Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
ON SLEEP. [1] Let us discuss sleep first, and afterward how the soul makes its way through death. Sleep is by no means something outside of nature, as certain philosophers hold, seeing that they trace it to causes which appear to lie beyond the natural order. [2] The Stoics call sleep a slackening of sensory vigor; the Epicureans, a diminishment of the animal spirit; Anaxagoras and Xenophanes, a weariness; Empedocles and Parmenides, a cooling; Strato, a separation of compacted spirit; Democritus, a want of spirit; Aristotle, a languishing of the heat around the heart. I, for my part, cannot recall ever having slept in a way that let me recognize any of these. Nor should we believe sleep to be weariness — it is rather the opposite of weariness, since it removes weariness, seeing that a man is restored by sleep rather than fatigued by it. Besides, sleep does not always arise from fatigue, and when it does, the fatigue is by then already gone. [3] Nor will I admit any cooling or languishing of heat, seeing how thoroughly bodies grow warm in sleep, and how the digestion of food would not proceed smoothly, with heat too quick and cold too slow, if we were chilled by sleep. More than that: sweat itself is a sign of digestive heat at work. Indeed we speak of "concocting" food, and concoction is the operation of heat, not of cold. [4] Likewise, the immortality of the soul will not allow us to believe in any diminishment of the animal spirit, or want of spirit, or separation of compacted spirit. The soul perishes if it is diminished. [5] It remains, perhaps, that with the Stoics we define sleep as a slackening of sensory vigor, on the ground that it procures rest for the body alone, not for the soul as well. For the soul, being ever mobile and ever in exercise, never sinks into rest — rest being foreign, of course, to the condition of immortality; nothing immortal admits an end to its own work, and sleep is the end of a work. In short, it is only to the body, to which mortality belongs, that rest can flatteringly promise an end of labor. [6] Whoever, then, doubts whether sleep is natural has the dialecticians themselves to call into doubt the whole distinction between the natural and the unnatural, so that he may know that even what he judged to fall outside nature can be claimed by the very nature from which it derives its being in such a way as to appear to lie outside it — and in any case either everything belongs to nature or nothing does. But with us, that alone can be heard which the contemplation of God suggests, God being the author of everything in question. [7] For we believe that whatever exists by nature is some rational work of God. Now sleep is preceded by reason — so fitting, so useful, so necessary that no soul could do without it: the restorer of bodies, the renewer of strength, the tester of health, the pacifier of labors, the physician of fatigue, to whose lawful enjoyment day yields, while night makes the law, taking away even the color of things. If sleep is thus vital, salutary, and helpful, nothing of that kind is other than rational, and nothing rational is other than natural. [8] So too physicians relegate everything contrary to what is vital, salutary, and helpful to outside the hinges of nature. For by judging as unnatural those disorders which rival sleep — the frenzy of delirium and the collapse of heart-failure — they have already prejudged natural sleep to be natural; and in noting that lethargy is unnatural they bear natural witness in favor of sleep, when it keeps its own proper measure. For every natural thing is undone either by deprivation or by excess, and preserved by the proper measure. Thus a thing remains natural in its due state, even though it can be rendered unnatural by falling short of or overrunning that state. [9] What if you should also try to strip eating and drinking out of the lot assigned to nature? For in these too there is much preparation for sleep. Certainly man was imbued with them from the very origin of his nature. If you will learn it from God, that fountainhead of our race, Adam, drank down slumber before he thirsted for rest, slept before he labored — no, before he even ate, no, before he even spoke a word — so that we might see natural sleep set as the foremost of all natural things. [10] From this we are led to conclude that even then he was rehearsing an image of death. For if Adam bore the figure of Christ, then Adam's sleep prefigured Christ's dying, for Christ too would be laid low in the slumber of death, so that out of the wound opened in his side there might be shaped the true mother of the living, the church. That is why sleep, so wholesome, so reasonable, is even fashioned as the pattern of that public and common death which is to come. [11] For God willed — and in nothing else in his ordering has he ever worked without patterns — after the Platonic paradigm, to trace out for us daily, and more fully, the lines of man's beginning and end, reaching out a hand to make faith easier to assist through images and parables, both of words and of things. He sets before you, then, a body struck down by the friendly force of slumber, laid low by the winning compulsion of rest, motionless in its posture — resembling how it lay before this life began, and foreshadowing how it shall lie once this life is over — offering thereby a proof of both its molding and its burial, while it waits for the soul as though not yet bestowed and as though already snatched away. [12] But the soul, meanwhile, so behaves as though it were active elsewhere, rehearsing by this dissembling of presence its future absence (we shall learn of this from the case of Hermotimus), and yet all the while it dreams — whence, then, come dreams? It neither rests nor grows idle nor at all surrenders the nature of its immortality into slumber's servitude. It proves itself ever mobile: it travels by land and sea, does business, is stirred to action, labors, plays, grieves, rejoices, pursues things lawful and unlawful, showing that it can do a great deal even without the body, that it is also equipped with its own members, but that nonetheless it retains the need to set the body in motion once again. And so, when the body wakes and is restored to its offices, it assures you of the resurrection of the dead. This, then, will be both the rational account of sleep's nature and the natural rationality of sleep. Through this image of death, too, you are initiated into faith, you rehearse hope, you learn to die and to live, you learn to keep watch even while you sleep.