Why a Body, and Not a Bare Command

But perhaps, shamed into agreeing with this, they will choose to say that if God wanted to reform and save mankind, he should have done it by a simple command, without his Word taking a body, in just the same way as he did before, when he brought them into being out of nothing. To this objection of theirs a reasonable answer would be this. Before, when nothing existed at all, all that was needed to make everything was a command and the bare will to do it. But once man had been made, and need called for a cure, not for things that did not exist but for things that had come into being, it naturally followed that the Physician and Savior should appear in what had come into being, in order to cure the things that were as well. That is why he became man and used his body as a human instrument. For if this was not the right way, how was the Word, choosing to use an instrument, to appear? Where was he to take it from, except from those already in being, who needed his Godhead through one like themselves? It was not things that did not exist that needed salvation, so that a bare command would have been enough. It was man, already in existence, who was going to corruption and ruin. So it was natural and right that the Word should use a human instrument and reveal himself in every direction. [a]

Secondly, you must also know this: the corruption that had set in was not outside the body but had become attached to it. What was needed was that life should cling to it in place of corruption, so that, just as death had come to be in the body, life might come to be in it too. Now if death were outside the body, it would be fitting for life also to have come to be outside it. But if death was wound closely around the body and was ruling over it as though united to it, then life too had to be wound closely around the body, so that the body, putting on life in its place, might throw off corruption. Besides, even supposing the Word had come outside the body and not in it, death would indeed have been defeated by him, quite in keeping with nature, since death has no power against the Life. But the corruption attached to the body would have stayed in it all the same. That is why the Savior reasonably clothed himself with a body: so that the body, wound closely to the Life, would no longer stay in death as something mortal, but, having put on immortality, would from then on rise again and remain immortal. For once it had put on corruption, it could not have risen again unless it had put on life. And death, likewise, by its very nature could not appear except in the body. So he put on a body, so that he might find death in the body and wipe it out. For how could the Lord have been shown at all to be the Life, if he had not given life to what was mortal?

Think of stubble, which fire naturally destroys. Suppose, first, that someone keeps the fire away from the stubble. Though it is not burned, it still remains nothing but stubble, afraid of the threat of the fire, because fire has the natural power to consume it. But suppose, second, that someone wraps it in a quantity of asbestos, the substance said to be a remedy against fire. Then the stubble no longer dreads the fire, because it is protected by being wrapped in something that will not burn. In the very same way one may speak of the body and death. If death had been kept away from the body by a mere command from him, the body would still have been mortal and corruptible, as bodies by nature are. But so that this would not be so, it put on the bodiless Word of God, and so it no longer fears either death or corruption, for it has life as its garment, and corruption is done away in it.