From St. Athanasios the Great (On the Incarnation as quoted in The Mystery of Death by Nikolaos P. Vassiliadis pg. 226):

“Ever since the God-Man was resurrected and ascended, all the faithful (can) trample death as if it did not exist. They prefer to die than to deny their faith in Christ. Now there are no dead. Now the only dead one is the devil, who in the past used to boast about the death of men. The devil is the only truly dead, since ‘the pangs of death’ have been loosed (Acts 2:24). And the proof of this is the following: People who were afraid of death before believing in Christ, once baptized and members of the Church, despised death so much that they would readily rush towards it and become martyrs. Death became so weak that even children and women, who were at first deceived by it in the person of Eve, can now mock death as something truly dead and altogether weakened.”

In His Name, Keith C. Wilkerson

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