On the Soul

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.

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.

I turn to the intellectual side, and to how Plato, separating it from the bodily, commended it to the heretics, having attained knowledge before death. For he says in the Phaedo: “What then about the actual acquisition of wisdom? Will the body be a hindrance or not, if one takes it as a partner in the inquiry? I mean something like this: do sight and hearing have any truth for men, or not? Do not even the poets always mutter this to us, that we neither hear nor see anything certain?” He remembered, no doubt, the comic poet Epicharmus too: “The mind sees, the mind hears; all else is deaf and blind.” So again he says that the one is supremely wise who is wise most by the mind, neither setting sight before himself nor dragging any such sense into his thinking, but using the pure mind itself in reflection to grasp whatever is pure in things, withdrawn above all from eyes and ears and, so to speak, from the whole body, since it disturbs the soul and does not allow it to possess truth and wisdom when it shares with it. We see, then, that against the bodily senses another apparatus is held out, as much better suited: the powers of the soul that work the understanding of that truth whose objects are not present nor subject to the bodily senses, but are far removed from common awareness, in the secret places, in the higher regions, and with God himself. For Plato holds that there are certain invisible, bodiless, supramundane, divine, and eternal substances, which he calls ideas, that is, forms, the patterns and causes of these natural things that are manifest and subject to the bodily senses; and that those are the truths, and these their images. Do the heretical seeds of the Gnostics and Valentinians not shine through already? For from here they seize on the difference between bodily senses and intellectual powers, which they also fit to the parable of the ten virgins: the five foolish ones figure the bodily senses—foolish, you see, because easily deceived—while the wise express the mark of the intellectual powers—wise, you see, because they reach that secret and heavenly truth set in the Pleroma, the mysteries of heretical ideas. For this is what their Aeons and their genealogies are. So they divide sense too: the intellectual kind from their spiritual seed, the sensible kind from the animal, since the animal can in no way grasp spiritual things; to the one belong invisible things, to the other visible, lowly, and temporal things, which are met by sense, being set in images. It is for this reason that we laid the groundwork that the mind is nothing other than a faculty and structure of the soul, and that the spirit is nothing foreign besides what the soul itself is through breath, while whatever God or the devil breathes into it later is to be reckoned an addition. And now, as to the difference between the sensible and the intellectual, we admit nothing but the difference of things—bodily and spiritual, visible and invisible, public and secret—in that the former are assigned to sense and the latter to intellect; yet both are subject to the soul, which perceives bodily things through the body just as it understands bodiless things through the mind, with this proviso, that it also perceives while it understands. For is not perceiving understanding, and understanding perceiving? Or what will sense be but the understanding of the thing perceived? What will understanding be but the sense of the thing understood? Why these tortures, racking simplicity and hanging truth on the rack? Who will show me a sense that does not understand what it perceives, or an understanding that does not perceive what it understands, so as to prove that one can exist without the other? If bodily things are perceived and bodiless things understood, it is the kinds of things that differ, not the dwellings of sense and intellect, that is, not soul and mind. In short, by what are bodily things perceived? If by the mind, then the mind is sensible too, not only intellectual; for while it understands it perceives, since if it does not perceive, it does not understand. If bodily things are perceived by the soul, then the power of the soul is intellectual too, not only sensible; for while it perceives it understands, since if it does not understand, it does not perceive. Likewise, by what are bodiless things understood? If by the mind, where will the soul be? If by the soul, where will the mind be? For things that are distinct must be apart from each other when they do their own tasks. You will indeed think that the mind is absent from the soul when we are so affected in mind that we do not know we have seen or heard something, because the mind was elsewhere. I shall maintain, on the contrary, that the soul itself neither saw nor heard, because it was elsewhere with its power, that is, the mind. For when a man goes mad, it is the soul that goes mad, the mind not being abroad but suffering with it. Rather, the mishap belongs principally to the soul. This is confirmed by the fact that when the soul has departed, the mind is not found in the man either; so it follows the soul everywhere, and does not stay behind it even at the end. And since it follows, it is also bound to it; so the understanding is bound to the soul just as the mind, to which the understanding is bound, follows it. Now let understanding be superior to sense, and a better knower of mysteries, so long as it too is a power proper to the soul, as sense is. It makes no difference to me—unless understanding is preferred to sense so that it may be held more separate by the very fact that it is declared superior. Then, after the difference, the preference too must be beaten back by me, since it would lead to persuading us of a superior god. But we shall try conclusions about God with the heretics on their own field. Now the heading is the soul, and the point is that understanding is not to be treacherously preferred. For even if what is reached by the understanding, as spiritual things, is superior to what is reached by sense, as bodily things, the preference will be one of things—the loftier over the lowlier—not of understanding over sense. For how could understanding be preferred to sense, when it is by sense that it is informed for the knowledge of truths? For if truths are grasped through images, that is, invisible things are known through visible ones—since the apostle too writes to us, “For his invisible things from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood through the things made,” and Plato to the heretics, “The things that appear are the face of hidden things,” and “This world must by all means be an image of something else”—does not the understanding there seem to use sense as its guide, author, and chief foundation, so that truths cannot be reached without it? How then will it be superior to that through which it exists, which it needs, to which it owes all that it reaches? So both conclusions follow: understanding is not to be preferred to sense, since whatever stands by means of something is inferior to it; nor to be separated from sense, since that through which a thing exists is with it.

But neither should we pass over those who deprive the soul of understanding even for a short time. For in this way they pave the road for bringing it in later, as with the mind, from which, of course, understanding comes. They would have infancy held by the soul alone, by which it only lives, not so that it also knows, since not everything that lives knows. So trees live and yet do not know, according to Aristotle and anyone else who shares animate substance with everything. With us this is a thing proper to man, not only as the work of God, which the rest are too, but as the breath of God, which this alone is—the soul that we say is born with all its equipment. And if we are challenged with trees, we shall embrace the example; for in them too, not yet shrubs but still stems and even shoots, as soon as they spring up from their trenches, the proper power of the soul is present. But according to the reckoning of time it waits, growing together and growing up with its strength, until age completes the condition in which nature does its work. Otherwise how could they soon have buds grafted in, and leaves formed, and sprouts swell, and blossoms adorn them, and juices ripen, unless all the equipment of their kind lies quiet in them and, brought forward in its parts, grows large? From the same source, then, from which they live, they also know, by the property both of living and of knowing—and that from their own infancy. For I see the vine, still tender and immature, yet already understanding its own works and wanting to cling to something, leaning on and twined around which it may make progress. Indeed, without waiting for the farmer's training, without a reed, without a prop, if it touches anything, it will embrace it of its own accord, and will clasp it more vigorously by its own talent than by your decision. It hastens to be secure. I see ivy too, press it down as much as you like, at once striving upward and hanging on with no one leading it, because it prefers to climb walls with its woven forest than to be trodden on the ground by voluntary injury. On the other hand, those to which a building does harm—how they draw back as they grow, how they shun it! You would feel that their branches are aimed elsewhere, and understand the animation of the tree from its divorce from the wall; it is content with its smallness, which it learned from the beginning as a most provident shrub, fearing even the fall. Why should I not maintain these wisdoms and knowledges of trees? Let them live, as the philosophers will; let them know, as the philosophers will not; let the infancy of wood understand—how much more that of man? For man's soul, like a shoot drawn off from the parent stock of Adam into a layer, and entrusted to the genital furrows of the woman, has sprouted with all its equipment, of understanding as well as of sense. I lie if the infant, as soon as it has greeted life with its wail, does not testify that it has perceived and understood this very fact, that it is born, dedicating all its senses at once there and then: sight by light, hearing by sound, taste by moisture, smell by air, touch by earth. So that first cry is forced out by the first utterances of the senses and the first impulses of the understanding. There is more: some interpret that tearful cry as the voice of one foreseeing the troubles of a life full of weeping, so that it must be held to have foreknowledge from the very entrance of birth, let alone understanding. From then on it tests its mother by the breath, examines its nurse by the breath, recognizes its carrier by the breath, fleeing strange breasts and refusing unknown beds, seeking no one but those it is used to. Where does it get judgment of the new and the familiar, if it does not know? Where does it get being offended and soothed, if it does not understand? It would be strange indeed for infancy to be naturally spirited without having a mind, and naturally affectionate without having understanding. But Christ, by finding praise from the mouths of sucklings and little children, declared neither childhood nor infancy dull: the one, coming to meet him with acclaim, could offer him testimony; the other, slaughtered for his sake, certainly perceived him.

Here too, then, we conclude that all the natural properties of the soul, as belonging to its substance, are present in it and advance and progress with it, from the moment it is reckoned to exist. As Seneca, so often on our side, says too: “The seeds of all arts and ages are implanted in us, and God, the master, secretly draws out our talents”—from the seeds, of course, implanted and hidden through infancy, which are the understanding too. For from these the talents are drawn out. Again, the seeds of crops have one form for each kind, yet varied developments. Some come out in their original state, some turn out even better, some degenerate, according to climate and soil, the method of labour and care, the course of the seasons, the licence of chance. So too the soul may be uniform in seed, multiform in growth. For here too place makes a difference. It is reported that at Thebes people are born dull and stupid, at Athens very sharp in wisdom and speech, where, around Colyttus, boys speak a month earlier with precocious tongues. Plato too in the Timaeus affirms that Minerva, when she was building that city, looked to nothing but the nature of the region, which promised such talents; and so he himself in the Laws instructs Megillus and Clinias to take care over the site for founding a city. But Empedocles places the cause of a sharp or a dull disposition in the quality of the blood, and derives perfection and progress from teaching and training. Still, the peculiarities of peoples are now common talk. The comic poets mock the Phrygians as cowards; Sallust lashes the Moors as fickle and the Dalmatians as fierce; the apostle too brands the Cretans as liars. Perhaps something comes from the body and from health as well. Fatness hinders wisdom, leanness furthers it; paralysis squanders the mind, consumption preserves it. How much more will those accidents count which, apart from bulk and strength, either sharpen or blunt! Sharpening are learning, training, arts, experience, business, studies; blunting are ignorance, sloth, idleness, lusts, inexperience, leisure, vices. Above these, there are also some ruling powers. Indeed there are: according to us, God the Lord and the devil his rival; according to common opinion, the fate of providence, necessity, fortune, and freedom of choice. For the philosophers distinguish these, and we have already vowed to discuss them according to the faith under their own heading. It is clear how great are the things that have placed the one nature of the soul in various conditions, so that they are commonly reckoned to nature, though they are not species but lots of one nature and substance—the one which God conferred on Adam and made the parent stock of all. So they will be lots, not species of one substance, as is shown by the fact that this moral variety, as great as it now is, was not so great in Adam himself, the first of the race. For all these things ought to have been in him as in the fountain of nature, and to have flowed from there with all their variety, if the variety were of nature.

But if the nature of the soul was uniform from the beginning in Adam, before so many dispositions, then it is not multiform, since it is uniform through so many dispositions; nor threefold, so that the Valentinian trinity may still be cut down, which is not recognized in Adam either. For what was spiritual in him? If it is because he prophesied that great sacrament concerning Christ and the church—“This bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh shall be called woman; for this reason a man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall be in one flesh”—this came to him later, when God sent upon him the ecstasy, the spiritual power in which prophecy consists. And if the evil of the committed transgression appeared in him, this too is not to be reckoned natural, since he did it at the serpent's instigation—as little natural as it is material, since we have already ruled out belief in matter. But if neither the spiritual nor the so-called material was proper to him—and if he had been from matter, the seed of evil would have been in him—it remains that there was in him only and singly the natural, which is reckoned the animal, which we maintain is simple and uniform in its state. On this it remains, of course, to ask whether what is called natural must be believed changeable. For these same people deny that nature can be converted, so as to fix their trinity in its separate properties: because “a good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor a bad tree good,” and “no one reaps figs from thorns or grapes from thistles.” If that is so, then God will not be able to raise up children to Abraham from stones, nor make the brood of vipers bear fruits of repentance; and the apostle erred in writing, “You too were once darkness,” and “We too were once by nature children of wrath, and you too were among them, but you have been washed.” But the holy sayings will never disagree. For a bad tree will not give good fruit if it is not grafted, and a good tree will give bad fruit if it is not cultivated; and stones will become children of Abraham if they are formed into the faith of Abraham; and the brood of vipers will bear the fruit of repentance if they spit out the poisons of malice. This will be the power of divine grace, stronger certainly than nature, having subject to itself in us the free power of choice, which is called autexousion; and since this too is natural and changeable, whichever way it turns, the nature turns. That free will (to autexousion) is naturally present in us we have already shown both to Marcion and to Hermogenes. And what now if the condition of nature is to be defined as twofold, of the born and the unborn, the made and the unmade? Then the nature of whatever is established as born and made will admit change; for it can be born again and made again. But what is unborn and unmade will stand immovable. Since this belongs to God alone, as alone unborn and unmade and therefore immortal and unchangeable, it is settled that the nature of all other things born and made is convertible and changeable; so that even if a threefold nature were to be ascribed to the soul, it would be reckoned from the change of something accidental, not from the constitution of nature.

The other natural properties of the soul Hermogenes has already heard from us, with their defence and proof, by which the soul is recognized as akin to God rather than to matter. Here they will only be named, so that they may not seem passed over. For we assigned to it freedom of choice, as we wrote above, and dominion over things, and at times divination, apart from what comes by the grace of God through prophecy. So I shall now leave this treatment of its constitution, in order to complete its sequence. We define the soul as born of the breath of God, immortal, bodily, having shape, simple in substance, knowing of itself, developing in various ways, free in choice, subject to accidents, changeable through dispositions, rational, ruling, divining, and overflowing from one. It follows now that we consider how it overflows from one, that is, whence, when, and in what manner it is derived.

Some believe that they came down from heaven, with as much conviction as they promise that they will undoubtedly return there. So Saturninus, disciple of Menander the Simonian, taught, affirming that man was made by angels; at first a futile, weak, and unstable work, he writhed on the ground like a worm, lacking the strength to stand; then, by the mercy of the supreme Power, in whose image, though not fully perceived, he had been rashly built, he obtained a little spark of life, which roused him, set him upright, animated him more steadily, and after his departure from life will carry him back to its parent source. Carpocrates too claims as much for himself from the higher regions, so that his disciples equal their souls with Christ, let alone the apostles, and when they wish rank them above him, as having conceived them likewise from the sublime Power that looks down on the principalities that rule the world. Apelles relates that souls were enticed from their supercelestial seats by earthly foods by a fiery angel, the God of Israel and ours, who then fashioned sinful flesh around them. The swarm of Valentinus stuffs the seed of Sophia into the soul, by which they recognize from the images of visible things the histories and Milesian tales of their Aeons. I am sorry, in good faith, that Plato has become the spice-seller of all the heretics. For his is the idea in the Phaedo that souls go from here to there and from there to here; and likewise in the Timaeus, that the offspring of God, to whom the generation of mortals had been delegated, took the immortal principle of the soul and congealed a mortal body around it; and that this world is the image of something else. To commend all this to belief—that the soul formerly lived above with God in the fellowship of the ideas, and passes from there to here, and here recalls what it formerly knew of the patterns—he worked out a new argument: mathēseis anamnēseis, that is, learning is remembering. For souls coming from there to here forget the things among which they formerly were, and then, taught by these visible things, remember them. Since, then, the things the heretics borrow are insinuated by Plato through this kind of argument, I shall sufficiently strike back at the heretics if I shatter Plato's argument.

First, I shall not grant that the soul is capable of forgetting, since Plato has granted it so great a divinity as to make it equal to God. He makes it unborn—which alone I could have armed as testimony to full divinity; he adds immortal, incorruptible, bodiless (because he believed God to be so too), invisible, shapeless, uniform, ruling, rational, intellectual. What more could he inscribe on the soul if he called it God? We, however, who weigh nothing against God, rate the soul far below God by this very fact, that we acknowledge it to have been born, and therefore of a more diluted divinity and slighter happiness, as breath, not as spirit; and if immortal, as belonging to divinity, yet passible, as belonging to birth, and therefore capable from the beginning of going astray, and so also akin to forgetting. Enough of this with Hermogenes. But a soul which, by the equalling of all its properties, could rightly be considered God, will be subject to no passion, and so not to forgetting either, since forgetting is as great an injury as the glory of what it injures, namely memory—which Plato himself proclaimed the safeguard of the senses and understanding, and Cicero the treasury of all studies. Nor will the question now be whether so divine a soul could lose its memory, but whether it could recover it once lost. For I doubt whether a soul that ought not to have forgotten, if it has forgotten, is able to remember. So both points will fit my soul, not Plato's. In the second step I shall object: do you make the soul possessed of those ideas by nature or not? By nature, you say. Then no one will grant that natural knowledge of natural arts fails. Knowledge of studies will fail, of teachings and disciplines; perhaps that of dispositions and feelings too, which seem to be of nature but are not, since, as we said before, they depend on accidents—on places, upbringing, bodily build, health, ruling powers, and freedom of choice. But knowledge of natural things does not fail even in beasts. A lion will, of course, forget his fierceness, overcome by training in gentleness, and with all his furniture of mane become the pet of some queen Berenice, licking her cheeks clean with his tongue. The beast will lose its manners; its knowledge of natural things will remain. It will not forget its natural foods, its natural remedies, its natural terrors; even if the queen offers it fish and cakes, it will want meat; and if she mixes it a theriac when it is ill, the lion will look for a monkey; and even if no hunting spear threatens it, it will still fear the cock. In the same way, in man, perhaps the most forgetful of all creatures, knowledge of natural things alone will remain unblotted, as the only natural knowledge: always remembering to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty, to see with the eyes, hear with the ears, smell with the nose, taste with the mouth, and handle with the hand. These surely are the senses which philosophy disparages by preferring the intellectual. If, then, natural knowledge of the sensible remains, how does that of the intellectual, which is held superior, perish? Where now does this power of forgetting that precedes recollection come from? From the length of time, he says. That is rather short-sighted. For quantity of time will not concern a thing called unborn and therefore believed above all to be eternal. What is eternal, because it is also unborn, admits neither beginning nor end of time and so suffers no measure of time. What has no measure of time is not subject to time by any change, nor has length of time any power over it. If time is the cause of forgetting, why does memory slip away from the moment the soul is brought into the body, as though the soul endured time from then on—the soul which, before the body, was certainly not without time? And having entered the body, does it forget at once, or some while later? If at once, what length of time will there be, not yet to be reckoned? Infancy, of course. If some while later, then in that interval before the times of forgetting will the soul still live remembering? And what sort of thing is it that it should afterwards forget and afterwards again remember? And at whatever time forgetting assailed it, how great a measure of time will be held to do this? The whole course of life, I think, will not be enough to overturn the memory of so long an age before the body. But Plato again shifts the cause to the body, as though this too were credible, that a born substance should extinguish the power of an unborn one. Yet there are great and many differences of bodies, by race, size, build, age, and health. Will there then be differences of forgetting too? But forgetting is uniform; therefore a multiform corporeality will not be the cause of a uniform result. Many proofs, moreover, on Plato's own testimony, have established the soul's power of divination, which we have already set before Hermogenes. And there is no man who has not at some time felt his own soul presaging, an augur of an omen, a danger, or a joy. If the body does not stand in the way of divination, neither, I think, will it hinder memory. Certainly in the same body souls both forget and remember. If some condition of the body strikes in forgetting, how will it admit recollection, its opposite? Because recollection itself, after forgetting, is memory returning? What opposes the first memory, why should it not also resist the second? Finally, who would remember better than little children, as newer souls, not yet immersed in domestic and public cares, given over only to the studies whose learnings become recollections? Indeed, why do we not all remember equally, since we all forget equally? But only the philosophers do. Not even all of them. Plato alone, it seems, in so great a forest of nations, in so great a meadow of sages, both forgot and remembered the ideas. So if this principal argument by no means stands, the whole thing it was fitted to is equally overthrown—that souls should be believed to be unborn, to have lived in the heavens, to have known divine things there, to have been brought down from there, and here to remember—plainly to supply opportunities to the heretics.

Now I shall return to the cause of this digression, to explain how souls overflow from one, when, where, and in what manner they are derived. On this matter it makes no difference whether the question comes from a philosopher, a heretic, or the common crowd. To those who profess the truth, its adversaries are of no account—especially such bold ones as these first, who presume that the soul is not conceived in the womb, nor compacted and produced with the fashioning of the flesh, but is impressed from outside on the infant, not yet alive, once the birth has been poured forth. The seed from intercourse, they say, set apart in the woman's parts and quickened by natural motion, thickens into the substance of flesh alone; and this, brought forth and steaming from the furnace of the womb, relaxed by heat like red-hot iron plunged there into cold water, is struck by the chill of the air and both seizes the power of life and utters a vocal sound. This the Stoics hold, with Aenesidemus, and at times Plato himself, when he says that the soul, being otherwise foreign and exiled from the womb, is brought in with the first breath of the newborn infant, just as it is led out with the last breath. We shall see whether he devised this from his own opinion. Among the physicians too there was Hicesius, a betrayer both of nature and of his own art. They were ashamed, I think, to lay down what women would recognize. But how much more blushing the outcome, to be refuted by women rather than approved! For in this matter no one is so fit a teacher, judge, and witness as the sense of that sex itself. Answer, you mothers, you who are pregnant, you who have given birth—let the barren and the males keep silent—it is the truth of your nature that is sought, the reliability of your experience that is consulted: whether you feel any liveliness in the fetus other than your own, from which your flanks throb, your sides quiver, the whole curve of the belly is struck, the region of the weight shifts everywhere; whether these movements are your joy and sure reassurance, because you are confident that the infant thus both lives and plays; whether, if its restlessness stops, you fear for it first; whether it already hears within you, when it is startled by a new sound; whether you crave strange foods for it and also loathe foods for it; whether you share illnesses with one another, so that even from your bruises it is marked inside in the same members, taking to itself the mother's injuries. If bruising and redness are an affection of the blood, there will be no blood without a soul; if illness is an attack on the soul, there will be no illness without a soul; if nourishment, hunger, growth, decline, fear, and movement are the business of the soul, whoever performs them will be alive. Indeed he ceases to live who ceases to perform them. Indeed some are also brought forth dead: how, unless they were alive too? And who are dead, unless those previously alive? Why, even while still in the womb the infant is slaughtered by a necessary cruelty, when, lying crosswise at the exit, it prevents the birth and would kill its mother, unless it is to die itself. So among the physicians' weapons there is an instrument by which the hidden parts are first forced open by a twisting adjustment; with a ring-knife, by which the limbs are cut inside with anxious judgment; with a blunt hook, by which the whole crime is drawn out in a violent delivery. There is also a bronze needle, by which the very slaughter is directed in blind robbery: they call it embryosphaktēs, “fetus-slayer,” from its office of infanticide—surely the destroyer of a living infant. Hippocrates had this, and Asclepiades, and Erasistratus, and Herophilus, the dissector even of adults, and Soranus himself, the gentler one, certain that what is conceived is a living being, and so pitying such most unhappy infancy that it should first be killed, lest it be torn apart alive. Of the necessity of this crime Hicesius too, I believe, had no doubt, though he brings the soul upon those already born by the blow of cold air, because even the word for soul among the Greeks comes from cooling. You should answer: are barbarian and Roman peoples then animated differently, because they have named the soul something other than psychē? And how many nations are reckoned under the hottest sky, their very colour baked? Where do they get a soul, who have no chill of air? I say nothing of the heat of bedchambers and all the provision of warmth necessary there for women in labour, on whom it is most dangerous for any draught to blow. In the very baths, almost, the fetus slips out, and at once its wail is heard. Moreover, if the chill of the air is the treasury of the soul, no one should have been born outside Germany, Scythia, the Alps, and Argaeus. Yet peoples are more numerous in the eastern and southern climate, and their talents readier, while all Sarmatians are sluggish even in mind. For minds would also turn out more knowing from cold, if souls came from chill; for substance and power go together. With these foundations laid, we may also recall those who drew in air alive after their mother's womb was cut open, some Liber or Scipio. But if anyone, like Plato, thinks that two souls cannot come together in one, any more than bodies, I would show him not only two souls gathered into one, as also bodies, in pregnancies, but many other things joined with the soul—of a demon, that is, and not only one, as in Socrates himself, but even seven spirits, as in Magdalene, and a legion in number, as in the Gerasene—so that a soul will more easily be joined with a soul by partnership of substance than an evil spirit by difference of nature. But when the same Plato in the sixth book of the Laws warns to beware lest corruption of the seed through some baseness of intercourse supply a stain to body and soul, I do not know whether he has fallen away more from his former opinion or from this one. For he shows that the soul is brought in from the seed, which he warns must be cared for, not from the first breath of the newborn. From where, I ask you, do we also resemble our parents in soul, in disposition, according to the testimony of Cleanthes, if we are not also drawn from the seed of the soul? And why did the ancient astrologers too direct a man's nativity from the beginning of conception, if the soul is not also from then? To it equally belongs the breath, whatever it is.

But every inconsistency of human opinion ends at the boundaries set by God. I shall now draw my steps back within our own lines, to prove to the Christian what I have answered to philosophers and physicians. Build your faith, brother, on your own foundation. Look at the living wombs of the most holy women, and at the infants there not only breathing but even prophesying. See, the inward parts of Rebecca are disturbed, though the birth is still far off and there is no blow of air. See, a double fetus is in tumult in the mother's parts, though there are as yet no two peoples. It would perhaps have been a portentous petulance of an infancy contending before it lived, spirited before it was animated, if it had only troubled its mother by leaping. But when the birth opens, and the number is seen, and the augury recognized, then, I think, not only the souls of the infants are proved, but their struggles too. The one who had got ahead to be born was held back by the one he had got ahead of, who was not yet fully brought forth, born only as far as his hand. And if the first drank in his soul from the first breath in Platonic fashion, or plucked it from the chill of the air in Stoic form, what of the one who was waited for, who was still held inside and was already holding onto the one outside? Not yet breathing, I suppose, he had seized his brother's heel; still warm from his mother, he wanted to have come out first. O infant, both rival and strong and already contentious—because, I believe, alive! Look also at the singular conceptions, and indeed the more extraordinary ones, of the barren woman and the virgin, who for this very reason might have borne imperfect offspring, as an overturning of nature, the one being numb to seed, the other untouched. If anyone should have been born without a soul, it would have been those who were not duly conceived. But they too are alive, each in his own womb. Elizabeth exults—John had stirred her from within; Mary glorifies the Lord—Christ had moved her from within. The mothers recognize each other's offspring, recognized in turn by them, who were certainly alive, and were not only souls but spirits too. So also you read God's word to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” If God forms in the womb, he also breathes in, as in the original pattern: “And God formed man and breathed into him the breath of life.” Nor would God have known man in the womb unless whole: “And before you came out of the womb, I sanctified you.” Was it still a dead body? Certainly not. For he is the God of the living, not of the dead.

How, then, is a living being conceived? Is the substance of both body and soul formed together, or does one of them come first? We say that both are conceived, formed, and perfected together, just as they are also brought forth together, and that no moment intervenes in conception in which a precedence could be arranged. Consider the last things first. If death is defined as nothing other than the separation of body and soul, life, the opposite of death, will be defined as nothing other than the union of body and soul. If separation befalls both substances at once through death, the pattern of union must have ordained this, which comes equally to both substances through life. Now we recognize life from conception, because we claim the soul from conception; for life begins where the soul does. So they are compacted together into life that are separated together into death. Then, if we give first place to one and second to the other, the times of the seed too must be distinguished according to the order of rank. And when will the seed of the body be placed, when that of the soul? Indeed, if the times of the seeds are divided, the materials too will be held to differ by the distance of times. For even if we confess two kinds of seed, bodily and soul-seed, we nonetheless claim that they are undivided, and in this way contemporaneous and of the same moment. So let us not be ashamed of a necessary explanation. Nature is to be revered, not blushed at. It is lust, not the condition, that has defiled intercourse. It is excess, not the state, that is shameless, since the state is blessed by God: “Increase and multiply.” But excess is cursed: adulteries, debaucheries, and brothels. So in this solemn function of the sexes which unites male and female—I mean ordinary intercourse—we know that soul and flesh act together: the soul by desire, the flesh by deed; the soul by impulse, the flesh by act. So with the whole man shaken by one impulse of both, the seed of the whole man is foamed out, having moisture from the bodily substance and heat from the soul's. And if soul is a cold name among the Greeks, why does the body grow cold when the soul is taken from it? Indeed—to risk modesty rather than proof—in that very heat of the final pleasure, when the generative fluid is expelled, do we not feel something of the soul too going out? And so we grow faint and languid, with a dimming of the light. This will be the soul-seed, coming straight from the distillation of the soul, just as that fluid is the bodily seed, from the draining of the flesh. The examples of the beginning are most faithful. The flesh in Adam was from clay. What else is clay but a rich liquid? From this will be the generative fluid. The soul was from the breath of God. What else is the breath of God but a vapour of spirit? From this will be what we breathe out through that fluid. Since, then, in the beginning two different and separate things, clay and breath, combined to make one man, the two substances, now blended in one, also mixed their seeds, and thenceforth handed on the pattern for propagating the race, so that now too the two, though different, yet united, flow out together, and, sown together in their furrow and field, together sprout a man from both substances, in whom again his seed is present according to his kind, as has been appointed for every generative condition. So from one man comes this whole overflowing of souls, nature observing God's command: “Increase and multiply.” For even in the very preface of the work of one man, “Let us make man,” all posterity was announced in the plural: “and let them rule over the fish of the sea.” No wonder: the promise of the harvest is in the seed.

What, now, is that ancient saying, mentioned by Plato, about the reciprocal traffic of souls: that those departing from here go there and come back here again, and live, and then depart from life, and again the living are made from the dead? Pythagorean, as some would have it; Albinus thinks it divine, perhaps of the Egyptian Mercury. But no saying is divine except that of the one God, by which the prophets, the apostles, and Christ himself thundered. Moses is much older, even than Saturn, by about nine hundred years, let alone his great-grandchildren, and certainly much more divine, since he set out the course of the human race from the beginning of the world through each generation by name and by date, sufficiently proving the divinity of his work by the divining power of his voice. But if the Samian sophist is Plato's source for the recurring return of souls in endless alternation of dead and living, certainly that Pythagoras, though good in other respects, resorted, in order to build up this opinion, to a lie not only disgraceful but reckless. Learn it, you who do not know, and believe it with us. He feigns death, he hides underground, he condemns himself to seven years' endurance there; meanwhile he learns from his mother, his sole confidante and helper, what he would report about those who had since died, to make the story credible. When he thought he had sufficiently altered his bodily appearance to the full horror of an old corpse, he emerges from the shrine of his deceit as if returned from the dead. Who would not believe that he had come back to life, whom he had believed dead, especially hearing from him things about those who had since died which, it seemed, he could have learned only in the underworld? So the saying that the living come from the dead is older. What if it were newer too? Truth does not need antiquity, nor does falsehood avoid novelty. I hold it plainly false, though noble by antiquity. Why should it not be false, when its very testimony comes from a falsehood? How shall I believe that Pythagoras does not lie, when he lies so that I will believe? How will he persuade me that he was formerly, before Pythagoras, Aethalides and Euphorbus and Pyrrhus the fisherman and Hermotimus, in order to persuade me that the living are made from the dead—he who perjured himself about being Pythagoras again? For as much more credible as it would have been that he himself had returned to life once as himself than so often as one man after another, so much did he deceive in the harder things, who lied in the easier. But, they say, the shield of Euphorbus had been dedicated long before at Delphi; he recognized it, called it his own, and proved it by marks unknown to the public. Look at his underground chamber and, if you can, believe. For a man who devised such a trick, with injury to his health, with the defrauding of his life, tormented seven years under the earth by hunger, idleness, and darkness, and who so disdained the sky—what recklessness would he not approach, what curiosity would he not attempt, to come to know that shield? What if he found it in some more obscure histories? What if he drew some faint breaths of report surviving from a tradition now lapsed? What if he learned it by a secret inspection bought from the temple-keeper? We know too that magic claims to use, for exploring hidden things, spirits that bring down, familiar spirits, and pythonic spirits. Did not Pherecydes too, Pythagoras' teacher, perhaps divine—not to say dream—by these arts? What if the same demon was in him that did the bloody deeds in Euphorbus? Finally, if he proved himself Euphorbus from the evidence of the shield, why did he not likewise recognize any of his Trojan fellow soldiers? For they too would have come back to life by now, if the living were made from the dead.

It is agreed that the dead are made from the living, but not, for that reason, the living from the dead. For from the beginning the living came first, and so from the beginning the dead came later—from nowhere but the living. The former had some other source to arise from, as long as it was not the dead; the latter had no other source to be derived from except the living. If, then, from the beginning the living did not come from the dead, why later from the dead? Had that fountain of origin, whatever it is, failed? Or did the pattern cause regret? And how is it preserved in the dead? Is it not the case that, because from the beginning the dead came from the living, therefore always from the living? For either the pattern of the beginning would have persisted on both sides, or it would have changed on both; so that if the living had later to be made from the dead, likewise the dead would have to be made not from the living. If the constancy of the original institution did not have to be kept equal, then contraries do not everywhere alternate by being re-formed from contraries. For we too shall set out the contraries of born and unborn, sight and blindness, youth and old age, wisdom and folly; yet it does not follow that the unborn comes from the born because a contrary comes from a contrary, nor sight again from blindness because blindness befalls sight, nor youth come back to life from old age because old age withers out of youth, nor folly blunted again out of wisdom because wisdom is sharpened out of folly. Here Albinus too, anxious for his Plato, subtly tries to distinguish kinds of contraries—as though these were not placed among contraries as absolutely as those which he interprets according to his master's opinion, I mean life and death. Yet life is not given back from death because death is brought from life.

And what shall we answer to the rest? First: if the living came from the dead as the dead from the living, one and the same number of all men would always have remained—the number, that is, which first entered life. For the living came before the dead, then the dead from the living, and again the living from the dead. And since this would always be from the same people, there would always be as many as came from the same. For neither more nor fewer would have gone out than came back. But we find in the records of human antiquities that the human race has grown steadily, as Aborigines, whether wanderers, exiles, or men seeking glory, occupy lands: as the Scythians the Parthian lands, the Temenidae the Peloponnese, the Athenians Asia, the Phrygians Italy, the Phoenicians Africa; while also regular migrations, which they call apoikiai, send out swarms of the nation into other territories by design, to unburden the population. For the Aborigines both remain now in their own seats and have lent out their stock at interest elsewhere. Certainly the world itself is plainly more cultivated and better furnished day by day than before. Everything is now accessible, everything known, everything busy with trade; the most pleasant estates have blotted out once-famous wildernesses, ploughlands have tamed forests, flocks have routed wild beasts, sands are sown, rocks are opened up, marshes drained; there are now more cities than there were once huts. Islands no longer frighten, nor do cliffs terrify; everywhere a house, everywhere a people, everywhere a commonwealth, everywhere life. The greatest testimony to the multitude of mankind: we are a burden to the world; the elements scarcely suffice for us; our needs press harder, and complaints are on everyone's lips, since nature no longer sustains us. In truth, plagues and famine and wars and cities swallowed up must be counted as a remedy, a kind of pruning of the overgrown human race. And yet, though axes of this kind cut down a very great mass of mortals at once, the world has never once been startled, after a thousand years, by a restoration of it that brought back the living from the dead. For an equal force of loss and restoration would have made this perceptible, if the living came from the dead. And why after a thousand years and not at once, the living from the dead? For if what was spent were not replaced at once, there would be a danger of total consumption, the failure outrunning the restoration, since this supply of life would not match the millennial period, being so much shorter and therefore more easily extinguished than rekindled. So since what would in this way have perished … if the living came from the dead, has not perished, it is not to be believed that the living come from the dead.

Next, if the living come from the dead, then surely one from one. So the souls of single bodies ought to return, as single souls, into single bodies. But if two and three and five at once are taken up in one womb, the living will not be from the dead, since not one from one. And in this way the pattern of the beginning is marked, since even now several souls are brought forth from one. Again, since souls depart at various ages, why do they return at one age? For all begin again from infancy. What sort of thing is it that an old man who has died should return an infant? If the soul decreases outside the body, its age going backwards, how much more fitting would it be for it to return further advanced after a thousand years—or at least at the age of its death, so as to receive again the span it had left? Moreover, even if the same souls always came round again, though they did not also bring back the same forms of bodies, they ought at least to bring with them the former characteristics of their dispositions, pursuits, and affections, since it would be rash to hold them to be the same if they lacked the things by which they could be proved the same. How do you know, you say, whether it does not happen so in secret, but the condition of the thousand-year age destroys the ability to recognize, since they return there unknown? But I know it does not happen so, when you oppose to me Pythagoras as Euphorbus. For see, it is well established that Euphorbus was a soldierly and warlike soul, from the very glory of the shields dedicated to him; but Pythagoras was so sedentary and unwarlike that, avoiding the battles then in Greece, he preferred the quiet of Italy, devoted to geometry, astronomy, and music, a stranger to the pursuits and inclinations of Euphorbus. Pyrrhus too spent his time catching fish, Pythagoras on the contrary would not even eat them, abstaining from living creatures. Aethalides and Hermotimus had fallen upon beans too among common foods, but Pythagoras taught his disciples not even to walk through a bean-field. How then are the same souls recovered, which will be proved the same neither in dispositions, nor in customs, nor in diet? And now, out of so great a census of Greece, only four souls are recalled. And why only from the census of Greece, when transmigrations of souls and re-embodiments would be happening every day in every nation, every age and rank, and finally every sex—why does Pythagoras alone recognize himself as one man after another, and not I too? Or if it is the privilege of philosophers, and of Greeks at that—as though Scythians and Indians did not philosophize too—why did Epicurus remember no former self, or Chrysippus, or Zeno, not even Plato himself, whom we might perhaps have believed to be Nestor because of the honey of his eloquence?

But Empedocles, who had raved that he was a god, disdained, I suppose, for that reason to remember himself as any of the heroes: “I was a bush and a fish,” he says. Why not rather a melon, being so insipid, and a chameleon, being so puffed up? Clearly as a fish, so as not to rot in some more preserved burial, he preferred to be roasted, by throwing himself into Etna. And from then on transmigration was finished for him, like a summer supper after the roast. So here too we must fight against the more monstrous presumption that turns beasts out of men and men out of beasts. Let the bushes see to themselves. It may be done quickly, too, lest we be forced to laugh more than to teach. We say that the human soul can in no way be transferred into beasts, even if, according to the philosophers, it were reckoned to consist of elemental substances. For whether the soul is fire, or water, or blood, or spirit, or air, or light, we must consider the contraries in each kind among living creatures. To fire are opposed those that are cold—snakes, lizards, salamanders—and also whatever is produced from the rival element, water. Likewise contrary to water are those that are dry and juiceless; indeed locusts, little butterflies, and chameleons delight in dryness. Again, contrary to blood are those that lack its crimson: snails, little worms, and the greater number of fish. Contrary to spirit are those that do not seem to breathe, lacking lungs and windpipes: gnats, ants, moths, and small creatures of this kind. Again, contrary to air are those that always live under the earth or under the water and lack the drawing in of it—you will know the things better than their names. Again, contrary to light are those that are wholly blind or have eyes only for darkness: moles, bats, owls. I say this to teach from visible and evident substances. But if I held the atoms of Epicurus, saw the numbers of Pythagoras, came upon the ideas of Plato, and seized the entelechies of Aristotle, I would perhaps find animals in these kinds too to set against them under the name of contrariety. For I maintain that, whatever of the substances named above the human soul consisted of, it could not have been refashioned into animals so contrary to each substance, and contribute its being to them by its transfer, from which it would rather be shut out and rejected than admitted and received, by reason of this first contrariety, which produces a difference of substantial state, and then of the other contrarieties that follow in order from each nature. For the human soul has been allotted other dwellings, food, equipment, senses, affections, intercourse, and offspring; likewise dispositions, and also works, joys, weariness, vices, desires, pleasures, illnesses, remedies, and finally its own ways of life and ends of death. How then will that soul which clung to the earth, fearless of no height and no depth, tired out even by climbing stairs, choked even by sinking in fishponds, afterwards leap on the air in an eagle, or dart about the sea in an eel? How, likewise, will a soul brought up on generous, delicate, and well-prepared foods chew—I do not say chaff—but thorns and the wild bitterness of leaves, and the beasts of dung-heaps, even the poisons of worms, if it passes into a goat or a quail; indeed, carrion, and even human flesh, if it remembers itself, as it must, in a bear or a lion? So you will reduce the rest to incongruity, lest we linger pleading each case. Whatever the measure and size of the human soul itself, what will it do in animals far larger or smaller? For it is necessary both that every body be filled by the soul and that every soul be covered by the body. How then will a man's soul fill an elephant? How likewise will it be covered in a gnat? If it is so stretched or contracted, it will surely be endangered. So I add: if it is in no way capable of such a transfer into animals, not matching them either in the dimensions of their bodies or in the other laws of its nature, will it then be changed according to the qualities of the kinds and their life, contrary to human life, becoming itself contrary to the human by the change? But if it admits change and loses what it was, it will not be what it was; and if it will not be what it was, the transmigration is dissolved, since it cannot be ascribed to the soul which, if it is changed, will not be what it was. For transmigration would be said of that soul only which underwent it while remaining in its own state. If, then, it can neither be changed, lest it cease to be itself, nor remain in its state, because it does not admit contraries, I still look for some credible reason for such a transfer. For even if some men are likened to beasts by the qualities of their characters, dispositions, and feelings—since God too says, “Man has been likened to the senseless beasts”—it does not follow that kites will come from the rapacious, dogs from the filthy, panthers from the fierce, or sheep from the honest, swallows from the chatterers, and doves from the chaste, as though the same substance of the soul everywhere repeated its nature in the properties of animals. Substance is one thing, the nature of the substance another; for substance is proper to each thing, but nature can be common. Take an example. Stone and iron are substances; hardness is the nature of the substance of stone and iron. The hardness is shared; the substance differs. The softness of wool, the softness of a feather: their natural qualities match, their substantial ones do not. So too, if a man is called a savage beast or an honest one, the soul is still not the same. For the likeness of nature is noted precisely when the unlikeness of substance is observed. By the very fact that you judge a man like a beast, you confess that the soul is not the same, by saying “like,” not “itself.” So too the divine pronouncement is wise, likening man to cattle by nature, not by substance. Besides, God would not have censured man in this way if he had known him to be cattle in substance.

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.

Let us first discuss sleep, and afterwards how the soul passes through death. Sleep is certainly not something outside nature, as some philosophers hold, when they ascribe it to causes that seem to be reckoned contrary to nature. The Stoics affirm that sleep is a relaxation of the vigour of the senses; the Epicureans, a diminution of the animal spirit; Anaxagoras with Xenophanes, weariness; Empedocles and Parmenides, a cooling; Strato, a separation of the connate spirit; Democritus, a lack of spirit; Aristotle, a withering of the heat around the heart. I do not presume that I have ever slept in such a way as to recognize any of these. For we must not believe that sleep is weariness; it is rather the opposite of weariness, which it removes, since a man is refreshed by sleep rather than tired. Moreover, sleep is not always brought on by fatigue, and yet when it comes from fatigue, the fatigue is already gone. Nor shall I admit a cooling, or any withering of heat, since bodies grow so warm in sleep; and the distribution of food during sleep would not readily go forward—heat hastens it, cold slows it—if we were cooled by sleep. More: sweat too is a sign of digestion working hot. Indeed we are said to “concoct” our food, which is a work of heat, not of cold. Likewise the immortality of the soul does not allow us to believe in a diminution of the animal spirit, or a lack of spirit, or a separation of the connate spirit. The soul perishes if it is lessened. It remains, if at all, that with the Stoics we define sleep as a relaxation of the vigour of the senses, since it provides rest for the body alone, not for the soul too. For the soul, being always in motion and always active, never gives way to rest, which is foreign to the state of immortality; for nothing immortal admits an end of its activity, and sleep is an end of activity. So to the body, to which mortality belongs, to it alone rest will bring an end of activity. Whoever, then, doubts that sleep is natural has indeed the dialecticians, who call into doubt the whole distinction between natural and extranatural things, so that he may know that even what he thought beyond nature can be claimed for nature, from which they received their being such that they seem to be held beyond it; and surely either all is nature or nothing is. With us, however, what can be heard is what the contemplation of God suggests, the author of all the things under inquiry. For we believe that whatever is nature is some rational work of God. Now reason presides over sleep—so fitting, so useful, so necessary that without it no soul would suffice: the refresher of bodies, restorer of strength, tester of health, peacemaker of labours, physician of toils, for whose rightful enjoyment day gives way, and night lays down the law, taking away even the colour of things. If, then, sleep is vital, healthful, helpful, nothing of this kind is not rational, nothing not natural. So the physicians too banish everything contrary to what is vital, healthful, and helpful outside the hinges of nature. For in judging the illnesses that rival sleep, frenzy and heart disease, to be beyond nature, they prejudged sleep to be natural; and in marking the sleep of lethargy as not natural, they answer with testimony to the natural, when sleep is in its right balance. For every nature is broken down either by defect or by excess, and preserved by its proper measure. So what can be made unnatural by falling short or going beyond will be natural in its state. What if you exclude eating and drinking too from nature's lot? For in these lies the greatest preparation for sleep. Certainly man was imbued with these from the beginning of his nature. If you learn from God, that fountain of the race, Adam, drank in slumber before he thirsted for rest, slept before he laboured—indeed before he ate, even before he spoke—so that they may see that sleep is a natural sign more primary than all natural things. From this we are also led to think that he was already then rehearsing an image of death. For if Adam gave a figure of Christ, Adam's sleep was the death of Christ, who was to sleep in death, so that from the wound in his side, in like manner, the church, the true mother of the living, might be figured. So sleep, so healthful and so rational, is also fashioned as a pattern of the public and common death. For God—who in other matters too has built nothing in his arrangement without patterns—willed to trace with us daily, more fully than the Platonic paradigm, the outlines especially of man's beginning and end, stretching out his hand to help our faith more easily through images and parables, of things as well as of words. So he sets before you the body struck down by the friendly force of slumber, laid low by the pleasant necessity of rest, motionless in position, as it lay before life and will lie after life, as a testimony to its formation and its burial, waiting for the soul as though not yet given and as though already snatched away. But the soul too undergoes it in such a way that it seems to act elsewhere, learning future absence by concealing its presence. We shall know about Hermotimus. And yet meanwhile it dreams: whence, then, dreams? It neither rests nor grows wholly idle, nor surrenders the nature of immortality as a slave to slumber. It proves itself always in motion: on land and sea it travels, trades, is busy, labours, plays, grieves, rejoices, pursues things lawful and unlawful; it shows that without the body it can do a great deal, and that it is furnished with its own members, yet nonetheless has need of moving the body again. So when the body awakes, restored to its functions, it affirms to you the resurrection of the dead. This will be both the natural reason of sleep and its rational nature. Even through the image of death you are initiated into faith, you practise hope, you learn to die and to live, you learn to keep watch while you sleep.

As for Hermotimus: in sleep, they say, he was without his soul, as though it set out from the body taking the opportunity of the man's being unoccupied. His wife betrayed this. His enemies, finding him asleep, burned him as though dead. The soul, returning too late, I suppose, imputed the murder to itself. The citizens of Clazomenae console Hermotimus with a temple; no woman enters it, because of the wife's disgrace. To what end is this? So that, because it is easy for the crowd to think that sleep is the soul's withdrawal, credulity may be furnished by this argument of Hermotimus too? It was some kind of heavier slumber, as is presumed of the nightmare, or of that disorder of health which Soranus sets against it, ruling out the nightmare; or some such fault as drove Epimenides too into a fable, drowsy for almost fifty years. Suetonius says of Nero, and Theopompus of Thrasymedes, that they never dreamed—except that Nero barely did, at his very end, after his terrors. What if Hermotimus too was such that the idleness of a soul doing nothing in sleep was believed to be a divorce? Guess anything rather than such licence of a soul to run away without death, and that continually, according to the story. For if something like this were said to have happened once, like an eclipse of sun or moon, so also for the soul, I would indeed be persuaded that it was done by God; for it would be fitting for a man to be warned or terrified by God, as by a swift thunderbolt, with the blow of a momentary death—unless it were more natural to believe it a dream, that which should rather happen to one awake, unless it had rather to be believed a dream.

We are bound here to set out the Christian view of dreams too, as accidents of sleep and no small agitations of the soul, which we declared to be always busy and active by the perpetuity of its motion, which is the mark of divinity and immortality. So when rest comes to bodies, whose proper comfort it is, the soul, free from a comfort not its own, does not rest; and if it lacks the working of the bodily members, it uses its own. Imagine a gladiator without weapons or a charioteer without a chariot, going through every posture and effort of his art: there is fighting, there is contest, but the agitation is empty. Nonetheless things seem to be done which are yet not seen to be done; they are done in act, but not in effect. This power we call ecstasy, a going out of the senses and a likeness of madness. So too in the beginning sleep was inaugurated together with ecstasy: “And God sent an ecstasy upon Adam, and he slept.” For sleep came to the body for rest, ecstasy came upon the soul against rest; and from then on the pattern mixes sleep with ecstasy, and nature follows the pattern. So we are delighted, saddened, and terrified in dreams—how affectedly, anxiously, and passionately—whereas we would be moved in no way by empty images if we dreamed in possession of our senses. So good deeds done in dreams earn nothing and sins are safe; we shall no more be condemned for a vision of debauchery than crowned for one of martyrdom. And how, you say, does the soul remember dreams, when it cannot be in possession of itself? This will be the peculiarity of this madness: that it arises not from a corruption of health but from the principle of nature; for it does not banish the mind but calls it away. To shake is one thing, to move another; to overthrow is one thing, to stir another. So that memory is available is soundness of mind; that the soundness of mind, memory being preserved, … is stunned, is a kind of madness. And so we are not said to rave, but to dream; so we are also sensible, if we ever are. For our wisdom, though it may be overshadowed, is still not extinguished—except that this too may seem idle at that time, while ecstasy works this too from its own, so that it brings us images of wisdom just as of error.

See, we are pressed again to state our opinion on the treatment of dreams themselves, by which the soul is tossed. And when shall we come to death? Here too I would say: when God grants it; what is to come never has long delays. Epicurus judged dreams wholly empty, freeing the deity from affairs, dissolving the order of things, and scattering everything into passivity as exposed to chance and accident. But if so, then there will also be some chance of truth, since truth alone cannot be exempted from the chance owed to everything. Homer assigned two gates to dreams, the one of horn for truth, the one of ivory for deceit; for one can see through horn, they say, but ivory is opaque. Aristotle, declaring that they are mostly false, admits that some are true. The Telmessians make no dreams void; they blame the weakness of interpretation. And who is such a stranger to humanity as never at some time to have had a faithful vision? By touching on a few of the more notable, I shall bid Epicurus blush. Herodotus relates that Astyages, king of the Medes, saw in a dream the urine of his daughter Mandane, still a virgin, flowing into a flood over Asia; and again, a year after her marriage, a vine springing from the same parts overshadowing all Asia. Charon of Lampsacus, earlier than Herodotus, reports this too. Those who interpreted … her son for so great a work were not deceived; for Cyrus both flooded and crushed Asia. Philip of Macedon, not yet a father, had seen the womb of his wife Olympias sealed with a ring; the seal was a lion. He believed that childbearing had been shut off—I suppose because a lion is a father only once—… Aristodemus or Aristophon conjecturing, on the contrary, that nothing empty is sealed, and that a son was foretold, and one of the greatest force. Those who know Alexander recognize the lion of the ring. Ephorus writes this. A certain woman of Himera also dreamed of the tyranny of Dionysius of Sicily; Heraclides reported it. And Laodice, his mother, foresaw the kingdom of Asia for Seleucus before she bore him; Euphorion published it. I learn from Strabo too that Mithridates took possession of Pontus from a dream, and from Callisthenes that Bardylis the Illyrian ruled from the Molossians to Macedonia because of a dream. The Romans too have known dreams of such truth. The restorer of the empire, while still a little boy of private station, and only Julius Octavius, unknown to himself, Marcus Tullius already knew from a dream as Augustus and the burier of civil storms. This is recorded in the memoirs of Vitellius. Nor will this kind be a foreteller only of supreme powers, but also of dangers and deaths: as when Caesar, in the battle at Philippi against the traitors Brutus and Cassius, sick in any case but about to suffer a greater danger from the enemy, escapes, having left his tent because of Artorius' vision; as when the daughter of Polycrates of Samos foresees his cross from the anointing of the sun and the bath of Jupiter. Honours and talents are revealed in sleep, too; cures are provided, thefts betrayed, treasures bestowed. Cicero's dignity, when he was still a little child, his nurse had already seen. The swan from Socrates' bosom, soothing men, is his disciple Plato. Leonymus the boxer is cured by Achilles in dreams. When the Athenians had lost a golden crown from the citadel, Sophocles the tragedian found it again by dreaming. Neoptolemus the tragic actor, near Rhoeteum at Troy, warned in sleep by Ajax himself at his tomb, is freed from ruin, and, when he removes the decaying stones, goes home rich with gold. And how many commentators and asserters there are on this subject! Artemon, Antiphon, Strato, Philochorus, Epicharmus, Serapion, Cratippus, Dionysius of Rhodes, Hermippus—the whole literature of the world. I shall only laugh, if at all, at the one who thought he would persuade us that Saturn dreamed before anyone else—unless Aristotle too lived before anyone else! Forgive my laughing. Epicharmus, moreover, with Philochorus of Athens, raised dreams to the highest peak among kinds of divination. For the world is thronged with oracles of this kind: of Amphiaraus at Oropus, Amphilochus at Mallus, Sarpedon in the Troad, Trophonius in Boeotia, Mopsus in Cilicia, Hermione in Macedonia, Pasiphae in Laconia. The rest, with their origins, rites, and reporters, and the whole history of dreams, Hermippus of Berytus will set out most fully in five volumes. The Stoics too prefer to hold that God, most provident for human institutions, among other aids of the divining arts and disciplines, has given us dreams too, a special comfort of a natural oracle. So much as to the credibility of dreams, which we too must affirm, though interpreting it otherwise. For as to the other oracles too, at which no one sleeps, what else shall we declare than that their working is demonic, of those spirits which dwelt even then in the men themselves or aimed at their memorials, for the whole stage of their malice, lying about divinity in this form just as in others, and deceiving with the same industry through the benefits of cures, warnings, and predictions, so as to harm the more by helping, since through the things that help they lead men away from the search for the true divinity by insinuating a false one? And this power is certainly not shut in or bounded by the limits of shrines; it roams, flies about, and is free meanwhile. So no one will doubt that houses too are open to demons, and that they beset men with images not only in inner sanctuaries but in bedrooms.

We define, then, that dreams are mostly struck into us by demons—sometimes true and gracious, but, with the industry we described, seeking to catch and ensnare—how much more those that are empty, deceptive, disturbing, mocking, and unclean. No wonder if the images belong to those to whom the realities belong. But since God has promised the grace of the Holy Spirit upon all flesh, and that his servants and handmaids will dream as well as prophesy, to it will be reckoned those which will be compared to that grace—whatever are honourable, holy, prophetic, revealing, edifying, calling—whose generosity is wont to drip even upon the profane, God making his rains and his suns equal for the just and the unjust; since Nebuchadnezzar too dreams by divine agency, and almost the greater part of mankind learn God from visions. Just as God's favour extends to the heathen, so the temptation of evil extends to the saints, from whom it does not withdraw even by day, so that it may creep up on them as it can when they sleep, if it cannot when they wake. The third kind will be dreams which the soul seems to bring on itself from attention to its circumstances. But since dreaming is not at will (Epicharmus too thinks so), how will the soul itself be the cause of any vision for itself? Is this kind then to be left to the natural form, the soul keeping, even in ecstasy, the power to undergo its own affairs? But those which will seem to happen neither from God, nor from a demon, nor from the soul, and beyond expectation, interpretation, and narration, will be set apart for ecstasy alone and its own principle.

They affirm that dreams are more certain and clearer toward the end of the night, as the vigour of souls emerges when slumber has been drawn out. Among the seasons of the year, sleep is calmer in spring, since summer relaxes souls, winter somehow hardens them, and autumn, otherwise a tempter of illnesses, dilutes them with the very winy juices of fruit. Likewise from the position of rest itself: if one lies neither on the back nor on the right side, nor with the internal organs turned back so that the station of the senses floats as in overturned compartments, nor with the mind choked by pressure on the liver. But I would think these things are cleverly estimated rather than firmly proved, even though it is Plato who estimated them; and perhaps they happen by chance. Otherwise dreams would be at will, if they could be directed. As for the rule for dreams which now presumption, now superstition prescribes about distinguishing or abstaining from foods, that must be examined. Superstition, as when fasting is enjoined or chastity imposed on those about to sleep at oracles; presumption, as when the Pythagoreans reject the bean for this reason too, as a heavy and flatulent food. Yet those three brothers with Daniel, content with vegetables alone so as not to be defiled by the king's dishes, obtained from God, besides the rest of their wisdom, especially the grace of dreams, both of receiving and of interpreting them. For my part—whether I am the only one, I do not know—when fasting I mostly dream in such a way that I am not aware of having dreamed. Does sobriety, then, contribute nothing to this, you say? On the contrary, as much to this as to everything; if to superstition, much more to religion. For so the demons too demand it of their dreamers, as a lure of divinity, because they know it is familiar to God; since Daniel too again went without food for a station of three weeks—but to win God by acts of humility, not to build sense and wisdom for a soul about to dream, as though it would not be acting in ecstasy. So sobriety will not help to remove ecstasy, but to commend that very ecstasy, so that it may happen in God.

Those who think infants do not dream, when everything of the soul is fulfilled in life according to the measure of age, should notice their starts and nods and smiles in sleep, so as to understand from the fact that the motions of the dreaming soul easily break out to the surface through the tenderness of the flesh. And that the Libyan people, the Atlantes, are said to pass the night in blind sleep does not impeach the nature of the soul. Either report has lied to Herodotus, sometimes slanderous toward barbarians, or a great force of such demons holds sway in that region. For if Aristotle too notes a certain hero of Sardinia who deprives those who sleep in his shrine of visions, it will also lie in the whims of demons as much to take dreams away as to bring them, so that the notable case of Nero, a late dreamer, and of Thrasymedes may have come from this. But we also derive dreams from God. Why then would the Atlantes not dream from God either—especially since no nation is now a stranger to God, with the gospel flashing into all the earth and to the ends of the world? Either report has lied to Aristotle, or it is a scheme of the demons, so long as no nature of the soul is believed immune from dreams.

Enough about the mirror of death, that is, sleep, and also about the business of sleep, that is, dreams. Now to the origin of this digression, that is, to the order of death—for it too is not without its questions, though it is the end of all questions. By the common verdict of the whole human race we declare death to be the debt of nature. The voice of God stipulated this; everything born has pledged it. So from here let not only the stupor of Epicurus, who denies that this debt concerns us, be put to shame, but let the madness of the heretic magician Menander of Samaria be spat upon, who says that death not only does not concern his followers but does not even reach them. For this purpose, of course, he says he was sent from the supreme and secret Power: that those who put on his baptism should become immortal and incorruptible and at once partakers of the resurrection. We read of many wonderful kinds of waters indeed; but either the winy spring of the Lyncestae makes men drunk, or the demonic fountain of Colophon makes them mad, or the poisoned water of Nonacris in Arcadia (it happened to Alexander) kills. There was also a healing pool in Judaea before Christ. The poet, of course, tells of Stygian marshes that wash away death; yet Thetis mourned her son. And even if Menander plunges one into the Styx, one will nonetheless have to die to come to the Styx; for it is said to be in the underworld. What and where is this blessedness of waters, which neither John the Baptist administered beforehand nor Christ himself showed to his disciples? What is this bath of Menander? A comic one, I suppose. But why so rare, so hidden, where very few wash? For I shall make suspect such rarity of a sacrament so secure and safe, at which the law is not even to die for God himself—when on the contrary all nations now go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob, who demands death even by martyrdom, which he required even of his own Christ. Nor will anyone grant so much to magic as to exempt one from death, or re-trench life, like a vine, with renewed age. This was not permitted even to Medea in the case of a man, though it was in the case of a ram. Enoch was translated, and Elijah, and their death was not found—it was deferred, that is. They are reserved to die, so that they may extinguish Antichrist with their blood. John too died, whom it had been vainly hoped would remain until the coming of the Lord. For heresies generally spring out on our examples, taking from there the defences with which they fight. Finally, in short: where are those whom Menander himself drenched, whom he plunged into his Styx? Let those perennial apostles come and stand by. Let my Thomas see them, hear, touch—and he will have believed.

The work of death is plain: the separation of body and soul. But some, in defence of the soul's immortality—which they defend weakly, not having been taught it by God—beg for arguments in such a way that they would have it believed that even after death some souls cling to their bodies. To this end Plato too, although he dispatches the souls he pleases to heaven at once, yet in the Republic sets before us the corpse of a certain unburied man preserved for a long time without any decay, because, of course, of the soul's indivisibility. To this end Democritus too notes the growth of nails and hair in graves for some time. But the quality of the air may have protected that body. For what if the air was drier and the soil saltier? What if the substance of the body itself was juiceless? What if the manner of death had already spent the corrupting matter beforehand? As for the nails, since they are the beginnings of the sinews, they rightly seem to be pushed out further as the sinews are stretched in their relaxing, and as the flesh daily fails. The hair too is nourished from the brain, which a secret protection causes to last for some time. Indeed, in the living too the hair either flows abundantly or deserts us according to the richness of the brain. You have the physicians. But neither does any small part of the soul remain in the body, itself to depart at some time when time has abolished the whole scene of the body. For this too is in the opinion of some; for that reason, they say, the dead should not be cremated, sparing the remnant of the soul. But the reason for that piety is different: not flattering remnants of the soul, but turning away from cruelty even for the body's sake, since a man certainly does not deserve that even his body be given over to a penal end. Rather, the soul, indivisible as immortal, requires us to believe that death too is indivisible, befalling the soul indivisibly, not as immortal but as indivisible. But death too will be divided if the soul is, the remnant of the soul being, of course, to die at some time. So a portion of death will remain with a portion of the soul. Nor am I unaware that there is some trace of this opinion. I have learned it from my own people. I know of a certain woman, born in the church, who died in the bloom of form and age after a single short marriage. When she had fallen asleep in peace, and the burial was still delayed, while she was being composed with the prayer of the presbyter, at the first breath of the prayer she moved her hands from her sides into the posture of supplication, and, when the peace was concluded, returned them to their place. There is also that story among our people, that in a cemetery a body made room by withdrawing, to share the space with a body placed beside it. If something of the kind is also told among the heathen, God everywhere sets forth signs of his power, for comfort to his own, for testimony to outsiders. For I would rather believe it done by God for testimony than by any remnants of the soul, which, if present, would have moved other members too, and, if only the hands, then not for the purpose of prayer. That body too would not only have yielded to its brother but would also have refreshed itself by changing its position on other occasions. Certainly, wherever these things come from, they are to be reckoned signs and portents rather; they cannot make nature. Death, if it is not total at once, is not death. If anything of the soul remains, it is life. Death will no more be mixed with life than night with day.

This work of death, then, the separation of flesh and soul—setting aside the question of fate and chance—human feeling has divided into two forms, the ordinary and the extraordinary: ascribing the ordinary to nature, that is, every peaceful death, and judging the extraordinary to be beyond nature, that is, every violent end. But we who know man's beginnings boldly determine that death did not follow man from nature but from fault—and that fault itself not natural; though it is easy for the name of nature to be usurped for things that seem to have clung to us from birth by accident. For if man had been directly made for death, then indeed death would be ascribed to nature. But the very law proves that he was not made for death, suspending the event of death by a conditional threat and assigning it to man's choice. In short, if he had not sinned, he would never have died. So that will not be nature which happened through the will, from the power of going astray, not by necessity from the authority of the institution. Accordingly, although the ways of death vary, as the conditions of causes are manifold, we say that none is so gentle as not to be done by violence. That very principle that works death, simple though it is, is violence. Why not? It tears apart and severs so great a partnership of soul and flesh, so great a joining together from conception of sister substances. For even if someone breathes out his spirit for joy, like Chilon of Sparta while embracing his son, victor at Olympia; even if for glory, like Clidemus of Athens while being crowned with gold for the excellence of his histories; even if in sleep, like Plato; even if in laughter, like Publius Crassus—much more violent is the death that proceeds through things foreign to it, that drives out the soul by means of good things, that brings death just when it is sweeter to live, in exultation, honour, rest, and pleasure. It is violence too that befalls ships when, far from the rocks of Caphareus, assailed by no whirlwinds, shaken by no great waves, with a flattering breeze, a gliding course, a merry company, suddenly struck from within they sink in complete security. Not otherwise are the events of even a tranquil death shipwrecks of life. It makes no difference whether the ship of the body goes down whole or broken, when the soul's voyage is overturned.

But where will the soul, bare and expelled, turn next? No doubt we shall follow it in order. First, however, we shall complete what belongs to this place, lest, because we have stated that the ways of death vary, someone expect from us explanations of each, which are rather to be left to the physicians, the proper judges of all deadly things or causes and of the bodily conditions themselves. Certainly, to protect the soul's immortality here too, in speaking of death I shall insert something about the kind of end in which the soul slips away little by little and bit by bit. For bearing the appearance of failing, it is drawn away while it seems to be consumed, and suggests destruction from the gradualness of its departure. But the whole cause lies in the body and comes from the body. For whatever the way of death, it is without doubt an overthrow either of the materials, or of the regions, or of the vital passages: of materials, such as bile and blood; of regions, such as heart and liver; of passages, such as veins and arteries. While, then, each of these is laid waste in the body by its own cause of injury, up to the final overthrow and severing of the vital things, that is, of the natural boundaries, positions, and functions, necessarily the soul too, as its instruments, dwellings, and spaces gradually give way, is itself compelled gradually to move out and is brought into the appearance of diminishing—in no other way than the charioteer too is presumed to have failed when fatigue has denied the horses their strength, as far as the condition of the forsaken man is concerned, not the truth of what is suffered. So the charioteer of the body, the animal spirit, fails on account of the failing vehicle, not its own; departing from its work, not its vigour; flagging in act, not in state; losing steadiness, not substance; because it ceases to appear, not because it ceases to be. So too every swift death—like the cutting of the neck, opening at once so wide a door, or like the force of a collapse crushing all the vital parts at once, or like apoplexy, an inner collapse—gives the soul no delay and does not torment its departure into moments. But where death is long, the soul, as it is abandoned, so also abandons; yet it is not cut to pieces in this form, but drawn out, and while it is drawn out it makes its last part seem a part. But not every part is at once cut off because it is last, nor, because it is small, will it at once perish too. Its own end follows the series; the middle is drawn to the top; and the remnants that cohere with the whole are waited for by it, not abandoned. And so I would dare to say that the last of the whole is whole, because, though less and later, it belongs to it. Hence, indeed, it often happens that the soul in the very divorce is stirred more powerfully, with a more intent gaze and extraordinary talkativeness, while, already set in freedom on a higher stage, through the remainder that still lingers in the body it declares what it sees, what it hears, what it begins to know. For if this body is a prison, according to Plato's opinion—but, according to the apostle's, the temple of God when it is in Christ—still it meanwhile blocks and darkens the soul within its enclosure and muddies it with the concretion of the flesh, so that the light of things reaches it dimmer, as through a window of horn. Without doubt, when it is squeezed out of the concretion of the flesh by the force of death, it is filtered by the very squeezing; certainly, bursting from the covering of the body into the open, to its own clear and pure light, it at once recognizes itself in the release of its substance and by that very freedom comes back to its senses in divinity, as one emerging from a dream from images to realities. Then it both declares and sees, then it exults or trembles, according as it perceives the preparation of its lodging, straight from the face of the angel himself, the summoner of souls, the Mercury of the poets.

Where, then, the soul is led, we now explain. Almost all the philosophers who maintain the immortality of the soul, in whatever way they will—like Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato—and those who grant it some time from its departure until the conflagration of the universe, like the Stoics, place only their own souls, that is, the souls of the wise, in the upper mansions. Plato indeed does not grant this indiscriminately to the souls of philosophers, but to those who have adorned philosophy, of course, with the love of boys. So even among philosophers impurity has a great privilege! Thus with him the wise souls are raised to the aether, with Arius into the air, with the Stoics under the moon. I am surprised at them, indeed, that they lay the unwise souls low around the earth, while they affirm that they are instructed by the wise, who are much higher. Where will the school be, with so great a distance between their lodgings? How will the pupils meet their teachers, separated from each other by so great an interval? And what use or fruit of posthumous learning will they have, when they are soon to perish in the conflagration? The remaining souls they cast down to the underworld. This Plato describes in the Phaedo as a kind of bosom of the earth, into which all the stains of worldly filth flow together and, settling there, give off vapours, and, as it were with the mire of their uncleanness, thicken the heavier air there, which is its own.

For us the underworld is not believed to be a bare cavity, nor some sewer of the world under the open sky, but a vastness in the pit of the earth and in its depths, a hidden profundity in its very bowels; since we read that Christ spent the three days of his death in the heart of the earth, that is, in the inmost and internal recess, covered by the earth itself and shut within it, and built over still lower abysses. But if Christ, God because also man, dead according to the Scriptures and buried according to the same, also satisfied this law, fulfilling the form of human death in the underworld, and did not ascend into the heights of heaven before he descended into the depths of the earth, so as there to make the patriarchs and prophets partakers of himself—you have reason both to believe the region of the underworld subterranean and to push aside those who, proudly enough, do not think the souls of the faithful worthy of the underworld: servants above their lord and disciples above their master, scorning, if you please, to receive in Abraham's bosom the comfort of awaiting the resurrection. But Christ went to the underworld, they say, so that we should not go: otherwise what difference is there between heathen and Christians, if the prison is the same for the dead? How then will the soul breathe out to heaven, with Christ still sitting there at the right hand of the Father, God's command not yet heard through the archangel's trumpet, those whom the Lord's coming finds in the world not yet caught up to meet him in the air, with those who have died in Christ, who will rise first? Heaven is open to no one while the earth is still intact, not to say shut. For the kingdoms of heaven will be unlocked with the end of the world. But will our sleep be in the aether with Plato's boy-lovers, or in the air with Arius, or around the moon with the Endymions of the Stoics? No, you say, in paradise, to which even then the patriarchs and prophets, as the train of the Lord's resurrection, migrated from the underworld. And how is it that the region of paradise revealed to John in the Spirit, which lies under the altar, shows no other souls in it besides those of the martyrs? How did Perpetua, the bravest martyr, on the day of her passion, in the revelation of paradise, see only her fellow martyrs there, unless because the sword that guards the gate of paradise yields to none but those who have died in Christ, not in Adam? A new death for God, an extraordinary one for Christ, is received into another and private lodging. Recognize, then, the difference between heathen and believer in death, if you fall for God, as the Paraclete urges, not in soft fevers and in beds but in martyrdoms, if you take up your cross and follow the Lord, as he himself commanded. The whole key of paradise is your blood. You also have a little book of ours on paradise, in which we established that every soul is set apart in the underworld until the day of the Lord.

A dispute arises whether this happens immediately after departure, or whether some reason detains certain souls here meanwhile, or whether even when received there they may afterwards come back from the underworld by their own choice or by command. For these opinions do not lack persuasive arguments either. It has been believed that the unburied are not brought down to the underworld before they have received their due rites, following Homer's Patroclus, who in dreams demands burial from Achilles, because he could not otherwise approach the gates of the underworld, the souls of the buried keeping him far off. But we know, besides the licence of poetry, the pious intention of Homer too. For he laid the more stress on the care of burial the more he charged its delay with injury to souls; and at the same time, so that no one, keeping a dead man at home, should waste away further with him, his grief nourished by the excess of consolation. So he invented the complaints of the unburied soul for both purposes: that the urgency of the funeral and the honour of bodies might be preserved, and the memory of affection moderated. But how empty it is that the soul should await the rites of the body, as though it carried anything from them to the underworld! Much emptier, if the omission of burial is counted an injury to the soul, which it ought to embrace as a favour. For surely a soul that did not even wish to die will prefer to be dragged to the underworld later. It will love the undutiful heir through whom it still feeds on the light. Or if it is certainly an injury to be thrust under the earth later, and the ground of the injury is the omission of burial, it is most unjust that injury should befall the soul, to which the omission of burial, which concerns its relatives, is not imputed. They also say that souls overtaken by untimely death wander here until the remainder of the age is completed which they would have lived out had they not died prematurely. But either times are appointed for each, and I would not believe that appointed times can be snatched away; or, if they are appointed, yet cut short by the will of God or some power, they are cut short in vain if they still wait to be completed; or, if they are not appointed, there will be no remainder of times not appointed. I shall add more. Suppose an infant dies at the fountains of the breast; suppose now a boy not yet of age; suppose one of age, who yet would have lived eighty years: what sort of thing is it that his soul should spend these, snatched away, here after death? For it cannot take on age without a body, since ages work through bodies. And let our own people also reflect that souls will receive in the resurrection the same bodies in which they died. So the same measures of bodies will be hoped for, and the same ages, which make the measures of bodies. How then can the soul of an infant spend here the times snatched from it, so as to rise at eighty years old in a body of one month? Or if the times destined must be fulfilled here, will the soul also run through here the order of life which those times were allotted, destined here together with them—so that it studies from infancy, handed over to boyhood; serves as a soldier from adolescence, roused by youth; sits as a judge from youth, weighed by old age; exacts interest, presses the field, sails, goes to law, marries, labours, meets illnesses and whatever sorrows and joys awaited it with its times? But how will these be done without a body? Life without life? But, you say, the times will be empty, to be fulfilled by mere passage. What then prevents their being fulfilled in the underworld, where likewise there is no use for them? So we say that every soul, at whatever age it has died, stays in it until that day on which the promised perfection is attuned to the measure of angelic fullness. Likewise they will hold to be exiles from the underworld those souls they suppose snatched away by violence, especially through atrocious punishments—I mean the cross, the axe, the sword, and the beast; nor, indeed, are those deaths violent which justice decrees, the avenger of violence. And so, you will say, all wicked souls are exiled from the underworld. I press you to settle one or the other: that the underworld is for the good or for the wicked. If for the wicked, the worst souls ought to be hurled there too; if for the good, why do you judge souls untimely, unmarried, and, by the condition of their age, pure and innocent, meanwhile unworthy of the underworld?

Either it is best to be kept here, as with the aōroi (the untimely dead), or worst, as with the biaiothanatoi (those who died by violence)—to use the very words with which magic, the author of these opinions, resounds: Ostanes, Typhon, Dardanus, Damigeron, Nectabis, and Berenice. It is now common literature that promises to call up from their dwelling in the underworld even souls put to rest at a due age, even those separated by an honest death, even those discharged by prompt burial. What then shall we say of magic? What almost everyone says: that it is deceit. But the principle of the deceit escapes only the Christians, who know the spiritual powers of wickedness—not indeed by complicit awareness but by hostile knowledge—and handle them not by an inviting operation but by a conquering dominion: that manifold plague of the human mind, the craftsman of all error, the ruin alike of salvation and of the soul, the science of magic, a second idolatry, in which the demons pretend to be the dead just as in the other they pretend to be gods. Why not, since the gods too are dead men? So the aōroi and biaiothanatoi are invoked, on this argument for belief: that it seems credible that those souls above all incline to violence and injury which a cruel and untimely end has wrenched out by violence and injury, as if in retaliation for the offence. But demons work under the display of them, and especially those that were in them when they were alive and had driven them to such ends. For we have suggested that almost no man is without a demon, and many know that untimely and atrocious deaths too, which they ascribe to accidents, are brought about by the work of demons. This deceit too, of an evil spirit hiding under the persons of the dead, we prove, unless I am mistaken, by facts as well, when in exorcisms it sometimes claims to be one of the relatives of the man it possesses, sometimes a gladiator or a beast-fighter, just as elsewhere a god, caring for nothing more than to rule out this very thing that we preach, so that we may not readily believe that all souls are brought down to the underworld, and so to disturb faith in the judgment and the resurrection. And yet that demon, after trying to deceive the bystanders, overcome by the pressure of divine grace, unwillingly confesses what is true. So too in that other kind of magic which is believed to pull up souls already at rest from the underworld and show them to sight, there is no other force of deceit more effective. Of course, because a phantom is furnished, and a body is feigned; nor is it hard for him to deceive the outward eyes for whom it is very easy to blind the inner sight of the mind. So Pharaoh and the Egyptians seemed to see bodies in the serpents made from the magicians' rods; but the truth of Moses swallowed up the lie. Simon and Elymas the magicians did many things against the apostles; but the stroke of blindness did not come from sleight of hand. What is new in an unclean spirit's rivalry with the truth? See, today such presumption in their art exalts the heretics of that same Simon that they promise even to move the souls of the prophets from the underworld. And I believe they can—by a lie. For no less was allowed then to the pythonic spirit, to fabricate the soul of Samuel, when Saul consulted the dead after God. Far be it from us, otherwise, to believe that the soul of any saint, let alone of a prophet, was dragged out by a demon, taught as we are that Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light—much more into a man of light—and that at the end he will even assert himself to be God and work more portentous signs to overturn, if possible, the elect. He hardly hesitated then, I suppose, to assert himself a prophet of God, and to Saul at that, in whom he was already dwelling. Do not think that it was one who produced the phantom and another who commended it, but the same spirit, both in the false prophetess and in the apostate, easily lying about what it had caused to be believed, through whom Saul's treasure was where his heart was—where, that is, God was not. And so he saw through whom he believed he would see, because he believed through whom he saw. If it is objected, from visions at night, that the dead are often seen not in vain—for the Nasamonians get their own oracles by staying at the tombs of their parents, as Heraclides writes, or Nymphodorus, or Herodotus, and the Celts spend the night at the tombs of brave men for the same reason, as Nicander affirms—we no more truly suffer the dead in dreams than the living, if the dead are seen by the same principle as the living. Nor is everything that is seen true. For things are true not because they are seen but because they are fulfilled. The reliability of dreams is reported from the outcome, not from the sight. But that the underworld is open to no soul at all the Lord sufficiently established in that argument of the poor man at rest and the rich man groaning, in the person of Abraham: that a messenger reporting the arrangements of the underworld could not be sent back from there—which, if ever, could have been permitted then, so that Moses and the prophets might be believed. But even if the power of God has recalled some souls into bodies, as proofs of its right, that will not therefore be shared with the credulity and boldness of magicians, the deceit of dreams, and the licence of poets. On the contrary, in the examples of resurrection, when the power of God, whether through prophets, through Christ, or through apostles, restores souls to bodies, it is settled in advance by solid, tangible, and satisfying truth that this is the form of truth, so that you are to judge every bodiless display of the dead to be illusion.

Is every soul, then, in the underworld, you ask? Whether you like it or not; and there are already punishments and refreshments there: you have the poor man and the rich. And since I postponed something or other on this point, I shall now fittingly deliver it at the close. For why should you not think that the soul is both punished and comforted in the underworld meanwhile, awaiting either judgment, in a kind of foretaste and … of it? Because, you say, its case must be kept intact for the divine judgment without any anticipation of the sentence; and also because the restoration of the flesh must be awaited, as the partner of its works and wages. What then will happen in that time? Shall we sleep? But souls do not sleep even in the living; sleep belongs to bodies, as does death itself along with its mirror, sleep. Or do you want nothing to be done there, where all humanity is drawn, where all hope is held in trust? Do you think judgment is foretasted or begun? Hastened or prepared beforehand? And how most unjust would idleness in the underworld be, if the guilty still fare well there and the innocent not yet! What do you want there to be after death—a confused hope, sporting with uncertain expectation, or already a review of life and a shudder at the ordering of judgment? Does the soul always wait for the body in order to grieve or rejoice? Is it not sufficient of itself for both kinds of suffering? How often, with the body unharmed, is the soul alone tormented by bile, anger, weariness, often not known even to itself? How often, likewise, with the body afflicted, does the soul seek out a secret joy for itself and withdraw from the body's then troublesome company? I lie if it is not accustomed, alone, to glory and rejoice in the very tortures of the body. Look at the soul of Mucius, when he melted his right hand in the fire; look at Zeno's, when the tortures of Dionysius pass it by. The bites of wild beasts are ornaments of youth, as the bear's scars on Cyrus. So the soul knows how to rejoice and grieve in the underworld too without the flesh, since in the flesh too, if it wishes, it grieves when unharmed and rejoices when harmed. If it does this by its own choice in life, how much more by the judgment of God after death! Nor does the soul share all its works with the flesh's service; for the divine censure pursues even mere thoughts and bare wishes: “Whoever looks to lust has already committed adultery in his heart.” So, for these reasons at least, it is most fitting that the soul, without waiting for the flesh, should be punished for what it committed without the flesh's partnership. So too, for pious and kindly thoughts, in which it did not need the flesh, it will be refreshed without the flesh. And what now if, even in carnal things, it is the soul that first conceives, arranges, commands, and drives on? And even if at times unwilling, it still first handles what it will do through the body. In short, conscience will never come after the deed. So this order too requires that the soul first pay the wages to which it is first liable. In sum, since we understand that prison which the Gospel points out to be the underworld, and interpret the “last farthing” as the smallest offence to be paid off there by delay of the resurrection, no one will doubt that the soul pays something in the underworld, without prejudice to the fullness of the resurrection through the flesh as well. The Paraclete too has most frequently commended this, if anyone has accepted his words from recognition of the promised gifts. Having met, as I think, every human opinion about the soul with the teaching of the faith, we have satisfied a just and necessary curiosity, at least. For an excessive and idle curiosity there will be as much lacking in learning as it has pleased it to inquire.