Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

450
Jonathan Barnes
ity of choice and not by necessity from the authority of creation – that does
not come about by nature. (52.2)
Tertullian contrasts this true view with the widespread notion according
to which some deaths are ordinary, tranquil, and natural whereas others
are extraordinary, violent, and unnatural. He might have contrasted the
true view with the view of the pagan philosophers, who, whether or
not they distinguished between (as we should put it) death by natural
causes and death by misadventure, supposed that death is as natural
for men as it is for the other animals and for plants.
Tertullian accepts a pagan commonplace 8 which defines the nature
of death: “The function of death is evident: it is a dissolution of body
and soul.” (51.1) “This is the function of death: a separation of flesh
and soul.” (52.1) That being so, then since death is unnatural, a body
without a soul is in an unnatural state and a soul without a body is in
an unnatural state.
According to the doctrine of the General Resurrection, at some future
time – the date was sometimes, and unwisely, specified – the world
will end, the graves will open, the putrescent cadavers will be swabbed
down and reunited with their lost souls, and we shall then all go before
the mighty throne of judgement. At the end of his discussion of the false
eschatology of the metempsychotic philosophers, Tertullian outlines the
true account:
God will judge more fully, since he will judge more finally. His sentence,
for torment or for delight, is eternal. It is pronounced on souls which are
rejoining not beasts but their own bodies. It is pronounced one single time,
and on a day which the Father alone knows, so that, in a suspense of expectation,
the power of our faith may be proved, ever on the watch as it
is ever in ignorance and everyday fearing what everyday it hopes. (33.11)
For this Last Judgement bodies and souls, unnaturally separated by
death, come together again: not any soul and any body, not even any
soul and any human body – rather, “let Christians remember that at
the resurrection their souls will receive the same bodies in which they
died” (56.5). And so the soul of a dead infant will find itself back in
its infantile body, while the soul of a decrepit old man will recover its
decrepit old body. (Tertullian does not appear to notice that this
might be a depressing prospect for some of us; and in fact most of his
8 E.g. Plato: “Death is the departure of the soul from the body” (Phd. 64c);
Chrysippus: “Death is a separation of the soul from the body” (Plutarch,
St. rep. 1052c).