Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
WHERE THE SOUL COMES FROM. [1] Some believe they have descended from the heavens, with a conviction as great as the certainty with which they also promise they will return there again — as Saturninus, the disciple of Menander the Simonian, taught, asserting that man was made by angels, and that at first, a useless, weak, unsteady piece of work, he flopped about on the ground like a worm, lacking the strength to stand upright; then, out of the mercy of the supreme power, to whose likeness — though not even fully glimpsed — he had been rashly constructed, he obtained a little spark of life which roused him and set him upright and animated him more firmly, and which, at the departure of this life, will be carried back to its source. [2] But Carpocrates claims just as much for himself from the higher realms, so that his disciples set their souls on a level with Christ — let alone the apostles — and, whenever they please, rank them above, souls which they suppose were conceived, in just the same way, from a sublime power, as despisers of the principalities that rule the world. [3] Apelles reports that souls were lured down to earthly food from their supercelestial seats by a fiery angel — the God of Israel and ours — who then, in consequence, molded around them this sinning flesh. [4] The swarm of Valentinus stuffs the soul with the seed of Sophia, by means of which they recognize the storybook romances of their Aeons drawn from images of things visible. [5] I grieve, in good conscience, that Plato has become the caterer to all the heretics. For it is his doctrine, in the Phaedo, that souls go from here to there, and from there back here; likewise in the Timaeus, that the offspring of God, having been assigned the begetting of mortal beings, received the immortal soul at its outset and froze around it a mortal body; and further, that this world is the image of some other. [6] To lend all this credibility, and to establish that the soul, in an earlier state on high, once kept company with God amid the intercourse of the Ideas, and thence crosses over to here, and here recalls, from the exemplars, what it knew before, he worked up a novel argument — maqh&seij a)namnh&seij, that is, that learnings are recollections; that souls, coming from there to here, forget the things among which they formerly existed, and then, taught afresh by these visible things, remember them. Since, then, it is by an argument of this sort that Plato smuggles in the doctrines the heretics borrow, I shall sufficiently strike back at the heretics if I demolish Plato's argument.