on the incarnation athanasius of alexandria

After speaking of the especial fitness of the Cross, once the instrument of shame, now the trophy of victory, and after meet ing some difficulties connected with the manner of the Lord's Death, he passes to the Resurrection.

He, who alone could renew the handiwork and restore the likeness and give afresh the knowledge of God, must needs, in order to pay the debt which all had incurred, die in our stead, offering the sacrifice on behalf of all, so as to rise again, as our first-fruits, from the grave. Having dwelt upon the meaning and purpose of the Incarnation, he proceeds to speak of the death and resurrection of the Incarnate Word. Accordingly, condescending to man's sense-bound intelligence lest men should have been created in vain in the Image of God the Word took Flesh and became an object of Sense, that through the Seen he might reveal the Invisible.

To restore the effaced Likeness the presence of the Original was requisite. Heeding not even the means by which God sought to remind them of himself, they fell deeper and deeper into materialism and superstition. This knowledge their moral fall dimmed and perverted. With the Divine Life, men had also received, in the knowledge of God, the conscious reflex of the Divine Likeness, the faculty of reason in its highest exercise. Then follows a description in glowing words of the Incarnation of the Divine Word and of its efficacy against the plague of corruption. By foregoing the Divine Life, man had entered upon a course of endless undoing, of progressive decay, from which none could rescue him but the original Bestower of his life. The abuse by man of his special privilege had resulted in its loss. He begins by a review of the doctrine of creation and of man's place therein.

On the incarnation athanasius of alexandria