“Such and so many are the Saviour’s achievements that follow from His Incarnation, that to try to number them is like gazing at the open sea and trying to count the waves. One cannot see all the waves with one’s eyes, for when one tries to do so those that are following on baffle one’s senses.
Even so, when one wants to take in all the achievements of Christ in the body, one cannot do so, even by reckoning them up, for the things that transcend one’s thoughts are always more than those one thinks that one has grasped.
As we cannot speak adequately about even a part of His work, therefore, it will be better for us not to speak about it as a whole. So we will mention but one thing more, and then leave the whole for you to marvel at.
For, indeed everything about it is marvelous, and wherever a man turns his gaze he sees the Godhead of the Word and is smitten with awe.”
–Athanasius, On the Incarnation 8. 54. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 373/1993), 93.
I love the church fathers now, it’s so weird I grew up never hearing anything from anyone pre-Reformation. 90% of what I read now is pre-700AD or so. I think my old teachers were afraid I would go Eastern Orthodox.
I now blend the Reformations heavy focus on WORD with the East’s symbolic IMAGE (Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nyssa are great, so is Jonathan Pageau on Youtube, “Symbolic World”). The ancients (including Biblical authors) would communicate idea’s via symbology and we largely have lost that in the rational West. I remain Protestant, but benefit from studying the early Eastern fathers.
Over time you study the symbolic thinking and then they start to come off the page all over the OT and NT. Pageau explains Gregory of Nyssa well on the Garden of Eden, it ends up being like a mountain with Christ being sacrificed on the very top on the Tree of Life, and art throughout the centuries would often paint a birds nest on top of the Cross to signify this.