e God-man, the incarnate Word, came in order
that man, according to his mode, might be made God--that is, immortal.
And the Christian God, the Father of Christ, a God necessarily
anthropomorphic, is He who--as the Catechism of Christian Doctrine which
we were made to learn by heart at school says--created the world for
man, for each man. 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.
"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, appare