Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] That the dead are made from the living is settled; it does not follow that the living are made from the dead. From the beginning, the living came first — and hence, equally from the beginning, the dead came after, and from nowhere else than from the living. The living, then, had a source from which they could arise more readily — but not from the dead. The dead, on the other hand, had no source from which they could be drawn — except from the living. [2] So if from the beginning the living were not made from the dead, why should they be afterward? Has that fountainhead of origin, whatever it is, run dry? Or has it repented of its own pattern? And how, in that case, does that pattern still hold good among the dead? Is it not rather that, since it was from the living that the dead first arose at the outset, it is from the living they must go on arising ever after? For either the pattern of the beginning would have had to persist on both sides, or it would have had to change on both — so that if it were now proper for the living to be made from the dead afterward, it ought equally to be proper for the dead to be made from something other than the living. [3] If the logic of the original arrangement need not hold uniformly, still it does not follow that contraries are regularly reshaped out of contraries by turns in every case. We too could set up such pairs of opposites — born and unborn, sight and blindness, youth and old age, wisdom and folly — and yet it does not follow that the unborn arises from the born just because one contrary can arise from another, nor that sight arises again from blindness just because blindness befalls sight, nor that youth blooms afresh out of old age just because old age withers out of youth, nor that folly is sharpened anew out of wisdom just because wisdom is dulled out of folly. [4] These very distinctions Albinus himself, out of anxious loyalty to his Plato, tries subtly to draw among the kinds of contraries — as if these pairs were not set in opposition just as absolutely as the ones he interprets in his master's favor, namely life and death. And yet life is not restored out of death, any more than death is brought on out of life.