On the Incarnation (St. Athanasius)

St Athanasius’ short treatise on why the Word became flesh, the second half of a single work whose first is Against the Heathen. It was written in his youth, before the Arian controversy by the traditional reckoning, or in his first exile in the 330s by a later one. Its argument begins with the Fall as a slide back toward the nothing from which humanity was made: God could not let His image perish, and He could not take back His word that death would follow the transgression. So the Word took a body capable of death, gave it up for all, and raised it, and death was undone from within. A portrait that has been defaced, he says, is not thrown away: the one it depicts comes again, so that the likeness can be renewed on the same wood. Near its end stands its most quoted sentence, He was made man that we might be made god. C.S. Lewis introduced its English translation of 1944, and used the occasion to urge readers to take an old book for every new one.