XII–XIII. Joys and torments persist until judgment; no benefit after death; no magical return to earth

XII. Neither the joys of the pious nor the torments of the impious are finished: but the status of both remains the same from death until the day of judgment, nor after the soul's exit from the body can humans perceive any benefit by any prudence and study of humans. This from Christ's words in Luke 16:26 Epiphanius gathers (Heresy 59 against the Cathars) and Chrysostom (homily 2 on Lazarus) and the author of Questions and Responses to the Orthodox. So also Cyprian in tract 1 to Demetrianus (folio 32): When departure from here shall have occurred, there is already no place of penitence, no effect of satisfaction. For that reason what Damascene — or whoever else is the writer of the oration concerning those who have departed this life with faith — says, that the soul of Falconilla, although dead without washing and faith, was yet saved by Thecla's prayers: that conflicts with the judgment of the sacred letters and of purer antiquity.

XIII. Nor is return to the lands granted to a soul, from where it has once been carried, by any magical power. Tertullian concludes this from Christ's words already praised, in On the Soul chapter 57: Enough, he says, has the Lord sanctioned in that argument of the resting poor man and the groaning rich man from Abraham's person, that a messenger of the infernal disposition cannot be relegated: which might even then have been permitted, that Moses and the prophets might be believed. But although God's power recalled some into bodies for proofs of his right, it will not therefore be communicated to the faith and boldness of sorceresses, and the deceit of dreams, and the license of poets.