Pamela Shropshire’s Reviews > On the Incarnation: Saint Athanasius The Great of Alexandria > Status Update

…of all and as himself suffering for all, through coming into it “he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is the Devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage” (Heb 2:14-15).

…the death of all was completed in the lordly body, and also death and corruption were destroyed by the Word in it. For there was need of death, and death on behalf of all had to take place, so that what was required by all might occur. Therefore, as I said earlier, the Word, since he was not able to die - for he was immortal - took to himself a body able to die, that he might offer it as his own on behalf…

For the Word unfolded himself everywhere, above and below and in the depths and in the breadth; above, in creation; below, in the incarnation; in the depths, in hell; in breadth, in the world. Everything is filled with the knowledge of God. . . But by means of it he made himself visible, remaining in it and doing such works and giving signs which made him known to be…the God Word.

For this reason he was both born and appeared as a human being, and died, and rose again, dulling and overshadowing by his own works those of all human beings who ever existed, so that from wherever human beings were predisposed, from there he might raise them and teach them of his own true Father, just as he himself says, “I came to save and to find that which was lost” (Lk. 19.10).

Whence, by offering to death the body he had taken to himself, as an offering holy and free of all spot, he immediately abolished death from all like him, by the offering of a like.

. . . against similar human beings), and on the other hand, that as human beings had turned has turned toward corruption he might turn them again to incorruptibility and give them life from death, by making the body his own and by the grace of the resurrection banishing death from them as straw from the fire.

Therefore, since the rational creatures were being corrupted and such works were perishing, what should God, being good, do? Permit the corruption prevailing against them and death to seize them? . . . It was therefore right, not to permit human beings to be carried away by corruption, because this would be improper to, and unworthy of the goodness of God.

…even in their transgressions, human beings had not stopped short of any defined limits, but gradually pressing forward, they had passed beyond all measure: from the beginning, they were inventors of evil and called death and corruption down upon themselves; while later, turning to vice and exceeding all lawlessness, not stopping at one evil, but contriving in time every new evil, they became insatiable in sinning.

For God has not only created us from nothing, but also granted us by the grace of the Word to live a life according to God. But human beings, turning away from things eternal, and by the council of the devil, turning us towards things of corruption, were themselves the cause of corruption in death, being, as we already said, corruptible by nature…

…it followed that when human beings were bereft of the knowledge of God and had turned to things which exist not — evil is non-being, the good is being, since it has come into being from the existing God — then they were bereft also of eternal being.