Virginia Burrus offers a challenging feminist reading of the first of Athanasius’ Orations against the Arians in ‘Begotten, Not Made’: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture) .  Her attention to Athanasius’ sexually charged rhetoric reveals the underlying structure of Athanasius’ argument.  Orthodoxy is linked with a) God the Father begetting (without feminine intervention) a Son of His own nature; b) bishops “begetting” faithful sons.  Arius is illegitimate and feminized: a) theologically, his Father does not beget a “proper” son but instead constructs an illegitimate creature-son; b) ecclesiastically, Arius has abandoned his “father,” Alexander of Alexandria, and the “fathers” of Nicea, and instead consults with and mislead “little women” (citing 2 Timothy 2:6-7).  He is part of another family, the heretical family made up of “sisters” not brothers, whose archetype is Eve and whose father is ultimately the devil.

At several points, however, Burrus’ characterization of Athanasian theology is questionable.

First, she characterizes Athanasius’ theology as “static” because he teaches the Father and Son share the same essence: “Athanasius’s filial Logos is, as we have seen, defined by its immutability, its fixed or static essence.”  Later, she characterizes his theology as: “Frozen, fixed, essentially Father, essentially Son.”  Analogously, Athanasius appeals to Scripture in defense, so that his theology of divine Fatherhood and Sonship is “a lettered phenomenon” that relies on “the frozen words of Scripture to deliver the certainties of an immutable patriliny.”  But it is a central point of Athanasian theology that God is inherently productive, fertile, and precisely not “fixed or static.”  Still, I think there’s something to her criticism, to which I’ll return after noting another of her criticisms of Athanasius.

Second, she notes that for Athanasius creation, made from nothing, is inherently unstable, always in danger of slipping back into the nothingness from which it came.  She puts it arrestingly: “Materiality is the realm of what is contrived or fictive, and a corruptible and changeable creation is the natural ally of the Deceiver and his daughters.”  While it may be an exaggeration to say that creation, as it were, sides with the devil, again she is picking up a genuine thread of Athanasian theology.  She links this suspicion of creation with a suspicion of femininity.  In the immaterial God, the Father begets the Son without a mother; in the hierarchy of the church, there is a succession of fathers and sons that aspires to reproduce the exclusively masculine generativity of God.

Thus, her exploration of Athanasius is linked to a claim about the construction of gender and subjectivity in Western history: “his writings exemplify and concretize a broader historical shift in Western theories of subjectivity and practices of theory, in which a radical suppression of materiality is accompanied by an explicit masculinization of the constructive ‘self,’ articulated in the theological terms of a motherless patriliny.”

Again, I think Burrus’ claims are overstated.  Insofar as they hit the target, though, I think they hit it in both cases because of an underdeveloped or not-yet-developed pneumatology.  Athanasius doesn’t teach that God’s essence if “static” or “frozen,” but insofar as it appears that he does, it’s because he doesn’t place enough emphasis on the Spirit.  If we recognize that the Spirit is the one “between” the Father and the Son, the breath by which the Father speaks His Word and the “womb” in which He begets His Son, then charges of “frozenness” or even exclusion of the “feminine” are harder to make.  Similarly, if the Spirit is the Person of continuity between bishops and sons, if the Spirit “guarantees” “episcopal succession,” then again we have a “between” between fathers and sons.  And if the Spirit is the Person who hovers over the waters, who not only forms but sustains the materiality of a creation made from nothing, if the creation is the love language of Father to Son impassioned by the Spirit (Jenson), then we have little ground for any suspicion of materiality.

Pneumatology developed later than Christology, and the earlier formulas, somewhat one-sided because they are focused more or less exclusively on the Father-Son relation, require correction and refinement from later pneumatological developments.