“53 And, to mention one proof of the divinity of the Savior, which is indeed exceedingly wonderful: which mere human being or magician or tyrant or king was ever able to take so much upon himself, and to battle against all idolatry and the whole demonical host and all magic and all the wisdom of the Greeks, while they were so strong and still flourishing and captivating all, and at one turn withstand them all, as our Lord, the true Word of God who, invisibly confuting the error of each, alone despoils all of them of all human beings, so that those who worshipped idols now trample upon them, those who were under the spell of magic now burn their books (cf. Acts 19:19), and the wise prefer the interpretation of the Gospels above everything else?
Those whom they worshipped, them they abandon, while the crucified One whom they mocked, Him they worship as Christ, confessing Him to be God. Those called gods by them are driven out by the sign of the cross, while the crucified Savior is proclaimed in all the inhabited world as God and Son of God.
The gods worshipped by the Greeks, are reviled by them as shameful, while those who receive the teaching of Christ lead a more sober life than they. If, then, these and such works are human, let anyone who wishes point out similar things from those before, and persuade us.
But if they appear to be, and are, works not of human beings but of God, why are the unbelievers so impious as not to recognize the Master who wrought them? They are afflicted like one who did not know, from the works of creation, God their creator.
For if they knew His divinity from His power over the universe, they would have known that Christ’s works in the body also are not human but are of the Savior of all, the Word of God. And knowing this, as Paul said, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8).
54 Therefore, just as if someone wishes to see God, who is invisible by nature and not seen at all, understands and knows Him from His works, so let one who does not see Christ with his mind learn of Him from the works of His body, and test whether they be human or of God.
And if they be human, let him mock; but if they are known to be not human, but of God, let him not laugh at things that should not be mocked, but let him rather marvel that through such a paltry thing things divine have been manifested to us, and that through death incorruptibility has come to all, and through the incarnation of the Word the universal providence, and its giver and creator, the very Word of God, have been made known.
For He was incarnate that we might be made god (ie. glorified, 2 Peter 1:4); and He manifested Himself through a body that we might perceive the mind of the invisible Father; and He endured the insults of human beings, that we might inherit incorruptibility.
He himself was harmed in no way, being impassible and incorruptible and the very Word and God; but He held and preserved in His own impassibility the suffering human beings, on whose account He endured these things.
And, in short, the achievements of the Savior, effected by His incarnation, are of such a kind and number that if anyone should wish to expound them he would be like those who gaze at the expanse of the sea and wish to count its waves.
For as one cannot take in all the waves with one’s eyes, since those coming on elude the perception of one who tries, so also one who would comprehend all the achievements of Christ in the body is unable to take in the whole, even by reckoning them up, for those that elude his thought are more than he thinks he has grasped.
Therefore it is better not to seek to speak of the whole, of which one cannot even speak of a part, but rather to recall one thing, and leave the whole for you to marvel at.
For all are equally marvelous, and wherever one looks, seeing there the divinity of the Word, one is smitten with awe.”
–Athanasius the Great of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, ed. John Behr, trans. John Behr, vol. 44a, Popular Patristics Series (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 373/2011), 165–167. (53-54)
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