Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
AGAINST THE OPINION OF CARPOCRATES. [1] But it was not for you alone that transmigration built this fable: Carpocrates too makes use of it — equally a magician, equally a fornicator, if less devoted to a "Helen." Why not? Since, in order to overturn every rule of divine and human conduct, he has asserted that souls are re-embodied; for, he says, no one's life here counts as settled until every charge that can be brought against it has been struck off — since nothing is evil by nature, only by opinion. Hence transmigration necessarily looms over anyone who does not, in this single passage through life, satisfy every forbidden indulgence (so crimes, apparently, are simply life's dues!); otherwise the soul is recalled again and again, as often as it has fallen short in what it "brought in," still owing on its debts, until it pays the very last penny, thrust back time and again into the prison of the body. [2] It is to this end that he twists that whole allegory of the Lord which shines with quite definite meanings of its own, and is, first of all, to be taken simply. For the pagan too is our adversary, walking the same road of common life. Still, we would have had to leave this world altogether, if we could have no dealings at all with such people. So the Lord bids you show him goodwill ("love your enemies," he says, "and pray for those who curse you"), lest, provoked by some injury in the course of business dealings, he drag you off to his own judge, and you be handed over to custody until you have paid off the whole debt down to the last coin. [3] Then, if by an accompanying application "adversary" is transferred to the devil, you are likewise advised to come to terms with him too — terms defined by the covenant of faith; for you have pledged to renounce him, his pomp, and his angels. On this you have an agreement between you. This will be your "friendship": keeping the terms of that pledge, so that you never afterward reclaim anything you have foresworn, anything you have handed back to him — lest he denounce you before God the judge as a cheat, a breaker of covenant, just as we read of him elsewhere as the accuser of the saints, informer against them by the very meaning of his name "devil" — and lest the judge hand you over to the punishing angel, who then locks you away in the dungeon below, from which you will not be released until you have paid off, in the delay of your resurrection, even your smallest fault. What could fit these words better? What interpretation could be truer? [4] But back to Carpocrates: if the soul is debtor for every crime, who is to be understood as its enemy and adversary? I should think, the better mind, which drives it toward some measure of innocence, forcing it back again and again into the body until it is caught guilty of no good life at all. This is what it means to recognize a good tree by its bad fruit — that is, to recognize the doctrine of truth by the worst possible instructions. [5] I expect heretics of this stripe fall also upon the example of Elijah, as represented in John, supposing that the Lord's own statement supports transmigration: "Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him," and elsewhere: "and if you are willing to hear it, this is Elijah, who is to come." Did the Jews, then, question John out of some Pythagorean notion — "Are you Elijah?" — and not rather out of divine prophecy: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the Tishbite"? [6] But transmigration, as they mean it, is the recall of a soul long since finished with death and repeated in another body; whereas Elijah is to come not by the departure of life but by translation, and is to be restored not to a body he was never removed from, but to the world from which he was translated — not by any return from death, but by the fulfillment of prophecy, the very same man, in his own name and his own person. But how, then, is Elijah "John"? You have the angel's own words: "he," it says, "will go before them in the presence of the people, in the power and spirit of Elijah" — not in his soul, nor in his flesh. For these substances belong strictly to each man himself, but spirit and power are conferred from outside, by the grace of God; and so they can likewise be transferred to another by God's will, as happened long ago with the spirit of Moses.