Classroom · Orientation · lesson 3 of 5
The question it answers
Not whether it happened, but why it would have to happen that way.
It is worth naming the question early, because the middle of the book is hard to follow without it. Athanasius is not arguing that the Incarnation occurred. He is arguing that, given what God is and what had gone wrong with us, nothing else would have served — and that the shape of it, down to the manner of the death, is not arbitrary.
He puts the problem as a genuine difficulty rather than a rhetorical one. God is good, so He cannot watch His own work be destroyed. God had said that transgression would be met with death, so He cannot simply set that aside without being shown false. Both have to hold at once. Most of parts two through five is the working-out of that.
Athanasius knows this looks like a detour, and he says so himself in part one, mid-argument: he has promised to speak about the Word becoming man and finds himself telling the story of how men began. His answer is that the two cannot be separated — our condition is the occasion of His coming.
From the book itself
The passage, in full
Perhaps you wonder why, having set out to speak of the Word's becoming man, we are now telling of the origin of mankind. But this too belongs to the purpose of our account. For in speaking of the Savior's appearing among us, we must also speak of how men began, so that you may know that our own condition was the occasion of His descent, and that our own transgression called forth the love of the Word for mankind. It was so that the Lord came even to us, and appeared among men: we were the cause of His taking a body. For our salvation He so loved us that He came to be, and to be seen, in a human body.
A line to keep
what was God to do, being good?