Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
That these things would come to pass was foretold both by all the prophets, moved by the spirit of God, and also by the seers, moved by the instigation of demons. For Hystaspes, whom I named above, having described the wickedness of this final age, says that the pious and faithful, set apart from the wicked, will with weeping and groaning stretch out their hands to heaven and implore the good faith of Jove: that Jove would turn his gaze toward the earth, listen to what mankind was saying, and wipe out the wicked. All of this is true except one point — he attributed to Jove what God alone will do. But that too was concealed through demonic deceit: namely, that in time the Father would send his own Son, so that, once every evil had been wiped away, the faithful would go free. Yet Hermes did not conceal this. For in the book called the Perfect Discourse, after listing the evils we have mentioned, he adds this: "When these things have come to pass, O Asclepius, then the lord and father and God, and maker of the first and only God, having looked upon what has happened, and set his own will — that is, the good — against disorder, and having called back error and cleansed away wickedness, in one place by flooding it with much water, in another by scorching it with the sharpest fire, and sometimes driving it out by wars and plagues, will bring the world back to its ancient state and restore it, his own creation." The Sibyls likewise show that it will happen in no other way than that the Son of God be sent by the Father most high, to free the just from the hands of the impious and to destroy the unjust along with the raging tyrants. One of them puts it thus: "He will come, wishing to lay waste the city of the blessed. And a certain king, sent from God, will destroy all the great kings and the finest men; and thus afterward there will be a judgment of men by the imperishable one." And another again: "And then from the sun God will send a king, who will put an end to every evil of war upon the whole earth." And yet another: "He will come gentle, behold, that he may lift from our necks the heavy, servile yoke laid upon them, and loose the godless laws and the bonds of violence."
When the earth has been oppressed, then, and human strength has failed to overthrow so vast a tyranny, since the world will be captured and weighed down by great armies of brigands, that great calamity will need divine help. God, then, moved both by the peril hanging over all and by the pitiable lament of the righteous, will straightway send a deliverer. Then the midst of heaven will open in the dead and dark night, so that throughout the whole world the light of the descending God will appear like lightning; which the Sibyl put into these verses: "When he arrives, a smoky fire will blaze at the heart of night's darkness." It is this same night that we mark with vigil, in honor of our king and God's arrival — a night carrying two meanings, since on it he both regained life after his suffering and, later still, is destined to take up rule over the whole earth. He is judge, avenger, king, deliverer, and God — the one we name Christ — and before his descent he will give this sign: a sword will fall suddenly out of heaven, so the righteous will recognize that the commander of the holy host is coming down; and he will descend accompanied by angels into the middle of the earth, and an unquenchable flame will go before him, and the power of the angels will deliver into the hands of the righteous that great multitude which has surrounded the mountain, and it will be cut down from the third hour until evening, and blood will flow like a torrent; and when all his forces are destroyed, the impious one alone will flee, and his own strength will perish from him. This is the one called Antichrist, but he will falsely claim to be Christ himself and will fight against the true one, and, defeated, will flee, and will renew the war many times, and be defeated many times, until in a fourth battle, all the impious having been finished off, he is beaten down and captured, and at last pays the penalty for his crimes. And the other rulers and tyrants too, who ground down the world, will be led bound together with him to the king, and he will rebuke them and convict them and reproach them for their deeds, and condemn them, and hand them over to torments of the mind. Thus, with wickedness extinguished and impiety suppressed, the world will rest, which through so many ages, subjected to error and crime, endured an unspeakable slavery. No longer will gods made by hand be worshiped, but their images, thrown down from their temples and shrines, will be given to the fire and will burn along with their marvelous offerings; which the Sibyl too foretold in agreement with the prophets: "Mortals will cast away their idols and all their wealth." The Erythraean Sibyl promised the same: "The handmade works of the gods will be burned up."
After this the underworld will be opened and the dead will rise, and of them that same king and God will hold the great judgment, to whom the Father most high will give the fullest power both of judging and of ruling. Of this judgment and kingdom it is found thus in the Erythraean Sibyl: "When this too has reached its appointed day, and the judgment of the immortal God comes upon mortals, there will come upon men a great judgment and rule." And again in another: "Then gaping earth will show the Tartarean chasm, and all will come before the judgment-seat of the king, God." And elsewhere in the same: "I will fold back the sky, throw open the earth's hidden depths, and raise the dead to life again, breaking loose fate and death's own sting; afterward I will lead them to judgment, judging the life of the pious and the impious among men." Yet not all will then be judged by God, but only those who have lived within the religion of God. For those who did not acknowledge God — since no sentence of acquittal can be pronounced upon them — are already judged and condemned, the holy writings testifying that the impious will not rise to judgment. Those who have known God, then, will be judged, and what they have done — their wicked acts set against the good — will be weighed: if just and worthy deeds outnumber and outweigh the rest, they are granted a blessed life, but if wrongdoing tips the scale, they are sentenced to punishment. At this point someone might object: "Granting the soul's immortality, how could it still be shown as vulnerable to suffering and pain? For if it is punished for its deeds, it will surely feel pain, and thus also a kind of death; but if it is not subject to death, neither is it subject to pain; therefore it cannot suffer." To this question or argument the Stoics respond thus: the souls of men do indeed endure, and are not dissolved into nothing by the intervention of death, but the souls of the righteous return, pure, incapable of suffering, and blessed, to the heavenly seat from which they originated, or are carried off to certain fortunate fields, where they enjoy wondrous pleasures; but the souls of the impious, since they have stained themselves with evil desires, hold a kind of middle nature between the immortal and the mortal, and retain something of weakness from their contact with the flesh, and, being bound to its cravings and lusts, draw a stain that cannot be washed away and an earthly taint — which, once it has deeply taken hold through long duration, causes their souls to be reduced to that same nature, so that, though not utterly extinguishable, since they come from God, they nonetheless become capable of torment through the stain of the body, which, branded in by sins, gives rise to a sense of pain. The poet explained this view thus: "Nay, even when life has left them at their last hour, not all the evil, nor all the bodily plagues, wholly depart from the wretched; and of necessity many things, long grown together in wondrous ways, cling deep within. Therefore they are worked over by punishments, and pay the penalty for their old misdeeds." This is very nearly true. Once the soul has separated from the body, the same poet says, it resembles a light breeze, much like sleep taking flight; being pure spirit, its very fineness keeps it beyond the grasp of us bodily creatures — yet not beyond God, to whom everything, however intangible, lies open and within reach.
We hold, to begin with, that God's power is vast enough to lay hold of even bodiless things and to shape them exactly as he pleases. Angels themselves stand in awe of God, since he can discipline them in ways beyond telling, and demons likewise shrink from him, since he has the means to torment and chastise them. Little wonder, then, that souls, immortal as they are, can still suffer at God's hand. Having nothing solid or touchable within them, they cannot be harmed by anything solid or physical; but since their existence belongs wholly to the realm of spirit, only God can act upon them, for his power and being are themselves spiritual. Yet the sacred writings do reveal to you the manner in which the wicked will pay their penalty. Because they sinned while embodied, they will once more take on flesh, so that the punishment too may be borne in the body; but the flesh God clothes them in will bear no resemblance to this earthly kind — it will be unbreakable and last forever, able to endure endless torment and unending fire. And that fire is not the kind we know, the sort we rely on for daily needs, which dies out the moment its fuel runs dry. The divine fire, by contrast, sustains itself and burns on forever without any feeding at all, giving off no smoke, but flowing pure and clear like water; nothing drives it upward the way ours is driven — for our flame is forced to leap and quiver skyward only because of the grime of the earthly matter that holds it and the smoke tangled within it. That single divine flame, then, carries a twofold power: it burns the wicked even as it renews them, replacing in their bodies exactly what it consumes, feeding itself an endless supply — the very thing the poets recast as the vulture gnawing at Tityos. In this way the bodies keep regenerating without ever wasting away; the fire only scorches and delivers pain. The righteous, too, will be tested by this same fire once God has passed judgment on them. Those whose wrongdoing outweighs their merit, whether in gravity or in number, will be singed and burned by it, while those hardened by complete righteousness and ripened virtue will feel nothing at all — for something of God dwells in them that turns back and rejects the flame's force. Such is the strength of innocence that the fire retreats from it unharmed, having received from God precisely this charge: to scorch the wicked and spare the just. And let no one imagine that souls face judgment the instant they die: all are kept together in a single holding place until the appointed hour when the supreme judge weighs each one's merits. Those whose righteousness is confirmed will then receive the prize of immortality, while those whose sins and crimes stand exposed will not rise again, but will be locked away with the wicked in that same darkness, marked out for fixed punishment.
Some think these are fictions of the poets, not knowing where the poets got them, and deny that these things can happen; nor is it strange that it should seem so to them. For it is handed down by the poets in a different form from how it actually is; for although they are far more ancient than historians and orators and the other kinds of writers, still, because they did not know the mystery of the divine sacrament, and the mention of the coming resurrection had reached them by obscure rumor, they published what they had heard carelessly and lightly in the manner of an invented tale. And yet they themselves testified that they were not following a certain authority, but only an opinion, as Virgil says: "May it be right for me to tell what I have heard." Although, then, they corrupted the secrets of the truth in part, still the matter itself is found to be all the truer for the fact that it agrees in part with the prophets — which is enough proof for us. Yet there is some reason behind their error. Since the prophets kept declaring in their preaching that God's own Son would sit in judgment over the dead, word of this got around, and since they thought the ruler of heaven to be none other than Jove, they handed down that a son of Jove judges in the underworld — not Apollo, Bacchus, or Mercury — reckoned among the heavenly ones — but a figure who, though mortal, was known for justice: Minos, say, or Aeacus, or Rhadamanthus. They corrupted, then, by poetic license what they had received, or opinion changed the truth as it was scattered through different mouths and various reports. For as to their singing that, when a thousand years have passed in the underworld, souls are restored again to life — as Virgil puts it: "All these, when they have rolled the wheel through a thousand years, God calls to the river Lethe in a great throng, so that, forgetting, they may look again upon the vault above and begin once more to wish to return into bodies" — this reasoning misled them: that the dead will rise again, not a thousand years after their death, but so that, once restored again to life, they may reign with God for a thousand years. For God will come so that, once this world has been cleansed of all corruption, he may raise up the revived souls of the righteous in renewed bodies to everlasting blessedness. And so, apart from the water of forgetfulness, the rest is true; and that they invented for this reason, so that no one might object to them: "Why then do they not remember that they once lived, or who they were, or what they did?" But nonetheless the whole thing is not thought plausible, and the entire matter is rejected as though freely and fancifully invented. But when we assert and teach concerning the resurrection that souls will return to a second life not forgetful of themselves, but with the same consciousness and form, this is objected: "So many ages have already passed — who has ever risen from the dead, that we should believe it can happen by his example?" But indeed, the resurrection cannot take place while injustice still reigns. For in this age men are killed by violence, by the sword, by treachery, by poison, and are afflicted with wrongs, with poverty, with imprisonment, with torments, with proscriptions. Besides, righteousness itself draws hatred, since anyone wanting to follow God is met not merely with contempt but with every sort of abuse, tortured through countless forms of punishment, and forced — not by reason or truth, but by the abominable mangling of their bodies — into the impious worship of handmade gods. Is it fitting, then, that men should rise again or return to this same life, in which they cannot be safe? Since, then, the righteous are held so cheap, so easily destroyed, what do we imagine would occur if a person came back from death, restored to life as though returning home from banishment? Surely such a person would be removed from human sight, for fear that, upon seeing or hearing him, everyone would forsake their gods and give their devotion and worship over to the one true God. Therefore the resurrection must happen once only, when evil has been removed, since it is not right that those who have risen should either die again or be harmed in any way, so that those whose death has been sealed away may be able to lead a blessed life. But the poets, knowing that this age abounds in every evil, introduced the river of forgetfulness, lest souls, remembering their evils and toils, should refuse to return to the world above. Hence Virgil: "O father, are we to think that any souls go up from here to heaven on high, and again return to their sluggish bodies? What is this dreadful longing for the light in wretched souls?" Not knowing the timing or manner in which it was meant to occur, they imagined instead that souls were born anew, drawn back into the womb, and made to start over as infants. Hence too Plato, discussing the soul, says that from this it can be known that souls are immortal and divine: that in children their wits are quick and easily receptive, and that they grasp what they learn so swiftly that they do not seem to be learning it for the first time, but recognizing and recollecting it — in which a wise man believed the poets most foolishly.
Souls, then, are not born again — that cannot occur — but instead they will be raised and God will clothe them once more in bodies, and every deed and detail of their former life will come back to them; and there, placed among heaven's blessings and delighting in boundless riches, they will thank God for his presence among them, since he has wiped out every evil and lifted them up to his kingdom and to life without end. Concerning this resurrection the philosophers too tried to say something, as corruptly as the poets. For Pythagoras argued that souls pass into new bodies — but foolishly, claiming that they pass from men into beasts and from beasts into men, and that he himself had been restored from Euphorbus. Chrysippus did better, whom Cicero says props up the portico of the Stoics: in the books he wrote on providence, speaking of the renewal of the world, he added this: "Since this is so, it is clear that nothing is impossible, and that we too, after death, in a certain cycle of time, will be restored again to the form in which we now exist." But let us return from human matters to divine ones. The Sibyl puts it this way: "Mortal-kind as a whole is slow to believe. Yet once the reckoning for the world and for mortals finally arrives — brought about by God himself, who will judge the impious alongside the pious — he will banish the impious to darkness and fire, while all who were pious will live again on earth, as God grants them his own spirit, together with honor and life." But if it is not the prophets alone — if seers, poets, and philosophers likewise concur that the dead are destined to rise — then no one should demand of us an explanation of how. Divine works simply cannot be accounted for by reasoning; yet if God originally shaped man by some means beyond words, we should trust that the one who made him anew can bring the old man back as well.