Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
When, then, the times that God has fixed for death are fulfilled, death itself will be brought to an end. And since temporal life is followed by temporal death, it follows that souls will rise again to everlasting life, since temporal death has received its end. Consider too that the soul lives on forever, seizing upon divine and inexpressible fruits of its own deathlessness — and by that same logic, its dying must go on without end, paying out endless punishment and unceasing torment for its own wrongs. Matters therefore stand thus: people who prosper in this bodily, earthly existence are fated to misery without limit, since they have already grabbed the goods they chose over God — precisely what happens to worshippers of idols who ignore the true God. Those instead who pursued righteousness, who in this life suffered misery, contempt, and poverty, and who bore frequent abuse and harm precisely because of that righteousness — for virtue admits of no other path — are fated to blessedness without limit, so that, having already suffered evils, they may now also possess good things. Such precisely is the outcome for those who spurn earthly deities and crumbling goods and instead pursue a heavenly devotion to God, a devotion whose rewards, like God himself who gives them, never end. Now then — don't the products of body and mind reveal that death has no claim over the soul? The body itself, fragile and doomed as it is, produces things equally doomed to decay. Cicero remarks that nothing crafted by human hands escapes eventual ruin, whether from human violence or from age, that great destroyer of everything. Yet the mind's products, as we observe, endure forever. Everyone who, disdaining what is merely present, labored to leave something to be remembered — a monument to their talent and their achievements — was clearly seeking a name for mind and character that time could not erase. So then, if bodily products are mortal precisely because the body itself is mortal, the conclusion follows: the soul must be immortal, since we observe its products are not subject to death. Likewise, what body and mind each crave reveals that one dies while the other lasts without end. The body craves only passing things — food, drink, garments, rest, pleasure — and cannot even long for or acquire these apart from the mind's guidance and assistance. The mind, though, craves on its own many things offering the body no advantage or gain whatsoever, things not fleeting but everlasting — glory earned by virtue, a name kept in memory. Devotion to God is built from three things — reining in desire and lust, bearing pain patiently, and looking on death with contempt — and it is precisely this devotion the soul longs for, defying the body's own wishes to do so. From all this one may believe the soul does not die but is merely parted from the body, given that the body accomplishes nothing apart from the soul, whereas the mind achieves much of great weight without any body at all. Consider further: things seen by the eyes and grasped by the hand, precisely because outside force can act upon them, cannot last forever, while things that fall under neither touch nor sight, but whose power, reason, and effect alone appear, are eternal, because they suffer no force from outside? If the body is mortal because it is equally subject to force and to touch, then the soul, for that very reason, is immortal, because it can neither be touched nor seen.
Let us turn now to answering those who take the opposite side, arguments Lucretius laid out in book three of his poem. His claim runs that since soul comes into being alongside body, it must likewise die alongside body. Yet the logic doesn't hold equally for both. Body is dense, something eyes and hand alike can grasp, whereas soul is delicate, slipping past both sight and touch. Body is shaped and hardened from earthly stuff; soul, as Plato taught, carries nothing thick or heavy from the earth within it. Otherwise it could never possess such cleverness, such force, such quickness — these could only come from a heavenly source. Body, then, being shaped from a heavy and perishable element, both touchable and visible, rots away and dies, powerless against force, precisely because sight and touch can reach it; soul, however, evades every touch through its delicacy and so cannot be shattered by any blow. Hence though the pair enter existence bound and joined as one, with the earthly component serving as a kind of container for its partner drawn down from heaven's fineness, once some force pries the two apart — that parting we name death — both revert to their proper natures: the earthly part dissolves back into earth, while what came from heavenly breath persists and flourishes without end, since that divine breath itself has no end. Notably, this very Lucretius, losing track of his own argument and the doctrine he meant to uphold, penned these lines: what once came from earth sinks back into earth again, while what was dispatched from the borders of the sky, the glowing halls of heaven welcome home once more. Such words ill suited someone arguing that souls die along with bodies; but truth overpowered him, and against his intent the real account slipped through. Beyond this, his very conclusion — that the soul dissolves, meaning it dies alongside the body since both share a birth — is not only mistaken but reversible into its opposite. Death does not strike both at once: rather, after the soul departs, the body stays intact for many days afterward, and if embalmed can last a great while longer. Had they truly been fated to perish together as they were born together, the soul would not slip away suddenly leaving the body behind — instead the two would collapse together in one single moment, and the body, breath still within it, would decompose and expire exactly as fast as the departing soul — indeed, the instant the body dissolved, the soul would scatter away like liquid poured from a shattered jar. Yet given that the fragile, earthly body, once the soul has gone, does not instantly crumble back into the earth of its origin, it follows that the soul — not being fragile — endures without end, its source being eternal. His further claim, that mind grows in the young, thrives among youths, and shrinks in old people, and so appears mortal — first misses that soul and mind are two different things: one gives us life, the other gives us thought. In sleep it's the mind that rests, not the soul; in the insane, the mind is snuffed out while the soul carries on — hence such people are called not “lifeless” but “out of their mind.” So mind, meaning intellect, waxes and wanes with age, while soul stays constant throughout, and from the instant it gains the capacity for breath it continues unaltered right to the close, when, freed at last from the body's confinement, it soars back home. Further: the soul, though breathed into us by God, lacks divine knowledge because it sits shut up within the shadowy house of earthly flesh. So it listens and takes everything in, gathering understanding through the process of listening and being taught, and age does not erode this understanding but adds to it — provided youth was spent well; and should extreme old age wreck the limbs, dim the eyes, slur the tongue, or dull the ears, the fault lies with the body, not the soul. But — comes the objection — memory falters. Small surprise, if under a house collapsing into ruin the mind grows burdened and forgets what's past, since it will divine the future only when it has escaped the prison that confines it. It is further claimed the soul feels sorrow and grief, and loses awareness through drink, thereby seeming weak and mortal. This is exactly the reason virtue and wisdom matter so greatly: courage must drive off the grief born from enduring and beholding indignities, and restraint must conquer not just the pull of drink but every other pleasure too. Should the soul go without virtue, softened instead by surrender to pleasure, it becomes vulnerable to death, given that — as demonstrated — virtue builds toward immortality while pleasure builds toward death. Death, though, as already shown, does not wipe out or obliterate entirely, but instead inflicts torment without end. The soul simply cannot cease to exist altogether, having taken its origin from God's spirit, itself without end. It's also claimed the soul feels bodily illness and undergoes forgetfulness of itself, and just as it can sicken, so too it often recovers. This, then, is precisely the reason virtue must be applied above all — so no bodily pain can break it, and so any self-forgetting belongs to mind rather than soul. Mind, because it occupies a fixed region within the body, when some disease damages that region, gets pushed from its post and, shaken loose from its seat, withdraws for a time — bound to come back, naturally, once treatment and recovered health rebuild its home. Since soul is bound to body, lacking virtue it sickens through that connection, and weakness spreads to the mind from its alliance with fragility; but once torn free from the body it will thrive independently and face no further vulnerability to fragility, having shed its frail covering. It's claimed that just as a gouged-out eye, cut off from the body, cannot see anything, likewise a soul once parted senses nothing, being itself merely a piece of the body. This is mistaken and absurd: the soul isn't a piece of the body but resides within it. Just as a container's contents aren't a piece of the container, nor are items inside a house called pieces of the house, the soul likewise isn't a piece of the body, since the body serves either as the soul's vessel or its holding-place. Emptier still is the next argument, that because the soul doesn't exit the body all at once but instead works free gradually limb by limb, starting from the feet, it must therefore seem mortal — as though, had it been eternal, it would erupt free in one instant, the way it happens for those slain by the blade. But those whom illness kills release their breath more gradually, so the soul drains away bit by bit as the limbs cool in stages. Given the soul is fed by the blood's substance, much as a flame is fed by oil, once fever's heat has used up that substance, the body's farthest limbs inevitably turn cold, since the finer vessels stretch out to the body's outer reaches, and the slenderest, most distant channels run dry as the source-vein gives out. Even so, one must not conclude, merely because bodily feeling fails, that the soul's capacity to feel is snuffed out and dies along with it. It isn't the soul growing numb as the body fails but the body growing numb as the soul withdraws, since the soul takes every sensation with it as it goes. Given that the soul's presence is what supplies sensation to the body and keeps it alive, it cannot be that the soul fails to live and feel in its own right, since it is itself both feeling and life. As for the argument that if our mind were truly deathless, it wouldn't, upon dying, protest at being torn apart, but would instead simply step outward and slip off its covering the way a serpent does — I myself have never encountered anyone protesting at being torn apart in death; perhaps he'd instead witnessed some Epicurean playing the philosopher right up to his final breath, holding forth on his own coming dissolution. How, in any case, could one tell whether a person feels themselves being torn apart versus simply released from the body, given that at the very end the tongue itself goes silent? While someone still has feeling and speech, dissolution hasn't yet happened; once it has happened, feeling and speech are both gone. So the complaint about dissolution comes either too soon or too late to ever be voiced. Yet, comes the reply, before dissolution occurs, the person already grasps that dissolution is coming. And what of the fact that most of the dying, far from protesting dissolution as he claims, are instead heard declaring that they are departing, setting out, walking on — shown either through gesture or, when still capable, through spoken word? This reveals that what happens is not dissolution at all but separation, a fact establishing that the soul persists. As for the remaining Epicurean arguments, Pythagoras stands against them, teaching that souls pass out of bodies worn down by age and death and slip themselves into fresh newborn bodies, forever taking on new birth — now in a human, now in a beast of burden, now in a wild animal, now in a bird — and are immortal on this account, because they frequently exchange the dwellings of various and dissimilar bodies. Since this opinion of a deranged man was more ridiculous and more fit for the stage than for the schoolroom, it did not even deserve to be refuted seriously; whoever does so seems to fear that someone might actually believe it. We must therefore pass over what was argued, falsehood against falsehood; it is enough to have refuted what was argued against the truth.
I trust I have now made the case that the soul cannot come undone. What's left is to call in witnesses whose standing can back up these arguments. I won't turn here to the prophets, since their entire teaching and divine purpose rests on a single point — that humanity was fashioned to worship God and to receive from him deathlessness — I'll instead call on figures that the very deniers of this truth cannot help but trust. Hermes, sketching human nature to explain how God fashioned it, put it this way: 'and out of these two natures — the deathless one and the mortal one — he forged a single nature, that of humankind, making the same being partly deathless and partly mortal, and setting him thus in between the divine, deathless nature and the mortal, changeable one, so that, beholding everything, he might stand in awe of everything.' Someone might object that this figure belongs among mere philosophers, yet the Egyptians count him among the gods and revere him as Mercury, yet would grant him no more authority than Plato or Pythagoras. Let us look, then, for weightier testimony still. A man named Polites once asked the Apollo at Miletus whether the soul survives death or comes apart, and the god replied in verse: 'While bound fast within the body, sensing corruptible ills, it bows before mortal suffering; but once it wins swift freedom from the wasted frame, in the way mortals do, it rises entirely into the upper sky, unaging forever, abiding beyond every limit for all time — for the providence of God, born before all things, has decreed it so.' And do not the Sibylline oracles proclaim the same thing, foretelling a day when God shall pass judgment on both the living and the dead? We shall bring forward examples of these shortly. So the teaching of Democritus, Epicurus, and Dicaearchus regarding the soul's dissolution stands refuted. They would never risk claiming, before any sorcerer able to call the dead up by incantation and render them visible and speaking to human eyes, foretelling things to come, that souls are destroyed — and were they to try, the facts themselves, plainly before them, would expose the error. But since these men could not grasp the soul's nature, so delicate that it eludes the sight of the human mind, they concluded it simply ceases to exist. And what of Aristoxenus, who claimed no soul exists at all, not even in a living body? His view was that just as tightened strings on an instrument produce a harmonious tune — what musicians call “harmony” — so likewise within bodies, the arrangement of organs together with the strength of limbs generates the capacity to sense; nothing more ridiculous could be said. Yet this man, sound of eye but blind of understanding, failed to notice that he himself lived and possessed the very mind by which he devised this notion. Such is the common fate of philosophers: they assume that whatever fails to meet the eye simply has no existence at all — though the mind's keenness should register far more sharply than bodily sight does whatever things are grasped by reasoning and understanding rather than by vision.