Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Let it be granted, then, that the soul was shown by means of flesh — supposing it is established that it needed showing at all, that is, that it was unknown to itself and to us: though on this point the distinction is an empty one, as if we were something separate from the soul, when the whole of what we are is soul. Indeed, without a soul we are nothing — not even entitled to the name of man, but only of a corpse. Well, if we ourselves have no acquaintance with the soul, then plainly the soul lacks acquaintance with itself. [2] So it remains only to examine this one point: whether the soul is so ignorant of itself that it had to be made known in some way. My own view is that the very nature of the soul is sensation: nothing animate is without sense, nothing sensitive is without soul, and — to put it more pointedly — the soul's soul is sensation. [3] Since, then, the soul supplies sensation to everything else, and itself perceives the sensations, not to mention the qualities, of everything, how is it plausible that it alone should not have received, from the start, a sense of itself? How would it know what is at times necessary to it, out of the necessity of its own nature, if it does not know its own quality — for a thing to which anything is necessary must know itself? This much, I say, is to be recognized in every soul: self-knowledge, without which no soul could ever have managed itself. [4] I hold, further, that man especially — the only rational animal — has been allotted a soul, master of itself, which makes him a rational animal, being itself rational first and foremost. But how could it be rational, the thing that makes man a rational animal, if it did not know its own reason, being ignorant of itself? Quite the reverse: it recognizes its own maker, its own judge, and its own state well enough. [5] Though taught nothing yet of God, it names God; admitting nothing yet of his judgment, it says it commends itself to God; and though the claim it hears repeated most is that death leaves no further hope, it nevertheless pronounces blessing or curse over every dead man, whether he was good or wicked. This subject we have treated at greater length in our small treatise entitled ON THE TESTIMONY OF THE SOUL. [6] Otherwise, if the soul had been ignorant of itself from the beginning, it ought to have learned nothing from Christ except what sort of thing it was. But as it is, it did not learn its own likeness from Christ, but salvation. That is why the Son of God came down and took on a soul — not so that the soul might come to know itself in Christ, but so that it might know Christ within itself: for it was not by its ignorance of itself that its salvation was endangered, but by its ignorance of the Word of God. [7] 'The Life,' Scripture says, 'was manifested' — not the soul; and again, 'I came,' he says, 'that the soul might be rescued' — nowhere does he say, that it might be exhibited. We would indeed be ignorant that the soul, invisible though it is, is born and dies, unless it were shown to us bodily. We would plainly be ignorant that it is to rise again with flesh. This is what Christ made manifest — but even this, no differently in his own case than in the case of a Lazarus, whose flesh was no more animal-soul than his soul was fleshly. What more, then, has been made known to us about the soul's supposed prior condition of ignorance? What was invisible in it that needed visibility through flesh?