But, someone says, this very change of our body is a passion, and the one who enters into it comes to be in passion; yet the divine is impassible. Therefore, it would be an unfitting conception of God if one defines Him who is impassible by nature as having come into participation in passion. To this also we will again use the same argument: 'passion' is spoken of in one sense properly and in another by an extended use of the term. What touches moral choice and turns it from virtue toward evil is truly passion. But whatever is observed successively in nature as it proceeds according to its own order would more properly be called an operation than a passion—for example, birth, growth, the continuance of the subject through the incoming and outgoing flow of nourishment, the gathering of the elements in the body, and the dissolution of what has been compounded and its return again to kindred elements.
What, then, does our mystery say the divine has touched: passion properly so called, which is evil, or the movement that belongs to nature? If the teaching maintained that the divine had come to be among forbidden things, one ought to reject the absurdity of such a doctrine as saying nothing sound about the divine nature. But if it says that He touched our nature, whose first origin and subsistence also had their beginning from Him, where does the proclamation fall short of a conception fitting to God, since faith introduces no disposition of passion into our conceptions of God? For we do not say that a physician comes to be in the patient's suffering when he treats the one who suffers. Even if he touches the sickness, the healer remains outside the suffering.
If birth in itself is not a passion, neither would anyone call life a passion. Rather, the passion connected with pleasure precedes human generation, and the impulse of those who live toward evil—this is the sickness of our nature. Yet the mystery says that He is pure from both. If, then, His birth is separated from pleasure and His life from evil, what passion remains in which the mystery of godliness says that God shared? And if one calls the separation of body and soul a passion, one would with much more reason have to give the same name to their conjunction.
For if the separation of things that have been joined is a passion, then the joining of things that were apart would also be a passion. There is a certain movement both in the combining of things that were apart and in the separating of things that had been interwoven or united. Whatever name, then, is given to the final movement ought also to be given to the movement that precedes it. But if the first movement, which we call birth, is not a passion, then by the same reasoning the second movement, which we call death, would not be called a passion either, for in it the conjunction of body and soul is separated.
We say, then, that God came to be in both movements of our nature: the one by which the soul comes together with the body and the one by which the body is separated from the soul. And having been mingled with each of these—by which I mean both the sensible and the intelligible parts of the human composite—through that ineffable and inexpressible intermingling, He brought this about: that the union of those once joined, I mean soul and body, should continue forever.
For when our nature, following its own proper sequence, moved even in Him to the separation of body and soul, He joined the separated parts together again, as though with a kind of glue—I mean the divine power—fitting what had been divided into an unbreakable union. And this is the resurrection: after dissolution, the return of what had been joined into an indissoluble union, the parts growing together again with one another, so that the original grace concerning humanity might be restored and we might return again to eternal life, while the evil mixed into our nature flows out through our dissolution. It is like what happens to liquid when the vessel enclosing it is broken: it is scattered and disappears because nothing remains to contain it.
Just as the beginning of death, having arisen in one, passed together through the whole human nature, so in the same way the beginning of resurrection, through One, extends to all humanity. For He who by His own power reunited the soul He had assumed with its own body—the power that had been mingled with both from their first constitution—thereby, in a more universal manner, mingled the intelligible substance together with the sensible, as the beginning advances in due sequence toward its completion. For when, in the human being assumed by Him, the soul returned to the body after their dissolution, the reunion of what had been separated passes, as from a beginning, by the same power to the whole human nature alike.
And this is the mystery of God's dispensation concerning death and the resurrection from the dead: He did not prevent the soul from being separated from the body by death according to the necessary sequence of nature, but through the resurrection He brought them back again to one another, so that He Himself became the boundary of both, death and life—bringing to a halt in Himself the nature divided by death, and Himself becoming the beginning of the reunion of what had been divided.