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By Archibald Robertson.
St Athanasius the Great Resources Online and in Print
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76 Pages (Part II)
Page 25
(b) Accordingly the mere presence of the Word in a human body, the mere fact of the Incarnation, is the essential factor in our restoration (simile of the city and the king, ib. 9. 3, &c., cf. Orat. ii. 67, 70). But if so, what was the special need of the Cross? Athanasius felt, as we have already mentioned, the supremacy of the Cross as the purpose of the Saviour's coming, but he does not in fact give to it the central place in his system of thought which it occupies in his instincts. Man had involved himself in the sentence of death; death must therefore take place to satisfy this sentence (Orat. ii. 69; de Incar. 20. 2, 5); the Saviour's death, then, put an end to death regarded as penal and as symptomatic of man's phthora (cf. ib. 21. 1, &c.). It must be confessed that Athanasius does not penetrate to the full meaning of S. Paul. The latter also ascribed a central import to the mere fact of the Incarnation (Rom. viii. 3, pempsas), but primarily in relation to sin (yet see Athan. c. Apoll. ii. 6); and the destruction of the practical power of sin stands indissolubly correlated (Rom. viii. 1) with the removal of guilt and so with the Righteousness of God realising itself in the propitiation of the blood of Christ (ib. iii. 21--26).
To Athanasius nature is the central, will a secondary or implied factor in the problem. The aspect of the death of Christ most repeatedly dwelt upon is that in it death spent its force (plerotheises tes exousias en to kuriako souati, ib. 8) against human nature, that the 'corruption' of mankind might run its full course and be spent in the Lord's body, and so cease for the future. Of this Victory over death and the demons the Resurrection is the trophy. His death is therefore to us (ib. 10) the arche zoes, we are henceforth aphthartoi dia tes anastaseos (27. 2, 32. 6, cf. 34. 1, &c.), and have a portion in the divine nature, are in fact deified (cf. de Incarn. 54, and note there). This last thought, which became (Harnack, vol. ii. p. 46) the common property of Eastern theology, goes back through Origen and Hippolytus to Irenaeus. On the whole, its presentation in Athanasius is more akin to the Asiatic than to the Origenist form of the conception. To Origen, man's highest destiny could only be the return to his original source and condition: to Irenaeus and the Asiatics, man had been created for a destiny which he had never realised; the interruption in the history of our race introduced by sin was repaired by the Incarnation, which carried back the race to a new head, and so carried it forward to a destiny of which under its original head it was incapable. To Origen the Incarnation was a restoration to, to Irenaeus and to Athanasius (Or. ii. 67), an advance upon, the original state of man. (Pell, pp. 167-177, labours to prove the contrary, but he does not convince.)
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/athanasius/athanasius-life-arianism-2.asp?pg=25
