Verses

"Whether Bodily Pain Leads Inevitably to Destruction of the Flesh"
The City of God Against the Pagans, Book XXI, Chapter III
St. Augustine
5th Century

Moreover, while these gainsayers observe that there is now no flesh which can suffer pain and not suffer death, at the same time they fail to observe that there is something greater than the body. Surely the soul itself, by whose presence the body lives and is governed, can both suffer pain and be unable to die. There it is! A thing has been found which is immortal, though it has a sense of pain...but if we were to examine the matter more closely, what is said to be the body's pain belongs rather to the soul. For pain belongs to the soul, not the body, even when the the cause of its pain is derived from the body, when the soul's pain is felt in a place where the body is hurt...thus the soul feel pain with the body in the place where there happens to be a cause of pain. it also suffers alone, though it be dwelling in the body...

It has, indeed, been said by the Platonists that earthly bodies and mortal limbs are the source of the soul's fears, desires, sorrows and joys...but we have answered their argument in the twelfth book of this work, by citing their own statement that even souls cleansed from all contamination with body have a disastrous yearning, whereby "they begin once more to wish to return to bodies." But where there can be desire, surely there can also be pain; indeed, desire frustrated, either by failure to attain its goal or by loss of what it had attained, turns into pain.