‘I care nothing,’ he said, ‘about Plato or Pythagoras, nor, in fact, about any one at all who holds such opinions. For the truth is in this wise, and you may learn from it. The soul either is life or has life. If then it is life, it would make something else live, which is not itself, as motion also would make something else move rather than itself. And that the soul lives, none would gainsay. But, if it lives, it does not live as being life but as sharing in life, and anything which partakes is other than that of which it partakes. But a soul partakes of life when God wills it to live.
In the same way then it will also not partake (of life) at the moment, whenever that is, that He wishes it not to live. For living is not proper to it as it is to God. But a man does not exist for ever, and as the body is not always connected with the soul, but, when it is necessary for this concord to be broken, the soul forsakes the body and the man is no more, so also, in the same way, when it is necessary for the soul to be no more, the spirit of life departs from it, and the soul is no more, but spontaneously goes back again thither whence it was taken.’