On the Soul 1–9

Having engaged Hermogenes on the sole question of the soul's origin, since he presumed that it too derived from the supply of matter rather than from the breath of God, I now turn to the remaining questions, and I shall seem to be fighting mostly with the philosophers. Even in Socrates' prison there was skirmishing about the state of the soul. I do not know, first of all, whether that was a fitting time for teaching, though the place makes no difference. For what could the soul of Socrates clearly discern at that moment, when the sacred ship had already returned, when the hemlock of his condemnation had already been drained, when death was already present—a soul surely either thrown by it into some commotion, if according to nature, or driven out of itself, if not according to nature? For however calm and tranquil it was, unmoved by the law of affection either by the weeping of a wife about to be widowed or by the sight of children about to be orphans, yet it was moved in this very effort not to be moved, and its constancy was itself shaken in resisting the shock of inconstancy. And what else would any man unjustly condemned think of but consolation for the injustice? Much more a philosopher, that creature of glory, for whom injustice is not to be consoled but rather scorned. So after the sentence, when his wife met him and cried out like a woman, “You have been condemned unjustly, Socrates!”, he answered, as though even congratulating himself, “Would you rather it were justly?” No wonder, then, if even in prison he is eager to break the palms, now limed fast, of Anytus and Meletus, claiming immortality for the soul in the very face of death by a presumption necessary to frustrate the injustice. So all that wisdom of Socrates at that time came from a studied calm deliberately adopted, not from confidence in truth discovered. For to whom has truth been discovered without God? To whom is God known without Christ? To whom has Christ been searched out without the Holy Spirit? To whom has the Holy Spirit been granted without the sacrament of faith? Socrates, to be sure, was more easily driven by a different spirit. For they say that a demon clung to him from boyhood—in truth the worst of tutors, even though among the poets and philosophers demons are ranked after the gods and with the gods. For the proofs of Christian power had not yet come forth, which alone expose that force, most pernicious and never good, but rather the craftsman of every error and the seducer from every truth. But if Socrates was therefore the wisest of men, by the vote also of the Pythian demon, who of course was furthering the business of his colleague, how much worthier and more steadfast is the claim of Christian wisdom, before whose breath the whole power of demons gives way! This wisdom, from the school of heaven, is freer to deny the gods of the world; it does not prevaricate by ordering a cock to be paid to Aesculapius; it does not bring in new demons but drives out old ones; it does not corrupt youth but forms it in every good of modesty; and therefore it bears the unjust sentence not of one city but of the whole world, for the name of truth—hated the more, of course, the more complete it is—so that it does not swallow death from a cup in a manner of pleasantness, but drains it from the gibbet and the burning alive through every invention of cruelty. Meanwhile, in this darker prison of the world, among its own Cebeses and Phaedos, if anything about the soul is to be examined, it will steer by the rules of God. Certainly we have no better demonstrator of the soul than its author. Learn from God what you have from God, or from no one else, if not from God. For who will reveal what God has covered? From where must we inquire? From where it is also safest to be ignorant. It is better not to know, through God, because he has not revealed, than to know, through man, because man has presumed.

Of course we shall not deny that the philosophers have sometimes thought as we do. The event itself is a testimony to the truth. Sometimes even in a storm, when the tracks of sky and sea are confused, some harbour is struck upon by a lucky mistake; sometimes even in darkness entrances and exits are found by blind good fortune. But also many things are suggested by nature, as it were from the common sense with which God has deigned to endow the soul. Philosophy, having got hold of this, has inflated it for the glory of its own art, through eagerness—no wonder if I put it so—for an eloquence trained to build up and tear down anything, and persuading more by speaking than by teaching. It imposes shapes on things, now makes them equal, now sets them apart; it prejudges uncertain things from certain ones; it appeals to examples as though all things were comparable; it lays down rules for everything, even though things alike have different properties; it reserves nothing for the freedom of God; it makes its own opinions the laws of nature. I would bear it if it were itself natural, so that, as master of nature, it proved itself by sharing its condition. It thought indeed that it had drawn even from what they consider sacred writings, since antiquity reckoned many authors as gods, not to mention as divine men: as the Egyptian Mercury, to whom Plato was especially devoted; as the Phrygian Silenus, to whom, when shepherds brought him to him, Midas lent his enormous ears; as Hermotimus, to whom the people of Clazomenae built a temple after his death; as Orpheus, as Musaeus, as Pherecydes the teacher of Pythagoras. But what if the philosophers also fell upon those writings which among us are condemned by the verdict of “apocrypha”—we who are certain that nothing is to be received which does not agree with the genuine prophetic provision, produced already in its own age—since we remember the false prophets as well, and much earlier the apostate spirits, who have furnished the whole face of the world with the cunning of such talents too? Finally, even if it is credible that every searcher after wisdom went to the prophets themselves out of the business of curiosity, you will still find more disagreement among the philosophers than agreement, since even in their agreement their disagreement is detected. For whatever is true and in harmony with the prophets they either commend from some other source or twist in another direction, with the greatest injury to the truth, which they make either to be helped by falsehoods or to be the patron of them. This, then, is what has set us and the philosophers at odds, especially in this matter: that at times they clothe opinions we share with arguments of their own that are in places contrary to our rule, and at times they fortify opinions of their own with arguments we share that in places agree with their rule; so that truth is almost shut out from philosophy by the poisons they have put into it. And so, on both counts of this partnership with the adversary of truth, we are pressed both to free the shared opinions from the philosophers' arguments and to separate the shared arguments from their opinions, calling the questions back to the writings of God—except, of course, what it will be permissible to take up as simple testimony without the snare of some prejudgment, since testimony is sometimes necessary even from rivals, if it does not help the rivals. Nor am I unaware how great a forest of this subject there is among the philosophers, as many as are their commentators: how many varieties of opinion, how many wrestling-grounds of views, how many offshoots of questions, how many entanglements of solutions. I have looked into medicine too, philosophy's sister, as they say, which also claims this business for itself, since the theory of the soul seems to belong more to it through its care of the body. Hence it greatly opposes its sister, on the ground that it knows the soul better by dealing with it face to face, as it were, in its own dwelling. But let the ambition of each for pre-eminence see to that. Philosophy has had freedom of genius, and medicine the necessity of its craft, to extend their treatises on the soul; uncertain things are inquired into widely, presumptions are argued more widely still. As great as the difficulty of proving is the labour of persuading, so that the famous Heraclitus, the Obscure, noticing the vaster darkness among the examiners of the soul, declared in weariness of the questions: “You will never find the limits of the soul, though you travel every road.” But the Christian needs little for knowledge of this matter. For certain things are always found in few words, and he is not allowed to seek further than what may be found; for the apostle forbids endless questions. Moreover, nothing more may be found than what is learned from God; and what is learned from God is the whole.

And would that there had never had to be heresies, so that those who are approved might shine out! Then we would never have to try conclusions with the philosophers on the soul as well—the patriarchs, so to speak, of the heretics. For already in his day the apostle foresaw philosophy as a shaking of the truth. Having experienced at Athens that city of tongues, after he had tasted all the hucksters of wisdom and eloquence there, he conceived from it that warning edict. For in just the same way the theory of the soul too is handled through the philosophized doctrines of men, mixing water with wine. Some deny that the soul is immortal, others affirm that it is more than immortal; some dispute about its substance, others about its form, others about each of its arrangements; these derive its origin from one place, those lead its departure off to another, as the dignity of Plato, or the vigour of Zeno, or the evenness of Aristotle, or the stupor of Epicurus, or the gloom of Heraclitus, or the frenzy of Empedocles has persuaded them. The divine teaching went wrong, I suppose, in rising from Judaea rather than from Greece! Christ too made a mistake in sending out fishermen to preach rather than a sophist! So whatever things of this kind darken the clear, pure air of truth with the fumes of philosophy, these Christians must clear away, both by striking down the original—that is, philosophical—arguments and by opposing to them the heavenly—that is, the Lord's—definitions, so that both the things by which the heathen are taken captive by philosophy may be destroyed and the things by which believers are shaken by heresy may be beaten back. One contest has already been settled, against Hermogenes, as we said at the start, since we maintained that the soul is from the breath of God, not from matter, fortified there too by the rule of the divine definition that cannot be obscured—“And God breathed,” it says, “the breath of life into the face of the man, and the man became a living soul”—that is, from the breath of God. On this nothing more need be reconsidered. It has its own title and its own heretic. From here I shall begin the rest.

After the definition of its origin, the question of its state follows. For it is consequent that, having professed that the soul is from the breath of God, we ascribe a beginning to it. Plato excludes this, holding the soul to be unborn and unmade. But we teach that it was both born and made, from the establishment of its beginning. Nor have we erred about its state in saying both, since, of course, being born is one thing and being made another, the former being proper to living creatures. For differences, while they have their own places and times, sometimes also have exchanges of meaning. So “making” can also be put for having come forth, since everything that in any way receives being is generated. For even the maker himself can be called the parent of what is made; Plato also uses it so. So far, then, as our faith is concerned, souls are made or born; the philosopher's opinion has been driven off by the authority of prophecy too.

Let them summon some Eubulus, and Critolaus, and Xenocrates, and on this point Plato's friend Aristotle. Perhaps they will be better equipped to take away the soul's corporeality—unless they have looked at others on the opposite side, and indeed more of them, who claim a body for the soul. I do not mean only those who fashion it from obvious bodily things: as Hipparchus and Heraclitus from fire, as Hippon and Thales from water, as Empedocles and Critias from blood, as Epicurus from atoms (if atoms too compact bodies by their coming together), as Critolaus and his Peripatetics from some fifth substance or other (if that too is a body, since it encloses bodies). I also cite the Stoics, who, while proclaiming the soul a spirit almost as we do—since breath and spirit are closely akin—will nonetheless easily persuade that the soul is a body. So Zeno, defining the soul as a spirit sown in the body, sets up his argument this way: “That by whose departure a living creature dies is a body; but when the implanted spirit departs, the living creature dies; therefore the implanted spirit is a body; but the implanted spirit is the soul; therefore the soul is a body.” Cleanthes, too, holds that likeness to parents appears in children not only in the features of the body but also in the marks of the soul, from the mirror, that is, of character, talents, and feelings; but that likeness and unlikeness belong to body, and the soul receives them too; therefore it is subject to bodily likeness or unlikeness. Again, that the sufferings of bodily and bodiless things do not communicate with each other; but the soul suffers with the body, grieving with it when it is hurt by blows, wounds, and sores; and the body with the soul, sickening with it when it is afflicted by care, anguish, and love, through the loss of its vigour, and testifying to its shame and fear by blushing and pallor. Therefore the soul is a body, from its sharing in bodily sufferings. Chrysippus too lends a hand, laying down that bodily things cannot at all be abandoned by bodiless ones, since they are not even touched by them (hence Lucretius too: “For nothing can touch or be touched except a body”); but when the body is abandoned by the soul, a man is struck with death. Therefore the soul is a body, since unless it were bodily it would not abandon the body.

The Platonists disturb these points with subtlety rather than truth. Every body, they say, must be either animate or inanimate. If it is inanimate, it will be moved from without; if animate, from within. But the soul will be moved neither from without, since it is not inanimate, nor from within, since it is rather what itself moves the body. So it does not seem to be a body, since it is not moved from any quarter after the manner of bodies. To this we shall first wonder at the incongruity of a definition that appeals to things that do not fit the soul. For the soul cannot be called an animate or an inanimate body, since it is itself what makes a body animate if present, or inanimate if absent from it. So what it produces it cannot itself be, so as to be called animate or inanimate. For the soul is called by the name of its own substance. But if what the soul is does not admit of being called an animate or inanimate body, how will it be referred to the pattern of animate and inanimate bodies? Next, if it belongs to a body to be moved from without by something else, and we have shown above that the soul is moved by another, when it prophesies, when it raves—certainly from without, because by another—then rightly, according to the proposed example, I shall recognize as a body what will be moved from without by another. And if being moved by another belongs to a body, how much more moving another? But the soul moves the body, and its efforts appear outwardly on the outside. For it is from the soul that the feet are driven to walk, the hands to touch, the eyes to look, the tongue to speak—like figurines whose surface is worked by motion from within. Whence this power in a bodiless soul? Whence can an empty thing drive solid ones? But how, they say, do bodily and intellectual senses appear to be distinct in man? The qualities of bodily things, like earth and fire, are reported to the bodily senses, like touch and sight; but those of bodiless things, like kindness and malice, are met by the intellectual senses. So it is established that the soul is bodiless, since its qualities are grasped not by the bodily but by the intellectual senses. Plainly—unless I knock away the step of this definition. For see, I show that bodiless things are subject to the bodily senses: sound to hearing, colour to sight, smell to smelling; and by their example the soul too comes to the body—lest you say that these are reported through the bodily senses because they come to bodily things. If, then, it is established that bodiless things too are grasped by bodily ones, why should not the soul, which is bodily, be reported by bodiless ones? Certainly the definition is knocked out. Among their more notable arguments will also be this: that they judge every body to be nourished by bodily things, but the soul, as bodiless, by bodiless things, namely the pursuits of wisdom. But this step will not stand either, since Soranus, a most learned authority of the Methodist school of medicine, answers that the soul is nourished by bodily things too; indeed, when it is failing it is commonly propped up by food. Why not? For when food is taken away altogether, it slips out of the body entirely. So Soranus himself, who wrote most fully on the soul in four volumes and tested all the opinions of the philosophers, claims a bodily substance for the soul, even though he cheated it of immortality. For it is not for everyone to believe what Christians believe. Just as Soranus himself shows by facts that the soul is fed by bodily things, so let the philosopher show that it feeds on bodiless ones. But has anyone ever poured honeyed water from Plato's eloquence into a man hesitating at the point of death, or stuffed crumbs of Aristotle's hair-splitting into him? And what of the many great souls of rustics and barbarians, who lack the food of wisdom and yet are strong in untaught good sense, and without academies and Attic porches and Socratic prisons—in short, fasting from philosophy—still live? For the nourishment of study or learning does not profit the substance itself, since it does not make the soul fatter, only better furnished. It is good, moreover, that the Stoics affirm that the arts too are bodily. So in this way too the soul is bodily, if it is believed to be fed by the arts. But the immoderate straining of philosophy usually fails to look even in front of its feet—as Thales fell into a well. It also usually suspects a disorder of health through not understanding its own opinions—as Chrysippus took to hellebore. Something of the sort, I think, befell him when he denied that two bodies can be in one, turned away from the sight and thought of pregnant women, who daily carry not single bodies but two and three within the circuit of one womb. Indeed there is found in the civil law a certain Greek woman who gave birth to five sons, mother of all at once, manifold parent of a single birth, a numerous mother from one womb, who, packed with so many bodies—I had almost said a people—was herself the sixth body. All nature will testify that bodies which are to come forth from bodies are already there from where they come forth. What is from another must be a second. Nothing is from another except while it is being generated; but then there are two.

This is enough as far as the philosophers are concerned, and more than enough as far as our own people are concerned, for whom the soul's corporeality will shine out in the Gospel itself. In the underworld the soul of a certain man suffers pain, is punished in flame, is tormented in the tongue, and begs from the finger of a happier soul the comfort of a drop of dew. Do you think that ending of the rejoicing poor man and the mourning rich man is a figure? And why the name of Lazarus there, if the thing is not in truth? But even if it is to be believed a figure, it will be a testimony of the truth. For if the soul had no body, the figure of a soul could not contain the figure of a body, nor would Scripture lie about bodily members if they did not exist. And what is it that is carried off to the underworld after its divorce from the body, that is held there, that is kept for the day of judgment, to which Christ too descended in dying? To the souls of the patriarchs, I suppose. But why, if the soul is nothing under the earth? For it is nothing if it is not a body. For bodilessness is free from every kind of custody, immune both from punishment and from refreshment. For that through which one is punished or refreshed will be a body. I shall deal with this more fully and at a better point. If, then, the soul tastes beforehand any torment or comfort in the prison or lodging of the underworld, in the fire or in Abraham's bosom, the corporeality of the soul will be proved. For bodilessness suffers nothing, having nothing by which it can suffer; or if it has, that will be a body. For inasmuch as everything bodily is capable of suffering, so far what is capable of suffering is bodily.

It is abrupt and absurd, besides, to exclude something from the class of bodily things because it does not match the other examples of bodies. And where then are the private distinctions of properties, by which the magnificence of the Creator is marked in the diversity of those same works, so that they are as distinct as they are equal, as friendly as they are rivals? For the philosophers themselves agree that the universe consists of opposites, according to the friendship and enmity of Empedocles. So, although bodily things are set against bodiless ones, bodily things themselves also differ among themselves in such a way that the difference enlarges their species but does not change their genus: they are bodily, and many for the glory of God because varied; varied because diverse; diverse because some have one kind of sensible qualities and others another, some one kind of nourishment and others another, some are invisible and others visible, some heavy and others light. For they say the soul must be declared bodiless for this reason too: that when it has departed, the bodies of the dead become heavier, when they ought to be lighter, the weight of one body having been removed, if the soul is a body. “What then,” says Soranus, “if they were to deny that the sea is a body, because out of the sea a ship becomes immobile and heavy? How much stronger, then, is the body of the soul, which carries about a body of such weight afterwards with the lightest mobility!” Moreover, the soul is invisible, both by the condition of its body and by the property of its substance, and also by the nature of those to whom it has been allotted to be invisible. Owls do not know the sun with their eyes; eagles bear it so well that they judge the true breeding of their young by the boldness of their pupils, and will not rear as degenerate the one whom the sun's ray has turned aside. So a thing is invisible to one and not to another, and it is not therefore bodiless because the power of sight is not equal. For the sun is a body, since it is fire; yet what the eagle confesses the owl denies, without prejudice to the eagle. In the same way the body of the soul is invisible to the flesh, perhaps, but visible to the spirit. So John, being in the Spirit of God, sees the souls of the martyrs.

When we assert that the soul has a body of its own quality and its own kind, this very condition of distinctiveness will already settle the question of the other attributes of corporeality: either they are present in the soul, which we have shown to be a body, but of its own kind according to the distinctiveness of its body; or, even if they are not present, it belongs to its distinctiveness that attributes present in other bodies are not present in the body of the soul. And yet we shall not inconsistently profess that the more customary attributes, those altogether due to corporeality, are present in the soul too: such as outward form, limit, and that threefold dimension—I mean length, breadth, and height—by which the philosophers measure bodies. What now if we also give the soul a shape? Plato is unwilling, as though this endangered the soul's immortality. For he affirms that everything shaped is composite and constructed, and everything composite and constructed is dissoluble; but the soul is immortal, therefore indissoluble because immortal, and shapeless because indissoluble; whereas it would be composite and constructed if shaped. Yet he shapes it in another way, with intellectual forms: beautiful with justice and the disciplines of philosophy, but deformed by the contrary arts. But we inscribe bodily lines on it too, not only from confidence in its corporeality by reasoning, but also from the constancy of grace by revelation. For since we acknowledge spiritual gifts, we too have been granted, after John, to obtain prophecy. There is among us today a sister who has been allotted gifts of revelations, which she experiences in the church during the Sunday rites, through ecstasy in the Spirit. She converses with angels, sometimes even with the Lord; she sees and hears mysteries; she discerns the hearts of some, and supplies remedies to those who want them. And as the Scriptures are read, or psalms are sung, or addresses are delivered, or prayers are offered, so from these matter is supplied to her visions. It happened that we had been discoursing on something about the soul while this sister was in the Spirit. After the rites were over and the people dismissed, according to her custom of reporting to us what she has seen (for these things are also examined most carefully, so that they may be tested), she said among other things: “A soul was shown to me in bodily form, and it appeared to be a spirit, but not of an empty and void quality; rather, such as would even offer to be held: tender and bright and of the colour of air, and in form in every way human.” This is the vision; God is witness, and the apostle a sufficient guarantor of the gifts that were to be in the church. Will you not believe even if the thing itself persuades you on each point? For if the soul is a body, without doubt … among the things we have professed above. Likewise the property of colour belongs to every body. What other colour, then, will you reckon the soul to have than airy and bright? Not that its substance is air itself, though this seemed so to Aenesidemus and Anaximenes, and, I think, according to some, to Heraclitus; nor that it is light, though this pleased Heraclides of Pontus. For thunder-stones are not of fiery substance because they flash with glowing red, nor are beryls of watery material because they ripple with filtered sheen. How many things colour joins that nature separates! But since everything thin and transparent resembles air, so will the soul be, since it is breath and a shoot of spirit—and so because of the very fineness of its thinness its corporeality is endangered in belief. So too, from your own sense now, conceive that no other shape is to be assigned to the human soul than the human one, and indeed that of the body which each soul has carried about. Let the contemplation of the beginning lead us to understand this meanwhile. For consider: when God had breathed the breath of life into the man's face and the man had become a living soul, that whole breath was at once sent through the face into the interior, spread through all the spaces of the body, and at the same time, condensed by the divine breathing, was pressed into every line within which it had filled when condensed, and as it were congealed in a mould. From this, then, the corporeality of the soul was made solid by condensation, and its shape formed by the impression. This will be the inner man, the other the outer—one man in two ways; the inner too having its own eyes and ears, by which Paul was bound to hear and see the Lord, and having the other limbs as well, which it uses in thinking and exercises in dreams. So the rich man in the underworld has a tongue, and the poor man a finger, and Abraham a bosom. By these lines the souls of the martyrs under the altar are also perceived. For the soul, formed together and shaped with the body from the beginning in Adam, became the seed both of the whole substance and of this condition.