Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But every disagreement among human opinions runs only as far as God's own boundary-lines. Let me now draw the argument back within our own lines, so that what I answered the philosophers and the physicians I may prove afresh to the Christian. Build your faith, brother, on your own foundation: look at the living wombs of the holiest women, and see infants there not merely breathing already but even prophesying. [2] Look — the bowels of Rebecca are thrown into turmoil, and the birth is still far off, and no breath of air has yet stirred there. Look — a double offspring is already brawling in the mother's quarters, and there are as yet nowhere two peoples. One might call it some freakish petulance of infancy, fighting before it is even damp, spirited before it is even ensouled — if it had merely disturbed its mother with kicking. But when the birth is laid open and the order is examined and the divination is confirmed, then, I think, it is no longer merely the souls of the infants that stand proved, but their battle as well. [3] The one who had gotten ahead in being born was being held back by the one he'd gotten ahead of — not yet fully delivered, only born as far as a hand. And if that first one was already drinking in a soul from his first gasp of breath, Plato's way, or catching one from the chill of the air, the Stoic way, what of the one who was still waiting, still held back inside while already, from outside, holding the other back? Not breathing yet, I suppose, and already he had seized his brother's heel — still warm from the mother, and already wanting to have come out first. What a baby — a rival already, and a strong one, and, I'll wager, a quarrelsome one from the start, precisely because he was alive. [4] Look too at those singular conceptions, and monstrous ones at that — of the barren woman and of the virgin — which, precisely on that account, might have been expected to produce imperfect offspring, as a kind of overturning of nature, one womb dulled by age, the other untouched by seed. It would have been fitting, if ever, for children not properly conceived to be born without a soul — yet each of these two lives in her own womb. Elizabeth leaps for joy — John within had given the push; Mary glorifies the Lord — Christ within had stirred her to it. The mothers recognize each other's offspring, recognized in turn by the offspring themselves — beings who were, quite plainly, alive, and were not merely souls but spirits. [5] So too you read God's voice to Jeremiah: 'Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.' If God forms in the womb, he also breathes into that first shaping — for 'God shaped the man out of clay and blew into his face the breath of life.' And God could not have known man in the womb unless he knew the whole man: 'and before you came forth from the womb, I sanctified you.' A body, and still dead? By no means — for he is the God of the living, not of the dead.