On the Trinity 25

“Then,” they say, “if Christ is not only man but also God, and Scripture reports that Christ died for us and was raised, then Scripture teaches us to believe that God died; or if God does not die, and Christ is reported to have died, Christ will not be God, since God cannot be taken to have died.” If they ever understood, or had understood, what they read, they would never speak so dangerously at all. But the madness of error is always headlong; and it is nothing new if those who have abandoned the lawful faith go down even to dangerous things. For if Scripture set forth Christ as only God, and no association with human frailty were mingled in him, their twisted argument might rightly have had some force here: “If Christ is God, and Christ died, then God died.” But since Scripture establishes him, as we have often shown, not only as God but also as man, it follows that what is immortal must be held to have remained incorrupt. For who does not understand that the divinity is impassible, but human frailty passible? Since, then, Christ is understood to be mingled and united both from what is God and from what is man (for the Word became flesh and dwelt in us), who would not easily recognize of himself, without any teacher or interpreter, that it was not what is God in Christ that died, but what is man in him that died? For what if the divinity in Christ does not die, but only the substance of the flesh is extinguished, when in other men too, who are not flesh only but flesh and soul, the flesh alone suffers the assault of destruction and death, while the soul is seen to be incorrupt and outside the laws of destruction and death? For this is what the Lord himself said when he urged us to martyrdom and to contempt of all human power: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” And if the immortal soul cannot be killed or slain in anyone else, though the body and the flesh alone can be slain, how much more surely could the Word of God and God in Christ not be slain at all, when only the flesh and the body were killed? For if the soul in any man has this nobility of immortality, that it cannot be slain, much more does the nobility of the Word of God have this power, that it cannot be killed. For if the power of men fails to slay the sacred power of God, and if human cruelty fails to slay the soul, much more must it fail to slay the Word of God. For since the soul itself, which was made through the Word of God, is not killed by men, much more surely will the Word of God be believed unable to be destroyed. And if the bloody savagery of men can do no more against men than to kill only the body, how much more surely will it have no more power in Christ than to kill the body only: so that, since from this it is gathered that nothing but the man in Christ was slain, it is evident that the Word in him was not brought down to mortality. For if Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who are agreed to have been only men, are plainly alive (for “all these,” it says, “live to God”; nor did death, which dissolved their bodies, destroy the soul in them; for it could exercise its right over bodies, but had no power to exercise it over souls; for one thing in them was mortal and therefore dead, another immortal and therefore understood not to be extinguished, and for this reason they were declared and said to live to God): much more surely could death in Christ have power against the material of the body alone, but could not exercise itself against the divinity of the Word. For the power of death is broken where the authority of immortality intervenes.