ought to have seen the Lord, he is no doubt thinking of texts like Mk 8:18: Having eyes, do you
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Tertullian 's beliefthat the soul is a body
25, 41 . Finally, Tertullian43 believed the soul is a body simply because he was unable to conceive its being incorporeal, and therefore feared it would be nothing, if it were not a body; and so he was also incapable of having any different idea about God. But he was certainly clear-sighted enough to be over come by the truth from time to time against his own opinion. What after all could be truer that what he says in one place: Every bodily thing is passible?44 So he ought to have changed the statement in which he had said a little earlier on that God too is a body. l cannot, 1 mean to say, imagine that he was so out of his senses as to believe God also to be passible by nature, so that one would have to believe that Christ is subject to suffering and change not only in the flesh, and not only in flesh and soul, but also as the Word through which all things were made—far be such a thought from any Christian heart!
Again, when he would also give the soul an airy, luminous color, he came to the senses with which he attempted to equip it organ by organ like a body, and he said: "Here there will be an inner, and also an outer man, one man doubled, that inner man too having his eyes and ears, with which the people ought to have seen and heard the Lord, having other organs too which he makes use of in his thoughts and performs with in dreams."45
42. There you have the kind ofears and the kind ofeyes with which the people ought to have heard and seen God—the kind the soul performs with in dreams—when if anybody had seen Tertullian in a dream, he himself would never say that he had been seen by that person and had a talk with him, not having seen him in his turn himself! Lastly, if the soul sees itself in dreams, while it wanders about through the various images that it sees, and while its body and its organs, of course, are all lying in one place, has anyone ever seen it in dreams having an airy, luminous color? Well yes, it is possible to see this too; but God forbid that when you wake up you should believe it is really like that; otherwise, when you see yourselfdifferently, which happens rather more frequently, either your soul will have been altered, or else not even then is the substance of the soul being seen, but an incorporeal image of the body, which as in waking thought is formed in a wonderful manner. Did any Ethiopian, for example, ever see himself in dreams as anything but black? Or if he did ever see himselfas ofanother color,
43. The first African theologian, and the first significant Christian author to write in Latin; born in Carthage, the son of a Roman centurion, about 155, died in Rome shortly after 220. 44. On the Soul 7. 45. On the Soul 9. As regards the eyes and ears which the inner man has, and with which the people ought to have seen the Lord, he is no doubt thinking of texts like Mk 8:18: Having eyes, do you not see, and having ears, do you not hear?, and Mk 4:23; Ifanyone has ears to hear, let him hear. As for the other organs the inner man or soul is equipped with, he specifically mentions the tongue of the rich man in hell, the finger of Lazarus and the bosom of Abraham, Lk
16:19-31.