Letters 165.1–166.17

At last I have received a letter from your Unanimity from Africa, and I do not regret the shamelessness with which, while you were silent, I frequently pressed my letters on you, so that I might deserve a reply and learn that you are safe not from the reports of others but above all from your own words. About the state of the soul, I remember your little question, or rather the very great question of the church: whether it fell from heaven, as the philosopher Pythagoras and all the Platonists and Origen think; or is an emanation of the substance of God, as the Stoics, Mani, and the Spanish heresy of Priscillian suppose; or whether souls are kept in a treasury of God, created long ago, as certain churchmen confidently hold by a foolish persuasion; or are made by God daily and sent into bodies, according to what is written in the gospel, "My Father is working until now, and I am working"; or certainly are by transmission, as Tertullian, Apollinaris, and the greater part of the Westerners hold, so that, as body is born from body, so soul is born from soul, and subsists in a condition like that of the brute animals. What I thought on this, I know I wrote long ago in my little works against Rufinus, against the booklet which he gave to Anastasius of holy memory, bishop of the Roman church, in which, with a slippery and crafty, or rather foolish, confession, while trying to make sport of the simplicity of his hearers, he made sport of his own faith, or rather faithlessness. I think your holy relative Oceanus has those books; for they were published long ago, refuting the many slanders of Rufinus's books against us. Certainly you have there the holy and learned man, Bishop Augustine, who can teach you with a living voice, as they say, and explain his opinion, or rather through himself ours.

I long ago wished to undertake the volume of Ezekiel and fulfill a promise very often made to studious readers; but at the very beginning of dictating, my mind was so confounded by the devastation of the western provinces and above all of the city of Rome that, as the common proverb says, I did not know even my own name; and I was long silent, knowing that it was a time for tears. But this year, when I had finished three books, a sudden onslaught of the barbarians, of whom your Virgil says, "and the Barcaei raging far and wide," and holy Scripture of Ishmael, "He shall dwell over against all his brothers," so overran the borders of Egypt, Palestine, Phoenicia, and Syria, like a torrent sweeping all before it, that by the mercy of Christ we could scarcely escape their hands. But if, as the famous orator says, laws are silent amid arms, how much more the study of the Scriptures, which needs a multitude of books, silence, and the diligence of copyists, and, what is most essential, security and leisure for those who dictate! I have therefore sent two books to my holy daughter Fabiola, copies of which you can borrow from her if you wish; for owing to the shortness of time I could not have others written out. When you read them and see the entrance halls, it will be easy to guess what the house itself will be like. But I trust in the mercy of God, who helped us in the very difficult beginning of the aforesaid work, that he will help also in the last parts of the prophet, in which the wars of Gog and Magog are narrated, and in the final parts, in which the building, variety, and measurement of the most sacred and inexplicable temple are described.

Our holy brother Oceanus, to whom you wish to be commended, is so great and of such a kind, and so learned in the law of the Lord, that without our asking he can instruct you and explain our opinion on all questions of the Scriptures, according to the measure of our common understanding. May Christ our God, the Almighty, keep you safe and flourishing to a long age, truly holy lords.

I have asked, and I ask, our God, who has called us into his kingdom and glory, that he may will this letter which I write to you, holy brother Jerome, consulting you about things I do not know, to be fruitful for us. For although I consult you as one much older than I am, I too am already an old man; but for learning what is needful no age can seem to me too late, because, though it befits old men more to teach than to learn, it befits them more to learn than to be ignorant of what they should teach. Nothing indeed do I bear more grievously in all my difficulties, which I suffer in the hardest questions, than the absence of your love at so great a distance, so that I can scarcely send my letters or receive yours at intervals not of days, not of months, but of several years; whereas, if it were possible, I would wish to have you present every day, to talk with you about whatever I wished. Yet I ought not on that account to fail to do what I could, even if I could not do all that I wished.

Behold, there has come to me a religious young man, a brother in Catholic peace, a son in age, in honor our fellow presbyter, Orosius, alert in mind, ready in speech, burning with zeal, desiring to be a useful vessel in the house of the Lord for refuting the false and pernicious doctrines which have slaughtered the souls of the Spaniards far more unhappily than the barbarian sword their bodies. For he hastened from there, from the shore of the Ocean, all the way to us, roused by the report that he could hear from me whatever he wished about the things he wished to know. And his coming has not been without some fruit: first, that he should not believe much of the report about me; then, I taught the man what I could, and, as for what I could not, I told him where he could learn it and urged him to go to you. When he accepted this counsel or instruction of mine willingly and obediently, I asked him, on his way back from you, to return home by way of us. Holding him to this promise, I believed that an opportunity had been granted me by the Lord to write to you about the things I desire to know through you. For I was looking for someone to send to you, and no one suitable readily occurred to me, both in faithfulness in acting, readiness in obeying, and experience in traveling. When, then, I had tested this young man, I could not doubt that he was just the kind of man I was asking the Lord for.

Receive, then, what I ask you not to mind opening and discussing for me. The question about the soul troubles many, among whom I confess that I too am. For I shall not be silent about what I hold most firmly about the soul; then I shall add what I still wish to have explained to me. The soul of man is immortal according to a certain manner of its own; for it is not immortal in every way, as God is, of whom it was said that he alone has immortality; for holy Scripture mentions many deaths of the soul, whence the saying: "Let the dead bury their own dead." But because it dies, estranged from the life of God, in such a way that it does not altogether cease to live in its own nature, it is found mortal for some reason in such a way that it is also not without reason called immortal. The soul is not a part of God. For if it were, it would be in every way unchangeable and incorruptible; and if it were, it would neither fall off to worse nor advance to better, nor would it either begin to have in itself anything it did not have or cease to have what it had, as far as its own affections are concerned. How differently it actually is needs no outside testimony; whoever pays attention to himself recognizes it. It is vainly said by those who want the soul to be a part of God that this stain and baseness of it which we see in the most wicked people, and this weakness and sickness which we feel in all people, come to it not from itself but from the body. What does it matter from where it falls sick, when, if it were unchangeable, it could not fall sick from anywhere? For what is truly unchangeable and incorruptible cannot be changed or corrupted by the approach of anything; otherwise not only Achilles, as the tales say, but all flesh would be invulnerable, if no mishap befell it. A nature, therefore, is not unchangeable which is changeable in some way, from some cause, in some part. But it is wicked to believe God to be anything but truly and supremely unchangeable. The soul, therefore, is not a part of God.

That the soul is also incorporeal, although this can be hard to persuade slower minds of, I confess I am persuaded. But lest I either needlessly start or deservedly suffer a dispute about a word (since, when the thing is agreed, there is no need to fight over the name): if every substance or essence, or whatever more fittingly names that which in some way exists in itself, is a body, then the soul is a body. Likewise, if one chooses to call incorporeal only that nature which is supremely unchangeable and everywhere whole, then the soul is a body, since it is not anything of that kind. But if nothing is a body except what is so placed or moved through a space of place, with some length, breadth, and height, that it occupies a larger place with a larger part of itself and a smaller with a smaller, and is less in a part than in the whole, then the soul is not a body. For it extends through the whole body which it animates, not by local diffusion but by a certain vital tension; for it is present whole at once through all its particles, not less in the smaller and greater in the larger, but more intensely in some places and more slackly in others, and it is whole in all and whole in each. For otherwise it would not perceive as a whole what it perceives in not the whole body; for when something touches the living flesh at a tiny point, although that place is not only not the whole body but scarcely seems to be in the body, it is nevertheless not hidden from the whole soul; nor does what is felt run through all parts of the body, but it is felt only where it happens. How, then, does what does not happen in the whole at once reach the whole soul, except that the soul is whole also where it happens, and does not desert the rest to be whole there? For those other parts too live by its presence, where nothing of the kind has happened. And if this did happen there too, and both happened at once, both alike would at once be known to the whole soul. Accordingly, it could not be whole at once both in all and in each of the particles of its body, if it were diffused through them in the way we see bodies diffused through spaces of places, occupying smaller spaces with their smaller parts and larger with larger. Therefore, if the soul is to be called a body, it is certainly not a body such as earth is, nor such as water, air, or ether. For all such things are greater in greater places and smaller in smaller, and none of them is present whole in any part of itself; but as there are parts of places, so they are occupied by parts of bodies. Hence it is understood that the soul, whether it is to be called body or incorporeal, has a certain nature of its own, created of a substance more excellent than all these elements of the world's mass, which cannot truly be thought of in any fantasy of bodily images which we perceive through the senses of the flesh, but is understood by the mind and felt by life. I say these things not to teach you what you know, but to make plain what I hold most firmly about the soul, lest anyone, when I come to the things I ask, should think that I hold nothing about the soul either by knowledge or by faith.

I am certain also that the soul fell into sin through no fault of God, no necessity of God or of its own, but by its own will; and that it cannot be freed from the body of this death either by the power of its own will, as though sufficient for this, or by the death of the body itself, but by the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord; and that there is absolutely no soul in the human race which does not need for its liberation the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. And whatever soul has gone out of the body, at any age of the body, without the grace of the mediator and his sacrament, will be in punishment and at the last judgment will receive its body back for punishment. But if, after the human generation which came about from Adam, it is regenerated in Christ, belonging to his fellowship, it will both have rest after the death of the body and receive the body back for glory. These are the things I hold most firmly about the soul.

Now hear, I beg you, what I ask, and do not despise me; so may he not despise you who deigned to be despised for us. I ask where the soul contracted the guilt by which it is dragged into condemnation, even that of an infant overtaken by death, if the grace of Christ has not come to its aid through the sacrament by which even little ones are baptized. For you are not one of those who have lately begun to chatter certain novelties, saying that there is no guilt drawn from Adam to be dissolved in an infant by baptism. If I knew that you held that, or rather, if I did not know that you do not hold it, I would by no means ask this of you or think it should be asked. But since we hold your opinion on this matter, in harmony with the most firmly founded Catholic faith, by which, refuting the empty talk of Jovinian, you brought forward the testimony from the book of Job, "No one is clean in your sight, not even an infant whose life on earth is one day," and then added, "and we are held guilty in the likeness of Adam's transgression"; and your book on the prophet Jonah declares this quite remarkably and clearly, where you said that the little ones were rightly compelled to fast on account of original sin itself; I not unfittingly ask you where the soul contracted this guilt, from which it must be freed even at that age through the sacrament of Christian grace.

Some years ago, when I was writing certain books on free will, which have gone out into many hands and are held by very many, I thought that the four opinions about the incarnation of the soul (whether the others are propagated from that one which was given to the first man; or new souls are made even now for each individual; or souls already existing somewhere are either sent by God or slip of their own accord into bodies) should be treated in such a way that, whichever of them was true, it would not hinder my purpose, by which I was then acting with all the strength I could against those who try to introduce a nature of evil endowed with its own principle against God, that is, against the Manichaeans; for I had not yet heard anything of the Priscillianists, who fabricate blasphemies not very different from theirs. That is why I did not add the fifth opinion, which you mentioned among the others in your letter (so as not to pass over any) where, when asked about this question, you wrote back to Marcellinus, a man of religious memory and most dear to us in the love of Christ, namely that the soul is a part of God: first, because when this is asked, the question is not about its incarnation but about its nature; second, because this is what those held against whom I was acting, and I was chiefly concerned to separate the blameless and inviolable nature of the Creator from the faults and stain of the creature, since they contend that the very substance of the good God, in the part in which it was captured, was corrupted, oppressed, and brought to the necessity of sinning by the substance of evil, to which they attribute its own principle and princes. Setting aside, then, this error of a heretical opinion, I wish to know which of the four remaining opinions should be chosen. For whichever is to be chosen, God forbid that it should attack this faith of which we are certain: that every soul, even of a little infant, needs liberation from the bond of sin, and that there is none except through Jesus Christ and him crucified.

To be brief, then: you certainly hold that God makes individual souls even now for individuals at birth. Lest it be objected to this opinion that God completed all creatures on the sixth day and rested on the seventh, you bring forward the testimony from the gospel: "My Father is working until now." For so you wrote to Marcellinus, in which letter you deigned most kindly to mention me too, saying that he had me here in Africa, who could more easily explain this opinion to him. If I could have done so, he would not have asked it of you, placed so far away, if indeed he wrote to you from Africa. For when he wrote I do not know; I only know that he was well aware of my hesitation on this matter, which is why he wished to do it without consulting me. Although, even if he had consulted me, I would rather have encouraged him and thanked him, since it could have been shared with all of us, had you not preferred to write back briefly rather than to answer, I believe so as not to labor needlessly where I was, whom you thought to know very well what he had asked. See, I wish that opinion to be mine too, but I do not yet affirm that it is.

You have sent disciples to me, for me to teach them a thing I have not yet learned myself. Teach me, then, what to teach; for many demand of me that I teach, and to them I confess that I do not know this, as many other things. And perhaps, although they are too modest to say it to my face, yet among themselves they say: "You are a teacher in Israel and do not know these things!" That is what the Lord said to the man who was one of those who delighted to be called rabbi, which is why he had come to the true Teacher by night, because perhaps he was ashamed to learn, being accustomed to teach. But I am more delighted to listen to the Teacher than to be listened to as a teacher. For I recall what he said to those whom he chose above the rest: "But you, do not be called rabbi by men; for one is your Teacher, Christ." Nor did any other teach Moses, even through Jethro, nor any other Cornelius, even through Peter, who was earlier, nor any other Peter, even through Paul, who was later; by whomever the truth is spoken, it is spoken by the gift of him who is the Truth itself. What if we still do not know these things, and have not been able to find them by praying, reading, or thinking and reasoning, precisely so that we may be tested, not only with how much love we teach the unlearned, but also with how much humility we learn from the learned?

Teach, then, I beg you, what I should teach, teach what I should hold, and tell me: if souls are made individually for individuals born even today, where do they sin in little ones, so that they need forgiveness of sin in the sacrament of Christ, as sinning in Adam, from whom the flesh of sin has been propagated? Or, if they do not sin, by what justice of the Creator are they so bound by another's sin, when they are put into the mortal members propagated from him, that condemnation follows them unless help comes through the church, since it is not in their power to obtain the help of the grace of baptism? So many thousands of souls, then, which in the deaths of little ones go out of their bodies without the pardon of the Christian sacrament, with what equity are they condemned, if, newly created, with no preceding sin of their own but by the will of the Creator, they were joined one each to each individual born, for whose animation he created and gave them, he who certainly knew that each one of them, through no fault of its own, would go out of the body without the baptism of Christ? Since, therefore, we can neither say of God that he either compels souls to become sinners or punishes the innocent, nor is it lawful for us to deny that those souls, even of little ones, which have gone out of their bodies without the sacrament of Christ, are drawn only to condemnation, I beg you, how is this opinion defended, by which souls are believed not all to be made from that one of the first man, but each for each, as that one was for one?

The other things which are said against this opinion I think I can easily refute, such as that by which some think they press hard against it: how God completed all his works on the sixth day and rested on the seventh, if he still creates new souls. If we say to them what you set down from the gospel in the aforesaid letter, "My Father is working until now," they answer: "'Is working' was said of administering natures already established, not of establishing new ones, lest the Scripture of Genesis be contradicted, where we read most plainly that God completed all his works. For the statement that he rested is certainly to be understood of creating new creatures, not of governing them; because then he made the things which did not exist, from the making of which he rested, because he had completed all the things which, before they existed, he saw should be made, so that from then on he would create and make whatever he made not of things which did not exist but from those which already existed. Thus both are shown to be true, both what was said, 'He rested from his works,' and what was said, 'He is working until now,' since the gospel cannot be contrary to Genesis."

But to those who say these things so that it may not be believed that God now makes new souls, which did not exist, as he made that one, but creates them from that one which already existed, or sends them from some fountain or treasury which he made then, it is easily answered that even in those six days God created many things from natures which he had already created, as birds and fish from the waters, and trees, grass, and animals from the earth. But that he then made things which did not exist is manifest; for there was no bird, no fish, no tree, no animal; and he is rightly understood to have rested from creating those things which did not exist and were created, that is, to have ceased, so that no more things which did not exist should be created. But now, when it is said that he does not send souls already existing in some fountain or other, nor sprinkle them from himself as particles of his own, nor draw them originally from that one, nor fetter them with fleshly bonds for offenses committed before the flesh, but creates new ones, individually for individuals, his own for each one born, he is not said to do something which he had not done before. For already on the sixth day he had made man in his image, which he is certainly understood to have done according to the rational soul. This he does now too, not by establishing what did not exist, but by multiplying what did. Hence both this is true, that he rested from establishing things which did not exist, and this is true, that he is working until now, not only by governing what he made, but also by creating more numerously something which he had not now first created but had already created. Either in this way, then, or in any other way, we escape what is objected to us about God's rest from his works, so that we need not refuse on this account to believe that new souls are made even now, not from that one but like that one.

As for the question, "Why does he make souls for those whom he knows will soon die?", we can answer that by this the sins of the parents are either exposed or chastised. We can also rightly leave these things to the governance of him who we know gives a most beautiful and most ordered course to all things that pass in time, among which are also the births and deaths of animals, though we cannot perceive these things; if we did perceive them, we would be soothed with unspeakable delight. For not in vain was it said of God through the prophet who had learned these things by divine inspiration: "Who brings forth the world in measured order." Hence music, that is, the knowledge or sense of measured movement, has been granted by God's generosity even to mortals who have rational souls, as a reminder of a great thing. Hence, if a man who is a craftsman in making a song knows what durations to assign to which notes, so that what is sung may run and pass most beautifully with sounds departing and succeeding, how much more does God, whose wisdom, through which he made all things, is to be preferred far above all arts, allow no spans of time in natures that are born and die, which are like syllables and words belonging to the parts of this age, to pass in this wonderful song, as it were, of passing things, either more briefly or more lengthily than the measure foreknown and predetermined demands! Since I would say this even of the leaf of a tree and of the number of our hairs, how much more of the birth and death of a human being, whose temporal life is not extended more briefly or more lengthily than God, the disposer of times, knows to harmonize with the governance of the universe!

And what they say, that whatever began to exist in time cannot be immortal, because "all things that arise perish and all that grow grow old," so as to compel the belief that the human mind is immortal for the reason that it was created before all times, does not trouble our faith; for, to say nothing of other things, the immortality of Christ's flesh began to exist in time, yet it now dies no more and death will no longer have dominion over it.

As for what you set down in your book against Rufinus, that some slander this opinion on the ground that it seems unworthy for God to give souls to adulterous conceptions, from which they try to establish that souls can justly be brought into such prison-houses, as it were, for the merits of a life lived before the flesh, this does not trouble me, since I can think of many ways in which this slander can be refuted. And your own answer, that the fault is not in the seed of wheat which is said to have been stolen, but in the one who stole the grain, and that the earth ought not therefore to refuse to cherish the seeds in its bosom because the sower cast them with an unclean hand, is a most elegant comparison. Even before I read it, this objection about adulterous offspring caused me no difficulty in this question, since I considered in general that God makes many good things even out of our evils and our sins. For the creation of any animal whatever, if it has a prudent and godly observer, stirs up unspeakable praise of the Creator; how much more the creation not of just any animal but of a human being! And if the reason for creating is asked, no answer is quicker or better than that every creature of God is good; and what is more fitting than that the good God should make good things, which no one but God can make?

These and other things, as I can, I say against those who try to undermine this opinion, by which souls are believed to be made for individuals as that one was. But when it comes to the punishments of little ones, believe me, I am pressed by great difficulties and find absolutely nothing to answer; I mean not only those punishments which that condemnation holds after this life, to which they must be dragged if they go out of the body without the sacrament of Christian grace, but those very ones which, to our grief, are before our eyes in this life, which, if I wished to enumerate them, time would fail before examples. They languish with illnesses, are racked with pains, tormented by hunger and thirst, crippled in their limbs, deprived of senses, harassed by unclean spirits. It must certainly be shown how they justly suffer these things without any evil cause of their own. For it is not lawful to say either that these things happen without God's knowledge, or that he cannot resist those who do them, or that he unjustly either does or permits them. Just as we rightly say that irrational animals are given for the use of more excellent natures, even if vicious ones (as we most plainly see in the gospel that pigs were granted to the demons for the use they desired), can we rightly say this also of man? For he is an animal, but rational, though mortal. There is a rational soul in those members which pays the penalty with such great afflictions. God is good, God is just, God is almighty; to doubt this is utter madness. Let a just cause, then, be stated for such great evils as happen in little ones. Indeed, when adults suffer these things, we usually say either that their merits are being tested, as in Job, or that their sins are being punished, as in Herod; and from certain examples which God willed to be manifest, human conjecture is allowed about other things which are obscure. But this is in adults. Tell me, then, what we should answer about little ones, if there are no sins in them to be punished by such great penalties; for certainly in those ages there is no righteousness to be tested.

What shall I say of the diversity of talents? It is hidden in little ones, but, drawn from their very natural beginnings, it appears in adults, some of whom are so slow and forgetful that they cannot learn even the first elements of letters, while some are of such stupidity that they differ little from cattle; people commonly call them morons. Perhaps it is answered: "Bodies cause this." But according to this opinion which we want defended, did the soul choose a body for itself and err in choosing when it was deceived? Or, when it was compelled to enter a body by the necessity of being born, did it find no other because crowds of souls had seized the other bodies first, and, as with a seat at some show, take possession of a flesh, not the one it wanted, but the one it could get? Can we say such things, or ought we to think them? Teach me, then, what we ought to think and say, so that the reasoning for new souls made for individual bodies one by one may stand firm for us.