Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul 58

So you're asking whether all souls go straight to the underworld? Willingly or not, punishments and refreshments are already happening there. You've got the poor and the rich. I've held something back for this section, so I'll deliver it now, right where it belongs. Why shouldn't you think the soul is both punished and comforted in the underworld while it waits for both judgments, operating under a kind of provisional, candid assessment? You say divine judgment must keep its case intact without any pre-tasting of the sentence. And then there's the resurrection of the flesh, which has to be worked out so the body can share in the works and the rewards. So what happens in the meantime? Do we sleep? Souls don't sleep, not even in the living. Sleep belongs to bodies, and death itself is just sleep's mirror. Or do you think nothing happens in the place where all humanity is dragged and every hope is held in escrow? You imagine judgment is being deliberated, or just beginning, rushed, or served up? Tell me, how monstrously unjust it would be even in the underworld if the guilty are still comfortable there while the innocent get nothing yet. What do you want? An extension after death, with confused hope and uncertain expectation toying with you? Or a reckoning of your life and a sentence already shuddering into place? Does the soul always wait for the body to feel grief or joy? Doesn't it have enough from itself for both kinds of suffering? How often, with the body unharmed, the soul alone is tortured by bile, rage, disgust, often without even knowing why? How often, with the body wrecked, the soul steals a private joy and slips away from the body's demanding company? I'd be lying if the soul weren't accustomed to boasting and rejoicing even in bodily torments—all on its own. Look at Mucius's soul when he thrust his right hand into the flames. Look at Zeno's soul when he walked past Dionysius's tortures. Wild beast bites are decorations of youth, like the bear scars on Cyrus. The soul knows perfectly well how to suffer and rejoice without flesh even in the underworld, because even in unharmed flesh it suffers if it chooses, and in harmed flesh it rejoices if it chooses. If it can do that by its own will in life, how much more by God's judgment after death? But the soul doesn't share all its works with the body's service. Divine scrutiny also pursues solitary thoughts and naked wills: anyone who has looked to lust has already committed adultery in his heart (Matthew 5:28). So it's entirely fitting that the soul be punished even without the body, because it sinned without the body's partnership. Likewise, it will be comforted without the body for pious and benevolent thoughts in which the flesh had no share. What if the soul leads even in carnal matters, the one that conceives, arranges, commands, impels? Even when unwilling, it still handles first what it will do through the body. Conscience is never posterior to the deed. So the proper order requires that the one who is owed the rewards first should weigh them first. In short, once we understand that the prison the Gospel shows is the underworld, and that the final small quadrant where every minor fault is paid off by the resurrection's delay—no one will doubt the soul pays something among the dead, with the fullness of the resurrection preserved through the flesh as well. The Paraclete has urged this most frequently, if anyone has received his sermons through recognition of the promised gifts of the Spirit (John 14:26). For every human opinion about the soul, having met the doctrine of faith, we have satisfied just and necessary curiosity. But for enormous and idle curiosity, it will fall short of learning as much as it pleased to investigate.