On the Incarnation — Selections
Athanasius served as Bishop of Alexandria and spent much of his career in exile for defending Nicene orthodoxy against Arianism — earning the epithet Athanasius contra mundum, Athanasius against the world. His early work On the Incarnation presents a systematic account of the fall and redemption: humanity had fallen into corruption through sin and death, and only the incarnate Word of God could reverse that corruption. For Athanasius, the problem of evil is inseparable from the problem of death — what went wrong at the fall was not merely moral but ontological, a drift toward non-being — and both find their resolution in the cross and resurrection.