Athanasius: The Coherence of his Thought

Athanasius: The Coherence of his Thought. By Khaled Anatolios. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. viii + 258 pp. $75.00 (cloth). Athanasius of Alexandria is arguably the most powerful voice from the ancient Church on themes of the redeeming power of the incarnation and the idea of salvation as "deification," notions that resonate with many Christians in the contemporary world. An exposition of Athanasius's thought is therefore a welcome addition not only for specialists and students.

While recent works on Athanasius have emphasized his role in fourthcentury controversies, or examined particular themes and elements gleaned from his writings, Khaled Anatolios's new book seeks to deal with Athanasius as theologian in his own terms. This is not, however, a mere survey; it is a strongly conceived and well-executed exposition of the heart of Athanasius's theology, the God-world relationship in creation and salvation.

Anatolios begins by surveying the God-creation relationship before Athanasius, from Greek philosophy through Irenaeus and Origen. This serves largely to establish the theme of distance between the transcendent God and contingent creation that the philosophers establish, and which earlier theologians both accept and seek to mitigate, and thus sets the scene for what Anatolios will present as the distinctive convergence of transcendence and immanence in Athanasius. Athanasius's own thought is then explored in chapters focused on the double work Contra Gentes-De Incarnatione, on the anti-Arian writings as a group, and on pastoral writings including the Festal Letters and the Life of Antony.

Anatolios dates the Contra Gentes-De Incarnatione relatively early among the viable options, to 328-335, in other words to the earliest part of Athanasius's episcopate. This gives the work a well-suited foundational place in his thought. Here God's absolute transcendence, which Athanasius holds in common with his predecessors, is distinctively modified. God's immanence is not merely a mitigation of transcendence; Athanasius makes an intimate connection between God and the world (and humanity in particular) fundamental to who God is. This is all the more striking because Athanasius does not weaken the absolute distinction between creator and created, but rather assumes this in strong terms. Yet the Incarnation in particular presents God to the world in an immediate (and paradoxical) sense that contrasts with most of Athanasius's Middle-Platonizing theological predecessors. This remains a striking and powerful position.

Anatolios is critical of the objectification of Athanasius's Christology in terms of the classic logos-sari (word-flesh) model, arguing that while formally correct, such analytical accounts (notably Grillmeier's in Christ in Christian Tradition) are inadequate to the nexus of cosmology and incarnation in Athanasius's thought. Athanasius's use of notions of appropriation (by the Logos of humanity) and predication (to each nature of the other's characteristics) are arguably more important in his own system than is the controverted analytical question of the existence of a human soul in Christ.

Here, as often, Anatolios's approach is clearly one of advocacy, and involves insistence that Athanasius's thought be seen primarily in terms of its own aims and assumptions-a reasonable claim, but perhaps not the only possibility this side of reductionism. It is important to hear Athanasius in his own terms, yet we may also note that his thought could be problematic as well as creative, even for his orthodox contemporaries, as obviously in the case of Apollinarius of Laodicea whose unnuanced development of Alexandrian Christology effectively denied Jesus' humanity.

The relevance of the God-world relation to the Arian dispute may already be obvious. In writings such as the Orationes contra Arianos, Athanasius rejects the idea of a created mediator, since the action that bridges the (real) divide between creator and created can only belong to the creator. The controverted homoousios ("of one being") of the Nicene creed also guarantees that human participation in Christ is not mediated in the Middle Platonist sense; for Athanasius, the immediacy of essence between Father and Son and the participation of humanity in the Son are bound up together. Christ, as become human, also receives what he gives as divine.

The last chapter moves to the human point of view and the life of grace, notably in the Festal Letters and the Life of Antony. While he had signaled his disagreement with Gregg and Groh's Early Arianism in the second chapter, Anatolios organizes the early part of the fourth chapter around strong criticism of their redactional approach to the Life of Antony, even before having addressed that work directly. Anatolios goes on to make a good case for a more thoroughly "Athanasian" Life of Antony; his theme of the tension between transcendence and immanence is a useful one in light of which to read the work. There is nonetheless a brief loss of focus at this stage of what is otherwise a book that seeks to privilege the ancient setting. The problem of how Athanasius might have used existing traditions about Antony does not disappear.