On the Soul and Its Origin 4.12–4.26

See, then, how many things we do not know about our nature—not past but present—not only as regards the body but also as regards the inner man, and yet we are not compared to the beasts; and you thought me worthy of so great a reproach because, as to the past origin of my soul, I am not wholly ignorant of it but do not fully know it—for I know that it was given me by God and yet is not from God! And when can I recount everything we do not know about the nature of our spirit and soul? Here we ought rather to cry out to God what he cried out in the psalm: “Your knowledge has become wonderful from me; it has grown strong; I shall not be able to reach it.” For why did he add “from me”, except because from himself he inferred how incomprehensible God’s knowledge was, since he could not comprehend himself? The apostle was caught up to the third heaven and heard unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to speak, and he says he does not know whether this happened to him in the body or out of the body, and he is not afraid of being compared by you to the beasts. His spirit knew that it was in the third heaven, in paradise, and did not know whether it was in the body. And certainly the third heaven and paradise were not the apostle Paul himself; but his body and soul and spirit were himself. See, he knew great, lofty, and divine things which he himself was not; and he did not know this, which belonged to his own nature. Who would not marvel at such ignorance of himself in such knowledge of hidden things? Who, finally, would believe it, had not he who does not deceive said: “We do not know what we should pray for as we ought”? Here our attention ought to be most of all, that we may stretch ourselves toward what lies ahead; and you compare me to the beasts if among the things that lie behind I have forgotten something about my origin, when you hear the same apostle saying: “Forgetting what lies behind, stretched out toward what lies ahead, I follow, according to my purpose, toward the prize of God’s upward call in Christ Jesus”!

Or perhaps, because I said this too, “We do not know what we should pray for as we ought”, you think I should be laughed at and judge me like irrational animals? And perhaps more tolerably. For since by right and sound judgment we prefer our future to our past, and prayer is necessary to us not because of what we were but because of what we shall be, it is certainly much more troublesome not to know what to pray for than how we came into being. But let it come to your mind where you read this, or recall it by rereading, and do not throw the stone of this reproach at me, lest it reach one whom you do not wish to hit. For that very teacher of the Gentiles, the apostle, said, “For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought”, which he taught not only by word but also showed by his own example. For, not knowing, he prayed against his own advantage and the perfection of his salvation that the goad of the flesh should depart from him, which he said was given him lest he be lifted up by the greatness of his revelations. And because the Lord loved him, he did not do what he asked in ignorance. But where he says, “For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought”, he immediately added: “but the Spirit himself intercedes with unspeakable groanings. And he who searches hearts knows what the Spirit minds, because he intercedes for the saints according to God”—that is, he makes the saints intercede; that Spirit, namely, whom God sent into our hearts crying, “Abba, Father”, and in whom we cry, “Abba, Father”; for both are said, that we received the Spirit crying, “Abba, Father”, and that we received the Spirit in whom we cry, “Abba, Father”, so that it might be explained how he said “crying”, that is, making us cry, so that by his doing we cry. Let him, then, teach me this too when he wills, if he knows it is good for me, so that I may know from where I derive my origin as to the soul. But let that Spirit teach me this who searches the depths of God, not a man who does not know from where the breath comes by which a wineskin is blown up. Far be it, however, that I should compare you to the beasts on this account; for you did not know it, not because you could not, but because you had not paid attention.

But perhaps, although the questions about the origin of souls are higher than that from which we draw and give back breath, you are confident that you have learned these same higher things from the holy Scriptures, from which we have learned by faith things that no human wit could track down. For it is certainly far more excellent to know that the flesh will rise again and live without end than whatever physicians have been able to learn in it by examination, which the soul perceives by no sense, although by its presence it quickens all the things it does not know; and it is far better to know that the soul which has been reborn and renewed in Christ will be blessed forever than whatever we do not know about its memory, understanding, and will. But these things which I have called more excellent and better we could in no way know unless we believed the divine oracles. Perhaps, then, you think you trust these oracles so as not to hesitate to put forward a definite opinion on the origin of souls. First, if this were so, you ought not to have attributed to human nature itself that a man knows how to inquire and discourse about his own quality and nature, but to the gift of God; for you said, “How does a man differ from a beast if he does not know this?” What need is there, then, to read anything in order to know this, if by the very thing by which we differ from a beast we ought already to know it? For just as you read me nothing so that I may know that I live—for my nature is such that I cannot fail to know this—so, if knowing that too belongs to nature, why do you bring me testimonies of the Scriptures to believe on this matter? Do only those who read them differ from a beast? Were we not so created that we differ from the beasts even before we can come to any letters? What is it, I ask, that you claim so much for our nature that by the very thing by which it differs from a beast it already knows how to inquire and discourse about the origin of souls, and again make it so devoid of this knowledge that it cannot know it by human means unless it believes divine witnesses?

Next, you are deceived in this too. For the divine testimonies which you wished to bring to solve this question do not disclose it. What they show is something else, without which we truly cannot live devoutly: namely, that we have God as the giver, creator, and former of our souls. But how he does this, whether by breathing them in new or by drawing them from the parents, they do not express, except for that one soul which he gave to the first man. Read carefully what I wrote to our brother Renatus, the servant of God; since I showed it there, it was not necessary to write it here too. But you would have me define what you yourself defined, so that I would be pushed into such straits as you were pushed into, and said so many and such great things against the catholic faith that, if you recall and consider them faithfully and humbly, you would certainly see how much it would have profited you to know that you do not know what you do not know, and how much it would profit you if you knew it even now. For if understanding pleases you in the nature of man—since truly, if it did not have it, we would not differ from the beasts as far as souls are concerned—understand what you do not understand, lest you understand nothing at all; and do not despise a man who, in order to understand truly what he does not understand, understands that he does not understand it. And read and understand in what sense it was said in the sacred psalm, “Man, when he was in honour, did not understand; he has been compared to senseless beasts and become like them”, so that you yourself may humbly guard against this reproach rather than proudly throw it at another. For it was said of those who count this life the only life, living according to the flesh and hoping for nothing after death, like beasts; not of those who neither deny that they know what they know nor fail to confess that they do not know what they do not know, and who more safely understand their weakness than trust in their own strength.

So do not let my old man’s fear displease your youthful presumption, son. For if I cannot know what we are asking about the origin of souls either by God’s teaching or that of some spiritual man, I am readier to defend how rightly God willed us not to know this, as he willed with many other things, than rashly to say something which is either so obscure that I not only cannot bring others to understand it but do not understand it myself, or which at any rate helps the heretics, who try to persuade us that the souls of little children are pure of all guilt for this reason—lest that guilt run back and return upon God as author, in that by giving to sinful flesh innocent souls, which he foreknew the washing of regeneration would not reach, he compelled them to be sinful with no grace of baptism coming to their aid by which they might be freed from perpetual damnation, since countless souls of infants leave their bodies before they are baptized. Far be it that, unwilling to wash this away, I should say the things you yourself said: that the soul deserved to be defiled through the flesh and to be sinful, having no prior sin for which it may rightly be said to have deserved this; that original sins are loosed even without baptism; and that the kingdom of heaven is granted in the end even to the unbaptized. Were I not afraid to say these and similar poisons of the faith, perhaps I would not be afraid to define something on this matter. How much better, then, that I do not discuss the soul separately and affirm what I do not know, but simply hold what I see the apostle has most plainly taught: that from one man all men who are born of Adam go into condemnation, unless they are so reborn in Christ as he established that they should be reborn, before they die in the body—those whom he predestined to eternal life, the most merciful bestower of grace, who is also, to those whom he predestined to eternal death, the most just repayer of punishment, not only for the things they add by their own will, but also, if as infants they add nothing, for original sin. This is my definition on this question: that the hidden works of God may keep their secret, my faith remaining safe.

Now, as far as the Lord deigns to grant, I must also answer the place where, speaking of the soul, you repeated my name and said: “For we do not allow, as Augustine, a most skilled bishop, professes, that it is incorporeal and likewise spirit.” So let us first discuss whether the soul is to be thought incorporeal, as I said, or corporeal, as you say; then whether, according to our Scriptures, it is itself also called spirit, although what is properly called spirit is not the whole of it but something of it. And first I should like to know how you define a body. For if nothing is a body except what consists of fleshly members, then neither earth nor sky nor stone nor water nor stars nor anything of that kind will be a body; but if a body is whatever consists of greater and lesser parts occupying greater and lesser spaces, then the things I have mentioned are also bodies: air is a body, this visible light is a body, and all, as the apostle says, heavenly bodies and earthly bodies.

But whether the soul is anything of this kind is a question examined most scrupulously and subtly. Yet you—on which I most congratulate you—affirm that God is not a body; but you make me anxious again when you say: “If the soul lacks a body, so that it is, as some hold, an airy and futile substance of empty vacuity.” For by these words of yours you seem to believe that everything that lacks a body is of empty substance. If that is so, how do you dare to say that God lacks a body, and do you not fear that it follows that he is of empty substance? But if God both lacks a body, as you have already admitted, and far be it that you should say he is of empty substance, then not everything that lacks a body is of empty substance. And so, for one who says the soul is incorporeal, it does not follow that he wants it to seem of empty and futile substance, since he also confesses that God, who is not anything empty, is incorporeal. And see how great the difference is between what I say and what you think I say. For I do not say the soul is of airy substance: otherwise I would admit it is a body. For air is a body according to all who know what they are saying when they speak of bodies. But you, because I said the soul is incorporeal, thought that I had said it was not only of empty vacuity but for that reason an airy substance, although I both said it was not a body, which air is, and that which is filled with air cannot be empty. Your wineskins could not even remind you of this. For what else is forced into them when they are blown up but air? And they are so far from empty that with this same fullness they even bear weights. But if perhaps breath seems to you one thing and air another, although breath is simply air in motion, as can be shown by waving a fan, certainly take any hollow vessels, which you think empty, and, to learn that they are full, press them into water by the side through which they are filled, and see that no liquid can enter them because the air with which they are full drives it back. But when they are placed mouth upward or on their side, then they take in the liquid, if it is poured in or flows in, as the air goes out and escapes where an exit lies open. This could be shown more easily by doing it in person than by writing. But there is no need to dwell on this any longer, since, whether you understand that the nature of air is corporeal or do not understand it, you ought not to think that I said the soul is airy, but that it is wholly incorporeal; which you too confess God to be, whom you do not dare to call anything empty, but cannot deny to be of an almighty and unchangeable substance. Why then do we fear that the soul is of empty vacuity if it is incorporeal, when we confess that God is incorporeal and do not say that he is of empty vacuity? So, then, the incorporeal God could create an incorporeal soul, just as the living could create the living, although the unchangeable created the changeable and the Almighty what is far unequal to him.

But why you will not have the soul be spirit, but will have it be body, I do not see. For if it is not spirit because the apostle named spirit distinctly when he said, “and may your spirit and soul and body be whole”, there is the same reason why it is not body, since he named body distinctly too; but if you affirm that the soul is a body although the body is named distinctly, allow it also to be spirit although spirit is named distinctly. For the soul ought to seem to you much more to be spirit than body, since you confess that spirit and soul are of one substance, but you do not say that soul and body are of one substance. On what terms, then, is the soul a body, when its nature and that of the body are different, and not spirit, when its nature and that of the spirit are one and the same? What of the fact that by this reasoning of yours you are forced to say that the spirit too is a body? Otherwise, if the spirit is not a body and the soul is a body, spirit and soul are not of one and the same substance; but you confess that both, although you think them two particular things, have one substance: therefore the spirit is also a body, if the soul is a body; for they cannot otherwise be of one and the same nature. Accordingly, on your view, what the apostle says, “your spirit and soul and body”, are three bodies; but of these, two, the soul and the spirit, are bodies of one nature, while the body, which is also called flesh, is of a different nature. And of these three bodies, as you suppose, one of which is different while two are of one and the same substance, the whole man consists, one particular thing and one substance. Though you assert this, you will not have two things of one and the same substance, namely soul and spirit, have the one name of spirit, while two things not of one and the same but of unequal and different substance, namely soul and body, have, as you think, the one name of body.

But I pass this over, lest our controversy be about names rather than things. Let us see who the inner man is, whether the soul or the spirit or both. But, as I see you have written, you say the inner man is the soul. For you were speaking of it when you said: “and as the substance, which could not be grasped, congealed, it made another body within the body, compacted by the force and breath of its nature, and thence the inner man began to appear, whom, enclosed as in the form of a bodily sheath, the shape of the outer man outlined in its own likeness.” Then you add: “So the breath of God made the soul; indeed, the breath from God became the soul, a substance given shape, corporeal according to its nature, and conformed to the likeness and image of its body.” After this, beginning to speak of the spirit, you say: “This soul, which had its origin from the breath of God, could not be without its own sense and inmost understanding, which is the spirit.” So, as I see, you want the soul to be the inner man and the spirit the inmost, as though it too were inner to the soul as the soul is to the body. So it comes about that, just as the body receives into its hollow interior another body, which is the soul, as you think, so the soul too must be believed to have an empty interior, by which it received a third body, the spirit; and so the whole man consists of three: an outer, an inner, and an inmost. Do you still not see how many most absurd things follow for you when you try to assert that the soul is corporeal? Next, tell me: which of them will be renewed in the knowledge of God according to the image of him who created him—the inner or the inmost? I do not see that the apostle knows, besides the inner and the outer, another inner of the inner, that is, the inmost of the whole man. But choose which you like. The one who is renewed according to the image of God—how will he receive it, who has already taken the image of the outer man? For if the inner ran through the limbs of the outer and congealed—for you used this very word too, as though a cast figure were made from a clay mould that was made from dust—how, with the same form remaining which was stamped on it or pressed out from the body, can it be re-formed to the image of God? Or will it have two images, God’s from above and the body’s from below, as on a coin one speaks of head and ship? Or do you perhaps say that the soul took the image of the body and the spirit takes the image of God, as though the one were next to the body and the other to God, and so the inmost man, not the inner, is re-formed to the image of God? But you say this in vain. For if that inmost is spread through all the members of the soul as the soul is through those of the body, then it too has taken the image of the body through the soul, just as the soul was formed by that form. And therefore it has nowhere to take the image of God while this image of the body remains in it, unless, as I said, like a coin it is formed one way on the lower side and another on the upper. To these absurdities the fleshly thought of bodies drives you, whether you will or not, when you think about the soul. But God, as you yourself most rightly confess, is not a body; how then could a body take his image? I beg you, brother, not to be conformed to this age but to be re-formed in the newness of your mind, and not to think according to the flesh, since that is death.

“But,” you say, “if the soul lacks a body, what is it that the rich man recognizes in the underworld? Certainly,” you say, “he already knew Lazarus; he did not know Abraham. How did recognition of Abraham, who had died so long before, come to him?” If in saying this you think that recognition of a man cannot come about without the form of a body, then, in order to know yourself, I suppose you constantly look in a mirror, lest, if you forgot your face, you could not recognize yourself. I ask you, what man does a man know more than himself, and whose face can he see less than his own? And who can know God, whom you too do not doubt to be incorporeal, if knowledge cannot come about apart from the form of a body, as you think—that is, if only bodies can be known? And what Christian, discussing such great and difficult matters, would apply his mind to the divine words so carelessly as to say: “If the soul is incorporeal, it must lack form”? Have you forgotten that you have read of the form of doctrine? Is the form of doctrine then corporeal? Have you forgotten that it is written of Christ Jesus, before he had put on man, that he was in the form of God? How then do you say, “If the soul is incorporeal, it must lack form”, when you hear of the form of God, whom you confess is not corporeal, and yet you speak as though form could exist only in bodies?

You also say that names cease where form is not distinguished, and that the calling of names does nothing where there is no designation of persons, wishing to prove from this that Abraham’s soul was corporeal, because it could be said, “Father Abraham.” We have already said that there is form even where there is no body. But if you think that the calling of names does nothing where there are no bodies, count these names, I beg you: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, self-control”; and tell me whether you do not recognize the things themselves whose names these are, or whether you recognize them in such a way as to see some outlines of bodies. See—to say nothing of the others—tell me what shape, what limbs, what colour love has, which, if you yourself are not empty, cannot seem to you something empty. “He whose help was implored,” you say, “was certainly seen as corporeal and formed.” Let people hear you and let no one implore the help of God, since no one can see him as corporeal.

“Finally,” you say, “members of the soul are described there, so that it is truly a body”; and you want the whole head understood by the eye, because he is said to have lifted up his eyes; the jaws by the tongue, and the hand by the finger, because it was said: “Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue.” Yet, lest the names of members prescribe to you that God is corporeal, you say that incorporeal powers are to be understood by them, because you most rightly maintain that God is not corporeal. What reason is there, then, why these names of members do not make God a body for you, but do make the soul one? Or are they to be taken literally when said of the creature, but figuratively and metaphorically when said of the Creator? Then you will give us bodily wings, since it is not the Creator but a creature, that is, a man, who says, “If I take my wings like a dove”? And further, if that rich man had a bodily tongue because he said, “Let him cool my tongue”, then in us too, still living in the flesh, the tongue itself has bodily hands, because it is written, “Death and life are in the hands of the tongue.” I suppose too that it does not seem to you that sin is either a creature or a body: why then does it have a face? Or do you not hear in the psalm: “There is no peace for my bones from the face of my sins”?

As for your thinking that Abraham’s bosom is corporeal, and asserting that by it his whole body is meant, I fear you may be thought to be acting jokingly and mockingly in so great a matter, not seriously and gravely. For you would not be so foolish as to think that one man’s bodily bosom could hold so many souls—indeed, to speak according to you, so many bodies of the well-deserving, whom the angels carry there as they did Lazarus—unless perhaps you suppose that that one soul alone deserved to reach that bosom. If you are not joking and do not wish to err childishly, understand Abraham’s bosom as the remote and secret seat of rest where Abraham is; and it is called Abraham’s not because it is his alone, but because he was set up as the father of many nations, to whom he was proposed for imitation as the first in faith; just as God willed to be called the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, though he is the God of countless people.

Do not think I discuss this as though I denied that the soul of a dead person, like that of a sleeper, can feel good or bad things in the likeness of its body. For in dreams too, when we suffer hard and troublesome things, it is certainly we ourselves, and, unless those things pass away when we wake, we pay very heavy penalties; but to believe that those are bodies in which we are, as it were, carried this way and that and fly about in dreams belongs to a man who has thought too little wakefully about such matters. For it is above all from these images of what is seen that the soul is proved not to be corporeal—unless you want to call bodies also the many things besides ourselves that we see in dreams: sky, earth, sea, sun, moon, stars, rivers, mountains, trees, animals. Whoever believes these are bodies is unbelievably foolish; yet they are altogether like bodies. Of this kind too are the significant things shown by God either in sleep or in ecstasy. Who could track down or say from what these come about, that is, what their material, as it were, is? Yet without doubt it is spiritual, not bodily. For forms of this kind, like bodies but not bodies, are also formed in the thought of those awake, and are held in the depth of memory, and come forth from its most hidden recesses in some marvellous and unspeakable way when we remember, and move about as if set before our eyes. So many and so great images of bodies the soul could not take in by thinking or hold in memory if it were a body. For according to your definition its bodily substance does not exceed this outer body. By what size, then, since it has none, does it take in images of such great bodies and spaces and regions? What wonder, then, if it appears to itself in the likeness of its body, even when it appears without the body? For it does not appear to itself with its body in dreams, and yet in that very likeness of its body it runs about, as it were, through unknown and known places and feels many joyful or sad things. But I think that not even you would dare to say that the figure of body and limbs which it seems to have in dreams is a true body. For in that way the mountain it seems to climb will be a true mountain, the house it seems to enter a bodily house, the tree under which it seems to lie a true tree, true wood having a body, and the water it seems to draw true water, and all the things among which it moves as if among bodies will be bodies, if it too is a body, which moves among them all in a like image.

Something must be said to you about the written visions of the martyrs, since you thought testimony should be drawn from there too. Saint Perpetua, as we know, seemed to herself in her sleep to be changed into a man and to wrestle with a certain Egyptian. But who doubts that in that likeness of a body it was her soul, not her body, since her body, remaining in its female sex, lay on the bed with its senses asleep while her soul was wrestling in that likeness of a male body? What do you say here? Was that likeness of a man a true body, or was it not a body, though it had the likeness of a body? Choose what you like. If it was a body, why did it not keep the form of its sheath? For it had not found male genitals in that woman’s flesh from which it could be formed by compressing itself and, as you put it, congealing. Next, I beg you, since the body of the sleeper was still alive while her soul was wrestling, her soul was certainly enclosed in its sheath, in all the members of the living woman, and kept in her body its form, from which it had been formed—for it had not yet left those limbs, as happens in death; it had not yet drawn out members from members, formed from forming, by the compelling force of death: from where, then, was the soul’s male body in which it seemed to itself to wrestle with the adversary? But if it was not a body and yet was something like a body, in which true toil or true joy was felt, do you at last see how it can be that there is in the soul a certain likeness of a body and yet the soul itself is not a body?