Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
That Nothing of the Soul Remains Behind in the Body. Death's task, meanwhile, stands in the middle: the separation of body and soul. Yet certain people, in defense of the soul's immortality — which, not having learned it from God, they hold onto rather feebly — beg such arguments from every quarter that they would have us believe that even after death some souls still cling to their bodies. Plato, for instance, though he is quick enough to send off the souls he chooses straight to heaven, nevertheless in the Republic sets before us the corpse of a certain unburied man kept for a long time without any decay, thanks, apparently, to the soul's individuality still lodged in it. Democritus, likewise, points to the growth of nails and hair in graves over a certain stretch of time. But in fact the quality of the air could well have been the body's protector. What if the air was drier and the ground saltier? What if the substance of the body itself was less moist? What if the very kind of death had already spent, beforehand, the matter that causes decay? As for nails, since they are the outgrowths of the sinews, it is only natural that, as the sinews slacken in dissolution, they appear to lengthen and to be pushed out day by day as the flesh wastes away. Hair, too, feeds off the brain, which for some while manages to hold its private fortress intact; indeed, even in the living, hair thickens or thins depending on the brain's abundance. There you have your doctors' answer. But it is not even the case that some small remnant of the soul lingers in the body only to depart later, once time has struck the whole stage-set of the body from the scene. This too is somebody's opinion; and that is why they say the body should not be burned, out of sparing regard for this "surplus" of soul. But there is another reason for that scruple — not flattery toward the soul's remains, but revulsion from cruelty even where the body is concerned, since a man, precisely as a man, does not deserve to be spent on a punitive death. As for the rest: the soul, being indivisible, since it is immortal, must, by the same logic, undergo an indivisible death — not as though death fell on an immortal soul, but as an indivisible event befalling an indivisible soul, indivisibly. But death too will be divided, if the soul is, since some remnant of soul will, on this view, be superfluously left to die at some later point; and so a portion of death will remain alongside a portion of soul. Nor am I unaware that this opinion has some trace of fact behind it. I learned it from my own experience. I know of a certain woman, born into the church's own household, who died whole in beauty and years after a brief, single marriage; and while she lay at peace and the burial was still delayed, and the presbyter's prayer was in the meantime being said over her as she was laid out, at the very first breath of the prayer she moved her hands from her sides into the posture of supplication, and then, once the prayer was done, restored them again to their place of rest. There is also that story current among our own people, of a body which, laid next to another body in the cemetery, made room by shifting aside for its neighbor's approach. If something of the sort is reported even among the pagans, it only shows that God everywhere sets up signs of his power — for the comfort of his own, and as a testimony to outsiders. And I would sooner believe it a testimony wrought by God than the work of any leftover fragments of soul; for if such fragments were really present, they would have moved the other limbs as well, and not the hands only — and even the hands not merely into a posture of prayer. That body, too, would not simply have yielded room to its fellow, but would, by shifting its own position, have made itself more comfortable as well. Whatever the source of such things, in any case, they are to be reckoned as signs and portents, not as proof that nature herself can act so. Death, if it is not wholly complete all at once, is not death at all; if any part of the soul remains, that is life — and life will no more mix with death than day mixes with night.