Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Come now, let our opponents first tear apart the union of flesh and soul in the conduct of life, before they presume to sunder it likewise where life's wages are paid out; let them disown the fellowship of their toils, so that afterward, and rightly, they may disown the fellowship of their pay. [2] Let the flesh have no part in the verdict, if it had none in the cause; let the soul alone be summoned back, if it alone departs. But it no more departs alone than it alone ran the course from which it departs — I mean this life. [3] So far indeed is it from being the soul alone that transacts life, that we cannot even strip from the flesh's fellowship its very thoughts — though they be only thoughts, though never carried through into deed by the flesh — because whatever the soul enacts in the heart is enacted inside flesh, alongside flesh, and by means of flesh. [4] This very stronghold of the soul, the flesh, the Lord himself indicts in his rebuke of thoughts: 'Why do you think evil in your hearts?' and, 'Whoever has looked to lust after has already committed adultery in his heart' — so true is it that even without a deed, even without an effect, a thought is an act of the flesh. [5] But even if the ruling principle of the senses is enthroned — as the philosophers would have it — in the brain, or at the meeting-point between the brows, or wherever else they please, that which they call the hēgemonikon, the flesh will still be the whole workshop of the soul's thinking. The soul is never parted from flesh for as long as flesh houses it; it performs nothing apart from that apart from which it could not even subsist. [6] Ask further whether thoughts too are carried out through the flesh, seeing that they are recognized from the outside through the flesh: let the soul turn something over, and the face performs the telltale sign; the countenance is the mirror of every intention. Let them deny the partnership in deeds, then, to one to whom they cannot deny the partnership in thoughts. [7] And indeed they themselves catalogue the offenses of the flesh: therefore it will be held for punishment as a sinner. But we, for our part, set the virtues of the flesh against theirs: therefore it will also be held for reward as a doer of good. And if it is the soul that acts and drives everything forward, the flesh is still its instrument of compliance. [8] But God may not be believed either an unjust judge or a lazy one — unjust, if he shuts out from reward a partner in good works; lazy, if he lets a partner in evil ones slip free of punishment — since human judgment itself is reckoned the more perfect the more it demands accomplices of every deed as well, sparing none and begrudging none the sharing, with the principals, of the fruit whether of punishment or of favor.