Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But lest the dignity of the flesh should seem watered down on the ground that the divine hand did not properly handle it in itself, as it handled the clay — well, in handling the clay for this very purpose, that it should afterward become flesh out of clay, God was in fact already transacting business with the flesh. But I want you now to learn further when and how the flesh actually flowered out of the clay. For it is not, as some would have it, that those hides of skin, put on by Adam and by Eve once they had lost paradise and were left bare, marked the moment flesh was reshaped out of clay — since well before that, Adam had already recognized, in flesh, the cutting taken from his own substance now present in the woman: 'This one, at last, is bone out of my bones, flesh out of my flesh' — and that very extraction of the man's rib, built up into woman's flesh, must surely, I take it, have been built up out of clay too, seeing Adam himself was still clay at that point. So the clay was swallowed up and lost in the flesh. When? When man became a living soul from God's breath — a breath that was, so to speak, a warm and fitting blast baking the clay, as it were, into a different quality, into flesh, much as into pottery. Just so the potter too, tempering his clay with a blast of fire, is able to re-embody it into a sturdier material and press one shape into another out of it, better suited than the original and now bearing its own kind and name. For though it is written, 'Shall the clay say to the potter' — meaning, man to God — and though the Apostle speaks of 'earthen vessels,' still man is called clay because he was clay before, and flesh is called earthenware because it came from clay by way of the blast of the divine breath. That flesh was afterward clothed over by the coats of skin, that is, the outer hide — so much so that if you strip off the skin, you lay the flesh bare. So what today counts as stripping, if you take the skin off, was, when it was first laid on, a garment. Hence, too, the Apostle, calling circumcision a stripping of the flesh, confirms that the skin is its tunic. Since this is so, both stand ennobled: the clay, dignified by the touch of God's hand, and the flesh, dignified still further by the breath of God — through which the flesh set aside its beginnings as clay and put on instead the adornments proper to a soul. Are you more careful than God — you who, for Scythian and Indian gems and the gleaming grains of the ruddy sea, will not have lead or bronze or iron, no, not even silver as a setting, but only the choicest and most laboriously mined gold; who take pains, for your wines and your costliest perfumes, to match the vessel to what it holds; who match the worth of the scabbard to the polished steel of the sword within — while God, by contrast, has lodged the very reflection of his own soul, the outbreathing of his own spirit, the craft-work of his own mouth, inside some altogether cheap sheath, and stands accused of housing it so unworthily? Or did he rather lodge it — or rather graft it in and blend it with the flesh? With such thoroughgoing fusion, indeed, that it can be left uncertain whether the flesh carries the soul about or the soul the flesh, whether it is the flesh that appears to belong to the soul or the soul that appears to belong to the flesh. But even granting that the soul is to be believed the more prominent partner and the ruler, as standing nearer to God, this too redounds to the glory of the flesh — that it holds within itself the one nearest to God, and furnishes that very rule with its instrument. For what use of nature, what fruit of the world, what savor of the elements does the soul not taste through the flesh? Of course — for it is through the flesh that it is furnished with every instrument of sense: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch; through the flesh it is sprinkled with divine power, foreseeing nothing without speech going silently ahead of it. For speech, too, comes from the organ that is flesh. The arts are through the flesh, study and talent are through the flesh, works and business and duties are through the flesh; indeed, living itself belongs so entirely to the soul-and-flesh together that for the soul not to live is nothing other than to part from the flesh. So too dying itself belongs to the flesh, just as living does. Further, if all things lie subject to the soul through the flesh, they lie subject to the flesh as well: whatever instrument you use, you necessarily use along with the one you use it through. So the flesh, though reckoned the servant and handmaid of the soul, turns out to be its partner and co-heir: if in things temporal, why not in things eternal too?