Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] 'The soul was made flesh so that the soul might be displayed.' Was the flesh, then, likewise made soul so that the flesh might be manifested? If flesh amounts to soul, then soul has vanished and only flesh remains; if soul amounts to flesh, then flesh has vanished and only soul remains. So where has the flesh gone, and where the soul, once each was converted into the other — or rather, if neither is what it is, so long as each becomes the other? Surely it is utterly perverse that, naming flesh, we should understand soul, and meaning soul, we should interpret it as flesh. [2] Everything runs the risk of being taken as other than it is, and of losing what it is, the moment it is understood otherwise than it is — if it is called by another name than its own. Fidelity to names is the safeguard of properties. Even when qualities change, they take on the ownership of new names. For example, clay once fired takes the name of a potsherd, and no longer shares the name of its former kind, because it no longer shares that kind itself. [3] Likewise the soul of Christ, made flesh, cannot fail to be what it was made, and to cease being what it had been — having become, that is, something else. And since we have just used a convenient example, let us press it further. A potsherd made of clay is certainly a single body, with a single name for that single body: [4] nor can it be called both potsherd and clay, because what it was, it no longer is, and what it no longer is, no name clings to. So too the soul, made flesh, would be a uniform solidity, a total singularity, an undivided substance. But in Christ we find soul and flesh spoken of under plain, unmixed names — that is, soul called soul, and flesh called flesh — never soul-flesh or flesh-soul, though that is exactly how they ought to have been named if that is what they had become; but rather each substance is pronounced by him separately, precisely to mark the distinction of the two qualities — soul apart, and flesh apart. [5] Consider: 'My soul,' he says, 'is sorrowful even unto death'; and again, 'The bread that I am to hand over on behalf of the world's living is my own flesh.' Now if soul had been flesh, there would be in Christ one single thing — either a fleshly soul or an ensouled flesh; but since he divides the two species, flesh and soul, he shows two things. [6] If two, then no longer one; if not one, then neither a fleshly soul nor an ensouled flesh — for soul-flesh, or flesh-soul, is a single thing. Unless, of course, he carried about a separate soul besides the one that was flesh, and a separate flesh besides the one that was soul. But if it is one flesh and one soul — the one sorrowful unto death, and the other the bread for the world's salvation — then the number of the two substances stands intact, each distinct in its own kind, and this rules out any single hybrid species of fleshly soul.