On the Soul 10–17

It belongs to the state of the faith to define the soul as simple, according to Plato, that is, uniform, at least with respect to its substance. Let the arts and schools see to it; let the heresies see to it too. For some would have another natural substance present in it, the spirit, as though living, which comes from the soul, were one thing, and breathing, which is done by the spirit, another. For not all living creatures have both, they say; many only live and do not also breathe, since they lack the organs of breath, lungs and windpipes. But what sort of thing is it, in examining the human soul, to look to arguments from the gnat and the ant, when God the craftsman has adjusted the vital parts proper to all living creatures according to the arrangement of each kind, so that no inference is to be caught from it? For neither will man, because he is built with lungs and windpipes, therefore breathe by one thing and live by another; nor will the ant, because it lacks members of this kind, therefore be denied breathing, as though it only lived. And who has had such insight into God's works as to presume that these are lacking in anything? That Herophilus, the physician or butcher, who cut up six hundred people to search out nature, who hated man in order to know him—I do not know whether he clearly explored all his inner parts, since death itself changes what had lived, and a death not simple but wandering amid the very arts of dissection. The philosophers have reported as certain that gnats, ants, and moths lack lungs and windpipes. Tell me, most curious inspector: do they have eyes to see? Yet they go where they will, and avoid and seek what they know by seeing: point out their eyes, mark their pupils. Moths also eat things away: show me their jaws, produce their molars. Gnats hum too, and are not deaf even in the dark: show me their trumpet and the gaping of their mouth. Any creature, even the size of a single point, must be fed by something: display the organs for passing, digesting, and voiding food. What then shall we say? If these are what one lives by, they will surely be present in all things that live, even if they are not seen, even if they are not grasped because of their smallness. You will believe this the more if you reflect that God is as great a craftsman in small things as in the greatest. But if you do not think God's skill can take in such tiny bodies, then recognize his magnificence even so, in that he has equipped small creatures to live nonetheless without the necessary members—with sight preserved without eyes, eating without teeth, digestion without bellies—just as some things move without feet, by a flowing impulse, like snakes; by a rising effort, like worms; by a foaming crawl, like snails. Why then should you not think that breathing too can happen without the bellows of lungs and the pipes of windpipes, so that you do not embrace as a great argument that spirit is added to the human soul because there are creatures lacking spirit, and that they lack spirit because they are not built with breathing apparatus? Do you think something lives without spirit, yet do not think it breathes without lungs? What is breathing, I ask you? Producing breath from oneself, I suppose. What is not living? Not producing breath from oneself, I suppose. For that is what I shall have to answer if breathing is not the same as living. But not producing breath will belong to the dead; therefore producing breath belongs to the living. But producing breath also belongs to one who breathes; therefore breathing too belongs to the living. If both could have gone on without the soul, breathing would not have belonged to the soul, only living. But living is breathing and breathing is living. Therefore this whole, both breathing and living, belongs to that to which living belongs, that is, to the soul. In short, if you separate the spirit and the soul, separate their works as well. Let both do something apart, the soul on its own, the spirit on its own; let the soul live without the spirit, the spirit breathe without the soul; let one leave bodies and the other remain; let death and life meet. For if soul and spirit are two, they can be divided, so that by their division—one departing, the other remaining—a concurrence of death and life would occur. But in no way will it occur. Therefore they will not be two, since they cannot be divided, which could be divided if they had been two. But, you say, two may be joined together. But they will not be joined if living is one thing and breathing another; works distinguish substances. And how much more firmly may you now believe them one, when you allow no distinction, so that the soul itself is the spirit, since breathing belongs to that to which living belongs? For what if you wished day to be one thing and light, which comes to the day, another, when day itself is light? Of course there will be other kinds of light too, as from the service of fires. There will also be other species of spirit, as from God, as from the devil. So when it is a question of soul and spirit, the soul itself will be the spirit, just as day itself is light. For a thing is the very thing by which it is what it is.

But the reasoning of the present question compels me to call the soul spirit, since breathing is ascribed to another substance. While we claim this for the soul, which we acknowledge to be uniform and simple, we must call it spirit on a definite condition: not as the name of its state but of its action, not as the title of its substance but of its work, because it breathes, not because it is properly spirit. For blowing too is breathing. So the soul, which we maintain is breath by its own property, we now declare to be spirit out of necessity. Against Hermogenes, however, who contends that it is from matter and not from God's breath, we properly defend it as breath. For he, against the plain sense of Scripture itself, turned “breath” into “spirit,” so that, since it is incredible that the Spirit of God should fall into sin and then into judgment, the soul might be believed to be from matter rather than from God's Spirit. For that reason there we defend it as breath, not spirit, according to Scripture and according to the distinction of the Spirit; and here we call it spirit against our will, because breathing and blowing are the same. There the question is of substance; for breathing is an action of the substance. Nor would I dwell longer on this, were it not for the heretics who stuff into the soul some spiritual seed or other, bestowed by the secret generosity of their mother Sophia without the knowledge of the maker. Yet Scripture, which knows its maker, God, better, has declared nothing more than that God breathed into the man's face the breath of life and the man became a living soul, by which he thenceforth both lives and breathes; and the difference between spirit and soul is sufficiently declared in the following documents, where God himself says: “Spirit went forth from me, and I made every breath.” For the soul, the breath, was made from the Spirit. And again: “Who gave breath to the people upon the earth, and spirit to those who tread it.” First the soul, that is, the breath, to the people walking on the earth, that is, living carnally in the flesh; afterwards the spirit to those who tread the earth, that is, who subdue the works of the flesh; for the apostle too says that what is spiritual is not first, but what is natural, and afterwards the spiritual. For even if Adam at once prophesied that great sacrament concerning Christ and the church—“This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; for this reason a man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh”—he experienced the spirit as something added. For an ecstasy fell upon him, the power of the Holy Spirit that works prophecy. An evil spirit too is something that comes upon one. In short, the Spirit of God afterwards turned Saul into another man, that is, into a prophet, when it was said, “What is this that has come to the son of Kish? Is Saul too among the prophets?”, just as truly as an evil spirit afterwards turned him into another man, namely an apostate. Judas too, for some time counted among the chosen, even to the office of the money-box, already a cheat though not yet a traitor, the devil afterwards entered. If, then, neither the Spirit of God nor the spirit of the devil is sown together with the soul at birth, it is established that the soul is alone before either spirit comes; and if alone, then simple and uniform in respect of its substance, and so breathing from no other source than from the lot of its own substance.

In the same way we understand the mind, or intellect—nous among the Greeks—to be nothing other than a faculty of the soul, inborn, implanted, and proper to it from birth, by which it acts and knows; having it with itself, the soul moves itself from itself within itself, and so seems to be moved by it as by another substance, as those hold who declare the mind to be even the mover of the universe: that god of Socrates, that Only-begotten of Valentinus, from the father Bythos and the mother Sige. How confused is the opinion of Anaxagoras! Having devised mind as the beginning of all things, and hanging the swing of the universe on its axis, and affirming it to be pure, simple, and unmixable, on this very ground above all he separates it from mixture with the soul; and yet elsewhere he assigns it to the soul. Aristotle too pointed this out, though perhaps readier to fill up his own positions than to empty out another's. For he too, while postponing a definition of mind, meanwhile declared a second kind of mind, the divine one, which, by suggesting in turn that it is impassible, he also took away from partnership with the soul. For since it is established that the soul is passible in the things it has been allotted to suffer, either it will suffer through the mind and with the mind, if it is joined to the mind—and then the mind cannot be brought in as impassible—or, if the soul does not suffer through the mind nor with it, it will not be joined to that with which nothing suffers and which suffers nothing. Moreover, if the soul suffers nothing through it and with it, it will no longer perceive, know, or be moved through it, as they hold. For Aristotle makes the senses passions. Why not? For to perceive is to suffer, since to suffer is to perceive. Likewise to know is to perceive, and to be moved is to perceive, and so the whole is suffering. But we see that the soul experiences none of these things without their being ascribed also to the mind, since it is carried out through it and with it. So now the mind is mixable, against Anaxagoras, and passible, against Aristotle. But if a separation is admitted, so that mind and soul are two things in substance, then to one will belong passion, perception, all knowing, action, and motion, and to the other idleness, rest, stupor, and no longer any function; and either the mind or the soul will be idle. But if it is established that all these things are reckoned to both, then both will be one, and Democritus, who removes the difference, will win; and the question will be how both are one, whether by a fusion of two substances or by the arrangement of one. We, however, say that the mind is joined to the soul not as another in substance, but as a function of the substance.

Next it remains to consider where the sovereignty lies, that is, which presides over which; so that whichever is shown to have sovereignty is the mass of the substance, and what the mass of the substance presides over is reckoned as a natural function of the substance. And who will not give the whole supremacy to the soul, by whose name the whole man is referred to? “How many souls I feed!” says the rich man, not “minds”; the helmsman prays for the safety of souls, not minds; the farmer at his work, and the soldier in battle, says he lays down his soul, not his mind. Of which are dangers and vows more often spoken—of the mind or of the soul? And what are the dying said to breathe out—the mind or the soul? Finally, the philosophers themselves and the physicians themselves, though about to discuss the mind as well, have each headed the face of the work and the front of the subject with the soul. And that you may learn it from God too: God always addresses the soul; he calls on the soul and summons it to turn its mind to him. It is the soul that Christ came to save; it is the soul he threatens to destroy in Gehenna; it is the soul he forbids us to value too highly; it is the soul that the good shepherd himself lays down for his sheep. You have the soul's sovereignty, and in it you have also the unity of the substance, of which you are to understand that the mind is the instrument, not the master.

Besides, the soul is single and simple and wholly of itself, no more constructed from elsewhere than divisible from within, since it is not dissoluble either. For if it were constructed and dissoluble, it would no longer be immortal. So, since it is not mortal, it is neither dissoluble nor divisible. For to be divided is to be dissolved, and to be dissolved is to die. Yet it is divided into parts: now into two by Plato, now into three by Zeno, now into five and six by Panaetius, into seven by Soranus, even into eight by Chrysippus, even into nine by Apollophanes, and into twelve by some of the Stoics, and into two more by Posidonius, who, beginning from two headings—the ruling part, which they call hēgemonikon, and the rational, which they call logikon—cut it up from there into seventeen. So they divide the soul into one species after another. But such things will be held to be not so much parts of the soul as powers, efficacies, and functions, as Aristotle too judged about some of them. For they are not members of the soul's substance but capacities, such as the power of motion, of action, of thought, and whatever else they distinguish in this way; as also those five best-known senses, sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Although they have assigned to each of all these a definite dwelling in the body, this distribution will not therefore amount to sections of the soul, since not even the body itself is divided into members in the way they would have the soul divided. On the contrary, one body is made out of a multitude of members, so that the division itself is rather a joining together. Look at that most marvellous gift of Archimedes—I mean the water organ: so many members, so many parts, so many joints, so many passages for the notes, so many short cuts for the sounds, so many exchanges of modes, so many ranks of pipes, and all of them will be one mass. So the air, which there pants out from the pressure of the water, will not therefore be separated into parts because it is administered through parts; it is solid in substance, divided in operation. This example is not far from Strato, Aenesidemus, and Heraclitus; for they too maintain the unity of the soul, which is spread through the whole body and everywhere itself, and, like breath in a reed through its holes, flashes out through the senses in various ways, not so much cut up as distributed. By what names all these are called, by what divisions of itself they are derived, and by what locations in the body they are set apart, the physicians together with the philosophers will rather consider; a few points will suit us.

First of all, whether there is in the soul some supreme grade of life and wisdom, which they call hēgemonikon, that is, the ruling part; for if it is denied, the whole state of the soul is endangered. Indeed, those who deny the ruling part have first held the soul itself to be nothing. One Dicaearchus of Messene, and among the physicians Andreas and Asclepiades, did away with the ruling part by holding that the senses, for which a ruling part is claimed, are in the mind itself. Asclepiades also rides about on this argument: that many animals, when those parts of the body in which the ruling part is thought chiefly to reside are removed, both go on living for some time and still have some sense—like flies, wasps, and locusts, if you cut off their heads; like goats, tortoises, and eels, if you take out their hearts—so that there is no ruling part, since if there were, the vigour of the soul would not persist once it had been lost along with its seat. But more of the philosophers are against Dicaearchus—Plato, Strato, Epicurus, Democritus, Empedocles, Socrates, Aristotle—and more of the physicians against Andreas and Asclepiades—Herophilus, Erasistratus, Diocles, Hippocrates, and Soranus himself; and now more than all of them the Christians, who are taught by God on both points: that there is a ruling part in the soul, and that it is enshrined in a definite recess of the body. For if we read that God is the searcher and discerner of the heart; if his prophet too is proved by laying bare the secrets of the heart; if the Lord himself anticipates the thoughts of the heart in the people: “Why do you think evil in your hearts?”; if David too says, “Create a clean heart in me, O God,” and Paul says that one believes with the heart unto righteousness, and John says that each is condemned by his own heart; if, finally, “whoever looks at a woman to lust has already committed adultery in his heart”—then both points shine out at once: that there is a ruling part in the soul, to which the divine intent is directed, that is, the power of wisdom and of life (for what has wisdom is alive); and that it is kept in that treasury of the body to which God looks. So you are not to think that this ruling part is moved from outside, as Heraclitus holds; nor wafted through the whole body, as Moschion; nor shut up in the head, as Plato; nor presiding rather at the crown, as Xenocrates; nor lying in the brain, as Hippocrates; nor about the base of the brain, as Herophilus; nor in its membranes, as Strato and Erasistratus; nor in the middle between the eyebrows, as Strato the physicist; nor in the whole breastplate of the chest, as Epicurus; but … as the Egyptians too have reported, and those who were held to be interpreters of divine writings, as in that verse of Orpheus or Empedocles: “For the blood around the heart is the thought of man.” Protagoras too, and Apollodorus and Chrysippus, think so; so that, beaten back by these as well, Asclepiades may go look for his goats bleating without hearts and chase his flies buzzing about without heads, and all may now know that it is rather they who live without heart and brain who have prejudged the arrangement of the human soul from the condition of beasts.

Also pertaining to the faith is Plato's division of the soul into two, the rational and the irrational. We too applaud this definition, but not so that both are ascribed to nature. For the rational must be believed natural, since it was inborn in the soul from the beginning, from a rational author, of course. For what is not rational that God produced even by command, much more what he sent forth properly by his own breath? The irrational, on the other hand, must be understood as later, as something that happened at the serpent's instigation—that very act of transgression—and thereafter grew in and grew up with the soul to the likeness of something natural, because it happened at once, at the very beginning of nature. Moreover, since the same Plato calls only the rational part in the soul of God himself, if we ascribed the irrational too to the nature which our soul received from God, the irrational would equally be from God, as being natural, since God is the author of nature. But the insertion of sin is from the devil, and all sin is irrational; therefore the irrational is from the devil, from whom sin also comes, foreign to God, to whom the irrational is alien. So … the difference between these comes from the difference of their authors. Then, when Plato, reserving the rational to God alone, subdivides the irrational into two kinds, the indignant, which they call thymikon, and the desiring, which they call epithymētikon—so that the first is common to us and lions, the second to us and flies, while the rational is shared with God—I see that I must reconsider this too, because of what is found in Christ. For see, this whole trinity is in the Lord too: the rational, by which he teaches, discourses, and lays down the ways of salvation; the indignant, by which he inveighs against the scribes and Pharisees; and the desiring, by which he desires to eat the Passover with his disciples. So with us indignation and desire are not always to be reckoned to the irrational, since we are certain that they ran their course rationally in the Lord. God will be indignant rationally, namely with those with whom he ought; and God will desire rationally the things worthy of himself. For he will be indignant with the wicked, and will desire salvation for the good. The apostle too grants us desire: “If anyone desires the office of bishop, he desires a good work.” But by saying “a good work” he shows a rational desire. He allows indignation too. Why not, since he himself took it up? “Would that those who unsettle you would cut themselves off,” he says. Indignation is rational when it comes from zeal for discipline. But when he says, “We were once by nature children of wrath,” he rebukes irrational indignation, as not coming from that nature which is from God but from the one which the devil brought in—who is himself called lord of his own order, “You cannot serve two masters,” and is himself named father, “You are of your father the devil.” So do not be afraid to ascribe to him the property of another nature, a later and adulterous one, since you read of him as the one who sows adulterous seed over the good and corrupts the wheat crop by night.

The question of those five senses also concerns us—the ones we learn in our first lessons—since from here too something is provided for the heretics. They are sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The Academics condemn their reliability rather harshly, and according to some so do Heraclitus, Diocles, and Empedocles; Plato certainly does in the Timaeus, declaring sensation irrational and entangled with opinion. So falsehood is laid to the charge of sight, because it asserts that oars in water are bent or broken, against our knowledge that they are whole; because it persuades us that a square tower seen from far off is round; because it slanders a perfectly even colonnade as narrower at the far end; because it joins the sky, suspended at so great a height, to the sea. Hearing likewise is accused of deceit, as when we think it is thunder and it is a wagon, or, when thunder is rumbling, we are sure the sound is from a wagon. So smell and taste are convicted, since the same perfumes and the same wines are thought less of after further use. So touch too is censured, since the same pavements are thought rougher to the hands and smoother to the feet, and in the baths the same pool of hot water is reported very hot at first and then quite mild. So, they say, we are deceived by the senses in this way too, as we change our judgments. The Stoics are more moderate: they do not load every sense, nor always, with falsehood. The Epicureans, more consistently, defend an equal and perpetual truth for all the senses, but by another route: it is not the sense that lies, they say, but opinion; for the sense suffers, it does not form opinions; it is the soul that forms opinions. They cut off both opinion from sense and sense from the soul. And where does opinion come from, if not from sense? If sight had not perceived the tower as round, there would be no opinion of roundness. And where does sense come from, if not from the soul? In short, a body without a soul will lack sense too. So sense is from the soul, and opinion from sense, and the soul is the whole. It will be better, however, to propose that there is certainly something that causes a thing to be reported by the senses otherwise than it is in reality. And if something can be reported that is not in reality, why could it not be reported through something that is not in the senses but in those causes which intervene on their own account? And so it will be possible to recognize them. For that the oar appears bent or broken in water, the water is the cause; out of the water, the oar is whole to sight. But the delicacy of that substance, by which a mirror is formed from the light, as it is struck or stirred, makes the image quiver and so overturns the straight line. Again, that the tower's shape deceives is forced by the condition of distance in the open; for the evenness of the surrounding air, clothing the angles with equal light, blots out their lines. So too the uniformity of the colonnade tapers at the end, while the line of sight, crowded into a confined space, is thinned out there, where it is also stretched. So the sky is joined to the sea where vision is used up; as long as it is strong, it keeps them apart. And what else will deceive hearing but the likeness of sounds? And if the perfume later smells less, and the wine tastes less, and the pool is less hot, in almost all of these the first force is the whole of it. As for rough and smooth, hands and feet naturally disagree, being tender and calloused members. In this way no deception of the senses will lack a cause. But if causes deceive the senses, and through the senses the opinions, then deceit is not to be placed in the senses, which follow the causes, nor in the opinions, which are directed by the senses following the causes. The insane see one person in another, as Orestes saw his mother in his sister, Ajax Ulysses in the herd, Athamas and Agave beasts in their children. Will you reproach the eyes with this falsehood, or the madness? To those who are bitter with an overflow of bile, everything is bitter. Will you then reproach the taste with dereliction, or the illness? So all the senses are upset or circumvented for a time, in such a way that they are free of any intrinsic deceit. Indeed, not even to the causes themselves should the charge of deceit be ascribed. For if these things happen by reason, the reason does not deserve to be called deceit. What ought to happen in this way is not a lie. So if even the causes are freed from infamy, how much more the senses, before which the causes go freely; since on this ground above all truth, reliability, and integrity must be claimed for the senses: that they report nothing other than what that reason has commanded which causes a thing to be reported by the senses otherwise than it is in reality. What are you doing, most impudent Academy? You overturn the whole state of life, you throw the whole order of nature into confusion, you blind the providence of God himself, as though he had set deceitful and lying senses as masters over all his works, to understand, inhabit, dispense, and enjoy them. Is not the whole of creation served by them? Has not a second furnishing been added to the world through them—so many arts, so many talents, so many pursuits, businesses, offices, trades, remedies, counsels, consolations, means of living, dress, and adornment—everything? They have seasoned the whole taste of life, since by these senses man alone of all creatures is recognized as a rational animal, capable of understanding and knowledge—even of the Academy itself! But Plato, so as not to put any seal of testimony on the senses, for that reason in the Phaedrus, in the person of Socrates, denies that he can know himself, as the Delphic inscription advises; and in the Theaetetus he takes from himself knowing and perceiving; and in the Phaedo he postpones his judgment until after death—a posthumous truth, of course; and yet he philosophized while not yet dead. We may not, we may not call these senses into doubt, lest their reliability be debated in Christ as well; lest it perhaps be said that he falsely saw Satan cast down from heaven, or falsely heard the Father's voice testifying about him, or was deceived when he touched Peter's mother-in-law, or afterwards perceived a different scent of the ointment which he accepted for his burial, or afterwards a different taste of the wine which he consecrated in memory of his blood. For so Marcion preferred to believe him a phantom, disdaining the reality of his whole body in him. But nature was not mocked even in his apostles. Faithful was their sight and hearing on the mountain; faithful the taste of that wine, though it had been water before, at the wedding in Galilee; faithful then the touch of Thomas, who from then on believed. Read John's testimony: “What we have seen,” he says, “what we have heard, we have seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled, concerning the word of life.” A false testimony indeed, if the nature of the senses of eyes, ears, and hands lies.