Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
Ver. 7. Then shall the dust return to the earth, &c.] What is man, saith Nazianzen, but Nους και χους, soul and soil, breath and body; a puff of wind the one, a pile of dust the other; no solidity in either. Zoroaster and some other ancient heathens imagined that the soul had wings, that, having broken these wings, she fell headlong into the body, and that, recovering her wings again, she flies up to heaven, her original habitation. That of Epicharmus is better to be liked, and comes nearer to the truth here delivered by the Preacher, Coneretum fuit, et discretum est, rediitque unde venerat; terra deorsum, spiritus sursum, - It was together, but is now by death set asunder, and returned to the place whence it came, the earth downward, the spirit upward. See Genesis 2:7, "God made man of the dust of the earth," to note our frailty, vility, and impurity. Lutum enim conspurcat omnia, sic et caro, saith one, - Dirt defiles all things; so doth the flesh. It should seem so, truly, by man's soul, which, coming pure out of God's hands, soon becomes
“ Mens oblita Dei, vitiorumque oblita caeno. ”
Bernard complains, not without just cause, that our souls, by commerce with the flesh, are become fleshly. Sure it is, that by their mutual defilement, corruption is so far rooted in us now, that it is not cleansed out of us by mere death (as is to be seen in Lazarus, and others that died), but by cinerification, or turning of the body to dust and ashes.
The spirit returns to God that gave it.] For it is divinae particula aurae, an immaterial, immortal substance, that after death returns to God, the Fountain of life. The soul moves and guides the body, saith a worthy divine, a as the pilot doth the ship. Now the pilot may be safe, though the ship be split on the rock. And as in a chicken, it grows still, and so the shell breaks and falls off. So it is with the soul; the body hangs on it but as a shell, and when the soul is grown to perfection, it falls away, and the soul returns to the "Father of spirits." Augustine (after Origen) held a long while that the soul was begotten by the parents, as was the body. At length he began to doubt this point, and afterward altered his opinion, confessing inter caetera testimonia hoc esse praecipuum, that among other testimonies this to be the chief, to prove the contrary to that which he had formerly held.
a Dr Preston.