Summoning the Dead

The question arises whether this happens the moment the soul leaves the body; whether some souls are held back for particular reasons here on earth in the meantime; and whether they are allowed, either on their own initiative or by some authority stepping in, to be brought up out of the world below at some later time. There is no shortage of people ready to press opinions like these with confidence. [a]

It used to be believed that the unburied dead were not admitted to the regions below until they had been given a proper funeral. Homer’s Patroclus is the case in point: he begs Achilles in a dream for burial, on the ground that he could get through no other gate into Hades, because the souls of the buried kept shoving him back. We know that Homer was doing more here than taking a poet’s liberty; he had the rights of the dead in view. His care for the tomb’s proper honors was matched by his censure of the delay in burial that harmed souls. He also meant it as a warning: nobody should keep a friend’s corpse in his house and so lay up more harm and trouble for himself and the dead man alike, by the sheer excess of a consolation he goes on feeding with pain and grief. So he had two things in view when he drew the complaints of an unburied soul. He wanted to keep up honor for the dead by prompt attention to their funeral, and he wanted to hold within bounds the grief their memory stirred.

But when all that has been said, how empty it is to suppose that the soul could take on the rites and requirements of the body, or carry any of them down with it to the regions below! And emptier still to suppose that harm comes to the soul from a neglect of burial which it ought rather to welcome as a favor. Surely a soul that had no wish to die would prefer its removal to Hades to be put off as long as possible. It will love the heir who neglects his duty, since it is by his doing that it still has the daylight. And if it really is certain that harm comes to the soul from a late burial of the body — the harm lying precisely in the neglect of the funeral — then it is grossly unfair that all the harm should fall on the one party who could not possibly be charged with the guilty delay. The whole fault, of course, rests with the dead man’s nearest relatives.

They also say that souls carried off by an early death wander about here and there until they have finished out the remainder of the years they would have lived through, if their fate had not cut them short. Now either every man’s days are appointed to him, and if they are appointed I cannot see how they are capable of being shortened; or else, appointed though they are, they can be shortened by the will of God or some other powerful influence — and in that case the shortening means nothing, if the days may still be worked off some other way. And if they are not appointed at all, there can be no remainder to be worked off, since there were no fixed periods to leave one.

Here is another point. Suppose it is an infant that dies, still at the breast; or a boy not yet grown; or a young man who has just come of age. Suppose further that in each case the life ought to have run to a full eighty years. How could the soul of any of them spend all those cut-off years here on earth, once death has taken the body away? A man’s age cannot be got through without his body. It is by means of the body that a stretch of life gets its duties and its labors transacted.

And our own people should keep this in mind: at the resurrection souls are to receive back the very same bodies they died in. So our bodies must be expected to resume the same conditions and the same ages, since it is these particulars that give a body its own character. How, then, is an infant’s soul to spend its remaining years on earth in such a way that at the resurrection it can take up the state of an eighty-year-old, when it had barely lived a month?

Or if the appointed days of a life have to be fulfilled here on earth, must the whole course of that life, in all its turns — the course that was itself laid down to accompany the appointed days — be gone through by the soul as the days go by? Must it sit at school lessons on its way from infancy to boyhood; soldier away the excitement and vigor of youth and early manhood; take up serious business and the burden of the courts in the graver years between full manhood and old age? Must it work a trade for profit, break up the soil with hoe and plow, put to sea, bring lawsuits, get married, sweat and labor, come down with illnesses, and meet whatever else of good and bad the passing years bring? And how are any of these things to be managed without one’s body? A life lived without life?

But you will tell me: “The span in question is to be bare of anything at all; it is only to be accomplished by simply elapsing.” Then what is to stop it being fulfilled in Hades, where there is absolutely nothing you could put it to?

So we hold that every soul, whatever its age when it leaves the body, remains unchanged at that age until the day when what was promised is complete, and it is brought into a condition properly fitted to the measure of the angels, who have no equal. So the souls that people are apt to think of as snatched away by violence — above all by cruel executions, the cross and the axe and the sword and the lion — are to be reckoned as simply serving out an exile in Hades. But we do not count as violent those deaths that justice hands down, since justice is the avenger of violence.

So then, you will say: “It is all the wicked souls that are banished in Hades.” Not quite so fast. I must make you decide which of Hades’ two regions you mean, the region of the good or the region of the bad. If you mean the bad, then all I can say is that even now the souls of the wicked deserve to be consigned to those quarters. If you mean the good, why should you judge unworthy of such a resting place the souls of infants and of virgins — the very souls that by reason of their condition in life were pure and innocent?

So it is either a very fine thing to be detained in these regions below with the Aori, the souls hurried away before their time, or else a very bad thing indeed to be down there in the company of the Biaeothanati, who died by violence. Allow me to use the actual words and terms that magic rattles on with — magic, the inventor of every one of these odd opinions, with its Ostanes and Typhon and Dardanus and Damigeron and Nectabis and Berenice. [h]

There is a well-known piece of popular writing that undertakes to summon up out of Hades even the souls that really did sleep out their full age, that passed away by an honorable death, and that were buried with every rite and ceremony properly done. What are we to say about magic after that? Say, to be sure, what almost everybody says of it: that it is a fraud.

And we Christians are not the only ones whose notice this system of fraud does not escape. It is true that we have discovered these spirits of evil, not by any complicity with them, but by a knowledge that is set against them; and it is not by any procedure that attracts them, but by a power that subdues them, that we handle their wretched business — that many-sided plague on the human mind, that maker of every error, that destroyer of our salvation and our soul at a single stroke.

So it is by magic, which is only idolatry the second time round — where they pretend that after death men turn into demons, just as in the first and literal idolatry they were supposed to turn into gods (and why not, since the gods are only dead things?) — it is by magic that the Aori and Biaeothanati just mentioned are actually called up. And not unreasonably, if a man builds on this principle: that souls hurried away by a cruel and untimely death, with violence and wrong done to them, are plainly the likeliest of all to be given to violence and wrong themselves, and to have a keen appetite for reprisals.

But it is demons who work under cover of these souls — above all the demons that used to live in them while they were alive, and that in fact drove them to the end that carried them off. For as we have already suggested, there is hardly a human being who does not have a demon attached to him; and plenty of people know that the untimely and violent deaths men put down to accident are actually brought about by demons.

This trick of the evil spirit, hiding inside the person of a dead man, we are able to prove from actual cases, if I am not mistaken. In an exorcism the spirit will claim sometimes to be one of the family of the man he possesses, sometimes a gladiator or a beast-fighter, and sometimes even a god — always making it one of his chief cares to put out the very truth we are proclaiming, so that men will not readily believe that all souls go down to Hades, and so that faith in the resurrection and the judgment may be overthrown. And yet for all that, once he has tried to get around the bystanders, the demon is beaten down by the pressure of God’s grace and, badly against his will, confesses the whole truth.

The same holds for that other sort of magic, which is supposed to bring up from Hades the souls now resting there and put them on public show. No trick of imposture ever resorted to works more powerfully. Of course, the reason a phantom becomes visible is that a body has been attached to it as well; and it is no hard job to deceive a man’s outward eyes when his mind’s eye is so easy to blind. The snakes that came out of the magicians’ staffs certainly appeared to Pharaoh and the Egyptians as bodily substances. True enough, the truth on Moses’ side swallowed up their lying deceit.

The sorcerers Simon and Elymas made plenty of attempts against the apostles too, but the blindness that struck them was no conjurer’s trick. What is new about an unclean spirit trying to counterfeit the truth? Even at this moment the heretics who are Simon’s dupes are so puffed up by the extravagant claims of their art that they undertake to bring up from Hades the souls of the prophets themselves. And I suppose they can do it, under cover of a lying wonder.

For it was nothing less than this that was permitted long ago to the Pythonic spirit — even to represent the soul of Samuel, when Saul consulted the dead after losing the living God. But God forbid that we should suppose that the soul of any holy man, let alone a prophet, can be dragged out of its resting place by a demon. We know that “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” — much more into a man of light — and that at the last he will “show himself to be even God,” and will put on “great signs and wonders, so that if it were possible he would deceive the very elect.” He had little enough hesitation on the occasion just mentioned about claiming to be a prophet of God — and claiming it to Saul, in whom he was living at that very time.

You must not imagine that the one who produced the phantom was one being and the one who consulted it another. It was one and the same spirit, both in the sorceress and in the apostate king — a spirit that had no trouble faking an appearance of the very thing it had already got them ready to believe was real. It was the spirit through whose evil influence Saul’s heart was fixed where his treasure was, and where God certainly was not. So it came about that he saw the one by whose help he believed he was going to see, because he believed the one by whose help he saw.

But we are met with the objection that dead people are seen often enough in visions at night, and not for nothing. The Nasamones, for instance, get private oracles by frequent and lengthy visits to their relatives’ graves, as you may find in Heraclides, or Nymphodorus, or Herodotus; and the Celts spend whole nights at the tombs of their brave chieftains for the same purpose, as Nicander says.

Well, we grant that apparitions of dead people in dreams are no more really true than apparitions of living people; and we apply the same estimate to all of them alike — to the dead, to the living, and in fact to everything that is seen. Things are not true because they appear to be so; they are true because they are fully proved to be so. What shows a dream to be true is the way it turns out, not the way it looks.

Besides, that Hades is never opened to let any soul out has been firmly established by the Lord, in the person of Abraham, in his picture of the poor man at rest and the rich man in torment. Nobody, he said, could possibly be sent from those quarters to report to us how matters went in the world below — and if it could ever have been allowable, it might have been on such an occasion as that, to persuade men to believe Moses and the prophets.

The power of God has, no doubt, recalled men’s souls to their bodies now and then, as a proof of his own rights, which stand above anyone else’s. But that fact must never be taken to mean that any agreement is possible between faith in God and the swaggering claims of sorcerers, the fraud of dreams, and the free hand poets allow themselves. In every true raising of the dead, when the power of God recalls souls to their bodies — whether through prophets, or through Christ, or through apostles — the solid, touchable, tested reality of the body that comes back gives us complete grounds for saying what its true form must be: something that forces you to admit that every bodiless apparition of a dead person is a fraud.