On the Incarnation

Today I finished my third annual reading of St. Athanasius’ De Incarnatione, and I decided, despite the lateness of the entry, to bring you a few golden nuggets from this wonderful church father as a humble Christmas gift. Lest you protest that Christmas is over, I’ll remind you that there are 12 days of Nativity feasting given to us by Christian tradition between the Birth on December 25th and the Baptism of Christ on January 6th. In fact, Theophany was the greater holy day for most of Christian history, as it continues to be in Roman Catholic and Orthodox countries.

In my reading this year, two passages stuck out as being of particular interest. In the first, St. Athanasius is answering the question ‘why didn’t Christ choose an honourable death for himself instead of an ignoble death on the cross? ‘ For an educated Greek or Roman of his day, suicide might have been the most ‘honorable death’ imaginable, being an act of free will rather than necessity (see Sophocles’ Ajax). St. Athanasius’ reply is as follows:

Death came to His body, therefore, not from Himself but from enemy action, in order that the Saviour might utterly abolish death in whatever form they offered it to Him. A generous wrestler, virile and strong, does not himself choose his antagonists, lest it should be thought that of some of them he is afraid. Rather, he lets the spectators choose them, and that all the more if these are hostile, so that he may overthrow whomsoever they match against him and thus vindicate his superior strength. Even so was it with Christ. (§ 24)

Christ, the wrestler in the figure, accepted death from His enemies in whatever form it arrived, to show his strength over any kind of death. This wonderful image helps cleanse our minds of the one-sided view of Christ as a passive victim on the cross. He is not simply passive but awaits death like a strong and virile wrestler awaits his opponent, not fearing its supposed might.

The second passage is the last one in the book. In his final words to Macarius, the friend to whom Athanasius dedicates his treatise, he advises Macarius to search the Scriptures to see whether what he has said is true. Then he writes,

Anyone who wants to look at sunlight naturally wipes his eye clear first, in order to make, at any rate, some approximation to the purity of that on which he looks; and a person wishing to see a city or country goes to the place in order to do so. Similarly anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds. (§ 57)

The Gospel is a stumbling block to the tenured academics at big universities for this very reason: it makes a demand on us that is not simply intellectual. It teaches that the life one lives will clarify or distort one’s intellectual vision, that thought is not separate from the moral life. To see the ultimate truths requires the greatest attention to inner purity. Would academics still be reading Michel Foucault or Paul de Man if they understood this?

Here’s wishing all Locust Street patrons a Merry Christmas for the remaining days of the feast. I hope this year will smile on our meeting face to face somewhere, sometime soon.