And the end of redemption, in spite of appearances
due to an ethical deflection of a dogma properly religious, was to save
us from death rather than from sin, or from sin in so far as sin implies
death. And Christ died, or rather rose again, for _me_, for each one of
us. And a certain solidarity was established between God and His
creature. Malebranche said that the first man fell _in order that_
Christ might redeem us, rather than that Christ redeemed us _because_
man had fallen.
After the death of Paul years passed, and generations of Christianity
wrought upon this central dogma and its consequences in order to
safeguard faith in the immortality of the individual soul, and the
Council of Nicaea came, and with it the formidable Athanasius, whose
name is still a battle-cry, an incarnation of the popular faith.
Athanasius was a man of little learning but of great faith, and above
all of popular faith, devoured by the hunger of immortality. And he
opposed Arianism, which, like Unitarian and Socinian Protestantism,
threatened, although unknowingly and unintentionally, the foundation of
that belief. For the Arians, Christ was first and foremost a teacher--a
teacher of morality, the wholly perfect man, and therefore the guarantee
that we may all attain to supreme perfection; but Athanasius felt that
Christ cannot make us gods if he has not first made himself God; if his
Divinity had been communicated, he could not have communicated it to us.
Pages:
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125