Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
AGAINST PLATO: THE LIVING ARE NOT MADE OUT OF THE DEAD. [1] What is this now, this old story circulating under Plato's name about the souls' back-and-forth traffic — that departing from here they go there, and then come back here again, and are made, and so it happens over and over, that living men are made out of dead ones? Pythagorean, some say; a divine teaching, Albinus reckons, perhaps traceable to the Egyptian Hermes. But there is no divine speech except that of the one God, through whom the prophets thundered, through whom the apostles thundered, through whom Christ himself thundered. Moses is far more ancient — older than Saturn himself by some nine hundred years, let alone Saturn's great-grandsons — and certainly far more divine, he who set down the whole descending course of the human race from the founding of the world, generation by generation, name by name, date by date — the divinity of the work sufficiently proved by the divinatory power of its record. [2] But if it really is the Samian sophist who supplied Plato with this notion of souls endlessly recycling, forever replacing the dead with the living and the living with the dead in turn — well, that Pythagoras, admirable as he may have been in other respects, in constructing this particular doctrine committed a lie not merely shabby but downright reckless. Learn it, whoever does not know it, and believe it along with me. He fakes his own death, hides away underground, condemns himself to seven years' patience down there; meanwhile, whatever he intends to report as news of the dead, to make it credible, he learns from his mother, his sole confidante and accomplice. When he judged he had sufficiently worn down his flesh to match the full horror of a long-dead corpse, he emerges from the den of his fraud as though returned from the underworld. [3] Who would not believe that a man had come back to life whom he had believed dead — hearing from his own mouth, no less, things about the dead which, it would seem, could only have been learned in the underworld itself? So it is that this notion of the living made from the dead is an old story. And what if it were a younger one instead? Truth does not need antiquity, and falsehood does not shrink from novelty. I hold, plainly, a falsehood — noble, perhaps, for its age; but why should it not be a falsehood, when its very evidence is drawn from a falsehood? How am I to believe that Pythagoras was not lying when he lied in order to be believed? How is he going to persuade me that Aethalides and Euphorbus and Pyrrhus the fisherman and Hermotimus had all, in earlier times, been himself — enough to persuade me the living are made from the dead — when he has already perjured himself once over, claiming to have been Pythagoras again? Indeed, the more credible it would have been for him to have come back to life once, out of himself, the more he stretched credulity claiming it so many times over, as one man after another — and the harsher the tests he failed, the softer the lies he told. [4] 'But he recognized the shield of Euphorbus, long ago dedicated at Delphi, and called it his own, and proved it by signs unknown to the crowd.' Go look into his underground den instead, and, if you can manage it, believe that. For the man who devised such a trick, at the cost of his own good health, by fraud — after a seven-year ordeal of life spent underground in starvation, idleness, and shadow — a man to whom the sky itself had become so tiresome — what recklessness would he not have risked, what curiosity would he not have pursued, in order to arrive at the identifying mark on that shield? [5] But what if he found it in some more obscure histories? What if he caught some faint surviving breath of a fading tradition? What if he learned it from the temple-keeper, having bought a secret viewing on the sly? We know, too, that magic is permitted to explore hidden things through spirits summoned from below, familiars, and pythonic spirits. Did not Pherecydes, Pythagoras's own teacher, perhaps divine — I will not say dream — by these very arts? What if the same demon that had once been in Euphorbus was now in this man too? And finally — the man who proved himself Euphorbus by the evidence of the shield — why did he not equally recognize a single one of his Trojan comrades-in-arms? For they too would already have come back to life by now, if the living really were made out of the dead.