We have read indeed of very many marvelous kinds of waters, but either the wine-bearing spring of the Lyncestae makes men drunk, or the demonic fountain of Colophon renders them frenzied, or the poisoned water of Nonacris in Arcadia killed Alexander. There was also in Judaea a healing lake before Christ. Plainly the poet has handed down the Stygian marshes as washing away death, yet even so Thetis bewailed her son. And yet if Menander too plunges men into the Styx, one must nonetheless die in order to reach the Styx; for it is said to be among the dead. What and where is that felicity of waters, which neither John the baptizer administered beforehand nor Christ himself demonstrated to his disciples? What is this bath of Menander? A comic one, I suppose. But why is it so rarely used, so hidden, in which very few bathe?
For I shall render suspect so great a rarity of a supposedly most safe and secure sacrament, in which there is not even a law to die for God himself, whereas on the contrary all nations now go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob, which demands death through martyrdom as well—death which He exacted even from His own Christ. Nor will anyone grant so much to magic that it can exempt from death or replant life like a vine renewed in its age. For this was not permitted even to Medea in the case of a man, though it was permitted in the case of a ram. Enoch and Elijah were translated, and their death was not found, being deferred of course; but for the rest they are reserved to die, that by their blood they may extinguish Antichrist. John too died, whom the hope had vainly held would remain until the coming of the Lord.
For heresies commonly leap out at our examples, taking from thence the defenses with which they fight against us. Finally, here is the short reckoning: where are those whom Menander himself drenched, whom he plunged into his own Styx? Let the everlasting apostles come, let them stand by; let my Thomas behold them, hear them, handle them, and believe. LI. THAT NOTHING OF THE SOUL REMAINS BEHIND IN THE BODY. Now the work of death lies before us: the separation of body and soul. But certain persons, in support of the immortality of the soul—which indeed, not being taught it by God, they maintain feebly—beg for such arguments as would have it believed that even after death certain souls cling to their bodies.
For to this end Plato too, although he dispatches such souls as he wills straight to heaven, nevertheless in the Republic sets before us the corpse of a certain unburied man preserved for a long time without any decay—on account, of course, of the indivisibility of the soul. To this end Democritus also notes the growth of nails and hair in burials for some length of time. Moreover, the quality of the air too may have served as protection for that body. For what, if the air was rather dry and the soil rather salty? What, if the very substance of the body was rather juiceless? What, if the manner of death had already beforehand drained off the matters of corruption? As for the nails, since they are the extremities of the sinews, when the sinews are stretched out by relaxation they are with reason seen to be thrust farther forward and, as the flesh daily fails, to be expelled.
The hair too takes its nourishment from the brain, which a hidden defense enables to endure for some while. Finally, in the living also, according to the richness of the brain, the crop of hair either flourishes or fails. You have the physicians on your side. But it is not even the case that some slight portion of the soul settles behind in the body, since it too is destined to depart at some time, when time shall have abolished the whole scene of the body. For this also is in the opinion of certain persons; on this account they say that the dead should not be cremated with fire, sparing what is superfluous of the soul. But there is another rationale for that kind of piety, not one that flatters the relics of the soul, but one that turns away even from cruelty on account of the body—since man himself surely does not deserve to be expended by a penal end.
For the rest, the soul, being indivisible inasmuch as it is immortal, demands that its death also be believed indivisible—befalling it indivisibly not as immortal, but as an indivisible soul. But death too would be divided, if the soul were divided, since some superfluous part of the soul would die at some point; thus a portion of death would remain along with a portion of the soul. Nor am I ignorant that there is some vestige of this opinion. I learned it from my own experience. I know a certain woman, a home-bred servant of the church, who had died in the integrity of her form and age, after a single and brief marriage; and when she had fallen asleep in peace and the burial was as yet being delayed and she was meanwhile being laid out during the prayer of the presbyter, at the first breath of the prayer she moved her hands from her sides and composed them into the posture of a suppliant, and when peace was restored she returned them to their proper position.
There is also that report among our own people, that in a cemetery, when one body was being laid beside another, the body made room for the newcomer's approach. If among the heathen too something of this kind is handed down, everywhere God sets forth the signs of His power—for His own as a comfort, for outsiders as a testimony. For I would sooner believe it to have been done as a testimony from God than out of any relics of the soul, which, had they been present, would have moved the other limbs also—and if only the hands, not for the cause of prayer. That body too would not only have yielded to its brother, but would also on other occasions have refreshed its own self by a change of posture. Certainly, wherever these things come from, they are rather to be reckoned among signs and portents; they cannot make nature. Death, if it is not once and wholly, is not death at all; if any part of the soul remains, it is life;
death will no more be mingled with life than night with day. LII. This, then, is the work of death: the separation of flesh and soul. Setting aside the question of fates and chances, human sentiment has distinguished it in two ways, into an ordinary and an extraordinary form—reckoning the ordinary indeed to nature, that of any peaceful death, but judging the extraordinary to be contrary to nature, that of any violent end. But we who know the first beginnings of man boldly determine that death did not follow upon man from nature, but from fault—and that not even a natural fault; but the name of nature is easily usurped in those things which seem to have clung to us from birth by accident. For if man had been directly instituted for death, then indeed death would be ascribed to nature.
Moreover, that he was not instituted for death is proved by the very law, which suspended the outcome of death by a conditional threat and made it depend on man's own choice. In short, had he not sinned, he would by no means have died. Thus that will not be nature which came about through the will by the power of choice, not through the authority of institution by necessity. Accordingly, even though the outcomes of death are various, as the condition of causes is manifold, we say that none is so gentle as not to be brought about by force. That very working cause of death, though simple, is force. For what of it? That which severs and tears asunder so great a fellowship of soul and flesh, so great a concretion of sister substances from the very conception—
for even if someone breathes out his spirit through joy, as did Chilon the Spartan while embracing his son victorious at Olympia; even if through glory, as Clidemus the Athenian while being crowned with gold for the excellence of his historical style; even if through a dream, as Plato; even if through laughter, as P. Crassus—far more violent is that death which stalks through pleasant things, which expels the soul through advantages, which brings death to pass at that very moment when it is more delightful to live, amid exultation, amid honor, amid rest, amid pleasure. That too is force in the case of ships, when, far from the Capherean rocks, battered by no whirlwinds, shaken by no great waves, with a caressing breeze, a gliding course, a rejoicing company, they suddenly, by an inward blow, in total security go down.
In no other way are the outcomes of death shipwrecks even of a tranquil life. It makes no difference whether the ship of the body departs whole or shattered, so long as the navigation of the soul is overthrown. LIII. ON THE DEPARTURE OF SOULS. But whither then the soul, stripped bare and expelled, betakes itself, we shall doubtless pursue in due order; yet first we shall fill out what belongs to this place, lest, because we have declared the outcomes of death to be various, anyone should expect from us the several reckonings of them, which had rather be left to the physicians, the proper arbiters of all lethal things or causes, and of those very corporeal conditions. Plainly, to safeguard the immortality of the soul here too, in mentioning death I shall interweave something about the kind of departure in which the soul slips away little by little and bit by bit;
for while it sustains the semblance of failing, it is being led away as it seems to be consumed, and it furnishes a conjecture of destruction from the gradualness of its departure. But the whole rationale is in the body and from the body. For whatever be that outcome of death, it is without doubt the overthrow either of the vital materials, or of the vital regions, or of the vital passages: of the materials, as of the bile, as of the blood; of the regions, as of the heart, as of the liver; of the passages, as of the veins, as of the arteries.
Therefore, while these things are laid waste in the body from each one's proper cause of injury, unto the utter overthrow and severing of the vital—that is, of the natural—limits, situations, and functions, necessarily the soul too, as its instruments and dwellings and spaces gradually fail, is itself gradually compelled to migrate and is led into the semblance of diminution, in no other way than that in which the charioteer himself too is presumed to have failed when the exhaustion of the horses has denied him their strength—as far as concerns the disposition of the deprived man, not as concerns the truth of any suffering on his part.
In like manner the charioteer of the body, the animal spirit, when it fails, fails in the name of its vehicle, not its own—withdrawing in its operation, not in its vigor; growing faint in its action, not in its state; consuming away in constancy, not in substance—because it ceases to appear, not because it ceases to be. So too every swift death, as the reaping of the neck, which at once opens so great a door; as the force of a collapse crushing all the vitals at one stroke; as apoplexy, an inward collapse—affords no delay to the soul nor racks its departure into moments. But where death is long, in proportion as the soul is being deserted, so it also deserts; yet it is not cut down in this fashion, but drawn out, and while it is being drawn out it makes its last part seem to be visible.
But not every part is at once also cut off because it is later, nor because it is scanty is it at once also destined to perish itself. Its own end follows the series, and the middling portion is drawn along by the sum, and the remainders, cohering with the whole, are awaited by it, not abandoned. And so I would dare to say: the last of the whole is the whole, because, although it is less and later, it belongs to that whole itself. Hence, in fine, it often comes about that the soul, in the very moment of parting, is more powerfully stirred, with a more anxious gaze, with extraordinary loquacity, since, being now placed in freedom from a higher vantage, through the superfluous part that still lingers in the body it announces what it sees, what it hears, what it is beginning to know.
For if this body is, according to the Platonic sentence, a prison, but according to the apostolic one a temple of God when it is in Christ—yet meanwhile it walls in the soul with its enclosure and darkens it and befouls it with the concretion of the flesh, whence the light of things is to the soul, as through a horn window, rather obscured. Without doubt, when by the force of death the soul is pressed out from the concretion of the flesh and is by that very pressing-out strained clear, surely it bursts out from the spread-over covering of the body into the open, unto its own pure and unmixed light; straightway it recognizes itself in the freedom of its substance, and by that very liberty comes back to its senses into divinity, as one emerging from a dream from images to realities.
Then it both announces and sees, then it exults or trembles, according as it perceives the preparation of its lodging, from the very countenance at once of the angel, the summoner of souls—the Mercury of the poets. LIV. ON THE RECEPTION. Whither then the soul shall be led, we now render account. Almost all the philosophers who, in whatever manner they please, nevertheless vindicate the immortality of the soul—as Pythagoras, as Empedocles, as Plato—and those who grant it some time from its departure until the conflagration of the universe, as the Stoics, place only their own souls, that is, those of the wise, in the supernal dwellings. Plato indeed does not rashly grant this to the souls of philosophers, but to those who have adorned philosophy, namely, by the love of boys.
So great a privilege, even among philosophers, does impurity possess. And so, in his view souls that are wise are exalted into the ether; in Arius' view, into the air; in the Stoics' view, beneath the moon. And these I marvel at, that they lay the imprudent souls prostrate about the earth, while they affirm that these are being instructed by the wise, who are far higher up. Where will the region of the school be, amid so great a distance of their lodgings? By what means will the pupil-souls assemble to their teachers, being absent by so great an interval? And what use and fruit is there for them of this posthumous erudition, when they are on the very point of perishing in the conflagration? The remaining souls they cast down to the lower regions.
Plato describes these lower regions, in the Phaedo, as it were the lap of the earth, into which all the stains of worldly filth, by flowing together and there settling down, exhale their vapors and, as if with the mire of their own uncleannesses, they compress a grosser draught and a foul air peculiar to that place. LV. To us the lower regions are believed to be no bare hollow, nor any open-air sink of the world, but a vastness in a pit of the earth and in the deep, and a hidden profundity in its very bowels—seeing that we read that Christ passed the three days of death in the heart of the earth, that is, in the innermost and inner recess, and covered over within the earth itself, and shut up within it, and built over lower depths still.
But if Christ, being God because also man, died according to the Scriptures and was buried according to the same, and satisfied this law too by discharging the form of human death among the lower regions, nor ascended into the higher parts of the heavens before He descended into the lower parts of the earth, that He might there make the patriarchs and prophets partakers of Himself—then you have grounds both to believe that the region of the lower world is subterranean, and to thrust away with the elbow those who all too proudly do not think the souls of the faithful worthy of the lower regions—servants above their lord and disciples above their master—scorning perchance to take, in Abraham's bosom, the solace of awaiting the resurrection. 'But,' they say, 'Christ went down to the lower regions for this very purpose, that we might not go down.
For the rest, what distinction is there between heathens and Christians, if the prison is the same for the dead?' Whither then will you breathe out your soul into heaven, while Christ still sits there at the right hand of the Father, the command of God through the trumpet of the archangel not yet heard, those whom the coming of the Lord shall find in the world not yet caught up to meet Him in the air together with those who, having died in Christ, shall first rise? To no one does heaven lie open while the earth is still safe—not to say, closed. For with the transaction of the world the kingdoms of the heavens shall be unbarred. But is our repose to be in the ether with Plato's boy-lovers, or in the air with Arius, or about the moon with the Endymions of the Stoics? 'Nay,' you say, 'in paradise, whither even then the patriarchs and prophets, as appendages of the Lord's resurrection, migrated from the lower regions.'
And how is it that to John, in the spirit, the region of paradise was revealed—which lies beneath the altar—showing no other souls with itself save those of the martyrs? How is it that Perpetua, that most valiant martyr, on the day of her passion, in a revelation of paradise saw there the martyrs alone, unless because to none does the sword, the doorkeeper of paradise, yield place save to those who have died in Christ, not in Adam? A new death for God, and an extraordinary one for Christ, is received into another and privileged lodging. Recognize therefore the difference between the heathen and the faithful in death, if you fall for God, as the Paraclete admonishes, not in soft fevers and on 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 own blood.
You have too from us a little book on paradise, in which we have established that every soul is sequestered in the lower regions until the day of the Lord. LVI. WHETHER SOULS TARRY HERE AFTER DEATH. There occurs a dispute: whether this happens straightway upon departure, or whether some rationale detains certain souls here for a while, or whether even souls that have been received may afterward intervene from the lower regions, by their own choice or by command. For these opinions too do not lack their persuasions. It has been believed that the unburied are not brought down to the lower regions before they have received their due rites—according to the Homeric Patroclus demanding his funeral in dreams from Achilles, because otherwise he could not approach the gates of the lower world, the souls of the buried keeping him far off. But we know, besides the laws of poetry, the diligence also of Homeric piety.
For all the more did he bestow care upon burial, in that he also censured its delay as injurious to souls; and at the same time, lest anyone by detaining the deceased at home should himself be worn out along with him by the excess of a solace nourished by grief. Thus he devised the complaints of the unburied soul for both ends: that the pressing of the funeral and the honor of bodies might be preserved, and the memory of affections tempered. But for the rest, how vain it is that the soul should await the due rites of the body, as though it carried anything of them off to the lower regions! Much more vain, if the neglect of burial is to be reckoned an injury to the soul, which it ought rather to embrace as a favor. For surely it would prefer to be dragged more slowly down to the lower regions, seeing it did not even wish to die: it will love the impious heir, through whom it is still fed by the light.
Or if there is for certain some injury in being thrust down beneath the earth more slowly, and the title of the injury is the neglect of burial, it is exceedingly unjust that she should be afflicted by an injury for which the neglect of burial will not be imputed to her—pertaining, of course, to her near kin. They say too that souls forestalled by an untimely death wander here up to the point where the remainder of the years is fulfilled with which they would have lived on, had they not died out of season. But either the times are appointed to each one, and I shall not believe that what is appointed can be snatched away prematurely; or if they are indeed appointed, yet are curtailed by the will of God or by some power, they are curtailed in vain, if they are still awaited to be fulfilled; or if they are not appointed, there will be no remainder of times not appointed. I will add still further:
behold, for instance, an infant has died at the founts of the breast; suppose now a boy not yet clad in the toga, suppose one just of age—who nevertheless was to have lived eighty years. That his soul should pass these forestalled years here after death—what sort of thing is that? For it cannot take on age without a body, since ages operate through bodies. But let our own people also reconsider this: that souls will receive back in the resurrection the same bodies in which they departed. The same measures of bodies, therefore, and the same ages which make the measures of bodies, are to be hoped for. In what manner then can an infant's soul pass here the years snatched away, so as to rise again at eighty years old in a body one month old?
Or if it will be necessary here for those times to be fulfilled which had been destined, will the soul here run through in like manner the order of life too, which the times obtained as its lot, destined here together with them—so that it should study, being assigned from infancy to boyhood; and serve in the army, being roused from adolescence to youth; and hold office, being weighed down from youth into old age; and exact interest and press the farm, sail, litigate, marry, labor, undergo sicknesses, and whatever things sad and glad awaited it along with the times? But how shall these be transacted without a body? Life without life? But the times will be empty, to be filled up by their mere running-through. What then hinders these from being fulfilled in the lower regions, where likewise there is no use of them?
Thus we say that every soul, at whatever age it has departed, abides in that age until that day, when that perfection is promised, tempered to the measure of angelic fullness. Accordingly, those souls will be held as banished from the lower regions which they suppose to have been snatched away by force—especially through the atrocities of punishments, I mean of the cross and the axe and the sword and the beast; nor moreover are those outcomes violent which justice decrees, being the avenger of violence. 'And therefore,' you will say, 'all wicked souls are exiled from the lower regions.' Then constitute, I press you, the lower regions as either for the good or for the evil: if you please them to be for the evil, then even the worst souls ought to be cast down thither; if for the good, why do you meanwhile judge souls immature and unwed, and pure and innocent according to the condition of their age, unworthy of the lower regions?
LVII. Either it is best to be retained here, according to the ahoroi (the untimely dead), or worst, according to the biaeothanatoi (the violently slain)—to use the very terms in which the magic that is the authoress of these opinions resounds: Ostanes and Typhon and Dardanus and Damigeron and Nectabis and Berenice. It is now public literature which promises that it will summon up from their sojourn in the lower regions even souls laid to rest at a ripe age, even those parted by an honorable death, even those discharged by ready burial. What then shall we call magic? What almost everyone calls it: a deceit.
But the rationale of the deceit does not escape the Christians alone, who know the spiritual forces of wickedness—not indeed by a fellow conscience, but by a hostile knowledge—and who handle, not by an inviting operation, but by a subduing dominion, that manifold plague of the human mind, the artificer of all error, the devastator alike of salvation and of the soul; and so too the rationale of magic—the second idolatry, that is—in which the demons feign themselves likewise dead, just as in idolatry they feign themselves gods. And why not? Since the gods too are dead. Accordingly, the untimely dead and the violently slain are indeed invoked under that argument of belief which seems plausible—that those souls above all do violence and injury which a savage and untimely end has wrenched out through violence and injury, as it were in requital of the offense.
But it is the demons that operate under the pretense of these souls—and those especially who were then in the very persons while they were alive, and who had driven them into ends of this kind. For we have also suggested that almost no human being is without a demon, and it is known to many that untimely and atrocious deaths too are wrought by the works of demons, deaths which they attribute to onsets.
This deceit too of the wicked spirit lurking under the persons of the dead we prove, unless I am mistaken, even by facts, since in exorcisms it sometimes affirms itself to be one of the parents of the man it inhabits, sometimes a gladiator or a beast-fighter—just as elsewhere it affirms itself a god—caring for nothing more than for this very thing, to exclude what we proclaim, lest we readily believe that all souls are brought down to the lower regions, so that they may throw into confusion the faith both of judgment and of resurrection. And yet that demon, after it has attempted to circumvent the bystanders, being overcome by the insistence of divine grace, confesses against its will that which is the truth. So too in that other kind of magic, which is believed to tear souls already at rest away from the lower regions and to exhibit them to view, there is no other force of deceit:
more effective, plainly, because a phantasm too is furnished, because a body too is feigned; nor is it a great matter for it to deceive the outer eyes, for which it is very easy to blind the inner keenness of the mind. Bodies, in fine, appeared to Pharaoh and the Egyptians as dragons from the magic rods; but the truth of Moses devoured the lie. Simon and Elymas the magicians did many things too against the apostles; but the stroke of blindness was not from illusions. What new thing is it, this rivalry of the truth by the unclean spirit? Behold, today the presumption of that same heretic Simon exalts itself with such great art that they undertake even to move the souls of the prophets from the lower regions. And I believe it, because they can do it by a lie;
for neither was the pythonic spirit then less permitted to counterfeit the soul of Samuel, when Saul consulted the dead after God had departed. But far be it, otherwise, that we should believe the soul of any saint whatsoever—let alone of a prophet—to have been drawn forth by a demon, being well taught that Satan himself is transfigured into an angel of light, let alone into a man of light; who will even assert himself to be God in the end, and will put forth more monstrous signs and portents, to overthrow, if it were possible, the elect.
It doubted, perchance, whether to assert itself then to be a prophet of God—and that too to Saul, in whom it was itself already dwelling; lest you think that one being administered the phantasm, another commended it, but that it was the same spirit both in the pseudo-prophetess and in the apostate, easily lying that what it had done should be believed—the spirit through whom Saul's treasure was there where his heart also was, namely where God was not. And therefore, through the one by whom he believed he would see, he saw—because through the one by whom he saw he also believed.
If the objection is also raised, from nocturnal apparitions, that the dead are often seen and not without effect (for the Nasamones too, by lingering at the tombs of their ancestors, catch their own oracles, as Heraclides writes, or Nymphodorus, or Herodotus; and the Celts, for the same purpose, pass the night at the graves of their brave men, as Nicander affirms), we do not on that account truly experience the dead in our dreams any more than the living, but we experience the dead by the same principle by which we experience the living and all things that are seen. For things are not true because they are seen, but because they are fulfilled. The trustworthiness of dreams is reported from their effect, not from their appearance.
But that the underworld lies open to no soul at all, the Lord has sufficiently established in that parable of the poor man at rest and the rich man groaning, through the person of Abraham: that no reporter of the arrangement of the lower regions could be sent back thence—an errand which even then might have been permitted, so that Moses and the prophets might be believed. But even though the power of God has recalled certain souls into their bodies as proofs of His own authority, it is not on that account to be shared with the faith and audacity of magicians, nor with the deceit of dreams, nor with the licence of poets.
But rather, in the instances of resurrection, when the power of God—whether through the prophets, or through Christ, or through the apostles—restores souls to bodies, it has been established beforehand by solid, palpable, and satisfying truth that this is the very form of truth, so that you should judge every disembodied manifestation of the dead to be an illusion. LVIII. WHETHER SOULS ARE PUNISHED IN THE UNDERWORLD. Every soul, then, is in the underworld? you ask. Whether you will or no, and already there are torments there and refreshments: you have the poor man and the rich man. And because I deferred I know not what to this section, I shall now suitably render it in the conclusion. For why should you not think that the soul is both punished and cherished in the underworld in the meantime, under expectation of the twofold judgment, in a certain foretasting and forewarning of it?
Because, you say, its case ought to be kept intact for the divine judgment, without any foretasting of the sentence; and moreover because the restitution of the flesh must be awaited, as the partner of the labours and the wages. What, then, shall happen during that time? Shall we sleep? But indeed souls do not sleep even in the living; for sleep belongs to bodies, whose very death also comes with its mirror, sleep. Or do you wish nothing to be done there, whither all humanity is drawn, whither every hope is sequestered? Do you think the judgment is being tasted, or begun? Hurried on, or ministered in advance? Nay indeed, how most unjust would be the leisure in the underworld, if there the guilty are still well off and the innocent are not yet so!