You know what happens when a portrait that has been painted on a panel becomes obliterated through external stains. The artist does not throw away the panel, but the subject of the portrait has to come and sit for it again, and then the likeness is re-drawn on the same material.
Even so was it with the All-holy Son of God. He, the Image of the Father, came and dwelt in our midst, in order that He might renew mankind made after Himself, and seek out His lost sheep, even as He says in the Gospel: “I came to seek and to save that which was lost. This also explains His saying to the Jews: “Except a man be born anew …” He was not referring to a man’s natural birth from his mother, as they thought, but to the re-birth and re-creation of the soul in the Image of God.
-Athanasius, On the Incarnation
In §13-14 Athanasius’s theological argument seems informed, fundamentally, not by divine justice, or abstract agape, but by a yearning for a particular “thou.” Even his kingly metaphors are all centered on the king’s loving attachment to place. This emphasis on redeeming the particular, contingent creation suggests a tacitly aesthetic dimension to redemption.
