Nine Books on the Nature of Things

Let us turn to particulars and describe the death and mortification of each natural thing: what its death is and how it is mortified. First, human death is undoubtedly nothing but the end of the day’s work, the withdrawal of air, the disappearance of balsam, the extinguishing of the natural light, the great separation of the three substances—body, soul and spirit—and the return to the mother’s womb. Since the natural earthly human is from earth, earth will also be the mother to which that human must return, there to lose the earthly natural flesh and thus be regenerated on the last day in new, heavenly and clarified flesh, as Christ says to Nicodemus when he came to him by night. These words about regeneration must be understood in the manner just described.