“Therefore He put on a body, that He might find death in the body, and blot it out”

Therefore He put on a body, that He might find death in the body, and blot it out

Athanasius of Alexandria · On the Incarnation of the Word, and Against the Heathen · NPNF2 IV, On the Incarnation §44

His answer to the objection that God could have saved by a word. Corruption had got inside human nature, so the remedy had to be taken inside it too — the reason the Incarnation is not, for him, an ornament on the doctrine of redemption but the mechanism of it.