We are not at a loss for a reply fitting to God on this point either. You ask the reason why God came to be among human beings? If you remove from life the benefits that come from God, you would have no way to say from what things you recognize the divine. For it is from the good we receive that we recognize the benefactor; looking to what is done, through these things we reason about the nature of the one who acts. If, then, love for humanity is a distinctive mark of the divine nature, you have the reason you were seeking; you have the cause of God's presence among human beings.
For our nature, having become weak, needed one who heals; the human being who had fallen needed one who raises up; the one who had lost life needed a life-giver; the one who had slipped away from participation in the good needed one who leads back to the good; the one imprisoned in darkness needed the presence of light; the captive sought a redeemer, the prisoner an ally in the struggle, and the one held under the yoke of slavery a liberator. Were these things small and unworthy of moving God to descend for the visitation of human nature, when humanity was in such a pitiable and wretched condition? But, someone says, humanity could have been benefited while God remained impassible.
For the One who established the whole by His will and brought what did not exist into subsistence by the mere impulse of His will—why, if He so wished, did He not also tear the human being away from the opposing power by a sovereign and divine authority and lead him back to his original condition? Instead, He goes around by long courses: He comes under the nature of a body, passes into life through birth, proceeds in due order through every stage of age, then tastes death, and only in this way reaches the goal through the resurrection of His own body—as though it were not possible for Him, while remaining in the height of divine glory, to save the human being by a command and leave aside such courses. We must therefore set the truth against objections of this kind as well, so that the faith may be hindered by none of those who critically seek the reason of the mystery.
First, then, let us examine what stands opposite to virtue, a point already considered to some extent in what has gone before. As darkness stands opposite light and death opposite life, so evil clearly stands opposite virtue, and nothing else besides evil does. For although many things are observed in creation, nothing else stands in opposition to light or life—not stone, wood, water, a human being, or anything else that exists—except what is understood specifically as their opposites, such as darkness and death. In the same way, no one would say that any created nature is understood as the opposite of virtue, but only the conception of evil. If, therefore, our teaching maintained that the divine had come to be in evil, the objector would have occasion to attack our faith for teaching things discordant and unfitting concerning the divine nature. For it would not be lawful to say that Wisdom itself, Goodness, Incorruptibility, or any other exalted conception and name had fallen into its opposite.
If, then, God is true virtue, and it is not a nature that is opposed to virtue but evil, and God comes to be not in evil but in human nature, while the only thing unfitting and shameful is the passion that belongs to evil—in which God neither came to be nor is by nature capable of coming to be—why are they ashamed to confess that God touched human nature, when nothing in the constitution of the human being is observed to stand in opposition to the principle of virtue? For neither the rational, nor the intellectual, nor the capacity for knowledge, nor anything else of this kind that belongs properly to human being is opposed to the principle of virtue.