Athanasius Gnostic Influences

Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, is known for his unyielding and courageous defense of the Trinity against Arianism in the Post-Nicene church. What is often missed in accounts of his teaching, however, is the influence of gnostic anti-materialism on his theology. This significant blindspot in his thinking should cause us to reevaluate his contributions to broader Christian theology, and especially to vet the biblical quality of his trinitarian system.

For example, Athanasius defines proper human behavior as contemplation of God, over and above contemplation of material things. This is similar to the gnostic idea of salvation/enlightenment by knowledge of higher realities rather than the evil, physical world.

For having nothing to hinder his knowledge of the Deity, [sinless man] ever beholds, by his purity, the Image of the Father, God the Word, after Whose image he himself is made. He is awestruck as he contemplates that Providence which through the Word extends to the universe, being raised above the things of sense and every bodily appearance, but cleaving to the divine and thought-perceived things in the heavens by the power of his mind.

For when the mind of men does not hold converse with bodies, nor has mingled with it from without anything of their lust, but is wholly above them, dwelling with itself as it was made to begin with, then, transcending the things of sense and all things human, it is raised up on high; and seeing the Word, it sees in Him also the Father of the Word, taking pleasure in contemplating Him, and gaining renewal by its desire toward Him.

— Athanasius, Against the Heathen (emphasis mine)

This asceticism teaches a reductionist view of man that values only his spiritual aspects. Contrary to this, the Bible teaches that man was created by God to take dominion over the physical, earthly world (Gen 1:26). His first tasks were to cultivate the garden of Eden, and to “sense” (see, touch, observe) and name the animal kingdom (Gen 2:15, 18-20). Nowhere do we see Adam’s desire for Eve criticized as a base and immoral lust; rather scripture holds marriage and marital sex in honor (Heb 13:4). Certainly man was to know his creator, as they walked together in the cool of the day (Gen 3:8). But he was to take that knowledge of God and apply it into every area of life over which he had been given dominion. The material world is the context within which we love and serve God, not a distraction from our contemplation of Him.

Yet this is how Athenasius frames the fall of man, that we turned our minds from contemplating God to contemplate instead the material world. In his view, this is an existential error. The problem with contemplating the material world is that it does not truly exist in its own right; it was created out of nothing. Because God is the only self-existent one, only he may be the subject of our contemplation. When we turn our minds to consider instead the material world, we depart from connecting with our own source of existence, and therefore decay back into nothingness.

3. The decline of man from the above condition, owing to his absorption in material things.

Thus then, as we have said, the Creator fashioned the race of men, and thus meant it to remain. But men, making light of better things, and holding back from apprehending them, began to seek in preference things nearer to themselves. But nearer to themselves were the body and its senses; so that while removing their mind from the things perceived by thought, they began to regard themselves; and so doing…they fell into lust of themselves, preferring what was their own to the contemplation of what belonged to God. Having then made themselves at home in these things, and not being willing to leave what was so near to them, they entangled their soul with bodily pleasures, vexed and turbid with all kind of lusts, while they wholly forgot the power they originally had from God

— Athanasius, Against the Heathen

Thus, then, God has made man, and willed that he should abide in incorruption; but men, having despised and rejected the contemplation of God, and devised and contrived evil for themselves (as was said in the former treatise), received the condemnation of death with which they had been threatened; and from thenceforth no longer remained as they were made, but were being corrupted according to their devices; and death had the mastery over them as king.

For transgression of the commandment was turning them back to their natural state, so that just as they have had their being out of nothing, so also, as might be expected, they might look for corruption into nothing in the course of time. For if, out of a former normal state of non-existence, they were called into being by the Presence and loving-kindness of the Word, it followed naturally that when men were bereft of the knowledge of God and were turned back to what was not (for what is evil is not, but what is good is), they should, since they derive their being from God who IS, be everlastingly bereft even of being; in other words, that they should be disintegrated and abide in death and corruption.

— Athanasius, On the Incarnation

Notably, Athanasius views death (not life) as man’s natural state, on account of his creation out of nothing. This of course goes against the whole emphasis of the biblical worldview, which postures death and corruption as a foreign enemy which corrupted God’s naturally good world (Gen 1-3).

We can see the problem in Athanasius’ thinking on a more granular level, in the creation of new children. Scripture sees an ethical distinction between the prevention of children (non-existence) versus the killing of children (death of existent children). The first is allowed and even praised by Paul in scripture, for those gifted by God to remain celibate for the sake of the kingdom (1Co 7:25-35), whereas the latter is prohibited as murder (Gen 9:6). Death and non-existence are not the same concept, and Athanasius’ inability to radically depart from the greek thinking of his day (in a return to more Jewish thinking) thereby led his system into significant and destructive error.

Despite his anti-materialism, it would be unfair to say that Athanasius himself was a Gnostic, because he opposed gnostic teaching in his writing. The point here is merely to suggest that the anti-materialism of gnostic thinking made it into Athanasius’ worldview, corrupting his understanding of the Bible. As he fought against gnosticism, he inadvertently accepted many of their unbiblical presuppositions, and accommodated Christianity to them, while making the various points of difference that he cared about.

This trend toward syncretism is seen throughout Church history unto our own day, such as when Christians attempt to read evolutionary thinking into the Bible’s account of creation. The purpose may be well-meaning and unconscious of any compromise of the biblical text. But a failure to sufficiently vet Secular ideas can lead to theologies that sound biblical on the surface, while departing from scripture in significant ways.

Athanasius accepted the anti-material presuppositions of his contemporary Gnostics, but opposed the idea that matter is intrinsically evil. For Athanasius, evil is located in a person’s contemplation of the material world, not in the material world itself. This allowed him to reconcile the problem of evil in a world created by a good God, because evil is not a created phenomenon. It is a problem in man’s contemplation of the non-existent material world, instead of the existent God.

Evil, then consists essentially in the choice of what is lower in preference to what is higher…

Now certain of the Greeks, having erred from the right way, and not having known Christ, have ascribed to evil a substantive and independent existence. In this they make a double mistake: either in denying the Creator to be maker of all things, if evil had an independent subsistence and being of its own; or again, if they mean that He is maker of all things, they will of necessity admit Him to be maker of evil also. For evil, according to them, is included among existing things.

But this must appear paradoxical and impossible. For evil does not come from good, nor is it in, or the result of good, since in that case it would not be good, being mixed in its nature or a cause of evil.

Regardless of the distinction he made between his own view and that of the Gnostics, Athanasius still imported into Christianity an anti-material asceticism that undermines the value and importance of God’s good creation. Athanasius encouraged Christians to focus on and learn about God through internal reflection, but God reveals himself through all of the things that he made (Rom 1:20). We can grant that man will learn some things about God through internal reflection, since our own minds are part of the creation that testifies about him. But we also can learn from the external world, including (at the very least) the scriptures that God inspired and orchestrated through the lives and writings of other people.

Nancy Pearcey, in her book Total Truth, traces the history of anti-material ideas from the Greek philosophers, through the development of syncretistic Christian theology, to the modern sacred/secular divide between subjective values and objective, measurable truth claims. Ideas about the material world, such as those developed through science, history, mathematics, and other such disciplines, are considered testable and therefore “public facts.” Ideas about religion, philosophy, morality etc. are considered subjective and therefore exclusively personal. Thus any attempt to link the Bible to the real world, through the many truth claims it makes about science and history etc. is arbitrarily discarded because Christianity allowed an anti-material strain of thinking to enter its theology, and by extension, all of western civilization. The whole universe is God’s universe, and all truth is his truth. So while the ancient arguments may seem arcane at places, the philosophical impact of anti-material thinking upon the Church and western civilization cannot be easily overstated.

Trinity Berean as a site is, of course, focused on evaluating the biblical quality of trinitarian truth claims. Athanasius’ gnostic strains may not directly impact his views on the trinity, but they should cause us to take a more reserved approach to evaluating the theological accomplishments of the Church Fathers. We cannot just assume that the Nicene Church got everything right in their systematization of scripture. If Athanasius could be so off-base on the nature of man, and the fall of man, etc., then he could certainly have problems in his view of the godhead and the incarnation of Christ.

Rather than elevate the Church Fathers to a point of practical inerrancy, we should “be Bereans” and reevaluate what they came up with whenever it seems to contradict a clear teaching of scripture. Just as Jesus was always bringing his disciples back to the word of God over the theological traditions of man, we too must compare scripture to scripture, and not be bound by the straitjacket of our own historic traditions.