About AD 318, Athanasius, a deacon in Alexandria, writes to answer the questions: Why did God the Word become man? What did he accomplish? Why is it impossible to ascribe these things to a created being?
This article is especially important because it was also in 318 that the Alexandrian presbyter Arius began teaching that “there was a time when the Son was not,” challenging the doctrine of the Trinity.
Here Athanasius, the future Patriarch of Alexandria, shows in advance the understanding that will lead the Council at Nicea seven years later to reject the Arian proposal, recognizing that no one but a Person of the Godhead could unite man to God in himself.
Athanasius writes:
In our last book, we dealt fully enough with a few points about the error of the nations regarding the worship of idols, and how those false fears originally arose. And by God’s grace, we briefly pointed out that the Word of the Father is Himself divine, and his providence and power in all things, that it is through him that the Father gives order to creation. By him all things live and move and have their being.
Now, Macarius, true lover of Christ, let us take a step further in the faith of our religion, and consider also how the Word became Man and was divinely manifest in our midst.
You must understand why it is that the Word of the Father, so great and so high, has been made manifest in bodily form. He has not assumed a body as if it were proper to his own nature; rather, being by nature bodiless and existing as the Word, by the love for humankind and goodness of his own Father he appeared to us in a human body for our salvation.
So we will begin with the creation of the world and with God its Creator, for the first fact that you must grasp is this: The renewal of creation has been brought about by the Word who made it in the beginning. There is no contradiction if the Father accomplishes its salvation in the same One by whom he created it.
