The Soul's Testimony

Even now, as the matter refers to your opinion on a point the more closely belonging to you, in so far as it bears on your personal well-being, we maintain that after life has passed away you still remain in existence, and look forward to a day of judgment, and according to your deserts art assigned to misery or bliss, in either way of it for ever; that, to be capable of this, your former substance must needs return to you, the matter and the memory of the very same human being: for neither good nor evil could you feel if you were not endowed again with that sensitive bodily organization, and there would be no grounds for judgment without the presentation of the very person to whom the sufferings of judgment were due.

That Christian view, though much nobler than the Pythagorean, as it does not transfer you into beasts; though more complete than the Platonic, since it endows you again with a body; though more worthy of honour than the Epicurean, as it preserves you from annihilation—yet, because of the name connected with it, it is held to be nothing but vanity and folly, and, as it is called, a mere presumption. But we are not ashamed of ourselves if our presumption is found to have your support.

Well, in the first place, when you speak of one who is dead, you say of him, “Poor man”— poor, surely, not because he has been taken from the good of life, but because he has been given over to punishment and condemnation. But at another time you speak of the dead as free from trouble; you profess to think life a burden, and death a blessing. You are wont, too, to speak of the dead as in repose, when, returning to their graves beyond the city gates with food and dainties, you are wont to present offerings to yourself rather than to them; or when, coming from the graves again, you are staggering under the effects of wine.

But I want your sober opinion. You call the dead poor when you speak your own thoughts, when you are at a distance from them. For at their feast, where in a sense they are present and recline along with you, it would never do to cast reproach upon their lot. You can not but adulate those for whose sake you are feasting it so sumptuously. Do you then speak of him as poor who feels not? How happens it that you curse as one capable of suffering from your curse, the man whose memory comes back on you with the sting in it of some old injury?

It is your imprecation that “the earth may lie heavy on him,” and that there may be trouble “to his ashes in the realm of the dead.” In like manner, in your kindly feeling to him to whom you are indebted for favours, you entreat “repose to his bones and ashes,” and your desire is that among the dead he may “have pleasant rest.” If you have no power of suffering after death, if no feeling remains—if, in a word, severance from the body is the annihilation of you, what makes you lie against yourself, as if you could suffer in another state?

Nay, why do you fear death at all? There is nothing after death to be feared, if there is nothing to be felt. For though it may be said that death is dreadful not for anything it threatens afterwards, but because it deprives us of the good of life; yet, on the other hand, as it puts an end to life's discomforts, which are far more numerous, death's terrors are mitigated by a gain that more than outweighs the loss. And there is no occasion to be troubled about a loss of good things, which is amply made up for by so great a blessing as relief from every trouble.

There is nothing dreadful in that which delivers from all that is to be dreaded. If you shrink from giving up life because your experience of it has been sweet, at any rate there is no need to be in any alarm about death if you have no knowledge that it is evil. Your dread of it is the proof that you are aware of its evil. You would never think it evil— you would have no fear of it at all— if you were not sure that after it there is something to make it evil, and so a thing of terror. Let us leave unnoted at this time that natural way of fearing death.

It is a poor thing for any one to fear what is inevitable. I take up the other side, and argue on the ground of a joyful hope beyond our term of earthly life; for desire of posthumous fame is with almost every class an inborn thing. I have not time to speak of the Curtii, and the Reguli, or the brave men of Greece, who afford us innumerable cases of death despised for after renown. Who at this day is without the desire that he may be often remembered when he is dead? Who does not give all endeavour to preserve his name by works of literature, or by the simple glory of his virtues, or by the splendour even of his tomb?

How is it the nature of the soul to have these posthumous ambitions and with such amazing effort to prepare the things it can only use after decease? It would care nothing about the future, if the future were quite unknown to it. But perhaps you think yourself surer, after your exit from the body, of continuing still to feel, than of any future resurrection, which is a doctrine laid at our door as one of our presumptuous suppositions. But it is also the doctrine of the soul; for if any one inquires about a person lately dead as though he were alive, it occurs at once to say, “He has gone.” He is expected to return, then.