VI continued. Authorities for the division; sensitive part's abolition is the second plague (Prudentius, Plutarch, Antoninus)

This division is supported by Irenaeus (book 5, chapter 6), Chrysostom (homily 13 on Romans), Tertullian at the beginning of On the Trinity, and Athenagoras On the Resurrection. If this opinion is true, the solution is easy of all things that are brought from the Scriptures against the immortality of the mind, and the ancients' soul-sleep, well understood, will contain not much absurdity — the sensitive soul, not the rational, passing as it were into the matter of the soul, as bodies are born from bodies. Concerning which matter Prudentius among the ancients thus: Dry soil receives the body; the breeze snatches the moisture of the soul. An oracle in Pausanias says the soul is carried into the ether. So Psellus: the Greeks carry the soul atermon to the sublunary elements; the Chaldeans even above the moon; but Christians even make it die. Plutarch, On the Face in the Moon's Orb (p. 174): The element of souls, he says, is the moon, for they are dissolved into it just as the bodies of the dead return into the earth. But the sun receives the mind, which gave it. Finally Antoninus in his book On His Life (p. 36) had drawn from the Stoics that the human being consists of three things — soul, body, and spirit: whence he says the mind is a part of God and therefore returns into heaven; but concerning body and soul he philosophizes much, which we here forbear to review. Therefore the abolition of the sensible part is the other plague and mutation of each soul departing from its body, nor indeed will this seem light to him who considers this complaint of the crowd in Gregory of Nyssa.