Could Christ have been incarnate as something other than man?

[Mr. Bultitude]

Athanasius says in On the Incarnation:

By His own power He enters completely into each and all, and orders them throughout ungrudgingly; and, had He so willed, He could have revealed Himself and His Father by means of sun or moon or sky or earth or fire or water. Had He done so, no one could rightly have accused Him of acting unbecomingly, for He sustains in one whole all things at once, being present and invisibly revealed not only in the whole, but also in each particular part.

Really? Could there be a hypostatic union without one of the natures having any will or reason? God is three persons, and humanity has yielded billions of persons through the years, and the God-Man is one person in these two natures. The sun, moon, fire, and so on do not yield persons. God has revealed himself through the ages by means of fire, wind, earthquakes, and so on, but those were not examples of incarnation.

Am I splitting hairs here? Am I misunderstanding his point? I know this isn't an extremely important point in the incarnation, but I have found that sometimes focusing on a seemingly minor detail of something can help me understand the bigger picture.

 

[MW]

He was answering a specific objection. Isn't human nature below the dignity of God? The answer is, "if it were unfitting for Him thus to indwell the part, it would be equally so for Him to exist within the whole." The argument is based on the fact that God's presence in creation is already a condescension. When it is added that there are important reasons why He became man it is clear that the possibility of assuming something else was only hypothetical for the sake of answering the objection.

 

[clark thompson]

Christ came for man so this is why He came as a man.