Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Come now — if some philosopher were to declare, as Laberius says on the authority of Pythagoras, that a man is made from a mule, a snake from a woman — a mule's soul, that is, ending up human, a woman's ending up serpentine — and twisted every argument by sheer force of eloquence to fit that opinion, would he not win agreement and plant belief? Would not some be persuaded on that basis to abstain even from meat, for fear of perhaps dining on beef carved from some great-grandfather of theirs? But let a Christian promise that a man will return as a man, and Gaius himself come back as Gaius, and he will be pelted with stones — will not even be granted so much as a public hearing.
If there is some rational principle governing the recycling of human souls into bodies, why should they not go back into the same substance, since being restored means precisely this: being what one already was? As things stand they are no longer what they were, because becoming what they had not been required them, as a prior step, to leave off being what they once had been. It would take a great deal of idle time, too, if we wanted to indulge this line of fancy — working out who is supposed to be turned into which beast. But it suits our own case far better to propose that it is much more worthy of belief that a man will return from a man, whoever it may be in place of whoever it may be, so long as it is a man — so that the same quality of soul is restored to the same condition, even if not to the same outward shape. And certainly, since the whole rationale of restoration is aimed at judgment, the very same person who existed before must necessarily be presented again, so that he may render to God an account, good or bad, of his deserts. That is why the bodies too will be brought back on stage: the soul alone, without the stable matter that is flesh, can suffer nothing, and whatever the soul must suffer entirely at God's judgment, it earned not apart from the flesh but within the flesh, inside which it did everything it did.
"But how," you ask, "can dissolved matter be brought back?" Consider yourself, O man, and you will find the proof of the matter close at hand. Think back on what you were before you existed. Nothing, of course — for you would remember it, had you been something. You, in other words, amounted to nothing before you began to exist, and will return to that identical nothing once your existence ends — why should you not be able to exist again out of nothing, by the will of that same maker who willed you to exist out of nothing in the first place? What novelty would befall you? You who did not exist, came to exist; when again you will not exist, you will come to exist once more. Give me, if you can, the explanation of how you were made, and only then go asking how you will be made again! And in any case it will certainly be easier for you to become again what you once were, since it was no harder for you to become in the first place what you had never once been.
Will anyone doubt God's power, who established this vast body of the world out of what did not exist, no less than out of the death of vacancy and emptiness — a world animated by the spirit that gives life to every soul — a world itself marked and sealed as an example of human resurrection, held up as testimony to you? Light, though slain each day, shines out again, and darkness in its turn withdraws to make way in the same recurring cycle; the stars, though dead, come back to life; the seasons begin again exactly where they end; fruits are consumed and return; seeds, certainly, rise more fruitfully only once they have first rotted and been dissolved; everything is preserved by perishing, everything is reshaped out of ruin. Will you, O man — so great a name, if only you understood yourself, as you might even learn from the Pythian inscription: lord of all things that die and rise again — will you die only in order to be lost for good? Wherever you are dissolved, whatever matter destroys you, swallows you, wears you away, spends you down to nothing — it will give you back. That very nothing belongs to him to whom the whole belongs.
"So," you say, "we must die forever and rise forever?" If the Lord of all things had ordained it so, you would find yourself living out the law of your condition whether you liked it or not. But as it is, he has ordained nothing other than what he has announced. The same rational principle that assembled the universe out of diversity, so that all things should hold together in unity out of rival substances — out of void and solid, out of animate and inanimate, out of comprehensible and incomprehensible, out of light and darkness, out of life itself and death — that same principle has likewise woven the ages together under a fixed and distinct arrangement, so that this first age, the one we inhabit from the beginning of things, flows down through temporal duration toward an end, while the age to come, the one we await, is extended into infinite eternity.
When, then, the end and boundary arrives — the dividing line that stands between — so that even the very shape of this world is transformed, itself just as temporal, having been stretched like a curtain in front of that eternal arrangement, then the whole human race will be restored, to have reckoned against it whatever good or evil it earned in this present age, and from that point suspended in the immense, unbroken span of eternity. And so there will be no more death, no more resurrection after resurrection — we shall be the same people we are now, no others afterward: worshippers of God, forever in God's presence, clothed over with the very substance of eternity that is properly their own; while the profane, and those not wholly given to God, will be in a punishment equally unbroken, fed by fire — a fire that draws its own ongoing supply of incorruptibility from its own divine nature. Even the philosophers have recognized this distinction between the hidden fire and the common one. So it is a very different fire that serves human use from the one that appears at God's judgment, whether it flashes down as lightning from the sky or belches up from the earth through the peaks of mountains — for it does not consume what it burns; rather, in spending itself, it renews itself. That is why mountains go on burning forever and still endure, and why whatever is struck from the sky survives, so that no fire ever reduces it to ash. And this will stand as testimony of the eternal fire, this the model of an unbroken judgment that feeds its own punishment: mountains burn, and last. How much more the guilty, the enemies of God?