Punished in Another Body

This doctrine is defended even on the ground of judicial repayment. The claim is that souls are paired with the kind of living creature that suits the life they led and what they have earned: put to death, in those doomed to slaughter; put to hard labor, in the servile; worn out and exhausted, in the toiling; filthily degraded, in the unclean — or, on the same principle, kept for honor and love and care and close attention, in those highest in rank and in virtue, in usefulness, and in delicacy of feeling. Here too I have to point out that if souls are transformed, they will not in fact be able to carry out and feel the destinies they are supposed to deserve. The whole aim of judicial repayment collapses, because the awareness of what one has earned and what one is now paying will be missing. And that awareness must be missing if souls lose their own condition; and lose it they must, if they do not remain one and the same thing. [a]

Suppose, though, that they hold together well enough to remain unchanged until the judgment. Hermes the Egyptian saw that much. He said that the soul, once separated from the body, is not dissolved back into the soul of the universe but keeps its own separate identity — and keeps it, to use his words, “so that it may render to the Father an account of what it has done in the body.” Grant all of that, and I still want to look closely at the justice, the seriousness, the majesty and the dignity of this reputed judgment of God, and to ask whether what sits enthroned in it is not simply human judgment, blown up in both directions, in punishing and in rewarding alike: too savage when it takes vengeance, too extravagant when it hands out favors.

What do you suppose becomes of a murderer’s soul? Some animal, I imagine, bound for the slaughterhouse and the butcher’s stall — so that it may be killed as it killed, and skinned since it fleeced others, and eaten as food since it threw the poor wretches it once cut down in the woods and on lonely roads to the wild animals. Now if that is the sentence it is to serve, is such a soul not likelier to find consolation in it than punishment? It gets its finishing stroke from experts. It is buried under the sharpest sauces an Apicius or a Lurco could season. It is carried in to the tables of your refined Ciceros, served on the most magnificent plate a Sulla could set out, given its funeral in the middle of a dinner party, and eaten by respectable mouths on a level with its own rather than by kites and wolves — so that everyone may see how it has got a man’s body for a tomb, and has risen again after returning to its own kind. It can laugh in the face of human courts, if it ever stood in one.

For the savage sentences of death hand the man who has committed murder over alive to assorted wild animals, picked and trained against their own nature for that horrible work; and then he is kept from dying too easily by a contrivance that draws out his last moment in order to make the punishment worse. And even if his soul slips away ahead of the sword’s last stroke, his body is still not to escape the blade: payment for his own crime is exacted by stabbing his throat and his belly and running him through the side. After that he is thrown on the fire, so that even his grave is cheated of him. No other burial is allowed him. And not much care is taken over the pyre either, so that other animals get at what is left. In any case no mercy is shown to his bones and no indulgence to his ashes, which have to be punished by lying exposed and bare.

The vengeance men take on a killer is really as heavy as the one nature takes. Who would not prefer the justice of this world — which, as the apostle himself testifies, “does not carry the sword for nothing,” and which is an act of religion when it avenges human life so sternly? And when we look at the penalties set for other crimes — the cross, burning alive, the sack, the hook, the cliff — who would not think it a better bargain to be sentenced in the courts of Pythagoras and Empedocles? Even the poor wretches those two would send into the bodies of donkeys and mules to be punished with drudgery and slavery: how they will congratulate themselves on the mild work of the mill and the water-wheel, once they remember the mines and the chain gangs and the public works, and the prisons and the dark cells, terrible for their empty, do-nothing routine.

Then take the other side — people who have kept their integrity to the end and handed their lives over to the Judge. Here too I look for rewards, and what I find is more punishment. It must be a handsome profit for good men to be brought back to life as any animal whatever! Homer, so Ennius dreamed, remembered having once been a peacock. For my part I cannot believe poets even when they are wide awake. A peacock is certainly a pretty bird, and can preen itself at will on its splendid feathers; but the wings do not make up for the voice, which is harsh and unpleasant, and there is nothing poets care about more than a good song. Turning into a peacock was therefore a sentence on Homer, not an honor. The world’s payment will bring him far more joy when it praises him as the father of the liberal arts, and he will take the decoration of his fame over the decoration of his tail.

But never mind. Let poets migrate into peacocks, or into swans if you prefer, since a swan at least has a respectable voice. What animal will you put that upright hero Aeacus into? What beast will you dress the chaste and excellent Dido in? What bird falls to the lot of Patience? What animal to Holiness? What fish to Innocence? Every creature there is serves man; they are all under him, all dependent on him. If by and by he is to become one of them, the change lowers and degrades him — a man to whom images and statues and titles are freely awarded for his virtues, as public honors and marks of distinction; a man to whom the senate and the people vote even sacrifices.

What sentences for gods to pronounce, as a man’s repayment after death! They are more dishonest than any human verdict. As punishments they are contemptible, as rewards disgusting. The worst of men could never fear them and the best could never want them. Criminals will be reaching for them, in fact, and saints will not — the criminals so as to get clear of the world’s hard sentence sooner, the saints so as to run into it later. What fine teaching this is of yours, philosophers, and what useful advice: that after death rewards and punishments come down more lightly. Whereas if any judgment is waiting for souls at all, we ought rather to suppose that it will fall heavier at the close of a life than in the middle of its course, since nothing is more complete than what comes at the very last — and nothing, moreover, is more complete than what is above all divine. So God’s judgment will be fuller and more complete, because it will be handed down at the very last, in a sentence eternal and past recall, both of punishment and of consolation, on people whose souls are not to migrate into animals but to come back into their own proper bodies. And all of it once for all, and on that day “which only the Father knows” — only the Father, so that faith, by her trembling expectation, may put her anxious honesty to the full test, keeping her eyes fixed on that day while never knowing it, fearing every day the thing she hopes for every day.

No heresy has burst on us yet that carries a fiction as extravagant as this, that the souls of human beings pass into the bodies of wild animals. All the same, we thought it necessary to attack the notion and refute it, as the consistent sequel to the opinions already dealt with. Homer in the peacock had to be got rid of as thoroughly as Pythagoras in Euphorbus; and by demolishing at one blow both the passing of a soul into another body and the taking on of a body again, we cut away ground that has given our heretics no small support. [l]

There is the notorious Simon of Samaria in the Acts of the Apostles, the man who haggled for the Holy Spirit. After the sentence passed on him, and a useless regret that he and his money must perish together, he threw his energy into destroying the truth, as if to comfort himself with revenge. Besides what his own magic arts supplied him with, he turned to fraud. He bought a Tyrian woman named Helen out of a brothel, with the very money he had offered for the Holy Spirit — a piece of business worthy of the wretched man.

He actually pretended to be the Supreme Father himself, and pretended further that the woman was his own first conception, the thought by which he had meant to create the angels and the archangels. Once she was possessed of that purpose, he said, she sprang out from the Father and came down to the lower regions, and there, forestalling the Father’s design, produced the angelic powers, who knew nothing of the Father, the maker of this world. Those powers held her prisoner — out of a motive very like her own rebellion, so that when she left them they should not look like somebody else’s offspring — and having on that account exposed her to every kind of outrage, and to keep her from leaving them anywhere after her dishonor, they degraded her all the way down into human form, to be shut up, as it were, in the chains of the flesh.

After wallowing about through many ages in one woman’s shape after another, she became the famous Helen who was the ruin of Priam, and afterwards of the eyes of Stesichorus — she blinded him in revenge for his lampoons, then restored his sight to reward him for his praises. Wandering from body to body in this way, she came at last, in her final disgrace, to be a viler Helen still: a working prostitute. This, then, was the lost sheep, and it was for her that the Supreme Father, meaning Simon, came down. Having recovered her and brought her home — on his shoulders or on his loins I could not say — he turned his eye to the salvation of the human race, so that he might vent his spite by setting people free from the angelic powers. And to deceive those powers he took a visible shape himself, and, feigning the appearance of a man among men, played the Son in Judea and the Father in Samaria.

Poor Helen! What a hard fate is yours between the poets and the heretics, who have blackened your name now with adultery, now with prostitution. Only, being rescued from Troy is a grander affair than being got out of a brothel. It took a thousand ships to fetch her away from Troy; a thousand coins were probably more than enough to withdraw her from the house. Shame on you, Simon, so slow to look for her, so half-hearted in ransoming her! How different Menelaus was. The moment he loses her he goes after her; she is no sooner carried off than he begins his search; after ten years of fighting he takes her back in the open — no skulking, no deceiving, no quibbling. I am honestly afraid he was the much better “Father,” who worked so much harder, more bravely and more steadily, at recovering his Helen.

But it is not for you alone, Simon, that the transmigration philosophy has made up this story. Carpocrates gets just as much use out of it — a magician and a fornicator like you, only he had no Helen. And why should he not? He maintained that souls are reinvested with bodies, all so as to overthrow divine and human truth by every means available. On his miserable teaching, a man’s life was not brought to completion until every blemish that is held to disfigure it had been fully worked out in his conduct, because nothing is reckoned evil by nature; it is evil only as men think of it. So he thought the transmigration of human souls into bodies of every different kind absolutely indispensable, whenever some depravity or other had not been fully perpetrated in the early stage of life’s passage. Evil deeds, you may be sure, belong to living. And as often as the soul has come up short and defaulted in its sinning, it has to be recalled to existence, thrust out again and again into the prison of the body, until it “pays the last quadrans.” [q]

To get that, he tampers with the whole of the Lord’s illustration — a passage extremely clear and simple in its meaning, which ought to have been taken from the first in its plain and natural sense. Our “adversary” in that passage is the pagan, who is walking with us along the same road of life that he and we have in common. We should have to “leave the world” if we were not allowed to have dealings with such people. So the Lord tells us to show a friendly disposition toward such a man:

“Love your enemies. Pray for those who curse you.”

The point is that the man should not be irritated by some unjust dealing of yours in a piece of business, and “hand you over to the judge” of his own people, and get you thrown into prison and held in its close, narrow cell until you have paid off every debt you owe him.

Or suppose you would rather apply the word “adversary” to the devil. Then the instruction “while you are on the road with him” advises you to make the kind of settlement with him that squares with what your faith requires. Now the settlement you have made about him is to renounce him, and his pomp, and his angels. That is your agreement in the matter. And the good understanding you have to keep up must come out of your keeping that agreement: you must never think of taking back any of the things you swore off and handed over to him. Otherwise he will summon you as a cheat and a breaker of your own agreement before God the Judge — for we read of him elsewhere in exactly this role, as “the accuser of our brothers,” the saints, where an actual prosecution in court is in view. And then this Judge would hand you over to the angel who carries out the sentence, and that angel would commit you to the prison of hell, out of which there is no release until the very smallest of your offenses is paid off in the interval before the resurrection.

What sense could fit better than that? What reading is truer? Whereas if, according to Carpocrates, the soul is bound to commit every sort of crime and every kind of evil conduct, what are we to understand from his system by its “adversary” and enemy? I suppose it must be that better mind which will force it to perform some act of virtue, so that it can be driven from body to body until it is found in none of them still owing anything to a life of virtue. Which means that a good tree is known by its bad fruit — in other words, that the doctrine of truth is worked out from the worst possible rules.

I expect that heretics of this school seize with special eagerness on the example of Elijah, whom they assume to have been so reproduced in John the Baptist as to make our Lord’s own statement a guarantor for their theory of transmigration, when he said:

“Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him.”

And again, in another passage:

“And if you are willing to accept it, this is Elijah, who was to come.”

Well, then — was it really in a Pythagorean sense that the Jews approached John with the question, “Are you Elijah?” Or was it rather in the sense of the divine prediction, “Look, I am sending you Elijah the Tishbite”? The fact is that their metempsychosis, their transmigration theory, means calling back a soul that died long before and returning it to some other body. But Elijah is to come again not after quitting life by dying, but after his removal without dying; not to be restored to a body he never departed from, but to revisit the world he was taken out of; not to resume a life he had laid aside, but to fulfill prophecy — really and truly the same man, in name and title and in his unchanged humanity.

How, then, could John be Elijah? You have your answer in the angel’s announcement:

“He will go before the people in the spirit and power of Elijah.”

Not, notice, in his soul and his body. Those two substances are the natural property of each individual, while “the spirit and power” are bestowed as gifts from outside, by the grace of God, and so may be transferred to another person according to the purpose and will of the Almighty — as happened long ago with the spirit of Moses.