Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
WHETHER SOULS ARE PUNISHED IN THE UNDERWORLD. [1] "So every soul, then, belongs to the underworld?" you ask. Like it or not, there are already torments there, and refreshments too: you have the poor man and the rich man. And since I have put off something bearing on this point, let me now fittingly deliver it in closing. [2] For why should you not think that the soul, meanwhile, is both punished and comforted in the underworld while awaiting either judgment, in a kind of foretaste and preview of it? "Because," you say, "its case ought to be kept whole for the divine judgment, without any anticipation of the verdict; and besides, the restoration of the flesh must be waited for, as the flesh's partner in its works and its wages." [3] What, then, will happen across that stretch of waiting? Do we simply slumber? Souls, however, never fall asleep, not even within the living; sleep is a property of bodies, whose very mirror-image is death itself, along with its sleep. Or do you suppose nothing is transacted there, toward which the whole of humanity is being drawn, toward which all hope is deferred? Do you think judgment is being sampled in advance, or merely begun? Anticipated, or only prepared for? How monstrously unfair would be the idleness of the underworld, if the guilty are already well off there and the innocent not yet! What more would you want to come after death - a confused hope playing with uncertain expectation, or a soul already reviewing its life and trembling before the ordering of judgment? [4] But does the soul always wait for the body in order to grieve or rejoice? Does it not have enough of its own resources for either mark of suffering? How often is a soul tormented by bile, anger, or weariness, often unknown even to itself, while the body remains untouched? How often, likewise, when the body is afflicted, does the soul seek out for itself a stolen joy and withdraw then from the body's unwelcome company? [5] I am lying, if the soul has not always been used to glory and rejoice, on its own, over the very torments of the body. Consider the soul of Mucius, as he releases his own right hand into the flames; consider that of Zeno, as Dionysius's tortures pass over it without effect. The bites of wild beasts are ornaments of youth, as the bear-scars were on Cyrus. So thoroughly does the soul know how to rejoice and grieve even in the underworld without flesh, since even in the flesh it grieves, untouched, if it wills, and rejoices, wounded, if it wills. And if it can do this by its own choice in life, how much more by God's judgment after death? [6] Nor, indeed, does the soul share all its works, even its best ones, with the service of the flesh; for the divine scrutiny pursues mere thoughts and bare intentions alone. Whoever has looked so as to lust has already committed adultery in his heart. It is therefore entirely fitting that the soul, though it need not wait upon the flesh, should answer in penalty for whatever it did apart from any bodily partnership. So too, for pious and kindly thoughts, in which it had no need of the flesh, it will be refreshed without the flesh. [7] What further, if even in matters of the flesh it is the soul that is first to conceive, to plan, to command, to drive? And if sometimes unwillingly, still it is first to handle what it is about to carry out through the body; and conscience, in short, will never come after the deed. So it fits this same order too, that the one who is first should be first to weigh out the rewards owed to whoever comes first. [8] In sum, when we understand that prison which the Gospel points to as the underworld, and interpret the "very last farthing" as even a small offense to be paid off there by the delay of the resurrection, no one will doubt that the soul pays something out in the underworld, without prejudice to the full restoration of the resurrection through the flesh as well. The Paraclete, too, has repeatedly urged this very point, for anyone who has accepted his sayings on the strength of acknowledging the promised gifts of the Spirit. [9] We have, I think, joined issue with every human opinion about the soul, drawing on the teaching of the faith, and have satisfied a curiosity that is just and, indeed, necessary; but to the excessive and merely idle curiosity, there will remain to learn exactly as much as it pleases to keep inquiring.