From 6th Ecumenical Council, Synodical Epistle of Patriarch St. Sophronius of Jerusalem.
Profession of Faith in Creation;
1. Concerning the coming into being of the visible world, its establishment at the beginning of time, and its consummation, which it may receive before long, I confess to you, honoured by God, that the one God framed everything, not only the visible but also the invisible – the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that is, the nature which is external and without beginning – and brought from nonexistence into existence and created what previously was not, and wisely brought into being the myriad of varieties of them. The Father made everything through the only-begotten Son in the Holy Spirit, [everything] which he holds in being through wise foresight, presiding as God over his own works, and establishing a beginning in time for everything, he subjected the perceptible to an end in time, while to the intellectual and unseen he awarded greater honour than to these: they will not die at all or corrupt in the way that perceptible things flux and easily dissipate, not that they are immortal by nature or have changed into an incorruptible essence, but he has granted them this grace which keeps them from corruption and death. Thus the souls of human beings remain incorruptible, thus the angels continue immortal, not that they are truly incorruptible by in nature, as we have said, or in an essence which is properly immortal, but because they have been allotted a grace from God which bestows immortality and will grant them an incorrupt existence.
2. But it is not because the souls of human beings, by the grace of God, have thrust off the corruption lurking naturally in all created things that we shall suppose therefore [that they existed] before bodies, or that we shall think that they existed in some eternal life before creation and the compacting of the visible world. Nor would we allege that they had a heavenly way of life, living a fleshless and incorporeal life eternally in a heaven which once did not exist, as the frenzied Origen would have it, and his confederates who are of like mind with him, Didymus and Evagrius and the rest of their crowd that pays heed to fables. In their error they do not only hold this belief, mixing it up with pagan teachings and sullying the noble race of Christians, but they also mindlessly do away with the resurrection of these bodies with which they are now invested, stammering myriads of terrible things worthy of their impious, fabulous invention. To confound them what was said by Paul to the Corinthians is sufficient: ‘If the dead are not raised, nor has Christ been raised’. And finally, when in this way they have loitered vainly in their reasoning, he added: ‘And indeed your faith in vain’. Or is it, you people, that have no part in our sacred confession and the resurrection of the flesh in it? – for indeed the confession of the ‘resurrection of the flesh’ is required of us as we approach saving baptism. This is why, as it appeared to one of the sages, the entire resplendent and conspicuous dispensation of the only-begotten was put into effect so splendidly, ‘so that he might save the image and make the flesh immortal’.
3. But it is not only on this point that the deranged err and go astray from the straight road ( such impiety would be tolerable in comparison with [their other] evils), but they also make myriads of other statements contrary to the tradition of the apostles and our Fathers. They throw out the planting of paradise, they do not want Adam fashioned in the flesh, they object to the moulding of Eve from him, they reject the utterance of the snake, they forbid the ranks of heavenly armies as they were created to be in the beginning with God, imagining that they resulted from a primordial condemnation and deviation. They dream up, both godlessly and mythically, that all rational things were produced in a henad of minds, and they abuse the creation of the waters above heaven, and want an end to punishment, and they introduce besides total corruptibility of all perceptible things, while alleging the restoration of all rational creatures, angels, human beings, and demons, and again confounding their differences into one mythical unity, when Christ will be different from us in no respect, whom they preach in foolish manner, not with one foul perversion only but giving their neighbor myriads of draughts to drink, and, wretches that they are, deigned to die and poured out the ransom that was his divine blood and laid down his own life as a most divine gift exceeding all worth.
4. But we, because we have been given to drink the rational and guileless milk of right and blameless and well-disciplined faith, have tasted the good word of God, thrust away all their shadowy teachings. Being free of all their lawless babblings and walking in the footsteps of our Fathers, we both speak of the consummation of the present world and believe that that that life which is to come after the present life will last forever, and we hold to unending punishment; the former will gladden unceasingly those who have performed excellent deeds, but the latter will bring pain without respite, and also indeed punishment, on those who became lovers of what was vile in this life and refused to repent before the end of their course and departure hence. For ‘their worm will not die’, says Christ the judge, who is the truth, ‘and their fire will not be extinguished.’ These things received them from proclamation which is from apostles and evangelist, from prophets and the Law, from Fathers and Teachers, and we have made them manifest to You, all-wise One, and have hidden nothing from You.