Emma Brown Dewhurst

For Athanasius, non-being describes the original state of creatures, and the state that creatures return to when they are not sustained by God. ‘Being’ is a gift given to creatures. Sin, for Athanasius, is creaturely rejection of God and therefore rejection of being itself. This suggests that when we sin, humans fall into nothingness and cease to exist, leading to the implication that fallen human nature and personal sin should result in our immediate non-existence. In this paper, I describe Athanasius’ position on non-being and sin, and then go on to look at how the theology of Maximus the Confessor may offer a means to understanding the difficulty implied in Athanasius’ work. I look at how Maximus understands being to be transformative, and something into which humans grow. Perfect being, which is full communion with God, or absolute non-being are, through Christ, reserved for the time after this life on earth.

This paper concerns Athanasius’ understanding of non-existence and how human beings relate to it and to God. This consideration is important because it sheds light on how we understand human rejection of God. Without a definite affirmation of the reality of human rejection of God, we have very little grounds to talk about human freedom and co-operation with God. One of the things Athanasius allows us to do, is to conceive of both the moment of creation and sustaining providence as pivotal, continuous relationships between the created order and the Creator. These relationships are broken by sin. In On the Incarnation, Athanasius poses the premise that: if creatures are brought forth out of nothing by the Word and sustained by him, then when creatures break from him and withdraw themselves from him, they reject being itself. To return to non-existence, or non-being, is thus a result of sin, of choosing to reject God. This paper is about how literally we can under- stand Athanasius’ dedication to the idea that sinning returns us to a state of nothing identical to that we were first brought out of in Genesis. On the one hand, we need a strong affirmation of the reality of human choice to turn from God, but on the other, sin clearly does not result in an immediate lapse into non-being equivalent to that from which we have been brought forth, since we continue to go about our daily lives. To address this difficulty, I draw on the logic of Maximus the Confessor to think about how sense can be made of this seemingly paradoxical situation.