Never Without a Body

There is a question people are in the habit of raising here. The Father generates the Son, who is not a creature, and brings forth the Holy Spirit — not as though there were a time when they did not exist, but because the Father is their origin and their source, and no before and after can be understood among them. So the question is whether some union or relationship of that same kind holds between reasoning beings and bodily matter. [a]

To get at that point more fully and thoroughly, the discussion usually begins from another question: this bodily nature, which carries the lives of spiritual and reasoning minds and holds their movements, will it last exactly as long as they do, or will it perish altogether and be destroyed? And to settle the matter more exactly, we have to ask first of all whether it is possible for reasoning beings to remain entirely without bodies once they have reached the summit of holiness and happiness — which seems to me very hard, and next to impossible — or whether they must always of necessity be joined to bodies.

If, then, someone could show a reason why they were able to do without bodies altogether, it would seem to follow that bodily nature, which was made out of nothing after intervals of time and so was brought into being when it did not exist, must likewise cease to be once the purposes it served have ceased to exist.

But suppose that point cannot be maintained at all — suppose no nature other than the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit can live without a body. Then the necessity of the argument compels us to understand it this way: reasoning beings were indeed created at the beginning, but material substance was separated from them only in thought and understanding. It appears to have been formed for them, or after them, and they have never lived and do not live without it. For a life without a body will rightly be held to belong to the Trinity alone. [e]

So, as we remarked earlier, the material substance of this world has a nature that admits of every possible change. When it is dragged down to beings of a lower order, it is molded into the coarser and more solid condition of a body, so as to mark off those visible and changing forms of the world. But when it becomes the servant of more perfect and more blessed beings, it shines with the splendor of the heavenly bodies, and clothes the angels of God, or the sons of the resurrection, with a spiritual body. Out of all of these together the one world is filled up in its various and differing states.

But if anyone wants to discuss these matters more fully, he will have to examine the sacred Scriptures with greater attention and diligence, in all reverence and fear of God, to find out whether the secret and hidden sense inside them may perhaps disclose something about them. Something may indeed be found in their difficult and mysterious language, once many testimonies on this very point have been gathered together — found through the Holy Spirit’s showing it to those who are worthy.