Where the Soul Goes

What death does is plain and obvious: it separates body from soul. Some people, though, hold the soul’s immortality with such a feeble grip — never having been taught it by God — that they prop it up with beggarly arguments, and would have us suppose that certain souls cling to the body even after death. Plato argues in that way. He packs off to heaven, at once, whatever souls he pleases, and yet in the Republic he shows us the corpse of an unburied man kept a long while without decay, because, as he says, the soul had not separated from the body. Democritus makes the same sort of point when he remarks that human nails and hair go on growing for a considerable time in the grave. [a]

Now it is quite possible that the state of the air was what preserved the corpse he mentions. What if the air happened to be very dry and the ground salty? What if the substance of the body itself was unusually dry and shriveled? What, too, if the manner of the death had already drained out of the corpse everything that rots? As for the nails: since they are where the nerves begin, they may well look longer because the nerves themselves are slackening and stretching out, and because the nails stand out further and further as the flesh gives way. The hair, again, is fed from the brain, which would keep it going a long time as its hidden nourishment and its defense. In living people too, a head of hair is thick or thin in proportion to the abundance of the brain. You have medical men to confirm it.

But not a particle of the soul can possibly stay behind in the body — a body that is itself bound to disappear, once time has cleared away the whole stage on which it played its part. Even so, this notion of a partial survival has a place in some men’s opinions, and it is why they will not have the body consumed by fire at its funeral: they want to spare the small residue of the soul. There is, however, another way of accounting for that decent treatment. It need not mean favoring the relics of the soul. It may mean turning aside a cruel custom in the interest of the body itself, since the body is human and does not deserve an end that is also inflicted on murderers.

The truth is that the soul is indivisible, because it is immortal — and that fact forces us to believe that death itself is an indivisible process, happening to the soul indivisibly: not because the soul is immortal, but because it is indivisible. Death would have to be divided in its working if the soul could be divided into particles, with one of them held back for a later stage of death. At that rate a part of death would have to stay behind for a portion of the soul.

I am not unaware that some trace of this opinion still survives. I found it out from one of my own people. I know the case of a woman born and brought up inside the church, who in the very flower of her age and beauty fell asleep after a marriage that was singularly happy, though short. Before they laid her in the grave, when the elder began the appointed prayers, at his very first breath she drew her hands away from her sides, placed them in the posture of prayer, and when the holy service was over put them back at her sides again. And then there is that well-known story among our own people, of a body that made way of its own accord in a certain cemetery, to give room for another body to be laid beside it.

If stories like these are told among the heathen as well — and they are — we can only conclude that God shows signs of his own power everywhere: to his own people for their comfort, to outsiders as a testimony. For myself, I would much rather suppose that a portent of this kind came about by God acting directly than from any relics of the soul. If there were a residue of soul left, it would be sure to move the other limbs as well; and even if it did move the hands, it would not have moved them for the purpose of praying. Nor would the corpse have been content merely to make way for its neighbor: it would have done itself some good by the change of position too.

But whatever the cause of these things — and you must put them down among signs and portents — they cannot lay down the rule for nature. Death, once it falls short of working totally, is not death at all. If any fraction of the soul remains, that makes a living state. Death will no more mix with life than night with day.

So this is what death does: it separates the soul from the body. Leaving fate and chance out of the question, men have distinguished it, as they see it, into two forms — the ordinary and the extraordinary. The ordinary they credit to nature, working quietly in each individual’s death; the extraordinary they call contrary to nature, and it covers every violent death. Our own view is different, because we know how man began. We say boldly, and go on saying, that death does not come to man as a natural consequence, but because of a fault and a defect that is not itself natural — though it is easy enough, no doubt, to call natural the faults and circumstances that have been inseparable from us since birth, even though they got in from outside. [f]

If man had been set up at his creation with dying built into the terms, then of course death would have to be charged to nature. That he was not so set up is proved by the very law that made his standing depend on a warning, and made death the outcome of his own free choice. If he had not sinned, he certainly would not have died. What comes about by an act of will, after an alternative has been put before it, and not by necessity — the necessity of a fixed and unalterable condition — cannot be nature.

So although death has many ways out, since its causes are many, we cannot say that even the easiest death is so gentle that it happens without violence to our nature. The very law that produces death, simple as it is, is violence all the same. How could it be otherwise, when so close a companionship of soul and body — two sister substances that have grown together inseparably from the moment they were conceived — is broken apart and divided?

A man may breathe his last for joy, like Chilon the Spartan, while embracing the son who had just won at the Olympic games; or for glory, like Clidemus of Athens, while receiving a crown of gold for the excellence of his history; or in a dream, like Plato; or in a fit of laughter, like Publius Crassus. Death is still far too violent for that. It comes on us by strange and foreign means, drives the soul out by a method entirely its own, and calls a man to die at the very moment when he might be living a cheerful life in joy and honor, in peace and pleasure.

It is violence to a ship, too, when far away from the rocks of Caphereus, assailed by no storms, with no breaker to smash her, with a favoring wind, in gliding course, her crew in good spirits, she goes down in complete safety, all at once, because of some shock inside her. The shipwrecks of life are no different — and so are the endings of even a quiet death. It does not matter whether the vessel of the human body goes down with her timbers whole or shattered by storms, if the soul’s voyage is overturned.

But where in the end is the soul to lodge, once it is bare and stripped of the body? We must certainly not hesitate to follow it there, in the order our inquiry takes. First, though, we must finish stating what belongs to the subject in hand. Since I have mentioned the various ways death comes out, no one should expect a special description of them from me. That is better left to medical men, who are the proper judges of what happens in death, and of its causes, and of the actual condition of the human body. [j]

Of course, in order to keep the truth of the soul’s immortality safe while I handle this topic, I shall have to use, whenever I mention death, phrases about dissolution that seem to suggest the soul escapes by degrees, a piece at a time. It withdraws from the body with all the marks of a decline, looking as though it were being used up, and gives us the idea that it is being annihilated by the slowness of its departure.

But the whole reason for that appearance is in the body and comes from the body. Whatever kind of death is at work on a man, it destroys either the matter of life, or its region, or its passages: the matter, such as the gall and the blood; the region, such as the heart and the liver; the passages, such as the veins and the arteries. Now as these parts of the body are laid waste one by one, each by the injury proper to it, right down to the last ruin and cancelling of the vital powers — that is, of nature’s ends, its sites and its functions — it has to follow that, amid the gradual decay of its instruments, its houses and its spaces, the soul too takes on the appearance of being reduced to nothing, driven as it is to abandon one part after another. It is rather as a charioteer is taken to have failed himself when his horses grow tired and withdraw their energy from him. But that is only how things look for the man who has been stripped of his equipment; it is no real condition of suffering in him.

In the same way the body’s charioteer, the vital breath, fails because its vehicle fails, not because it fails itself. It gives up its work, not its vigor; it languishes in what it does, not in what it is; it is bankrupt in ready money, not in property; it stops putting in an appearance, not existing.

So every rapid death — a beheading, say, or a broken neck, which opens a wide exit for the soul all at once; or a sudden collapse that crushes every vital action at a stroke, like that inward collapse we call apoplexy — does not hold up the soul’s escape, and does not painfully divide its departure into a series of moments. Where the death is a lingering one, though, the soul gives up its position in the same way it is itself given up. Even so, it is not cut into fractions by that process. It is drawn out slowly, and while it is being drawn out it makes the last remnant look like a mere part of itself. But no portion of it is to be counted separable because it comes last, and no portion is to be reckoned capable of dissolution because it is small. The end of a series matches the series; the middle is carried on into the extremes; the remnants hold together with the mass, and the mass waits for them and never abandons them. I will even go so far as to say that the last of a whole is the whole, because although it is less, and latest, it still belongs to the whole and completes it.

That indeed is why it often happens that the soul, in the very act of separating, is stirred more powerfully, with a more anxious gaze and a quickened flow of speech. From the higher and freer position it now holds, it announces, by means of the last remnant of itself still lingering in the flesh, what it sees, what it hears, and what it is beginning to know.

In Plato’s phrase the body is a prison, but in the apostle’s it is “the temple of God,” because it is in Christ. Still, it has to be admitted that by shutting the soul in, the body blocks it and darkens it and soils it with the density of the flesh, so that the light which lights up objects reaches the soul more confusedly, as through a window of horn. When the soul is released by the power of death from being packed in with the flesh, that release itself cleanses it and purifies it. It certainly escapes from the veil of the flesh into open space, into its own clear, pure, native light. It then finds itself enjoying its discharge from matter, and by virtue of its liberty it recovers its divinity — like a man waking out of sleep and passing from images to realities. Then it tells out what it sees. Then it exults or it fears, according to the lodging it finds prepared for it, as soon as it sees the face of the angel himself, that caller of souls to account, the Mercury of the poets.

So now we come to the question of where the soul is withdrawn to, and we give our answer. Almost all the philosophers who hold that the soul is immortal — whatever their particular views — still claim this everlasting condition for it: Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato; and those who allow the soul some delay between its leaving the flesh and the burning up of all things; and the Stoics, who put only their own souls, the souls of the wise, in the dwellings above. Plato, it is true, does not grant that destination to the souls of all philosophers without distinction, but only to those who have pursued their philosophy out of love for boys. Such is the privilege that impurity wins at the hands of philosophers! [o]

In his system, then, the souls of the wise are carried up on high into the ether; according to Arius, into the air; according to the Stoics, into the moon. I do wonder that they abandon the souls of the unwise to the earth, when they say that even these are taught by the wise, who are so far above them. Where is the school where that teaching can happen, across the vast space that divides them? By what means can the pupil souls have gone to their teachers, parted from them by so great a distance? And what good can any instruction do them at all in their state after death, when they are on the brink of destruction in the universal fire? All the other souls they thrust down into Hades, which Plato in the Phaedo describes as the bosom of the earth, where all the filth of the world gathers and settles and steams up, and where every fresh draught of air only thickens the impurities of the seething mass.

We ourselves do not take the lower regions to be a bare hole, or some underground sewer of the world, but a vast deep space in the interior of the earth, a hidden recess in its very bowels. For we read that Christ in his death spent three days in the heart of the earth — that is, in the secret inner recess that is hidden in the earth and shut in by the earth and laid over the abysses that lie deeper still. Now although Christ is God, still, being also man, “he died according to the Scriptures,” and “according to the same Scriptures was buried.” He complied fully with the law of his own being by remaining in Hades in the form and condition of a dead man. He did not ascend into the heights of heaven before going down into the lower parts of the earth, so that he might make the patriarchs and the prophets there sharers in himself. [s]

That being so, you must take Hades to be a region under the earth, and keep at arm’s length the people who are too proud to believe that the souls of the faithful belong in the lower regions. These people, who are “servants above their Lord and disciples above their Master,” would no doubt turn up their noses at the comfort of the resurrection if they had to wait for it in Abraham’s bosom.

“But this is the very reason Christ went down to Hades — so that we would not have to go down there ourselves.”

Well then, what difference is there between heathen and Christian, if the same prison is waiting for them all when they die? And how is the soul to climb up to heaven, where Christ is already seated at the Father’s right hand, when as yet the archangel’s trumpet has not sounded at God’s command — when as yet those whom the Lord’s coming is to find on the earth have not been caught up into the air to meet him at his coming, in the company of the dead in Christ, who are to rise first? Heaven lies open to no one while the earth is still standing — though I would not go so far as to call heaven shut. When the world passes away, then the kingdom of heaven will be opened. Are we to sleep, then, high up in the ether with Plato’s boy-loving worthies, or in the air with Arius, or around the moon with the Stoics’ Endymions?

“No — in Paradise, where the patriarchs and the prophets have already moved from Hades, in the train of the Lord’s resurrection.”

How is it, then, that the region of Paradise, which was shown to John in the Spirit as lying under the altar, displays no other souls in it besides the souls of the martyrs? How is it that the bravest of martyrs, Perpetua, on the day of her death saw only her fellow-martyrs there, in the revelation of Paradise she was given? It can only be that the sword guarding the entrance let no one in except those who had died in Christ and not in Adam. A new death for God — the extraordinary death, the death for Christ — is received into the guest quarters of mortality, specially altered and fitted out to take in the newcomer.

Observe, then, the difference between a heathen and a Christian in their dying. If you have to lay down your life for God, as the Paraclete advises, it will not be in mild fevers and on a soft bed, but in the sharp pains of martyrdom. You must take up your cross and carry it after your Master, just as he taught you himself. The one key that unlocks Paradise is your own life’s blood. You have a treatise of ours, On Paradise, in which we have established that every soul is kept in safe custody in Hades until the day of the Lord.