On the Incarnation: Saint Athanasius (Popular Patristics Series Book 44)

by Athanasius of Alexandria

They do not realize that saying such things is to impute weakness to God: for if he is not himself the cause of matter, but simply makes things from pre-existent matter, then he is weak, not being able without matter to fashion any of the things that exist, just as the weakness of the carpenter is certainly his inability to make any required thing without wood.

For speaking of the manifestation of the Savior to us, it is necessary also to speak of the origin of human beings, in order that you might know that our own cause was the occasion of his descent and that our own transgression evoked the Word’s love for human beings, so that the Lord both came to us and appeared among human beings.

For these reasons, then, with death holding greater sway and corruption remaining fast against human beings, the race of humans was perishing, and the human being, made rational and in the image, was disappearing, and the work made by God was being obliterated.

It was therefore right not to permit human beings to be carried away by corruption, because this would be improper to and unworthy of the goodness of God.

But human beings, being again foolish, despising the grace thus given to them, so turned away from God and so darkened their own soul, that they not only forgot the concept of God but also fashioned for themselves others instead. They fabricated idols for themselves instead of the truth and honored beings which do not exist rather than God who is, worshipping “the creation rather than the Creator” (Rom 1.25), and, much worse, they even transferred the honor due to God to wood and stones and to every material object, and even to human beings, and went even further than this, as we described in the former treatise. They were so impious that they even thereafter worshipped demons and called them gods, fulfilling their own desires. They sacrificed irrational animals and slaughtered human beings, as we said earlier, as was required of them, ensnaring themselves even more in their own frenzies.