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The manner in which Athanasius conceives of the relationship between the Word of God and his assumed humanity is rightly described as instrumentalist'. The acting agent in the life of Jesus Christ is understood to be the Logos simpliciter, who has put on' or taken up' human flesh in order to accomplish the salvation of human persons - but is, in his own eternal person, unaltered. This is striking to a post-Chalcedonian understanding of the Incarnation as a hypostatic union of two natures, divine and human, which results in the Word's becoming a composite person whose humanity is no less important to his identity than is his divinity. The purpose of this paper is to test the sufficiency of Athanasius' understanding of the Incarnation for Christian dogmatics.