The Fatherhood of God from Origen to Athanasius (review)

This work traces the image of divine fatherhood in the Alexandrian tradition from Origen to Athanasius. While devoting five chapters to the former and four to the latter, Widdicombe also deals in two intervening chapters with the significant Alexandrians in the generations separating them: Dionysius, Theognostus, and, more importantly, Arius. Following Rowan Williams, Widdicombe believes that Methodius sets the stage for Arius by sharpening of the distinction between God and the created order in his criticism of the Origen’s doctrine of creation. Looking to the present theological concern for gender-specific language related to God, Widdicombe argues in a postscript that Father-Son language is integral to the Christian understanding of God as historically developed and that the figures with whom he is concerned “avoid drawing on the biological or the psychological and sociological dimensions of human fatherhood” in a way that would tie their theology of divine father to the Patriarchal institutions of their society.

Widdicombe states that “For Athanasius, the word Father signified that the divine nature was both inherently generative, giving life to the Son and through him to all other things, and inherently relational, a relation of Father and Son in which mutual love is eternally both given and received” (3). In giving divine fatherhood this importance, Athanasius evidences his indebtedness to Origen. Indeed, a thread of continuity linking the two is their insistence that, since fatherhood, an essential aspect of the godhead, is a correlative term, it implies an eternal generative relationship to the divine Son. Both men also taught that human salvation is fundamentally a process of being brought into the inner life of the Trinity through adoption as sons. Widdicombe thus argues that, for Origen no less than for Athanasius, Trintarian theology is grounded in soteriology. With regard to Origen, he states that, “The Son is a model for our knowing and loving God, and therefore must be a subject of knowledge and love and have a hypostatic existence comparable to ours” (90).

Widdicombe shows how Origen, even while drawing on Middle Platonic understandings of the ineffability and unnamability of God, took Plato to task for being insufficiently radical in his understanding of God’s transcendence. Plato allowed that some few people could attain knowledge of God, even if doing so was very difficult, but, according to Origen, Christians do not believe that human understanding can reach God at all, even though such understanding is potentially accessible to all, not just to Plato’s few, through grace mediated by the divine hypostases. Even while opening up the possibility of the knowledge of the many, Origen still made full entry of the divine Father-Son relationship depend on a protracted process of moral and intellectual purification. Thus, “We come to know God as Father through a step-by-step progression to the status of adopted sons and thus to a share in the eternal relationship of the Father and the Son. Origen portrays this progression as a spiritual pilgrimage from the condition of fear, servitude, and ignorance which characterizes the Lord-servant relationship to that of filial knowledge and love which characterizes the Father-Son relationship. This pilgrimage involves a corresponding development in our moral behaviour: as we become morally pure, we grow in our knowledge of Wisdom and in our degree of sonship” (93). An implication of this human entry into the divine Father-Son relationship is that “God has not begotten justice once for all time, but is continuously generating justice in each good human act” (97–98).

Drawing principally on the Contra Gentes, De Incarnatione, and Contra Arianos I–III (Widdicombe follows Christopher Stead in regarding Bk. III as genuine), discusses how Athanasius understood God as Father, related the Father to the Son, and described human salvation in terms of an entry into their relationship. Widdicombe shows that Athanasius takes for granted much that Origen had to establish: the notion that Fatherhood implies generativity and love, the noncorporeal and transcendent character of divine fatherhood, the...