Immortality of the Spirit?

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Assyrian412

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I was wondering if anybody could provide me quotes from Church Fathers before Augustine to prove the natural immortality of the spirit.

There seems to be an abundance of literature on the bodily resurrection of the dead and the final judgement but I can’t seem to find any Fathers writing about Christians’ spirit being taken into heaven after death.
 
I appreciate your reply but their spirits ascending into heaven is debatable and does not really address my original post. Elijah, from my understanding, never died; his spirit was never separated from his body.

Moses’ body was contested over by Michael and Satan, which tells us that there was at least something going on with his body. (Jude 9)

I’m speaking about our spirits.

I’m just interested in finding quotes from the early Fathers before Augustine! Thanks 😃
 
Fair enough, how about the good thief, I don’t think Jesus could have been joking at that time when He was on the cross and replied “today you’ll be with me in paradise”. TODAY could not mean until the last judgement. Then there is the parable about the rich man that Jesus spoke of with people with Abraham and the rich men suffering thirst. These people were not in this world, they were on the spirit only.
 
Tertullian says a lot on the immortality of the soul in “A Treatise on the Soul.”

A short excerpt:
In like manner, the immortality of the soul precludes belief in the theory that sleep is an intermission of the animal spirit, or an indigence of the spirit, or a separation of the (soul’s) connatural spirit. The soul perishes if it undergoes diminution or intermission. Our only resource, indeed, is to agree with the Stoics, by determining the soul to be a temporary suspension of the activity of the senses, procuring rest for the body only, not for the soul also. For the soul, as being always in motion, and always active, never succumbs to rest—a condition which is alien to immortality: for nothing immortal admits any end to its operation; but sleep is an end of operation. It is indeed on the body, which is subject to mortality, and on the body alone, that sleep graciously bestows a cessation from work.
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Now, I don’t think everything Tertullian says in this work is 100% consistent with Church teaching, but clearly the soul is considered immortal.

We see that the soul is immortal in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, in Jesus telling the Pharisees that God is the God of the living, not the dead, in John’s Revelation with the martyrs and saints worshipping God… all works of early Christianity.
 
Thanks for your answers everyone, I think I’ve thought of something related that is troubling me more; I’m going to ask it on a separate thread! Feel free to come give me some more good answers!
 
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