Some brilliant comments all the way from the fourth century, courtesy of Hilary of Poitiers in Book Three of his De Trinitate:
A virgin bears; her child is of God.
An infant wails; angels are heard in praise.
There are coarse swaddling clothes; God is being worshipped.
The glory of his majesty is not forfeited when he assumes the lowliness of flesh.
He who upholds the universe, within whom and through whom are all things, was brought forth by common childbirth;
He at whose voice Archangels and Angels tremble, and heaven and earth and all the elements of this world are melted, was heard in childish wailing.On understanding the eternal relationship between the Father and Son he says:
The Invisible and Incomprehensible, whom sight and feeling and touch cannot gauge, was wrapped in a cradle...He by whom man was made had nothing to gain by becoming man; it was to our gain that God was incarnate and dwelt among us.
...the proper service of faith is to grasp and confess the truth that it is incompetent to comprehend its Object.
If anyone lays upon his personal incapacity his failure to solve the mystery, in spite of the certainty that Father and Son stand to each other in those relations, he will be still more pained at the ignorance to which I confess.
I, too, am in the dark, yet I ask no questions. I look for comfort in the fact that Archangels share my ignorance, that Angels have not heard the explanation, and worlds do not contain it, that no prophet has espied it and no Apostle sought for it, that the Son himself has not revealed it.
Time then itself is His [Christ's] creature
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