Why the Soul Does Not Die

Now let us turn to the things that stand opposed to virtue, so that the soul’s immortality may be inferred from those as well. Every vice lasts only for a time, because a vice is stirred up for the moment. The rush of anger is quieted once revenge has been taken. Bodily pleasure is the end of lust. Desire is destroyed either by getting its fill of what it was after or by some other feeling taking its place. Ambition, once it has won the offices it wanted, grows old and weak. The rest of the vices are the same: they cannot hold their ground and stay, but are finished off by the very enjoyment they were after. So they retreat — and then come back. [a]

Virtue is unbroken, with no let-up in it, and a man who has once taken it up cannot walk away from it. For if it had a gap in it — if we could do without it at any point — the vices, which are always drawn up against virtue, would come back. So it has not really been taken hold of at all if it deserts its post, if it ever pulls back. Once it has set up a firm dwelling for itself, it has to be at work in everything a man does; and it cannot drive the vices off and keep them running unless it garrisons the heart it lives in with a guard that is never taken down. So the unbroken continuance of virtue itself shows that a man’s soul, once it has received virtue, stays in being — because virtue goes on without end, and the human mind is the only thing that receives virtue.

And since vices are the contrary of virtue, the two whole systems must differ from each other and be opposed at every point. Vices are upheavals and disturbances of the soul; virtue is calm and quiet of mind. Vices are temporary and short-lived; virtue is unbroken and steady and always of one piece with itself. The fruits of vices — that is, pleasures — are as short and as temporary as the vices themselves; therefore the fruit and the reward of virtue are everlasting. The profit of vices comes at once; therefore virtue’s profit lies in the future.

That is how it comes about that in this life there is no reward for virtue: virtue is still going on. Just as pleasure and the payment for vices follow once the vices have been carried through, so virtue’s reward follows once virtue has been finished. And virtue is never finished except by death, since its highest duty lies in undergoing death. Therefore virtue’s reward comes after death. In the end Cicero, in his Tusculan Disputations, saw this much, though he was not sure of it — that the highest good does not come to a man except after death. He says: “A man will go to his death with a confident spirit, if that is how things fall out, since we have found that in death there is either the highest good or no evil at all.”

So death does not put a man out; it lets him in to virtue’s reward. But the man who has stained himself, as the same writer puts it, with vices and crimes, and has been pleasure’s slave — he is the one who will be condemned and will suffer everlasting punishment, which the sacred writings call the second death: everlasting, and full of the harshest torments.

For as two lives are set before a man, one belonging to the soul and the other to the body, so also two deaths are set before him: one belonging to the body, which everyone has to go through by nature, and one belonging to the soul, which is earned by wickedness and escaped by virtue. And as this life is temporary and has fixed limits because it belongs to the body, so that death is likewise temporary and has a fixed end, because it touches the body.

So when the times God has appointed for death are complete, death itself will be finished. And because a death in time follows a life in time, it follows that souls rise again to everlasting life, since the death that belongs to time has been given an end. Again: as the soul’s life is everlasting — the life in which it receives the divine and unspeakable fruits of its immortality — so its death must be eternal too, the death in which it suffers unending punishments and torments without limit for its faults. [g]

So this is how matters stand. Those who are happy in this life, the life that belongs to the body and to the earth, are going to be wretched forever, because they have already had the good things they preferred; which is what happens to people who adore false gods and pay no attention to the true God. On the other side, those who have followed justice and have been wretched and looked down on and poor in this life, and have often been badly used with insults and injuries for the sake of justice itself — because there is no other way of reaching virtue — are going to be happy always: since they have already put up with the bad things, they may enjoy the good ones as well. And that is plainly what happens to people who have thought little of the gods of earth and of goods that break, and who follow the heavenly religion of God, whose goods are everlasting, as he is himself who gave them.

What am I to say about the works of the body and the works of the soul? Do they not show that the soul is not liable to death? As for the body: since it is itself breakable and mortal, whatever works it contrives are just as perishable. Cicero says that there is nothing made by human hands that is not brought to ruin at some point, either by damage men do to it or by sheer length of time, which destroys everything.

But what the mind produces — that, we can see, is immortal. Everyone who has given himself to thinking little of present things, and has handed down to memory the monuments of his talent and his great deeds, has plainly won by them an undying name for his mind and his virtue. So if the deeds of the body are mortal because the body itself is mortal, then it follows that the soul is shown to be immortal, because we can see that what it produces is not mortal.

In the same way the desires of the body and the desires of the soul declare that the one is mortal and the other everlasting. The body wants nothing but what belongs to time — food, drink, clothing, rest, pleasure — and it cannot even want these things, or reach them, without the soul’s nod and support. But the soul on its own wants many things that never spill over into the body’s business or the body’s enjoyment; and those things are not breakable but eternal, such as the fame of virtue, or being remembered by name. The soul even wants the worship of God against the body’s own interest — a worship that consists of keeping off desires and lusts, of putting up with pain, of thinking little of death. From this it is believable that the soul does not perish but is separated from the body: the body can do nothing without the soul, while the soul can do many great things without the body.

Why should I bring up the point that things visible to the eye and able to be handled cannot be eternal, because they are open to violence from outside, while things that come under neither touch nor sight, and show themselves only in their force and their method and their effect, are eternal, because nothing outside them can do them violence? But if the body is mortal on the ground that it lies open both to sight and to touch, then the soul is immortal on the ground that it can be neither touched nor seen.

Now let us take apart the arguments of those who hold the opposite view, the arguments Lucretius set out in his third book. Since the soul is born together with the body, he says, it must necessarily die with the body. But the two cases are not alike. The body is solid and can be laid hold of by the eye and by the hand; the soul is fine-drawn and slips past both touch and sight. The body is formed out of earth and set firm; the soul has nothing packed together in it, nothing of earthly weight, as Plato held. It could not have such force, such skill, such speed, unless it took its beginning from heaven. [k]

The body, then, since it is made up of a heavy and corruptible element and is open to touch and sight, is corrupted and dies, and cannot beat off violence, because it comes under sight and under touch. But the soul, which by its fineness escapes all touch, can be broken up by no attack. So although the two are joined and tied together from birth, and the one formed out of earthly stuff is a kind of vessel for the other, which is drawn out of a heavenly fineness — still, when some violence has pulled the two apart, and that pulling apart is what we call death, each goes back into its own nature. What was of earth is resolved into earth; what is of heavenly breath stays fixed and is always in flower, since the divine spirit is everlasting.

In the end this same Lucretius forgot what he had claimed and which doctrine he was defending, and wrote these lines:

That was not language for him to use, when he was arguing that souls perish along with bodies. But the truth got the better of him, and the true account crept up on him without his noticing. And the very conclusion he draws — that the soul comes apart, that is, that it perishes together with the body, since the two are produced together — is both false and can be turned around against him.

For the body does not perish along with the soul. When the soul leaves, the body stays whole for many days, and often, with the help of drugs, stays whole for a very long time. If the two perished together, as they are brought into being together, the soul would not hurry off and desert the body; both would be scattered alike at one and the same moment. The body would break up and perish while the breath was still in it, as fast as the soul goes out — or rather, the body would break up and the soul would spill away with it, like liquid poured out of a shattered jar. But if the earthly, breakable body does not at once run away and waste into the earth it came from as soon as the soul has left, then the soul, which is not breakable, lasts to eternity, since its origin is eternal.

He says: since the understanding grows in boys, is at full strength in young men, and dwindles in the old, plainly it is mortal. First of all, the soul is not the same thing as the mind. Being alive is one thing; thinking is another. In people asleep it is the mind that is lulled to rest, not the soul; and in people out of their senses the mind is put out while the soul stays. That is why we do not call them soulless but out of their minds. So it is the mind — that is, the understanding — that is increased or lessened according to a man’s age. The soul is always in the same condition. From the moment it receives the power of breathing it stays the same right to the end, until it is sent out from its close quarters in the body and flies back to its own home.

Next: although the soul is breathed into a man by God, still, because it is shut up in a dark dwelling of earthly flesh, it does not possess knowledge, which belongs to divinity. So it hears and learns everything, and takes in wisdom by learning and by listening. Old age does not lessen wisdom but increases it, if the years of youth were spent in virtue; and if extreme old age has weakened the limbs, it is not the mind’s fault that the sight has gone, that the tongue has grown thick, that the hearing has gone deaf. That is the body’s fault. But the memory fails, it is said. What is surprising in that? The mind is weighed down under the wreck of the house falling in on it, and forgets what is past — a mind that is not going to be divine on any other terms than by getting clear of the prison it is shut up in.

But the soul, he says, is also open to pain and grief, and loses its senses through drink; so plainly it is breakable and mortal. That is exactly why virtue and wisdom are needed: so that grief, which we catch from suffering and from the sight of things that ought not to happen, may be beaten back by courage, and pleasure be overcome, not only by keeping off drink but by keeping off other things too. For if the soul is stripped of virtue, if it is handed over to pleasure and made soft by it, it will fall under death; since virtue, as we have shown, is what contrives immortality, and pleasure is what contrives death. But death, as I have set out, does not put a man out and destroy him altogether; it visits him with everlasting torments. The soul cannot perish outright, since it received its origin from the Spirit of God, which is eternal.

The soul, he says, feels even the body’s disease, and suffers the loss of the memory of itself; and as it falls ill, so it is often cured. This is precisely why virtue is to be put to use: so that the mind — not the soul — may not be broken by any pain of the body, or fall into forgetfulness of itself. And since the mind has its seat in a particular part of the body, when some violent disease has spoiled that part, the mind is shifted out of place: shaken loose, as it were, it leaves its station, to come back when a cure and returning health have rebuilt its dwelling. For since the soul is joined to the body, if it is stripped of virtue it sickens by contagion from the body, and, sharing in the body’s frailty, the weakness reaches as far as the mind. But when it is parted from the body it will flourish by itself, and will not be attacked by any state of frailty any more, because it has laid its frail covering aside.

As the eye, he says, when it is torn out and separated from the body can see nothing, so the soul, once separated, can perceive nothing, since it too is a part of the body. That is false, and unlike the case he supposes; for the soul is not a part of the body but in the body. What is held in a jar is not a part of the jar, and the things inside a house are not called a part of the house. In the same way the mind is not a part of the body, because the body is the vessel — the container — of the soul.

Now here is a much emptier argument still: that the soul looks mortal because it is not sent out of the body quickly, but works itself loose from all the limbs by degrees, beginning at the ends of the feet — as though, if it were eternal, it would burst out in a single moment of time, the way it does in men who die by the sword. But those who are killed by disease take longer to breathe out their spirit, so that the soul is breathed out as the limbs grow cold. For the soul is held in the stuff of the blood as light is held in the oil; and when that stuff is burned away by the heat of fevers, the ends of the limbs must grow cold, since the thinner veins run out to the body’s edges, and the last and smallest channels dry up when the spring that feeds them fails.

It must not be supposed, though, that because the body’s perception fails, the soul’s power of feeling is put out and perishes. It is not the soul that goes senseless when the body fails; it is the body that goes senseless when the soul takes its leave, because the soul draws all feeling away with it. And since it is the soul, by being present, that gives the body feeling and makes it live, it is impossible that it should not live and perceive by itself, since it is in itself both consciousness and life.

As for the lines that say:

I have never seen anyone complain in death of coming apart. Perhaps he had once seen some Epicurean doing philosophy even as he died, and lecturing with his last breath on his own dissolution.

How can it be known whether a man feels that he is coming apart, or that he is being set free from the body, when his tongue goes dumb at his departure? As long as he perceives and has the power of speech, he has not yet come apart; once he has come apart, he can no longer either perceive or speak. So either he is not yet able to complain of it, or he is no longer able. But he understands before it happens, it is said, that it is going to happen. Why should I bring up the fact that we see many dying people who do not complain of coming apart, but say plainly that they are going out, and setting off on a journey, and walking? They show it by gesture, or, if they still can, they say it out loud as well. From which it is clear that what takes place is not a coming apart but a separation — and that shows that the soul goes on existing.

Other arguments of the Epicurean system are aimed at Pythagoras, who maintains that souls move out of bodies worn out by old age and death and work their way into bodies that are new and lately born; and that the same souls keep being produced again, now in a man, now in a sheep, now in a wild animal, now in a bird; and that they are immortal for this very reason, that they change their lodgings often, and those lodgings are bodies of every different kind. That notion of a man out of his senses is laughable, and better suited to a stage player than to a school of philosophy; it ought not even to have been answered seriously, since a man who answers it seriously looks afraid that somebody might believe it. So let us pass over what has been argued on behalf of one falsehood against another. It is enough to have answered the arguments that are aimed against the truth.