Not the Soul Alone

For this nature of ours, which from the beginning and by the intention of its Maker has had unevenness allotted to it, has an uneven life and an uneven continuance — broken now by sleep, now by death, and by the changes that come with each stage of life, while the earlier stages give no clear sign of what comes after them. Who would ever have believed, if experience had not taught him, that in the seed — uniform throughout and still waiting to be shaped — there lay stored up powers so many and so great, and a whole range of masses that gather and set solid out of it? I mean bones and sinews and cartilage, and muscles too, and flesh and inner organs and the other parts of the body. [a]

For none of this can be seen in the seed while it is still fluid. Infants show nothing of what belongs to grown men; the age of grown men shows nothing of what belongs to those past their prime; and they in turn show nothing of what belongs to men grown old. And yet, although some of the things I have mentioned do not show the natural sequence at all and others show it only faintly — the changes, I mean, that come over human nature — still, everyone whose judgment on these matters is not blinded by vice or laziness knows this much. First the seed must be sown. Then, when it has been shaped out into every member and part and what was conceived has come out into the light, there follows the growth that belongs to the first stage of life, and the maturing that comes with growth. Then, once maturity is reached, the natural powers slacken until old age. And then, when the body is worn out, it comes apart.

So in this case the seed has nothing inscribed on it of a human life or a human shape, and life has nothing inscribed on it of the dissolution into first elements — and yet the chain of natural events makes credible what the appearances themselves give no reason to believe. How much more, then, does reason, tracking down the truth from that natural sequence, give us grounds for trusting the resurrection, since reason is safer and stronger than experience for establishing what is true.

The arguments I put forward earlier for examination, which give assurance of the resurrection, are all of one family, since they grew from a single root: that root is the coming-to-be of the first human beings by creation. But some of them draw their force from that first root itself, out of which they grew; others follow the nature and the life of human beings, and get their credibility from God’s providence over us. For the cause according to which and on account of which human beings came to be is yoked to human nature itself, and takes its strength from creation; but the argument from righteousness — that God judges people according to whether they have lived well or badly — takes its strength from the end for which they exist. Human beings grow out of the one; but they hang more on providence. [c]

Now that the first points have been demonstrated as far as I am able, it will be good to prove the case from what comes later as well: I mean from the honor or the punishment owed to each person by just judgment, and from the end for which human life exists. Of these two I put first the one that leads by nature, and take up first the argument about judgment. I will only say this much in advance, out of concern for the starting-point and the order this subject requires. Those who accept God as the maker of this universe must, if they mean to stay with their own principles, hand over to his wisdom and righteousness the guarding and the providential care of everything that has come to be. And holding that, they must think nothing on earth or in heaven ungoverned or unprovided for, but must recognize that the Maker’s care reaches through everything alike, unseen and seen, small and great.

For everything that has come to be needs the care of the one who made it — each thing in its own way, according to what its nature is and what its nature is for. To run through the list now, or to sort the cases out, or to try to set down what suits each nature, would in my view be a useless show of effort. Man, at any rate, who is our subject now: as a needy being he needs food; as a mortal being, offspring; as a reasoning being, judgment.

And if each of these things belongs to man by nature — if he needs food for his life, needs offspring for the continuance of his race, and needs judgment so that his food and his offspring may be kept within the law — then, since food and offspring apply to the two together, judgment must of course apply to the two together as well. By “the two together” I mean the human being who is made of soul and body. And such a human being becomes answerable for everything he has done, and receives honor or punishment for it.

Now suppose just judgment brings its verdict for what was done on the two together. The soul alone should not collect the wages for what was done along with the body, since by itself the soul has no leaning toward the offenses committed over bodily pleasures or food or the care of the body. Nor should the body alone, since by itself the body cannot tell law from justice. Rather the human being made of the two receives the judgment for each thing he has done. But reason does not find that happening in this life. What a person deserves is not preserved in the life we have now: many who deny God and practice every kind of lawlessness and vice go on to the end untouched by trouble, while, on the contrary, men who have shown a life tested by every virtue live in pain, in abuse, in slander, in beatings, and in hardship of every kind. Nor does reason find it happening after death, since the two together no longer exist: the soul is separated from the body, and the body itself is scattered back into the things it was gathered from, keeping nothing of its former growth or shape — much less the memory of what it did.

So what is left is plain to everyone. As the apostle says, “this perishable and scatterable thing must put on imperishability,” so that when those who had died have been made alive by resurrection, and the parts that were separated, or even completely dissolved, have been made one again, each person may justly receive what he did through the body, whether good or bad.

So against those who acknowledge providence and accept the same first principles that we do, and yet somehow fall away from their own assumptions, a person might use arguments like these — and many more than these, if he wanted to spread out at length what has been said briefly and in passing. But with those who disagree with us about first principles, it will perhaps be better to lay down another starting-point ahead of these: to share their perplexity about the things they believe, and to look into the matter alongside them, this way. Is human life, and the whole run of it, altogether overlooked? Has some thick gloom been poured down over the earth, hiding both people themselves and their deeds in ignorance and silence? Or is it far safer to hold that the Maker stands over his own works, watching everything that in any way exists or comes to be, and judging both deeds and intentions? [h]

For if no judgment at all were ever passed on what people do, human beings would have no advantage over the animals that have no reason. In fact they would come off worse than the animals do — the very people who keep their passions in subjection and take trouble over reverence for God and over righteousness and the rest of virtue. The life of cattle would be best; virtue would be senseless; the threat of judgment would be a broad joke; and pampering every pleasure would be the highest good. The shared doctrine of all such people, their one law, would be the saying so dear to the unrestrained and the lewd: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” And the end of a life like that is not even pleasure, as some suppose, but total insensibility.

But if the Maker of human beings does take some care for his own works, and the distinction between those who have lived well and those who have lived badly is preserved somewhere, it must be either in the present life, while men who have lived virtuously or viciously are still alive, or after death, when they are in a state of separation and dissolution. On neither of these can we find just judgment preserved. In the present life the good do not carry off the wages of virtue, and the base do not carry off the wages of vice.

I pass over the fact that, so long as the nature we are now in is preserved, mortal nature cannot bear a penalty in proportion to offenses that are many or heavy. The bandit or the ruler or the tyrant who has unjustly killed tens of thousands upon tens of thousands could not by one death pay off the penalty for those deeds. And consider the man who holds nothing true about God, who lives in constant outrage and blasphemy, who despises what is divine, who tears down laws, who violates boys and women alike, who levels cities unjustly, who burns houses with the people still inside them and lays a countryside waste, and who along with all this wipes out whole communities and peoples, or even an entire nation. How could he, in a perishable body, be enough for a penalty proportioned to these things, when death gets in ahead of what he deserves, and mortal nature is not enough for even one of the things he has done? So judgment according to desert is shown neither in the present life nor after death.

For either death is the complete extinguishing of life, the soul being dissolved and destroyed along with the body; or the soul remains by itself, undissolved, unscattered, and beyond decay, while the body decays and comes apart, keeping no memory of what was done and no sense of what it went through along with the soul. [k]

If human life is entirely extinguished, then plainly there will be no care for people who are not alive, and no judgment on those who lived in virtue or in vice. Instead everything that belongs to a lawless life will come rolling back in on us, and the whole swarm of absurdities that follows it, and the crowning point of that lawlessness: the denial of God.

But suppose the body decays and each of its dissolved parts goes off to what is akin to it, while the soul remains by itself, beyond decay. Even so the judgment on the soul would have no place, since righteousness would not be present in it; for it is not even permitted to suppose that a judgment could come out of God and from God with nothing just about it. And there is nothing just about the judgment if the one who did the righteousness or the lawlessness is not kept in being. For the one who did each of the things in life that the judgment is about was a human being, not a soul by itself. To put it all in a word: this account will not keep what is just in a single case.

For if good deeds are honored, the body will plainly be wronged. It shared with the soul the hard work that went into doing well, but has no share in the honor for what was done well; and while the soul is often excused for certain offenses on the ground of the body’s neediness and want, the body itself is shut out of any share in the good deeds — the very deeds whose labors it helped to carry through life. [l]

And when offenses are judged, what is just is not preserved for the soul either — not if the soul alone pays the penalty for offenses it committed while the body was troubling it and dragging it toward the body’s own appetites and motions: sometimes snatching it away by surprise and by stealth, sometimes hauling it off by sheer force, and at other times running along with it out of kindness and out of care to keep the body going. Or how is it not unjust for the soul to be judged by itself for things toward which, in its own nature, it has no appetite at all, no motion, no impulse — things like lewdness, or violence, or greed, or injustice, and the wrongs that come out of them?

Most such evils come about because people do not master the passions that trouble them, and they are troubled by the body’s neediness and want and by the effort and care the body requires. These are the reason for every acquisition of property, and, before that, for the use of it; and further for marriage and for all the actions of life, in which and about which we see what is an offense and what is not. Where, then, is the justice in this? The body is the first to feel these things, and it drags the soul into sympathy and partnership in the actions it needs for what it wants — yet the soul alone is judged. The appetites and the pleasures, and the fears and griefs as well, in all of which anything beyond measure is liable to judgment, get their motion from the body — yet the sins that come from them, and the punishments for the sins committed, fall on the soul alone: the soul, which needs no such thing, desires no such thing, and by itself neither fears nor suffers anything of the kind a human being naturally suffers.

Even if we hold that these feelings belong not to the body alone but to the human being — and we would be right to say so, since a person’s life is one life made out of the two — we shall certainly not say that they belong to the soul, once we look purely at the soul’s own nature. For if it needs no food at all, it could never desire the things it in no way requires in order to exist; nor could it feel an impulse toward any of the things it has no natural use for; nor could it be grieved by a lack of money or property, since none of that belongs to it. And if it is also beyond decay, it fears nothing at all as able to destroy it. It has no dread of famine, or disease, or maiming, or disfigurement, or fire, or the sword, since it can suffer no harm or pain from any of these — because neither bodies nor bodily powers touch it at all.

But if it is absurd to attach the passions to souls as belonging to them in particular, then to lay the sins that come out of the passions, and the punishments for those sins, on souls alone is exceedingly unjust and unworthy of God’s judgment.

There is more to say besides. Is it not absurd that virtue and vice cannot even be thought of as existing separately in the soul — for we recognize the virtues as a human being’s virtues, and likewise the vice that stands opposed to them as not belonging to a soul cut off from the body and existing on its own — and yet that the honor or the punishment for them should fall on the soul alone? [n]

How could anyone so much as conceive of courage or fortitude in the soul alone, when it has no fear of death, or of a wound, or of maiming, or of loss, or of ill-treatment, or of the pains that go with these, or of the hardship that comes out of them? And what of self-control and moderation, when no craving draws the soul toward food or sexual union or the other pleasures and enjoyments, and nothing else troubles it from within or provokes it from outside? And what of practical wisdom, when nothing is set before it to be done or left undone, nothing to be chosen or avoided — or rather, when there is in it no motion at all, no natural impulse toward doing anything?

And in what sense at all does righteousness belong naturally to souls, whether toward one another or toward anything else of their own kind or of another kind, when they have nothing to give from, no means to give by, and no way of giving, so as to assign what is equal according to desert or according to proportion — the honor rendered to God excepted — and when they have no impulse and no motion toward using what is their own or keeping off what belongs to others? for the use of the things that are according to nature, and abstinence from them, is considered in the case of beings whose nature is to use such things — whereas the soul neither needs anything nor is by nature able to use any things or any single thing. And for that reason, what is called “each part minding its own business” cannot be found in a soul so constituted.