Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
On the Departure of Souls. Where, then, the soul goes once stripped bare and cast out — this we shall pursue in due order, without question. But first let us finish what belongs here, so that no one, because we have listed death's various exits, should expect from us an account of each one, matters better left to the doctors, who are the proper judges of all things lethal, whether causes or the bodily conditions themselves. Still, for the further defense of the soul's immortality, let me, while on the subject of death, insert something about that kind of exit in which the soul slips away little by little, bit by bit; for it is dragged off while still holding the posture of failing, even as it appears to be consumed, and it offers, by the temper of its departure, a mere conjecture about its actual extinction. But the whole account here is bound up in and derived from the body. For whatever the manner of death's exit, it is without doubt an overthrow either of the body's matters, or of its regions, or of its vital pathways: of matters, such as bile or blood; of regions, such as the heart or liver; of pathways, such as the veins or arteries. As long as these are being laid waste, each by its own particular kind of injury, right up to the final overthrow and rending of the vital — that is, the natural — limits, positions, and functions, the soul too, of necessity, as its instruments and dwellings and spaces collapse bit by bit, is itself compelled to migrate bit by bit, and is drawn down into the very picture of failing — no differently than the way the charioteer himself is presumed to have failed once his horses' strength has given out from exhaustion: which is a matter of the man's helpless situation, not of any real personal collapse. Just so the charioteer of the body, the animal spirit, fails as the name of the vehicle fails, not by its own power; it departs from its work, not from its vigor; it grows faint in action, not in condition; it wastes away in steadiness, not in substance, because it ceases to appear, not because it ceases to be. So too any swift death — such as the harvest of the neck, opening once and for all so vast a gate; such as a stroke that in one blow crushes every vital function, like apoplexy, an inward collapse — allows the soul no delay, and does not torture its departure moment by moment. But where death is a long-drawn affair, the soul, in proportion as it is abandoned, itself abandons the body in turn; yet it is not thereby chopped up, only drawn out — and in being drawn out, it makes its last remaining part appear to be the whole of it. Not every part, however, is instantly a severed part merely because it comes last, nor, merely because it is small, does it therefore perish first. Its own end follows the sequence, and the intermediate is dragged along by the sum, and the remainder, still clinging to the whole, is awaited by that whole, not abandoned by it. And so I would dare to say: the last of the whole is itself whole, because, though smaller and later, it still belongs to it. Hence it often happens that the soul, at the very moment of parting, is stirred to greater activity, with a keener gaze, with extraordinary eloquence, as, from its now-higher vantage, already established in freedom, it declares, through the surplus that still lingers in the body, what it sees, what it hears, what it is beginning to know. For if this body is, in Plato's phrase, a prison, yet, in the apostle's, a temple of God when it is in Christ — still, meanwhile, it walls the soul in within its own enclosure and darkens it, staining it with the concretion of flesh, so that, as through a pane of horn, the light of things reaches it dimmer than it is. But without doubt, when by the force of death it is squeezed out of its concretion with the flesh, and is itself refined by that very squeezing, then indeed it breaks forth from the body's covering into the open, into pure, unmixed light that is its own; and at once it recognizes itself in the unrestricted freedom of its own substance, and, by that very liberty, comes to its senses again in the presence of divinity — as one emerging from a dream passes from images to realities. Then it speaks out and sees; then it exults or trembles, according to how it senses the lodging being prepared for it — reading this at once from the face of that very angel, the summoner of souls, the poets' Mercury.