 Nevertheless, since the fall has darkened our minds and subjected our bodies to corruption, we cannot effect our own salvation without the assistance of God’s word made flesh. For Origen the virgin birth is a datable event, an appropriation by the Word of full humanity in body, soul and spirit. The union can be described as an anakrasis or mixture (Cels. 3.41), a voluntary cleaving of the flesh or soul to the Word, and (in defiance of chemical facts) as the sublimation of the humanity by the divinity, as iron loses its form when held in an incandescent flame (Princ. 2.6.4) The humanity, for all that, is not annihilated, and Christ can speak at times as man and at others with God without being guilty of dissimulation (CommJohn 19.2.6). His own words “my soul is sorrowful unto death” reveals his possession of a soul, which mediates between the flesh and the divinity which would otherwise destroy it. While the soul (for Christ as for us) is invariably the seat of passion, some of his passions originate in his spirit, which, though human, is divinely irradiated by the Word. By virtue of this irradiation, he foresees his own death, and his prescience gives rise not to a commotion of the spirit but to a commotion in the spirit, which is experienced as a passion of the soul (CommJohn 32.18.221–224). The body which clothes him before the crucifixion is as palpable as ours, and equally vulnerable to physical affections. After his resurrection, he does not show himself to Caiaphas and Pilate because he is visible only to the eye of faith (Cels. 2.60–65). This means not, however, that his body is no real body, but that it no longer suffers the consequences of the fall.