The Testimony of the Soul

We do not please, proclaiming the Lord by this one name as the one God, from whom are all things, and under whom are all things. Give your testimony if you know it to be so. For we hear you also openly and with full freedom, which is not permitted to us, pronouncing thus both at home and abroad: What God has given, and, If God wills, by which words you signify both that someone exists, and you confess all power to him whose will you look to, and at the same time you deny that the others are gods, when you name them by their own titles, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Minerva. For you affirm him alone to be God, whom you name as God alone, so that even when you sometimes call those others gods, you appear to be using the word as borrowed and as if on loan. Concerning the nature also of the God whom we proclaim, it is not hidden from you: God is good, God does good, is your own saying.

You say these things plainly, but as a wicked man of course, obliquely and figuratively reproaching by the contrary proposition, that a man is therefore wicked because he has departed from the good God. Also that among us the blessing of all goodness and kindness from God is the highest sacrament of discipline and conduct, You say as readily, May God bless you, as it is necessary for a Christian to say it. But when you turn the blessing of God into a curse, you equally confess by that saying that all his power over us consists according to our teaching. There are those who, even if they do not deny God, yet do not think him an observer, an arbiter, and a judge: in which point they especially reject us, who fly to that discipline out of fear of the proclaimed judgment; thus honoring God, while they free him from the anxieties of oversight and the troubles of punishment, to whom they do not even ascribe wrath.

For if God (they say) is angry, he is corruptible and subject to passion. But that which suffers and is corrupted can also admit of destruction, which God does not admit. Yet those same persons, elsewhere confessing that the soul is divine and bestowed by God, fall into the testimony of the soul itself, to be turned back against the opinion stated above. For if the soul is either divine or given by God, without doubt it knows its giver. And if it knows him, surely it also fears him, as so great an author at the last. Does it not fear him whom it would rather have propitious than angry? Whence then the natural fear of the soul toward God, if God does not know how to be angry? How is he feared who cannot be offended? What is feared, if not wrath? Whence wrath, if not from punishment? Whence punishment, if not from the judgment of God? Whence judgment, if not from power? Whose power is supreme, if not God's alone?

Hence therefore it is supplied to you, O soul, from your own conscience, to proclaim at home and abroad, with none mocking or forbidding: God sees all things, and I commend it to God, and God will repay, and God will judge between us. Whence have you this, you who are not a Christian? And this for the most part even when bound with the fillet of Ceres, and clad in the scarlet mantle of Saturn, and linen-robed of the goddess Isis? In the very temples at last you implore God as judge, standing before Aesculapius, beseeching Juno in the open air, putting on Minerva's helmet with dark-hued images, and you call none of the gods present to witness; in your own forum you appeal to a judge from elsewhere, in your own temples you endure another God. O testimony of truth, which among the very demons makes witnesses for Christians.

But why do we affirm that demons exist? As though we did not also prove it, we who alone drive them out of bodies. Some follower of Chrysippus mocks at them, both that they exist and that they endure abomination; your curses give answer. You call a man a demon, whether for uncleanness, or malice, or insolence, or whatever stain which we attribute to demons, or as occasion for the hatred that is needed.

Satan you name at last in every aversion and spurning and detestation, him whom we call the angel of malice, the artificer of all error, the corrupter of the whole world, through whom man was deceived from the beginning, so that he transgressed the commandment of God, and was therefore given over to death, and thenceforth made the whole race, infected from his own seed, the heir also of his own condemnation. You perceive therefore your destroyer. And though Christians alone know him, or whatever sect is with the Lord, yet you too know him, in that you hate him.

Now as to what concerns your more necessary judgment, inasmuch as it also bears upon your own condition, we affirm that you remain after the dissolution of life, and await the day of judgment, and that according to your merits you are destined either to torment or to refreshment, both everlasting. For the enduring of these it is necessary that your former substance return to you, and the matter of the same man, and memory, because you can feel nothing of evil or good without the capacity of the flesh for suffering, and there is no reason for judgment without the actual presentation of him who has merited the suffering of judgment. This Christian opinion, though far more honorable than the Pythagorean, which does not transfer you into beasts; though fuller than the Platonic, which also restores to you the dowry of the body; though more welcome than the Epicurean, which defends you from destruction: yet on account of its name alone is it attributed to mere vanity and stupidity, and, as they say, presumption.

But we are not ashamed, if our presumption shall be shared with you. For first, when you recall some deceased person, you call him poor wretch: not indeed as one snatched away from the good of life, but as one already assigned to punishment and judgment. Otherwise you call the dead carefree. You profess both the hardship of life and the benefit of death. You call them carefree, moreover, when beyond the gate you go back from the tombs, feasting with provisions and delicacies rather for yourself in honor of the dead, or return from the tombs somewhat the more flushed. But I demand your sober judgment: you call the dead poor wretches when you speak from your own heart, when you are far from them. For at their banquet, as if they were present and reclining with you, you cannot reproach them with their lot, you must flatter those on whose account you live more merrily. Do you then call him a poor wretch who feels nothing?

What of the fact that you speak ill of him as one who feels, when you make mention of him with the sting of some offense? You invoke upon him the heavy earth, and torment for his ashes among the shades below. Equally on the favorable side, to one to whom you owe gratitude, you pray refreshment for his bones and ashes, and desire that he may rest well among the shades below. If there is no suffering for you after death, if no continuance of sense, if finally you yourself are nothing where you have left the body: why do you lie about yourself, as though you could suffer something beyond? Nay, why do you fear death at all, if there is nothing for you to fear after death, since there is nothing to be experienced after death?

For even if you can say that death is therefore feared, not as threatening something, but as cutting off the convenience of life: yet since you equally depart from the far more numerous inconveniences of life, and dilute the fear by the gain of the weightier part, neither is the loss of good things any longer to be feared, which is compensated by the other good, that is, the peace of freedom from troubles. That is not to be feared which frees us from all that is to be feared. If you fear to depart from life because you know it to be most good: surely you ought not to fear death, which you do not know to be evil. But since you do fear it, you know it to be evil. But you would not know it to be evil, nor would you even fear it, if you did not know that there is something after death which makes it evil, so that you fear it. Let us now set aside the natural form of fearing death.

Let no one fear what he cannot escape. From the other side I approach, with a more joyful hope after death. For in almost all men there is an innate desire for fame after death. It would be long to recount the Curtiuses and Reguluses, or the Greek men, of whom there are countless eulogies for contempt of death on account of posthumous fame. Who today does not so study the frequenting of memory after death, that by literary works, or by the simple praise of character, or by the very ambition of their tombs, he preserves his name? Whence could the soul today aspire to something which it wishes after death, and prepare so earnestly that which it will use after its departure: if it knew nothing of what is to come? But perhaps you are more certain of consciousness after your departure than of the resurrection at some time, of which we are marked out as presumers. Yet this too is proclaimed by the soul.

For if anyone inquires after one long since dead as though he were alive, it is ready at hand to say: He has gone already, and he must return.

These testimonies of the soul, the more true they are, the more simple; the more simple, the more common; the more common, the more natural: the more natural, the more divine. Not I think it can seem frivolous and cold to no one, if he reflects upon the majesty of nature, from which the authority of the soul is reckoned. As much as you have granted to the teacher, so much will you adjudge to the pupil. Nature is the teacher, the soul is the pupil. Whatever either the one has taught, or the other has learned: it has been handed down by God, namely the teacher of the teacher herself. What the soul may presume from its original instructor, it is for you to estimate from that which is in you. Feel her, who brings it about that you feel! Recall her as a prophetess in forebodings, as an augur in all things, as one who looks ahead in events. It is a wonder if, given by God to man, she knows how to divine.

As great a wonder, if she knows him by whom she was given. Even when beset by the adversary, she remembers her author, and his goodness, and his decree, and her own end, and that of the adversary himself. Thus it is a wonder, if given by God, she sings the same things which God has given his own to know. But one who has not thought such outbursts of the soul to be the teaching of nature and the silent deposits of a conscience both innate and inborn, will say rather that, through opinions scattered abroad among the common people, and through the use of published writings, a habit of speaking in such a manner has now been strengthened as though into a vice. Certainly the soul came before the letter; and speech before the book; and sense before the pen; and man himself before the philosopher and the poet. Are we then to believe that, before literature and its dissemination, men lived mute, without pronouncements of this kind?

No one spoke of God and his goodness, no one of death, no one of the underworld: speech was begging, I suppose—nay, there could have been none at all, since even then those things were absent, without which even today speech cannot be more blessed, more rich, or more wise—if those things which today are so easy, so constant, so close at hand, born as it were upon the very lips, did not exist in former times, before letters had sprouted in the world, before Mercury (I suppose) had been born. And whence does it fall to letters themselves to know, and to scatter abroad for the use of speech, things which no mind had ever conceived, or tongue had uttered, or ear had received?

But indeed, since the divine Scriptures which are among us or among the Jews, into whose wild olive we have been grafted, precede secular writings by no small span of time—and by far more than a little—as we have shown in its proper place for the purpose of demonstrating their credibility; even if the soul has borrowed these expressions from writings, it must certainly be believed that it borrowed them from ours, not from yours: for those things are more powerful for instructing the soul which are prior, rather than those which are later, and which themselves had to be instructed by the prior ones; since, even if we grant that the soul was instructed from yours, the tradition nevertheless belongs to the original source, and whatever it happened for you to have taken from ours and handed on is altogether ours. This being so, it matters little whether the conscience of the soul was formed by God or by the writings of God.

What then do you wish, O man—that these things have passed from the human opinions of your writings into the callousness of common use?

Believe therefore your own writings, and from our records believe all the more the divine ones, but from the soul's own judgment believe likewise nature. Choose which of these you will observe as the more faithful sister of truth. If you doubt your own writings, neither God nor nature lies: that you may believe both nature and God, believe the soul; so it will come about that you believe yourself as well. She certainly is the one whom you value as highly as she values you; whose you are entirely; who is everything to you; without whom you can neither live nor die; on whose account you neglect God. For when you fear to become a Christian, go and consult her: why, while worshipping another, does she name God? Why, when she marks out spirits to be cursed, does she pronounce them demons? Why does she call heaven to witness, and execrate the earth? Why does she serve one elsewhere, and elsewhere invoke an avenger? Why does she pass judgment on the dead?

Why does she use the words of Christians, whom she wishes neither to have heard nor seen? Why has she either given those words to us, or received them from us? Why has she either taught, or learned? Hold suspect the agreement of her proclamation amid such great disagreement of her conduct. You are vain if you will attribute such things to the Latin tongue alone, or to the Greek, which are reckoned close to one another, so as to deny the universality of nature. The soul does not fall from heaven to Latins or to Argives alone. For all peoples, one man is the name, one soul, varied voice, one spirit, varied sound; to each people its own tongue, but the matter of speech is common. God is everywhere, and the goodness of God is everywhere; the demon is everywhere, and the curse of the demon is everywhere; the invocation of divine judgment is everywhere; death is everywhere, and the consciousness of death is everywhere, and testimony is everywhere.

Every soul proclaims by its own right what is not even permitted to us to murmur. Rightly therefore is every soul both guilty and a witness—guilty of error to the same degree as it is a witness of truth; and it will stand before the courts of God on the day of judgment, having nothing to say. You proclaimed God, and did not seek him; you abominated demons, and worshipped them; you appealed to the judgment of God, and did not believe it existed; you presumed upon the punishments of the underworld, and took no precaution against them; you had a taste for the Christian name, and persecuted the Christian.