Lactantius — Divine Institutes 2.13

When, therefore, He had first formed the male after His own likeness, then He also fashioned woman after the image of the man himself, that the two by their union might be able to perpetuate their race, and to fill the whole earth with a multitude. But in the making of man himself He concluded and completed the nature of those two materials which we have spoken of as contrary to each other, fire and water. For having made the body, He breathed into it a soul from the vital source of His own Spirit, which is everlasting, that it might bear the similitude of the world itself, which is composed of opposing elements.

For he consists of soul and body, that is, as it were, of heaven and earth: since the soul by which we live, has its origin, as it were, out of heaven from God , the body out of the earth, of the dust of which we have said that it was formed. Empedocles — whom you cannot tell whether to reckon among poets or philosophers , for he wrote in verse respecting the nature of things, as did Lucretius and Varro among the Romans — determined that there were four elements, that is, fire, air, water, and earth; perhaps following Trismegistus, who said that our bodies were composed of these four elements by God , for he said that they contained in themselves something of fire, something of air, something of water, and something of earth, and yet that they were neither fire, nor air, nor water, nor earth.

And these things indeed are not false; for the nature of earth is contained in the flesh, that of moisture in the blood, that of air in the breath, that of fire in the vital heat. But neither can the blood be separated from the body, as moisture is from the earth; nor the vital heat from the breath, as fire from the air: so that of all things only two elements are found, the whole nature of which is included in the formation of our body.

Man, therefore, was made from different and opposite substances, as the world itself was made from light and darkness, from life and death; and he has admonished us that these two things contend against each other in man: so that if the soul , which has its origin from God , gains the mastery, it is immortal , and lives in perpetual light; if, on the other hand, the body shall overpower the soul , and subject it to its dominion, it is in everlasting darkness and death. And the force of this is not that it altogether annihilates the souls of the unrighteous, but subjects them to everlasting punishment. We term that punishment the second death, which is itself also perpetual, as also is immortality . We thus define the first death: Death is the dissolution of the nature of living beings; or thus: Death is the separation of body and soul .