The Testimony of the Soul 4

Now as to the opinion of yours that is more necessary, inasmuch as it concerns your very state: we affirm that you remain after the end of life and await the day of judgment, and according to your deserts are assigned either to torment or to refreshment, both everlasting. To bear these, your former substance, and the matter and memory of the same person, must necessarily return to you, both because you could feel nothing evil or good without the faculty of the flesh that can suffer, and because there is no reason for judgment without the presence of the very one who deserved 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 even gives back to you the dowry of the body; though weightier than the Epicurean, which defends you from destruction: yet because of its name it is reckoned mere vanity and stupidity and, as they say, presumption. But we do not blush if our presumption will be yours too. First, when you remember someone who has died, you call him “poor fellow,” certainly not as one snatched from the good of life, but as one already assigned to punishment and judgment. At other times, however, you call the dead “free from care.” You profess both the trouble of life and the benefit of death. You call them “free from care,” moreover, when now and then you go out beyond the gate with delicacies and dainties, making an offering rather to yourself at the tombs, or return from the tombs somewhat the worse for drink. But I require your sober opinion. You call the dead “poor fellows” when you speak from your own mind, when you are far from them. For at their banquet, as though they were present and reclining with you, you could not reproach them with their lot; you have to flatter those on whose account you live more merrily. Do you then call him “poor fellow” who feels nothing? What of the fact that you curse him as one who feels, when you recall his memory with the sting of some offense? You pray that the earth may lie heavy on him, and torment in the underworld for his ashes. Likewise, on the good side, for one to whom you owe thanks, you pray refreshment for his bones and ashes, and desire that he may rest well in the underworld. If there is no suffering for you after death, if there is no persistence of sensation, if in short you are nothing once you have left the body, why do you lie against yourself, as if you could suffer anything further? Indeed, why do you fear death at all, if there is nothing for you to fear after death, since there is nothing to experience after death? For even if it can be said that death is feared not because it threatens anything further but because it cuts off the advantage of life, yet since you likewise leave behind the far more numerous disadvantages of life, you dissolve the fear by gaining the weightier part, and the loss of goods is no longer to be feared, being balanced by another good, namely peace from troubles. What frees us from everything to be feared is not to be feared. If you fear to depart from life because you know it to be very good, surely you ought not to fear death, which you do not know to be bad. But when you fear it, you know it is bad. And you would not know it to be bad, nor fear it, unless you knew that there is something after death that makes it bad, so that you fear it. Let us leave aside now the natural way of fearing death: let no one fear what he cannot escape. From the other side I engage the more joyful hope after death. For in almost all there is an inborn desire for fame after death. It would take long to recount the Curtii and the Reguli, or the Greek men, whose praises for despising death for the sake of posthumous fame are innumerable. Who today is not so eager to have his memory often recalled after death that he preserves his name either by works of literature or by the simple praise of his character or by the display of his very tomb? Whence does the soul today aim at something it wants after death and prepare so earnestly what it will enjoy after its departure? It would certainly care nothing about the future if it knew nothing about the future. But perhaps you are surer about sensation after your departure than about the resurrection some day, of which we are branded presumptuous champions. Yet this too is proclaimed by the soul. For if anyone asks about someone long dead as if he were alive, it comes readily to hand to say, “He has gone, and he must come back.”