Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
WHETHER SOULS LINGER HERE AFTER DEATH. [1] A dispute arises: does this happen immediately upon departure, or does some rule detain certain souls here for a while, and once received below, are they later permitted, by their own choice or by command, to intervene up here again? [2] Arguments for these opinions are not lacking. It has been believed that the unburied are not admitted to the underworld until they have received their due rites, following the Homeric Patroclus, who in a dream demands burial from Achilles, on the ground that he cannot otherwise pass the gates of the dead, the souls of the buried barring him far off. But we know that, apart from the poet's license, there was also Homer's zeal for piety. He laid so much stress on the care of burial precisely because he charged its delay with wronging the soul, and at the same time warned that no one should keep a corpse at home and waste away with it further, feeding his grief on an extravagant show of comfort. So he framed the complaints of the unburied soul to serve both ends at once: that the urgency of burial and the honor due to bodies be preserved, and that the excess of feeling be tempered. [3] But how empty, that a soul should suffer the rites owed to a body, as though it carried something of them down to the underworld! Far emptier still, if the postponement of burial is to be reckoned an injury to the soul, when it ought rather to welcome it as a favor. Surely a soul that did not even want to die will prefer to be dragged down to the underworld more slowly; it will love the undutiful heir through whom it still feeds on daylight. Or if there is indeed some real injury in being thrust under the earth later, and the mark of that injury is the delay of burial, then it is monstrously unjust that the injury should fall on the soul, when the delay of burial, plainly, is the business of the survivors, not of the dead. [4] They say too that those cut off by an untimely death wander about here until the remainder of the years they would have lived out is completed. But either fixed terms are set for each person - and I will not believe that what is fixed can be snatched away early - or, if terms are indeed fixed, yet are curtailed by God's will or by some power, then they are curtailed for nothing if they are still made to run their full course; or, if they are not fixed at all, there will be no "remainder" of terms that were never fixed. [5] I will add further: suppose, for example, an infant dies at the breast - or say now a boy not yet grown, or one just come of age - who nevertheless would have lived to eighty. That his soul should spend out here, after death, the years thus snatched from him - what sense does that make? For it cannot take on age without a body, since ages are transacted through bodies. And let our own people also bear this in mind: that souls will receive back in the resurrection the very bodies in which they departed. [6] The same measures of body, then, and the same ages that produce those measures, are what we must expect. How, then, can an infant's soul spend out here the snatched-away years, so as to rise again at eighty in a body one month old? Or if it will be necessary that those destined years be filled out here, must the soul likewise run through here, in step with those years, the whole order of a life that was fixed to run alongside them - so that, assigned to boyhood from infancy, it takes up study; roused from adolescence to youth, it does military service; weighed down from youth to old age, it takes stock; and it must draw interest and work a farm, sail, litigate, marry, labor, fall sick, and go through whatever sorrows and joys awaited it along with those years? [7] But how will all this be transacted without a body? Life without living? No - these will be empty stretches of time to be filled merely by running their course. What, then, prevents them from being filled out among the dead, where equally there is no use for any of that? So we say that every soul, whatever age it departed at, remains in that same state until the day appointed, when that perfect state is promised, tempered to the measure of angelic fullness. [8] Accordingly those souls will be reckoned exiles from the underworld which men suppose to have been torn away by force, especially through the savagery of executions - I mean the cross, the axe, the sword, the beast; nor, further, are those violent ends which justice decrees, avenging violence itself, of that kind. And so, you will say, all criminal souls are banished from the underworld. Then choose one or the other, I press you: is the underworld good, or is it bad? If you hold it bad, then the very worst souls ought to be flung down there all the sooner; if good, why then do you judge souls cut off young, unmarried, and pure and innocent for the time being by reason of their age, meanwhile unworthy of the underworld?