Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
ON METEMPSYCHOSIS AND METENSOMATOSIS. [1] But Empedocles, since he had gone quite mad enough to imagine himself a god, disdained, I suppose, to remember himself as any mere hero, and so declared: ‘I was once a bush, and a fish.’ Why not a pumpkin too—just as tasteless—or a chameleon, just as puffed up with wind? Clearly, being a fish, and not wanting to rot away in some more seemly burial, he chose instead to be roasted, by hurling himself into Etna. And there, from that point on, his metensomatosis came to its end—like a summer dinner, after the roast. [2] So, accordingly, here too we must do battle against an even more monstrous presumption, one that rolls beasts out of men and men out of beasts. Let the bushes see to themselves, and the sorrel too, lest we be forced into more laughing than teaching. We say that the human soul can in no way be transferred into beasts, even granting the philosophers' claim that it is composed of elemental substances. [3] For whether the soul is fire, or water, or blood, or breath, or air, or light, we must in each case think through the creatures that are the opposite of each such species: to fire belong those creatures that are cold-blooded—snakes, lizards, salamanders, and whatever else is bred of the rival element, namely water; likewise the opposite of water are the dry and sapless creatures—locusts, little moths, chameleons delight in dryness; likewise the opposite of blood are creatures that lack its crimson—snails, worms, and the greater part of fishkind; the opposite of breath are creatures that seem not to breathe at all, lacking lungs and windpipe—gnats, ants, moths, and that whole tribe of tiny things; likewise the opposite of air are creatures that live forever underground or underwater and never draw a breath of it (you will know the things better than their names); likewise the opposite of light are creatures wholly blind, or that have eyes only for darkness even in sunlight—moles, bats, owls. This much I teach from substances that are plain and evident. [4] But were I also to take up Epicurus's atoms, and eye Pythagoras's numbers, and run into Plato's Ideas, and lay hold of Aristotle's entelechies, I would doubtless find, even among these kinds of substance, creatures I could set against them by way of contrariety. For my whole contention is this: whatever substance, of those named above, the human soul might be supposed to consist of, it could not be reshaped into creatures so utterly contrary to that substance in every one of them, nor could it confer upon them its account by way of transfer—creatures which would be more likely to exclude and reject it than to admit and receive it, on the mere ground of this primary contrariety, which sets at odds the very diversity of substantial condition; and then, following on from that, the rest of each creature's nature in due order. [5] For the human soul has been allotted its own particular haunts, its own diet, furnishings, senses, affections, mating, and offspring; likewise its own capacities, and then its works, joys, weariness, vices, desires, pleasures, states of health, remedies, and finally its own manner of living and its own kind of death. [6] How, then, will that soul which clung to the earth, having no head for heights nor for depths, exhausted even by climbing a staircase, choked even by sinking into a swimming-pool, afterward go leaping through the air as an eagle, or afterward go plunging through the sea as an eel? Likewise, how will a soul raised on a rich and delicate, carefully tended diet chew—not merely straw, but thorns, and the bitter wildness of shrub-leaves, and dungheap vermin, even poisons—if it passes into a she-goat, or a quail; or indeed, still mindful of itself, into carrion, or even into a human corpse, as a bear or a lion? So too you may reduce all the rest to absurdity. And not to labor over every single case: whatever the measure, whatever the scale of the human soul itself, what will it do inside creatures far larger, or far tinier, than itself? For every body must necessarily be filled entirely by its soul, and every soul must be entirely wrapped round by its body. How, then, will a human soul fill an elephant? How, again, will it be wrapped round inside a gnat? If it can only stretch or shrink to fit, it will certainly be put at risk in the process. [7] And so I add this: if it is by no reckoning capable of such a transfer into creatures matched to it neither in bodily scale nor in any of the other laws of its own nature, will it then be changed to suit the qualities of these various kinds and their manner of life, which is the very opposite of human life—made, by that very transformation, the opposite of itself? But surely, if it undergoes such a change, losing what it was, it will no longer be what it was; and if what it was no longer exists, then metensomatosis itself has been dissolved—certainly not to be credited to that soul which, if it changes, simply ceases to be. For it is only of a soul that endures unchanged in its own condition that any ‘transmigration’ could properly be spoken. [8] So then, if it can neither change without ceasing to be itself, nor remain as it was, since it cannot take on such contraries, I still ask for some credible reason for a transfer of this sort. For even though some men are likened to beasts on account of the qualities of their character, disposition, and passions—since God himself has said, ‘Man, when he was in honor, became like the beasts that have no understanding’—it does not follow that kites are made out of rapacious men, or dogs out of the filthy, or panthers out of the savage, or sheep out of the upright, or swallows out of the chattering, or doves out of the chaste, as though one and the same substance of soul, wherever it went, kept repeating its own nature in the special traits of these animals. But a substance is one matter, and the nature belonging to that substance quite another; for substance is peculiar to each particular thing, while nature may be shared in common. [9] Take an example. Stone is a substance, so is iron; the hardness of stone and of iron is the nature of that substance. Hardness they share in common; substance sets them apart. The softness of wool, the softness of a feather: their natural qualities agree, their substances do not. So too, if a man is called a savage beast, or an upright one, it is not because he has the same soul: for it is precisely then that a likeness of nature is noted, when a dissimilarity of substance is plain to see. In the very fact that you judge a man to be like a beast, you confess that the soul is not the same—by calling it ‘like,’ not ‘identical.’ [10] So too runs the sense of the divine utterance, likening man to cattle in nature, not in substance. Indeed, God himself would not even have marked man out in this way, had he known him to be of the same substance as the beast.