Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Either it is best to be kept here, following the doctrine of the "ahoroi" (the untimely dead), or worst, following that of the "biaeothanatoi" (the violently dead) - to use the very terms in which the magic that fathers these opinions makes its noise: Ostanes, joined by Typhon, Dardanus, Damigeron, Nectabis, and Berenice. [2] It is now common literature, promising to summon up even souls put to rest at their full age, even released by a decent death, even dispatched with prompt burial, out of their dwelling among the dead. What, then, shall we call this magic? What almost everyone calls it: a fraud. But the reasoning behind the fraud escapes no one but Christians, who know the spirits of wickedness - not by complicit acquaintance but by hostile knowledge - and handle them not by an inviting operation but by a conquering mastery, this many-shaped plague of the human mind, artificer of every error, wrecker alike of salvation and of the soul; so too with magic, a second idolatry of sorts, in which demons feign themselves to be the dead just as, in the other idolatry, they feign themselves to be gods. And why not, since the gods too are dead? [3] And so the "ahoroi" and "biaeothanatoi" are the ones invoked, under this pretext of plausibility: that it seems credible that it is above all those souls that turn to violence and injury which a savage and untimely end has itself wrenched away by violence and injury, as though by way of retaliation for the wrong done them. [4] But it is demons who work behind the show of such souls, and especially those demons who were present in the very persons concerned while they were still alive, and who had driven them into ends of that kind. For we have already pointed out that scarcely any man is free of a demon, and it is known to many that untimely and atrocious deaths too are the work of demons, deaths which people attribute to mere accident. [5] This fraud too, of an evil spirit lurking under the guise of the dead, we prove, unless I am mistaken, by actual instances - since in exorcisms a spirit sometimes claims to be one of the man's own kin, sometimes a gladiator or a beast-fighter, just as elsewhere it claims to be a god, caring about nothing so much as excluding the very thing we preach, so that we should not readily believe that all souls are consigned to the underworld, and thereby have our faith in judgment and resurrection thrown into confusion. And yet that very demon, once it has tried and failed to entrap the bystanders, overcome by the pressure of divine grace, confesses against its will what is in fact true. [6] So too in that other kind of magic, believed to pluck resting souls up out of the underworld and display them to view, the force behind the fraud is no different - only more elaborate, since a phantom is produced, and a body is even counterfeited; and it is no great feat for one who can easily blind the inner eye of the mind to deceive mere outward eyes as well. [7] After all, the dragons of the magic wands appeared as real bodies to Pharaoh and the Egyptians; but Moses's truth swallowed up the lie. Simon and Elymas too worked much magic against the apostles; but the stroke of blindness did not come from their tricks. What wonder, then, that the unclean spirit rivals the truth in something new? Look - today the heretics of that same Simon boast such presumption in their art that they even pledge to move the souls of the prophets up from the underworld. [8] And I believe they can - by lying; for the python-spirit at that time was no less free to counterfeit Samuel's soul, when Saul, having deserted God, sought out the dead for guidance. Far be it from us, in any case, to believe that the soul of any saint, let alone a prophet, can be dragged up by a demon, taught as we are that Satan himself transforms into an angel of light, let alone into a man of light, and will one day even claim to be God and produce more monstrous signs still, to overturn the elect, if that were possible. Should we doubt, then, that he then dared to claim to be a prophet of God - and indeed Saul's own prophet, since he himself was already dwelling in that man? [9] Do not suppose that one spirit was staging the phantom and another was vouching for it; rather it was one and the same spirit, in the false prophetess and in the apostate alike, that lied with ease to make credible what it had already contrived - the very spirit through whom Saul's treasure lay where his heart also lay, where, that is to say, God was not. And so, through the one by whom he believed he would see, he saw - because through the one by whom he saw, he had already believed. [10] If it is also objected that in nocturnal visions the dead are often seen, and not without cause (for the Nasamones, as Heraclides or Nymphodorus or Herodotus writes, catch their own oracles by lodging at their ancestors' tombs, and the Celts, as Nicander affirms, spend the night at the graves of brave men for the same reason) - even so we no more truly experience the dead in dreams than we experience the living, but by the same reasoning in the case of the dead as in the case of the living and of everything else that is seen. For things are not true because they are seen, but because they come to pass. The credibility of dreams is pronounced from their fulfillment, not from their appearance. [11] But that the underworld lies open to no soul at all, the Lord has sufficiently established in that account, told through the person of Abraham, of the beggar finding rest while the wealthy man moaned - that no reporter of the arrangement of the underworld could be sent back from there, which could indeed have been allowed even then, so that Moses and the prophets might be believed. [12] But even if the power of God did recall certain souls into bodies, as proofs of his own authority, that is no reason it should be lumped together with the audacity and presumption of magicians, the deceit of dreams, and the license of poets. Rather, in the examples of resurrection, when the power of God, whether through the prophets or through Christ or through the apostles, presents souls again in bodies, it has been established, by a solid, tangible, and fully satisfied truth, that this is the true form of reality - so that you should judge every bodiless appearance of the dead to be mere trickery.