On the Soul 33–42

Even when this dogma is defended in the name of judgment—that human souls are allotted kinds of animals according to their life and merits: some to be slaughtered in animals for killing, some to be subdued in beasts of service, to be worn out in beasts of labour, to be defiled in unclean ones; likewise, to be honoured, loved, cared for, and sought after in the most beautiful, honest, useful, and delicate ones—here too I shall say: if they are changed, it will not be the same souls that are assessed as deserving, and the meaning of judgment will be emptied if the sense of merits is lacking. And the sense of merits will be lacking if the state of the souls changes; and the state of the souls changes if they do not remain the same until the judgment. The Egyptian Mercury knew this too, saying that the soul, having left the body, is not poured back into the soul of the universe but remains distinct, so that it may render an account, he says, to the Father of what it has done in the body. I wish to review the justice, gravity, majesty, and dignity of the divine judgment, to see whether human justice does not preside at a loftier height, fuller in the honour of both its sentences, punishments and favours, more severe in avenging and more generous in bestowing. What do you think the soul of a murderer will become? Some beast, I suppose, destined for the slaughterhouse and the meat market, so that it is butchered likewise because it butchered, skinned likewise because it stripped others, set out likewise for food because it made food for beasts of those it slaughtered in woods and wilds. If it is judged so, will not that soul bring away more consolation than punishment—that it finds its funeral among the most costly cooks, is buried in the sauces of Apicius and Lurco, is brought to the tables of Cicero, carried out on the most splendid dishes of Sulla, suffers a banquet for its obsequies, is devoured by its equals rather than by kites and wolves, so that, entombed in a man's body and returned to its own kind, it seems to have risen again, exulting over human judgments, if it has experienced them? For those tear the assassin apart with various and exquisite beasts, trained even beyond nature—and that while he is alive, or rather not easily dying, the end being carefully delayed to complete the punishment. And even if the soul flees before the final sword, the body does not escape the steel either; nonetheless, with throat and side pierced and ribs transfixed, compensation is exacted for his own crime. Then he is given to the fire, so that even his burial is punished. It is not permitted otherwise. Nor is so much care taken of the pyre that other beasts may not find the remains; certainly neither bones are spared nor ashes indulged, since they are to be punished by exposure. The vengeance for murder among men is as great as the nature of what is avenged. Who would not prefer the justice of the world, which the apostle too testifies is not armed with the sword in vain, which is religious in its fierceness on behalf of man? If we consider the wages of other crimes as well—gibbets, burnings alive, sacks, hooks, and rocks—who would not find it better to suffer sentence at the hands of Pythagoras and Empedocles? For those who are to be punished with labours and servitude and re-embodied as asses and mules—how they will congratulate themselves on the mills and water-wheels, if they remember the mines and the slave-prisons and the public works, and even the prisons themselves, idle though they are! Likewise, for those who have lived blamelessly and commended their life to the judge, I look for rewards, but find punishments instead. It is surely a great reward for the good to be restored into any animals whatever! Homer remembered that he was a peacock, as Ennius dreamed; but I would not believe poets even awake. Even if the peacock is most beautiful and adorned with whatever colour it wishes—yet its feathers are silent, its voice displeases, and poets prefer nothing so much as to sing. So Homer was condemned into a peacock, not honoured. He will rejoice more in the world's reward, held father of the liberal arts, so that he prefers the ornaments of his fame to those of a tail. Come now, let poets pass into peacocks or swans, if swans do have a fine voice; what animal will you clothe the just man Aeacus in? What beast will you give the chaste woman Dido? What bird will patience be allotted, what beast holiness, what fish innocence? All are servants of man, all subject, all his property. If he is to become any of these, he is diminished there, to whom, for the merits of his life, images, statues, and inscriptions, public honours and privileges are paid, to whom the senate and the people offer the sacrifice of their votes. O divine judgments after death more false than human ones, contemptible in their punishments, disdainful in their favours, which neither the worst would fear nor the best desire, to which the wicked will hasten more than the holy—the former to escape the world's justice sooner, the latter to receive it later! Well do you teach, philosophers, and usefully do you persuade, that punishments or rewards after death are lighter, when, if any judgment awaits souls, it ought to be believed heavier in the final reckoning of life than in its administration, since nothing is fuller than what is more final, and nothing fuller than what is more divine. So God will judge more fully, because more finally, by an eternal sentence both of punishment and of refreshment, with souls returning not into beasts but into their own bodies—and this once, and for that day which the Father alone knows, so that by suspended expectation the anxiety of faith may be tested, always watching for the day while always ignorant of it, daily fearing what it daily hopes for.

No opinion of such madness has yet broken out under a heretical name that refashions human souls into beasts. But we necessarily brought in this form too, and excluded it, as connected with the preceding, so that Homer might be beaten back in the peacock just as Euphorbus in Pythagoras, and so, with this metempsychosis or metensomatosis also repulsed, that other doctrine might again be cut down which has supplied something to the heretics. For Simon the Samaritan too, in the Acts of the Apostles the would-be purchaser of the Holy Spirit, after he had been condemned by the apostle and had wept in vain over his ruin together with his money, turned to attack the truth, as if for the consolation of revenge. Supported also by the powers of his art, to make a show of some power, he bought with the same money a certain Helen of Tyre from a place of public lust—a reward worthy of himself in place of the Holy Spirit. And he pretends that he is the supreme Father, and she his first Thought, by which he had conceived the making of angels and archangels; that, possessed of this purpose, she leapt forth from the Father and sprang down to the lower regions, and there, forestalling the Father's purpose, gave birth to the angelic powers, who did not know the Father, the maker of this world; that she was held back by them, not in the same spirit, lest after her departure they should seem the offspring of another, and therefore given over to every outrage, so that, degraded, she might never wish to leave; that she sank even into human form, to be confined as by the chains of the flesh; and that so, rolled for many ages through one female shape after another, she was also that Helen most ruinous to Priam, and afterwards to the eyes of Stesichorus, whom she blinded for the insult of his poem and then restored to sight for the amends of his praise; and that thus, migrating from bodies into bodies, in the final disgrace she stood for sale as a cheaper Helen. This, then, was the lost sheep to which the supreme Father, Simon of course, came down; and having first recovered her and carried her back—on his shoulders or his thighs, I do not know—he then turned to the salvation of men, as though by way of liberating them from those angelic powers; to deceive whom he too was shaped like men and, feigning to be a man, acted as the Son in Judaea and as the Father in Samaria. O Helen, toiling between poets and heretics, then notorious for adultery, now for prostitution! Except that she is rescued from Troy more gloriously than from a brothel: with a thousand ships from Troy, not perhaps with a thousand denarii from the brothel. Blush, Simon, slower in seeking her, less steadfast in bringing her back! But Menelaus at once pursues the one he lost, at once demands back the one snatched from him, wrests her away by a ten-year war—not hiding, not deceiving, not quibbling. I fear that he was more of a father who laboured more vigilantly, boldly, and long for Helen's recovery.

But metempsychosis has not furnished this tale for you alone. Carpocrates too makes use of it, equally a magician, equally a fornicator, though lacking a Helen. Why not? For, in order to establish the complete overthrow of divine and human discipline, he asserted that souls are re-embodied. For no one, he says, can complete this life properly unless all the things that are held against it are done, since nothing is held evil by nature but by opinion. So metempsychosis must necessarily threaten if full satisfaction is not made to every unlawful thing in the first passage of this life—crimes, you see, are the tribute owed to life! Otherwise the soul must be called back as often as it has paid in less, remaining a debtor of offences, until it pays the last farthing, thrust again and again into the prison of the body. For to this he adapts that whole allegory of the Lord, which shines with its definite interpretations, and which is first of all to be understood simply. For the heathen man too is our adversary, walking in the same road of common life. Otherwise we would have to go out of the world if we were not allowed to associate with them. To him, then, he commands you to show good will—“Love your enemies,” he says, “and pray for those who curse you”—lest, provoked by some injury in dealings of business, he drag you before his judge, and, consigned to custody, you be squeezed until you pay the whole debt. Then, if the mention of the adversary is transferred to the devil, from the accompanying observance you are warned to enter into that agreement with him too which is reckoned to come from the compact of faith. For you have covenanted to renounce him, and his pomp, and his angels. On this you are agreed. This will be friendship: by the keeping of the pledge, never afterwards to take back anything of what you have renounced and given back to him, lest he bring you before God the judge as a cheat, as a transgressor of the pact—just as we read elsewhere that he is the accuser of the saints, and is an informer by his very name of devil—and the judge hand you over to the angel of execution, and he commit you to the prison of the underworld, from which you will not be let out until even the smallest offence has been paid off by the delay of the resurrection. What is more fitting than these meanings? What truer than these interpretations? But with Carpocrates, if the soul is a debtor for all crimes, whom are we to understand as its enemy and adversary? The better mind, I suppose, which has driven it into some bit of innocence, so that it must be driven again and again into a body until it is found guilty of no good life. This is to recognize a good tree from bad fruits—that is, to know the doctrine of truth from the worst precepts! I expect that heretics of this kind also seize on the example of Elijah, as though he were so represented in John that the Lord's pronouncement supports metempsychosis: “Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him,” and elsewhere, “And if you are willing to hear, this is Elijah who is to come.” Were the Jews then consulting John from Pythagorean opinion, “Are you Elijah?”—and not from the divine prediction, “And behold, I will send you Elijah the Tishbite”? But their metempsychosis is the recalling of a soul long since dead and repeated in another body. Elijah, however, is to come not after departing life but after being translated; not to be restored to a body, from which he was not removed, but to be given back to the world, from which he was translated; not by a return from exile into life, but to complete prophecy; the same man, with his own name and his own person. But how is John Elijah? You have the angel's word: “And he will go before the people,” he says, “in the power and spirit of Elijah”—not in his soul, nor in his flesh. For these substances belong to each man himself; but spirit and power are conferred from outside by the grace of God, and so can be transferred to another by the will of God, as happened long ago with the spirit of Moses.

We digressed into these questions, I think, from the point to which we must now return. We had established that the soul is sown in man himself and from man himself, and that from the beginning there is one seed, as of the flesh too, for the whole swarm of the race—on account, of course, of the rival opinions of the philosophers and heretics and that drowsy saying of Plato. Now we weave the order of the treatments that follow from there. The soul, sown in the womb together with the flesh, receives its sex together with it—so together that neither substance is held to be the cause of the sex. For if, in the seeds of the two substances, their conception admitted some interval, so that either flesh or soul were sown first, one could also ascribe the property of sex to one of the substances through the interval of time between the seeds, so that either the flesh stamped the sex on the soul or the soul on the flesh. So Apelles—not the painter, but the heretic—who places souls, male and female, before bodies, as he learned from Philumene, certainly makes the flesh, as later, receive its sex from the soul. And those who bring the soul onto the flesh after birth, the flesh having of course been formed before, prejudge the soul's sex, male or female, from the flesh. But the undivided seeds of both substances and their united outpouring undergo together the common event of sex, along whatever lines that principle of nature, whatever it is, has drawn. Certainly here too the pattern of the beginning testifies to itself, when the male is formed earlier, for Adam was first, and the female somewhat later, for Eve was after. So as long as the flesh is unformed, as was that plucked from Adam's side, it is yet itself a living thing, since I recognize that portion of Adam too as ensouled at that time. Otherwise the breath of God would have ensouled her too, if there had not been in the woman a shoot from Adam of the soul as well as of the flesh.

The whole process of sowing, building, and shaping man in the womb is regulated by some power serving the divine will, whatever manner it has been allotted to carry it out. Roman superstition, reckoning this, even invented a goddess Alemona for nourishing the fetus in the womb, and Nona and Decima after the more anxious months, and Partula to govern the birth, and Lucina to bring it into the light. We believe the divine functions are angels. The fetus in the womb, then, is a man from the time its form is complete. For the law of Moses too judges one who causes an abortion liable to retaliation at that point, when it is already the case of a human being, when the status of life and death is already ascribed to it, when it is already inscribed by fate, although, while still living in its mother, it mostly shares its lot with the mother. I shall say something also about the times of the soul's birth, to run through the order. The lawful birth is usually at the beginning of the tenth month. Those who reckon numbers revere the number ten as the parent of the others, and so as the perfecter of human birth. I shall rather argue this measure of time with reference to God, so that ten months may inaugurate man in the Decalogue, and we may be born in as great a number of time as the number of the discipline by which we are born again. And when birth is complete in the seventh month more readily than in the eighth, I shall recognize the honour of the Sabbath, so that in the month numbered as the day on which God's creation was dedicated, God's image is sometimes brought forth. Birth is allowed to hurry, and yet to arrive fittingly at the seventh, in the auspices of the resurrection, the rest, and the kingdom. For this reason the eighth does not create us; for then there will be no marriages. We have long since commended the partnership of flesh and soul from the joining of the very seeds to the completion of the formation. So now we defend it from birth onward as well, first of all in that they grow together, but in different ways according to their kinds: the flesh in size, the soul in capacity; the flesh in bulk, the soul in sense. But it must be denied that the soul grows in substance, lest it also be said to decrease in substance and so be believed to be going to fail; rather, its power, in which its natural endowments are kept planted, is drawn out little by little with the flesh, the measure of the substance being preserved with which it was breathed in from the beginning. Take a fixed weight of gold or silver, still a rough mass: its form is compact and meanwhile smaller than it will be, yet it contains within the line of its measure all that is the nature of gold or silver. Then, when the mass is beaten out into a plate, it becomes larger than at first by the spreading of a fixed weight, not by addition—while it is extended, not while it is increased. Though in this way too it is increased while it is extended; for it may be increased in form, though not in state. Then the very brightness of the gold or silver is brought out, which was there in the mass too, but dimmer—yet not absent. Then one form after another is added according to the pliancy of the material, as the worker draws it out, adding nothing to the measure but shape. So too the soul's growths are to be reckoned not substantial but developmental.

Although we laid down earlier that all the natural properties of the soul pertaining to sense and intellect are present in its very substance from the soul's inborn constitution, but develop gradually through the stages of age and turn out variously through accidents, according to arts, upbringing, places, and ruling powers—yet, as bearing on the partnership of flesh and soul now under discussion, we say that the puberty of the soul coincides with that of the flesh, and that both rise together, the one by the prompting of the senses, the other by the growth of the members, from about the fourteenth year—not because Asclepiades reckons wisdom from then, nor because the civil laws adjust the conduct of affairs from then, but because this too is the principle from the beginning. For if Adam and Eve felt they must cover their shame after the knowledge of good and evil, then from the time we feel the same, we profess the knowledge of good and evil. From these years sex is both more suffused and more clothed; desire uses the eyes as judges, shares its pleasure, understands what … are, girds its own bounds, after the pattern of the fig leaf, with the itch of …, and leads man out of the paradise of integrity; thereafter, scabbed, it breaks out into other faults too and into offences not natural …, since now not from the institution of nature but from vice. But the only properly natural desire is that for food alone, which God bestowed at the beginning: “Of every tree,” he says, “you shall eat”; and for the second generation after the flood he measured it out more widely: “See, I have given you all things for food, like green herbs”—providing not so much for the soul as for the flesh, though for the soul's sake. For the arguer's pretext must be removed, who, because the soul seems to desire food, would have it understood to be mortal on this ground too, being sustained by food, weakening when it is withheld, and finally perishing when it is withdrawn. Now we must set out not only who desires it but for whom; and if for itself, then also why, when, and how far; then that one thing is desired by nature, another by necessity, one according to property, another for a purpose. The soul, then, will desire food for itself by reason of necessity, but for the flesh by nature of its property. For certainly the flesh is the house of the soul, and the soul the tenant of the flesh. So the tenant will desire, by reason and necessity of that name, what will benefit the house for the whole time of its tenancy—not so that it itself is underpinned, nor itself walled, nor itself propped, but only so that it is held in, since it cannot be held in otherwise than by a house that is supported. Otherwise, when the house has fallen for lack of its former supports, the soul may depart unharmed, having its own props and the nourishment of its own condition: immortality, rationality, sensibility, intellectuality, freedom of choice.

All these endowments conferred on the soul at birth are overshadowed and depraved even now by the same one who envied it at the beginning, so that they are neither spontaneously foreseen nor administered as they should be. For to which of men will an evil spirit not attach itself, lying in wait for souls from the very doorway of birth, or invited there by that whole superstition of childbirth? So all are born with idolatry as midwife, while the very wombs, still bound with fillets made before idols, declare their offspring candidates of demons; while in labour there is wailing to Lucina and Diana; while for the whole week a table is set out for Juno; while on the last day the Fates who write are invoked; while even the first setting of the infant on the ground is sacred to the goddess Statina. Who, after that, does not either vow the whole head of his son to guilt, or reserve some lock of hair, or shave it all with a razor, or bind him with a sacrifice, or seal him with a sacred rite, for the family, the ancestral, the public, or a private devotion? So it was that a demonic spirit found Socrates while still a boy. So too genii are assigned to everyone, which is a name for demons. So almost no birth is clean—that is, of the heathen. Hence the apostle too says that from either sex being sanctified holy children are produced, as much by the prerogative of the seed as by the discipline of upbringing. “Otherwise,” he says, “they would be born unclean,” as though wishing the children of believers to be understood as designated for holiness, and so for salvation, so that by the pledge of this hope he might support the marriages which he had judged should be kept. Otherwise he remembered the Lord's definition: “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he will not enter the kingdom of God”—that is, he will not be holy.

So every soul is reckoned in Adam until it is re-enrolled in Christ, unclean as long as it is not re-enrolled; and sinful because unclean, though not receiving the disgrace from its partnership with the flesh. For even if the flesh is sinful—according to which we are forbidden to walk, whose works are condemned as lusting against the spirit, on account of which men are branded carnal—yet the flesh is not disgraced in its own name. For it does not of itself think or feel anything so as to persuade or command sin. Why should it? It is a servant—not a servant like a slave or a lesser friend, which are names of living beings, but like a cup or something else of that kind, a body, not a soul. For a cup too is the servant of one who is thirsty; yet unless the thirsty man puts the cup to his use, the cup will serve nothing. So nothing proper to man lies in what is earthy, nor is the flesh the man as if it were another power of the soul and another person; it is a thing of plainly another substance and another condition, yet bound to the soul as furniture, as an instrument for the tasks of life. The flesh, then, is reproved in the Scriptures because the soul does nothing without the flesh in the working of lust, gluttony, drunkenness, cruelty, idolatry, and the other carnal things—carnal not in sense but in effect. Indeed, the intentions of sins, even without effect, are regularly imputed to the soul: “Whoever looks at a woman to lust has already committed adultery in his heart.” But what does the flesh do without the soul in the working of goodness, justice, endurance, and chastity? And what sort of thing is it to paint crimes onto that to which you do not ascribe good deeds as its own? But the instrument through which sin is committed is summoned, so that the one by whom sin is committed may be burdened, even by the accusation of its servant. The odium against a governor is heavier when his officials are attacked. The one who gives the order is beaten more, when not even the one who obeys is excused.

The evil of the soul, then, besides what is built upon it by the coming of an evil spirit, is antecedent from the fault of its origin, natural in a certain way. For, as we said, the corruption of nature is another nature, having its own lord and father, namely the very author of the corruption; yet so that that original good of the soul is still present in it, that divine, genuine, and properly natural good. For what is from God is not so much extinguished as overshadowed. It can be overshadowed, because it is not God; it cannot be extinguished, because it is from God. So just as light hindered by some obstacle remains, but does not appear if the obstacle is thick enough, so the good in the soul, oppressed by evil according to the nature of the evil, either is wholly idle, its light hidden, or, where it is allowed, shines out, having found freedom. So some are very bad and some very good, and nonetheless all souls are of one kind. So too in the worst there is something good, and in the best something very bad. For God alone is without sin, and the only man without sin is Christ, because Christ is also God. So too the divinity of the soul bursts out in presentiments from its former good, and its awareness of God comes out in testimony: “God is good,” “God sees,” and “I commend it to God.” Therefore no soul is without guilt, because none is without the seed of good. Accordingly, when it comes to faith, re-formed through the second birth from water and the power from above, the veil of its former corruption drawn away, it beholds all its light. It is also received by the Holy Spirit, just as in its former birth by the profane spirit. The flesh follows the soul, now wedded to the Spirit, as a dowry-slave, and is no longer the servant of the soul but of the Spirit. O blessed marriage, if it admits no adultery!

It remains now to speak of death, so that the subject may be closed where the soul itself is consummated. Epicurus, to be sure, following a rather vulgar opinion, denied that death concerns us. “For what is dissolved,” he says, “lacks sensation, and what lacks sensation is nothing to us.” But what is dissolved and lacks sensation is not death itself but the man who suffers it. Yet he has given the suffering to the one to whom the action belongs. And if it belongs to man to suffer the death that dissolves the body and destroys sensation, how absurd to say that so great a power does not concern man! Much more forced is Seneca: “After death,” he says, “all things are ended, even death itself.” If this is so, then death will concern itself too, if it too is ended; all the more will it concern man, in whom, among all the things that are ended, it too is ended. If death is nothing to us, then life is nothing to us either. For if that by which we are dissolved is apart from us, so is that by which we are joined together outside us. If the removal of sensation is nothing to us, neither is the acquiring of sensation anything to us. But let him who destroys the soul destroy death too. By us, death will be treated as the afterlife and the soul's other province are, since we at least belong to it, if it does not belong to us. Indeed, not even sleep, its mirror, is a foreign subject.