Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] How, then, is a living being conceived? Are the two substances, body and soul, fused together at once, or does one of them come first? No — we say both are conceived together, and wrought together, brought to completion together, just as they are also brought forth together, and that no interval intervenes in the conceiving where some order could be arranged. [2] Reason it out, in fact, from the last things backward to the first: if death is defined as nothing other than the separation of body and soul, then life, being the opposite of death, must be defined as nothing other than the conjunction of body and soul; and if the separation befalls both substances at once through death, then the very pattern of their union must have decreed that they came upon each other equally, at the same time, through life. [3] Further, we recognize life as beginning from conception, precisely because we claim the soul begins from conception; life follows the soul from that same point. Things which are separated together in death, then, must equally be compacted together into life. But if you grant primacy to the one and secondary rank to the other, then the timing of the seeds too must be distinguished according to this order of rank. And when, pray, will the seed of the body be deposited, and when the seed of the soul? [4] Indeed, if the times of the seeds are to be divided, then different matters too will have to be assigned, on the strength of that difference in timing. For even if we grant two kinds of seed, bodily and psychic, still we maintain they are indistinguishable, and in this sense contemporaneous, of one and the same moment. So let no one be ashamed of an explanation that necessity requires. Nature is to be revered, not blushed at. It is lust that has defiled the sexual act, not the institution itself; excess is shameful, not the state as such — since the state itself is blessed by God: 'increase and multiply' — while the excess is cursed: adulteries and fornications and brothels. [5] In this solemn office of the sexes, then, which joins male and female — in ordinary intercourse, I mean — we know that soul and flesh perform their function together: the soul with desire, the flesh with the act; the soul with the impulse, the flesh with the doing. So by one single thrust that shakes the whole man in both his parts, the seed of the whole man is foamed forth, carrying moisture from the bodily substance and heat from the substance of the soul. And if the Greeks' word for soul (psyche) means 'cold,' why does the body go cold the moment the soul is withdrawn from it? [6] Finally — though here I risk offending modesty more than I secure proof — in that very heat of the ultimate pleasure by which the seed of generation is expelled, do we not sense that something of the soul, too, is going out of us? Is that not why we grow faint and slack afterward, with a diminishment of light in us? This, then, will be the psychic seed, distilled directly from the soul; just as that other fluid, the bodily seed, is strained off from the flesh. [7] Most faithful are the models of our first origin. 'From clay,' in Adam, came flesh — and what is clay but a rich, thickened liquid? From that will come the generative fluid. From God's breath came the soul — and what is God's breath but a vapor of spirit? From that will come what we breathe forth through that fluid. [8] When, therefore, at the beginning two diverse and separate things, clay and breath, were compacted into one man, both substances, now fused into one, mingled their seeds together too, and from that point handed down the pattern for propagating the race — so that even now the two, though diverse, flow forth united and equally, and, sown equally into their furrow and field, together sprout a man from both substances at once — a man in whom, in turn, his own seed is present according to its kind, as has been ordained for every generative condition from the start. [9] So it is from one man that this whole overflowing abundance of souls has come, nature simply obeying God's decree: 'increase and multiply.' Indeed, even in the very preface to that single work — 'let us make man' — the whole of posterity was proclaimed in the plural: 'and let them rule over the fishes of the sea and the birds of the sky.' No wonder the promise of the harvest lies folded already in the seed.