On the Resurrection of the Dead 21

If good deeds are honored, the body will clearly be wronged: it shared with the soul the labors of what was striven for, but would not share in the honor for the good deeds; and while the soul often obtains pardon for some faults because of the body's want and need, the body itself would be shut out from any share in the good deeds for which it bore the labors of life. And if faults are judged, justice is not done to the soul if it alone pays the penalty for the wrongs it committed when the body troubled it and drew it toward its own desires and movements: sometimes by snatching and stealth, sometimes by a more violent pull, and at other times by the soul's going along with it out of kindness and care for the body's welfare. How is it not unjust for the soul to be judged by itself for things for which, by its own nature, it has no desire, movement, or impulse at all, such as lust, violence, greed, injustice, and the wrongs that go with them? Most such evils arise because human beings do not master the passions that trouble them, and they are troubled by the body's want and need and by their concern and care for the body. For these are the reason for all acquiring, and, before that, for all using; and for marriage too, and for all the actions of life, in and about which we see what is wrong and what is not. Where, then, is the justice in judging the soul alone for things in which the body is the first to be affected and draws the soul into fellow-feeling and partnership in the actions it needs? Desires and pleasures, and fears and griefs as well, in which everything immoderate is liable to judgment, have their movement from the body; how could the sins arising from them, and the punishments for these sins, fall on the soul alone, which by itself neither needs any such thing, nor desires it, nor fears or suffers anything like what a human being naturally suffers? Even if we suppose that the passions belong not to the body alone but to the human being, and rightly say so, since his life is one life made of both, we will surely not say that they belong to the soul, when we consider its own nature purely. If the soul needs no food whatever, it would never desire things it does not need at all in order to exist, nor would it be drawn toward anything it is naturally unfit to use; nor would it grieve at the lack of money or possessions, since none of these has anything to do with it. And if it is above corruption, it fears nothing whatever as destructive of itself: it does not fear famine, disease, maiming, disfigurement, fire, or sword, since it can suffer nothing harmful or painful from these, as neither bodies nor bodily powers touch it at all. If it is absurd to attach the passions to souls as though they were theirs alone, it is utterly unjust and unworthy of God's judgment to lay the sins arising from those passions, and the punishments for them, on souls alone.