The Death of Adam According to Athanasius

some thoughts on "On the Incarnation" part 5

And now the very corruption of death no longer holds ground against human beings because of the indwelling Word, in them through the one body.

St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. John Behr (2011), page (p.) 58, paragraph (par.) 9

In this article, I’ll be sharing quotations along with some light commentary on Athanasius’s view of the death of Adam. I had intentions of writing on resurrection and immortality, but the article became too long, so you’ll have to wait for that one.

A Quick Introduction

I start with this controversial topic because there is no other place to start. If we are going to talk about any view on the defeat of death, it is necessary to talk about Genesis 2:16-17 in which God issued the warning concerning death. For the sake of this article, I’ll be using the Lexham English Septuagint (LES).

The Lord God commanded Adam, saying, “From every tree that is in the paradise you may eat for food, but from the tree for knowing good and evil, you will not eat from it. And on whichever day you eat from it, you will surely die.” Genesis 2:16–17

There are many questions we could ask about this text related to the nature of the Genesis account, the historicity of it, the authorship of it, and the universality of Adam, but let’s focus in on two questions:

1. What does God mean by “and on whichever day you eat from it”?

2. What does God mean by “you will surely die”?

The first question is a matter of timing: when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, did they die in the day they ate? The serpent famously said, “You certainly will not die” (Genesis 3:4). So did they or did they not die on whichever day they did eat?

The second question is a matter of nature: what kind of death is meant by “you will surely die”? Would they experience biological death on whichever day they did eat? If not, would the threat of eventual death hundreds of years later satisfy the conditions of on whichever day…you will surely die? If God cannot lie, and the death must have been experienced on whichever day, then is the nature of this death something other than physical? Could spiritual or covenantal death be the death they would die on whichever day they would eat?

Since this problem seems obvious, even the serpent in the narrative recognizing it in Genesis 3, then those who originally told these stories, documented this account, and heard this exchange read aloud from a young age must have been aware of the dilemma. And since it makes no sense to give the serpent any semblance of victory from the first page, I think it stands to reason that it must not have been an issue to them as it is to us.

But you aren’t here to read my thoughts. You’re here to read Athanasius and perhaps my commentary on the select quotes I have prepared, so let’s jump in. Keep in mind that this is my commentary on his thoughts, not a commentary on my own.

Athanasius on “In the Day You Eat”

For God is good, or rather the source of all goodness, and one who is good grudges nothing, so that grudging nothing its existence, he made all things through his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ. Among these things, of all things upon earth he had mercy upon the human race, and seeing that by the principle of its own coming into being it would not be able to endure eternally, he granted them a further gift, creating human beings not simply like all the irrational animals upon the earth but making them according to his own image (cf. Gen 1.27), giving them a share of the power of his own Word, so that having as it were shadows of the Word and being made rational, they might be able to abide in blessedness, living the true life which is really that of the holy ones in paradise. (p. 52, par. 3)

Athanasius begins by affirming the transient, or temporary, nature of created things. John Behr, the translator of this work, said in a recent interview, “So when [Paul] says death came into the world is he saying that death only started to happen after one man's sin, yeah? As if no blade of grass ever died before that? No cat never ate a mouse before that?” Instead, Behr says that, with Adam, “Death now becomes a phenomena in my horizon. It's something that I'm now held fast by.”

Since death, in Athanasius’s view, is a natural part of creation, sharing in the life of God has always been a gift and an act of mercy.

Athanasius continues,

And knowing again that free choice of human beings could turn either way, he secured beforehand, by a law and a set place, the grace given. For bringing them into his own paradise, he gave them a law, so that if they guarded the grace and remained good, they might have the life of paradise-without sorrow, pain, or care-besides having the promise of their incorruptibility in heaven; but if they were to transgress and turning away become wicked, they would know themselves enduring the corruption of death according to nature, and no longer live in paradise, but thereafter dying outside of it, would remain in death and in corruption. (p. 52, par. 3)

Notice how Athanasius defines their blessings: without sorrow, pain, or care, but he also adds: “besides having the promise of their incorruptibility in heaven.” Thus, when sin entered into the world and death by sin, returning to Behr’s quote from above, it wasn’t that Adam suddenly had biological mortality; instead, it’s his relationship to death that changed. That is, it became something to be feared, something that loomed on the horizon. And this dread of death, and the potential nothingness that lies after, is perhaps a better understanding of how Paul uses the word “mortality.”

Physical death is the natural consequence of existing as a created being, but the fear of death is less than human. Death only has power because of sin, as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 1 Corinthians 15:56

Victory over death comes through the removal of sin and the consciousness of this removal (Hebrews 2:14-15). We’ll get more into that in the next section.

Athanasius says that with sin comes a new kind of knowledge: “they would know themselves enduring the corruption of death according to nature.” Instead of dying in paradise while engaged in contemplation of God through the Word, accepting death as a natural occurrence and even something to be welcomed, they would die outside of paradise in fear of death and in full knowledge of their mortality.

Now we come to the last quote in this section:

This also the Divine Scripture foretells, speaking in the person of God, "You may eat from all the trees in paradise; from the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. On the day you eat of it, you shall die by death" (Gen 2.16-18). This "you shall die by death," what else might it be except not merely to die, but to remain in the corruption of death? (p. 52, par. 3)

If I’m reading Athanasius correctly, I believe he sees three things happening here: (1) they would leave paradise, which may be interpreted as a kind of death, though he doesn’t call it that, (2) they would have a fearful knowledge of death through sin, and (3) their death wouldn’t end in incorruptibility in heaven as it would have previously.

But we have to read beyond paragraph 3 in order to truly grapple with Athanasius. I have to be honest: it’s hard for me to reconcile what is said in paragraph 3 with what is said in paragraph 4, so this should be a lot of fun for both you, the reader, and me, the ignorant writer.

A Return to the Natural State

Thus, then, God created the human being and willed that he should abide in incorruptibility; but when humans despised and overturned the comprehension of God, devising and contriving evil for themselves, as was said in the first work, then they received the previously threatened condemnation of death, and thereafter no longer remained as they had been created, but were corrupted as they had contrived; and, seizing them, death reigned. (p. 53, par. 4)

In paragraph 3, Athanasius did not seem to see a contradiction between physical death and incorruptibility, for he spoke of the promise of incorruptibility in heaven as a blessing of being in communion with God in what he saw Moses as figuratively calling paradise (Contra Gentiles, par. 2). When they devised and contrived evil for themselves, this is when they received the “condemnation of death,” which was a fundamental shift in respect to their relationship with death as a consequence of separation from God via their preference of non-being/ sin/ evil. Instead of being a pathway to a magnified incorruptibility in heaven, it was something to be feared, so “death reigned” from Adam to Moses.

For the transgression of the commandment returned them to the natural state, so that, just as they, not being, came to be, so also they might rightly endure in time the corruption unto non-being. For if, having a nature that did not once exist, they were called into existence by the Word's advent [parousia] and love for human beings, it followed that when human beings were bereft of the knowledge of God and had turned to things which exist not—evil is non-being, the good is being, since it has come into being from the existing God—then they were bereft also of eternal being. (p. 53, par. 4)

They returned to the natural state in three ways: (1) they left paradise, (2) they lost the privilege of continual contemplation of God, which is life, and (3) they now had a fear of death that comes through sin.

I find it fascinating that Athanasius views the human beings as coming into existence through the parousia of the Logos, the Word. We might think of this in reverse: Adam and Eve’s fall necessitated the coming of Christ, and this happened thousands of years after Adam’s death. But Athanasius does not see the Word as coming second. Instead, it is the Eternal Logos that casts the shadow that is Adam. Adam is modeled after the Word. In human perception of time, Jesus came second, but in Athanasius’s eyes, it’s as if time is pulled forward by the parousia of the Word.

Thus, Adam is not the original human; Jesus is. Adam is not the firstborn of all creation; Jesus is. Adam’s death does not have preeminence and priority; Jesus’s life does. Adam was only called “son of God” because he was modeled after the Word, the Eternal Son of God. The end isn’t just a new beginning; it is the beginning, the former being a shadow of the true. Thus we might say that the lamb was slain from before the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8, KJV).

Returning to Athanasius, he said, “When they were bereft of the knowledge of God… they were bereft also of eternal being.” This is what Jesus meant by the saying, “This is eternal life, that they may know you…” (John 17:3). By latching on to non-being, they descended into non-being. By relinquishing the knowledge of God, they only had knowledge of the transient. This brought separation from paradise, a loss of contemplation of God, and a sudden knowledge of their own mortality.

When we live in contemplation of God, we view death as a welcome transition into a “far better” experience of the presence of God (Philippians 1:20-24). But when we are living in sin, all we have is fear, bondage, and non-being (Hebrews 2:14-15).

But this, being decomposed, is to remain in death and corruption. For the human being is by nature mortal, having come into being from nothing. But because of his likeness to the One who Is, which, if he had guarded through his comprehension of him, would have blunted his natural corruption, he would have remained incorruptible, just as Wisdom says, "Attention to the laws is the confirmation of incorruptibility" (Wis 6.18). (p. 52, par. 4)

Thus, death reigns. When they lost knowledge or comprehension of God, they no longer participated in incorruptibility. Instead, they began their descent into non-being.

Closing Thoughts

While I find a lot of Athanasius’s ideas compelling, there are still a lot of questions I have about the implications of his thinking. And there’s always the possibility I’m interpreting some of his statements incorrectly, so I’m open to critique.

But I find his interpretation of Adam’s death comforting in that it foreshadows what we’ll see in the next article on Athanasius in which we’ll read how his view of death impacts how we view our life and incorruptibility in Christ. To Athanasius, there is no question that Jesus completely dealt with the death of Adam. I’ll leave you with the one of the quotes from the next article:

And thus, taking from ours that which is like, since all were liable to the corruption of death, delivering it over to death on behalf of all, he offered it to the Father, doing this in his love for human beings, so that, on the one hand, with all dying in him the law concerning corruption in human beings might be undone (its power being fully expended in the lordly body and no longer having any ground against similar human beings), and, on the other hand, that as human beings had turned towards corruption he might turn them again to incorruptibility and give them life from death, by making the body his own and by the grace of the resurrection banishing death from them as straw from the fire. (p. 57, par. 8)