Very thought-provoking and informative, thank you.
Cappadocian Fathers held that God created man potentially mortal or immortal. They believe that based on our conviction that man has free will.
We certainly believe that it is only through the grace of God and not by our nature that we can become immortal.
But that takes us into another direction: I think they are talking about our "natural" state of dying or not dying physical death. Your last sentence reflects that view. For we shall be made whole again.
The only thing that remains uncertain is what happens to our free will. Do we lose it and become mindless do-gooders, or do we retain it and run a risk of another Fall? The Creed, after all, does not say we shall live forever, but only that we look forward to the Age to come.
However, one thing is certain, the souls shall live regardless; only the new bodies are to be created; not the souls.
What about a soul without a body? The Orthodox Church teaches that a soul "lives" after physical death, and is even conscious! The fact that it is in an "unnatural" state (i.e. separated from the body) causes it to "feel" discomfort, a feeling further burdened by tghe shame experienced by residual unrepented sins.
A soul, through the prayers of the Church and God's love, is "purified" which also relieves some of the discomfort and shame. The purification is necessary in order for a soul destined to enter the Kingdom of Heaven at the Second Coming because something that is not thoroughly cleansed and pure cannot enter God's House.
Now, don't ask me how do they know all this? I have no clue, but the after-life is a pretty much done deal in Orthodox Christianity and I believe equally in Roman Catholicism.
"The Creed, after all, does not say we shall live forever, but only that we look forward to the Age to come."
While it isn't spelled out in the Creed, St. Paul does say in I Thes that "we shall be with the Lord forever" after the resurrection.
A book worth reading is "Free Choice in St. Maximus the Confessor" -- it is a treatment of free choice in the next life, as touched on by St. Maximus in his various writings. Bottom line as I recall it is that we will indeed have free choice, being faced with a multiplicity (perhaps an infinity) of choices -- but in that next life, *all* of the choices before us will be good.