ABSTRACT
We begin our investigation of the theme of the relation between God and creation in Athanasius by analyzing its significance in his earliest doctrinal treatise, the Contra Gentes-De Incarnatione. In dealing with this double work, the first issue to present itself is the controversy regarding its dating, with suggestions varying from as early as c. AD 3181 or as late as the 350s.2 Traditionally, it has been presumed that the apparent lack of reference to the Arian heresy is sufficient proof for a date prior to the condemnation of Arius, c. 318. However, as early as the late nineteenth century, this argument was undermined by Loofs’s observation that neither do the Festal Letters show any reference to the Arians before 335.3 This omission was explained by Charles Kannengiesser, who dates the work during Athanasius’s first exile, as an intentional silence motivated by political expediency.4 Kannengiesser takes Athanasius’s comment about not having “our teachers’ works to hand” in Contra Gentes 1 (hereafter cited as CG) as an allusion to the bishop’s exile, and further specifies the date by linking a reference in De Incarnatione 24 (hereafter DI) to those who wish to divide the Church with a similar phrase in the Festal Letter of 337, both taken as alluding to the Arians. Besides accounting for the relative maturity of the work, this suggestion also has the advantage of helping to explain Athanasius’s apparent dependence on Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica and Theophany.
