GroshLink

While researching material on Advent, I came across Jaroslav Pelikan's The Light of the World (NY:  Harper & Brothers, 1962), which explores the work of Athanasius (c293-373). 

Join me in reflecting upon Athanasius' interpretation of the meaning of our literary images of God.  More quotes coming . . . 

"In order to express our thought in language, it is necessary to make use of an unsatisfactory image taken from the tangible and familiar objects; for it is rash to pry into the incomprehensible nature [of God]."

Athanasius was speaking here about the image "light," as this was applied to the relation between Christ and God.  His explanation was called forth by the Arian attempt to interpret the words "All things have been delivered to me by my Father" (Luke 10:22) as proof that the Son was subordinate to the Father.  Although he commented upon the "admirable precision" of biblical words, he meant not their literal accuracy as propositions but their clarity as images.  Elsewhere he noted that images like "word," "light," and "wisdom" were accommodations to man's inability to grasp the idea of God.  It was the function of such images to make it possible for the human mind to form some idea of God, "to the extent that this is attainable."  Continuing in the same vein a little later in the same treatise, he addressed himself to the problem of doubt.  Faced by the vastness and the mystery of God, man could easily give up the effort to make sense of divine revelation.  Yet Athanasius insisted:  "In doubt it is better to be silent and to go on believing that to stop believing because of doubt."  He therefore counseled those in doubt to contemplate the images in which the Scriptures described divine being.  And since the image under consideration in his discussion was that of Christ as the Logos of God, he turned his exposition to any analysis of both the possibilities and the limits of this image as a way of speaking above the inner life of God.  His procedure seems to have been one of excluding from the image those features that did not properly symbolize and of retaining only those which stood for genuine analogies between the Logos of God and the logos of man" -- pp.23-24.