"He was not, therefore," he said, "first man and then became God; but He
was first God and then became man in order that He might the better
deify us (_theopoiese_)" (_Orat._ i. 39). It was not the Logos of
the philosophers, the cosmological Logos, that Athanasius knew and
adored;[15] and thus he instituted a separation between nature and
revelation. The Athanasian or Nicene Christ, who is the Catholic Christ,
is not the cosmological, nor even, strictly, the ethical Christ; he is
the eternalizing, the deifying, the religious Christ. Harnack says of
this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, that he is
essentially docetic--that is, apparential--because the process of the
divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of
eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called
historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a
myth or in a social atom?
This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us that Arianism or
Unitarianism would have been the death of Christianity, reducing it to
cosmology and ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the
learned might pass over to Catholicism--that is to say, from reason to
faith. To this same learned historian of dogmas it appears to be an
indication of a perverse state of things that the man Athanasius, who
saved Christianity as the religion of a living communion with God,
should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus,
whom neither Paul nor Athanasius knew personally, nor yet Harnack
himself.
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