Free The Case for God by Karen Armstrong Page A

because we had no idea what God was that we could say that God had been in the man Jesus. It was also impossible to say that God’s substance was
not
in Christ, because we could not identify the
ousia
of God; it lay completely beyond our ken, so we did not know what we were denying. Christians would not have been able to experience the “deification” of
theosis
or even imagine the unknowable God unless God had—in some unfathomable way—taken the initiative and entered the realm of fragile creatures. “The Word became human that we might become divine,” Athanasius wrote in his treatise
On the Incarnation;
“he revealed himself through a body that we might receive an idea of the invisible Father.” 18 When we looked at the man Jesus, therefore, we had a partial glimpse of the otherwise unknowable God, and God’s Spirit, an immanent presence within us, enabled us to recognize this.
    Unfortunately, Constantine, who had no understanding of the issues, decided to intervene and summoned all the bishops to Nicaea in Asia Minor on May 20, 325. Athanasius managed to impose his views on the delegates, and the council issued a statement that Christ, the Word, had not been created but had been begotten “in an ineffable, indescribable manner” from the
ousia
of the Father—not from nothingness like everything else. So he was “from God” in an entirely different manner from all other creatures. 19 The paradoxical terminology of the Nicene statement revealed the new emphasis on the absolute unknowability of the “ineffable, indescribable” God. 20 But this authoritative ruling solved nothing. Because of imperial pressure, all the delegates except Arius and two of his colleagues signed the statement, but once they had returned to their dioceses, they continued to teach as they had always done—for the most part midwaybetween Arius and Athanasius. This attempt to impose a uniform belief on the bishops and the faithful was counterproductive. Nicaea led to another fifty years of acrimony, divisions, conciliar deliberations, and even to violence, as creedal orthodoxy became politicized. The Nicene Council would eventually become a symbol of orthodoxy, but it would be centuries before Athanasius’s formula was restated in a form that Christians were willing to accept—and even then there was no uniformity.
    Eastern and Western Christians would understand the incarnation very differently. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) defined the doctrine of atonement that became normative in the West: God became man in order to expiate the sin of Adam. Orthodox Christians have never accepted this. The Orthodox view of Jesus was defined by Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662), who believed that the Word would have become flesh even if Adam had not sinned. Jesus was the first human being to be wholly “deified,” entirely possessed and permeated by the divine, and we could all be like him, even in this life. The Word had become incarnate in order that “the whole human being would become God, deified by the grace of God become man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body by grace.” 21 As a result of this divine initiative, God and humanity had become inseparable. The man Jesus gave us our only hint of what God was like and had shown that human beings could participate in some indefinable way in the being of the incomprehensible God. We could no longer think “God” without thinking “human,” or “human” without thinking “God.”
    Maximus fully accepted Athanasius’s appreciation of the absolute transcendence of God. The revelation of the incarnate Logos made it clear that God must be absolutely unknowable. It was only because we did
not
regard God as an immense being (as Arius did) that we could say that God could remain the all-powerful God at the same time as assuming the frailty of human flesh, because any mere being of our experience could not be two incompatible things at once. It was only