That Spiritual Gifts Are Imprinted Upon the Body

¹ Whoever does not accept that the spiritual dispositions imprinted upon the body arise from the gifts of the Spirit that are in the soul of those who advance according to God, and who says that the mortification, as a settled habit, of the passible faculty is dispassion—rather than its habitual energy directed toward the better, when one has wholly turned away from evils and turned toward what is good, having ⟦put off⟧ the evil habits and grown rich in the good ones—such a one, consistently with this opinion, also renounces the manner of life with the body in the incorruptible age of the things that are. For if the body will then share with the soul in the ineffable goods, surely even now it shares, so far as is possible, in the grace mystically and ineffably bestowed by God upon the purified intellect, and it too will experience the divine things, in a manner suited to itself, the passible faculty of the soul being transformed and sanctified, but not mortified as a settled habit. And through itself, being common to body and soul, it sanctifies the dispositions and energies of the body. For since, according to Saint Diadochus, when a man has been released from the good things of this life through hope of the good things to come, the intellect, vigorously moved by reason of its freedom from care, itself perceives the ineffable [conj. the ineffable things] kindness of God, and imparts to the body also, according to the measure of its own advance, a share of the kindness that is its own. And this joy, then arising in soul and body, is an unerring reminder of the incorruptible life.

² The intellect is fitted by nature to apprehend one light, and the sense another. For sense apprehends a sensible light, one that displays sensible things as sensible; but the light of the intellect is the knowledge that lies in concepts. Sight and intellect, therefore, are not fitted to apprehend the same light, but only so long as each of them operates according to its own nature and within what is according to nature. But when they have been granted a spiritual and supernatural grace and power, then, by both sense and intellect, those counted worthy behold the things that are beyond all sense and all intellect—so that, to speak with the great Gregory the Theologian, only God knows, and those in whom such things are worked.