The Soul Is Immortal

You must also know a further point of the church’s teaching, that the soul was made immortal, so that you may see how the idols are to be overthrown. We will arrive at a knowledge of this more directly from what we know of the body, and from the difference between the body and the soul. For if our argument has proved that the soul is distinct from the body, and the body is mortal by nature, it follows that the soul is immortal, because it is not like the body. Again, if, as we have shown, the soul moves the body and is not moved by other things, it follows that the soul moves of itself, and that this movement of its own goes on after the body is laid in the earth. If the soul were moved by the body, it would follow that when its mover was cut off from it, it would die. But if the soul moves the body as well, then all the more does it move itself. And if it is moved by itself, it follows that it outlives the body. For the movement of the soul is the same thing as its life, just as, of course, we call the body alive when it moves, and say that it dies when it stops moving. [a]

But this can be made clearer once and for all from what the soul does in the body. Even while it is joined and coupled to the body, it is not shut in by it or limited to the body’s small size. Often, when the body lies in bed, not moving but in a sleep like death, the soul stays awake by its own power and goes beyond the natural power of the body. As though it were traveling away from the body while still remaining in it, it imagines and sees things above the earth. Often it even holds conversation with the saints and angels, who are above earthly and bodily existence, and approaches them, confident in the purity of its mind. If it does this, will it not all the more have a clearer knowledge of its immortality when it is separated from the body at the time appointed by God, who coupled them together? For if even while coupled with the body it lived a life outside the body, much more will its life continue after the death of the body, and it will live without ceasing because of God, who made it so by his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the reason the soul thinks of and keeps in mind things immortal and eternal: because it is itself immortal. Just as the body is mortal and its senses have mortal things as their objects, so, since the soul contemplates and beholds immortal things, it follows that it is immortal and lives forever. For ideas and thoughts of immortality never leave the soul but remain in it, and they are, so to speak, the fuel within it that secures its immortality. That, then, is why the soul is able to behold God and is its own road to him, receiving the knowledge and understanding of the Word of God not from outside but from itself.