Category — Athanasius

“His epitaph is Athanasius contra mundum, “Athanasius against the world.” We are proud that our own country has more than once stood against the world. Athanasius did the same. He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, “whole and undefiled,” when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those “sensible” synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away”.

— CS Lewis, Introduction to On the Incarnation

“But for the searching of the Scriptures and true knowledge of them, an honourable life is needed, and a pure soul, and that virtue which is according to Christ; so that the intellect guiding its path by it, may be able to attain what it desires, and to comprehend it, in so far as it is accessible to human nature to learn concerning the Word of God. For without a pure mind and a modelling of the life after the saints, a man could not possibly comprehend the words of the saints”.
— Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 57:1-2

“We will begin with the creation of the world and with God its maker, for the first fact you must grasp is this: the renewal of the creation has been wrought by the self-same Word who made it in the beginning…

In order to affect this re-creation, however, He had first to do away with death and corruption. Therefore He assumed a human body, in order that in it death might once for all be destroyed, and that men might be renewed according to the image”.
— Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 1:1, 3:13

“Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day”.
— 2 Corinthians 4:16

What is apparent is that God does not simply erase us and start over, but remakes what is essentially new through the fall into something old again. God is a revivalist.