St. Athanasius composed one of the most important books in Christian literature, On the Incarnation, which provides a discourse on the divinity of Christ and the redemptive purpose of the Incarnation. In explaining the reason behind the Word of God becoming man, St. Athanasius provides five main arguments; in this article, we will cover the last one.
The Incarnation is the best way for God to reveal Himself to man and for man to know God.
Finally, St. Athanasius mentions the deep yearning in each human to know and see God. At the same time, God too wanted to reveal Himself to man out of His love for us. It was the Incarnation that would make this happen. As St. Athanasius explained:
Then God the Almighty was making mankind through His own Word, He perceived that they, owing to the limitation of their nature, could not of themselves have any knowledge of their Artificer, the Incorporeal and Uncreated. He took pity on them, therefore, and did not leave them destitute of the knowledge of Himself, lest their very existence should prove purposeless.
St. Athanasius argued for God’s purpose to reveal Himself to us; otherwise, “Why should God have made them at all, if He had not intended them to know Him?”.
For man, seeing and knowing God is the only way to live a happy life:
“through Him to apprehend the Father, whose knowledge of their Maker is for men the only really happy and blessed life.” Otherwise, “what was the use of their ever having had the knowledge of God? Surely it would have been better for God never to have bestowed it than that men should subsequently be found unworthy to receive it.”
As such, St. Athanasius concludes by questioning,
“What else could He possibly do, being God, but renew His image in mankind, so that through it men might once more come to know Him? And how could this be done, save by the coming of the very image of Himself, our Saviour Jesus Christ? Men could not have done it, for they are only made after the Image; nor could angels have done it, for they are not the images of God.”
Another important point that St. Athanasius mentions is the fact that humans mostly understand through their senses. God, knowing this, “in His great love, took to Himself a body and moved as Man among men, meeting their senses, so to speak, halfway. He became Himself an object for the senses so that those who were seeking God in sensible things might apprehend the Father through the works which He, the Word of God, did in the body.”
The incarnation also provides humans with answers to many of their questions:
- Did their minds tend to regard men as Gods? The uniqueness of the Saviour’s works marked Him, alone of men, as the Son of God.
- Were they drawn to evil spirits? They saw them driven out by the Lord and learned that the Word of God alone was God and that the evil spirits were not gods at all.
- Were they inclined towards hero worship and the cult of the dead? Then the fact that the Saviour had risen from the dead showed them how false these other deities were and that the Word of the Father is the one true Lord, the Lord even of death… For this reason, He did not offer the sacrifice on behalf of all immediately [after] He came, for if He had surrendered His body to death and then raised it again at once, He would have ceased to be an object of our senses. Instead of that, He stayed in His body and let Himself be seen in it, doing acts and giving signs which showed Him to be not only man but also God the Word.”