On the Soul against the Arians

1What could they say when they look at the nourishings of the infant, or the increase of his age, or the extension of his years, or the growth of his body? And to pass over the wonders performed on the ground, let them look at the revivals of the dead, the symbols of the passion, the marks of the whips, the bruises of the blows, the pierced side, the prints of the nails, the pouring out of the blood, the signs of death, and, to say it all at once, the very resurrection of his own body.

Indeed, if anyone looks at the birth of the body, he will clearly find that he was born in Bethlehem and wrapped in swaddling clothes, that he was nourished in Egypt for some time because of the plot of the accursed Herod, and that in Nazareth, having become a man, he grew.

2For the tabernacle of the Word and God is not the same thing as the Word himself, and it was through this tabernacle that the blessed Stephen beheld the divine glory. Before the passion, Christ repeatedly foretold his bodily death, saying that he would be handed over to those around the high priests, and proclaiming the trophy of the cross. After the passion, having risen on the third day from the dead, when his disciples doubted that he had been raised, he appeared to them in that very body, acknowledged that he had all his flesh together with his bones, and placing before their eyes his wounded sides, showed them the prints of the nails. But their impious slander can be refuted in just a few words. First of all, if he had not willingly handed over his own body to the slaughter of death for the salvation of human beings, they would be attributing great weakness to him, because he was not able to hold back the assault of his enemies.

3Why, then, do they make so much of showing that Christ took up a soulless body, fabricating earthy deceits? So that if they are able to corrupt some people and get them to define the matter this way, they may then attach the alterations of the passions to the Spirit and easily persuade them that the changeable was not begotten from the unchangeable nature. Jeremiah, speaking in agreement with these things, introduces the voices of God which he serves, and through them shows that God does not accept even the intercessions of the righteous, if they should choose to plead on behalf of murderers. And the Lord said to me, saying, “If Moses and Samuel stood before my face, my soul is not toward them” (Jeremiah 15:1).

4But if through the appearing of Christ the human race is being brought into paradise, and if at the hour he was crucified he foretold that he would bring the thief there that very day while his body still lay cast into the tomb, then it is established that the soul of Christ, dwelling together properly with the Word and God who encompasses all created things at once, brought the kindred soul of the man into paradise. For it is nowhere written that before the resurrection of the holy body the thief's body went ahead and received the promise. It follows, then, to think sensibly that the soul, kindly guiding the kindred soul, since it indeed possessed the greater authority, was bringing the promise to fulfillment that very day, and was leading it into the special inheritance, opening paradise.