The Mirror of Death

What is left now is death, so that our subject may end where the soul itself brings it to an end. It is true that Epicurus, in a doctrine well enough known, maintained that death has nothing to do with us. His argument runs: [a]

“What is dissolved has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.”

But it is not death that undergoes dissolution and loses sensation; it is the human being who undergoes death. And even Epicurus admitted that suffering belongs to the being to which acting belongs. Now if it lies in a man to suffer death, which dissolves the body and destroys the senses, how absurd to say that so great a capacity does not belong to man! Seneca puts it far more exactly:

“After death everything comes to an end — death itself included.”

From that position of his it has to follow that death does belong to itself, since it comes to an end itself; and much more that it belongs to man, in whose ending, among the “everything,” death also ends. Death, says Epicurus, does not belong to us. Then at that rate life does not belong to us either. For surely, if what dissolves us has no relation to us, then what puts us together and holds us together must be unconnected with us as well. If losing our sensation is nothing to us, then gaining sensation can have nothing to do with us either. The fact is, a man who destroys the soul itself, as Epicurus does, cannot help destroying death along with it. As for us Christians, we have to treat death exactly as we treat the life that follows death, or any other province of the soul — taking it that we at any rate belong to death, even if death does not belong to us. And on the same principle, sleep, which is the very mirror of death, is not off our subject either.

So let us discuss sleep first, and afterwards ask how the soul makes its way down to death. Now sleep is certainly not something above nature, as some philosophers will have it when they trace it to causes that look higher than nature. The Stoics say that sleep is “a temporary suspension of the activity of the senses.” The Epicureans define it as a slackening of the vital breath; Anaxagoras and Xenophanes, as a weariness of that breath; Empedocles and Parmenides, as its cooling down; Strato, as a separation of the breath born with the soul; Democritus, as the soul’s want; Aristotle, as a fading of the heat around the heart. Speaking for myself, I can safely say that I have never slept in such a way as to discover a single one of these conditions. [d]

Indeed, we cannot possibly believe that sleep is weariness. It is rather the opposite, for it undoubtedly takes weariness away, and a person comes out of sleep refreshed instead of tired. Besides, sleep is not always the result of fatigue, and even when it is, the fatigue does not outlast it. Nor can I allow that sleep is a cooling or a decay of the body’s heat. Our bodies draw warmth from sleep, and the steady distribution of food that goes on during sleep could not proceed so easily if there were too much heat hurrying it along or cold holding it back — which is what sleep would supply, if it really chilled us. There is the further fact that sweating shows an over-heated digestion; and digestion is described in us as a cooking, an operation that has to do with heat and not with cold.

In the same way, the immortality of the soul rules out any belief that sleep is a slackening of the vital breath, or a want of that breath, or a separation of the breath born with the soul. The soul perishes if it undergoes any diminishing or any interruption. Our only recourse, then, is to agree with the Stoics, and settle that the soul in sleep is under a temporary suspension of the activity of the senses, which procures rest for the body only and not for the soul as well. For the soul, being always in motion and always at work, never gives in to rest — a condition foreign to immortality, since nothing immortal admits any end to its working, and sleep is an end of working. It is on the body, which is subject to death, and on the body alone, that sleep pays its court with a rest from work.

A man who doubts whether sleep is a natural function, then, has the experts in argument calling the whole difference between the natural and the supernatural into question — so that whatever he supposed lay beyond nature he may safely assign to nature, nature having arranged things in such a way that they can seem to lie beyond it; and so, of course, everything is natural or nothing is, whichever suits the moment. With us Christians, however, only what comes of looking to God can get a hearing — God, the Author of all the things we are now discussing. For we believe that nature, if it is anything at all, is a reasonable work of God. And reason presides over sleep. Sleep is so fitted to man, so useful, so necessary, that without it not a soul could manage the business of restoring the body, renewing its strength, securing its health, providing time off from work and a remedy for labor — and for the lawful enjoyment of which the day withdraws, while night makes its own provision by taking the very color out of everything.

Since sleep is indispensable to our life, our health and our relief, there can be nothing about it that is not reasonable and not natural. That is why doctors banish beyond nature’s gate everything that runs against what is vital, healthful and helpful to nature. The disorders that are hostile to sleep — disorders of the mind and of the stomach — they have judged to be against nature, and by that judgment they have settled its corollary, that sleep is perfectly natural. And when they declare that sleep in the lethargic state is not natural, they draw the conclusion from the fact that sleep is natural when it keeps its due and regular exercise. Every natural state is spoiled either by falling short or by going too far, and is maintained by its proper measure and amount. So a thing will be natural in its condition if defect or excess can make it unnatural.

Well now, what if you were to take eating and drinking out of the conditions of nature — when they are the chief thing that brings sleep on? It is certain that from the very beginning of his nature man was stamped with this instinct. If you take your instruction from God, you will find that Adam, the fountain of the human race, had a taste of drowsiness before he had a draught of rest; he slept before he worked, or even ate, or even spoke — so that men might see that sleep is a natural feature and function, and one that actually comes before all the other natural faculties.

From this first instance we are led to trace, even that early, the image of death in sleep. For as Adam was a figure of Christ, Adam’s sleep foreshadowed the death of Christ, who was to sleep a mortal slumber, so that from the wound made in his side the church, the true mother of the living, might be figured in the same way that Eve was formed. This is why sleep is so healthful, so reasonable, and is actually made into the model of that death which is general and common to the whole human race.

God has willed — and it may be said in passing that in his dealings he has generally brought nothing to pass without such types and shadows — to set the outlines of man’s condition before us by daily repetition, more fully and completely than Plato’s example does, and especially the beginning of that condition and the end of it. He is stretching out a hand to help our faith along more readily by types and parables, in things and not only in words. So he sets before your eyes the human body struck down by the friendly power of slumber, laid flat by the kindly necessity of rest, motionless in its position, exactly as it lay before life and exactly as it will lie once life is past. There it lies, a witness to its shape when it was first molded and to its condition when it is at last buried — waiting for the soul in both cases: in the first before the soul was given, in the second just after the soul was withdrawn.

Meanwhile the soul is so placed that it seems to be busy somewhere else, learning to bear a future absence by pretending for the moment that it is not present. We shall come to the case of Hermotimus shortly. But in the interval the soul dreams. Where do its dreams come from? The fact is that it cannot rest or be idle altogether, and it does not confine the nature of its immortality to the still hours of sleep. It proves that it possesses a constant motion. It travels over land and sea, it trades, it gets excited, it works, it plays, it grieves, it rejoices, it follows pursuits lawful and unlawful — showing what very great power it has even without the body, and how well equipped it is with limbs of its own, while at the same time betraying its need to have some body again to press its activity upon. And so, when the body shakes off its slumber, it asserts before your eyes the resurrection of the dead by taking up its natural functions again. That, then, must be both the natural reason of sleep and the reasonable nature of it. If you only regard it as the image of death, you begin faith, you feed hope, you learn both how to die and how to live, you learn watchfulness even while you sleep.

As for the case of Hermotimus: they say that he used to be robbed of his soul while he slept, as though it wandered off from his body like a man on a holiday trip. His wife gave the strange peculiarity away. His enemies found him asleep and burned his body as if it were a corpse; and when his soul came back too late, it took the guilt of the murder on itself, I suppose. The good citizens of Clazomenae, however, consoled poor Hermotimus with a temple that no woman ever enters, because of the disgrace of that wife. [k]

Now why bring the story up? Because the common belief so readily takes sleep to be the separation of the soul from the body, and this case of Hermotimus must not be allowed to feed that credulity. It must certainly have been a much heavier kind of slumber. One would guess it was the nightmare, or perhaps that diseased lethargy which Soranus proposes in place of the nightmare, or else some such illness as the one the fable has fastened on Epimenides, who slept some fifty years or so.

Suetonius tells us that Nero never dreamed, and Theopompus says the same about Thrasymedes; though Nero, at the close of his life, did manage with some difficulty to dream, after a bad fright. What indeed would be said if the case of Hermotimus were believed to be such that his soul’s repose was a state of actual idleness during sleep, and a real separation from his body? You may guess it to be anything rather than that kind of license in the soul — flights away from the body without death, and those recurring again and again, as if they belonged to the soul’s habit and constitution. If I were told that such a thing had ever happened to a soul — something like a total eclipse of the sun or the moon — I would honestly suppose that God himself had brought the event about; for it would not be unreasonable for a man to receive a warning or a fright from the Divine Being, as by a flash of lightning or a sudden stroke of death. Only it would be far more natural to conclude that this happens by a dream — because if it has to be supposed not a dream, as the theory we are resisting assumes, then the thing ought rather to happen to a man while he is wide awake.

At this point we are bound to set out what Christians think about dreams, as incidents of sleep and as no slight or trifling stirrings of the soul — the soul which we have declared to be always occupied and active because of its perpetual movement, and that movement is itself a proof and an evidence of its divine quality and its immortality. [n]

So when rest comes to human bodies, since rest is their own particular comfort, the soul disdains a repose that is not natural to it and never rests. And since it gets no help from the body’s limbs, it uses limbs of its own. Picture a gladiator without his gear and weapons, or a charioteer without his team, still going through the whole course and exertion of their trade: there is the fight, there is the struggle, but the effort comes to nothing. The whole business seems to be gone through, though plainly nothing has actually been done. There is the act, but not the effect.

This power we call ecstasy — the state in which the sensing soul stands outside itself, in a way that even resembles madness. So at the very beginning sleep was inaugurated by ecstasy: “And God cast an ecstasy on Adam, and he slept.” Sleep came on his body to make it rest, but the ecstasy fell on his soul to take rest away. From that very circumstance it still ordinarily happens — and the nature of the case follows the order in which it was set up — that sleep is combined with ecstasy.

In fact, with what real feeling, what anxiety, what suffering we experience joy and sorrow and alarm in our dreams! We should not be moved by any such emotions — by what are, of course, the merest fantasies — if we were masters of ourselves when we dream, unaffected by ecstasy. In these dreams good actions are useless and crimes do no harm; we shall no more be condemned for acts of sin seen in a vision than we shall be crowned for an imagined martyrdom.

But how, you will ask, can the soul remember its dreams, if it is said to have no mastery over its own operations? That memory must be a special gift of the ecstatic condition we are treating of, since ecstasy does not arise from any failure of healthy action but entirely from a natural process; and it does not drive out the working of the mind — it withdraws it for a time. It is one thing to shake, another to move; one thing to destroy, another to agitate. So what memory supplies is a sign of soundness of mind; and what a sound mind experiences ecstatically while the memory remains unhindered is a kind of madness. That is why we are not said to be mad in that state, but to be dreaming, and to be in full possession of our senses too, if we ever are. For although the power to use those faculties may be dimmed in us, it is still not put out; only it can seem to be absent at the very moment when the ecstasy is working in us in its own particular way, so as to bring before us images of a sound mind and of wisdom, just as it brings us images of derangement.