On the Incarnation

I recently read Miracles by C.S. Lewis for the first time and was especially struck by his descriptions of the Incarnation (the doctrine that God became a man in Jesus). Although I've always viewed Easter as the supreme Christian holiday, Lewis reminds us that without the Incarnation, the redemption of man would not have been possible. In part, Lewis says:

"The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation...Every other miracles prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this...If the thing happened, it was the central event in the history of the Earth - the very thing the whole story has been about.

In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity;...down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature He has created. But He he goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him."

He then follows with several arguments supporting the belief in the Incarnation, one of the most interesting of which is its likeness or familiarity with the reason of men. Lewis asks in what sense it is conceivable that an eternal Sprit - God - could be combined with a human being. He then answers by stating:

"And this would be a fatal stumbling block if we had not already discovered that in every human being a more than natural activity (the act of reasoning) and therefore presumably a more than natural agent is thus united with a part of Nature: so united that the composite creature calls itself 'I' and 'Me'."

He then likens the infusion of reason into men as a type or "faint image" of the descending of God into a one man. The same tune "in a very minor key". Lewis uses this Platonic idea to argue that "our own composite existence is not the sheer anomaly it might seem to be."

Some greats thoughts by a great thinker to contemplate at Christmas.