Athanasius and the Death of Death; Or, Death, Thou Shalt Die
Archbishop Fulton Sheen, in defense of this point, said simply:
…to Christ, death was the goal and fulfillment of his life, the gold that He was seeking. Few of His words or actions are intelligible without reference to His Cross. He presented Himself as a Savior rather than merely as a Teacher. It meant nothing to teach men to be good unless He gave them the power to be good, after rescuing from the frustration of guilt. (Life of Christ, 14)Think of this. Nothing in Our Lord’s life, not even the majestic Gloria in Excelsis Deo of the heavenly host to shepherds watching their flocks means anything without Jesus’ death. Yet such a notion upsets us, doesn’t it? Today there’s no greater Scrooge or buzzkill to the secular Christmas season than that of the cross of Our Lord. Furthermore, nothing is as startling to the modern eye as a crucifix. It’s audacious. An actual body is hanging on it. And if there’s one thing we can’t have in modern society, it’s a reminder that all of us will die. A memento mori, as it were, is taboo. It seems to be bad taste. Why would one, in good conscience, try and remember a public execution? We worship a God not of the dead, but of the living, after all (Mark 12:27). Let’s put Jesus back into the manger. As Christians we shirk from the story of the Passion and want to forget the “bad part” because, let’s face it: crucifixion is ugly. We’re afraid of death. Especially when that crucified God is staring us in the face.
According to St. Athanasius of Alexandria, however, a God with a face is precisely the point of the Catholic religion. Recently I spent a night reading his On the Incarnation as a devotional guide to Advent. While that five-times-exiled veteran of orthodoxy had much to say on the wonder that is the Second Person of the Trinity’s assuming human flesh into the Godhead, there was something that struck me. His language was predominantly crucified. Almost eerily obsessed with the way in which Jesus died. In an instructing but loving way, Athanasius says:
…if any honest Christian wants to know why He suffered death on a cross and not in some other way, we answer thus: in no other way was it expedient for us, indeed the Lord offered for our sakes the one death that was supremely good. (On the Incarnation, 54).God the Son’s death on the cross was supremely good? That’s jarring. How can we say that being stripped naked, whipped to bloody pulp, and being deserted by nearly all your followers is good? Yet Athanasius continues:
He had come to bear the curse that lay on us; and how could He “become a curse” otherwise than by accepting the accursed death? And that death is the cross, for it is written, “Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.” Again, the death of the Lord is the ransom of all, and by it “the middle wall of partition” is broken down and the call of the Gentiles comes about. (On the Incarnation, 54-55)According to St. Athanasius, who was only merely echoing St. Paul in Galatians (who in turn was quoting Deuteronomy), Christ became a curse. That is, as the God-man, Jesus extinguished the sin-tainted nature of the Old Adam and put it to death in Himself, the New Adam. This does not mean the Lord was Himself sinful, the letter of Hebrews clearly teaches He never sinned (Hebrews 4:15). Rather, it means this: in uniting Himself to humanity in a body, Christ can be both a priest and victim when he undergoes the passion. The cross may be a scandal, but it is the most necessary of scandals. Because Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, he can know humanity for it really is, and call us back to the heights for which He created us for. Heights which he cleared the way for in the lifting up of His cross. Heights that will lead back to the Father who sent Him. As Athanasius puts it:
How could He have called us if He had not been crucified? Here again, we see the fitness of His death and of those outstretched arms: it was that He might draw His ancient people with the one and the Gentiles with the other, and join both together in Himself. Even so, He foretold the manner of His redeeming death, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto myself.” (On the Incarnation, 55)Going along though these mediations Athanasius becomes a little punch drunk. Like St. Paul, he starts boasting. Which is acceptable if it is in the cross (Galatians 6:14). He reveals that, though Christians love the cross of Our Lord, we don’t really love death in and of itself. Instead, he notes:
All the disciples of Christ despise death; they take the offensive against it and, instead of fearing it, by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ trample on it as something dead. Before the divine sojourn of the Saviour, even the holiest men were afraid of death… .But now that the Savior has raised His body, death is no longer terrible, but all those who believe in Christ tread it underfoot as nothing, and prefer to die rather than deny their faith in Christ, knowing full well that when they die they do not perish, but live indeed, and become incorruptible through the resurrection….Death has become like a tyrant who has been conquered by the legitimate monarch; bound hand and foot as he now is, the passers-by jeer at him, hitting him and abusing him, no longer afraid of his cruelty and rage, because of the king that has conquered him. So has death been conquered and branded for what it is by the Saviour on the cross. (On the Incarnation, 57-58)
As Christians living the Paschal Mystery of Our Lord, death no longer binds the race of Adam like it had. In the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus, there is a new race of men. These men will be crucified, dead, and resurrected. They will rise again to die now no more. And in so doing, both Paul and Athanasius tell us that we will exult in that cry of I Corinthians 15:55: “O Death, where is thy victory? O Grave, where is thy sting?” Our joy rests in that “death is daily proved to be stripped of all its strength” (On the Incarnation, 62). For the Word, having been made flesh, crucified and risen for sinful man, cannot be defeated.
Why is the Incarnate Word undefeatable? The answer is twofold. The first way to approach the question is to realize that Our Lord humbled Himself. The humiliation of the Passion to many eyes seemed a resounding defeat. God the Father knew that His Son was the one sacrifice that would forever fragrance Heaven in the way bullocks never could. Namely, Jesus was the “broken spirit” and the “heart that is humbled and contrite” which the Father could never “disdain” (Psalm 51:19). The second way is this. The humility and great Love of God surpasses the power of death, which can only be proud. Sin entered the world through the pride of man in the Garden and his disobedience. Disobedience was truly made sin because Adam and Eve’s hid from the Lord after the fact. And even then, the Lord walked about the Garden seeking for man created in the imago Dei. As Genesis 3:15—commonly called the Protoevangelium (first Gospel)—shows us, God had a plan to use the woman’s seed to crush the head of that evil serpent. Sin, pain, and death may have entered the world with Original Sin, but God is to be praised. Because with that felix culpa He had a remedy—He would do something to save us. With God’s intervention, Adam would walk once more in Paradise with his Maker.
In the cross and in nothing else, there is freedom. G.K. Chesterton once quipped that “The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for weary travelers” (Orthodoxy, 48). Christ is the leader of our race’s victory over death, why ought we who are purchased with His Precious Blood be ashamed of it? We may get discouraged in our journey during this life, but it is no real reason to despair. Our Lord has put death to death. Christ conquers, reigns, and commands. This Advent season, let us keep in mind the words of Sacred Scripture and those mediations of St. Athanasius. With every glance at the manger, let us also see the wood of the cross, and especially the corpus on the crucifix. Let us put our trust in Him. Let us look upon Him who they have pierced (Zechariah 12:10). For He is lifted in that moment of supposed defeat. Death has been condemned. Eternal life is found in that font which flows from Calvary. And in that lifting of His, even now in our time, hearts are converted; all men are drawn unto that babe born in Bethlehem, born to die. Reveling in the crucified and risen God of our salvation, we can recite those wonderful words of the poet Donne: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
Amen. So be it. Death, thou shalt die.
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Works Cited
Athanasius, and C. S. Lewis. On the Incarnation: the Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2002.
Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. Moody Publishers, 2009.
Donne, John. “Holy Sonnets: Death, Be Not Proud by John Donne.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44107/holy-sonnets-death-be-not-proud.
Sheen, Fulton J. The Life of Christ. McGraw-Hill, 1958.
