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

“Let these brief remarks, then, O Christ-loving human being, be dedicated to you from us, as an elementary sketch and paradigm of the faith of Christ and his divine manifestation to us. Taking occasion from them, if you will take the text of the scriptures and genuinely apply your mind to them, you will know from them more completely and more clearly the accuracy of what has been said.”

…when the Word of God appeared in a body and made known to us his own Father, then indeed the deceit of the demons disappears and ceases, while human beings, looking to the true God Word of the Father, abandon idols and henceforth recognize the true God.

Now…human beings are deserting the superstition of idols, taking refuge in Christ , and worshipping him as God, and through him they know the Father, of whom they had been ignorant…only Christ is worshipped by all as one and everywhere the same.

So something wonderful and marvelous happened: that ignominious death which they thought to inflict, this was the trophy of his victory over death.

…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.