It can readily be appreciated that
such a framework, despite its philosophical provenance, is highly serviceable
in a religious setting. In particular affinity with a Christian theocentrism
can be seen in the biblical texts that Athanasius tends to cite when he uses
the terminology of participation. To take only two significant examples, we
will consider Colossians 1:15-18 and the opening verses from the prologue to
the Gospel of John. . . . in CG 41, Athanasius says that creation “participates”
(μεταλαμβανουσα) in the Word
who is truly from the Father and is helped by him so as to exist. This was done
so that what would have happened to creation apart from the Word did not happen
– namely, relapse into nothingness, ‘For, he is the image of the invisible God,
the first-born of all creation, because through him and in him subsist all
things, visible and invisible, and he is the head of the church,’ as the
ministers of the truth teach in the holy writings.” This passage expresses the
typically Athanasian move from God’s self-contained transcendence and
creation’s radical contingency to a conception of God’s goodness as maintaining
creation in being. It is precisely this radical ontological sustenance and
“protection” that is expressed here, in the vocabulary of participation is
employed by Athanasius as strictly convertible into the scriptural witness that
“through him and in him subsist all things.” . . . The form that this mercy
takes in the original act of human creation is described by Athanasius as “an
added grace (πλεον τι χαριζομενος),” and this grace is further
articulated as leading to our being made in God’s image, κατα την εαυτου εικονα εποιησεν αυτους. For an appreciation of the
fundamental structure of Athanasius’s anthropology, it is necessary to probe
the implications and resonances of this terminology in relation to the rest of
his teaching. With regard to the notion of χαρις, first of all, we must note that
its significance is fully ascertained only with a view to its correlative, φυσις, though we immediately hasten to
dissociate this terminology from a nature-grace distinction conceived along a
scholastic or post-scholastic model. Rather, it has been rightly pointed out
that the φυσις-χαρις distinction in Athanasius belongs
within the more radical framework of the fundamental distinction between
created and uncreated. Within this framework, this φυσις of created beings is precisely
their creatureliness, the fact of having some to be from nothing as essentially
constitutive of an inherent proclivity toward that nothingness, φυσις thus represents the radical
dependency of the creature on the One who brought it into being, and apart from
whom it is powerless to sustain itself in being. If we understand φυσις not as “la somme de éléments qui
constituent la nature humaine” but as “la qualité même d’être creature” (Gross,
La Divinisation du chrétien d'après les Pères Grecs, Paris: Livraire
Lecoffre, 1938, p. 204), we can correctly appreciate Athanasius’s
characterization that “all created nature (την γενητην πασαν φυσιν) is in flux and subject to
dissolution” and carries within its being the “risk of returning to nothing” (CG
41). On the other hand, χαρις
represents God’s solicitude toward creation, often articulated in terms of
protecting creation from its inherent nothingness by continually supporting it
in being, “lest it suffer a relapse into non-existence if it were not protected
by the Word” (ibid.).
The terminology of χαρις, it needs also be said, it
intimately related to the framework of participation. Such a participation, we
recall, preserves intact the essential otherness between God and creation; God
remains outside creation by his essence, but allows creation to share in his
power. This participation affords creation the stability which it inherently
lacks; it enlivens and orders all creation. In this passage, the connection
between the term χαρις and the framework of participation may be observed in
the convergence of two sets of terminology. Thus χαρις is
described in terms of God giving humanity a share in his power, δυναμις. The verb employed is μεταδιδωμι, the correlative of μεταλαμβανω. And the effect of this sharing
is that humanity becomes, as it were, “shadows” of the Word, another reference to
the participation model. But, of course, Athanasius elsewhere employs the
participation model and vocabulary to speak of the sharing of the whole
creation in the beneficent δυναμις
of the Word, a sharing which makes the whole world a “shadow” and reflection of
the Word (CG 41-7). In humanity, however, the reflection achieves an
altogether different level, and it is this qualitative difference that is
articulated in terms of humanity’s being κατ’ εικονα. We must now try to tease out the
significance of this qualification. (Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The
Coherence of His Thought [Routledge Early Church Monographs; London:
Routledge, 1998], 50-51, 55-56)