians II, ch. 21, para. 59).
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******* Liturgical Texts for the Feast of Saint Athanasius *******
“Blaring trumpet of the Lord and flute of the Spirit, O great Athanasius, O fiery mind, it is fitting to sing your praises with hymns; for you taught us to honor the Trinity of one essence” (Kontakion, Byzantine Liturgy for Feast of Saint Athanasius).
“Almighty ever-living God, who raised up the Bishop Saint Athanasius as an outstanding champion of your Son’s divinity, mercifully grant, that, rejoicing in his teaching and his protection, we may never cease to grow in knowledge and love of you. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever” (Collect, Roman Liturgy for the Feast of Saint Athanasius).
