Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
ON HOW FOODS BEAR UPON THE SOUL. [1] Although we have already established earlier that all natural faculties belonging to sensation and understanding are present in the soul's own substance from its innate endowment, yet advancing gradually through the stages of age and diversifying through accidents according to skills, upbringing, places, and the powers that dominate — which nonetheless bears on the partnership of flesh and soul now proposed — we say that the puberty of the soul, too, coincides with that of the flesh, and that the one rises with the prompting of the senses and the other with the growth of the limbs, from about the fourteenth year; not because Asclepiades reckons wisdom from that point, nor because the civil laws adjust the conduct of legal business from then on, but because this too is a principle reaching back to the beginning. [2] For if Adam and Eve, from the knowledge of good and evil, felt the need to cover their shameful parts, then from the moment we feel the same, we are confessing the same knowledge of good and evil. From these years onward, the sex becomes both more suffused with blood and more clothed; desire employs the eyes as witnesses and communicates its pleasure and understands its own objects, and, like the sting of a fig-leaf's touch, girds its own boundaries with an itch, and drives the man forth from innocence's garden — and from there the itch spreads even to other faults, sins of a kind not natural, since they now spring not from nature's ordinance but from vice. [3] But the one desire that is properly natural is that for food alone, which God supplied even at the beginning: 'Of every tree,' he says, 'you shall eat'; and at the second begetting, after the flood, he made a further allowance: 'Behold, I have given you all things to eat, as the green herbs of the field' — provided not so much for the soul as for the flesh, though for the soul's sake too. For the pretext must be taken away from the arguer who, because the soul seems to desire food, wants it understood from this that the soul is therefore mortal — sustained by food, and accordingly weakening when food is withheld, and finally perishing when it is cut off. [4] Further, one must ask not only who desires these things, but for whom; and if for its own sake, then also why, and when, and to what point; then again, one thing is desired by nature, another by necessity, another according to a thing's own property, another for the sake of an end. The soul, then, will desire food for itself out of the cause of necessity, but for the flesh out of the nature of its own property. For the flesh is, assuredly, the soul's dwelling, and the soul is the lodger within that dwelling. [5] The tenant, then, will desire, from the cause and necessity implied by that very name, things that will profit the house for the whole span of its tenancy — not that the tenant himself needs to be built up, or armored, or propped with scaffolding, but only kept intact, since he cannot otherwise be kept intact than by being upheld by the house. [6] Otherwise, should the house collapse, it will be permitted to the soul, once stripped of its former supports, to depart unharmed, possessing its own foundations and the nourishments proper to its own condition: immortality, rationality, sensibility, intellect, freedom of will.