3. Though life be a good, it does not belong to all beings. Life
is incomplete for the evil person, as for an eye that does not see
distinctly; neither accomplish their purpose. If, for us, life, though
mingled as it is, be a good, even if an imperfect one, how shall we
continue to assert that death is not an evil? But for whom would it be
an evil? This we must ask because evil must necessarily be an attribute
of somebody. Now there is no more evil for a being which, though
even existing, is deprived of life, any more than for a stone (as
they say). But if, after death, the being still live, if it be still
animate, it will possess good, and so much the more as it exercises
its faculties without the body. If it be united to the universal Soul,
evidently there can be no evil for it, any more than for the gods who
possess good unmingled with evil. Similar is the case of the soul which
preserves her purity, inasmuch as he who loses her finds that life, and
not death, is the real Evil. If there be chastisements in Hades, again
is life an evil for the soul, because she is not pure. If, further, we
define life as the union of the soul with the body, and death as their
separation, the soul can pass through both these conditions (without,
on that account, being unhappy, or losing her hold on the Good).