And it is possible to affirm that thenceforward he who does not believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ may be Christophile but cannot be specifically Christian.  It is true that a Justin Martyr could say that “all those are Christians who live in accordance with reason, even though they may be deemed to be atheists, as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and other such”; but this martyr, is he a martyr—­that is to say a witness—­of Christianity?  No.

And it was around this dogma, inwardly experienced by Paul, the dogma of the resurrection and immortality of Christ, the guarantee of the resurrection and immortality of each believer, that the whole of Christology was built up.  The 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;