But, someone says, human nature is small and easily circumscribed, whereas divinity is infinite; how, then, could the infinite have been contained within the individual? And who says that the infinity of divinity was contained within the boundary of the flesh as though in some vessel? For even in our own life the intellectual nature is not shut up within the limits of the flesh.
The body's bulk is circumscribed by its own dimensions, but the soul, through the movements of thought, freely extends itself throughout all creation: it ascends to the heavens, sets foot upon the depths, ranges over the breadth of the inhabited world, penetrates through inquiry into the regions beneath the earth, and often embraces in thought the wonders of the heavens, without being weighed down at all by the burden of the body.
If, then, the human soul, though by the necessity of its nature mingled with the body, is able to range everywhere at will, what necessity is there to say that divinity is confined within the nature of the flesh, rather than to form, through examples accessible to us, some fitting conception of the divine economy? For just as the fire of a lamp is seen clinging to the material beneath it, and reason distinguishes the fire on the material from the material that kindles the fire, while in actuality it is impossible, by cutting the two apart, to display the flame by itself separated from the material, but the two together become one, so also here. Yet let no one carry over into the illustration the destructive property of fire. Let him receive only what is fitting in the image and reject what does not correspond. In the same way, then, since we see the flame attached to its underlying material without being enclosed within the matter, what prevents us, while conceiving a certain union and approach of the divine nature toward the human, from preserving even in this approach a conception worthy of God, believing that the divine remains outside every circumscription even when it is in a human being?