On the Resurrection

From this the simpler among believers set out and suppose that the ungodly will not attain the resurrection. What do they mean by the resurrection? For even if they seem to make pronouncements about these things, examination will refute them, since they cannot consistently maintain what follows. If, then, we ask them whose resurrection takes place, they answer, "That of the bodies we now wear." Then, when we ask further whether it is of their whole substance or not, before they are examined they say, "Of the whole." But if, accommodating ourselves to their simplicity, we raise the further difficulty whether the blood that has flowed out in blood-lettings will rise along with them, and all the flesh and hair that ever existed, or only what was there at their departure, being hard pressed they run for refuge to "God does what he wills." The more noble of them, so as not to be forced by the argument to gather together the same blood, which has often been excreted from our bodies, say that the body we have at our end will rise. But we raised a further difficulty, because bodily nature is changeable, and such things as foods are assimilated into our body and change their likeness: so too our bodies are changed in carnivorous birds and beasts and become parts of their bodies, and these in turn, eaten by men or by other animals, are changed back and become the bodies of men or of other animals. And since this goes on for a long time, the same body must often become part of several men. Whose body, then, will it be in the resurrection? And so it will happen that we fall into a deep sea of irrational nonsense.

"And after these difficulties they take refuge in the claim that all things are possible to God, and they bring forward passages of the Scriptures which, on a ready interpretation, can suggest what they think; for example, the one in Ezekiel: 'And the hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit and set me in the middle of the plain, and it was full of human bones. And he led me around them all about; and behold, there were very many on the face of the plain, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, Son of man, will these bones live? And I said, O Lord God, you know this. And he said to me, Prophesy, son of man, and say to them: You dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says Adonai the Lord to these bones: Behold, I bring into you the breath of life, and I will put sinews upon you, and bring flesh upon you, and stretch skin over you, and I will put my Spirit into you, and you shall live; and I will set you in your own land, and you shall know that I am the Lord.' This is the more persuasive text they use. They also cite other passages from the Gospels, such as 'There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth,' and 'Fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna'; and the saying in Paul, 'He will give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwells in you.'"

"But every lover of truth must fix his mind on these points in the same way and contend for the resurrection, preserving the tradition of the ancients and at the same time taking care not to fall into the nonsense of beggarly notions, which are both impossible and unworthy of God. This, then, must be understood on this point: every body, being held together by a nature that brings certain things into it from outside by way of food and excretes others in place of those brought in (as the bodies of plants and animals do), never has the same material substrate. That is why the body has not been badly called a river. For, strictly speaking, the first substrate in our body is perhaps not the same for even two days, although Paul or Peter, so to speak, is always the same (not only in respect of the soul, whose substance on our view neither flows nor ever has anything brought into it), even though the nature of the body is in flux. For the form that characterizes the body is the same, so that the same features remain that present the bodily quality of Peter and Paul; and according to this quality scars from childhood remain on bodies, and certain other peculiarities in the body, moles, and anything else of the kind. This form, by which Peter and Paul are formed, the bodily form, is what is put around the soul again in the resurrection, changed for the better; but by no means this particular substrate that was laid out at first. Just as the form is the same from infancy to old age, even though the features seem to undergo much alteration, so one must understand that the form of the present body is the same as that of the future one, though there will be a very great change for the better. For a soul that exists in bodily places must use bodies suited to those places. And just as, if we had to live in the sea as water creatures, we would certainly need gills and the rest of the make-up of fish, so, since we are to inherit the kingdom of heaven and to be in places that are different, we must use spiritual bodies; not that the former form disappears, even if its change is to something more glorious, just as the form of Jesus, and of Moses and Elijah, was not other in the transfiguration than it had been."

"So do not take offence if someone says that the first substrate will not then be the same, when reason shows those able to attend that not even now can the first substrate be the same for two days. It is worth noting too that what is sown is of one kind and what rises of another. For 'it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.' And the apostle adds again, as though teaching that we are to put off the earthly quality while the form is preserved in the resurrection: 'This I say, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption.' For there will be a body around the saint, held together by that which once gave form to the flesh, but no longer flesh; what was once characterized in the flesh will be characterized in the spiritual body.

"And to the texts of the Scriptures which our brothers put forward, this can be said. First the passage in Ezekiel: if one goes as far as the simpler ones wish, then according to these words there will not even be a resurrection of flesh, but only of bones and skins and sinews. At the same time we must show them that they are carried away, not having understood what is written. For if bones are named, these bones need not by any means be understood; as also in 'Our bones were scattered beside Hades,' and 'All my bones were scattered,' and 'Heal me, for my bones are troubled,' where it is plain that bones are not meant in the common sense. Indeed it is added to the word: 'They say, Our bones have become dry.' Do they then say 'Our bones have become dry' because they wish to rise when they have been gathered together? That is impossible. They would say 'Our bones have become dry' when they were in captivities and had lost all living moisture. Indeed they add, 'Our hope has perished; we are undone.' So the promise of the resurrection of the people is a rising from the fall and, as it were, from the deadness which they suffered when they were delivered to their enemies because of their sins. And sinners too are said by the Saviour to be 'tombs full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness.' But it befits God to open the tombs of each one and to bring us out of the tombs made alive, as the Saviour drew Lazarus out.

[24] "As for 'There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth,' we must put this difficulty to them: just as in this life the Creator made every member for some use, so he made the teeth for cutting up solid food. What use, then, do those being punished have for teeth? For on their own view they will not eat in Gehenna. And it must be shown that not everything is to be taken according to the letter. 'You have broken the teeth of sinners,' he says, and 'The Lord has shattered the molars of the lions.' Who is so foolish as to suppose that God preserves the bodies of sinners and breaks only their teeth? So, just as someone who wanted these things to be so would be hard pressed and drawn to allegory, so we must look for the gnashing of teeth of those who are punished in the soul's power of chewing, which, at the time of its conviction for its sins, will gnash its teeth by the clashing together of the things it has thought. And 'Fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna' perhaps teaches that the soul is incorporeal, and perhaps also shows that it will not be punished without a body, about which we have spoken in our natural account of the form and of the first substrate. And the saying in the apostle, 'He will give life also to our mortal bodies,' since the body is mortal and does not share in the true life, can show this: the bodily form of which we have spoken, being mortal by nature, will itself, when 'Christ, our life, is revealed,' be changed from being a body of death to being made alive, through the Spirit that gives life, having become spiritual instead of fleshly. And 'But someone will say, How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?' shows plainly that the first substrate will not rise. For if we have taken the example rightly, we must observe that the seminal principle in the grain of wheat lays hold of the matter lying around it, passes through the matter itself, and, having grasped it, imposes on what was once earth and water and air and fire the powers it has of its own form; and, overcoming their qualities, it changes them into the form of which it is itself the maker. And so the ear is filled out, differing exceedingly from the original grain in size and shape and variety."

Proclus: "This, then, is what Origen strove to set out when he undertook the treatment of the resurrection, displaying a most varied speculation on it; so much, by way of summary. Consider it, and review in order what follows from it. For it remains to take up, in addition to what has been said, the testimonies from the Scriptures, so that the argument, like a statue, having all its parts in proportion, may be whole and fully finished, lacking nothing that contributes to shape and beauty. We must say, then, how the Scriptures agree with these things, confirming them for the bringing of man to a better way of life. For if anyone is able to understand these things exactly, not merely glancing past what is needed, he will know that the resurrection must not be understood of this body, since it cannot remain unchanged for ever, but of the spiritual body, in which the same character that is now preserved in this one will be kept, so that each of us may be the same in shape too, as was said by Origen as well. For this is how he lays down that the resurrection will be. Since the material body is in flux and never remains in itself even for a short time, but is added to and taken away around the form that characterizes the man, by which the shape too is held together, it is necessary, he says, to expect that the resurrection will preserve the form alone. And so that you may not say, 'I do not understand' (for he set this out concisely), I will explain the sense of these things to you more clearly, as follows. You have surely seen an animal's skin or something else of the kind filled with water: if it is emptied a little and filled a little, it always shows the same form. For whatever the container is like, the contents too must be shaped to it. Suppose, as the water flows out, someone adds as much as is poured out, not letting the skin be emptied of water all at once: must not what is added appear such as the first was, because the container too, around which the water flows in and out, is the same? And indeed whoever wishes to compare the body to these things will have no cause for shame. For in the same way what is brought in from food in place of the flesh that has been pushed out will change into the shape of the containing form; as much of it as is spread over the eyes resembles the eyes, as much as over the face, the face, as much as over the other parts, those parts; so that each person appears the same, not because the flesh consists of the same first substrates, but because of the form by which what is added is formed. And so, if we are not the same in body even for a few days, but are the same by the form that is in the body (for this alone has stood firm from birth), much more shall we not then be the same in the same flesh, but by the form that even now is always preserved in us and remains. What the skin is there, the form is here; and what the water is there, in the image, is here what is added and taken away. Just as now, though the body is not the same, the character in the same shape is preserved the same, so also then, though the body is not the same, the form, increased to greater glory, will be shown no longer in a corruptible body but in an impassible and spiritual body, as that of Jesus was at the transfiguration, when he went up the mountain with Peter, and those of Moses and Elijah, who were seen with him.

[26] "Let these things, then, be considered thus far; for this, in summary, is the sense of Origen's doctrines. But if one of those who dispute this puts forward the body of Christ, because he is called 'the firstborn of the dead' and 'the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep,' and says that just as he rose, so the bodies of all must be expected to rise in the same way as his, so that, just as Christ has been raised, 'so also God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep through Jesus,' and the body of Jesus was raised having the flesh and the bones that it had, as Thomas too was persuaded, we shall say: But the body of Christ was not 'of the will of a man,' of 'pleasure coming together with sleep,' 'conceived in iniquities and conceived in sins,' but of 'the Holy Spirit and the power of the Most High' and of a virgin; whereas yours is sleep and pleasure and filth. And for this reason the wise Sirach too declares, 'For when a man dies, he will inherit creeping things and beasts and worms.' And in the eighty-seventh psalm: 'Will you work wonders for the dead, or will physicians raise them up and they confess you? Will anyone tell of your mercy in the tomb, and of your truth in destruction? Will your wonders be known in the darkness, and your righteousness in a land that is forgotten?' And other sayings of this kind are at hand for anyone who wishes to gather them from the Scriptures; we pass them over, so as not to swell our discussion to many times what has been said by recounting them all at length."

When Proclus had at last stopped, and there was a long silence among those present, who had been considerably cast down toward unbelief, and I perceived that he had really finished, I gently raised my head and drew breath, like sailors when the wave is already subsiding, still trembling and in darkness (for I had been struck, I tell you, and overwhelmed by the force of the arguments). I turned to Auxentius, called him and said: "Auxentius, I think the poet's line 'when two go together' was not said in vain; for our opponents are two. So let the two of us together have the strength of both. I choose you as my helper and fellow-combatant in the battle against them, lest Aglaophon, together with Proclus and Origen, armed with arguments meant to overthrow us, should lay waste the resurrection. Come then, let us draw up against them, fearing none of their contentious sophisms, by which the cowardly are struck down. For there is nothing at all sound or firm in them, only a specious show of words, contrived to astonish the hearers and to persuade them, not for the sake of the truth and of what is profitable, but so that the arguments may seem wise to those present. That is why arguments from probability, decked out for beauty and pleasure, are sometimes thought more serious by the many than those that have been examined for exactness, since the teachers no longer compete for what is better and dignified, but to please and win applause, like the sophists, who take a fee for their speeches and cheapen wisdom for the sake of praise. In ancient times, however, interpretation was altogether brief, since the men of that time were eager not to delight those present but to benefit them. But since then, for ease, all have been permitted to interpret the Scriptures; and all, filled with conceit, have grown dull in doing what is good but have advanced in argumentation, priding themselves on being clever at knowing everything, ashamed to admit that they need to be taught, but rather contentious and leaping forward as if they were the teachers. Emboldened by this, they slipped from believing with reverence and gentleness that God can do all things, as he promised, and have come to empty questionings and blasphemies, not understanding that deeds were not practised for the sake of words, but words for the sake of deeds. It is as in medicine, by which the sick are to be saved: the words are confirmed by deeds, so that our mind, being well tuned, may be in all things in harmony with the best words, offering a life that accords with the tongue, like a lyre, and not one that is unmusical and out of tune. For one must strive to acquire wisdom in truth, practising justice, and not merely to seem to, stepping lamely into wisdom and competing for reputation rather than for truth, having put on facades and pretences and the whole costume of hypocrisy.

"For there are, there truly are, people decked out with tragic displays of words, like women who adorn themselves outwardly with skill in order to deceive, unless one of those still young in the faith looks at them warily and soberly. Hence one must beware of admitting such people's argument into the heart before learning it securely. For deceivers often get the better even of those who teach, just as the Sirens, too, by the beauty of their voices hide their hatred of men from afar from those who flee them. Or how do these things seem to you to stand, Auxentius?" I said.

Auxentius: And he answered, "Just as they do to you."

Methodius: "Shall we not say, then, that the sophists among the heterodox are altogether imitators of images of truth, not knowing the truth, like painters? For painters too attempt to imitate shipwrights and ships and pilots, without knowing how to build ships or to steer. So, if you like, let us scrape away their colours and persuade their children, who marvel at such paintings, that this ship is not a ship, nor the pilot a pilot, but a wall decked out outwardly with colours and paintings to give pleasure; and that those who made these things out of colours are imitators of the image of a ship and a pilot, and not of a ship or a pilot."

Auxentius: "The preface is long for one who longs to hear."

Methodius: "But it is profitable, my excellent friend," I said. "For they use the words of the divinely inspired writings to colour and embellish their own opinion in order to deceive, boldly calling it justice and truth, though they do not know justice at all. If someone were to take these words away, how much do you think they would be mocked, stripped of such names?"

Auxentius: "Very much," he said.

Methodius: "Which then do you want, Auxentius," said I, "to lead on this road, or shall I lead?"

Auxentius: "It is fair," he said, "that you should lead; for you always begin the discussion."

Methodius: "Was it not said, then (for let us examine Aglaophon's meaning in order, from the beginning), that the soul put on this body which we wear because of the transgression, having passed the earlier ages blessedly without it? For the garments of skins, you said, are bodies, in which the souls came to be wrapped, so that by carrying corpses about they might pay the penalty for what they did. Or were these not the first things said by you at the beginning, physician? Come, remind me, if I seem to you not to remember something."

Aglaophon: "There is no need of reminding about this now; these very things were among the first we said."

Methodius: "What then? Was not this also said by you, in many ways, in what followed: that the body is a hindrance to our apprehension and knowledge of the things that truly are, because of the occupations of adorning it and caring for it and the other assaults of the desire of the belly; and further that it is the cause of blasphemies and of sins of every kind, because the soul by itself, apart from the body, cannot sin at all; and that therefore, so that after its departure from here it may be free of sin and disobedience in the heavens, where it will have its dwelling with the angels, it must remain free and naked of the body, since the body becomes the soul's accomplice and fellow-worker in being defiled and sinning (for without a body it is impossible for the soul to sin); and hence, so that it may be kept sinless for the infinite age, it will no longer take the wretched body that drags it down to corruption and injustice?"

Aglaophon: "This too was said."

Methodius: "What then? Do you think," I said, "that this was said well and rightly?"

Aglaophon: "And what difference does that make to you?" he said. "Why do you not refute the argument?"

Methodius: "None," I said, "but I ask because of what you have said, so that the argument may be examined."

Aglaophon: "Well and rightly," he said.

Methodius: "And does one who says things that are contrary to themselves and discordant seem to you to lay them down well and rightly?"

Aglaophon: "Not in the least."

Methodius: "For he seems to you to play the part of truth unmusically?"

Aglaophon: "Most of all," he said.

Methodius: "Then you do not accept one who tunes his harmonies to the false melody of arguments?"

Aglaophon: "Not in the least."

Methodius: "Then neither will you accept yourself in the least when you speak unmusically. For you granted that souls sinned without bodies, having fallen away from the commandment, and you said that because of the lawlessness God later gave them the garments of skins, so that by carrying corpses about they might pay the penalty, calling the garments the bodies; yet as the argument went on you forgot what you first laid down, and you say that the soul cannot sin by itself (for it is not disposed to this by nature at all, but the body has become for it the accomplice of all kinds of evils), so that, in order that the soul may not be drawn to injustice by the body as before, it will be without the body for the ages. And yet you said first that the soul sinned in paradise before the body, while it was still blessed and free of pain; for when it had transgressed the commandment, sin having already been strengthened by its being persuaded by the serpent, the body was given to it as a punishing fetter. So either the former statement or the latter is not right. Either the soul sinned before the body, and then it will sin no less even if it does not receive a body, and all the superfluous talk about the body's not rising is futile; or it sinned with the body, and then the garments of skins cannot be held to be the body. For man is found to have set aside the divine commandment before they were made; and that is why the garments are made, to cover the nakedness that had come upon them from their sin. But do I persuade you? Do you see that you laid down things that fight against each other, and has this become clear to you? Or do you not yet understand what I say, Aglaophon?" I said.

Aglaophon: "I understand," he said, "and I do not need to hear it a second time; I did not notice that I had spoken incorrectly. For having granted that the garments of skins are the bodies, I must admit that the soul sinned even before it came into the body, since the transgression happened before they were made (for the garments are made for them because of the transgression; the transgression does not happen because of the garments); and from this admission I must agree that it is not this body that is the accomplice of evil, but the soul itself, in itself. So even if it does not receive the body it will sin, since it sinned before without a body. And it is foolish to say that the body cannot come back to life for this reason, so that it may not become the soul's accomplice in sinning. For it will sin after laying the body aside, just as it sinned before the body, even if it does not take the body back again. Hence, for these reasons, I must accept neither myself nor anyone else who says that the garments of skins are the bodies. If I did accept it, I would also have to admit what has just been said."

Methodius: "What then? Does not this too seem to you to be wrong, Aglaophon?" I said.

Aglaophon: "Which?"

Methodius: "To say," said I, "that the body was contrived as a fetter and shackles against the soul, and that this is why the prophet called us 'prisoners of the earth,' and David 'the shackled.'"

Aglaophon: And he said, "I cannot answer you offhand. Why not argue with someone else?"

Methodius: And I, noticing that he blushed and was trying to avoid having his argument refuted, said: "Do you think that I am trying to refute you out of envy, and not out of eagerness to make the matter before us plain? My good friend, do not tire of being questioned. You see that our discussion is not about small things, but about how one must believe; and I think that no evil so great can befall a man as holding false opinions about the necessary things. Come then, answer readily what you are asked; and if I seem to you to say anything untrue, care more for the truth than for me, and refute me. For I think that being refuted is a greater good than refuting, inasmuch as it is greater to be freed from evil oneself than to free another. Come then, let us set the arguments side by side and consider whether they differ from one another. For the things we dispute about happen to be not at all small, but things which it is finest to know and shameful not to know. You, then, do not believe that the body comes back to life, but I do."

Aglaophon: "Quite so," he said, "for the reasons I gave."

Methodius: "And you," said I, "said that it is a fetter and a prison and a tomb and a burden and shackles; but I do not say so."

Aglaophon: "You state my view truly," he said.

Methodius: "And moreover you said that it is the cause of licentiousness and error and grief and anger and, in short, of all the other evils, which hinder the impulse of our soul toward what is better, not allowing us to come to the apprehension and knowledge of the things that truly are. For even if we try to hunt down something of what is, a darkness always falls in and darkens our reasoning, not permitting us to examine the truth clearly. For perception through our ears is full of deception, as you said; full of deception, too, is perception through sight, and full of deception that through the other senses."

Aglaophon: "Do you see, Eubulius," he said, "that I am ready to praise you whenever you set out the arguments correctly?"

Methodius: "Then, so that you may praise me still more: if the body is a fetter in your view, can it not be considered the cause of vice and injustice for the soul, but, on the contrary, of self-control and discipline? Consider it this way, for so you may follow better. Where do we take those who are sick in body? Not to the physicians?"

Aglaophon: "Clearly," he said.

Methodius: "And where do we take wrongdoers? Not to the judges?"

Aglaophon: "Necessarily."

Methodius: "So that they may justly pay the penalty for what they did?" I said.

Aglaophon: "Yes."

Methodius: "And everything just is good?"

Aglaophon agreed.

Methodius: "And one who judges justly does well, for he judges justly?"

Aglaophon assented.

Methodius: "And the good is beneficial?"

Aglaophon: "It seems so."

Methodius: "Then those who are judged are benefited; for their wickedness is checked and removed by the punishments, just as diseases are by the surgeons' cutting and medicines. For a wrongdoer to pay the penalty is for his soul to be set right, casting off that great disease, injustice."

Aglaophon agreed.

Methodius: "What then? Do you not say that punishments are justly applied to those who are punished in proportion to their offences, as surgery is applied to the wounded in proportion to their wounds?"

Aglaophon nodded.

Methodius: "So the man who has done what deserves death is punished with death, the one who deserves blows with blows, the one who deserves fetters with fetters?"

Aglaophon agreed.

Methodius: "And the guilty man is penalized," I said, "with fetters or blows or some other such punishment, so that he may repent and cease from wrongdoing, being straightened by punishments like crooked wood?"

Aglaophon: "What you say is most true," he said.

Methodius: "The judge punishes the man not for the sake of the past offence but for the future, so that he may not do it again."

Aglaophon: "Clearly," he said.

Methodius: "For the fetter clearly removes his impulse to do wrong, not permitting him to do what he wishes."

Aglaophon: "True."

Methodius: "Then he is kept from sinning, since the fetters do not allow him to indulge in pleasures freely, but restrain him and teach him to honour justice, until, being admonished, he himself learns to be self-controlled?"

Aglaophon: "It seems so," he said.

Methodius: "Then neither does the fetter become an accomplice of wrongdoing."

Aglaophon: "Apparently not."

Methodius: "For it disciplines men and makes them more just, being a remedy for the soul, harsh and stinging, but healing."

Aglaophon: "Clearly," he said.

Methodius: "What then? Come, let us examine again what came before. Did you not grant that the body is the soul's fetter because of the transgression?"

Aglaophon: "I grant it," he said.

Methodius: "And that the soul sins with the body, if adultery, murder and impiety seem to you sins, which the soul commits with the body?"

Aglaophon nodded.

Methodius: "But we agreed that the prisoner cannot do wrong?"

Aglaophon: "We agreed," he said.

Methodius: "Since he is prevented by the fetters, which cause him pain?"

Aglaophon: "Yes."

Methodius: "And the flesh is the soul's fetter?"

Aglaophon nodded.

Methodius: "But we sin while we are in the flesh, the flesh agreeing with us in this?"

Aglaophon: "We sin," he said.

Methodius: "But one who is shackled cannot sin?"

Aglaophon nodded here too.

Methodius: "For he is restrained?"

Aglaophon: "Yes."

Methodius: "Not being permitted by the fetter?"

Aglaophon: "Clearly."

Methodius: "But the body is a fellow-worker toward sinning? And the fetter prevents it?"

Aglaophon assented.

Methodius: "Then the body is not a fetter, either in your view or in anyone else's, Aglaophon," I said, "but a fellow-worker with the soul toward either, whether toward good or toward evil."

Aglaophon conceded.

[32] Methodius: "Since this is so, then, Aglaophon, make your defence regarding what you first laid down. For you said earlier that the body is the soul's fetter and prison and shackles. Do you see that what you said does not agree with these conclusions? How could they agree, my excellent friend, if one had to consider the flesh a fetter, while the soul used the fetter as its fellow-worker and accomplice in injustice? That is impossible. For if the body was given as an instrument of torture because of sin, so that the soul, being pained, might be trained to honour God, how does the body work with it and fight alongside it in wrongdoing? Fetters and prisons and shackles and, in short, all such punitive devices for correction serve to prevent those who are punished from doing wrong and sinning. The fetter is not given to the wrongdoer as a fellow-worker in wrongdoing so that he may do more wrong, but so that, tormented by the fetters, he may cease from wrongdoing; and that is why judges bind the wicked. For by the fetters they are prevented from doing evil even if they do not wish it. Evil-doing belongs to those who are free and live unguarded, not to those who are shackled. But man first committed murder, as Cain did; he grew in unbelief, turned to idols, and fell away from God. How, then, was the body given to him as a fetter? Or how did God, after man had transgressed before having a body, give him the body as a still greater fellow-worker in injustice? And how, after the fetter was made, is it said, 'Behold, I have set before your face life and death; choose life; good and evil; choose the good,' and 'If you are willing and listen to me'? For these words were spoken as to one who has free will, and not as to one led under fetters and necessity. So it is established on every ground that one must not consider the body to be shackles or a prison or fetters, nor souls on this account to be 'prisoners of the earth,' as though God had condemned them to be bound with 'earthly shackles.' For how could this be, when it cannot be proved? And plainly absurd, too, is the notion that the body will not be with the soul in its life through the ages because it is a fetter and shackles, lest, as they say, we should become eternally condemned prisoners of corruption while we are in the kingdom of light. For since the argument by which they defined the flesh as the fetter of the soul has been sufficiently dissolved and refuted, the claim that the body will not rise for this reason, lest we be prisoners in the kingdom of light when we take it back, is dissolved too.

[33] "What other truth, then, more evident than what has been said, must one show to persuade those who are hard to convince, which they will accept? But one could refute this contentiousness of theirs both from these arguments and from many others. For we have shown, and will show further as the argument proceeds, from the truths of nature and not from conjectures, that Jeremiah did not call us 'prisoners of the earth' because of our communion with the body, nor David 'the shackled' in this sense. It is worth bringing forward these points too, where they seem most of all to fail. Having said, then, what is fitting about the 'garments of skins,' and that before they were made the first-formed lived with a body, enjoying immortality, and further that the body cannot be considered a fetter and a prison, I shall now turn, gentlemen judges (for I call you judges of the arguments before us, most excellent Theophilus), to what follows, as I promised, so that we may see more clearly what we are seeking."

"God, the maker of all things, when he had set the universe in good order like a great city and arranged it by commanding with his word, fitted each element harmoniously to himself and filled all things with the varieties of living creatures, so that the world might grow perfectly into beauty, bringing forth the forms of every kind of nature: stars in the heaven and birds in the air, four-footed beasts on the earth and swimming creatures in the water. Last of all, having first prepared the whole universe as a most beautiful house for him, he fashioned man with his own hands, a likeness resembling his own image, bringing him into the world like a shining statue into a beautiful temple. For he knew that whatever he fashioned with his own hand would necessarily be immortal, as the work of immortality. For immortal things become immortal by immortality, just as evil things are evil by evil, and unjust things unjust by injustice. Doing injustice is not the work of justice but of injustice; nor, conversely, is acting justly the work of injustice but of justice; just as corrupting is not the work of incorruption but of corruption, nor making immortal the work of corruption but of incorruption; and, in a word, whatever the maker is, such, on the same principle, must necessarily be what it produces. But God is immortality and life and incorruption; and man is the work of God; and everything produced by immortality is immortal. Man, then, is immortal. That is why he fashioned man himself, with his own hands, but commanded the air, the earth and the water to bring forth the other kinds of living creatures. And man, most truly, is by nature neither soul without body nor again body without soul, but what is composed from the union of soul and body into one beautiful form. Hence it appears that man was made immortal, free of all corruption and disease. One could learn this sufficiently from Scripture too. For of the other creatures, which are transformed over intervals of time, growing young and growing old, it is said: 'Let the waters bring forth creeping things with living souls, and birds flying above the earth under the firmament of heaven,' and 'Let the earth bring forth the living creature according to its kind, four-footed beasts and creeping things and wild beasts of the earth according to their kind'; but of man it is no longer said, as of them, 'Let the earth bring forth,' or 'Let the waters bring forth,' or 'Let there be lights,' but 'Let us make man according to our image and likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of heaven and all the cattle.' And 'God took dust from the earth and formed man.'"

"And so that you too may perceive the difference more clearly, how man, differing wholly and entirely from the other creatures and enrolled in honour second only to the angels, is found to be immortal, come, let us take up this point too according to true and orthodox reasoning. To the other creatures it was given to be animated and to live from breathing in the spirit that is in the air; but to man, from the immortal and superior essence itself. For 'God breathed into his face the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.' And the others were commanded to serve and to be ruled, but he to rule and to be master. To them were given different shapes and forms of nature, as many as the solid and visible nature of the earth brought forth at God's command; but to him what is godlike and like God, in all things exactly fashioned after that archetypal and only-begotten image of the Father. For 'God made man,' it says, 'according to the image of God he made him.' That is why he took care for the permanence of his own statue, that it might not easily fall prey to corruption, as sculptors also do for their statues. For they take thought not only for the beauty and comeliness of their statues, that they may be magnificently beautiful, but they also provide, as far as they can, for the immortality of their works, so that they may be preserved for a very long time without being dissolved; as Phidias did. For he, after making the image at Pisa (it was of ivory), ordered oil to be poured out before the feet of the statue, keeping it as nearly immortal as he could. And so, if the makers of things made with hands act in this way, did not God, the best of artists, who can make all things even out of what is not, much more contrive by every necessity that his rational statue, man, should be altogether indestructible and immortal? Or did he allow what he had specially deemed worthy to make with his own hands, forming it 'according to his image and likeness,' the adornment of the world, for whose sake the world itself came into being, to be dissolved so dishonourably and handed over to destruction and corruption? It cannot be said; to think this is to be carried away into folly.

[36] "Perhaps, attending to what has now been said, you will say, Aglaophon: 'And how, if according to you the living creature was immortal from its origin, has it become mortal, since what is immortal must be what it is unchangeably, not falling away or departing into the baser and mortal nature? That is impossible, since it will no longer be immortal.' Because, I shall say, it had been made free to choose the good, and had received this law; and the devil, wickedly standing by, envied it. 'For God created man for incorruption and made him an image of his own eternity'; and 'God did not make death, nor does he delight in the destruction of the living'; 'but through the envy of the devil death entered into the world,' as Wisdom, written by Solomon, also testifies. From where, then, must death be said to come, if God did not make death? If from envy, how then did envy prove stronger than the will of God? But we shall say that this is blasphemous. 'From where, then, does envy come?' the objector will say. 'For if from the devil, why did the devil come to be, if he came to be at all, and is not the one who made him the cause of his being evil? Yet God is wholly blameless of all evils for all. The devil, then, is unoriginate; and if unoriginate, he is also impassible, indestructible and without need, for these must of every necessity belong to the unoriginate. But the devil is brought to nothing and punished; and what is punished is altered and suffers, whereas the unoriginate is impassible. The devil, then, is not unoriginate but originate. And if he is originate, and everything that has come into being came to be from some beginning and has a maker, then there is some maker of the devil. And is that maker unoriginate or originate? But only one must be understood to be unoriginate, God; for there can be no other maker at all besides him ("I," he says, "am the first, and I am after these things, and besides me there is no other God"), nor can anything be reshaped or created contrary to his will. For the Son too will confess that "he can do nothing of himself, unless he sees the Father doing something; for whatever the Father does," he says, "the Son also does likewise." Nor indeed is anything hostile or opposed or contrary to God; for if anything acted against God, it would cease to exist, its constitution dissolved by God's power and strength. For he alone who made them can dissolve even immortal things.'"

"What then is the devil?" you will say. A spirit concerned with matter, as Athenagoras too said, made by God, just as the other angels were made by him, and entrusted with the administration of matter and of the forms of matter. For this was how the angels were constituted: they were made by God to exercise providence over the things he had ordered, so that God might hold the universal and general providence over all things, himself keeping the authority and power over everything and steering the universe unswervingly, like a ship, with the helm of his wisdom, while the angels appointed to this task held the providence over particular things. The others remained in the tasks for which God made and appointed them; but he grew insolent and became wicked in the administration of what had been entrusted to him, conceiving envy against us, as did also those who afterwards fell in love with flesh and consorted with the daughters of men for pleasure. For God ordained that they too should have a will of their own choosing, inclined to either side, as with men, so that either, obeying the Word, they might be with him and enjoy blessedness, or, not obeying, they might be judged. The devil, too, was a morning star, a light-bringer. 'How has the morning star fallen from heaven, he that rose early?' He rose with the angels of light, like a morning star; but he fell and 'was crushed to the earth,' having plotted against man. For the divine always resents 'the proud' and cuts down arrogant thoughts. And it occurs to me to say something in verse too:

O serpent, beginning and end of all evils for all, and you, Error, who bear a heavy treasure of evils, guide of a blind and ignorant life, who rejoice in the laments and groans of mortals: you armed the brother-hating arms of kinsmen for lawless outrages, and persuaded Cain to be the first to defile the earth with murderous gore; and you contrived that the first-formed man should fall from undefiled ages to the ground.

"So much for the devil. But death was devised for conversion, just as blows are for the correction of children who have newly begun to learn their letters. For death is nothing other than the separation and parting of the soul from the body. 'What then? Is God the cause of death?' you will say; for the same argument comes round to us again. God forbid; for teachers too are not primarily the cause of children's being pained by blows. Death, then, is good, if it was devised for conversion, like blows for children: not the death of sin, most wise friends, but the death that is the separation and parting of the flesh. For man was free and his own master, and had received, as I said, a will of his own and self-chosen for the choice of the good. He heard, 'From every tree that is in the paradise you shall eat; but from the tree of knowing good and evil you shall not eat of it; in the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.' Yet he gave in to the devil, who persuaded him in various ways to disobedience with a beguiling wisdom, so that he ate of it; and he set aside God's commandment, and this became for him a stumbling-block and a snare and an offence. For God did not make evil, nor is he in any way at all the cause of evil; but whatever has been made free by him in this way, for keeping and guarding the law that he justly ordained, and does not keep it, is called evil. And the gravest harm is to disobey God, overstepping the bounds of the justice that belongs to free will. Hence, since man had been defiled and polluted by turning away from God's decree, and had taken on the stains of much wickedness which the ruler of darkness and father of error brought forth, having 'conceived toil,' as Scripture says, so as always to have the means of stirring up and moving man toward injustice, God the Almighty, seeing that by the devil's plot he had become an immortal evil, as the devil too was a deceiver, made the garments of skins for this reason, clothing him as it were with mortality, so that through the dissolution of the body all the evil begotten in him might die.

[39] "It has already been raised as a question and shown that the garments of skins are not the bodies. Nevertheless let us speak of it again, for it must not be said only once. Before they were made, the first-formed man himself acknowledges that he has both bones and flesh, when, seeing the woman brought to him, he cried out: 'This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken from her man. For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' I will not put up with some who talk nonsense and shamelessly do violence to Scripture, so that their notion that the resurrection is not of the flesh may succeed: they suppose bones and flesh to be only figurative, and turn them now one way and now another, up and down, by allegories. Yet Christ confirms that these words are to be taken as they are written, where, when the Pharisees ask him about the putting away of a wife, he answers: 'Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother,' and so on. For how could 'Increase and multiply and fill the earth' be understood of souls alone, or 'God took dust from the earth and formed man,' which plainly refers properly to the body? For the soul did not get its substance from dust and the heavier elements. So it is established most truly on every ground that man was embodied before the garments of skins. For all these things were said before his fall, and what concerns the garments after the fall. Let us go, then, to consider again the matter in hand, having sufficiently shown that the garments of skins are not the bodies but the mortality made from the irrational animals; for that is what remains. It is indeed for this reason that he is moved out beyond the bounds of paradise. For it was not because God did not want him to reach out to the tree of life and eat that he cast him out (for he could have lived forever, if he had eaten again of the tree of life), but so that evil might not become immortal, as we have laid down. Otherwise why did he send Christ from heaven to earth, if he wanted man to die altogether without tasting life? And if the objector should say that God did this out of repentance, his argument is weak, since it brings in a God who changes his mind. But God is neither ignorant of the future nor a doer of evil; he is supremely good and foreknows what is to come. So it was not to keep him from being preserved forever by eating from the tree of life that he cast him out, but so that sin might first be put to death by death, and that thus, after sin had wasted away in death, man might be raised pure and eat of life.

[40] "Let no one, in his foolishness, run the risk of thinking that these things were said in any other sense. For whoever altogether defines this flesh as incapable of immortality is truly guilty of folly, and how great is his blasphemy! For why is Adam cast out after the making of the garments of skins, prevented from eating of the tree of life and living, if it was altogether impossible for man to live forever with a body? The prohibition is made because he could have escaped death, if he had taken and tasted of life. For it says: 'And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins and clothed them. And God said, Behold, Adam has become like one of us, in knowing good and evil; and now, lest he stretch out his hand and take of the tree of life and eat and live forever. And the Lord God sent him out of the paradise of delight to till the earth from which he was taken, and he cast Adam out.' The body, then, could have lived forever and been immortal, if it had not been prevented from tasting of life. But it was prevented so that sin, being killed together with the body, might die, and the body might be raised after sin had perished. So, in order that man might not be an immortal or ever-living evil, as I said, having sin prevailing in him, since it had sprung up in an immortal body and had immortal nourishment, God for this reason pronounced him mortal, clothing him with mortality. For this is what the garments of skins were meant for: that through the dissolution and division of the body, sin might be wholly destroyed from below, root and all, so that not even the smallest part of a root might be left from which new shoots of sins might spring up again.

[41] "For just as, when a fig tree has sprung up in the beautiful buildings of a temple and has grown well in extent and size, and has spread with many-branched roots over all the joints of the stones, it does not stop growing until it is entirely torn out, the stones in the places where it sprouted being loosened (for once the fig tree is removed the stones can be fitted again into their own places, so that the temple is preserved, no longer bearing within itself any of the evils that would destroy it, while the fig tree, torn out root and all, dies), in the same way God the craftsman dissolved his own temple, man, when he had sprouted sin like a wild fig tree, by the temporary assaults of death, 'killing,' as it is written, 'and making alive,' so that the flesh, after sin has withered and died, may be raised again from the same parts, like a renewed temple, immortal and unharmed, sin having perished completely from its foundations. For while the body is still living, before it has died, sin must live along with it, hiding its roots within us, even if outwardly it is checked by the prunings of corrections and admonitions; otherwise it would not happen that we do wrong after being enlightened, since sin would have been taken away from us altogether and completely. But now, even after believing and coming to the water of purification, we are often found in sins. For no one will boast of being so free from sin as not even to think of injustice at all. So it is established that sin is now restrained and lulled to sleep by faith, so that it does not bear harmful fruits, but it is not taken away down to the roots. For now we restrain its shoots here, such as evil thoughts, 'lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble,' not allowing the closed mouths of its buds to open and unclose into shoots, while the Word, like an axe, cuts its roots that grow below; but then even thinking about evil at all will disappear."

"For the argument is not without the witness of the Scriptures for those who wish to speak the truth sincerely, since the apostle too knew that the root of sin had not yet been wholly removed from men, saying at one time, 'For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but to accomplish the good is not. For the good that I will, I do not do; but the evil that I do not will, that I practise. But if I do what I do not will, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me'; and at another, 'I delight in the law of God according to the inner man; but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and taking me captive to the law of sin that is in my members.' So it has not yet come about that sin is cut off root and all, from its roots; it lives (for it has not died completely; how could it, before man was clothed with death?), so that, withering and wasting away together with him, it may itself be utterly destroyed and perish like a plant once that in which it was preserved, hiding its roots, as I said, has been dissolved, and man may be raised up again like a temple, no longer having 'a root of bitterness' lurking within him. For death was adopted by God, our true helper and physician, like a remedy, for the uprooting and destruction of sin, so that evil might not be everlasting and immortal in us, having sprung up in immortal beings, and so that we ourselves, maimed and fallen away from our own virtue like the sick, might not spend a long time nursing the great disease of sin in bodies that always subsist and are immortal. That is why God fittingly devised this death for the salvation of both soul and body, like a medicinal purging, so that we might thus be made entirely blameless and unharmed.

[43] "Come, then, since many examples are needed in such matters, let us consider them from this point especially, not desisting until the argument first arrives at a clearer explanation and proof. It appears, then, as if a master craftsman were to melt down again a beautiful statue, made by him of gold or some other material and with all its members proportionately arranged for beauty, upon suddenly seeing it mutilated by some most wicked man who, unable from envy to bear that the statue should be beautiful, damaged it, reaping the vain pleasure of his envy. (For note, most wise Aglaophon, that if the craftsman wished that what he had laboured on with such zeal and care should not be damaged at all or open to blame, he will be impelled to melt it down and make it such as it was before. But if he did not recast it or remake it, but let it remain, repairing and mending it, then the statue, heated in the fire and hammered, could no longer be kept the same, but would be altered and diminished.) For this reason, if he wished the work to be wholly beautiful and blameless, it must be broken up and recast, so that all the disfigurements and alterations that came upon it from plotting and envy may perish through the remaking and recasting, while the statue is restored to its own form, unharmed and unalloyed, as like itself as possible. (For the statue cannot perish under the same craftsman, even if it is poured back into its material, but it can be restored; whereas the disfigurements and injuries can perish, for they melt away, but cannot be restored, because in every art the best craftsman looks not at what is ugly or hateful but at what is proportionate and right in the thing he makes.) This, then, seems to me to be what God has also arranged in our case. For seeing man, his most comely work, damaged by the envious plots of jealousy, he could not bear, being a lover of man, to leave him so, lest he be blemished forever, having the blame in himself immortal; but he dissolved him again into his material, so that through the remoulding all the blemishes in him might melt away and vanish. For the recasting of the statue there corresponds to the death and dissolution of the body here; and the reshaping or re-adorning of the material there to the rising here. So the prophet Jeremiah too, who already recommends the same things in these words: 'And I went down,' he says, 'to the potter's house; and behold, he was making a work on the stones, and the vessel which he was making fell apart in his hands, and he made it again into another vessel, as it pleased him to make it. And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, Shall I not be able to do to you as this potter does, house of Israel? Behold, as the clay of the potter, so are you in my hands.'"

"For observe how, as I said, after man had transgressed, the great Hand did not consent to leave its own work as a trophy of victory to the wicked one, who had unjustly damaged it for envious reasons, as something counterfeit; but it melted it down and turned it back again into clay, as a potter remoulds a vessel, so that through the remoulding all the disfigurements and bruises in it might vanish, and the whole might be made anew, blamelessly pleasing. 'Or does the potter not have authority over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honour and another for dishonour?' That is to say (for this is plainly what the apostle seems to me to show): has God no authority, having remoulded and re-adorned each of us individually from the same material of each, to raise us either to honour and glory or to dishonour and condemnation? To dishonour the one who lived wickedly in sins, and to honour the one who lived in righteousness. As was revealed to Daniel too: 'And many of those who sleep in the mound of the earth,' he says, 'will awake, these to everlasting life, and these to reproach and everlasting shame; and those who understand will shine like the brightness of the firmament.' For it is not in our power to destroy the root of wickedness completely, but only not to let it grow to its full extent and bear fruit. For its general and total removal and destruction, roots and all, is brought about by God at the dissolution of the body, as has been said; but the partial removal, so that it may not put out a shoot, is brought about by us. And for this reason the one who has nourished it to growth and size, instead of making it barren and keeping it down as far as lay in him, must pay the penalty, because, being able to do so and having the authority, he chose to honour what harms rather than what profits."

"So let no one, being himself the cause, blame the divine nature with unbridled tongue, as though it did not justly distribute to each the wages of vice and virtue. 'For who are you, O man, who answer back to God? Will what is formed say to the one who formed it, Why did you make me thus or thus?' How could it, when it chose evil by its own self-governing will? Therefore it will not say to God, who judges by the unvarying decrees of justice, 'Why did you make me thus,' when it has been condemned to suffer pain. For observe how the apostle, like a skilled javelin-thrower, casting compact words into the midst, makes the working-out of what he writes obscure and veiled in depth, yet most true and orthodox, with nothing in it careless or ill-spoken. To those who stoop over his words not earnestly but carelessly he sometimes seems to say things disconnected and discordant; but to those who read earnestly and with sober reason, how full of order and truth they are! To go through these matters with exactness now would be a sufficient task by itself; and it would be ridiculous to leave the inquiry for whose sake we set out and to pass on to other things. These things have been said by us because of the punishment that justice inflicts on those who choose to be evil. Since, then, it has been shown most clearly that death was devised for man not for any evil but for good, whoever studies these matters without carelessness must now consider the resurrection of the body. For how is death not beneficial, since it destroys what plunders our nature, even if it is hateful at the time when it seems to be applied, like a most bitter medicine to the sick? And so that we may not discuss the same things often about the same matters, come, let us confirm the argument from the song in Deuteronomy as well, and go on to take up what follows."

"For the saying of God, 'I will kill and I will make alive; I will strike and I will heal; and there is no one who will deliver out of my hands,' what else does it mean to teach than that the body is first killed and dies for this reason, so that it may rise again and live? It is first struck and shattered, so that it may be formed again whole and sound; and nothing at all has the strength to snatch it out of his great and mighty hand for destruction and ruin: not fire, not death, not darkness, not chaos, not corruption. 'For who,' he says, 'will separate us from the love of Christ?' (who is interpreted as the Father's hand and Word) 'Tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, For your sake we are being put to death all the day long; we are reckoned as sheep for slaughter. But in all these things we more than conquer through him who loved us.' Most truly, so that, as I said, the saying may be fulfilled, 'I will kill and I will make alive; I will strike and I will heal; and there is no one who will deliver' us 'from the love of God which is in Christ' for destruction. That is why 'we are reckoned as sheep for slaughter,' so that, having died 'to sin,' we may live 'to God.' Let these things be considered thus far; what follows from them must be taken up again as follows."

"'If everything that is born is sick,' so the opponent argues, 'both in its birth and in its nourishment (for it grows, he says, by what comes in and diminishes by what goes out); and if the things that are not born are healthy, because they are not sick, nor in need, nor desire; and if the things that are born desire both intercourse and food, and to desire is to be sick, while not to need or desire is to be healthy; and if the things that are born are sick because they desire, while the things not born are not sick; and if sick things suffer, either by excess or by deficiency of what is added and taken away, and what suffers both wastes away and perishes, and so does whatever is born; and if man is born: then man cannot be impassible and immortal.' But even on these points their argument collapses. For if everything that comes into being or is born perishes (it makes no difference to put it so, since the first-formed too were not born but came into being), and the angels and the souls too came into being ('who makes his angels spirits'), then according to them the angels and the souls perish. But neither the angels nor the souls perish; for they are immortal and indomitable, as the one who made them willed them to be. Man too, then, is immortal.

"Nor is that view acceptable either, which says that the universe will be utterly destroyed, and that there will be no earth or air or heaven. For the whole world will indeed be deluged with fire coming down from above for purification and renewal, but it will not come to complete destruction and corruption. For if it were better for the world not to be than to be, why did God, in making the world, choose the worse? But God made nothing in vain or worse. So God ordered the creation for being and abiding, as Wisdom too confirms, saying, 'For God created all things for being, and the generations of the world are wholesome, and there is no poison of destruction in them.' And Paul clearly testifies, saying, 'For the eager expectation of the creation waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope, because the creation itself also will be set free from the bondage of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.' 'For the creation was subjected to futility,' he says, and it expects to be 'set free' from such 'bondage'; by 'creation' he means here this world. For it is not what is unseen that is in bondage to corruption, but these 'things that are seen.' The creation, then, remains, renewed to a better and more seemly state, rejoicing and exulting over the children of God at the resurrection, for whose sake it now groans and travails, itself also awaiting our redemption from the corruption of the body, so that, when we have risen and shaken off the deadness of the flesh, according to what is written, 'Shake off the dust, and arise and sit, Jerusalem,' and have been set free from sin, it too 'will be set free from corruption,' no longer in bondage to futility but to righteousness. 'For we know,' he says, 'that the whole creation groans together and travails together until now; and not only so, but we ourselves too, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves, awaiting the adoption, the redemption of our body.' And Isaiah: 'For as the new heaven and the new earth which I make,' he says, 'remain before me, says the Lord, so will your seed and your name be.' And again: 'Thus says the Lord who made the heaven, this God who prepared the earth and made it; he marked it out; he did not make it for nothing, but to be inhabited.' For truly God did not create the universe for nothing or in vain, for destruction, as those who think vain things say, but to exist and to be inhabited and to abide. Therefore the earth and the heaven too must exist again after the conflagration and the shaking of all things. Why this is necessary would take still more words than have been said. For the universe will not be dissolved and resolved into its elements as formless matter, into such a state as it was in before its ordering, nor, again, will it come to complete destruction and corruption."

"But if the opponents say, 'How then, if the universe does not perish, did Christ say that heaven and earth would pass away, and the prophet that the heaven would perish like smoke and the earth grow old like a garment?' we shall say: because it is the custom of the Scriptures to call destruction the change of the world from its present state to a better and more glorious one, its former shape being destroyed in the change of all things into something brighter; for there is no contradiction or absurdity in the divine words. For 'the form of this world passes away,' it is said, not the world itself. So it is the custom of the Scriptures to call destruction the change from a former shape to a better and sometimes more comely one; as when someone should call destruction the change from the shape of an infant into 'the perfect man,' when the infant's stature turns to size and beauty. 'For when I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child; but when I became a man, I put away the things of the child.' For we must expect that the creation will be thrown into turmoil, as though about to die in the conflagration, so that it may be created anew, but not that it will perish, so that we who have been renewed may dwell in a renewed world without tasting grief, according to what is said in the hundred and third psalm, 'You will send forth your Spirit, and they will be created, and you will renew the face of the earth,' God thenceforth regulating the good temperature of the surrounding air. For since there will be an earth even after this age, there must by all necessity be those who will dwell on it, who will no longer die, or marry, or beget, but, like angels, will unchangeably do what is best in incorruption. Therefore it is silly to ask in what manner of life our bodies will then exist, if there will be neither air nor earth nor anything else.

[49] "In addition to what has been said, this too is worth considering, since it contains a great error, if we are to speak freely, Aglaophon, when discussing matters of such importance. For having said that the Lord declared that those who attain the resurrection will then be 'as angels,' when the Sadducees were testing him, you went on: 'The angels, being without flesh, are on this account in the height of blessedness and glory; and we too, then, since we are to be made equal to angels, must necessarily be stripped of flesh as they are.' You did not consider, my excellent friend, that he who made and ordered the universe out of nothing ordered the nature of immortal beings, distributing it not only into angels and ministers, but also into principalities and thrones and powers. For the race of angels is one thing and that of principalities and powers another, because there is not one rank and one constitution and tribe and family of immortals, but kinds and tribes and differences. Neither do the cherubim depart from their own nature and get transformed into the form of angels, nor again the angels into another. For they must be what they are and what they were made. And man too, appointed by the original ordering to inhabit the world and to rule over all things in it, being immortal, will never be changed from being man, either into the form of angels or into that of the others; for the angels too are not changed from their original form by being transformed into that of the others. For Christ came proclaiming not that human nature would be formed or remade into another form, but into what it was from the beginning before the fall, when it was immortal. For each of the things that have come into being must remain in its own proper type, so that all things may be filled with all: the heavens with angels, the thrones with powers, the lights with ministers, the more divine places and the undefiled and pure lights with the seraphim, who stand beside the great counsel that governs the universe, and the world with men. [But if we grant that men are changed into angels, it is time to say that the angels too are changed into powers, and these into one thing and another, until the argument climbs up and falls into danger.]"

"Nor did God, as though he had made man badly or had erred in fashioning him, decide afterwards to make him an angel, changing his mind like the worst of craftsmen; nor did he want at the beginning to make an angel and, being unable, form a man instead. For that would be weakness. Why then did he make man a man and not an angel, if he wanted man to become an angel and not a man? Because he was unable? That is blasphemous. Or did he put off the better while making the worse? That too is absurd. For he neither fails in making what is good, nor puts it off, nor is unable, but has the power both as he wills and when he wills, being himself power. So it was because he willed man to be man that he created him so from the beginning. And if he willed it, and he wills what is good, then man is good; and man is said to be what is composed of soul and body. Man, then, will not be without a body, but with a body, lest another man come into being besides the man. For all the immortal kinds must be preserved by God, and man too is immortal: 'For God created man for incorruption,' says Wisdom, 'and made him an image of his own eternity.' The body, then, does not perish; for man is of soul and body."

"Notice, then, how the Lord too wished to teach these very things, when the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the flesh; for that was a doctrine of the Sadducees. That is why they contrived the parable about the woman and the seven brothers, to cast doubt on the teaching of the resurrection of the flesh, and came to him; indeed the evangelist himself noted it, saying, 'And there came to him Sadducees, who say that there is no resurrection.' If, then, there were no resurrection of the flesh, but only the soul were saved, Christ would have agreed with them that they thought rightly and well. But as it is he rebuffs them, saying, 'In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as angels in heaven': not by having no flesh, but by not marrying and being given in marriage, but being from then on in incorruption and light, and coming near to the angels in this respect, so that, as the angels are in heaven, so we too are in paradise, no longer occupied with weddings or feasts, but with seeing God and cultivating life, with Christ presiding over us. For he did not say 'they will be angels,' but 'as angels,' that is, 'crowned' with 'glory' and 'honour,' according to what is written, differing 'a little from the angels' and near to being angels. It is as if someone said, when the air is calm and the night still and everything is adorned with the ethereal light of the moon, that the moon shines like the sun; we would not say that he was testifying that the moon is altogether the sun, but like the sun. So too what is not gold, but is by nature near to being gold, is called 'like gold' and not gold (if it were gold, it would not be called 'like gold' but 'gold'; but since it is not gold, but near to being gold and resembling gold, it is called not gold but like gold). In the same way, when he says that the saints will be as angels in the resurrection, we do not hear him promising that the saints will be angels in the resurrection, but near to being angels. So it is most unreasonable to say that, because Christ declared that the saints will appear as angels in the resurrection, these bodies do not rise; and yet the very word clearly shows the order of what happens. For 'resurrection' is said not of what has not fallen, but of what has fallen and rises again, as when the prophet too says, 'And I will raise up the tent of David that has fallen.' And the longed-for tent of the soul fell, sinking down 'to the earth of dust.' For it is not what does not die that sinks down, but what dies. And it is the flesh that dies; for the soul is immortal. And so, if the soul is immortal and the body is the dead thing, those who say that there is a resurrection, but not of the flesh, deny that there is a resurrection, since it is not what stands that rises again but what has fallen and sunk down, according to what is written, 'Does not he who falls rise again, or he who turns away return?'"

"That the soul is immortal Christ taught openly, speaking both himself and through Solomon: himself in the story of the rich man and the poor man Lazarus, where he grants the one rest in the bosom of Abraham after laying aside the body, and puts the other in torments, and brings him in conversing with Abraham; and through Solomon in the book entitled Wisdom, where it is written, 'The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought an affliction, and their going from us a ruin; but they are in peace, and their hope is full of immortality.' So the resurrection is of the body, not of the soul. For no one raises up someone who is standing, but someone who is lying down, just as no one treats the healthy, but the sick. If anyone forcibly maintains that the resurrection will be of the soul and not of the flesh, this is great folly and unreason. For he must first show the corruption and dissolution of the soul, and so show its resurrection too, if he is not to talk nonsense but to be seen to say something clear; and so he must define the soul as mortal. For one of two things must be held here: either the Lord declared the truth when he taught that the soul is immortal, and it is false to say that it perishes; or it perishes, and Christ lied when he taught that it is indestructible and immortal, both in the account of the rich man and the poor man and in the vision of Moses and Elijah. But Christ said nothing otherwise than as it is, nor did he lie. For it was not an image or a phantom that he showed the apostles on the mountain, Elijah and Moses, wishing to deceive them; he showed them truly, so that, so to speak, even the slowest to learn might learn that the soul is immortal and be firmly assured that it is indestructible."

"So the resurrection is of the flesh and not of the soul, so that 'the fallen tent' of David, which fell into corruption, may rise, and, having risen and been rebuilt 'as in the days of old,' may remain thereafter unharmed and unfallen. For God is not going to build the stone house of David in the future, so that he may have a fine house in the kingdom of heaven, but the flesh, the tent of the soul, which he himself fashioned with his own hands. You should consider it in this way, most wise Aglaophon. You will learn this most easily of all if you attend to the image of sleeping and rising. For if sleeping comes from being awake, and rising from sleeping, and this is a rehearsal of death and resurrection (for sleep and death are twins), then the flesh's coming back to life must also come from being dead into living, just as waking comes from those who are asleep. For as waking comes from sleeping, and the sleeper does not by any means remain always in the same posture asleep, but rises again, so living too will come from dying, and the one who has died does not by any means remain in that state once he has died. For if waking comes from sleeping, and being raised up from falling, and being rebuilt from being thrown down, by what reasoning can we fail to expect that what has sunk down will rise and what has died will come back to life? Indeed we, without being deceived, confess this: that coming back to life happens from dead bodies. And consider this, if you like, not only from sleeping and rising, but also from seeds and plants, how the resurrection is proclaimed in them all. Learn from the seeds how they are cast into the earth 'bare,' as he says, and fleshless, and when they come to fruit are given back again, the same. For if the seeds died and rotted, but no living again and growing came from the seeds, what other lot would there be than that all things should be consumed into death?"

"But we shall leave off saying more about these things for now, most excellent Theophilus, and you other judges of the discussion. Let us take up what follows next, and see how far it has strayed from what is right. For he again, in the prophecy of the sixty-fifth psalm, which he expounds forcibly and inappropriately, has God put the souls into the flesh as into a snare, to undergo punishment for their sins; and this belongs to absurdity rather than to orthodoxy. For if before the transgression, as we have already set out above, the souls possessed a body, how are they afterwards, after the transgression, put into the body as into a snare, when there was no time in which they sinned before receiving the body? For it is not the part of a sensible man to say at one time that the souls sinned because of the body, and at another that, because they had sinned, the body became a fetter and a snare for their condemnation. For if they sinned because of the body, then the body was with them from the beginning, even before sin; for how did they sin because of what did not yet exist? And if, again, the body itself is considered a snare and shackles and a fetter, then the cause is no longer both together, but the soul alone; for fetters and snares and shackles are prepared for one who has sinned, after the sinning. But we agreed that the body cannot be the soul's fetter, since the body works with it toward either, toward what is just and what is unjust, whereas a fetter keeps one from doing wrong. So, as I say, it is one of two things: either we sinned from the beginning with the body, and no time appears in which we existed outside the body, and the body is a joint cause with the soul of both good and evil; or we sinned while living without a body, and the body is entirely innocent of vice. But without a body the soul is not overcome by irrational pleasure; and the first-formed were overcome, enticed by irrational pleasure. The soul, then, was with a body even before sin. As for the claim that the body came into being after the transgression as a fetter for punishment, so that the soul, according to them, might have pure and continual torment carrying a corpse, I think I have already shown fully, with every proof, that it cannot be admitted. Hence it is incoherent and inadmissible to make the body a snare and a fetter, and to bring in God putting the souls into the snare to undergo punishment, casting them down from the third heaven above because they disobeyed the commandment. For why should anyone believe what they have said so rashly, when the psalm does not mean this, even if they expound it forcibly? I will set out the words themselves, so that the fabulous character of their interpretation may appear, since they will not understand the Scriptures rightly. The words are these: 'You have tested us, O God; you have tried us by fire as silver is tried by fire. You brought us into the snare; you laid afflictions on our back; you set men over our heads; we went through fire and water, and you brought us out into refreshment.' And at once they add: 'These things are said by the souls that were brought down from the third heaven, where paradise is, into the snare, the body, as into a contest. For "we went through fire and water" shows either the passage of the soul through the womb into the world, since it is formed in such great heat and moisture, or its fall from the heavens into this life, passing through the springs of fire and the waters above the back of the firmament.' I thought it right to oppose them. Come, Aglaophon, give the answer on their behalf yourself: what will they say?

[55] "First, the paradise from which we were cast out in the first-formed man is plainly a special place of this earth, set apart for the saints for rest and life free from pain. This is clear from the fact that the Tigris and the Euphrates and the other rivers that flow out from there are seen here, flooding our continent with the outflows of their streams. For they do not pour down from the heavens above; the earth could not have endured to receive so great a mass of water borne down all at once from the height. Nor does the apostle suppose that paradise is in the third heaven, for those who know how to listen to subtle words. For in saying, 'I know such a man caught up to the third heaven; and I know such a man, whether in the body or out of the body, God knows, that he was caught up into paradise,' he indicates that he saw two great revelations, having been plainly taken up twice, once to the third heaven and once into paradise. For 'I know such a man caught up to the third heaven' establishes that a revelation appeared to him when he was taken up to the third heaven; and 'And I know,' added again, 'such a man, whether in the body or out of the body, God knows, that he was caught up into paradise' shows that another revelation was made to him in paradise. It is therefore twaddle and tragic bombast to say that the souls are cast down from the heavens and pass through the springs of fire and the waters above the back of the firmament as they are carried into our world; for not even Adam was cast out of the heavens, but out of the paradise 'planted in Eden toward the east.' For the transgression did not happen before embodiment, as we have sufficiently taught, nor is the body this snare; the transgression happens after the soul's union with the body, when man is both together, and the fall from paradise happens here. But Aglaophon did not attend to the argument at all carefully; he strained after matters that admit no understanding, trying to expound the psalm according to the opinions of the wicked, about which we shall say no more.

[56] "For since we have once come to correcting their wickedness, I wish to strip them of the pretext of this prophecy too. 'You have tested us, O God; you have tried us by fire as silver is tried.' The martyrs, thoroughly tested in the assaults of torments in their trials (for the prophecies are fulfilled mostly in our faith), and having contended gloriously and most bravely, give thanks, saying to God, 'You have tested us,' because, so that they might gain greater glory with him, he exercised them through many labours, setting before them the winning of the truly Olympic contest. And observe how Solomon too clearly declares things in accord with these words about the martyrs (for the argument is not without the witness of other Scriptures too): 'God tested them and found them worthy of himself; as gold in the furnace he tried them, and as a whole burnt offering of sweet savour he accepted them, and in the time of their visitation…', having said before, 'For though in the sight of men they are punished, their hope is full of immortality; and having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good.' And also in the hundred and twenty-third psalm: 'If the Lord had not been among us when men rose up against us, then they would have swallowed us alive; then the water would have drowned us; our soul passed through a torrent; then our soul passed through the overwhelming water. Blessed be the Lord, who did not give us as prey to their teeth. Our soul was rescued like a sparrow from the snare of the hunters; the snare was broken, and we were rescued.' Those who say this are the martyrs. And there are two choirs of martyrs of fair renown, one of the new covenant and the other of the old, sending up in harmony an answering hymn to the Champion and King of all: 'You have tested us, O God; you have tried us by fire as silver is tried; you brought us into the snare; you laid afflictions on our back,' meaning the tribunal of the nations or the trials in which they were afflicted and tried by fire and strongly tested. And again David: 'Test me, O Lord,' he says, 'and try me; try by fire my kidneys and my heart.' Let Abraham too say it, whose inward parts were tried by fire over his only son, and who preferred the command of God, when, after hearing, 'Abraham, spare your child,' he threw away the sword: 'You have tested us, O God; you have tried us by fire as silver is tried.' Let Job say it too, after scraping off the putrid matter [of his sores], and being reproached by his friends and suffering pain in his body, when he heard God speaking to him 'through the whirlwind,' 'Do you think that I have dealt with you otherwise than so that you might be shown righteous?': 'You laid afflictions before us, Lord, so that you might test us as gold in a furnace.' Let the three youths in the furnace say it too, refreshed with dew so that they were not burned by the fire: 'You have tested us, O God; you have tried us by fire as silver is tried; we went through fire and water, and you brought us out into refreshment.' Grant me too, Methodius, O God almighty, great, eternal, Father of Christ, to say in your day, when I have passed through the fire without pain and escaped the onrush of the streams changed into a burning nature: 'I went through fire and water, and you brought me out into refreshment.' For this is your promise to those who love you: 'If you pass through water, I am with you, and rivers will not overwhelm you; if you pass through fire, you will not be burned; the flame will not burn you.' But this is enough about the interpretation of the psalm."

"Further, this point too must be examined, in which, deluded by many-shaped deceits, like men asleep, they declare that the apostle said, 'I was once alive apart from the law,' and they cry: 'He meant our life before the commandment in the first-formed man, before the body, as what follows shows: "But I am fleshly, sold under sin"; for man could not otherwise be ruled and mastered by evil, having been sold to it through the transgression, unless he had become fleshly. For the soul by itself,' he says, 'cannot be taken by sin. That is why he sharply added, "But I am fleshly, sold under sin," having said before, "I was once alive apart from the law."' When they said this, the many were at that time seized with wonder and amazement; but now that the truth has already come forth more clearly, they are seen not only to be wandering far astray, but even to be climbing to the height of blasphemy. For having granted that souls lived without bodies before the commandment, and that by themselves they cannot be taken by sin at all, they then, on reflection, overturned their own argument, and much more themselves. For they furnish the souls with bodies later, given for punishment because they sinned before the body. And so they fell to abuse as well, likening the body to fetters and shackles and saying other senseless things. But now, as has been said, the whole is the opposite: the soul must have been with a body before sin. For if the soul by itself cannot be taken by sin, it would not have sinned at all before the body; and if it sinned, then it is no longer, by itself, beyond the reach of sin, but rather easily captured and taken. So it will sin again even if it does not take this body, just as it sinned before taking it. And why at all did it take a body later, after it had sinned? Or what need of a body did it have? If it was so that it might be tormented and pained, how is it that with the body it rather lives in luxury and licentiousness? And how does free will appear to exist in this world? For believing and not believing rest with us; and where believing and not believing rest with us, so do doing right and sinning, so do doing good and doing evil. And how can the judgment still be expected as something to come, in which God renders to each according to his works and pursuits, and not be thought to be already present, if for the soul to be born and to come into the body is already to be judged and requited, and to die and be separated from the body is to be set free and come into refreshment, because, according to you, the soul, having sinned before the body, is put into the body as for condemnation and sentence? But the argument has shown fully and abundantly that the body cannot be considered a torture chamber and shackles of the soul.

[58] "It would be enough, then, having shown from Scripture itself that the first-formed man was of soul and body before the transgression, to stop the discussion of these matters here. I go through them by headings, removing the pretexts of their attempts and striving to correct them, so that I may not go beyond the measure of the discussion. For it is now possible to see, judges, that 'I was once alive apart from the law,' said in the Epistle to the Romans, cannot refer to the life of the soul before the body that they speak of, as the words that follow show; even though this noble physician, taking away what follows in the texts, forced the apostle's meaning to be remoulded to suit what pleased him, suffering a quite incurable and childish affliction. For instead of keeping the members of bodies in their own joints and fittings, so that the whole shape of the body may be complete according to nature, he has mutilated it, passing over the sequence of Scripture, like a Scythian who cuts up the limbs of an enemy unsparingly to destroy him. 'How then,' they will say, 'did the apostle declare these things, if you have not shown them to be so?' Because, I would say, though he called the commandment law (let it first be granted, on your supposition, that he called that commandment law), he did not on that account suppose that the first-formed man lived without a body before the commandment, but without sin. For short was the time from their creation to the commandment, in which he lived without sin, not outside the body but with the body. At any rate they were cast out after the commandment, having stayed in paradise a very short time. But if anyone, seizing on the saying, 'For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sins, which were through the law, were at work in our members,' thinks that he slanders the flesh and rejects it, and brings forward all the other such sayings (for example, 'that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit'; or 'For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit on the things of the Spirit; for the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind of the flesh is enmity toward God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can it be; but you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit'), we must say to him: did the apostle write these things when he and those to whom he wrote had already departed from life, if what he was rejecting here was not the life according to the flesh but the flesh itself, or was he still in the flesh? It cannot be said that he wrote these things when he was not in the flesh; for it is evident that both he and those to whom he wrote were in the flesh. How then does he say, 'For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sins, which were through the law, were at work in our members,' as though neither he nor those to whom he writes were still in the flesh? So he is speaking about the life of intemperance and not about the flesh itself. For it is his custom to call a man who lives in this way fleshly, just as he calls 'natural' the man who has become too dull to look steadily at the truth and at the enlightenment of the mystery. Otherwise let them say that the soul cannot be saved at all. For it is written, 'The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; but the spiritual man judges all things.' Just as there a natural man and a spiritual man are introduced, and the spiritual man belongs to those who are saved, the natural to those who perish, and yet the soul does not on that account perish while something other than the soul is saved, so here too, in saying that those who are fleshly and in the flesh perish and cannot please God, he is striving to abolish not the flesh but the life according to the flesh. And going on, after saying, 'Those who are in the flesh cannot please God,' he immediately adds, 'But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if the Spirit of Christ dwells in you'; and a little after, 'But if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh; for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.' For note that he affirmed that it is the body's impulse toward pleasures, and not the body, that is put to death."

"If they object again, saying, 'How then is "the mind of the flesh" said to be "enmity toward God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can it be"?', we must say that here too they go astray. For he did not suppose that the flesh itself cannot be subject to the law of God, but that the mind of the flesh cannot, which is something other than the flesh. It is as if he said: the dross of silver that has not been well refined 'is not subject' to the craftsman so as to become a suitable vessel, 'nor indeed can it be' (for it must first be cast out and melted away); and he would not on that account declare that the silver cannot be worked into a useful vessel, but only the brassy part in the silver and its other hardness. So too, in saying 'the mind of the flesh,' he said not that the flesh cannot be subject to 'the law of God,' but the mind in the flesh, meaning, as it were, its impulse toward its intemperate desires; this he called elsewhere at one time 'the old leaven of malice and wickedness,' urging that it be completely removed from us, and at another 'a law warring against the law of the mind and taking it captive.' For if he said that the flesh itself cannot be subject to the law of God, then, first, we could incur no blame before a just judge when we behave licentiously or rob or do the other things we do through the body, since the flesh would be incapable of being subject to the law of God. For how could the body be blamed for being according to the nature that belongs to it? Nor could the body ever be brought to chastity or virtue, if it were by nature not subject to the good. For if such is the nature of the flesh, that it cannot be subject to the law of God, and the law of God is righteousness and self-control, then it ought to be utterly impossible to live as a virgin or to practise self-control. But if people do live as virgins and practise self-control, and they practise self-control when they bring the body into subjection (for otherwise it is impossible to abstain from sin), then it is not true that the body cannot be subject to the law of God. Otherwise how did John bring his body into subjection to chastity, or Peter to holiness, or those after them to righteousness? And how does Paul say, 'Let not sin reign in your mortal body, so that you obey its desires; and do not present your members to sin as weapons of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as alive from the dead, and your members to God as weapons of righteousness'? And again, 'For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, leading to lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification.'

[60] "So he knew that this body can be directed and can incline toward the good, so that sins may be put to death in it. For how else can a man be made a slave to righteousness and live worthily of Christ, unless he first subjects the members of his flesh so that they obey not sin but righteousness? For sinning and not sinning happen through the body, the soul using it as an instrument either for virtue or for vice. For if 'neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor the effeminate nor men who lie with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor revilers nor robbers can inherit the kingdom of God,' and these things are accomplished and strengthened through the body, and no one is justified unless he first masters them, and the one who turns aside toward self-control and faith does master them, then the body is subject to the law of God; for the law of God is self-control. So the apostle did not say that the flesh 'is not subject' to the good, but 'the mind of the flesh,' doing away with its impulse toward intemperance, just as he does away with the soul's inclination toward injustice. Indeed, he strives for cleansing even down to the intemperance of gluttony, teaching that such appetites and pleasures are to be utterly destroyed, and putting to shame those who think that luxury and extravagance are life, who regard the belly as their god ('Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die'), busying themselves down below with food and tables only, like gluttonous beasts. And having said, 'Food for the belly and the belly for food, but God will bring to nothing both it and them,' he went on: 'But the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body; and God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. Do you not know that your members are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? God forbid! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute is one body with her? For the two, he says, will become one flesh. But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit. Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but the sexually immoral man sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? And you are not your own; for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's.'"

"For observe that the apostle said these things because this body can be subject to the law of God and receive immortality, if it is cleansed of the intemperance of its inflaming passions and not defiled at all by the lawless frictions of frenzy. For what else is it that is 'joined to the prostitute' and draws near and becomes 'one flesh' with her by the joining of members and the union, besides this outward body, through which all these sins of intercourse and burning are accomplished? Hence too, 'Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but the sexually immoral man sins against his own body.' For pride and unbelief and anger and hypocrisy are sins of the soul, but sexual immorality and frenzy and luxury are sins of the body; through which neither will the soul fly up to the truth nor will the body be made subject to the decrees of self-control, but both slip away from the kingdom of Christ. And so, if our bodies, kept in sanctification, are 'a temple' of 'the Spirit' who dwells 'in us,' and 'the Lord is for the body,' and the members of the body are 'members of Christ,' then the body is subject to 'the' divine 'law' and can 'inherit the kingdom of God.' For 'he who raised Christ from the dead will give life,' he says, 'also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you,' so that 'this mortal' may put on 'immortality, and this corruptible incorruption,' and 'death be swallowed up in victory.' For the apostle was not speaking here, as we hold, about some other body, but about this one which dies and is put to death, through which it is possible to commit sexual immorality and licentiousness."

"But if they suppose that there is a difference between body and flesh (let us allow them to reason about this too), and consider 'body' to be something else, such as that of the soul itself, which is not seen, but 'flesh' this outward thing that is seen, we must say that not only Paul and the prophets know that this flesh is called body, but other philosophers too, among whom above all the exactness of names has been carefully observed. For 'flesh,' as they know if they are willing to examine these things scientifically, is not properly said of this whole mass of our tabernacle, but of a part of the whole, such as the bones or the sinews or the veins; the whole is 'body.' That is why physicians too, who have treated exactly of the nature of bodies, call this visible thing a body. And Plato himself also calls this very thing a body. At any rate in the Phaedo Socrates said, 'Do we think death is anything other than the release of the soul from the body? And that being dead is this: that the body, released from the soul, has come to be apart by itself, and the soul apart from the body?' Indeed blessed Moses (for I now come to these, the Lord's Scriptures) calls what we see a body, when he says in the purifications that the one who touched the unclean 'shall wash his clothes and bathe' his body 'in water, and shall be unclean until evening.' And what of Job? Does not he too call this body that is put to death a body, saying, 'My body is soaked in the corruption of worms'? And Solomon too, saying that 'wisdom will not enter a soul that devises evil, nor dwell in a body enslaved to sin.' And in Daniel it is said of the martyrs, 'The fire had no power over their bodies, and the hair of their heads was not singed.' And the Lord in the Gospel: 'Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about what you will eat or what you will wear. Is not the soul more than food and the body more than clothing?' And the apostle too, in saying, 'Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body,' shows that he calls this which we wear a body. And again, 'But if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies.' And again, 'If the foot should say, Because I am not a hand, I am not of the body, it is not for that reason not of the body.' And again, 'And not being weak in faith,' Abraham 'did not consider his own body, which was as good as dead.' And again, 'For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive the things done through the body, according to what he has done.' And again, 'His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak.' And again, 'I know a man in Christ fourteen years ago, whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not know.' And again, 'So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies.' And again, 'May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly, and may your spirit and soul and body be kept whole and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.' But those who did not securely understand any of these things supposed that the apostle is carried about in tossing and turmoil, as though the thoughts of his words had no standing or settled seat, but floated up and down and said contradictory things, at one time that the flesh rises and at another that it does not rise. Therefore, so that nothing of what was put forward may be left out, and that we may cut off the Hydra completely, I will return again to the matter in hand. For next, as I promised, I will set out the other headings that they raise as further difficulties, and show what must be said in reply to them, and so present the apostle as saying these things too consistently and in harmony with faith in the resurrection of the flesh."

"Let us see, then, what we were first led to say about the apostle. For his saying, 'And I was alive apart from the law once,' refers to our life above in paradise in the first-formed, before the commandment, as we laid down at the beginning, not outside the body but with the body, since before the commandment was given 'God took dust from the earth and formed man.' We lived without desire, knowing nothing at all of the assaults of irrational desire, forcing us toward intemperance by the alluring enticements of pleasures. For one who has no rule according to which he must live, nor a self-governing power of reason to choose what way of life to follow, so that he may justly be either honoured or blamed, must be held free of every charge, since no one can desire the things from which he is not restrained; and even if he desires them, he will not be blamed. For desire falls not on things that are present and lie in our power, but on things that are present but not in our power. For how does anyone desire and love what he is neither forbidden nor in need of? That is why 'I would not have known desire, if the law had not said, You shall not desire.' For when they heard, 'But from the tree of knowing good and evil you shall not eat of it; in the day you eat of it, you shall surely die,' then they conceived desire and became pregnant with it. For the one who desires does not desire what he has and controls and uses, but what he is forbidden and deprived of and does not have. Therefore it was rightly said, 'I would not have known desire, if the law had not said, You shall not desire,' that is, if it had not been said, 'You shall not eat of it.' For from that point sin gained a place and an occasion to enter, to mock me and to turn me aside."

"For when the commandment had been given, the devil had through the commandment an occasion to work desire in me, urging me and skilfully calling me on to fall into longing for the forbidden things. 'For apart from the law sin was dead,' that is: since the commandment had not been given and did not yet exist, sin was inactive. 'And I was alive' blamelessly before the commandment, having no rule or ordinance according to which I had to live, so as to slip and sin. 'But when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died; and the commandment that was for life was found to be for me for death'; because after God had given the law and defined for me what was to be done and what was not to be done, the devil worked desire in me. For God's exhortation and command, given to me for life and incorruption, so that by obeying it and living according to it I might have a life unharmed and most blessed through the ages, ever flourishing toward immortality and joy, turned for me, when I set it aside, to death and condemnation; for the devil, whom he here calls sin because he is its maker and inventor, taking occasion through the commandment for disobedience, deceived me and, having deceived me, killed me, bringing it about that I became liable to the sentence, 'In the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.' 'So the law is holy,' and the commandment of God 'holy and just and good,' because it was given not to harm but to save. For let us by no means think that God does anything useless or harmful. What then? 'Did the good become death to me?' Did the ordinance that was given to be the cause of the greatest good to me [become death]? 'By no means'; for the commandment of God did not come about to enslave me to corruption, as the cause of my taking on the stains of destruction; but the devil did, so that, having prepared the evil for me through the good, the inventor and craftsman of sin might be shown and become and be proved exceedingly sinful, and the one who contrived what is contrary to God's commandment might be set apart from the good. 'For we know that the law is spiritual,' and so it is the cause of harm to no one; for spiritual things dwell far from irrational desire and sin. 'But I am fleshly, sold under sin,' that is: I am 'fleshly,' and, having been set in the midst between evil and good as one who is free, so that it rests with me to choose what I wish ('for I have set,' he says, 'before your face life and death'), I inclined to disobey the spiritual law, that is, the commandment, and to obey the material one, that is, the counsel of the serpent, and so 'I have been sold' to the devil, falling 'under sin' through this choice. Hence evil, having laid siege to me from then on, settles in me and dwells in me as a citizen, lodged in my flesh, like a drone in a bee's honeycomb, often flying and buzzing about it, since a penalty was laid on me, for setting aside the commandment, that I should be sold to evil. That is why 'I do not know what I do,' thinking what I do not want. For the sayings 'What I do I do not know' and 'I do what I hate' are to be taken not of carrying out what is bad and doing it, but of merely thinking it, since thoughts foreign to us often fly at us and fill us with images of what we do not want, the soul being carried about by its thoughts among many things.

[3] "For whether we think or do not think strange things does not rest with us at all, but whether we use or do not use the thoughts. For we cannot prevent the thoughts from falling upon us, since they are breathed into us from outside to test us; but we can refuse to be persuaded by them or to use them. Otherwise how did the apostle do the evil that displeased him not in the least degree, and the good that pleased him in the least degree, unless he was speaking of the alien thoughts, which we sometimes think even when we do not want to, from a cause we do not know? These must be overthrown and muzzled, so that they may not spread out and master the bounds of the soul. For it is impossible for the good to rise in our soul while these linger in us. Rightly, then, did he say, 'For what I do, I do not know; for I do not practise what I want, but what I hate, that I do.' For we want not even to think things that are unfitting and unlawful, since this is the perfect good, to abstain not only from doing them but also from thinking them; and what we want, this good, does not come about, but what we do not want, the evil. For they come upon our heart and assail it, even when we do not want them, often in thousands about thousands of things, filling us with irrational curiosity and meddlesomeness. Therefore to want not to think them is present with me, but to bring about their abolition, so that they may not come up again into our reasoning, is not, because, as I said, this does not rest with us, but only how we use them or do not use them. So the sense of the saying 'For I do not do the good I want' is this: I want not to think the things that harm me, since this good is wholly blameless, as the saying goes, 'fashioned without fault, square in hands and mind.' And this is 'the good I want I do not do, but the evil I do not want I practise': I do not want to have these thoughts, and I think what I do not want. And one must consider whether it was not for these very reasons that David too pleaded with God, distressed that he too reasoned about what he did not want: 'Cleanse me from my hidden faults, and spare your servant from alien ones; if they do not gain dominion over me, then I shall be blameless and cleansed from great sin.' And the apostle himself, elsewhere: 'Casting down reasonings and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.'"

"But if someone, daring to come to close quarters with the argument, should answer that the apostle teaches that we hate evil and do what we do not want not only in thinking it but also in doing and accomplishing it, because it is said, 'For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want, that I practise,' we shall ask him, if the one who says this speaks the truth, to make clear what the evil was that the apostle hated and did not want to do, yet did; and what the good was that he wanted to do, yet did not do, but on the contrary, as often as he wanted to do the good, so often did not the good that he wanted, but the evil that he did not want. Was it that, not wanting to worship idols but to worship God, he could not worship God, which he wanted, but could worship idols, which he did not want? Or that he wanted to be self-controlled and did not do it, but was licentious, which he loathed, and did that? And, in short, did he do carousing, dissipation and anger, injustice and the other works of wickedness, which he did not want, while what he wanted, righteousness and holiness, he did not do? And yet he himself in the churches, rousing everyone headlong not to act lawlessly, warns that not only those who do and practise wicked things, but also those who approve of them, are kept for destruction and wrath, striving that righteousness may be practised in us unmixed with sin. For every sin and practice reaches its completion through the flesh. At any rate, often in his letters, teaching us openly to avoid and hate these very things, he cries, 'Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor the effeminate nor men who lie with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor revilers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.' And, highest of all, urging us to shake off sin completely and in every way, he declares, 'Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.' So he did not mean what has been mentioned of doing and practising what he did not want, but only of thinking it; for how else would he be an exact imitator of Christ? But since beastly thoughts often fall upon us, filling us with desires and irrational curiosity now in one way and now in another, 'like the many tribes of thronging flies,' he said, 'For what I do not want, that I do.' These the soul must courageously drive away, not inclining at all to supply what they suggest. For it is in order that we may be judged fit for the kingdom of heaven, being tested in all pleasures and griefs whether we are changed, or whether, like pure gold tested in fire, we do not depart at all from our own virtue, that this happens: the mind is troubled by many things. So we must draw up against them nobly, like the best soldiers, who, when they perceive that they are besieged by the enemy, pay no heed to the archery and the other missiles, but rush eagerly against them to save the city, sparing no effort, until they turn their throng to flight and drive them beyond the borders. For you see how thoughts, because of the sin dwelling in us, gather from outside like mad dogs or savage and bold robbers, always urged on against us by the tyrant and ruler of wickedness, who tests us whether we are able to resist them and draw up against them."

"Come then, my soul, take care lest you give way and be snatched by them, and we have no ransom to give for you. For 'what will a man give in exchange,' he says, 'for his soul?' It would indeed be best and most profitable if we did not have those who oppose us and fight against us; but since this is impossible, and we cannot do what we want (we want not to have those who drag us into passions, for then we could be saved without sweat; and what we want does not happen, but what we do not want, for we must be tested, as I said), let us not give in, my soul, let us not yield to the wicked one; but, taking up 'the armour of God,' which shields us and fights for us, let us put on 'the breastplate of righteousness,' and shoe 'the feet with the readiness of the gospel,' and in all things take up 'the shield of faith, with which we shall be able to quench all the flaming darts of the evil one,' and 'the helmet of salvation,' 'and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,' 'so as to be able to stand against the wiles of the devil,' and to cast down 'reasonings and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God'; 'for our wrestling is not against blood and flesh.' I say these things for this reason, that this is the manner of the apostle's writings. Much could be shown about each of the things said in this epistle, how orthodox and carefully considered it is; but it would be long to go through each of them in this way, for I have now chosen to show only his manner and his intention. 'For I do not practise what I want, but what I hate, that I do. But if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law of God that it is good. But now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, nothing good dwells': he says this rightly. For you remember how we defined it above; though, eager as I am to go through everything quickly, I am rather slow, since the course of my discourse has become longer than I expected. I must make every effort to finish it; otherwise we shall never come to the end of what is before us."

"We said, then, if you remember, that from the time when man, led astray, came to set aside the commandment, sin, taking its origin from the disobedience, settled in him. For in this way a revolt first broke out, and we were filled with agitations and alien thoughts, emptied of God's inbreathing and filled with material desire, which the crafty serpent breathed into us when we fell short of the course of God's command. That is why God devised death on our behalf for the destruction of sin, so that, having sprung up in us who were immortal, it might not be immortal, as I said. Hence the apostle, in saying, 'For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh,' means the sin that settled in us from the transgression through desire; from it, like new shoots and twigs, the pleasure-loving thoughts always spring up around us. For there are two kinds of thoughts in us: the one arising from the desire that lurks in the body, which came into being, as I said, from the inbreathing of the material spirit; the other from the law in accordance with the commandment, which we received to have as an implanted and natural law, rousing and correcting our reasoning toward the good. Hence we delight in the law of God according to the mind (for this is 'the inner man'), but in the law of the devil according to the desire dwelling in the flesh. For the law that wars against and opposes 'the law' of God, that is, our impulse toward the good and the desire 'of the mind,' is the one that always produces passionate and material distractions toward lawlessness, since it altogether draws toward pleasures."

"For Paul here seems to me plainly to suppose three laws: one in accordance with the good implanted in us, which he clearly called 'the law of the mind'; one arising from the assault of the evil one and often dragging the soul away to passionate imaginings, which he said 'wars against the law of the mind'; and another, in accordance with sin, which has hardened in the flesh from desire, which he called the law 'of sin dwelling in my members.' Mounting and riding on this, the evil one often urges it on against us, driving us together toward injustice and evil deeds. For the law breathed in from outside by the evil one, and poured in through the senses into the soul itself like a stream of pitch, is strengthened by the law that exists in the flesh in accordance with desire. For it appears that there is in ourselves something better and something worse; and when the better by nature becomes stronger than the worse, the whole mind is carried toward the good; but when the worse gains the upper hand and outweighs it, which is said to war against the good in us, the man is led in turn to all kinds of imaginings and worse thoughts."

"That is why the apostle prays to be rescued from it, considering it death and destruction, as the prophet too says, 'Cleanse me from my hidden faults.' The words themselves show this: 'For I delight in the law of God according to the inner man; but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and taking me captive to the law of sin that is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?' He does not declare the body to be death, but the law of sin in the members, lurking in us through the transgression and always deluding the soul toward the death of injustice. At any rate he immediately adds, making plain from what kind of death he longed to be rescued and who it was who rescued him: 'Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ.' For it must be noted that, if he were calling this body death, Aglaophon, as you supposed, he would not afterwards have brought in Christ as rescuing him from such an evil. For what more wonderful or greater thing would we have received from the coming of Christ? And why would the apostle have said this at all, as though by the coming of Christ he could be freed from death by God, when it was the lot of all to die even before Christ came into the world? For all were rescued, being separated from their bodies in this departure from life. And likewise all souls, of unbelievers and believers, of the unjust and the just, were separated from their bodies on the day of their death. What more, then, was the apostle eager to receive than the others who lived in unbelief? Or why did he pray to be rescued from the body, a thing that would certainly have happened to him even if he did not wish it, since it is laid up for all to die and to have their souls separated from their bodies, if he supposed the body to be the death of the soul? So, Aglaophon, he calls not this body death, but the sin that dwelt in the body through desire, from which God rescued him through the coming of Christ. 'For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and of death,' so that he who raised 'Jesus from the dead' may give life 'also to our mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in us,' once 'sin' in the body has been condemned to destruction, 'so that the righteous requirement of' the natural 'law,' which draws us toward the good in accordance with the commandment, might be lifted up and made manifest; for, being weak because the flesh was mastered by sin before Christ's coming, it was buried under material cares. 'For what was impossible' for the natural good in us, 'in that it was weak,' being overcome by the desire that lies in the body, 'God' strengthened, 'sending his own Son,' who took up flesh 'in the likeness of sinful flesh' (for he appeared in truth and not in seeming), so that, sin having been condemned to destruction so as no longer to 'bear fruit' in the flesh, 'the righteous requirement of' the natural 'law might be fulfilled,' abounding in obedience, 'in those who walk not according to' the desire 'of the flesh but according to' the desire and guidance 'of the Spirit.' For 'the law of the Spirit of life,' which is the gospel, being different from the laws mentioned before and set forth through preaching for obedience and the forgiveness of sins, 'set us free from the law of sin and of death,' having utterly conquered the sin that reigned over the flesh.

"I have explained, Theophilus," I said, "what they put forward from the words of the apostle too, interpreting them wrongly. I shall turn to the other matters, if we find someone to help us through the discussion. For what follows is difficult and not at all easy to demolish. That is why I approach it rather slowly, seeing that its demonstration will be long and hard, unless a breeze of understanding, suddenly breathing on us from heaven, brings us, who are swimming as it were in the midst of the sea, back to some calm harbour and to a more secure demonstration."

[9] "One might well ask how the earth can be changed and taken up into the bulk of trees. For, since the earth beneath is always being drawn up through the roots into the whole substance of the wood, the place where the tree has grown would have to be hollowed out; so their reasoning about the flux of bodies on this analogy is vain. For how does the earth as a whole, entering through the roots into the trunks of plants and divided through the channels into all their branches, change into leaves and fruit? There are tall trees, cedars or pines or firs, bearing much foliage and fruit every year, and one can see that they consume nothing of the earth beneath into their own woody bulk. For if it were true that the earth rising through the roots is turned into wood, the whole surrounding place of the earth would have to be hollowed out, since what is dry does not naturally flow in, as what is moist does, to take the place of what moves away. Indeed fig trees and other such plants, which often spring up in the buildings of tombs, are reported to have consumed nothing of the building into themselves at all. If anyone were to reckon up their fruit and leaves over many years, he would see that their bulk had become many times greater than the earth on the tombs. ... Hence it is most absurd to think that the earth is changed into the crop of fruits and leaves and consumed; even if everything comes about through it, you would see them using it as a seat and a place. For neither is bread made without a mill and a place and time and fire, and yet bread is none of these; and likewise with countless other things. ... The apostle, at any rate, giving planting and watering to art, earth and water, allowed growth to God alone, where he said, 'Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but God who gives the growth.' ... For he knew that the firstborn wisdom of God, which brings forth all things and is the craftswoman of all, brings all things forth into the world; she whom men of old called nature and providence, because she makes all things grow and increase, always taking forethought and care. 'For my Father is working until now,' he says, 'and I am working.' That is why Solomon too called her the craftswoman of all: 'For wisdom, the craftswoman of all, taught me,' he says; for God is poor in nothing, but is richly able to create and make and adorn and increase all things.

[10] "... That God, who creates all things and cares and provides for all, 'took dust from the earth' and 'formed' our outer 'man,' not only the great prophet Moses but the whole choir of the prophets, speaking with one voice with him in the spiritual language, testify. For the universe did not come into being by an unprovided and chance motion, as those say who introduce the infinite and the void, as though from atoms coming together by chance, but from fire and air and earth and water, even if some will not have these to be elements and primary bodies of the universe, but compounds and forms made of atoms or masses or indivisibles or homoeomeries, brought together by some spontaneous and unchosen friendship. For this account follows from the absence of providence and governance over the universe, and is dear to Democritus and Epicurus, but not to us; for we know that the universe is steered without stumbling by the governance of the divine counsel. For the wisdom that works all things at God's commands and gives them shape, breaking the cold with the hot and taming the hot with the cold, binding the moist with the dry and loosening the dry with the moist, built man in this way, sketching in him the likeness of the universe and in the universe the likeness of him, so that man is a small world, having in himself all the parts of the whole, and the world is a great man. Just as in the whole the earth stands unmoved and settled, having the cold air poured all around it, which gives the fiery element room to breathe, while fire is suspended in order above it, and water is poured around the earth; so too in us the solid nature of the bones is earth, and the flesh poured around it is soft, and the veins and the blood in the veins are images of waters and rivers; air and breath are what is in the arteries, cooling the great heat of the fire within us; and fire is the innate warmth, which melts the excess of phlegm like an icy mass of water. For this reason the prophet too, showing God's governance and steering of the universe (for none of the works of art comes about of itself), describes to us the driving of the four-faced cherubim and their direction, guided knowingly by the Word. We say there are four, as the living creatures yoked to the chariot: one of a man, one of a lion, one of a calf, one of an eagle; and each of them again, being four-formed in itself, has as many other heads grown together with it, signifying by these more familiar names the agreement of the four elements, of which the universe was ordered. For he fittingly likened man to air, since man is a heavenly plant; the lion to fire, because of its swift motion and lordliness; the calf to earth; and the eagle to water, because birds have their origin from water. God, then, as the ancient saying goes, holding the beginning, end and middle of all things that are, air and earth, water and fire, the greatest living creatures, holds them together by his own counsel and keeps them in his grasp, and, like a four-horse chariot, steering it toward permanence, ineffably drives the universe. The prophet supposed each of them to be a four-formed living creature in itself, showing that the elements are mixed wholly through one another, and that the compounds made from them are of a fourfold mixture."

[Slavonic version, translated from N. Bonwetsch's German:] And Memianius began and said: "I take up the contest against them on your behalf, since you have now spoken with moderation, against a difficult and long array of questions. For there are medical questions among them too, and questions about the corruptibility of the body. Let us therefore examine how the visible world itself makes the matter known. For if it is true of trees that the earth is raised up into fruits, then it is true of us too that food becomes flesh and displaces the earlier bodies. As people who have not received the truth, they have thought this way about this too, turning to myths and error. But it will rather be recognized from the following. For, asserting that food first works in the belly, cooking as in its oven by means of the juice, and passing from there into the liver, is distributed to the whole body, given to each member according to its need, becoming blood and changing into flesh and into bones and veins (or sinews), they have taken refuge in the example of the trees as most instructive, saying that there is one manner of change and of sending up and growing, namely of trees and of animals ... [trees have no ...] belly, nor the other organs, into which the food enters and receives its concoction so that, turned to vapour, it may pass into every branch. For the earth that mingles with trees would first need a change if it were to be transformed into their state. For this too is unreasonable. In us food, even though it is quickly concocted, needs much cooperation of nature to be assimilated; but in trees it is neither concocted nor distributed, even to the outermost foliage, since neither the structure nor the power of entrails or belly cooperates. For they have no belly in which the earth is first concocted, dissolved and mixed with moisture, nor entrails through which they excrete the husk-like part, nor any other vessel through which it passes through the tree and reaches its goal. But they said: 'Plants do not have visible vessels such as we have, but invisible paths by which the earth, as vapour, proceeds even into the smallest parts of the tree and is divided as it sprouts.' ... We see many trees on walls too, which in no way ... the vessels, in which [the clay] is shaped by men into an image ... through fire, do not become that form. ... The apostle at any rate [assigns] to the water the watering, but to God the growth. For he knew ... Since it has now been fully shown that the earth is not changed into branches or into fruits, let us leave the matter there."

"... the members cut off ⟨from the body⟩, that is, an ear or a finger or a nose, would have had to be filled up again from food ..."

[Slavonic version, translated from N. Bonwetsch's German:] "Therefore the body must be the same, the first body, since the one who had joined it together wished to dissolve it ... that it comes into being through the juices of food that come and go. Since you can separate by art the union of gold melted together with silver or with something else, should not rather what God, who created that very matter out of what is not, has put together with unsearchable wisdom, be undestroyed and unchanged if he wills, rather than wasting away day by day? That is, if food changes into flesh and into bones and sinews, and flesh into hair and nails, while the former body departs: which is more incorrect than anything. For if every day some things come to the body from food and others go away, some flowing off like water and others flowing in, then man is not a creation but some unpremeditated arrangement by chance. For how can we call what is constantly flowing, what appears like water and is never the same, made by God? If it is God's work, then what has once been created as bone and flesh and sinews must also remain, if we want even what any craftsman has made to remain for even a very short time. [Its nature is not] to flow, but to receive frequently coming into being and passing away. And the saying 'God took dust from the earth and created man' would be false. For how was he created, if what is created receives its form from what came into being first and remains, not passing over into another form? But according to them it is said of the body that it never remains this same thing in its identity, even for a very short time, but from the very sowing of the seed comes into being and passes away and in reality never is. This seems to me a hypothesis true according to frivolous imagination, but by no means according to true understanding. For how would it not be foolish to say that something is, but never is by itself? For we say that a creation is the creation of something existing by itself; but how should this be, if the shaping in the matter has never come to an end? For we do not say that something has been created until one sees in it a certain completion of form, which underlies it for the growth of the whole."

"'For we know that if the earthly house of our tent is destroyed': by 'earthly house' must be understood, by an extended use, our short-lived life here, and not this tent ... For if you think that he means the body by the earthly house that is destroyed, tell me what the tent is whose house is destroyed? For the tent is one thing, the house of the tent another, and we, whose own the tent is, yet another. 'For if the earthly house of our tent,' he says, 'is destroyed,' showing that we are the souls, that the tent is the body, and that the house of the tent is, figuratively, the enjoyment of the flesh in the present life. If, then, this present life of the body is destroyed like a house, we shall have the house not made with hands in the heavens, that is, eternal life. He says 'not made with hands' by contrast, because this life is said to be made with hands, since all the adornments and pursuits of our life are worked by human hands. ... For the body, being God's workmanship, is not called made with hands, since it was not worked by human arts. But if they will call it made with hands because it was made by God, then the souls too, and the angels, and the very garments in the heavens, are made with hands. But they are not made with hands, for these too are God's own work. What then is the house made with hands? This short-lived life, as I said, acted out by human hands ('in the sweat of your face,' he says, 'you shall eat your bread'); when it is destroyed we have that life not made with hands. As the Lord too made plain when he said, 'Make friends for yourselves from the mammon of unrighteousness, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal tents.' For what the Lord there called 'tents,' the apostle here calls 'garments'; and what the Lord there called 'friends from unrighteousness,' the apostle here calls 'houses' that are 'destroyed.' So just as, when the days of our present life fail, the good works of beneficence that we acquired from life in unrighteousness (since the world 'lies in the evil one') will receive our souls, so, when this swift-perishing life is destroyed, we souls shall have our dwelling before the resurrection with God, until we take up again the house renewed for us and never to fall. Hence 'we groan,' not wishing to 'put off' the body, but to 'put on' over it the life free from grief. For the dwelling from heaven, which we long to put on over it, is immortality; when we put it on, all that is weak and mortal in it will be wholly swallowed up and consumed by the timeless life. 'For we walk by faith, not by sight,' that is, we still go forward by faith, viewing the things there with a reasoning that is not yet clear, and not plainly, so as to see and enjoy them and be among them."

[Slavonic version, translated from N. Bonwetsch's German:] "Therefore, since the structure of the body has also been shown, we must look at the rest as well. For the apostle is not speaking to the Corinthians about the resurrection as you think, explaining Scripture more cleverly, when he says, 'If our earthly house of the body is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands,' and so on; rather he is assuring them of faith in it. And if you read what follows in order, you will find him rather confirming the resurrection of the body. For after first saying how the future life is to be expected not in another body but in this one, he added how one should not grieve over-eagerly ... [when the present life] has been destroyed, we shall [have a building] from God ..."

"'This I say, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption.' By flesh, he says, he meant not the flesh itself, but the irrational impulse of the soul toward lascivious pleasures. So, having said that 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,' he went on to explain, 'nor does corruption inherit incorruption.' But corruption is not what is corrupted, but what corrupts. For when death prevails, the body sinks into corruption; but when life, on the contrary, remains in it, it stands without being destroyed. Therefore, since the flesh was made on the border between incorruption and corruption, being neither corruption nor incorruption, and was overcome by corruption through pleasure, though it was the work and possession of incorruption, it became corruptible and sank 'into the earth of dust.' And since it was held fast by corruption and handed over to death for discipline, God did not leave it to corruption as a trophy, like an inheritance, but, conquering death again through the resurrection, he gave it back to incorruption, so that corruption might not inherit incorruption, but incorruption what is corruptible. At any rate he answers further, 'For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.' And what else could the corruptible and mortal that puts on immortality and incorruption be than what is 'sown in corruption' and raised 'in incorruption' (for the soul is not corruptible or mortal, but this mortal and corruptible flesh), so that 'as we have borne the image of the earthy, we may also bear the image of the heavenly'? For the image of the earthy which we have borne is 'You are earth, and to earth you shall return'; but the image of the heavenly is the resurrection from the dead and incorruption, so that 'as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life.' But if anyone thinks that the earthy image means the flesh itself, and the heavenly image some spiritual body other than the flesh, let him first consider that Christ, the heavenly man, appeared bearing the same shape of body and members, and an image and flesh the same as ours, through which he, who was not man, became man, so that 'as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.' For if he did not bear flesh in order to free the flesh and raise it, why did he bear flesh superfluously, when he did not intend either to save it or to raise it? But the Son of God does nothing superfluously. So he did not take 'the form' of 'a servant' uselessly, but to raise and save it. For he truly became man and truly died, and not in seeming, which would be 'no' (for in him all things were 'yes'), so that he might truly be shown to be 'the firstborn of the dead,' truly changing the earthy into the heavenly and the mortal into the immortal. And Justin of Neapolis, a man not far from the apostles either in time or in virtue, says that what dies is inherited, and what lives inherits; and that the flesh dies, but the kingdom of heaven lives. So when Paul says that flesh and blood cannot 'inherit the kingdom of God,' he declares this, he says, not as despising the regeneration of the flesh, but teaching that the kingdom of God, which is eternal life, is not inherited by the body, but the body by life. For if the kingdom of God, being life, were inherited by the body, it would come about that life was swallowed up by corruption. But as it is, life inherits what has died, so that 'death may be swallowed up in victory' by life, and the corruptible may be shown to be the possession of incorruption and immortality, set loose and free from death and sin, but a slave and subject of immortality, so that the body may be the possession of incorruption, and not incorruption the possession of the body."

"... If from such a small drop, which is not yet anything at all, in such moisture and compression and stifling, a man comes into being from nothing, how much more will the man become man again from a man who already existed? For it is not so great a thing to make again what has already come to be and been dissolved, as to produce from what is not what has not yet come to be. ... If, then, we should wish to show the seed discharged from the male, and at the same time bring forward the body of a dead man, which of the two, lying openly before them, will the onlookers believe will become a man: that drop, which is nothing at all, or the one that already has shape and size and substance? For if that which is nothing at all becomes the most beautiful living creature merely because God wills it, much more will what already exists and has been brought to completion become the same man again if God wills it."

[Slavonic version, translated from N. Bonwetsch's German:] "So let us now pass on to what follows. For who, having looked up to heaven and seen the nature of the stars, so bright and well ordered, would not at once think that they are either uncreated or long-lived? But if things made from the same elements as we are appear wonderful by the command of God, lasting great ages and neither growing old nor changing, then our bodies too will rise again immortal, since nothing can withstand that command which created things out of what is not and adorned all with its wisdom. As blessed Solomon says: 'He who created the world from formless matter' — what can he not do? 'Great power is always present with him, and who will withstand the might of his arm? For the whole world before him is like the turn of the scale, and like a drop of morning dew that has fallen on the earth.' For we must recognize this: if the whole world is like a drop of dew before him whose power is unthinkable, how is it impossible for him to raise this body and to lead it to a more honourable place?"

[21] "For what did the theologian Moses intend in mystically introducing the feast of Tabernacles in Leviticus? Was it that we should keep festival to God in this way, as the Jews explain it, understanding the Scriptures too crudely, as though God were pleased with such tents made of fruits and branches and leafy trees, which at once wither when stripped of their green? It cannot be said. Tell me, then, of what was the feast of Tabernacles introduced as a sign? Of this true tent of ours, men, which fell into corruption through the transgression and was dissolved by sin, and which God promised to fix together again and raise up indestructible, so that we may truly keep for him the great and much-celebrated feast of Tabernacles at the resurrection, when our tents, fixed together for the adornment and harmony of immortality, rise incorruptible from the dust; when 'the dry bones' hear the word of God, brought, according to the most truthful prophecy, to their joints by God, the life-shaper and best of craftsmen, who renews the flesh again and fixes it together, no longer with such bonds as those that first held it together, but with bonds entirely undefiled and indissoluble from then on. 'For behold,' he says, 'I will put upon you the breath of life, and you shall live; and I will put sinews upon you and bring up flesh upon you and stretch skin over you,' and so on. And again the apostle: when 'the Lord descends with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive,' that is, these very bodies of ours; for 'we who are alive' are the souls, which receive back the dead raised from the earth, so that, caught up 'together with them' 'to meet' the Lord, we may gloriously keep for him the bright feast of the resurrection, since we receive our tents, that is, our bodies, eternal, no longer to die or be dissolved. 'For I will raise up,' he says, 'the tent of David that has fallen, and I will rebuild its ruins, as in the days of old.'"

"If the body of man is more honourable than that of the other living creatures, both because it is said to have been formed by God's hands and because it has become the vehicle of the more honourable soul, how is it short-lived, while the bodies of some irrational creatures live much longer? Or is it plain that its long-lasting existence will come after [the resurrection]?"

"For I myself saw on Olympus (Olympus is a mountain of Lycia) fire rising of itself from the earth below on the summit of the mountain, and beside the fire stood a chaste-tree, so flourishing and green and so shady that one would rather suppose it had sprung up beside an ever-flowing spring. For what reason, then, if bodies are by nature corruptible and consumed by fire, and it is impossible for what is once by nature combustible to remain unburned, is this plant not only not burned up, but rather more vigorous and greener, though by nature it burns easily, and that while the fire is kindled around its very roots? I threw branches of trees from the nearby wood onto the place where the fire bursts out, and at once they went up in flame and were reduced to ashes. Tell me, then, for what reason that which cannot bear even the heat of the sun, but dries up if it is not watered a little, is not consumed when surrounded by so great a blaze of fire, but lives and flourishes? What does this marvel mean? God set it as a sign and prelude of the coming day, so that we might know more clearly that, when all things are deluged with fire coming down, the bodies that have lived in chastity and righteousness will walk upon the fire as on cold water, suffering no pain from it. For truly, most magnificent and bountiful Master, 'creation, serving you its maker, is intensified for punishment against the unjust and relaxed for benefit on behalf of those who trust in you'; and when you will, fire cools, harming nothing that you judge should be preserved, and water, conversely, burns with sharper assaults than fire; and nothing withstands your invincible might and your strength. For you created all things out of what is not; therefore you also change all things, since they are yours, as you will, being the only God.

[24] "Thus the images of kings here, even if they are not made of the more precious material, gold, silver, electrum or ivory, are honoured by all. For men do not reverence those made of the more precious material and despise the others, but honour all equally, even if they are of plaster or bronze; and one who has insulted either is neither let off as having dishonoured clay, nor judged as having made light of gold, but as having committed impiety against the king and lord himself. The images made of gold we understand to be his angels, the principalities and the powers, made 'for' his 'honour' and glory. For consider with me that God has images of himself made, as it were, of gold, from the purer spiritual substance, such as the angels ('who makes his angels spirits,' says David, 'and his ministers a flaming fire'), and others as of plaster or bronze, such as us ('God took dust from the earth,' he says, 'and formed man'); for he united the soul made 'according to the image of God' to what is earthy. So just as all the images of the king here must be honoured because of the form in them, so too it is impossible that we, who are images of God ('for God created man for incorruption and made him an image of his own eternity'), should go maimed to utter destruction. That is why the Word came down into our world and became flesh from our body, so that, restoring the image to a state more fitting for God, as one dissolved by long time, he might raise it up indestructible."

"Indeed, when we explained the dispensation enacted mystically in the case of the prophet Jonah, we found the whole account plainly tending to this. The story of Jonah contains a great mystery. For the whale seems to signify time, which never stands still but always goes on and consumes what is born in longer and shorter intervals. Jonah, fleeing from the face of God, is that first man himself, who, having set aside the commandment, fled from being seen naked of incorruption, deprived by sin of his freedom of speech toward the divine. The ship he boarded, in which he was storm-tossed, is this short-lived and displeasing life of the present time, since we turned and migrated from that most blessed and safe life into this most stormy and unsettled one, as from land into a ship. For what a ship is to land, the present life is to the immortal life. The storm and the tempests that gather against us are the temptations here, which, as in the surge of the world, do not allow us to sail through life straight and without grief, in calm and stillness from evils. The casting of Jonah from the ship into the sea signifies the fall of the first-formed man from life into death, when he received the sentence, because by sinning he had run away from righteousness: 'You are earth, and to earth you shall return.' His being swallowed by the whale signifies our inexorable destruction by time. For the belly of the whale, in which Jonah was hidden when swallowed, is the all-receiving earth, which receives the bodies consumed by time. As, then, Jonah, having spent 'three days' and as many 'nights in the belly of the whale,' was given back whole, so we too, all of us, having passed the three intervals of the present age on the earth (I mean the beginning, the middle and the end, of which all this present time is composed), shall rise. For there are three general intervals of time: past, future and present. And for this reason the Lord too, having symbolically spent so many days in the earth, taught clearly that when the intervals of time just mentioned are fulfilled, our resurrection will come, being the beginning of the age to come and the end of this one. For in eternity nothing is past or future, but it only is. Moreover, Jonah, having spent 'three days and three nights in the belly of the whale,' was not destroyed, though his flesh would have melted away through the natural putrefaction of the food brought into the belly, because of the greater heat in creatures of the water, so that it might be shown that these bodies of ours can be indestructible."

(a) "... According to you, men are shown to be very much more powerful than God, and it is superfluous for the Saviour to say, 'What is impossible with men is possible with God.' For men, using art and knowledge, separate wine mixed with water, and silver from bronze, and know how to make the separation of very many things. But God, the craftsman unsurpassed in power and the maker of all things, to whom fire, air, water and earth are subject, serving in fear and each keeping its own part: how would he not give back to each his own body in the resurrection?"

(b) [28] "Moreover, the sweet waters that flow into the sea, mingled and rolled together with it, are poured out again as sweet waters through the clouds, separated from the salt. As the prophet too says, 'He who calls the water of the sea and pours it out on the face of the earth.' ... And consider whether blessed John too, in saying, 'The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them,' did not mean the portions given back by the elements for the restoration of each. For the sea is the moist substance; Hades is the air, from 'unseen' (aeides), because it is not seen, as Origen too said; and death is the earth, because the dying are laid in it; that is why it was called 'the dust of death' in the Psalms, Christ saying that he had been brought down 'into the dust of death.'"

(c) "... For every compound made of pure air and pure fire, being of the same essence as the angelic beings, cannot have the quality of earth and water; otherwise it would turn out earthy. Such, and made of such things, was the body that Origen imagined would rise, which he also called spiritual."

[Slavonic version, translated from N. Bonwetsch's German:] "This, then, is what you say, Proclus; and understanding it, I take it up again and again, so that nothing of it may escape us. Come, let us look at it again. According to the true state of things there are three kinds of liquid: water, oil and molten things. Let everything watery belong to water, and again let everything fatty be oily, and molten things be such as lead and bronze and the rest. And it is possible to separate after mixing not only these, but many other things too ... The purple-dyers in their art, when, as they dye silk, the blood of the purple-fish somehow mixes with water, separate the water from the blood of the purple-fish with sponges by their art. It is also recorded that in Tiberias, a city of Judea, there is a spring which brings forth five kinds of water without confusion, so that whoever wants to draw pure water takes it from the middle; on one side it is sweet as honey, on the other bitter. God gives this as a sign, so that we may believe that our watery element too cannot be found mixed with another in the resurrection. For see how one spring makes various waters flow forth for you, and that without mixture.

[28] "... 'on the face of the earth.' For the rains do not come down from the waters above the firmament; they would often flood the earth, since the sea could not hold the quantity of water coming down. One of the holy initiates sings: 'All the rivers go into the sea, and the sea is not filled; to the place where the rivers go, from there they return' to their places; and the waters of the rivers rise again from the sea as rain at God's command. Great too is this knowledge, that the sweet waters are separated from the salt, after the union that takes place in the water, that is, in the salt water. For while the more watery part is seized by the heat of the sun and lifted into the air, all that is salty remains behind."

"So Origen holds that the same flesh is not restored to the soul, but that the particular form of each, after the form that characterizes the flesh even now, will rise imprinted on another, spiritual body, so that each may appear again the same in form; and that this is the promised resurrection. 'For since the material body,' he says, 'is in flux and never remains in itself, but is taken away and added to around the form that characterizes the shape, by which the figure too is held together, the resurrection must necessarily be of the form alone.' ...

"But every lover of truth must contend for the resurrection, preserving the tradition of the ancients and at the same time taking care not to fall into the nonsense of beggarly notions, which are both impossible and unworthy of God. This, then, must be understood on this point: every body, being held together by a nature that brings certain things into it from outside by way of food and excretes others in place of those brought in (as the bodies of plants and animals do), never has the same material substrate. That is why the body has not been badly called a river. For, strictly speaking, the first substrate in our body is perhaps not the same for even two days, although Paul or Peter, so to speak, is always the same (not only in respect of the soul, whose substance on our view neither flows nor ever has anything brought into it), even though the nature of the body is in flux. For the form that characterizes the body is the same, so that the same features remain that present the bodily quality of Peter and Paul; and according to this quality scars from childhood remain on bodies, and certain other peculiarities in the body, moles, and anything else of the kind. This form, by which Peter and Paul are formed, the bodily form, is what is put around the soul again in the resurrection, changed for the better; but by no means this particular substrate that was laid out at first. Just as the form is the same from infancy to old age, even though the features seem to undergo much alteration, so one must understand that the form of the present body is the same as that of the future one, though there will be a very great change for the better. For a soul that exists in bodily places must use bodies suited to those places. And just as, if we had to live in the sea as water creatures, we would certainly need gills and the rest of the make-up of fish, so, since we are to inherit the kingdom of heaven and to be in places that are different, we must use spiritual bodies; not that the former form disappears, even if its change is to something more glorious, just as the form of Jesus, and of Moses and Elijah, was not other in the transfiguration than it had been."

[Slavonic version, translated from N. Bonwetsch's German:] "... 'him who can destroy soul and body in fire.' So here he is not speaking of that spiritual body; Christ answered that those killed by men are to receive punishment with the soul. And it must be recognized that the body cannot be destroyed by men. So it is not by having another body instead of this one, Origen, that the one who has sinned is thrown into the lake of fire. But if not another, then rather the one with which we are clothed outwardly, so that Christ too appears so; the resurrection of the dead will take place in the whole body ... that 'gnashing of teeth' is spoken of. But if they object again, saying, 'But the story of the rich man and Lazarus: how is the soul said, after its separation from the flesh, to have a tongue and teeth and fingers, unless there is another body finer than this one?', we must answer: even if the soul had another fine body, inseparable from it even after it departed from this life, this would contain no contradiction to the regeneration, since Christ said that only this dying body rises. But the body of which you speak cannot be killed by men. We would also have set out their supposed replies, if there were time; for it is no trouble to refute this unreason too. And first, if that body goes through the whole body, so that the soul is a substantial power, the soul cannot move together two bodies which have opposite motions. For the one is heavy and the other light, the sensible one heavy and the fine one light; and the heavy inclines downward, the light upward. So the two opposite motions cannot move the one substance."

"Then, noble Origen, if you insist that the resurrection is to be expected of the form alone, transferred into a spiritual body, and offer as the most approved proof of this the vision of Elijah and Moses, saying, 'As they, after their departure from life, were seen preserving no other form than the one they had from the beginning, so also will be the resurrection of all'; but if Moses and Elijah, before Christ suffered and rose, had already risen with this form of which you speak, and were seen: how then is Christ still proclaimed by the prophets and apostles as 'the firstborn of the dead'? For if Christ is believed to be 'the firstborn' and 'the beginning of the dead,' and 'the firstborn of the dead' is he who rose before all, while Moses appeared to the apostles already before Christ suffered and rose, having this form in which you yourself say the resurrection is fulfilled, then the resurrection is not of the form without the flesh. For either the resurrection is of the form alone, as he holds, and then Christ can no longer be 'the firstborn of the dead,' since souls appeared before him having this form after death; or he is truly 'the firstborn,' as indeed he is (for there is nothing false in him), and then it is altogether impossible that any should have been deemed worthy before him of the resurrection that dies no more. And if no one rose before him, and those with Moses and Elijah were seen by the apostles not having flesh but only the form ..., then the resurrection is plainly shown to be of the flesh. For it is most absurd to define the resurrection as being of the form alone, when the souls, even after their departure from the flesh, are never seen laying aside the form which you say rises. And if it is present with them inseparably, as with the souls of Moses and Elijah, and, according to you, is neither corrupted nor destroyed, but is present with them everywhere, then it is not the form that rises, since it never fell.

"But if someone, finding this hard, answers, 'And how, if no one rose before Christ went down into Hades, are some recorded as having risen before him, among them the son of the widow of Zarephath, and the son of the Shunammite, and Lazarus?' we must say: these rose to die again, but we are speaking of those who will die no more after their raising. And if anyone raises a difficulty about the soul of Elijah, saying that the Scriptures say he was taken up in the flesh, while we say that he appeared to the apostles without flesh, we must say: indeed, to say that he appeared to the apostles in the flesh is rather on our side. For this too shows that our body is capable of incorruption, as was shown also in the translation of Enoch; for if it could not receive incorruption, it would not have remained free of suffering for so long a time. Either, then, Elijah was seen with the body, not yet having died, or without the body, and he had died but had not yet risen from the dead."

"And this is granting Origen his claim that the form by itself, separated from the body after death, is given to the soul; which is the most impossible thing of all, since the form of the flesh perishes beforehand in its alterations, just as the shape of a statue that is being melted down perishes before the dissolution of the bronze, because quality cannot be separated from matter so as to subsist by itself. For the shape that disappears around the bronze is separated from the melted statue, but it no longer subsists in substance. And since the form is said to be separated from the flesh in death, come, let us consider in how many ways what is separated is said to be separated. A thing is said to be separated from something either in act and in subsistence, or in thought, or in act but not in subsistence. In act and in subsistence, as when someone separates wheat and barley that have been mixed: in so far as they are separated by motion, they are said to be separated in act; in so far as they subsist when separated, they are said to be separated in subsistence. In thought, when we separate matter from its qualities and qualities from matter. In act but not in subsistence, when something separated from something no longer exists, having no subsistence of substance. One may see how this is in handicrafts too, looking at a statue or a bronze horse. For when one considers these, one will see them changing their inborn form and passing over into another appearance, through which the form they had disappears. For if someone melts down works shaped into the form of a man or a horse, he will find the form of the shape disappearing, but the material itself remaining. So it is incoherent to say that the form alone rises, dimmed in nothing, while the body in which the form was imprinted is destroyed. 'Yes,' he says, 'for it will be transferred into a spiritual body.' Then it must be admitted that the form itself, properly that first one, does not rise, because it has wasted away together with the flesh. For even if it is remoulded in a spiritual body, it is not itself properly that first substrate, but a certain likeness of it remoulded in a fine body. Neither the same form nor the body rises, but another in place of the former. For what is like, being other than that which it is like, cannot be that very first thing after which it was made."

"... 'as the form of Jesus and of Moses and Elijah was not other in the transfiguration than it had been' ... 'What need, then, have those who are punished of teeth? For they will not eat in Gehenna. For the Creator made every member for some use' ... 'For form is what displays the quality of the members in the character of each one's shape' ... 'as the form of Jesus and of Moses and Elijah was not other in the transfiguration than it had been' ..."

[Slavonic version, translated from N. Bonwetsch's German:] "But a certain man is insolent in this too. For after asserting that the form is what rises, when it is granted a change to greater glory, 'as the form of Jesus was,' he trampled on his own word again, having forgotten it, and like those without reason began to proclaim something else. For, not wishing to speak according to the true word, 'where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth,' he has rather devised another word opposed to it: 'It is not possible for us to rise in the same constitution, having legs again and hands and the like.' He has said things that altogether contradict themselves. For how is it not contradictory, when, after establishing that the abiding form rises, he further asserts that the same impress will not exist, although there will be no other form than the sameness of the impress, which shows each form in each person? For the form, he says, is what shows [the quality of the members]. So, if he hopes that the resurrection will take place in the form, one must rise again having that form, that is, hands and feet and the other members, even if the body will be changed into something finer. Origen says: 'For it is unfitting to rise in the same shape, having feet and teeth and the other members ...' For if there is no need at all there of hand or foot or the other members, then the form does not rise either. But if the form rises, everything must rise in the first shape. For even if the body given to the soul is to be a psychic one, it too must be shaped into the first body and in its likeness, if what rises exists only in the form. If there is no need of feet or teeth in the resurrection, there is no need for the form to rise either. And if the form does not rise, then that fine body cannot be characterized by this body; for how could that body be reshaped into members we have no need of? So if the form rises, he contradicts himself, destroying the resurrection for the regeneration of the members; and if even the form does not rise, he contradicts himself on this and is inconsistent, expecting each to receive the form that will not be received ... the resurrection of all will be [like the transfiguration]. So if the resurrection of all will be as Jesus' appearing on the mountain was, the resurrection is proclaimed in the same members. For Jesus did not have another body in the transfiguration than his real one, in which he was also glorified, having hands and a body and eyes, so that we may clearly recognize that we too will rise in this body, and that this body will be glorified."

"... For neither did they themselves rise again to pure freedom, nor, having overcome their enemies, did they dwell in Jerusalem with greater authority. Indeed, they were often prevented by the foreign nations when they wanted to build the temple; that is why they were barely able to build it in forty-six years, whereas Solomon completed it from the foundations in seven years. And what need is there to say more? From Nebuchadnezzar and those who reigned in Babylon after him, until the descent of the Persians against the Assyrians, the rule of Alexander, and the war of the Romans that broke out against the Jews, Jerusalem was overthrown six times by its enemies ... And Josephus records this, saying: 'In the second year of Vespasian's rule ... having been captured five times before, it was now laid waste a second time. For Asochaeus the king of the Egyptians, and after him Antiochus, then Pompey, and after these Sosius with Herod, captured the city and burned it; but before these the king of the Babylonians captured it and laid it waste.'"

[Slavonic version, translated from N. Bonwetsch's German:] "He also speaks of Ezekiel's prophecy of the bones that rise: he says it speaks of the captivity, that the people were like withered bones through grief and toil, and he calls their return a resurrection. That is why they said, 'Our bones were withered,' that is, in the captivity; so the promise of the resurrection of the people is a promise as from death and from exile. But the word runs as follows (let us look at the text of the Bible too): 'And the hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a plain, and it was full of human bones.' And soon after: 'And I will put my Spirit upon you, and you shall live ... And I prophesied as the Lord commanded me.' And soon after: 'And I looked, and behold, sinews and flesh grew upon them, and skin came upon them,' and so on. 'And he said to me, Prophesy to the wind, son of man. And I said to the wind, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds and breathe upon these dead.' And soon after: 'Thus says the Lord: Behold, I open your graves and bring you up out of your graves.' And soon after: 'And you shall know that I am the Lord; I have spoken and I will do it, says the Lord God.' While the word shows the resurrection of the dead from the grave, and those scattered bones adorned with sinews and flesh and skin and made alive by the Holy Spirit, Origen foolishly understands them of the captivity, as though the people had been set free as from death from that heavy servitude. But the prophet does not say that there were men on that plain, but human bones. For if this were said not of bones without souls but of the living and the captives, then the very people who were alive at the time of the prophecy, to whom the promise was made, would have had to be freed from captivity and come to their own land. But if those to whom the word came are shown not to have returned from captivity, but to have died there among the Chaldeans with Zedekiah, then the truth contradicts you, Origen; for seventy years were completed from the time Jerusalem was taken captive. Origen himself teaches that a prophecy is fulfilled not in something else but in that about which it was prophesied: for 'they say, Our bones were withered, we are lost' is said not of others but of those very people who were led captive. So if this is said of them, those in Babylon, the promise of return was also made to them. Why did they not enjoy the promise, but perished in servitude? ... 'nor did he lay it waste after capturing it.' So the promise of God was not fulfilled in the later generations either, as I understand it, even if Origen thinks that God's promise is only words and not deeds. The words of Scripture by which he would like to confirm this explanation also contradict him. For what is said in Scripture, 'Our bones are scattered in Hades' and 'Heal me, for my bones are troubled,' is said in truth of bones scattered after the death of this body, the souls praying to be freed from that scattering and slaughter."

"'... [For as] the seminal principle in the grain of wheat lays hold of the matter lying around it, passes through the matter itself, and, having grasped it, imposes on what was once earth and water and air and fire the powers it has of its own form, and, overcoming their qualities, changes them into the form of which it is itself the maker; and so the ear is filled out, differing exceedingly from the original grain.'"

[Slavonic version, translated from N. Bonwetsch's German:] "Let us examine also the parable of the grain of wheat, how, when sown and grown into a blade, it comes again to its old form. The apostle too says: 'But someone will say, How are the dead raised? With what form do they come?' Origen explains this and says: 'So if our body is like a grain of wheat, and is sown and decays like a grain, while the shoot within it lets the former constitution gain substance in the ear, and what rises is not what was sown but what comes from what was sown, so too our body will at that time gain substance from the matter at hand, receiving a spiritual body, not heavy or hard like this earthly one of flesh and bone, but delicate and as if of air; for such is the spiritual body.' This he writes in his treatise on the resurrection. And he also writes in that on the Psalms: 'For as the seminal principle ...' It is clear that Origen cannot think quite exactly about the grain of wheat. For he said that 'the grain passes into another body, that is, that of the ear, and its constitution changes through the decay and through the growth,' and that what remains of the plant is not like it, so that there is a great difference between the grain and the ear in shape and size and adornment, and that the resurrection of the dead happens in the same way as with what is sown and sprouts, so that the dying body must necessarily be unlike the rising one. But he erred altogether, not having grasped how to think rightly about nature, when he said, 'What is sown is one thing, and what sprouts from what is sown is another.' To me it seems more correct that from the same grain a grain of the same kind is born, the same in every respect, in size and in all its properties. What else is the ear but a grain of wheat that has not yet thrown off the garment of its husk? So it would be better to say that the grains are more useful than the ear; for the grains are the wheat, fit to be laid in the barn, but the ear is the wheat still mixed with husks. And if it is according to this word, the risen body is inferior to the one that died. For if the sown wheat changes into the ear, and the ears are nothing but wheat not yet separated from the husks, and Origen prefers to compare the resurrection of our bodies to the ears rather than to what is sown, which is the wheat, then according to Origen the risen body will not only not be better than the one that died, but even inferior. And if we say that the ear is more beautiful than the grain, that sown grain too was an ear before. If the sown grain had never previously grown as an ear, it would be right to say that the grain sown first is not equal to the ear; but if the sown grain too was previously in an ear, how can what is sown differ from what has grown? The apostle, then, wishing to show the resurrection of the dead to those who did not yet believe in it, makes a comparison from this visible thing, saying, 'Fool, what you sow does not come to life unless it first dies,' and so on. For as that too seems to have died, but in its time comes to life again more beautiful, so the dead bodies too will rise on that day at the Lord's command."

"(And this body of ours was once a body of glory, before the transgression, and so glorious that now, after the transgression, it is called a body of humiliation. For it would not now have been called 'of humiliation' unless it had been glorious; for what is glorious is humbled through a fall. No one would say of what is always lowly that it was humbled because of the transgression. For of what stands, if it falls, we say that it fell; but of what always lies down no one would say that it fell by sinning. So it is this body that rises, becoming incorruptible and glorious, and not another.)"

[Slavonic version, translated from N. Bonwetsch's German:] "So one must not think that the body of glory is one and the body of humiliation another; it is one and the same body, of glory and of humiliation. And the apostle again speaks of these: 'Who will transform the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of Christ's glory.' He does not speak of two different bodies, but plainly hopes that the very same lowly, buried and scattered body will rise to glory and incorruption at God's command. And the Lord, when he went up the mountain and was transfigured, did not appear to the apostles transfigured into another body, but was seen with the very body he had, made to shine through. So it is clear that the sameness of the body remains in the glorified body too. Here the word runs thus: 'And after six days Jesus took Peter and James and John and was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun.' If, then, the change of the body will take place after the pattern of Christ's transfiguration, it must also rise with the adornment of face and hand and foot and the other members, and not, as Origen thought, change into another shape, destroying the identity of each. So it is not possible for another body to rise in place of the one in which I now am.

[16] "Let us take other proofs from Scripture as well, which show that this corruptible shape of ours is not changed into another, but that in this visible shape we shall share in the glory of God. For see, Moses too received the shining of his face not in another shape but in this one. For Scripture says, 'When Moses came down from the mountain, he did not know that his face was glorified,' 'and they were afraid to come near him.' So we have shown that glorification is not a destruction of the body, but rather a change to what is better and more glorious, from corruption to incorruption, so that, as our body was humbled when it was given over to impurity, so it may shine again when it is freed from it. And Daniel says, 'And those who understand will shine like the sun.' Now it is a body neither of continence nor of self-control; then it will be one of continence and self-control. Now we see the good 'as through a mirror, but then face to face.' So now it is a body of weakness and corruption, but then of power and incorruption. For so the apostle says somewhere: 'It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption'; for the will of God far surpasses every natural cause, so that the body may be ageless and free of suffering for ever, able to hold perfect knowledge within itself, having already become a spiritual body.

[17] "Having shown this, we must go through Origen's further words too. After this the man writes about Lazarus and the rich man, of whom the one 'rests' and the other is 'tormented'; and the latter asks that Lazarus may drip with his little finger on his tongue ... For after first destroying the shape of man, saying that it does not rise in the regeneration, he undertakes again to say not only that it is saved, but also that it is in Hades with the soul, compelled to speak the truth of the matter itself. For if one is to say that the soul has a body shaped like this body, it is altogether necessary that the same shape be preserved for each after death and after the resurrection."

[15] "What kind of shape, then, is it that rises, if this human form, as useless in his view, is wholly done away with, though it is the loveliest of all the shapes compounded into living creatures, the shape which even the divine uses as an image, as the most wise Paul shows when he says, 'For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God'; the shape into which also the intelligent bodies of the angels have been ordered? Is it round, or polygonal, or cubic, or pyramidal? For the varieties of shapes are very many. But this is impossible. What reason is there, then, that the godlike shape should be rejected as less honourable (for he himself admits that the soul is of the same form as the body), and that it should rise without feet and without hands?"

[16] "... So the change of shape is the restoration to what is impassible and glorious. For now it is a body of desire and of humiliation (that is why Daniel heard, 'man of desires'), but then it will be changed into an impassible body, not by an alteration of the arrangement of the members, but by not desiring material pleasures."

"... It is called a spiritual body, not what is fine-grained and airy, as some say that the souls will receive such a body in the resurrection, of whom Origen too is one; but what holds all the working and fellowship of the Holy Spirit is called spiritual, just as a vessel that holds wine or oil is called a wine-vessel or an oil-vessel. Correspondingly, he called natural (psychic) what is governed by the soul and not by the Holy Spirit."

"About Lazarus and the rich man there can be a difficulty. The simpler think that these things were said as of both receiving, with their bodies, what their deeds in life deserved; but the more exact, since after the resurrection no one is left in life, think that these things do not happen at the resurrection (for the rich man says, 'I have five brothers, and lest they come to this place of torment, send Lazarus to tell them the things here'), and so they inquire about the tongue and the finger and Abraham's bosom and the reclining at table. And perhaps the shape of the soul at the moment of its release, being of the same form as the gross and earthly body, can be understood in this way. If ever anyone of those who have fallen asleep is recorded as appearing, he has been seen like the shape he had when he had the flesh." Then: "And Samuel too, appearing, as is clear ..., being visible, shows that he was clothed with a body, especially if we are compelled by the proofs to declare that the essence of the soul is incorporeal in itself. And the rich man who is punished and the poor man resting in Abraham's bosom, being said, before the coming of the Saviour and before the end of the age and therefore before the resurrection, the one to be punished in Hades and the other to rest in Abraham's bosom, teach that even now, at its release, the soul uses a body."

"In setting out that the soul, after its departure from here, has another vehicle of the same form as this sensible body, he declares, in Platonic fashion, that it is in some sense incorporeal. For if he says that even after its departure from the world it needs a vehicle and a covering, as though it could not be held naked, how would it not be incorporeal in itself? And being incorporeal, how will it not also be incapable of passions? For it follows from its being incorporeal that it is also impassible and undistracted. If, then, it were not dragged about at all by irrational desire, nor changed together with the body when the body is in pain and suffering (for the incorporeal could never suffer with a body, nor a body with the incorporeal), it might be thought incorporeal, in keeping with what has been said. But if it suffers with the body, as is demonstrated also by the testimony of appearances, it cannot be incorporeal. At any rate God alone is celebrated as the unoriginate, self-sufficient and untiring nature, being incorporeal, and therefore also invisible, for 'no one has seen God.' But souls, being rational bodies, have been ordered by the maker and father of all into members that are visible to reason, having received this impress of form. Hence in Hades too, as in the case of Lazarus and the rich man, they are recorded as having a tongue and a finger and the other members, not as though another, invisible body existed together with them, but because the souls themselves by nature, stripped of every covering, are such in their essence. But since it is plain that souls are not impassible, nor again have other bodies after their departure from life in which they appear before the resurrection, it would follow that he is at variance with himself and contradicts himself. At any rate he himself admits it, saying, 'If ever anyone of those who have fallen asleep is recorded as appearing, he has been seen like the shape he had when he had the flesh.' How then shall we not say that you, Origen, say these things plainly? For if the soul itself, even after its departure from the world, has the same form as the flesh, shaped into the same members, so as to have a tongue and a finger and the other members, why, since the most proper and primary part, the soul, has been ordered into this shape, should not the body that is to exist for its sake also be shaped into the same form as it?"

So the saying, 'For this reason Christ died ⟨and rose and lived again⟩, that he might be Lord of the living and the dead,' must be taken of souls and bodies: the souls are the living, as being immortal, and the bodies the dead.

[Slavonic version, translated from N. Bonwetsch's German:] "We must also understand what is so often brought forward about 'the dead.' For Origen tries to make a distinction between those called 'the living' and 'the dead,' for whose sake 'Christ died.' But we must not listen to him; for, to deceive his hearer, as though the apostle did not mean us and the bodies that are dead in every sense, he has invented the idea that those who have sinned after baptism are called dead. He writes, explaining the word of the Epistle to the Romans, 'For this reason Christ died and rose and lived again, that he might be Lord of the dead and the living,' and says: 'Over the living, then, such as Paul was: "we who are alive and remain"; and "Abraham and Isaac and Jacob," of whom it is said, "God is not the God of the dead but of the living." But he calls dead those who have sinned again after baptism.' Why then does Christ say that those who are dead through this body receive life again from him? For 'Truly,' he says, 'I say to you, the hour is coming when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has given to the Son also to have life in himself.' And soon after: 'those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment.' For the dead who 'hear the voice' of the Lord and rise from 'the tombs,' some going to paradise and others to judgment, are none other than these dead bodies of ours. As he says again, 'Everyone who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.' Here too we can see that he calls the believers living, never to die, but the bodies dying and coming to life again. 'When the Lord comes from heaven with the voice of the archangel and the trumpet of God, the dead in Christ will rise first,' that is, the bodies; 'then we,' that is, the souls that have received incorruptible bodies, 'will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,' and so on. And since Origen holds that the dead who rise, 'who hear the voice of the Son of God,' are those who have sinned after coming to faith, and who receive life in the forgiveness of sins, we say: how then did Christ teach, if he had given forgiveness to those who did not keep his commandments, saying, 'Many will say on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and cast out demons? And he will answer them and say, Depart from me, you who have done lawlessness'; and again, 'And he will say to those on the left, Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire'? For by saying this, does he not show plainly that those who have sinned after baptism and have not repented receive punishment, while those who have not sinned and those who have repented go into life, and not, as Origen thinks, that sinners are not punished? So it is plainly shown that the dead who hear the voice of God and enter into life are not the souls, but these fallen bodies of ours. 'For this reason Christ,' who is the life, 'died, that' he might free those held by death ...

[22] "Yet Origen himself also says, concerning those who believe, that it belongs to this body to rise ... and he says: 'That every promise of the resurrection of the dead is about this body which is left dead, the holy Scriptures show in many ways; and the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ itself also declares it, who is called "the firstborn from the dead."' ...

[23] "So much, then, for Origen. But let us give praise to God, now that we have finished this treatise. Lord my God, I praise you and sing to your name, for you have done wonderful things, a counsel from the beginning and true. For when in Adam we transgressed your commandment, ... has 'swallowed up death in victory' and taken away 'every tear from every face.' For you have made great your 'grace and truth' and your love and kindness toward me. Therefore the poor people bless you, for you have become the helper of every humbled soul. You sent from heaven your Word, who instructs us in the truth, who, being impassible, took on by your will this much-suffering body, so that by suffering the impassible one, having become for the sake of the contest of suffering a suffering to sufferings, might free us from sufferings, and that through the death of the deathless one, a death devised for death, he might extinguish death, so that the mortal might be changed into immortality and the passible into impassibility because of your mercy. For no one at all has withstood your command. You have made what is out of what is not, and nothing of it has been hidden from your art and adornment. For there is no God besides you, ruler of life and death; you are Lord and ruler of all. For your sake are the angels and archangels and all powers and all spirits. Yours is the artwork of the world and all the stars and all the lights, and every day and every night and season, and every height and depth. You hold all things together through your all-holy Wisdom, which shone forth from you before all ages. To you, Lord, I offer the gift of blessing through your priest and only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, through whom you have led man to immortality, as heartfelt 'fruit of the lips.' For you rejoice to justify those who have chosen to honour him, blessed by offerings of the mind, rational sacrifices, spiritual gifts. And I pray and fall down before you, that you may cleanse me from my sins and not reckon sin to me. For 'it is good to confess' sins, since you are very merciful and patient and kind and gentle, and grieve over our transgressions. Therefore I implore you, for all my sins are manifest before you: have mercy and deliver me, O Lord, from the wrath to come and from the unquenchable fire which you will bring upon those who have not known you nor kept your commandments, when you judge the world in righteousness. To you, Lord, I confess, and I praise and glorify your most holy and most honoured name. Through your Comforter, the 'Perfecter of our souls,' the Spirit, and through Jesus Christ your beloved Son, I ask you that my sins may not be reckoned to me. For if you have chosen to justify, 'who' will be 'the one who condemns,' or who will say to you, Why have you done this? And now, O Lord, do not destroy me with the ungodly, but be merciful; release me from all my debt; be merciful to them, O Lord, and forgive them; be merciful, accept us; deliver us from the judgment that lies before us; amend our mind yourself, so that we may not take offence at you. For in man the inclination to strive after what is harmful is greater, since many fight against us and always turn us to evil. Therefore, O Lord, be to us a strong fortress and the repulse of deceitful plots, for the destruction of the wicked and cunning one, and for the withering of the burning of the flesh! For if you do not shelter us, we 'watch in vain' and 'labour in vain.' Cut away what weighs on us, we pray, and be to us 'helper and advocate' and physician, O great Giver and great Helper, so that we may become strong and healthy through faith to do your commandment. For the sufferer is not himself changed by suffering; powerless to act, he also becomes impatient, and rather strives after what is harmful. Heal us therefore, heal us, healing the diseases of our hearts, O Lord, so that, 'enlightened in the eyes,' we may no longer sleep in death. For yours is the glory and the power, O Christ Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, from eternity and now and into the ages to come. Amen."