What Human Beings Are For

And the most unreasonable thing of all is this: to bring the laws that were decreed to bear on human beings, and then to turn the sentence for what has been done, lawfully or unlawfully, onto souls alone. For if the one who received the laws is also the one who would justly receive the sentence for breaking them, and if it was a human being who received the laws and not a soul on its own, then it must be a human being who bears the sentence for the sins committed, and not a soul on its own. For God did not decree to souls that they keep away from things that have nothing to do with them — adultery, murder, theft, robbery, dishonoring the parents who bore you, and, in general, every craving that arises to wrong and harm our neighbors. [a]

For the command “Honor your father and your mother” does not fit souls by themselves, since such names do not belong to them. Souls do not beget souls so as to take to themselves the title of father or mother; human beings beget human beings. Nor could “You shall not commit adultery” ever be rightly said of souls, or even thought of them, since in them there is no difference of male and female, no fitness for intercourse, and no appetite for it. And where there is no such appetite, there can be no intercourse either. Where there is no intercourse at all, there is no lawful intercourse — which is what marriage is. And where there is no lawful intercourse, there can be no unlawful appetite for another man’s wife, and no intercourse with her; and that is what adultery is.

Nor does the ban on theft, or on craving more than your share, suit souls. They have no need of the things that people who do need them, out of natural lack or want, are in the habit of stealing or robbing — gold, or silver, or an animal, or anything else fit for food or shelter or use. To an immortal nature, everything the needy long for as useful is useless.

Let the fuller treatment of these matters be left to those who want to look into each point more carefully, or to fight it out more eagerly with people who disagree. What has just been said is enough for us, along with everything that agrees with it in guaranteeing the resurrection, and there would be no point now in spending longer on the same ground. Our aim has not been to leave nothing unsaid, but to show in summary, to those who have gathered here, what ought to be thought about the resurrection, and to fit the arguments that bear on it to the capacity of the people present.

Now that the questions set out have been examined to some extent, what remains is to look at the argument from the end as well. It has already shown through in what has been said, and it needs only enough attention and filling out to keep us from seeming to leave unmentioned any of the matters we touched on briefly, and so damaging the case, or the division of topics we made at the start. [d]

For that reason, then, and for the sake of those who will press hard on these points, it would be well to note just this much: that everything put together by nature, and everything made by craft, must have an end of its own. This is what the common notions of all people teach us, and what the things passing before our eyes bear witness to. Do we not see that farmers have one end in view and doctors another; and again, that the things growing out of the earth have one, and the animals fed on it and born in a certain natural sequence another?

If that is clear, and if the powers of nature or of craft, and the activities that come from them, must in every case be followed by an end that accords with nature, then it is absolutely necessary that the end of human beings too — belonging as it does to a nature of its own kind — be set apart from what they share with everything else. It is not even permitted to suppose the same end for creatures that have no share in rational judgment and for those who act by the inborn law and reason, who live an intelligent life and practice justice.

So freedom from pain cannot be the end proper to these, for they would share that with things that have no sensation at all. Nor can it be the enjoyment of what feeds or pleases the body, and a great quantity of pleasures — otherwise the life of cattle must take first place, and the life lived by virtue must be the one that never reaches its end. That, I think, is the end proper to cattle and grazing beasts, not to human beings, who have an immortal soul and rational judgment.

Nor, again, is it the blessedness of a soul separated from the body. We were not looking into the life or the end of either of the two parts a human being is made of, but of the being made up of both; for that is what every human being is who has been allotted this present life, and there must be some end proper to that life. [g]

But if the end belongs to the two of them together; and if it cannot be found while they are still living this present life, for the reasons already given more than once; nor while the soul is in separation, since a human being of that kind does not exist once the body has been dissolved and even scattered entirely, even if the soul goes on by itself — then it is absolutely necessary that the end of human beings appear in some other putting-together of the two, and of the same living creature.

And since that follows of necessity, there must certainly be a resurrection of the bodies that have died or even been entirely dissolved, and the same human beings must be put together again. For the law of nature lays down the end not simply, and not for whatever human beings happen along, but for those very ones who lived through the earlier life; and it is impossible for the same human beings to be put together again unless the same bodies are given back to the same souls. And for the same body to receive back the same soul is impossible in any other way, and possible only through the resurrection. Once that has happened, the end that fits the nature of human beings follows as well.

And one would not be wrong to say that the end of an intelligent life and of rational judgment is to go on forever, undistracted, with the things that natural reason is chiefly and first of all fitted to, and to delight without ceasing in contemplating the One who is and what he has decided — even though most people, too passionately and too violently attached to things here below, live out their lives without ever hitting it. For the great number of those who fall short of the end that belongs to them does not cancel the allotment common to all, since the examination in these matters is of each one on his own, and the honor or the penalty measured out to each is for the life he lived, well or badly.