For this purpose, then, the incorporeal, incorruptible, and immaterial Word of God came into our world, though He had not been far from us before. No part of creation is empty of Him; He fills all things while remaining with His own Father. Yet He came down to us in His love for humanity and made Himself manifest.
He saw the rational race perishing and death reigning over them through corruption. He saw that the threat attached to the transgression gave corruption a firm hold over us, and that it would have been unthinkable for the law to be set aside before it was fulfilled. He also saw how unfitting the situation was, since what He Himself had made was disappearing. He saw the surpassing wickedness of human beings and how, little by little, they had increased it against themselves until it became unbearable. He also saw that all human beings were liable to death. So He took pity on our race and had compassion on our weakness. He came down to us in our state of corruption and could not endure the dominion of death, lest what had been made should perish and His Father’s work in humanity should come to nothing. So He took a body for Himself, one not foreign to our own.
He did not merely will to become embodied or merely to appear. If He had wished only to appear, He could have made His divine appearance in some other, higher way. No, He took our body, and not just any body, but one from a spotless and stainless virgin who had known no man—a pure body, truly untouched by intercourse with a man. Because He Himself is powerful and the Maker of all, He prepared this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself and made it His own, as the instrument in which He was made known and in which He dwelt.
Thus, taking a body like our own, because all were liable to the corruption of death, He gave it over to death on behalf of all and offered it to the Father. He did this out of love for humanity so that the law concerning the corruption of human beings might be abolished, since all had died in Him. Its authority had been fully exercised in the Lord’s body and therefore no longer had any claim against those who shared the same human nature. He also did this so that, since human beings had turned toward corruption, He might turn them back to incorruption and bring them to life from death, through making the body His own and through the grace of the resurrection. In this way He made death vanish from them as straw vanishes in fire.