Danielou in Nanticoke

The following Danielou selection from "The Salvation of the Nations" fleshes out for me Addleshaw's statement that "The Incarnation is not something new."
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Of the Divine Persons, why was it the Word Who was sent forth? Why did not the Father become man? Or the Holy Ghost? This is explained to us by what Scripture, particularly the New Testament, tells us concerning the person of the Word and His relation to the Father. The Word, as His very name implies, Verbum, Logos, is the element of expression in God, whereas the Father is the element of origin and principle. The Father expresses Himself through His Word, Who is His image. As Saint Paul says in an admirable text of the Epistle to the Colossians: “(He) is the image of the invisible God.” Or again, in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “(He is) the figure of His (the Father’s) substance.” Therefore He is, as it were, an image in which God sees Himself and is pleased.

Therefore, it is natural that if, as certain Fathers of the Church have said, the Father is Silence, whereas the Word is Expression – and this is in the eternal generation of the Word, inasmuch as the Father expresses Himself eternally through His Word, prior to all creation – then it is also normal that there should be a special relation between the Word and creation. The Word is the substantial and eternal image of God. Creation is like a reflection of this image, the image of the image, as the Fathers of the Church used to say. That is what we find in the mysterious and pregnant prologue of Saint John that we read every day at Mass: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him.” He was with the Father from all eternity, and it was through Him that everything was created. Or again, as Saint Paul says in the Epistle to the Colossians: “He is the first-born of every creature.” At first glance, this expression seems mysterious to us because the Word is not a creature. He exists eternally. But he is the first-born of every creature in the sense that it is through Him that all creatures were created. And that is why the Epistle to the Colossians adds: “All things were created by him and in him.”

This is very important in stressing the bond that exists between the Word and creation; that is why, when the Word came into the world to save it, Saint John was able to say: “He came unto his own” – His own domain, among His own people – “and his own knew him not.” But, at any rate, He came into His own domain. Thus, when the Word came into the world at the Incarnation, it was not by accident, as if the world had gone on without Him until then, and He had come only at that particular moment. But from its origin the world was His. It was by Him that the world had been made, it was through Him that the world was held together. In consequence, when He came into the world, He came among His own. And on this were founded the various missions of the Word in the world, through which the Word was to come in order to achieve His work, and little by little bring it to fruition.
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