On the Reasons of the Holy Spirit, Book II

which tend toward piety, that the more they are exercised, the more they affect the one who exercises them. Such is the nature of virtue, which is the way to immortality. Since, however, eternal life is the unfailing knowledge of the supreme good, and at that time no bodies are to be oppressed by any necessity, as they will have passed over to the nature and inclination of spirits, there is no doubt that that happiness will be eternal. Wherefore Origen seems not to have had a sufficiently great understanding of the eternal good when he left it written (as they reproach him) that nature will one day fail there, feeling in this way with the impious Lucian, who hints at this in his dialogues. For to measure the immortal by the nature of mortality is to affirm this. That God can restore bodies to their spirits—no differently than how it now gives life to this mass by the power of the soul holding it—is sufficiently known to those who estimate His power. Those who affirm that the body will be impalpable after the resurrection, like the Eutychians, do not speak of a body, but of a spirit. But indeed, the four elements would not be in it. For otherwise, that harmony of the body which now exists would be lacking, which is against nature. For it is fitting that the same parts, and the same power and nature of the elements, should correspond in all things for the sake of merit, and thus the very autotaton self-same body should correspond in all things. Wherefore it is evident that the Germans are held by the greatest impiety, who, because of the deformities and imperfections of the present life, affirm that it will not be the same body as this one in the resurrection, when at that time deformity and every imperfection of age will be absent. It is most certain that since God does all things in the most excellent manner, even (since age is not of the essence of the thing, unless