Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
This, then, is death's task: the separation of flesh and soul. Setting aside the question of fate and chance, human feeling has drawn a line between two kinds of death, the ordinary and the extraordinary — reckoning the ordinary as belonging to nature, the death of anyone who dies peacefully, and judging the extraordinary to be against nature, the end of anyone who dies violently. But we who know the origins of man state boldly that death did not come upon man from nature, but from guilt — and not even from a "natural" guilt at that; it is easy enough to misuse the name of "nature" for things which only seem, from birth, to have attached themselves to us as if by accident. For if man had been set up straight for death from the start, then indeed death might be credited to nature. But that he was not instituted for death is proved by the very law that hung the matter on a conditional threat and left the outcome of death to man's own free choice. In short, had he not transgressed, he would never have died. Therefore what results from an exercise of choice, through the will, is not "nature" — as opposed to what follows from the authority of an original decree, through necessity. Accordingly, even granting the varied exits death takes — as multiform as the causes that produce them — we say that none is so gentle that it is not, in fact, a use of force. That very mechanism which brings about death, simple though it looks, is itself violence. What else could it be? It tears apart and dissolves so great a partnership of soul and flesh, so great a concretion of sister substances joined from the moment of conception. For even though a man may breathe out his spirit for sheer joy, as Chilon the Spartan did while embracing his son, victor at Olympia; or for glory, as Clidemus the Athenian did on being crowned in gold for the excellence of his historical style; or in his sleep, as Plato; or through laughter, as P. Crassus — a far more violent death is that which stalks through outward accidents, which drives the soul out through pleasant circumstance, which brings its blow precisely when life is sweetest, amid rejoicing, honor, ease, delight. It is violence, too, in the case of ships, when, far from the rocks of Caphereus, battered by no storm, shaken by no towering wave, with a coaxing breeze and a smooth run and a joyful crew, they suddenly go down from some inner shock, in the midst of perfect safety. The wrecks of life are no different, even when death's arrival looks calm. It makes no difference whether the ship of the body goes down whole or in pieces, so long as the soul's own voyage is capsized.