On the Soul 53–58

But where will the soul, bare and expelled, turn next? No doubt we shall follow it in order. First, however, we shall complete what belongs to this place, lest, because we have stated that the ways of death vary, someone expect from us explanations of each, which are rather to be left to the physicians, the proper judges of all deadly things or causes and of the bodily conditions themselves. Certainly, to protect the soul's immortality here too, in speaking of death I shall insert something about the kind of end in which the soul slips away little by little and bit by bit. For bearing the appearance of failing, it is drawn away while it seems to be consumed, and suggests destruction from the gradualness of its departure. But the whole cause lies in the body and comes from the body. For whatever the way of death, it is without doubt an overthrow either of the materials, or of the regions, or of the vital passages: of materials, such as bile and blood; of regions, such as heart and liver; of passages, such as veins and arteries. While, then, each of these is laid waste in the body by its own cause of injury, up to the final overthrow and severing of the vital things, that is, of the natural boundaries, positions, and functions, necessarily the soul too, as its instruments, dwellings, and spaces gradually give way, is itself compelled gradually to move out and is brought into the appearance of diminishing—in no other way than the charioteer too is presumed to have failed when fatigue has denied the horses their strength, as far as the condition of the forsaken man is concerned, not the truth of what is suffered. So the charioteer of the body, the animal spirit, fails on account of the failing vehicle, not its own; departing from its work, not its vigour; flagging in act, not in state; losing steadiness, not substance; because it ceases to appear, not because it ceases to be. So too every swift death—like the cutting of the neck, opening at once so wide a door, or like the force of a collapse crushing all the vital parts at once, or like apoplexy, an inner collapse—gives the soul no delay and does not torment its departure into moments. But where death is long, the soul, as it is abandoned, so also abandons; yet it is not cut to pieces in this form, but drawn out, and while it is drawn out it makes its last part seem a part. But not every part is at once cut off because it is last, nor, because it is small, will it at once perish too. Its own end follows the series; the middle is drawn to the top; and the remnants that cohere with the whole are waited for by it, not abandoned. And so I would dare to say that the last of the whole is whole, because, though less and later, it belongs to it. Hence, indeed, it often happens that the soul in the very divorce is stirred more powerfully, with a more intent gaze and extraordinary talkativeness, while, already set in freedom on a higher stage, through the remainder that still lingers in the body it declares what it sees, what it hears, what it begins to know. For if this body is a prison, according to Plato's opinion—but, according to the apostle's, the temple of God when it is in Christ—still it meanwhile blocks and darkens the soul within its enclosure and muddies it with the concretion of the flesh, so that the light of things reaches it dimmer, as through a window of horn. Without doubt, when it is squeezed out of the concretion of the flesh by the force of death, it is filtered by the very squeezing; certainly, bursting from the covering of the body into the open, to its own clear and pure light, it at once recognizes itself in the release of its substance and by that very freedom comes back to its senses in divinity, as one emerging from a dream from images to realities. Then it both declares and sees, then it exults or trembles, according as it perceives the preparation of its lodging, straight from the face of the angel himself, the summoner of souls, the Mercury of the poets.

Where, then, the soul is led, we now explain. Almost all the philosophers who maintain the immortality of the soul, in whatever way they will—like Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato—and those who grant it some time from its departure until the conflagration of the universe, like the Stoics, place only their own souls, that is, the souls of the wise, in the upper mansions. Plato indeed does not grant this indiscriminately to the souls of philosophers, but to those who have adorned philosophy, of course, with the love of boys. So even among philosophers impurity has a great privilege! Thus with him the wise souls are raised to the aether, with Arius into the air, with the Stoics under the moon. I am surprised at them, indeed, that they lay the unwise souls low around the earth, while they affirm that they are instructed by the wise, who are much higher. Where will the school be, with so great a distance between their lodgings? How will the pupils meet their teachers, separated from each other by so great an interval? And what use or fruit of posthumous learning will they have, when they are soon to perish in the conflagration? The remaining souls they cast down to the underworld. This Plato describes in the Phaedo as a kind of bosom of the earth, into which all the stains of worldly filth flow together and, settling there, give off vapours, and, as it were with the mire of their uncleanness, thicken the heavier air there, which is its own.

For us the underworld is not believed to be a bare cavity, nor some sewer of the world under the open sky, but a vastness in the pit of the earth and in its depths, a hidden profundity in its very bowels; since we read that Christ spent the three days of his death in the heart of the earth, that is, in the inmost and internal recess, covered by the earth itself and shut within it, and built over still lower abysses. But if Christ, God because also man, dead according to the Scriptures and buried according to the same, also satisfied this law, fulfilling the form of human death in the underworld, and did not ascend into the heights of heaven before he descended into the depths of the earth, so as there to make the patriarchs and prophets partakers of himself—you have reason both to believe the region of the underworld subterranean and to push aside those who, proudly enough, do not think the souls of the faithful worthy of the underworld: servants above their lord and disciples above their master, scorning, if you please, to receive in Abraham's bosom the comfort of awaiting the resurrection. But Christ went to the underworld, they say, so that we should not go: otherwise what difference is there between heathen and Christians, if the prison is the same for the dead? How then will the soul breathe out to heaven, with Christ still sitting there at the right hand of the Father, God's command not yet heard through the archangel's trumpet, those whom the Lord's coming finds in the world not yet caught up to meet him in the air, with those who have died in Christ, who will rise first? Heaven is open to no one while the earth is still intact, not to say shut. For the kingdoms of heaven will be unlocked with the end of the world. But will our sleep be in the aether with Plato's boy-lovers, or in the air with Arius, or around the moon with the Endymions of the Stoics? No, you say, in paradise, to which even then the patriarchs and prophets, as the train of the Lord's resurrection, migrated from the underworld. And how is it that the region of paradise revealed to John in the Spirit, which lies under the altar, shows no other souls in it besides those of the martyrs? How did Perpetua, the bravest martyr, on the day of her passion, in the revelation of paradise, see only her fellow martyrs there, unless because the sword that guards the gate of paradise yields to none but those who have died in Christ, not in Adam? A new death for God, an extraordinary one for Christ, is received into another and private lodging. Recognize, then, the difference between heathen and believer in death, if you fall for God, as the Paraclete urges, not in soft fevers and in beds but in martyrdoms, if you take up your cross and follow the Lord, as he himself commanded. The whole key of paradise is your blood. You also have a little book of ours on paradise, in which we established that every soul is set apart in the underworld until the day of the Lord.

A dispute arises whether this happens immediately after departure, or whether some reason detains certain souls here meanwhile, or whether even when received there they may afterwards come back from the underworld by their own choice or by command. For these opinions do not lack persuasive arguments either. It has been believed that the unburied are not brought down to the underworld before they have received their due rites, following Homer's Patroclus, who in dreams demands burial from Achilles, because he could not otherwise approach the gates of the underworld, the souls of the buried keeping him far off. But we know, besides the licence of poetry, the pious intention of Homer too. For he laid the more stress on the care of burial the more he charged its delay with injury to souls; and at the same time, so that no one, keeping a dead man at home, should waste away further with him, his grief nourished by the excess of consolation. So he invented the complaints of the unburied soul for both purposes: that the urgency of the funeral and the honour of bodies might be preserved, and the memory of affection moderated. But how empty it is that the soul should await the rites of the body, as though it carried anything from them to the underworld! Much emptier, if the omission of burial is counted an injury to the soul, which it ought to embrace as a favour. For surely a soul that did not even wish to die will prefer to be dragged to the underworld later. It will love the undutiful heir through whom it still feeds on the light. Or if it is certainly an injury to be thrust under the earth later, and the ground of the injury is the omission of burial, it is most unjust that injury should befall the soul, to which the omission of burial, which concerns its relatives, is not imputed. They also say that souls overtaken by untimely death wander here until the remainder of the age is completed which they would have lived out had they not died prematurely. But either times are appointed for each, and I would not believe that appointed times can be snatched away; or, if they are appointed, yet cut short by the will of God or some power, they are cut short in vain if they still wait to be completed; or, if they are not appointed, there will be no remainder of times not appointed. I shall add more. Suppose an infant dies at the fountains of the breast; suppose now a boy not yet of age; suppose one of age, who yet would have lived eighty years: what sort of thing is it that his soul should spend these, snatched away, here after death? For it cannot take on age without a body, since ages work through bodies. And let our own people also reflect that souls will receive in the resurrection the same bodies in which they died. So the same measures of bodies will be hoped for, and the same ages, which make the measures of bodies. How then can the soul of an infant spend here the times snatched from it, so as to rise at eighty years old in a body of one month? Or if the times destined must be fulfilled here, will the soul also run through here the order of life which those times were allotted, destined here together with them—so that it studies from infancy, handed over to boyhood; serves as a soldier from adolescence, roused by youth; sits as a judge from youth, weighed by old age; exacts interest, presses the field, sails, goes to law, marries, labours, meets illnesses and whatever sorrows and joys awaited it with its times? But how will these be done without a body? Life without life? But, you say, the times will be empty, to be fulfilled by mere passage. What then prevents their being fulfilled in the underworld, where likewise there is no use for them? So we say that every soul, at whatever age it has died, stays in it until that day on which the promised perfection is attuned to the measure of angelic fullness. Likewise they will hold to be exiles from the underworld those souls they suppose snatched away by violence, especially through atrocious punishments—I mean the cross, the axe, the sword, and the beast; nor, indeed, are those deaths violent which justice decrees, the avenger of violence. And so, you will say, all wicked souls are exiled from the underworld. I press you to settle one or the other: that the underworld is for the good or for the wicked. If for the wicked, the worst souls ought to be hurled there too; if for the good, why do you judge souls untimely, unmarried, and, by the condition of their age, pure and innocent, meanwhile unworthy of the underworld?

Either it is best to be kept here, as with the aōroi (the untimely dead), or worst, as with the biaiothanatoi (those who died by violence)—to use the very words with which magic, the author of these opinions, resounds: Ostanes, Typhon, Dardanus, Damigeron, Nectabis, and Berenice. It is now common literature that promises to call up from their dwelling in the underworld even souls put to rest at a due age, even those separated by an honest death, even those discharged by prompt burial. What then shall we say of magic? What almost everyone says: that it is deceit. But the principle of the deceit escapes only the Christians, who know the spiritual powers of wickedness—not indeed by complicit awareness but by hostile knowledge—and handle them not by an inviting operation but by a conquering dominion: that manifold plague of the human mind, the craftsman of all error, the ruin alike of salvation and of the soul, the science of magic, a second idolatry, in which the demons pretend to be the dead just as in the other they pretend to be gods. Why not, since the gods too are dead men? So the aōroi and biaiothanatoi are invoked, on this argument for belief: that it seems credible that those souls above all incline to violence and injury which a cruel and untimely end has wrenched out by violence and injury, as if in retaliation for the offence. But demons work under the display of them, and especially those that were in them when they were alive and had driven them to such ends. For we have suggested that almost no man is without a demon, and many know that untimely and atrocious deaths too, which they ascribe to accidents, are brought about by the work of demons. This deceit too, of an evil spirit hiding under the persons of the dead, we prove, unless I am mistaken, by facts as well, when in exorcisms it sometimes claims to be one of the relatives of the man it possesses, sometimes a gladiator or a beast-fighter, just as elsewhere a god, caring for nothing more than to rule out this very thing that we preach, so that we may not readily believe that all souls are brought down to the underworld, and so to disturb faith in the judgment and the resurrection. And yet that demon, after trying to deceive the bystanders, overcome by the pressure of divine grace, unwillingly confesses what is true. So too in that other kind of magic which is believed to pull up souls already at rest from the underworld and show them to sight, there is no other force of deceit more effective. Of course, because a phantom is furnished, and a body is feigned; nor is it hard for him to deceive the outward eyes for whom it is very easy to blind the inner sight of the mind. So Pharaoh and the Egyptians seemed to see bodies in the serpents made from the magicians' rods; but the truth of Moses swallowed up the lie. Simon and Elymas the magicians did many things against the apostles; but the stroke of blindness did not come from sleight of hand. What is new in an unclean spirit's rivalry with the truth? See, today such presumption in their art exalts the heretics of that same Simon that they promise even to move the souls of the prophets from the underworld. And I believe they can—by a lie. For no less was allowed then to the pythonic spirit, to fabricate the soul of Samuel, when Saul consulted the dead after God. Far be it from us, otherwise, to believe that the soul of any saint, let alone of a prophet, was dragged out by a demon, taught as we are that Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light—much more into a man of light—and that at the end he will even assert himself to be God and work more portentous signs to overturn, if possible, the elect. He hardly hesitated then, I suppose, to assert himself a prophet of God, and to Saul at that, in whom he was already dwelling. Do not think that it was one who produced the phantom and another who commended it, but the same spirit, both in the false prophetess and in the apostate, easily lying about what it had caused to be believed, through whom Saul's treasure was where his heart was—where, that is, God was not. And so he saw through whom he believed he would see, because he believed through whom he saw. If it is objected, from visions at night, that the dead are often seen not in vain—for the Nasamonians get their own oracles by staying at the tombs of their parents, as Heraclides writes, or Nymphodorus, or Herodotus, and the Celts spend the night at the tombs of brave men for the same reason, as Nicander affirms—we no more truly suffer the dead in dreams than the living, if the dead are seen by the same principle as the living. Nor is everything that is seen true. For things are true not because they are seen but because they are fulfilled. The reliability of dreams is reported from the outcome, not from the sight. But that the underworld is open to no soul at all the Lord sufficiently established in that argument of the poor man at rest and the rich man groaning, in the person of Abraham: that a messenger reporting the arrangements of the underworld could not be sent back from there—which, if ever, could have been permitted then, so that Moses and the prophets might be believed. But even if the power of God has recalled some souls into bodies, as proofs of its right, that will not therefore be shared with the credulity and boldness of magicians, the deceit of dreams, and the licence of poets. On the contrary, in the examples of resurrection, when the power of God, whether through prophets, through Christ, or through apostles, restores souls to bodies, it is settled in advance by solid, tangible, and satisfying truth that this is the form of truth, so that you are to judge every bodiless display of the dead to be illusion.

Is every soul, then, in the underworld, you ask? Whether you like it or not; and there are already punishments and refreshments there: you have the poor man and the rich. And since I postponed something or other on this point, I shall now fittingly deliver it at the close. For why should you not think that the soul is both punished and comforted in the underworld meanwhile, awaiting either judgment, in a kind of foretaste and … of it? Because, you say, its case must be kept intact for the divine judgment without any anticipation of the sentence; and also because the restoration of the flesh must be awaited, as the partner of its works and wages. What then will happen in that time? Shall we sleep? But souls do not sleep even in the living; sleep belongs to bodies, as does death itself along with its mirror, sleep. Or do you want nothing to be done there, where all humanity is drawn, where all hope is held in trust? Do you think judgment is foretasted or begun? Hastened or prepared beforehand? And how most unjust would idleness in the underworld be, if the guilty still fare well there and the innocent not yet! What do you want there to be after death—a confused hope, sporting with uncertain expectation, or already a review of life and a shudder at the ordering of judgment? Does the soul always wait for the body in order to grieve or rejoice? Is it not sufficient of itself for both kinds of suffering? How often, with the body unharmed, is the soul alone tormented by bile, anger, weariness, often not known even to itself? How often, likewise, with the body afflicted, does the soul seek out a secret joy for itself and withdraw from the body's then troublesome company? I lie if it is not accustomed, alone, to glory and rejoice in the very tortures of the body. Look at the soul of Mucius, when he melted his right hand in the fire; look at Zeno's, when the tortures of Dionysius pass it by. The bites of wild beasts are ornaments of youth, as the bear's scars on Cyrus. So the soul knows how to rejoice and grieve in the underworld too without the flesh, since in the flesh too, if it wishes, it grieves when unharmed and rejoices when harmed. If it does this by its own choice in life, how much more by the judgment of God after death! Nor does the soul share all its works with the flesh's service; for the divine censure pursues even mere thoughts and bare wishes: “Whoever looks to lust has already committed adultery in his heart.” So, for these reasons at least, it is most fitting that the soul, without waiting for the flesh, should be punished for what it committed without the flesh's partnership. So too, for pious and kindly thoughts, in which it did not need the flesh, it will be refreshed without the flesh. And what now if, even in carnal things, it is the soul that first conceives, arranges, commands, and drives on? And even if at times unwilling, it still first handles what it will do through the body. In short, conscience will never come after the deed. So this order too requires that the soul first pay the wages to which it is first liable. In sum, since we understand that prison which the Gospel points out to be the underworld, and interpret the “last farthing” as the smallest offence to be paid off there by delay of the resurrection, no one will doubt that the soul pays something in the underworld, without prejudice to the fullness of the resurrection through the flesh as well. The Paraclete too has most frequently commended this, if anyone has accepted his words from recognition of the promised gifts. Having met, as I think, every human opinion about the soul with the teaching of the faith, we have satisfied a just and necessary curiosity, at least. For an excessive and idle curiosity there will be as much lacking in learning as it has pleased it to inquire.