This paper explores Athanasius's treatment of Christ's suffering and
grief in the third Oration Against the Arians through the lens of ideas
about the soul's impassibility in proximate Platonist anthropology. It
is argued that Athanasius's ascription of Christ's grief to Christ's
flesh, or body, rather than to the Word needs to be seen in light of the
common idea that human souls are passible only, or primarily, through
human bodies. This idea is found, for example, in Plotinus and Gregory
of Nyssa. Read in this way, Athanasius gives the Word the place in
affective experience that was given to the soul in much Platonist
anthropology: he deploys the notion that intelligible beings are
passible through embodiment to suggest that the Word suffers through
Christ's body. This needs, in turn, to be set in the context of
Athanasius's claim that the Word became human: rather than protecting
the Word from Christ's grief and suffering, Athanasius argues the Word
became passible, and so suffered, in the incarnation. This paper thus
argues that Athanasius's third Oration Against the Arians is an example
of anti-subordinationist, theopaschite theology in the ‘Arian'
controversy. It further suggests that Athanasius implies that his
opponents' theological and Christological error is based partly on a
flawed anthropology.
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