Can the eternal enter time without ceasing to be itself? Can the boundless become an infant who can be swaddled and taken into the arms? Reason has stumbled over this from the first day. Five men went through this stumbling block differently: four saw in it the very heart of faith, the fifth saw a last impossibility that it is more honest not to step over.
Augustine, who had already read the Platonists, was shaken not by the fact that there is an eternal Logos — that he had found in them — but by what was not in them: “and the Word became flesh.” The philosophers knew the Reason by which the world is ordered, but they did not know that He could be born in time. Here is the boundary Augustine steps across: He through whom time itself was made enters time; the unchanging consents to have a date of birth. The eternal entered the temporal — and did not cease to be eternal.
Luther pushed the Incarnation to the point of scandal. God reveals Himself not in power and glory but under the mask of the opposite — sub contrario: in the weakness of an Infant and the shame of the Cross. This is his theologia crucis, the theology of the Cross: whoever looks for God in greatness will walk straight past the manger, because God has hidden Himself in what is weakest and most despised. The eternal enters time not on a throne but in a feeding trough for cattle — and He can be recognized only by faith, not by the eyes.
Kierkegaard called things by their names: that the eternal has become temporal, that God has become a single individual man — this is the “absolute paradox,” against which reason is broken on purpose. It cannot be thought, it cannot be proved; before it there is only a choice — to take offense and walk away, or to believe. For Kierkegaard the Incarnation is precisely the limit where thought falls silent and faith begins: not “I have understood,” but “I believe precisely because it cannot be understood.”
Dostoevsky unfolded the paradox into two roads. If God became man, then there is the God-man, Christ, and a person is saved by having been loved first; Prince Myshkin is a desperate attempt to write “a positively beautiful man” on that model. Turn the formula around, and man will want to become god himself, and what comes out is the man-god: Kirillov, shooting himself to prove his self-will, Ivan with his “everything is permitted.” The God-man or the man-god — for Dostoevsky this is the fork where all of modern history divides.
Camus stands at the same wall — and does not cross it. The eternal does not enter time; the world is silent in answer to the thirst for meaning, and Camus refuses to drown that silence out with the “leap of faith,” which he calls philosophical suicide. No God-man: there is only man, the absurd, and the honesty of not lying to oneself about consolation. And still he honors those who at this wall, like him, refuse the easy lie — they simply cross it, and he stays. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
From Augustine to Camus the argument is over one thing: could God become man. Four answer “yes” — each in his own word: confession, cross, paradox, love. The fifth answers “no” — and stays honest in his refusal, at the same wall.
If the eternal really did enter time, then the argument about God stops being an argument about an idea and becomes a meeting with the One who became man. And if it did not, what is left at the wall is Sisyphus with his stone. Everything turns on one thing: whether that Child was actually born.