Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Even when this doctrine is claimed under the name of "judgment" — that human souls are allotted animal bodies according to their life and merits, the murderous to be butchered in slaughterhouses and the tyrannical to be broken in as beasts of burden, the lazy to be worked to exhaustion as laborers and the filthy to be defiled among unclean creatures, while correspondingly the honorable are to be honored, the lovable loved, the careful cared for, and the admirable sought out among the loveliest, finest, most useful, and most refined of animals — even here I will say: if they are changed, then it is not the very souls that earned the sentence who are being paid out. [2] The whole rationale of judgment is emptied if the sense of one's own deserts is lost. And lost it will be, if the soul's status is altered. And altered the soul's status is, if the souls do not remain themselves. But if they do remain themselves for judgment — which even the Egyptian Hermes knew, saying that the soul, once departed from the body, is not merged again into the world-soul but keeps its own separateness, "in order," he says, "that it may render account to the Father of what it did in the body" — then I insist we weigh the justice, the gravity, the majesty, the dignity of that divine judgment, and ask whether it does not preside from a loftier height than human courts, with fuller honor paid to both verdicts, punishments and rewards alike, sterner in avenging and more generous in bestowing. [3] What do you suppose becomes of a murderer's soul? Some beast, I suppose, destined for the abattoir and the butcher's stall, to have its own throat cut just as it cut another's, to be flayed just as it stripped its victims, to be served up as food just as it made food of those it slaughtered in the woods and byways for wild beasts. [4] But if that is how it will be judged, will not that soul come away with more comfort than punishment — finding its funeral among the finest cooks, being interred in Apician and Lurconian sauces, borne to Ciceronian tables, carried out on Sulla's most splendid platters, its funeral rites a banquet, devoured by its own kin instead of by hawks and wolves — with the result that, entombed in a human body and returned to its own kind, it seems to have risen again, exulting over human judgments if it has had that experience! [5] For as it stands, our courts tear the murderer apart with beasts of every exotic and specially trained savagery, and that while he is still alive — indeed, since he does not die easily, they contrive delay to bring the penalty to its full measure. And if the soul escapes ahead of the final sword-stroke, lest even the body cheat the blade, they still exact payment for his crime by stabbing both throat and ribs alike. Then he is given to the fire, so that even his burial is made a punishment. Otherwise, indeed, it is not permitted. Nor is there even that much care for his pyre, that other beasts should not find the remains; certainly his bones are not spared nor his ashes granted the covering they deserve. [6] Such is the vengeance men exact for murder — matching the very magnitude of the nature that is avenged. Who would not prefer the justice of this age — which even the apostle, not without reason, attests is armed with the sword, a savagery that is itself an act of devotion on man's behalf? And if we consider the wages of other crimes as well — the gibbet, the burning alive, the sack for parricides, the hook, the cliff — who would not rather take his sentence from Pythagoras and Empedocles? [7] For those to be punished with labor and servitude will, of course, be given new bodies as donkeys and mules — how they will congratulate themselves, when they recall the millstones and water-wheels, compared with the mines and the workhouses and the public works gangs and the prisons themselves, idle as those are! And likewise those who lived uprightly and commended their lives to the judge — I look for their rewards, but instead I find punishments. A fine reward indeed, for the good, to be restored as some animal or other! [8] Homer remembered being a peacock, in Ennius's dream — but I will not trust poets even when they are awake. And granted the peacock is the most beautiful of birds and decked in whatever color it pleases, still its feathers are silent, its voice displeases, and poets want nothing so much as to sing. Homer, then, was condemned to the peacock, not honored by it. He will take far more delight in this world's reward — being called the father of the liberal arts — preferring the ornaments of his own fame to a peacock's tail. [9] Come now — granting that poets pass into peacocks or even swans, if indeed the swan's voice is lovely — what animal will you clothe the just Aeacus in? What beast will you make of chaste Dido? What bird will inherit patience, what sheep holiness, what fish innocence? All these creatures are man's servants, all subject to him, all his property. If he is to become one of them, then diminished is the man to whom, for the merits of his life, images, statues, and inscriptions are paid, public honors and privileges rendered, to whom the senate house and the people offer their votes as sacrifice. [10] O divine judgments, more mendacious after death than human ones — contemptible in their punishments, unappealing in their rewards, judgments that neither the worst men fear nor the best desire, toward which the wicked will hasten rather than the holy: the wicked, so as to escape this world's justice all the sooner; the holy, so as to put off receiving it as long as possible! Well do you teach, philosophers, and helpfully do you counsel, making the punishments and rewards after death lighter than those of this life — when, if any judgment does await souls, it ought to be believed far weightier at the settling of accounts for a whole life than in its ordinary administration, since nothing is more complete than what comes last, and nothing more final than what is most divine. [11] God, therefore, will judge more completely, because more finally — by an eternal sentence, of punishment as much as of refreshment, with souls returning not into beasts but into their own bodies, and this once only, and on that day which the Father alone knows — so that, kept in suspended expectation, faith's earnestness may be tested, always watching for the day even while always ignorant of it, fearing daily what it daily hopes for.