There's really no way to unite them, though. Viruses are basically rogue bits of subcellular machinery that mess up a cell's blueprint for how it's supposed to work. If it does so in a way that makes more viruses, then evolution selects for it, but it's still a stretch to call that life. It's just a piece of DNA or RNA and protein.
Compare to a viroid, which is just RNA, or a prion, which is just protein. If a protein turns other protein into itself, is that protein suddenly an organism? IMO it's just a rogue organic compound that stumbled into evolutionary selection by sheer accident.