But anyone who looks at the dissolution of the body is naturally distressed and regards it as a grievous thing that our life is dissolved by death, saying that this is the worst of evils: that our life is extinguished in death. Let him therefore consider, through this very thing that seems so gloomy, the surpassing greatness of the divine beneficence. Perhaps through these very considerations he will be led all the more to marvel at the grace of God's care for humanity. For those who share in life find living desirable because of the enjoyment of the things they desire.
For if someone were to spend his life in pain, he would judge nonexistence far preferable to an existence filled with suffering. Let us therefore examine whether the Giver of life looks to some other end than this: that we should live among the best things.
For by a self-determined movement we drew ourselves into fellowship with evil, mixing evil into our nature through a certain pleasure, like poison seasoned with honey. In this way we fell from the blessedness understood as freedom from passion and were transformed toward evil. For this reason the human being is dissolved again into the earth like an earthen vessel, so that the defilement now embedded in him may be separated off and he may, through the resurrection, be refashioned according to the form he had from the beginning.
Moses sets out this teaching for us in a more narrative form and through riddles. Yet the teaching contained in the riddles is also clear.
For, he says, when the first human beings became involved with what had been forbidden and were stripped of that blessed state, the Lord clothed those first-formed ones with garments of skin. I do not think the meaning of the passage directs us to literal animal skins. For what animals are we to imagine were slaughtered and flayed to provide them with this covering? Rather, since every skin separated from an animal is dead, I think that the One who heals our evil afterward, in His providential care, clothed human beings with the capacity for mortality, which had been a distinctive feature of irrational nature—not so that it would remain forever. A garment is something placed upon us from outside, serving the body for a time; it is not something grown together with our nature.
Thus mortality, taken from the nature of irrational creatures, was providentially wrapped around the nature that had been created for immortality. It covered what was outside, not what was within; it encompassed the sensible part of the human being but did not touch the divine image itself. The sensible part is dissolved, but it is not annihilated. Annihilation is a passing over into nonbeing; dissolution is a dispersal back into the elements of the world from which it was constituted. What has come to be among those elements has not perished, even if it escapes the grasp of our senses.
The reason for this dissolution is clear from the illustration already given. Sense-perception is naturally at home with what is dense and earthly, while the intellectual nature is better and higher than movements governed by sense. Because judgment concerning what is beautiful went wrong when tested by the senses, and because missing the beautiful brought the opposite disposition into actuality, the part of us rendered useless by receiving the opposite is dissolved. The illustration is as follows.
Suppose that a vessel has been made of clay and, through some malicious act, has become filled with melted lead. Suppose that the lead, once poured in, hardens and remains impossible to pour out. The owner claims the vessel as his own and, possessing the potter's craft, breaks the clay vessel apart around the lead. Then he forms the vessel again according to its former shape for his own use, now emptied of the material that had been mixed into it.
So too the Maker of our vessel, after evil had become mixed into its sensible part—that is, the bodily part—dissolves the material that received the evil and then, through the resurrection, refashions the vessel free from admixture with its opposite, reconstituting it according to its original beauty.
But because the passions that arise from sin form a certain bond and fellowship in both soul and body, there is also an analogy between bodily death and the death of the soul. In the case of the flesh, we call separation from sensible life death; likewise, in the case of the soul, we call separation from true life death. Since, as was said before, there is one fellowship with evil seen in both soul and body—for evil comes into operation through both—the death that consists in bodily dissolution, arising from the putting on of the dead skins, does not touch the soul.
For how could what is not composite be dissolved? Yet the stains implanted in the soul by sins also need to be removed by some form of healing. For this reason, in the present life the medicine of virtue has been applied for the healing of such wounds. But if the soul remains unhealed, its healing is reserved for the life that follows.
Just as bodily ailments differ—some yielding more easily to treatment, others with greater difficulty, so that incisions, cauteries, and bitter medicines are used to remove the disease that has attacked the body—something of this kind is also proclaimed concerning the judgment that comes afterward for the healing of the soul's diseases. To the more careless it is a threat and a correction through grim things, so that fear of being repaid with pains may discipline us to flee from evil. But to the more understanding it is believed to be healing and treatment from God, who is bringing His own creation back toward its original grace.
For those who remove corns and warts that have grown on the body contrary to nature by cutting or cauterizing do not bring the person they are helping a painless cure; yet they do not use the knife in order to harm the one who undergoes the cutting. In the same way, whatever material accretions have hardened upon our souls, made fleshly through fellowship with the passions, are cut away and scraped off at the time of judgment by that ineffable wisdom and power of the One who, as the Gospel says, heals those who are ill.
For, He says, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick do.
Because the soul has become deeply grown together with evil, the process is like cutting away a wart, which sharply stings the surface. What has grown into nature contrary to nature clings to its subject through a kind of sympathy, and an irrational intermingling of what is foreign with what is ours comes about, so that sensation grieves and suffers when what is contrary to nature is separated from it. So too, as the soul is refined and melted down in the reproofs that address sin, certain ineffable and inexpressible pains necessarily follow because of its deeply rooted familiarity with evil. An account of these pains is just as incapable of expression as is the nature of the good things for which we hope.
Neither these pains nor those good things can be brought within the power of words or the conjecture of thought. Therefore, if someone looks to the final purpose of the wisdom of the One who orders the whole, he would no longer reasonably, through narrowness of mind, call the Creator of human beings the cause of evils, whether by saying that He did not know what was going to happen or that, knowing it and nevertheless creating, He was not free from an impulse toward evil.
For He knew what was going to happen and did not prevent the tendency toward what in fact came to be. The One who encompasses all things by His power of knowledge and beholds what comes afterward on equal terms with what has passed did not fail to know that humanity would turn away from the good. But just as He foresaw the deviation, so He also comprehended humanity's recall back toward the good.
What, then, would have been better: not to bring our nature into being at all because He foresaw that the one who would come to be would miss the beautiful, or, having brought him into being and after he had become diseased, to recall him again through repentance toward the grace he had from the beginning? To call God the maker of evils because of bodily pains, which necessarily accompany the changeable condition of our nature, or to suppose that He is not the Creator of humanity at all so that He may not also be thought the cause of the things that pain us—this belongs to the most extreme narrowness of mind in those who distinguish good and evil by sensation. They do not know that only that is good by nature which sensation does not grasp, and that the only evil is estrangement from the true good.
To judge what is beautiful and what is not by pains and pleasures belongs to irrational nature, in which understanding of what is truly beautiful has no place because it does not share in intellect and reason. But that the human being is God's work, beautiful and brought into being for the most beautiful ends, is clear not only from what has been said but also from countless other considerations, whose number we pass over because it is beyond measure.
And when we call God the Maker of humanity, we have not forgotten what was clarified in the prologue in our argument addressed to those who hold Greek views. There it was shown that the Word of God, being substantial and subsistent, is Himself both God and Word, encompassing every creative power—or rather, being Power itself—inclined toward every good and accomplishing whatever He wills because power runs together with His will. The life of all that exists is both His will and His work, and from Him the human being too was brought into life, adorned in a Godlike way with every beautiful gift.
Only what does not have its origin through creation is by nature unchangeable. Everything that came to subsist from nonbeing through the uncreated nature began its existence with a change and continues always through change: if it acts according to nature, its change is forever toward what is better; but if it turns aside from the straight path, the movement that follows carries it toward the opposite. Humanity belonged among these created things, and the mutability of its nature slipped toward the opposite. Once it withdrew from the good, every form of evil followed in sequence: turning away from life introduced death; deprivation of light brought darkness; absence of virtue introduced evil; and against every form of good there came to be a corresponding catalogue of opposites. The human being, having fallen into these and similar things through lack of good counsel—for it was not possible for one who had turned away from prudence to remain prudent, or for one who had withdrawn from wisdom to devise anything wise—through whom was he to be recalled again toward the grace he had from the beginning?
To whom belonged the raising up of the fallen, the recall of the lost, and the guiding by the hand of the one who had gone astray? To whom else, surely, than to the Lord of the nature? For only the One who gave life at the beginning was it both possible and fitting to recall it when it had been lost.
This is what we hear from the mystery of truth: we learn that God made the human being at the beginning and saved him after he had fallen.