The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.
All Commentaries on Proverbs 8:22 Go To Proverbs 8
Athanasius the Apostolic
AD 373
The fact is, then, that the Word is not from things created but is rather himself their creator. For this reason did he assume a body created and human: so that, having renewed it as its creator, he might deify it in himself and thus might introduce all of us in that likeness into the kingdom of heaven. A man would not have been deified if joined to a creature, nor if the Son were not true God; neither would a man have been brought into the Father’s presence if he had not been the Father’s natural and true Word who had put on the body. Since we could have had nothing in common with what is foreign, we would not have been delivered from sin and from the curse if that which the Word put on had not been natural human flesh. So also, the man would not have been deified if the Word which became flesh had not been by nature from the Father and true and proper to him. The union, therefore, was of just such a kind, so that he might unite what is man by nature, to him who is in the nature of the Godhead, thereby assuring the accomplishment of salvation and his deification. Let those, therefore, who deny that the Son is by nature from the Father and proper to his essence, deny also that he took true human flesh from the evervirgin Mary. In neither case would it have been profitable to us men: if the Word were not by nature true Son of God, or if the flesh which he assumed were not true flesh.
