Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
On the Soul's Reception. Where, then, the soul is brought — this we now report from here on. Nearly all the philosophers who claim the soul's immortality in one fashion or another — Pythagoras, say, Empedocles, Plato — and those who grant it only a fixed stretch of time, from its departure up to the world's final conflagration, such as the Stoics, assign only souls belonging to themselves — namely those of persons deemed wise — to the upper regions. Plato, in fact, does not grant this lightly even to the souls of philosophers, but only to those who, shall we say, have "adorned" philosophy with the love of boys. So great, even among philosophers, is the privilege that impurity enjoys! And so, in his system, the wise souls are lifted up into the ether; in Arius's, into the air; among the Stoics, they go only as far as the moon. And I confess I marvel at this: that they cast the unwise souls down around the earth, when they claim these very souls are to be instructed by the wise from so much loftier a station. Where, in such a vast distance between lodgings, will the schoolroom even be located? By what method will the pupils gather to their teachers, separated by so great a gap? And what use or profit is there in this posthumous schooling for souls that are, in any case, about to perish in the coming conflagration? The remaining souls they cast down to the underworld. This Plato describes, in the Phaedo, as a kind of "lap of the earth," into which all the filth of the world's grime drains and settles, and there breathes out — and, as it were, stews in — a thicker draught of its own muck, choking off a private air peculiar to itself.