Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But let us meet another of their arguments, and ask why, by undergoing animal flesh, Christ should be thought to have had an animal soul. 'For God,' they say, 'was eager to display the soul visibly to men by making it a body — the soul which before had been invisible, by nature seeing nothing, not even itself, on account of the hindrance of this flesh — so that it might even be debated whether a soul is born or not, mortal or not: and so the soul was made body in Christ, so that we might see it being born and dying and, more than that, rising again.' [2] But what sort of thing will this be, that the soul should be demonstrated to itself or to us by means of flesh — the soul which could not be known through flesh — so that the thing might be shown by the very act in which lay concealed the one doing the showing, namely the flesh? Darkness, apparently, was taken on so that light might shine. Well then, let us first examine whether the soul needed to be shown in this fashion at all, and then whether they in fact claim it was wholly invisible before — whether as something incorporeal, or as possessing some kind of body of its own. [3] And yet, when they call it invisible, they are making it corporeal, since it possesses something that is invisible: for how can a thing that possesses nothing invisible be called invisible? Indeed it cannot even exist, having nothing by which it is; but since it exists, it must necessarily have something by which it exists. [4] If it has something by which it exists, that will be its body. Everything that is a body is of its own proper kind: nothing is incorporeal except what does not exist. Since the soul, then, has an invisible body, the one who undertook to make it visible ought surely to have made visible, more fittingly, that very thing of it which was held to be invisible — since neither lying nor incapacity befits God: lying, if he showed the soul to be something other than what it was; incapacity, if he was unable to show what it actually was. [5] No one wishing to display a man puts a helmet or a mask on him — yet this is exactly what was done to the soul, if, converted into flesh, it put on a surface not its own. But even supposing the soul is reckoned incorporeal, so that by some hidden force of reason it is indeed a soul, yet whatever a soul is, is not a body — even so it was not impossible for God, and it would have suited his purpose far better, to display it by some new kind of body proper to itself rather than by this one common to everyone else, one requiring no further explanation — rather than being eager, for no reason, to make the invisible soul visible by means of a defense so conveniently supplied by human flesh for exactly these controversies. [6] 'But Christ could not appear among men except as a man.' Then give Christ back his own good faith: let him who chose to walk as a man have shown the soul, too, in a human condition — not by making it flesh, but by clothing it in flesh.