Justice requires the body to share in reward and punishment

For when good deeds are honored, the body will clearly be wronged: it shared with the soul in the labors spent on what was pursued, but it does not share in the honor given for what was accomplished. The soul often receives pardon for certain offenses because of the body's lack and need, yet the body itself is shut out from sharing in the rewards for the good deeds—rewards for which it bore the labors together with the soul during life.

And further, when offenses are judged, justice is not preserved for the soul if it alone pays the penalty for what it did wrong when the body was troubling it and dragging it toward its own appetites or movements—sometimes toward seizure and theft, sometimes toward a more violent pulling, and at other times toward a coming together in the way of favor and care for its constitution.

Or how is it not unjust for the soul to be judged by itself for things for which it has no appetite, no movement, no impulse at all according to its own nature—such as lust, violence, greed, injustice, and the wrongs that follow from these? For if most such evils arise because human beings do not master the passions that trouble them, and they are troubled by the body's lack and need and by the effort and care devoted to it—since for the sake of these come all possessions and, before possessions, their use, and also marriage and all the actions of life, in which and around which both what is faulty and what is not are observed—where is the justice in this: the body first suffers and drags the soul into sympathy and partnership in the actions it needs, yet the soul alone is judged? The appetites and pleasures, and also fears and griefs—on which every excess is liable to punishment—have their movement from the body, but the sins arising from these and the punishments for the sins are carried to the soul alone, which neither needs any such thing nor desires it nor fears or suffers anything of the sort by itself, the sort of thing a human being naturally suffers.

But even if we grant that the passions belong not to the body alone but to the human being—and we say this rightly, because his life is one made from both—we certainly will not say that these things belong to the soul, whenever we examine its own nature purely. For if it is entirely without need of all food, it would never desire those things it in no way needs for its existence, nor would it set out toward any of those things it is not at all naturally suited to use. Nor would it grieve over a lack of money or possessions, since these do not belong to it at all.

And if it is superior to corruption, it fears nothing whatever as destructive of itself. For it does not fear hunger, disease, mutilation, injury, fire, or iron, since it cannot suffer anything harmful or painful from these; neither bodies nor bodily powers touch it at all.

But if attaching the passions to souls as proper to them is absurd, then carrying the sins that come from these and the punishments for them to the souls alone is surpassingly unjust and unworthy of the judgment of God.