About the testimony of the soul

“On the Witness of the Soul” is a short (6 chapters) but meaningful treatise, which is a disclosure of the idea expressed in “Apologetics” (chapter 17) that the soul by nature knows the truths preached by Christianity (the soul is by nature Christian). The work was written in 197. Since the testimony of pagan philosophers and poets did not lead to the adoption of the Christian religion, Tertullian calls on a new witness - the human soul and turns to its inner consciousness of God. It testifies to the existence of one God (“what God will give”, “if God wills”, “God will reward”), the existence of demons (to express contempt he uses the name of the demon, Satan), his own immortality (fear of death and judgment, expectations of punishment and bliss), etc. This witness of the soul is simple and natural and therefore divine. The soul, despite the machinations of its enemy, remembers its Creator, His goodness and commandments. Therefore, her testimony must be taken with confidence. *The title of the work in Latin is De testimonio animae. If anyone wishes to borrow evidence of Christian truth from all the most commonly used writings of philosophers or poets or any other teachers of pagan science and wisdom, in order to prove with their own writings that its enemies and persecutors are guilty of their errors and injustice towards us; then for this he needs great curiosity and even greater memory. Some of our people, who have preserved both the works of curiosity and the strength of memory in relation to previous literature, have actually compiled small works for this purpose. They separately speak and testify to the beginning, origin, teaching and evidence of those opinions, from which it can be seen that we have not accepted anything new or monstrous, regarding which general and domestic literature would not agree with us, although we have discarded some errors and introduced some truth. But incredible human stupidity does not trust even those of its mentors, who in other matters are considered the most honest and omniscient people, as soon as they provide material for Christian apology. Poets are then deceitful when they attribute human passions to the gods and decorate them with plots. Philosophers are then stupid when they knock on the doors of truth. Whoever proclaims a teaching close to Christianity will only be considered wise and prudent until then; for if he acquires any wisdom and prudence, either by rejecting religious ceremonies, or by condemning this age, then he will be recognized as a Christian. Therefore, we will have nothing in common with the writings and teachings about perverse happiness, which is believed more in the darkness of lies than in the light of truth. Let them find out if anyone has preached about the one and only God. But nothing at all has been communicated that would make Christians impossible to blame, and what is communicated is not known to everyone, and those who know do not hope to agree. Thus, people are removed from agreeing with our writings, which no one turns to except the one who has already become a Christian. I call upon a new witness, but he is more famous than any literature, more effective than any doctrine, more widespread than any books, more than any man; he is everything that makes up man. Soul! stand in the middle. If you are divine and eternal, as most philosophers believe, then you will certainly not lie. If you are not divine, since you are mortal, which only Epicurus thinks, then you will certainly not have to lie. Did you come from heaven, or did you appear from the earth? Are you made of numbers or of atoms? Do you begin with the body, or do you enter the body after? Why and how do you make a person, a rational being, capable of feeling and knowing? But I do not call you the one who spews wisdom, having been educated in schools, worked in libraries, satiated in academies and attic porticos. I am addressing you as simple, rude, uneducated, ignorant, as you are among those who have only you, as you are on the streets, at crossroads, in factories. I need your ignorance because no one believes your little knowledge. I demand from you that you bring with you into a person, to feel that you have learned either from yourself or from some of your Creator. You, as I know. not a Christian; for the soul usually becomes a Christian, and is not born. However, Christians now demand testimony from you, a stranger to us, against yours, so that they may at least be ashamed of you, because they hate us and laugh at us for what your own consciousness testifies to. They don’t like us because we preach that there is only one God, that this name belongs to Him alone, that everything came from Him and everything is subordinated to Him. If you, soul, know this, then testify. After all, we hear that you preach openly and with complete freedom, which we do not have, at home and outside the house like this: “what God will give, and if God wills.” With these words you express that there is Someone, and you acknowledge all power to the One on whose will you direct your gaze; At the same time, you also assert that there are no other gods, since you call them by their proper names: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Minerva. After all, you say that there is only one God and you only call Him God. Although you sometimes call those gods, it seems to me that you use this name as if it were someone else’s and as if borrowed. Say in nature that God whom we preach; and it is not hidden from you. “God is good, God does good, and man is evil.” With this contrast you indirectly and covertly indicate that a person is evil because he has moved away from the good God. Also, what we consider to be the most important dogma of our teaching and life, namely, that the God of goodness and kindness is the source of blessing, you so readily say, as a Christian should say it: “God will bless you.” But when you exchange God’s blessing for a curse, then in agreement with us you acknowledge that all His power is over us. There are those who, although they do not reject God, do not believe that He is omniscient, governs everything and judges everyone, for which we, of course, are most despised, since we hasten to accept this teaching, fearing the foretold judgment. They honor God in such a way that they free Him from the worries of industry and from the labors of punishment. They do not even attribute anger to Him. For if God, they say, is angry, then He is subject to destruction and suffering. And what suffers and what is destroyed can perish, which is unacceptable in God. But admitting elsewhere that the soul is divine, and that it came from God, they contradict the above opinion according to the testimony of the soul itself. For if the soul is either divine or given by God, then it undoubtedly knows its Giver; and if she knows, then, of course, she fears Him, such a great Giver. How can she not be afraid of Him from Whom she wants benevolence rather than anger? So, where does the soul’s natural fear of God come from if God does not know wrath? How does He who knows no insults arouse fear? What is there to be afraid of if not anger? Where does anger come from if not from the right to punish? Where does the right to punish come from, if not from the court? Where does the court come from if it comes from the authorities? Who owns power if not God alone? Therefore, you, soul, have to say the following at home and outside of home, without any irony and without any hesitation, in a clear conscience: “God sees everything, I hand it over to God, God will reward, God will be the judge between us.” Where did you get this from, you are not a Christian. You, even adorned with the crown-shaped bandage of Ceres, dressed in the light red cloak of Saturn, in the linen shirt of Isis, often tearfully ask God, the Judge, in the very churches. You stand before Aesculapius, decorate the copper Juno, put a black helmet on Minerva, and do not call any of the gods present as a witness. On your forum you call upon a foreign Judge, in your churches you tolerate another God. O testimony of the truth, which makes you a witness of Christians in the face of the demons themselves! In fact, when we assert that demons exist, we do not seem to prove this by expelling them from bodies alone, which is ridiculed by some follower of Chrysippus. That they exist and arouse self-loathing is shown by your curses. You call a demon a person who is either dirty, or evil, or proud, or who has some kind of defect that we attribute to demons, or who is impudent to the point that he arouses inevitable hatred towards himself. You declare Satan in every disgust, in every contempt, in every curse. We call him the messenger of evil, the culprit of every error, the corrupter of the whole world. From the very beginning, man was deceived by him, as a result of which he transgressed the commandment of God, and therefore suffered death, and then the entire human race that descended from him was condemned. Therefore, you feel your corrupter, and although only Christians or some sect of the Lord knows him, he is not unknown to you either, if you hate him. As for your opinion, which is closer to yourself, since it applies to your very position, we now affirm that you are after the end of your life, and that the day of judgment awaits you, that you, in accordance with your merits, will be destined for eternal torment or eternal bliss. To obtain this, you will, of course, be restored to the former substance, matter and memory of the same person, because you cannot feel either evil or good without a body capable of feeling, and judgment cannot have any basis without the representation of the very one who deserved the consequences of the judgment. Although this Christian opinion is much more honorable than the opinion of Pythagoras, since it does not transform you into a beast; although it is more complete than Platonov’s opinion, since it returns to you your dowry, your body; although it is more serious than Epicurus’s opinion, since it protects you from destruction: however, for its name it is considered empty, stupid and, as they say, prejudiced. But we are not ashamed of this if our prejudice agrees with you. For firstly, when you remember a dead person, you call him unhappy, of course, not because he was deprived of the blessings of life, but because he has already been subjected to judgment and punishment. However, sometimes you call the dead free from work. You recognize both the burden of life and the blessing of death. But you call them free from worries when you go beyond the gates with snacks and delicacies to the graves with the goal of making sacrifices for yourself rather than for the dead, or when you return from the graves drunk. I'm asking for your opinion. when you're sober. You call the dead unfortunate when you speak from yourself, when you are far from them. For at their feast, when they seem to be present and recline with you, you cannot condemn their lot. You should flatter those who give you a joyful life. So, do you call someone unhappy who feels nothing? What does it mean that you vilify him (the dead) as a sentient one, when you sarcastically recall some of his misfortunes? You ask for the ashes of his heavy earth and suffering in the underworld. Likewise, to whom you owe gratitude for your good fate, to the bones and ashes of that person you ask for consolation and wish that he would find peace for himself in the underworld. If for you there is no suffering after death, if then there is no feeling, if finally you yourself turn into nothing after leaving the body; then why are you deceiving yourself, as if you could suffer even after that? Why are you afraid of death at all, if you should not be afraid of anything after death, since after death you should not experience anything? For although it can be said that death should be feared not because it threatens anything in the afterlife, but because it deprives the pleasures of life; however, since at the same time you are freed from the disasters of life, of which there are much more, you destroy fear by gaining more than you lose, and therefore you should not be afraid of the loss of goods, since it is rewarded with another, greater benefit, namely: the transformation of disasters. We should not be afraid of that which frees us from all fear. If you are afraid of the end of life because you know that it is the greatest good; then, of course, you should not be afraid of death, which you do not know is evil. And if you're afraid, then you know she's evil. You would not know that she is evil, and would not be afraid of her, if you did not know that there is something after death that makes it so difficult that you are afraid of it. Let us now leave the natural cause of the fear of death. No one should fear what they cannot avoid. I will enter into the debate from the other side, from the side of joyful hope after death. For almost everyone has an innate desire for glory after death. It would be a long story to talk about the Curtii, the Reguli, or the Greek men, whose praises for their contempt of death for the sake of glory in posterity are countless. Who does not even now try to glorify himself after death by preserving his name, either by writings or by praising morality or by the splendor of the tombs themselves? Why does the soul even now have a desire for something that it desires after death, and why does it have a strong desire to prepare something that it will use after separation from the body? Of course, she wouldn't try anything for the future if she didn't know anything about the future. But maybe you know more about the feeling after death than about the resurrection, which has no time to happen, for which we are considered people of prejudice. But this is also what the soul preaches. For if they ask about someone who has long since died as if he were alive, they usually say: “He has already left, but must return.” The more true these testimonies of the soul are, the simpler; the simpler, the more popular; the more popular, the more general; the more general, the more natural; the more natural, the more divine. I don’t think that they could seem stupid and funny to anyone if he reflects on the greatness of nature, by which the dignity of the soul is valued. As much as you give it to the teacher, so much will you award to the student. The teacher is nature, the student is the soul. Everything that she taught or that one learned was communicated by God, the Teacher of the teacher herself. What the soul can imagine about the original Mentor, it is able to recognize in you from the soul that is in you. Feel the soul that makes you feel. Know the prophetess in predictions, the interpreter in signs, the clairvoyant in events. Is it surprising if a soul originating from God communicates prophecies to man? Is it surprising if she knows the One from whom she came? She, despite the machinations of her enemy, remembers both her Creator, and His goodness and commandments, and her end, and her enemy himself. Is it surprising if she, descended from God, preaches what God has made known to his own? But who will think that such expressions of the soul are not the instructions of nature and are not the silent messages of the natural and innate conscience; he, of course, will say that they are used as a result of popular opinions, gleaned from publicly accessible works. Without a doubt, the soul is older than the letter, and speech is older than the book, and thought is older than the word, and man himself is older than the philosopher and poet. Is it really necessary to believe that before the advent of literature and before its spread, people were dumb in relation to this kind of expression? No one spoke about God and His goodness, about death, about the underworld. The speech, I suppose, was poor; on the contrary, there could not even be any speech, since then there was not yet that without which even now it cannot be good, and abundant, and reasonable, if that which is now so easy, so constant, so close, as if born on the lips, did not exist before writings appeared in the world, before, I believe, Mercury was born. But how, I ask, did the writings themselves come to know and spread in speech the use of that which no mind has ever imagined, no tongue has ever uttered, no ear has ever heard? Of course, the Divine Scripture, which we have and the Jews, on whose fruitful olive tree we are grafted, existed much earlier than pagan writings of little antiquity, as we showed in our place to prove its reliability. Therefore, if the soul borrowed those sayings from the works, then without a doubt from ours, and not from yours, because the most ancient works are more capable of teaching the soul than the later ones, which themselves expected edification from the first. But let us assume that the soul is instructed by your writings, but its instructions must relate to the original source, and everything belongs to us that you managed to take from us and pass on to others. But since this is so, it does not make much difference whether the knowledge of the soul came from God or from the writings of God. Why do you, man, want those expressions to come from your human writings for general and common use? So, believe your writings and especially our divine ones. Trust also nature for the sake of the free confession of the soul itself. Which of these sisters of truth you consider more true, choose that one. If you doubt your writings, then neither God nor nature will deceive you. In order for you to believe both God and nature, then trust your soul, and then it will happen that you will believe in yourself. She is reliable, whom you value as much as she values ​​you, to whom you belong entirely, who is everything to you, without whom you can neither live nor die, for whose sake you despise God. For since you are afraid to become a Christian, then ask her. Why does she say the name of God while idolizing others? Why does she, when cursing spirits, call them demons? Why does she turn to heaven for evidence and to earth for curses? Why does she serve in one place and look for a protector in another? Why does she judge the dead? Why does she use the words of Christians whom she does not want to listen to or see? Why did she either give us these words or receive them from us? Why did she either teach or learn? You should consider the agreement of teaching with such disagreement in life suspicious. You are stupid if you begin to attribute this only to Latin or Greek languages, which are considered related to each other, denying the universality of nature. The soul descended from heaven not only for the Latins and the Greeks. All nations are one person, different names; one soul, different words; one spirit, different sounds; Every nation has its own language, but the essence of language is universal. God is everywhere and God’s goodness is everywhere; everywhere there is a demon and everywhere a demon's curse; everywhere the invocation of God's judgment; everywhere is death and everywhere is the writing of death and everywhere is evidence. Every soul, by its own right, declares what we are not allowed to say a word about. So, in justice, every soul is both a criminal and a witness, and as much a criminal of error as she is a witness of truth, and on that day of judgment she will stand before the throne of God and will have nothing to say. You preached God and did not seek Him; she abhorred demons and worshiped them; called for the judgment of God and did not believe in it; imagined the torments of hell and was not afraid of them; understood the Christian name and pursued the Christian name. You might be interested in: