In his third Festal Letter from AD 342, Athanasius wrote the following of heretics at the eschaton:
By “girding up the loins of our mind,” like our Saviour
Jesus Christ—about whom it is written, “Righteousness shall gird his loins, and
faithfulness (shall be) the spear at his sides”—while each of us has in his
hand the staff that came forth from the root of Jesse, with our feet wearing as
shoes the readiness for the Gospel, by “celebrating the feast,” as Paul said,
“not with the old yeast, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth,”
confident that we are thinking with piety about Christ and that we are not
departing from the faith in him and that we are not defiled together with the
heretics and strangers to the truth, those who are degraded by their conduct
and their will; and by rejecting in afflictions, we escape the furnace of iron
and darkness, and we pass through without harm that fearful and red sea. In
this way, when we see the disgrace of the heretics, we too shall sing that
great hymn of praise with the blessed Moses, saying, “Let us sing to the Lord,
for gloriously he is glorified.” And we this sing and we shall see that the
sing that was in us has been drowned, and as pass over to the desert as well.
For when we have first been purified by the fast of forty days, through
prayers, fasts, discipline, and good works, we are able to get the holy
Passover in Jerusalem. (The Festal Letters of Athanasius of Alexandria, with
the Festal Index and the Historia Acephala [trans. David Brakke and David
M. Gwynn; Translated Texts for Historians 81; Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2022], 150)
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