The soul in the early church · Sophia Scriptura

First Apology 18Justin Martyr · ca. 150–155 · Pagan practices and writers show souls survive death; Christians go further and expect the resurrection of the body.
Acts of Andrew (Vatican fragments), chapter 6Anonymous · ca. 150-200 (the Acts); the Martyrdom text is later · Andrew praises the soul that returns to itself, recognizing that it is immaterial, holy, light, and akin to the unbegotten, and bids it long to see the one who did not come into being.
Acts of John 29Anonymous · ca. 150–200 · John urges Lycomedes to paint his soul with the colours of the virtues instead of a portrait of the body.
On the Resurrection 8Justin Martyr · 2nd century (disputed) · God would not neglect his precious work: he has called the whole man, soul and body, to resurrection; to save the soul alone, a part of himself, would be no act of goodness.
On the Resurrection 10Justin Martyr · 2nd century (disputed) · The resurrection is of the flesh that fell; the soul's immortality alone was Plato's teaching, while Christ brought a new hope, and the flesh he disciplines is kept for salvation.
Discourse to the Greeks 5Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · The Greeks should come to the divine Word, who makes mortals immortal by driving the passions from the soul and restoring it to its Maker.
Sentences of Sextus 21Anonymous · 2nd-early 3rd cent. · Be sure that you have received your soul from God as a faithful deposit.
Sentences of Sextus 24Anonymous · 2nd-early 3rd cent. · The soul is purified in the word of God through wisdom.
Sentence 21 (Greek)Anonymous · 2nd-early 3rd cent. · Consider that you hold your soul as a deposit from God.
Sentence 55 (Greek)Anonymous · 2nd-early 3rd cent. · Let only your body sojourn on earth, but let your soul be always with God.
Sentence 136 (Greek)Anonymous · 2nd-early 3rd cent. · As long as the body longs, the soul does not know God.
Sentence 208 (Greek)Anonymous · 2nd-early 3rd cent. · Wickedness is a disease of the soul. Injustice is the death of the soul.
Sentence 397 (Greek)Anonymous · 2nd-early 3rd cent. · Death does not destroy the soul, but a bad life does.
Sentence 420 (Greek)Anonymous · 2nd-early 3rd cent. · The soul's ascent to God is through the word of God.
Dialogue with Trypho 4.2Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Justin, as a Platonist, holds that the soul is divine and that all animals have the same kind of soul.
Dialogue with Trypho 4.5Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · If souls forget their vision of God when reborn, it profits them nothing.
Dialogue with Trypho 4.6Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · The Platonist doctrine of transmigration as punishment is questioned.
Dialogue with Trypho 4.7Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Justin concedes that souls neither see God nor transmigrate, though they can know that God exists.
Dialogue with Trypho 5.1Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · The old man argues that if the soul were immortal by nature it would also be uncreated.
Dialogue with Trypho 5.2Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · The world had a beginning, and so did souls; so they are not immortal by nature.
Dialogue with Trypho 5.3Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Souls do not die at once: the godly and the wicked await judgment in different places.
Dialogue with Trypho 5.5Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Souls that sin and change cannot be uncreated.
Dialogue with Trypho 6.1Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · The soul is not life itself but receives life from God.
Dialogue with Trypho 6.2Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Life belongs to God; the soul lives only as long as God gives it life.
Dialogue with Trypho 105.4Justin Martyr · ca. 155–160 · Samuel's appearance through the medium shows that souls survive.
Oration to the Greeks 12Tatian · ca. 165–172 · Tatian's cosmology: matter was created by God; one material spirit runs through all things, but humans were first given also a higher spirit, God's image; the demons are made of matter.
Oration to the Greeks 13Tatian · ca. 165–172 · The soul is not immortal by nature; united with the divine Spirit and knowing God it lives, but without the Spirit it dies and is raised only for punishment.
Oration to the Greeks 16Tatian · ca. 165–172 · The demons are not the souls of the dead; they deceive by illusions, claim credit for illnesses, and flee before the word of God's power.
Oration to the Greeks 20Tatian · ca. 165–172 · The soul lost its “wings,” the divine spirit, through sin; paradise was beyond this world; the prophets, clothed with the Spirit, reveal what lies beyond it.
Apollinaris of Hierapolis, Fr. 2Claudius Apollinaris of Hierapolis · ca. 165-180 · A later historian reports that Apollinaris, with Irenaeus, Clement, and Serapion, taught that the incarnate Word had a human soul.
To Autolycus 1.2Theophilus of Antioch · ca. 180–185 · God is seen only by the eyes of a pure soul; sin clouds them, as rust clouds a mirror.
On the Resurrection of the Dead 10Athenagoras · ca. 177–180 (if by Athenagoras) · Raising the dead wrongs no one, neither other creatures nor the soul or body of the one raised, and it is not unworthy of God.
On the Resurrection of the Dead 21Athenagoras · ca. 177–180 (if by Athenagoras) · Rewarding or punishing the soul alone would be unjust: the body shared in the labors of virtue, and most sins arise from the body's needs and passions.
On the Resurrection of the Dead 23Athenagoras · ca. 177–180 (if by Athenagoras) · God's commandments (honor parents, do not commit adultery, do not steal) were given to embodied human beings, not to souls, so the whole person must be judged.
On the Resurrection of the Dead 25Athenagoras · ca. 177–180 (if by Athenagoras) · The end of human life, which belongs to the whole person, is eternal contemplation of God; it requires the resurrection, by which the same souls receive the same bodies.
Fragment 11Clement of Alexandria · late 2nd–early 3rd century · Sayings ascribed to Clement: souls longing for God rise to his bosom at death; all souls, even of the ungodly, are immortal and the wicked suffer endless punishment; do not listen to slander; and the believer is justified not by mere abstention but by purity of thought.
Adumbrations on 1 Peter, paragraph 1Clement of Alexandria · original ca. 200; Latin translation 6th century · On 1 Pet 1: regeneration through Christ's resurrection in us; the soul does not return to a body in this life but rejoins it at the resurrection; the soul becomes incorruptible by grace; the prophets spoke by the Spirit of Christ.
The Instructor 3.1.1Clement of Alexandria · ca. 190–200 · Knowing oneself leads to knowing and becoming like God; desire, shape-shifting like Proteus, degrades the human being, but the one in whom the Word dwells has true beauty and is made like God.
Against Heresies 1.25.4Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Carpocratians hold that souls must pass through every kind of action, however vile, before being freed, misreading Jesus' parable of the adversary.
Against Heresies 2.29.1Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · If souls are saved by righteousness rather than by nature, the bodies that shared in righteousness must be saved too.
Against Heresies 2.33.1Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Transmigration is refuted by the fact that souls remember nothing of previous lives, though they remember even dreams.
Against Heresies 2.33.2Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Plato's cup of forgetfulness cannot explain why souls forget former lives, since he could not then know of the cup himself.
Against Heresies 2.33.3Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The body is not forgetfulness, for the soul remembers dreams and visions, and the prophets reported what they saw in the spirit.
Against Heresies 2.33.4Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The soul rules the body like an artist using an instrument; slowed by it, it does not lose its powers or memory.
Against Heresies 2.33.5Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Each person has his own soul as his own body, and at the resurrection all will rise with their own body, soul, and spirit.
Against Heresies 2.34.1Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The story of the rich man and Lazarus shows that souls persist, keep their form, remember this life, and await judgment in fitting places.
Against Heresies 2.34.2Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · Souls had a beginning, but like all creatures they continue to exist as long as God wills.
Against Heresies 2.34.4Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The soul is not life itself but receives life from God, and continues because God wills it.
Against Heresies 5.7.1Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · As Christ rose with the marks of the nails in his flesh, so our mortal bodies, which alone die and decay, are what God will raise.
Against Heresies 5.12.2Irenaeus of Lyons · ca. 180–190 · The breath of life given to all is temporary, but the life-giving Spirit given to those who tread down earthly desires is everlasting; the natural comes first, then the spiritual.
Hortatory Address to the Greeks 7Anonymous · 2nd–3rd century (disputed) · Plato contradicts himself, and the philosophers disagree endlessly about the soul, because they relied on human cleverness.
Prophetic Extracts 17.1Clement of Alexandria · ca. 200 · Against the preexistence of souls: we did not exist before God made us, or we would remember it.
Excerpts from Theodotus 14.3Clement of Alexandria · ca. 200 · Souls must be bodies of some kind, since they are punished; Christ speaks of casting soul and body into Gehenna.
Excerpts from Theodotus 27.1Clement of Alexandria · ca. 200 · The high priest's laying aside of the golden plate before entering the Holy of Holies signifies the purified soul laying aside its body, having the Name engraved within.
Excerpts from Theodotus 50.1Clement of Alexandria · ca. 200 · They say the Demiurge formed from matter an earthy, irrational soul, the man “according to the image.”
Excerpts from Theodotus 51.2Clement of Alexandria · ca. 200 · They read “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh” as the divine soul hidden in the material soul.
Miscellanies 5.14.91Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Punishment after death implies that the soul is immortal; Plato knew of rivers of fire and Tartarus, which Scripture calls Gehenna, and of guardian spirits, as Scripture speaks of the angels of the little ones.
Miscellanies 6.16.135Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · The reasoning, ruling part of the soul is added and is not generated from the seed; the fleshly spirit carries the powers of nourishment, growth, and movement, while the ruling part chooses, learns, and knows, and governs the whole person.
Miscellanies 8.4.10Clement of Alexandria · ca. 198–203 · Before answering whether the unborn is an animal, one must ask what the questioner means by “animal,” since Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics define it differently.
The Testimony of the Soul 1Tertullian · ca. 197–198 · Rather than appeal to pagan literature, which its readers do not trust, Tertullian calls the simple, untaught human soul itself as a witness to Christian truth.
The Testimony of the Soul 4Tertullian · ca. 197–198 · The soul's habits of pitying, cursing, or blessing the dead, fearing death, and seeking posthumous fame show that it knows it survives death and faces judgment, and even hints at resurrection.
The Testimony of the Soul 5Tertullian · ca. 197–198 · The soul's testimony is natural and therefore divine, older than literature; and if it was learned from books at all, it came from the Scriptures, which are older than pagan writings.
The Testimony of the Soul 6Tertullian · ca. 197–198 · The soul's testimony is the same in every nation, so every soul will stand at the judgment both as witness to the truth and as defendant for rejecting it.
Irrision of the Gentile Philosophers 2Hermias · 3rd–6th century (disputed) · Hermias mocks the philosophers who turn his soul into every creature and toss him from Anaxagoras to Parmenides, Anaximenes, Empedocles, Protagoras, Thales, Anaximander, Archelaus, Plato and Aristotle.
Against the Greeks 2Hippolytus of Rome · 3rd century (disputed) · God will raise the same bodies, pure and incorruptible for the righteous, unchanged for the unrighteous, as seed rises from the earth.
Pistis Sophia 96Anonymous · 3rd century
Pistis Sophia 111Anonymous · 3rd century
Pistis Sophia 112Anonymous · 3rd century
Pistis Sophia 131Anonymous · 3rd century
Pistis Sophia 132Anonymous · 3rd century
Pistis Sophia 144Anonymous · 3rd century
Pistis Sophia 146Anonymous · 3rd century
On the Flesh of Christ 10Tertullian · ca. 206–211 · Against those who say Christ's soul was turned into flesh: he took a real soul like ours in order to save ours, so it was not made flesh, nor his flesh made of soul.
On the Flesh of Christ 11Tertullian · ca. 206–211 · Christ did not turn his soul into flesh in order to make souls visible; he showed a real human soul by clothing it with real flesh.
On the Flesh of Christ 12Tertullian · ca. 206–211 · The soul was never ignorant of itself, for it naturally knows God and his judgement; Christ came not to show the soul to itself but to save it.
On the Flesh of Christ 13Tertullian · ca. 206–211 · Things take the name of what they become, yet Christ speaks separately of “my soul” and “my flesh”; so in him soul and flesh remained two distinct substances.
Against Marcion 1.10Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · The Creator has been known since creation, not only since Moses: every human soul naturally speaks of God, so he was never unknown, even in Pontus.
Against Marcion 1.24Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · Marcion's god saves only a few, and saves only their souls, abandoning the flesh that bears baptism, celibacy, and martyrdom; and he leaves his followers suffering under the Creator's hand, so his goodness is not perfect.
Against Marcion 2.9Tertullian · 207/208 (third edition, completed later) · The soul is God's “breath,” not his Spirit: an image of God, free and rational, but not incapable of sin as God is; so its sin comes from its free choice, not from God, who forbade sin and warned of death.
On the Soul 1Tertullian · ca. 210 · Socrates' calm talk of the soul's immortality before his death was studied composure, not knowledge of truth; knowledge of the soul must be learned from God, its author.
On the Soul 3Tertullian · ca. 210 · Because philosophers are the forerunners of heretics, Christians must counter their confused theories of the soul with the Lord's teaching; the soul's origin from God's breath has already been settled.
On the Soul 4Tertullian · ca. 210 · Against Plato, who held the soul unborn and unmade, the soul had a beginning: it was both made and born.
On the Soul 5Tertullian · ca. 210 · Many philosophers, especially the Stoics Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, argued that the soul is a body.
On the Soul 6Tertullian · ca. 210 · The Platonist arguments that the soul is bodiless fail: the soul moves and is moved, is perceived like other things, and is fed by food, as the physician Soranus shows.
On the Soul 7Tertullian · ca. 210 · The Gospel story of the rich man and Lazarus, whose souls suffer and are comforted in the underworld, proves that the soul has a kind of body.
On the Soul 8Tertullian · ca. 210 · The soul differs from other bodies without ceasing to be a body; it is invisible to the flesh but visible to the spirit, as John saw the souls of the martyrs.
On the Soul 9Tertullian · ca. 210 · The soul has dimensions, colour, and human shape, as a Christian prophetess saw in a vision; God's breath took on the form of Adam's body when it filled him.
On the Soul 10Tertullian · ca. 210 · The soul is one simple substance; breathing and living are the same act, so the “spirit” by which we breathe is not a second substance but the soul itself.
On the Soul 11Tertullian · ca. 210 · The soul may be called “spirit” because it breathes, but it is one simple substance; the Spirit of God or an evil spirit comes upon it later, as with Adam, Saul, and Judas.
On the Soul 12Tertullian · ca. 210 · The mind is not a separate substance but a faculty of the soul, against Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and the Valentinians.
On the Soul 13Tertullian · ca. 210 · The soul, not the mind, holds the sovereign place: ordinary speech, the philosophers, and above all Scripture speak of the soul as the whole person.
On the Soul 14Tertullian · ca. 210 · The soul is one and indivisible; the “parts” philosophers count are really its powers and functions, as one water organ has many pipes.
On the Soul 15Tertullian · ca. 210 · The soul has a ruling part, and Scripture places it in the heart, as many philosophers and physicians also held.
On the Soul 16Tertullian · ca. 210 · Reason is natural to the soul from God, while the irrational came from the devil through sin; anger and desire can be rational, as they were in Christ.
On the Soul 17Tertullian · ca. 210 · Against the Academics, the senses are reliable, since apparent errors have natural causes; to doubt them would make even the witness to Christ's real body untrustworthy.
On the Soul 18Tertullian · ca. 210 · Plato and the Gnostics wrongly separate intellect from sense; both are powers of the one soul, and the intellect depends on the senses for its knowledge.
On the Soul 19Tertullian · ca. 210 · The soul has understanding from infancy, as even plants show a kind of knowing; the newborn's cry and recognition of its mother prove it, and Christ received praise from infants.
On the Soul 20Tertullian · ca. 210 · The soul is uniform in its nature but develops variously through place, body, training, and ruling powers, as seeds grow differently in different soils.
On the Soul 22Tertullian · ca. 210 · Tertullian sums up his definition of the soul: born of God's breath, immortal, bodily, shaped, simple, free, rational, and propagated from one original soul.
On the Soul 24Tertullian · ca. 210 · Plato's doctrine that learning is recollection fails: a godlike soul could not forget, natural knowledge is never lost, and time or the body cannot explain forgetting.
On the Soul 25Tertullian · ca. 210 · Against those who say the soul enters at birth with the first breath, pregnant women know the fetus is alive in the womb; physicians' instruments for killing it show the same, so the soul is present from conception.
On the Soul 26Tertullian · ca. 210 · Scripture shows that children live in the womb: Jacob and Esau struggled before birth, John leapt at Christ's presence, and God knew Jeremiah before he was born.
On the Soul 27Tertullian · ca. 210 · Body and soul are conceived together from one act of intercourse, each from its own kind of seed, so that all human souls derive from Adam's.
On the Soul 28Tertullian · ca. 210 · The doctrine that souls pass back and forth between the living and the dead rests on Pythagoras, who faked his own death and return from the underworld.
On the Soul 29Tertullian · ca. 210 · Plato's argument from contraries fails: the dead come from the living, but the living do not therefore come from the dead.
On the Soul 30Tertullian · ca. 210 · If the living came from the dead, the human population would stay the same; but mankind has grown so much that the earth can scarcely support it.
On the Soul 31Tertullian · ca. 210 · Transmigration makes no sense: souls would return one to one and at the same age, and Pythagoras' supposed former lives were utterly unlike his own.
On the Soul 32Tertullian · ca. 210 · The human soul cannot pass into animals, whose natures, sizes, and ways of life are contrary to it; Scripture likens men to beasts only in character, not substance.
On the Soul 33Tertullian · ca. 210 · Transmigration as reward and punishment would make divine judgment weaker than human courts; God will judge once and finally, with souls returning to their own bodies.
On the Soul 35Tertullian · ca. 210 · Carpocrates used transmigration to excuse every sin, twisting Christ's parable of the adversary; nor does John the Baptist's being “Elijah” mean reincarnation, since he came only in Elijah's spirit and power.
On the Soul 36Tertullian · ca. 210 · Soul and body receive their sex together at conception, as the pattern of Adam and Eve shows, Eve's soul too having come from Adam.
On the Soul 37Tertullian · ca. 210 · The fetus is a human being once formed, as the law of Moses on abortion shows; after birth the soul grows with the body not in substance but in its powers, as gold is beaten out.
On the Soul 38Tertullian · ca. 210 · The soul's maturity comes with bodily puberty, as sexual shame came with Adam and Eve's knowledge; the soul desires food only for its house, the flesh, and does not die when the body fails.
On the Soul 43Tertullian · ca. 210 · Sleep is natural, a rest for the body but not the soul; God made it an image of death and of resurrection, as Adam's sleep prefigured Christ's death and the church born from his side.
On the Soul 44Tertullian · ca. 210 · The story that Hermotimus' soul left his body in sleep is better explained as a heavy sleep or disorder; the soul does not wander from the body without death.
On the Soul 45Tertullian · ca. 210 · In dreams the soul, restless while the body sleeps, is in a natural “ecstasy” like Adam's; dream deeds carry neither guilt nor merit.
On the Soul 51Tertullian · ca. 210 · Death separates the whole soul from the body at once; reports of corpses that seem to move are signs from God, not proof that part of the soul remains.
On the Soul 53Tertullian · ca. 210 · In a slow death the soul only seems to decline because its bodily instruments fail; at the moment of release it sees clearly and perceives, from the angel who summons it, what awaits it.
On the Soul 54Tertullian · ca. 210 · The philosophers send only the souls of the wise upward and the rest to an underworld; their schemes are inconsistent.
On the Soul 56Tertullian · ca. 210 · Neither the unburied nor those who die young or violently linger on earth; every soul goes at once to the underworld and remains at the age it died until the resurrection.
On the Soul 58Tertullian · ca. 210 · All souls wait in the underworld, where they already taste punishment or comfort before the final judgment and the resurrection of the flesh.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 3Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · Common human notions may support the truth, but heretics who borrow the pagans' denial of life after death should be made to argue from Scripture alone.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 7Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · The clay became flesh when God breathed into it, and the soul is so joined to the flesh that it does everything through it; the flesh is therefore the soul's partner and co-heir.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 16Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · The flesh is not a mere tool like a cup or a sword but the soul's partner from the womb, which Paul calls both a vessel and the outer man; it therefore shares in judgment and reward.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 17Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · Though the soul is itself corporeal and already suffers or is comforted in the underworld, it must be judged with the flesh, through which it performed its deeds.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 53Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · The “animal body” that is sown and raised a “spiritual body” is the flesh, not the soul, as the examples of Lazarus and of the first and last Adam show.
On the Resurrection of the Flesh 56Tertullian · ca. 208–212 · It would be unjust for one flesh to suffer or sin and another to be rewarded or punished, and the risen person must remember being the one who is judged.
On First Principles 1.1.7Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Against those who think the mind a body, Origen points to its grasp of incorporeal things and to the superiority of the mind's sense over the bodily senses.
On First Principles 1.7.4Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Origen suspects that the souls of the stars were implanted from outside after their bodies were made, as human souls seem to exist before their bodies (Jacob, John the Baptist, Jeremiah), lest God seem unjust.
On First Principles 1.8.4Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Every rank of rational beings, good or evil, is held by merit; the second order has given itself to wickedness, the third is human souls, some of whom rise to the angels; transmigration into animals is rejected.
On First Principles 2.3.2Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · To learn whether matter exists only at intervals, Origen asks whether anyone can live without a body, and explains how “this corruptible will put on incorruption” when the soul, clothed with Christ, clothes the body.
On First Principles 2.6.3Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · The soul of Jesus, clinging to the Word from the beginning with perfect love, became one spirit with him and mediated between God and the flesh; hence divine and human names are exchanged in Scripture.
On First Principles 2.6.5Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Christ's human soul had the same nature as all souls, but by its immense love for righteousness it became unchangeable, so that it had no possibility of sin.
On First Principles 2.8.1Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · All living things, including water creatures, have souls, defined as substances capable of perception and movement; Scripture speaks of the soul of God and of Christ, but never calls angels souls.
On First Principles 2.8.2Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Christ had a true soul; the definition of soul may apply to the angels, and Paul joins the Spirit to the mind rather than to the soul.
On First Principles 2.8.3Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Origen asks, as an inquiry, whether the soul (psyche) is so called from having grown cold, a mind fallen from the fervour of the divine fire that can return to being mind.
On First Principles 2.8.4Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Minds fell into souls in different degrees, explaining differences of ability; Origen offers this as inquiry, not dogma, and notes that the Gospel ascribes Christ's distress to his soul and his offering to his spirit.
On First Principles 2.8.5Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · The “soul of God” is to be understood figuratively, perhaps as the only-begotten Son; Origen leaves these views on the soul for readers to discuss.
On First Principles 3.3.5Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Why some are moved by good spirits and others possessed from birth: Origen suggests causes earlier than bodily birth, since the soul always has free choice and is never without motion.
On First Principles 3.4.1Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Origen turns to temptations from flesh and blood and sets out three views of the soul: two souls in us, the influence of the body, or the Greek threefold soul, which Scripture does not support.
On First Principles 3.4.2Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · The view of two souls: a heavenly soul and a lower 'soul of the flesh' transmitted with the body, which is meant to explain Paul's war of flesh and spirit and a middle will between them.
On First Principles 3.4.4Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · The opposing view holds that there is one soul: inner conflict is ordinary deliberation, and 'flesh against spirit' means the body's needs and pleasures distracting us from divine things.
On First Principles 3.4.5Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Those who hold to one soul explain the 'works of the flesh' as a soul grown coarse, and argue that a hostile 'soul of the flesh' would make God the creator of an enemy, as the heretics' fixed natures do.
On First Principles 3.5.4Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Scripture's word καταβολή for the founding of the world suggests a “casting down” of rational beings from the invisible to the visible, some by merit and some, like the stars, for service.
On First Principles 4.3.10Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · As the dead go to the underworld or Abraham's bosom, so souls “die” from higher places into this world and are born according to merit; prophecies and histories about the nations refer to such souls.
On First Principles 4.4.4Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · The Son's undivided divinity took a human body and soul; that soul, joined to the Word in a spotless union, chose the good and could not sin, and is the example for believers to imitate.
On First Principles 4.4.9Origen · ca. 220–230 (Rufinus's translation 398) · Since rational beings share, in differing degrees, in the intellectual light of the eternal Trinity, the human soul is of one nature with the heavenly powers and is immortal, always keeping seeds of renewal.
Eclogae on Exodus-Judges, column 399Origen · ca. 220-254 · Notes on Leviticus 10–13: priests must be cleansed first; clean animals read of the pious life; uncleanness trains the soul; leprosy and scars as wounds of sin that must not be hidden.
Fragments on the Song of Songs, chapter 1Origen · ca. 220-254 · Short comments on Song of Songs 1:2–16 read the bride as the soul or the church from the Gentiles and the bridegroom as Christ the Word.
Fragments on the Song of Songs, chapter 2Origen · ca. 220-254 · Comments on Song of Songs 2:1–17 read the flower, the shade, the call to arise, the little foxes, and the gazelle as figures of Christ's coming and the soul's ascent from the senses.
PG 12:1123 (Ps 3 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · On Ps 3:4 Origen asks why the prayer is reported after the thanksgiving, and explains the saints’ “cry” as the intense, intelligible voice of the soul, uttered by the Spirit and by the Savior himself.
PG 12:1127 (Ps 3 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · Sleep also means the soul’s inattention; applied to Christ, “I lay down” is his death and “I slept” the separation of his soul from the body, during which his soul was active for the salvation of souls, as 1 Peter 3:19 shows.
PG 12:1479 (Ps 60–61 LXX)Origen · ca. 220-254 · End of Ps 60 LXX (61) (paying vows daily, singing for ever) and beginning of Ps 61 LXX (62): the psalm of the coming Judge; the soul of the Saviour subject to God and shaken only a little.
Refutation of All Heresies 1.2.11Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Pythagoras taught the immortality and transmigration of the soul and listed his own former lives.
Refutation of All Heresies 1.3.2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Empedocles taught that souls pass into all kinds of creatures, as he claimed of himself.
Refutation of All Heresies 1.16.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Hippo made water and fire the principles and identified the soul with the brain or with water.
Refutation of All Heresies 1.19.10Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Interpreters disagree whether Plato's soul is unbegotten, or generated but immortal, or perishable.
Refutation of All Heresies 1.19.12Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Some say Plato taught that souls return in new bodies according to their deserts.
Refutation of All Heresies 1.19.13Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Others say Plato taught that souls receive places by desert, some with the gods and some in eternal punishment.
Refutation of All Heresies 1.20.4Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Aristotle held that the soul survives only for a time and then vanishes into the fifth element.
Refutation of All Heresies 1.21.3Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The Stoics held the soul to be a body formed by cooling air, surviving death.
Refutation of All Heresies 5.7.8Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The Naassenes seek the soul's nature in the mysteries, not in Scripture.
Refutation of All Heresies 5.7.10Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · They teach that all nature, even stone, desires soul, the cause of growth.
Refutation of All Heresies 5.7.11Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · In Assyrian myth, Aphrodite (generation) loves Adonis (the soul).
Refutation of All Heresies 5.7.12Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Persephone's and Selene's loves are read as allegories of the soul.
Refutation of All Heresies 5.7.13Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The castration of Attis by the Mother of the gods is read as the soul's recall to the eternal realm.
Refutation of All Heresies 6.25.4Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Pythagoras taught that souls come from the stars, are entombed in the body, and become immortal when released.
Refutation of All Heresies 6.26.1Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Plato, a disciple of Pythagoras, called philosophy the separation of soul from body; Pythagorean riddles call the passions Furies.
Refutation of All Heresies 6.26.2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The riddle warns the soul leaving the body not to cling to it, reflecting belief in transmigration.
Refutation of All Heresies 6.26.3Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Souls that do not practice philosophy pass through animals and plants; those that do return to their star.
Refutation of All Heresies 6.32.8Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The Demiurge is the “consuming fire” of Deuteronomy; the soul is a middle realm, the Hebdomad.
Refutation of All Heresies 6.32.9Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The soul, between the Ogdoad and matter, becomes immortal if it is made like what is above, and perishes if it is made like matter.
Refutation of All Heresies 6.34.4Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Sophia and her bridegroom emitted heavenly “words”; the Demiurge, called Abraham, emitted souls and made bodies for them from matter.
Refutation of All Heresies 6.34.6Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The body is an inn housing the soul alone, or the soul with demons, or the soul with heavenly words.
Refutation of All Heresies 7.19.5Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Aristotle's doctrine of the soul is unclear: his definition is easy to state but hard to understand.
Refutation of All Heresies 7.19.6Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Aristotle defines the soul as the actuality of an organic body, and God, cause of all good things, is harder still to know.
Refutation of All Heresies 7.29.16Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Empedocles says souls, immortal “spirits,” are condemned for sin to exile by Strife.
Refutation of All Heresies 7.29.18Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · Hippolytus explains this as the transmigration of souls from body to body as punishment.
Refutation of All Heresies 8.10.2Hippolytus of Rome · ca. 222–235 · The Docetae cite Job and Jesus' words about Elijah for transmigration, which they say ended with the Savior.
Commentary on John 2.180Origen · ca. 230–248 · John was filled with the Spirit from the womb and leapt for joy, which suggests his soul existed before his body.
Commentary on John 2.181Origen · ca. 230–248 · Since God acts justly, John's soul must have existed before his body; Jesus also called him Elijah.
Commentary on John 2.192Origen · ca. 230–248 · Only deeds before this life explain God's justice toward Esau; so John may well have been an angel who took a body.
Commentary on John 6.64Origen · ca. 230–248 · Believers in transmigration say John did not remember being Elijah, and that some thought Jesus was an old prophet reborn.
Commentary on John 6.65Origen · ca. 230–248 · They argue that people who knew Jesus' parents must have thought of rebirth, and they cite Genesis for their view.
Commentary on John 6.66Origen · ca. 230–248 · A churchman answers that John had Elijah's spirit and power, not his soul.
Commentary on John 6.72Origen · ca. 230–248 · The transmigrationist replies that John's famous birth must have been known in Jerusalem.
Commentary on John 6.73Origen · ca. 230–248 · So, he argues, the priests believed in transmigration, and John denied being Elijah because he did not remember it.
Commentary on John 6.85Origen · ca. 230–248 · Origen lists questions about the soul's origin, embodiment, and possible re-embodiment that need separate treatment.
Commentary on John 6.86Origen · ca. 230–248 · Transmigration, embodiment, and the view that soul and body begin together all need examination.
Commentary on John 6.87Origen · ca. 230–248 · The doctrine of the soul needs its own treatise; the next lemma is John 1:21.
Commentary on John 6.217Origen · ca. 230–248 · Jordan means “descent,” like the name Jared, in whose days, according to Enoch, the sons of God came down; some take this as souls descending into bodies.
Commentary on John 10.132Origen · ca. 230–248 · Jerusalem is the soul gifted for spiritual insight; even such a soul can sin and, unless it repents, become a citizen of foreign cities.
Commentary on John 10.141Origen · ca. 230–248 · The soul is a temple; Jesus drives out its earthly and foolish impulses with the whip of reasoned teaching so that it may truly serve God.
Commentary on John 13.417Origen · ca. 230–248 · Heracleon took “he was about to die” to disprove the soul's immortality, citing the destruction of soul and body in Gehenna.
Commentary on John 13.418Origen · ca. 230–248 · Heracleon holds the soul is not immortal by nature but can put on immortality.
Commentary on John 13.427Origen · ca. 230–248 · Origen calls Heracleon's views bold and impious, and says he denies the soul's immortality by ignoring the many senses of “death.”
Commentary on John 13.429Origen · ca. 230–248 · The soul is mortal in that it can die by sin, but not in the sense of annihilation; putting on incorruption is not the same as changing into it.
Commentary on John 20.5Origen · ca. 230–248 · Abraham's spiritual seed consists of seminal principles sown in certain souls; not all souls come into life with the same seeds.
Commentary on John 20.6Origen · ca. 230–248 · The cause of these differences lies in hidden divine judgments about souls before birth, which are dangerous to discuss openly.
Commentary on John 20.52Origen · ca. 230–248 · Another view: some souls heard the Father before birth; these are Abraham's seed, now called to act on it.
Commentary on John 20.162Origen · ca. 230–248 · Jesus' soul came forth from God because the Father sent it; other souls came without being sent.
Commentary on John 28.44Origen · ca. 230–248 · Lazarus' soul was not waiting beside his corpse; it was sent back from elsewhere.
Commentary on John 32.218Origen · ca. 230–248 · Origen distinguishes soul, which can turn to good or evil, from the human spirit, which cannot receive evil.
Homily on Luke 36Origen · ca. 233–250 · Martyrs lose their soul in order to save it, and the soul joined to the Lord becomes spiritual; the kingdom of God is within those whom God rules, while others are ruled by sin and passion.
Exhortation to Martyrdom 12Origen · 235 · At baptism we agreed to the gospel's terms: to deny ourselves, take up the cross, and lose our life for Christ; only Christ's blood could ransom a lost soul.
Exhortation to Martyrdom 37Origen · 235 · Christ's sword and fire divide the heavenly from the earthly in us; Ambrose must “hate” wife, children, and his own life, in the Gospel's sense, so as to gain them for eternity.
Address of Thanksgiving 9Gregory Thaumaturgus · ca. 238–245 · Origen taught the moral virtues, prudence, temperance, justice, and courage, by self-examination and by his own example, not by mere definitions.
On the Witch of Endor 2Origen · ca. 240 · Unlike some Old Testament stories, the account of Samuel and the medium concerns everyone, since it raises the question whether after death even a prophet's soul could fall under a demon's power.
Homilies on Exodus 1.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The seventy-five “souls” who went down with Jacob point to the begetting of souls, which only those like Paul can do, and Adam's silence about the soul shows that the soul is not of the earth.
Homilies on Ezekiel 1.16Origen · ca. 238–250 (Jerome's translation in the 380s) · The four faces may signify the soul’s three parts (reason, anger, desire) with the spirit above them, and the wheel within a wheel the providence that turns all things.
Homilies on Ezekiel 7.6Origen · ca. 238–250 (Jerome's translation in the 380s) · The soul, made in God’s image and very beautiful, is courted by corrupt lovers; Jerusalem’s brothel is the soul that gives itself to them.
Homilies on Joshua 22.4Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Joseph’s sons are told to clear the Perizzites, evil “fruitfulness,” and the Rephaim, the “loosened mother,” the soul’s slack power that bears feeble thoughts, which must be purified, not destroyed.
Homilies on Leviticus 2.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The 'man' who offers animals is the rational person made in God's image; the 'soul' offering only flour is Paul's natural man; the first fruits point to Pentecost; it is the soul, not the spirit, that sins.
Homilies on Leviticus 9.11Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · 'There shall be no man' in the tabernacle means that those who follow Christ into heaven become like angels; the soul is mortal or immortal according to whether it shares in death or in life.
Homilies on Numbers 2.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · As each person has his own face and handwriting, each soul has its own signs, and believers can advance from lower to brighter signs toward the glory of the resurrection.
Homilies on Numbers 12.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The many wells and one spring of Proverbs signify the three persons and one substance of the Trinity; the soul's wells must be dug clear of earth, and the law gathers us to the well that is Christ.
Homilies on Numbers 20.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Worse than bodily immorality is the “general” immorality of the soul that abandons its marriage to the Word for the embraces of demons; the soul always bears children, virtues or sins, and sinful desires must be dashed against the rock of Christ while still small.
Homilies on Numbers 27.2Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The list of stations, written by the word of the Lord, must profit us; it signifies both the soul’s progress from paganism to the knowledge of God and its passage through the “many dwellings” after death, Christ being the door to each.
Homilies on Numbers 27.4Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · After death the soul journeys through the dwellings prepared with the Father toward its homeland, paradise; the stations of the exodus, with their pursuits, songs, wars, and temptations, describe in mystery this ascent, which only those whose portion is the Lord complete.
Homilies on Numbers 27.6Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The list of stations is given twice to show the soul’s two ways, its advance in virtue in this life and its illumination through the dwellings after the resurrection; the “hand” of Moses and Aaron signifies the knowledge of the law joined with the works that please God.
Homilies on Psalms 36-38 1.3Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · “Hope in the Lord and do goodness” and “dwell in the land” mean cultivating the land of one’s own soul; “delight in the Lord” means enjoying the delicacies of understanding Scripture, and the Lord gives the heart what it naturally asks, understanding.
Homilies on Psalms 36-38 9.8Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · Sin makes the soul coarse and fleshly, virtue makes it fine; God’s rebukes thin it “like a spider,” and those who will not be amended by the rod of correction in this life will be refined in the fire, like the flesh in Ezekiel’s cauldron.
Homilies on Psalms 36-38 9.12Origen · ca. 238–250 (Rufinus's translation ca. 400–410) · The soul truly “is” only while it clings to God, who truly is; departing from him, it becomes as one who is not, though its substance is not destroyed.
Homilies on Jeremiah 5.6Origen · ca. 240 · The “sheep” of the fathers are the soul's irrational impulses; Christ the good shepherd must dwell in the soul and shepherd them.
Homilies on Jeremiah 8.1Origen · ca. 240 · God made the earth by strength, the world by wisdom, the heaven by understanding; the soul is an inhabited world when Father, Son, and Spirit dwell in it, and the fallen world is set upright by God's wisdom in Christ.
Homilies on Jeremiah 16.1Origen · ca. 240 · The “fishermen” of Jeremiah are the apostles and teachers who draw souls out of the sea of this world by the net of Scripture; the converted soul, transformed, lives on the mountains, where God's “hunters” will later take it.
To Philagrius on the Consubstantiality, section 3Gregory Thaumaturgus · if authentic, ca. 240-275 · The three names do not divide God's one essence: as the soul and the word it begets remain one, so the Son is never separated from the Father.
To Tatian on the Soul 1Gregory Thaumaturgus · 3rd–5th century (disputed) · The author lists the questions to be treated (whether the soul is corporeal, simple, immortal, a substance, rational), promises to argue from common notions, and begins: the soul, known only by thought, is known from its operations.
To Tatian on the Soul 2Gregory Thaumaturgus · 3rd–5th century (disputed) · The body moves neither by outside force nor by nature like fire, since a dead body does not move; so it is moved by a soul, which gives it life.
To Tatian on the Soul 3Gregory Thaumaturgus · 3rd–5th century (disputed) · The soul is a substance, because it receives contraries such as justice and injustice while remaining itself, and because what gives life to a substance cannot itself lack substance.
To Tatian on the Soul 4Gregory Thaumaturgus · 3rd–5th century (disputed) · The soul is incorporeal: it adds no bulk to the body, is not moved from without or within as bodies are, is nourished by reason, and has no color, size, or shape.
To Tatian on the Soul 5Gregory Thaumaturgus · 3rd–5th century (disputed) · Being incorporeal, the soul is simple, uncompounded and without parts.
To Tatian on the Soul 6Gregory Thaumaturgus · 3rd–5th century (disputed) · The soul is immortal: nothing that exists destroys itself; being simple it cannot be dissolved; being self-moved it never ceases; and its own evils, the vices, do not take away its life.
To Tatian on the Soul 7Gregory Thaumaturgus · 3rd–5th century (disputed) · The soul is rational, as shown by its invention of useful arts, by the mind's correcting the senses to grasp things as they are, and by its planning everything inwardly before acting.
On the Trinity 25Novatian · ca. 240–250 · To the objection that if Christ is God then God died, Novatian answers that only the man in Christ died: as death cannot kill even the soul, much less can it touch the divinity of the Word.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 0.65Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · Scripture speaks of the soul's ages and of its members (eyes, ears, hands, feet, belly, throat, tongue, teeth, arm) with the names of the body's.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 2.146Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · The deeper self-knowledge belongs to the gift of knowledge, whose first object is the Trinity and second the creation; the soul should ask about its own substance and origin, whether transmitted with the body or coming from outside.
Commentary on the Song of Songs 2.147Origen · ca. 240–245 (Rufinus's translation ca. 410) · The soul should ask whether it was created with the body or before it, whether it takes a body more than once (which the end of the world excludes in this life), and whether it shares the angels' substance or may become like them by grace.
Against Celsus 2.60Origen · ca. 248 · Origen replies to Celsus's claim that the resurrection appearances were waking dreams: even appearances of the dead imply that the soul survives, and nothing in the Gospel suggests the witnesses were deranged.
Against Celsus 3.22Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus contrasts the deified Greek heroes with the risen Jesus; Origen asks whether Celsus thinks those heroes exist at all, and argues from their own stories that they could not have become gods.
Against Celsus 3.80Origen · ca. 248 · If Christian hope of blessed life is empty, so are the hopes of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle about the soul; only an Epicurean, who expects the soul to perish, could say so, and his own hope rests on pleasure of the flesh.
Against Celsus 4.18Origen · ca. 248 · The Word does not deceive but adapts himself to each person as milk, vegetables, or solid food; and the soul of Jesus freely entered human misfortunes out of love, as Philippians 2 describes.
Against Celsus 4.56Origen · ca. 248 · If all bodies are the same because they share one matter, then human bodies are no different from the sun and stars, which the Greeks call gods; unless Celsus adopts Aristotle's fifth element, which Platonists and Stoics reject and which Scripture's perishing heavens contradict.
Against Celsus 4.58Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus does not say whether every soul or only the rational soul is God's work; either way, since each body corresponds to its soul, a human body must differ from that of a bat or frog.
Against Celsus 4.59Origen · ca. 248 · Just as buildings differ according to their use, so bodies differ according to the souls that dwell in them; no wise person would bury Socrates and his accuser Anytus with equal honor.
Against Celsus 4.83Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus's praise of ants that share burdens would undermine human compassion and imply that human and animal souls are alike, but Christians hold that the human soul is made in God's image.
Against Celsus 6.47Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus says Christians took the idea of a Son of God from pagan talk of the world as God's child, but Origen replies that the prophets spoke of the Son long before, and that Jesus' soul is so united with the Word that they are not two.
Against Celsus 6.63Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus denies man is God's image, but Origen explains that Christ alone is God's image, and man is made “according to” that image in the inner self, renewed by becoming holy and like God.
Against Celsus 7.32Origen · ca. 248 · The resurrection is not a borrowing from reincarnation: the incorporeal soul receives a body suited to each place, and at the resurrection the mortal “puts on” incorruption and immortality like a garment.
Against Celsus 7.39Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus insults martyrs as cowards and body-lovers, and thinks the idea of the soul's eye is Greek; Origen shows it already in Genesis and in Jesus' words about the blind seeing and the seeing becoming blind.
Against Celsus 7.50Origen · ca. 248 · Scripture teaches more clearly than Celsus that becoming involves error: newborns need a sin offering, creation is subject to vanity, and the soul's life here is lowly compared with life with the Lord.
Against Celsus 8.49Origen · ca. 248 · Celsus mocks Christians for both longing for the body's resurrection and consigning bodies to punishment, but agrees that the righteous will be happy and the wicked punished for ever; Origen answers that Christians value the rational soul above the body, and God is not a body as the Stoics say.
Commentary on Matthew, Latin Series 56Origen · ca. 244–249 (Latin translation, 4th–5th century) · The end will come suddenly, in a time of peace, like the flood and the fire of Sodom; what matters is each one's own end, for which one must always watch; of the two in the field, the good is taken and the bad left, though the spirit returns to God.
Commentary on Matthew 10.20Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen asks how Herod could think Jesus was John risen from the dead, rejects transmigration, and suggests Herod thought John's powers had passed to Jesus as Elijah's spirit had passed to John.
Commentary on Matthew 11.17Origen · ca. 246–248 · The different petitioners and titles for Jesus signify different kinds of souls; the Canaanite woman, at first answered as a little dog, wins the children’s bread by great faith, and Origen rejects the transmigration of souls into animals while allowing that a soul may sink or rise in rationality.
Commentary on Matthew 13.1Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen explains the disciples' question about Elijah and argues at length that “Elijah” in John cannot mean a transmigrated soul, since transmigration contradicts the Scriptures on the end of the world.
Commentary on Matthew 13.2Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen argues that John was “Elijah” not by the same soul but by Elijah's spirit and power, distinguishes spirit from soul, and asks who “did to him whatever they wished.”
Commentary on Matthew 15.34Origen · ca. 246–248 · The hours correspond to the works needed in each age, the new covenant being the last; the denarius is salvation; and the idleness of the eleventh-hour workers hints at a secret doctrine about the soul.
Commentary on Matthew 15.35Origen · ca. 246–248 · Origen suggests that the place outside the vineyard is the state of souls before the body, that the vineyard extends beyond this life, that the eleventh-hour workers are Christ’s own, and that the vineyard is the kingdom of God.
Commentary on Matthew 17.8Origen · ca. 246–248 · The ripening of the vine through its seasons pictures the soul’s growth from infancy through imperfect stages to the mature fruit of virtue and the beatitudes.
Commentary on Matthew 17.29Origen · ca. 246–248 · The Sadducees, like the Samaritans and some Corinthians, denied not only the resurrection of the flesh but any survival of the soul; Origen argues that Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15 are aimed at that denial.
Symposium 2.7Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd century · God alone gives the immortal soul; childbearing is good and virginity better, and the church, like a meadow, is adorned with both; Thalia rises to speak next.
Symposium 6.1Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd century · Agathe, the sixth speaker, says that every soul is created beautiful, in the image of the Only-begotten, and that the devil and his angels seek to defile it.
Cib. 13Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The dead man in the house means the soul dead in sin, whose ways defile those who enter; dead bodies themselves are not unclean, since God will raise them.
Res. 1.4Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · Aglaophon, stating the case against bodily resurrection, argues that the 'garments of skins' given after the fall are our bodies, a fetter and tomb of the soul that clouds its knowledge.
Res. 1.17Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · Proclus argues that a soul cannot justly be rewarded or punished in a different body, so the risen body must be spiritual, and introduces Origen's teaching as the strongest statement of this view.
Res. 1.29Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The narrator shows that Aglaophon contradicted himself: if the soul sinned before receiving the 'garments of skins', the body cannot be the cause of sin, and Aglaophon concedes.
Res. 1.31Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · By a Socratic exchange the narrator shows that a fetter prevents wrongdoing, whereas the body serves the soul for good or evil, so the body is not a punitive fetter; Scripture's appeal to free choice confirms it.
Res. 1.52Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · Christ taught the soul's immortality in the story of the rich man and Lazarus and at the transfiguration, as does Wisdom 3; therefore 'resurrection' must refer to the body, which falls, not to the soul.
Res. 1.54Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The narrator rejects the reading of Psalm 66 as souls falling from heaven into bodies, argues from Paul's two raptures that paradise is on earth, and reads the psalm as the thanksgiving of the martyrs tested by fire.
Res. 1.57Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The narrator refutes the claim that Paul's 'I was once alive apart from the law' refers to souls living without bodies, and shows that Paul's 'flesh' in Romans 7-8 means a fleshly way of life, not the body.
Res. 2.14Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · If constant change destroyed the identity of the body, it would destroy that of the soul too; and the opponents, who give the soul another spiritual body, make God unjust by their own standard.
Res. 2.15Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · Methodius interprets 2 Corinthians 5:1-7: the 'earthly house' is our short life in the body, not the body itself, and what we long to put on is immortality.
Res. 3.2Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · The narrator states Origen's view that only the bodily form, not the flesh, rises in a spiritual body, and quotes Origen's own words again.
Res. 3.17Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · Origen's argument from the rich man and Lazarus and from Samuel's appearance that the soul after death has a body-like shape.
Res. 3.18Methodius of Olympus · late 3rd cent. (disputed) · Origen's claim that the soul after death has a body-shaped vehicle contradicts itself: souls are themselves rational bodies shaped in members, so the body that belongs to them must take the same form.
Against the Nations 2.14Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Arnobius holds that souls are of a middle nature, neither immortal nor mortal by themselves: those who do not know God are finally destroyed in fire, while those who turn to God's mercy are saved.
Against the Nations 2.15Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Arnobius ironically draws out the claim of 'new men' that souls are divine and immortal: if so, all people would be perfect and in agreement.
Against the Nations 2.16Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Arnobius rejects the claim that divine souls are corrupted by descending into bodies, and argues that humans are closely akin to other animals.
Against the Nations 2.18Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · The arts were discovered gradually on earth out of need, which shows that souls do not bring divine knowledge with them.
Against the Nations 2.19Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Human arts are useful inventions, not proof of divinity, and people's unequal learning and conflicting opinions refute the Platonic doctrine that learning is recollection.
Against the Nations 2.22Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Such a person, brought out at forty, would know nothing of himself or the world, which disproves the claim that souls come with divine knowledge.
Against the Nations 2.24Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Plato's slave-boy in the Meno answered because he had learned numbers by use; Arnobius's isolated man could not answer even the simplest sum.
Against the Nations 2.25Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · The supposedly divine soul, left untaught, is duller than a beast, and learning by training is something animals share.
Against the Nations 2.26Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · If souls forget their knowledge on entering bodies, they are not incorporeal, and if they can suffer such change they are not naturally immortal.
Against the Nations 2.27Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · A soul that forgets must undergo change and suffering, and whatever suffers is not immortal but holds life only on loan.
Against the Nations 2.28Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · If the body made souls forget their former life, they would not remember decades of bodily life either, nor could Platonists know their own doctrine about the soul's descent.
Against the Nations 2.30Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · If souls are immortal and incorruptible, punishments cannot touch them and virtue is pointless; if they simply perish, as Epicurus held, virtue is equally without reward.
Against the Nations 2.31Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · The middle, uncertain nature of souls explains both the value of philosophy and the philosophers' disagreement about whether the soul is mortal or immortal.
Against the Nations 2.32Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Since souls can gain lasting life only by knowing God, Christians reasonably entrust themselves to their Deliverer, as people take precautions against lesser dangers.
Against the Nations 2.33Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Unlike philosophers who trust in their own divinity to rise to the stars, Christians trust God alone for life beyond death.
Against the Nations 2.35Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · God can make souls immortal, and even the gods, having been produced by the one unbegotten Father, are of a middle nature.
Against the Nations 2.36Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Plato himself taught that the gods are immortal only by God's will; so God can make souls immortal, and Arnobius adds that souls were not begotten by the supreme God but by a lesser being of his court.
Against the Nations 2.37Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · If souls were God's own offspring they would never have left heaven for bodies, and humans add nothing to the world's completeness.
Against the Nations 2.39Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Arnobius ridicules the idea that God sent his own divine offspring into bodies to be born in filth, learn deceit, make war, worship idols, and fall into confusion.
Against the Nations 2.45Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · It is monstrous to believe that the almighty God begot such fickle souls and sent them into bodies to suffer and do all these evils.
Against the Nations 2.47Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Christians need not know who made souls in order to deny that the supreme God made them, just as one can deny God made vermin without knowing their maker.
Against the Nations 2.48Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · The vices of human souls show they cannot be the offspring of the perfect supreme God.
Against the Nations 2.50Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · The philosophers' very struggle against their passions shows that souls are weak and prone to evil, not naturally good.
Against the Nations 2.51Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Arnobius defends his admission of ignorance about the soul's origin: the Platonists' claim that souls descend from God is itself only conjecture.
Against the Nations 2.52Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Human souls, like those of animals, may come from some unknown lower cause; even Plato assigned the making of man to lesser gods, not to the supreme God.
Against the Nations 2.53Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Arnobius restates that human souls are naturally mortal but can receive everlasting life from God if they hope in him.
Against the Nations 2.57Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Philosophers argue equally persuasively for opposite views of the soul, which shows that such questions cannot be settled by human reason.
Against the Nations 2.61Arnobius of Sicca · ca. 297–303 · Christ bids his hearers leave speculative questions to God and attend to the salvation of their souls, which without knowledge of God face a slow and painful destruction.
Church History 6.37.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · In Arabia some taught that the soul dies with the body until the resurrection; Origen persuaded them otherwise at a synod.
Church History 10.4.56Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · The Son created the soul in his own image, rational and incorruptible, to be his bride and the temple of the Father and himself.
Church History 10.4.57Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 300–325 · Through the devil's envy and its own free choice the soul fell into sin, lost God's protection, and lay spiritually dead, without knowledge of God.
Acts of Archelaus 7Hegemonius · early to mid 4th century · Turbo’s summary of Mani’s myth: two gods, the First Man, the creation of the world, the docetic Christ, and the ferrying of souls by sun and moon.
Acts of Archelaus 10Hegemonius · early to mid 4th century · Mani’s teaching on transmigration, the elect and catechumens, and the ban on work.
Acta Archelai (Latin) 21Hegemonius · early to mid 4th century (Greek original) · Archelaus argues from the parables of the new wine and the new patch that soul and body are made by one God and work in harmony.
Acta Archelai (Latin) 22Hegemonius · early to mid 4th century (Greek original) · Archelaus compares body and soul to a temple and its statue and to a ship and its rudder, to show that both have one maker.
Acta Archelai (Latin) 24Hegemonius · early to mid 4th century (Greek original) · Archelaus argues from Jesus' woe on the Pharisees that the maker of the outside also made the inside, and that God confined to a fixed place would be less than human rulers.
Acta Archelai (Latin) 28Hegemonius · early to mid 4th century (Greek original) · Manes tells a parable of a shepherd who traps a lion with a kid thrown into a pit; Archelaus argues that this makes God betray a soul and use tricks out of weakness.
Fragment 6Peter of Alexandria · ca. 300–311 · From the work That the soul does not pre-exist the body: man, outer and inner, was made at once on the day God said, “Let us make man,” not by joining a body to a pre-existing soul.
Homilies 2.13Anonymous · 4th century (reworking earlier material) · Peter argues that God's justice requires the immortality of the soul and a judgment after death.
Homilies 2.29Anonymous · 4th century (reworking earlier material) · Simon mocks belief in the soul's immortality, and Nicetes retorts that Simon's own necromancy proves it.
Homilies 2.31Anonymous · 4th century (reworking earlier material) · Aquila argues from Simon's own practice that souls are immortal and that a judgment is coming; Simon threatens them with death.
Homilies 16.10Anonymous · 4th century (reworking earlier material) · Peter says the Scriptures test each reader's intent, and argues that the God in whose image and shape man was made is the only God.
Recognitions 1.3Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · The endless disputes of the philosophical schools left Clement without any certainty about the soul.
Recognitions 2.13Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Aquila tells how Simon claimed to work his magic through the soul of a murdered boy, and how Niceta challenged him with the coming judgment.
Recognitions 2.16Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Peter laments that Simon, though convinced by his own sorcery that souls are immortal and judged, still defies God's judgment.
Recognitions 2.57Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Simon claims that souls come from the good God and were taken captive by the creator; Peter shows that this contradicts Simon's earlier claims.
Recognitions 3.4Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · In the bracketed passage, Peter rejects calling God self-made and argues from Jesus' words that the soul is immortal and unaffected by bodily change.
Recognitions 3.5Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · In the bracketed passage, Peter argues from Jesus' teaching on adultery and desire that the commandment is addressed to the free, immortal soul rather than to the body.
Recognitions 3.39Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Simon demands proof of the soul's immortality, and Peter proposes first to establish that God is just.
Recognitions 3.40Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Peter argues that the prosperity of the wicked and the suffering of the righteous in this life require the soul's immortality if God is just.
Recognitions 3.41Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Peter argues that the injustice of this life proves a coming judgment; Simon accuses him of evading the question of the soul's immortality.
Recognitions 3.42Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Peter denounces Simon as armed with the serpent's cunning and describes the moral chaos that denying the soul's immortality would bring.
Recognitions 8.28Anonymous · Greek original 3rd–4th century; Rufinus's Latin translation before 407 · Man, a little world, joins mortal body and immortal soul without impairing immortality; the soul has affections rather than separate parts, and the body grows from seed in the womb.
Divine Institutes 2.12.3Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Man, of soul from God and body from earth, mirrors heaven and earth.
Divine Institutes 2.12.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Soul and body contend in man; if the soul wins he gains eternal light, if the body, eternal death.
Divine Institutes 2.12.10Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · In man the soul belongs to God and should rule; the body, earthly, belongs to the devil's side and should serve.
Divine Institutes 2.12.11Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The body is a temporary vessel; the heavenly soul should rule it.
Divine Institutes 2.12.14Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The soul, like fire, must rise toward heaven and is kept alive by justice alone.
Divine Institutes 3.12.25Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Those who held the soul immortal should have seen that virtue leads souls back to God.
Divine Institutes 3.12.27Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Religion shows the human spirit is immortal, since it longs for the immortal God.
Divine Institutes 3.13.1Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Having shown immortality is the highest good, he turns to the soul's immortality.
Divine Institutes 3.13.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Philosophers who held the soul immortal could not prove it.
Divine Institutes 3.17.33Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · If pain is the greatest evil, the approach to death must be feared; besides, souls do not perish.
Divine Institutes 3.18.1Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Pythagoreans and Stoics rightly held the soul survives, but by chance and with errors.
Divine Institutes 3.18.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · To escape the argument for mortality, they taught pre-existence and transmigration.
Divine Institutes 3.18.4Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The truth is that souls are born and do not perish.
Divine Institutes 3.19.19Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Transmigration of souls is both needless and impossible.
Divine Institutes 3.19.20Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Plato imagined a human soul trapped in an animal body.
Divine Institutes 5.18.10Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Virtue's goodness shows the soul is immortal.
Divine Institutes 7.5.9Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · God set souls in bodies between good and evil so they would earn immortality.
Divine Institutes 7.7.12Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Pherecydes and Plato taught the soul's immortality.
Divine Institutes 7.8.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Plato's arguments for immortality are incomplete.
Divine Institutes 7.8.4Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Plato's argument from self-motion.
Divine Institutes 7.8.6Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The subtle soul returns to heaven when freed from the body.
Divine Institutes 7.9.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · An unseen soul need not perish.
Divine Institutes 7.9.9Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · If gods live without bodies, so can souls.
Divine Institutes 7.9.10Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Religion, unique to man, shows the soul is eternal.
Divine Institutes 7.10.5Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Perpetual virtue implies a perpetual soul.
Divine Institutes 7.11.6Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The soul's lasting works show it is immortal.
Divine Institutes 7.11.8Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The soul can act without the body, so it survives.
Divine Institutes 7.12.1Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Lucretius: the soul, born with the body, dies with it.
Divine Institutes 7.12.2Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Body and soul differ in nature; the soul is from heaven.
Divine Institutes 7.12.5Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Lucretius unwittingly admitted the soul returns to heaven.
Divine Institutes 7.12.21Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · The soul is in the body, not part of it.
Divine Institutes 7.12.30Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Pythagoras taught transmigration.
Divine Institutes 7.13.7Lactantius · ca. 303–311 · Necromancy refutes the materialists.
On the Workmanship of God 4.14Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · Denying providence forced them to hold that souls die with bodies, and to look for supposed flaws in creation.
On the Workmanship of God 14.8Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · Where the passions arise cannot be known; the workings of mind and soul are beyond human insight.
On the Workmanship of God 16.1Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · The nature and seat of the mind are unknown, and philosophers disagree about them.
On the Workmanship of God 16.14Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · In this view the soul is the harmony produced by the body's well-joined parts.
On the Workmanship of God 16.16Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · The comparison fails: a lyre cannot play itself, but the soul thinks and moves of its own accord.
On the Workmanship of God 17.1Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · Though its nature is unknown, the soul is immortal, since what moves itself and is invisible must be eternal.
On the Workmanship of God 17.2Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · Philosophers call the soul blood, fire, or wind, but none of them has really explained it.
On the Workmanship of God 17.3Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · The soul is not blood, but is fed by blood as a lamp's light is fed by oil.
On the Workmanship of God 17.4Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · The soul is not fire, for it perceives, is invisible, and does not burn; it is something like God.
On the Workmanship of God 17.5Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · Varro defined the soul as air breathed in, warmed, tempered, and spread through the body.
On the Workmanship of God 17.7Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · The soul is given not at birth but at conception, since the unborn child already lives, grows, and moves in the womb.
On the Workmanship of God 17.9Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · Blood, heat, and breath all sustain life, but the soul itself can no more be described than seen.
On the Workmanship of God 18.1Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · Are the life-principle and the mind one thing or two? There are arguments on both sides.
On the Workmanship of God 18.3Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · Others argue they differ, since madness destroys the mind but not life, and sleep stills the mind while the soul lives on.
On the Workmanship of God 19.1Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · Is the soul inherited from father, mother, or both? Lactantius will settle it.
On the Workmanship of God 19.2Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · Souls do not come from the parents, since nothing can be split off from an incorporeal soul.
On the Workmanship of God 19.3Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · God alone creates souls; as Lucretius says, all are born of heavenly seed and have one father.
On the Workmanship of God 19.4Lactantius · ca. 303–305 · Souls come from God, the Father of all; parents only supply the bodily material, which is why they pray for children.
Apology for Origen 5.8Pamphilus of Caesarea · ca. 308–310 (Rufinus's Latin about 397) · The eighth charge: that Origen's views on the soul are wrong.
Apology for Origen 8.1Pamphilus of Caesarea · ca. 308–310 (Rufinus's Latin about 397) · Pamphilus answers the charge that Origen denied the punishment of sinners with his teaching on the fire of judgment as a remedy and on the pains of the risen body, and begins his defence of Origen's views on the soul.
Apology for Origen 9.1Pamphilus of Caesarea · ca. 308–310 (Rufinus's Latin about 397) · Pamphilus argues that the origin of the soul is not settled by Scripture or the Church's preaching, that the rival views (creation at conception, transmission with the seed) are more open to objection than Origen's, and begins his answer to the charge of transmigration.
Apology for Origen 10.1Pamphilus of Caesarea · ca. 308–310 (Rufinus's Latin about 397) · Pamphilus answers the charge that Origen taught the transmigration of souls with passages in which Origen rejects it as foreign to the Church and contrary to Scripture's teaching that the world will end.
On the Anger of God 10.43Lactantius · ca. 313–314 · Man's body is from the earth, but his wise, ruling soul can only come from a wise source.
On the Anger of God 10.44Lactantius · ca. 313–314 · As the soul governs the body, God governs the world.
On the Anger of God 10.45Lactantius · ca. 313–314 · Cicero says souls have no earthly origin and contain nothing earthly, watery, airy, or fiery.
On the Anger of God 15.3Lactantius · ca. 313–314 · Man is made of opposing soul and body: the soul heavenly, eternal, and good; the body earthly, mortal, and inclined to evil.
On the Anger of God 19.1Lactantius · ca. 313–314 · Man is soul and body, and the virtues of the one fight the vices of the other.
On the Anger of God 19.2Lactantius · ca. 313–314 · When the soul masters desire, man is truly like God, which shows the soul is immortal.
Martyrs of Palestine (shorter recension) 13.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 311–314 · Eusebius tells of hearing blind John recite Scripture from memory in church, proof that the true person is the soul and mind.
Preparation for the Gospel 1.4.14Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Christian martyrs, even women and children, prove the soul's immortality by deeds and surpass the philosophers' talk about death.
Preparation for the Gospel 7.4.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The Hebrews held the soul to be the true self and the body its covering, and cared for the inner man.
Preparation for the Gospel 7.10.11Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Moses teaches not to neglect our likeness to God, the ground of the soul's immortality.
Preparation for the Gospel 7.18.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Philo: Moses says the soul is stamped with God's seal, the eternal Word, by God's breath.
Preparation for the Gospel 7.18.6Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The body, from earth, should be cared for like a servant, the soul honored as master.
Preparation for the Gospel 7.18.10Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · We must recover the soul's godlike purity.
Preparation for the Gospel 9.3.20Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · In the Roman war the Essenes died cheerfully, believing in the immortality of the soul.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.25.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Moses: body from earth, soul breathed by God.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.26.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato’s Laws: at least two souls, one good and one evil.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.27.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Gen 2:7 distinguishes body and soul.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.27.5Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato’s Alcibiades: the soul knows itself by looking at God as a mirror.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.27.7Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The body is akin to the visible; the soul is not visible.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.27.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The soul is like the invisible.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.27.10Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · By itself the soul reaches the pure and unchanging, and this is wisdom.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.27.11Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The soul is more like what is always the same.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.27.13Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The soul is like the divine and immortal; the body like the mortal.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.27.14Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The body dissolves quickly; the soul is indissoluble.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.27.16Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Does the soul perish when it leaves the body?
Preparation for the Gospel 11.27.17Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The pure soul, practised in philosophy, departs free of the body.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.27.18Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The pure soul goes to the divine and lives happily with the gods.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.27.19Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The soul devoted to the body departs impure.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.28.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Porphyry: Plato’s argument from likeness for immortality.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.28.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato judged the soul by its likeness to divine or earthly.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.28.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · If the soul is like God in other respects, it is like him in substance.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.28.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The soul is most like God.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.28.9Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Alcmaeon of Croton held the soul immortal and ever moving.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.28.11Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Likeness to the divine is enough to prove immortality.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.28.12Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The soul, even in the body, shows a divine nature that cannot perish.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.28.13Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The soul is both divine and mortal in appearance.
Preparation for the Gospel 11.28.17Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Moses taught the soul’s immortality through its likeness to God.
Preparation for the Gospel 12.28.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato: soul and its states are older than body.
Preparation for the Gospel 12.28.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Soul is the cause of good and evil; Moses too speaks of the soul sinning.
Preparation for the Gospel 12.46.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato’s image of the soul as a composite creature.
Preparation for the Gospel 12.46.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The soul’s lowest part is a many-headed beast.
Preparation for the Gospel 12.50.9Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Soul is older than all bodies and governs their changes.
Preparation for the Gospel 12.50.11Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Soul, being first, is most truly “by nature.”
Preparation for the Gospel 12.51.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Self-motion is life, and life is soul.
Preparation for the Gospel 12.51.12Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Soul is defined as self-moving motion.
Preparation for the Gospel 12.51.13Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Soul is the first motion and the oldest of all.
Preparation for the Gospel 12.51.18Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Soul is the cause of good and evil.
Preparation for the Gospel 12.51.19Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · At least two souls govern the heaven, good and evil.
Preparation for the Gospel 13.16.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato, unlike the Hebrews, makes the soul composite.
Preparation for the Gospel 13.16.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato also teaches that the soul passes into animals, without proof.
Preparation for the Gospel 13.16.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato (Phaedo): souls are bound again into bodies according to their habits.
Preparation for the Gospel 13.16.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plato (Phaedrus) on judgment and the cycles of reincarnation.
Preparation for the Gospel 13.16.12Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Eusebius: Plato’s transmigration is Egyptian, and contradicts his teaching on eternal punishment.
Preparation for the Gospel 13.17.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Severus: a soul mixed of passible and impassible being would dissolve like a mixed color.
Preparation for the Gospel 13.17.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The soul is simple and incorporeal, and so immortal.
Preparation for the Gospel 14.10.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Porphyry admits that the philosophers’ proofs of the soul’s immortality are easily overturned.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.9.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Atticus: Plato taught and argued for the soul’s immortality.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.9.6Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristotle was the first to deny the soul’s immortality and powers.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.9.7Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristotle belittled the soul as much as Plato exalted it.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.9.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristotle denied the soul even its primary motions of thought and memory.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.9.9Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristotle says the man, not the soul, thinks, the soul being unmoved.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.9.10Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Dicaearchus, following Aristotle, abolished the soul altogether.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.9.11Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · We infer the soul from activities that are not bodily.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.9.12Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristotle’s teaching cannot support the soul’s immortality or self-motion.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.9.13Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Aristotle’s immortal mind is obscure, and he hides behind his obscurity.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.10.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plotinus examines Aristotle’s definition of the soul as entelechy of an organic body.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.10.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The entelechy theory cannot explain inner conflict or thought.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.10.7Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Transmigration and growth show the soul is not the entelechy of one body.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.10.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The soul is a substance prior to the body, not its form.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.11.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Porphyry: inspiration and deliberation show the soul is moved, against Aristotle.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.11.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Porphyry: Aristotle’s, the Stoics’, and the Epicureans’ accounts of the soul are shameful; Plato’s self-moved soul is not.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.20.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Zeno on human seed as a fragment of soul that grows in the womb.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.20.2Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Zeno, like Heraclitus, called the soul an exhalation, likened to the flowing river.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.20.4Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The Stoics held a world-soul to which other souls are joined, and that the souls of the dead survive.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.20.7Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Souls of the foolish and of animals perish with the body.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.22.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plotinus raises the question whether the self is immortal.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.22.5Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The soul, whether as form or as user of the body, is the true self.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.22.8Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · None of the elements has life of itself; their combination cannot produce it.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.22.12Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · If the form gives life, the soul is form, not body.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.22.16Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Breath needs soul to order it; soul uses bodies, not the reverse.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.22.25Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Memory requires a constant soul; a divisible soul would cease to be soul.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.22.29Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · If parts are not soul, soul comes from soulless parts.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.22.57Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · A bodily soul mixed through the body would cease to be soul.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.22.64Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Plotinus examines the view that the soul is a harmony of the body.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.22.66Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · The soul rules the body, is a substance, and requires a prior soul to tune it, so it is not a harmony.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.22.67Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Strings do not tune themselves; the soul is not a harmony.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.60.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Pythagoras and Plato on the parts of the soul.
Preparation for the Gospel 15.60.3Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 313–324 · Democritus and Epicurus: two parts of the soul.
Epitome of the Divine Institutes 31.5Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Invisible atoms are unprovable and self-contradictory; and Epicurus made souls mortal.
Epitome of the Divine Institutes 31.7Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Pythagoras taught immortality but also transmigration into animals.
Epitome of the Divine Institutes 62.4Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · True worship earns immortality; now he refutes those who say the soul dies with the body.
Epitome of the Divine Institutes 62.7Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Denying a rational creator, they also denied the soul's immortality.
Epitome of the Divine Institutes 63.8Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Plato affirmed immortality but not its purpose or means.
Epitome of the Divine Institutes 63.9Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Plato's transmigration replaces God's judgement with an endless, pointless cycle.
Epitome of the Divine Institutes 65.1Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Plato argued the soul is immortal because it is self-moving and has godlike powers.
Epitome of the Divine Institutes 65.2Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Virtue, unique to humans and contrary to self-interest, implies immortality.
Epitome of the Divine Institutes 65.3Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Virtue that accepts suffering and death makes sense only if the soul is immortal.
Epitome of the Divine Institutes 65.4Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Only humans know God and look upward, proof that they are immortal.
Epitome of the Divine Institutes 65.6Lactantius · ca. 314–320 · Scripture, the Sibyls, and even oracles attest the soul's immortality.
Demonstration of the Gospel 3.3.16Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Christ taught the soul’s immortality and dignity, wiser than philosophers who equated human and animal souls.
Demonstration of the Gospel 3.7.1Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 314–324 · Eusebius quotes Porphyry's oracle of Hecate calling Christ most pious and his soul immortal in heaven.
Against the Heathen 30Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 318–325 · The road to the true God lies within each person, in the rational soul, which Athanasius now sets out to prove exists.
Against the Heathen 31Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 318–325 · The human soul is rational, as shown by deliberate choice, by the mind’s judging the senses as a musician governs a lyre, and by thought ranging beyond the body.
Against the Heathen 32Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 318–325 · Thoughts of immortality and the mind’s control over the senses show that a rational soul governs the body, as a rider drives a horse.
Against the Heathen 33Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 318–325 · The soul is immortal, for it moves itself, its movement is its life, and even in the body it reaches beyond the body to eternal things.
Against the Heathen 34Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 318–325 · The soul made in God’s image can return to God by cleansing itself of desire and beholding the Word, the Father’s image, as in a mirror; creation also proclaims its Maker.
On the Witch of Endor 6Eustathius of Antioch · ca. 324–337 · Eustathius rejects the explanation that Samuel's soul took human shape, arguing that the woman's description of an upright man in a cloak fits a body, not a soul, and that if it was a soul her description was false.
Theophany 1.43Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
Theophany 1.44Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
Theophany 1.47Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
Theophany 1.75Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
Theophany 2.21Eusebius of Caesarea · ca. 325–337
Letter to Marcellinus 12Athanasius of Alexandria · uncertain, after 335 · The Psalms are a mirror in which the singer recognizes his own soul and its movements.
Letter to Marcellinus 27Athanasius of Alexandria · uncertain, after 335 · The Psalms are sung not for pleasure but so that God is praised with full voice and so that the singer's soul is brought into harmony with itself.
Letter to Marcellinus 28Athanasius of Alexandria · uncertain, after 335 · Melodious psalmody is an image of the harmony of a soul guided by the mind of Christ; the Psalms calm, heal, correct, and strengthen it.
Letter to Marcellinus 29Athanasius of Alexandria · uncertain, after 335 · Psalms must be sung with understanding; then, like David's playing before Saul, they bring the soul into order and calm, as the body's members become strings for the Spirit.
Tricennial Oration (In Praise of Constantine) 13.13Eusebius of Caesarea · 335–336 · Believing the soul perished with the body, they lived like beasts with no thought of judgment.
Catechetical Lecture 4.18Cyril of Jerusalem · ca. 350 · The human being is soul and body, both made by God; the soul is free, immortal, and rational, and sin cannot be blamed on the stars.
Catechetical Lecture 4.20Cyril of Jerusalem · ca. 350 · Souls of men and women are alike and sin by choice, not by nature; the body is God’s skillful work and the soul’s instrument, to be kept pure as a temple of the Spirit.
Life of Antony 66Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 357–360 · In another vision Antony saw souls ascending past a giant figure, the enemy, who seized those subject to him while the faithful passed beyond; he told such things only when pressed, for others’ benefit.
On the Trinity 10.22Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 356–360 · Christ took his soul as well as his body from God; one and the same Christ, truly God and truly man, was born, died, rose, and is in heaven.
On the Trinity 10.57Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 356–360 · Christ said he lays down his life and takes it again (John 10:17–18): neither the body nor God the Word can be the one who does so.
Letters to Serapion 1.7Athanasius of Alexandria · ca. 357–360 · Scripture uses “spirit” of the human spirit and of the winds, so Amos 4:13 need not refer to the Holy Spirit.
Against Arius 1.20Marius Victorinus · ca. 357–362 · Victorinus reads Genesis 1:26 to show that Christ is the image of God and one image with the Father, while man's rational soul is made according to the image and is to reach the likeness through faith.
Against Arius 1.32Marius Victorinus · ca. 357–362 · Victorinus illustrates the homoousion by the soul, whose life and understanding are one motion and one substance with it, as the Son, the Father's will and motion, is one substance with the Father.
Against Arius 1.61Marius Victorinus · ca. 357–362 · Victorinus describes the soul as an image of the Son, who is life, able to turn upward to intellect and become divine or downward toward matter and become embodied.
Against Arius 1.62Marius Victorinus · ca. 357–362 · Victorinus surveys views of human nature and, from Gen 2:7 and the sayings about one taken and one left, distinguishes a heavenly soul and intellect from a material soul, both to be purified by faith in Christ.
Against Arius 1.63Marius Victorinus · ca. 357–362 · Victorinus explains that the soul is made in the image of the Trinity, its being, living and understanding being three in one, as an image of the Son, who is the image of the Father.
Against Arius 3.3Marius Victorinus · ca. 357–362 · Victorinus argues that the Son is life from himself, in whom all things were made, and that in the incarnation the Word took the universal principle of flesh and of soul, so that the whole man was assumed and freed.
Against Arius 3.12Marius Victorinus · ca. 357–362 · Victorinus explains that the soul is the image of the Word, of like substance, which the Word, as life, takes up in the incarnation and lays down in death, and identifies the Spirit who came after Christ's departure as the one motion of the Word.
On the Generation of the Divine Word 7Marius Victorinus · ca. 357–362 · Victorinus describes the ladder of intelligible realities and explains that the soul, which becomes intelligent when intellect is roused in it, is a substance because it underlies intellect and the Holy Spirit.
On the Generation of the Divine Word 10Marius Victorinus · ca. 357–362 · Victorinus explains how matter and quality are one, how soul differs from matter by understanding itself, and why mixed things belong to the things that are not truly not.
Homilies on the Psalms 29.5Basil of Caesarea · ca. 360-378 · Basil explains beauty and strength as the virtues that follow on contemplation, given by grace to restore the beauty of creation; true beauty is God's, reflected in those who behold him, as in Moses' face, while the passions make the soul hideous.
On the Holy Spirit 54Didymus the Blind · Greek ca. 360-390; Latin 387-391 · The name "spirit" is shared by Father, Son and Holy Spirit as one nature, but in Scripture it also means wind, the soul, and the spirit within a man.
Letter 183Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 360–390 · Gregory argues that Christ assumed a complete human nature, mind included, since the whole of Adam fell and the whole must be saved; intelligible realities can coexist without crowding one another.
Tractates on the Psalms 62.3Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Both soul and flesh thirst for God; the body, often thought incapable of salvation, shares in the hope of eternity if it lives by the Spirit; the saint longs to appear before God.
Tractates on the Psalms 63.9Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The arguments of philosophers fail before the faith: God is creator and governor, the soul is from God's breath and survives death, the body will rise, and God judges human life.
Tractates on the Psalms 118.4.1Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The fourth letter opens with the soul cleaving to the ground, which Hilary takes as the soul's complaint at its union with the earthly body.
Tractates on the Psalms 118.10.8Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Man's double nature of soul and body, and God's plural "Let us make", explain why the psalmist says he was made by God's hands.
Tractates on the Psalms 129.5Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · Hilary holds that God first made the soul in his image (Gen 1:26) and later formed the body from dust and joined the two by his breath (Gen 2:7).
Tractates on the Psalms 129.6Hilary of Poitiers · ca. 360–367 · The image of God is the inner man, the soul, whose swift incorporeal mobility imitates God; renewal in that image is putting on knowledge, faith, and goodness.
Titus of Bostra, Against the Manichees 1.17Titus of Bostra · ca. 360s · Titus summarizes Mani’s myth of matter’s assault on the light, the swallowed power, the making of the world, and the moon that carries souls back to the good.
Against the Manichees, Greek continuation of book 3, Lagarde p. 99Titus of Bostra · ca. 360s · True opposites cannot coexist, yet soul and body form one harmonious person who loves and feels with the body, so they cannot come from opposite principles.
Against the Manichees, Greek continuation of book 3, Lagarde p. 100Titus of Bostra · ca. 360s · Soul and body share pleasure and pain and the soul sanctifies the flesh; Christ’s words on the creation of male and female and on what God has joined show the one Creator of body and soul.
Commentary on Ephesians 1.4Marius Victorinus · ca. 360–363 · Election “before the foundation of the world” shows, for Victorinus, that souls existed in Christ before the world, which was made so that souls deceived by the senses might know God and, through Christ, become spiritual, holy, and without blemish.
Commentary on Ephesians 1.8Marius Victorinus · ca. 360–363 · Unlike angels and the rest of creation, which stay as they were made, souls receive the riches of grace to be raised into spirits and adopted sons through Christ, and this knowledge of Christ is all wisdom and prudence.
Commentary on Galatians 4.19Marius Victorinus · ca. 360–363 · Paul, father of the Galatians through baptism and renewal, labors again until Christ, the spirit, is formed in their souls, which brings them to salvation.
Oration 2.17Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · The soul, bound to the body for its testing and the body's elevation, needs a healing far harder than any physician's.
Oration 32.27Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Gregory urges the would-be theologian to know himself first, listing the mysteries of human nature, body, soul, senses, memory, speech, and passions, before approaching higher things.
Oration 37.15Gregory of Nazianzus · ca. 362–383 · Gregory rejects the idea that souls lived a former life that determines their lot, and explains “to whom it is given” as “to those who are worthy”, who both receive from God and contribute themselves.
Tractates 1.16.1Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno begins a sermon on the resurrection: even the wisest pagan held that the soul survives the body's prison, so a Christian should not doubt.
Tractates 1.16.2Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno argues that souls survive death and are punished or refreshed, citing pagan rites, philosophers and Virgil's two ways in the underworld.
Tractates 1.16.3Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno argues from exorcisms, in which possessing spirits name themselves as dead persons, that the souls of the dead live.
Tractates 1.16.4Zeno of Verona · ca. 362-380 · Zeno proves the survival of souls from Samuel's appearance to Saul, Moses and Elijah at the transfiguration, and the rich man and Lazarus.
Hexaemeron 8.1Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · The earth brings forth living souls not from a soul within it, as the Manichees say, but by God's gift; land animals have a fuller soul-life than fish.
Hexaemeron 8.2Basil of Caesarea · ca. 370 · The soul of beasts is earthy and perishes with the body, against the doctrine of transmigration; Basil returns to the birds, created from the waters because flight is a kind of swimming.
Homilies 3.1Basil of Caesarea · ca. 363-378 · Basil introduces Deut 15:9 and expounds 'give heed to yourself' as watchfulness over one's thoughts and soul, applied to every calling and to every state of fortune.
Homilies 3.7Basil of Caesarea · ca. 363-378 · Heeding oneself curbs anger and lust, keeps reason ruling the passions, and leads from the soul and the marvellous structure of the body to the knowledge of God.
On the Destruction of Jerusalem 5.53Anonymous · ca. 370 · Eleazar persuades the defenders of Masada to kill their families and themselves rather than surrender; 960 die, and only a woman and five children survive to tell the Romans.
Question 23, section 1Ambrosiaster · ca. 370–384 · Souls are not generated from souls with the body, since only God, being simple, can beget the simple, as in the Son’s generation, which Photinians and Arians reject.
Question 23, section 2Ambrosiaster · ca. 370–384 · Scripture shows the soul is created and given to the formed body in the womb, as the law on miscarriage distinguishes formed from unformed fetuses; otherwise souls would perish with lost seed.
Question 23, section 3Ambrosiaster · ca. 370–384 · Adam’s body was formed before it received a soul, which shows the order God follows; deriving the soul from either parent leads to absurdities.
On Virginity 5Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 370–371 · Bodily virginity serves the soul’s freedom from passion: freed from the claims of the flesh, the soul can turn its power of love wholly to the contemplation of the divine beauty.
On Virginity 11Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 370–371 · To find the true Beauty one must look past material beauties to the formless, unchanging Good; the soul, purified and winged like the dove of the Spirit, becomes light and, like a clean mirror, reflects God, whom true virginity aims to see.
Letter 51.4Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Epiphanius lists Origen's teachings that the Son cannot see the Father, that souls are fallen angels imprisoned in bodies, and his allegorical proof texts.
Letter 96.17Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Theophilus rejects Origen's teachings that souls fell into bodies, that the cosmos arose from sin, and that bodily nature is 'vanity'.
Letter 96.18Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Theophilus argues that the Origenist idea that souls fall from heaven into bodies would make marriage and childbearing evil, contrary to Scripture's blessings.
Letter 96.19Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Theophilus argues that God blessed the first human beings before they sinned, so bodies do not result from the sin of souls, and urges Origen's followers to accept correction.
Letter 98.4Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Theophilus teaches that the Word became fully human without ceasing to be God, and rejects the Apollinarian view that Christ lacked a human rational soul.
Letter 98.5Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Theophilus refutes the Apollinarian claim that Christ's soul was 'the mind of the flesh', distinguishing the soul from its faculties.
Letter 98.6Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Theophilus argues that Apollinaris's orthodox writings do not excuse his error about Christ's soul, and that Christ took a complete human soul.
Letter 98.8Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Theophilus teaches that Christ took a complete human body and soul at his birth from Mary, rejecting the Origenist view that his soul pre-existed in heaven.
Letter 98.14Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Theophilus rejects Origen's reading of Philippians 2, in which the Saviour's soul, not the Word, emptied itself, arguing that it makes the soul equal to God.
Letter 98.15Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Theophilus argues that Origen's derivation of 'soul' (psyche) from 'cooling' would imply that Christ's soul too had cooled from the love of God.
Letter 98.16Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Theophilus argues that Origen contradicts himself by making Christ's soul one with the Son as the Son is one with the Father, while also calling it inferior to the Word.
Letter 100.12Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Against Origen's teaching that bodies are prisons for fallen souls, Theophilus argues from Paul's commendation of marriage and God's blessing of Adam and Eve that bodies, marriage, and childbearing are blessings, not punishments.
Letter 108.23Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome tells how an Origenist questioner tried to unsettle Paula about the resurrection body and the pre-existence of souls, and how Jerome confronted him, arguing that the same bodies, with their sex, will rise, though without marriage.
Letter 124.6Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome quotes Origen on God’s invisibility even to the Son, on the soul of Christ, on souls as fallen minds, on Esau’s prior sins and on the souls of the stars.
Letter 124.8Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome quotes book 3 of On First Principles, where Origen explains Jacob and Esau, vessels of honor and dishonor, and possessed children by the merits of souls before birth.
Letter 124.9Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome quotes Origen on worlds before and after this one, on the fall of rational creatures into bodies, on the stars as ensouled ministers, and on an incorporeal end in which the saints share God’s life.
Letter 124.11Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome reports Origen’s view in book 4 that souls descend from the heavenly Jerusalem as if dying into lower worlds, so that hell and heaven are relative, and that the saints will fight hostile powers at the end.
Letter 126.1Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome thanks Marcellinus and Anapsychia for their letter, lists the views on the soul's origin, and refers them to his books against Rufinus and to Augustine.
Letter 130.16Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Jerome warns Demetrias to hold the faith of Pope Innocent and reject the Origenist teaching that souls pre-existed and were sent into bodies for earlier sins.
Letter 131.3Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine states his firm convictions: the soul is immortal in its own way, but it is not a part of God, since it is changeable.
Letter 131.4Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine argues that the soul, whatever it is called, is not a body extended in space, since it is present whole in every part of the body.
Letter 131.5Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine states that the soul sinned by its own will and can be saved only by Christ's grace and sacrament, without which it faces condemnation.
Letter 131.7Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine recalls treating four views of the soul's origin in On Free Will against the Manichees, and asks Jerome which of them is true.
Letter 131.8Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine notes that Jerome holds that God creates each soul anew, and says he would like to hold this view too but cannot yet affirm it.
Letter 131.11Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine sets out the objection that God rested after creation and so does not create new souls, with its answer that he still governs what he made.
Letter 131.12Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine answers that creating each new soul multiplies what God already made on the sixth day and so does not contradict his rest.
Letter 131.14Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine rejects the argument that only what existed before time can be immortal, citing Christ's risen flesh.
Letter 131.15Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine accepts Jerome's answer that God's creating souls for children of adultery is no more unworthy than the earth nourishing stolen seed.
Letter 131.17Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine asks how the differences in natural ability among people can be explained if each soul is newly created.
Letter 131.19Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine explains that his earlier argument was meant to hold under any view of the soul's origin and does not settle the present question.
Letter 131.25Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine asks Jerome to reconcile the creation of new souls with the condemnation of unbaptized infants, or else abandon it.
Letter 131.26Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine warns that proof texts about God forming the spirit do not settle the question, and some even favour the view that souls descend from Adam's.
Letter 131.27Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine shows that the same difficulty besets the view that souls pre-exist, and rejects the idea that souls are imprisoned in bodies for sins of a former life.
Letter 140.6Jerome · ca. 370–419 · On Ps 90:2 Jerome rejects a punctuation used to support the pre-existence of souls, and notes that Prov 8:22 in Hebrew speaks of Wisdom (Christ) as 'possessed', not 'created'.
Letter 144.1Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine tells Optatus that he has had no reply to the question on the soul's origin he sent to Jerome nearly five years ago.
Letter 144.6Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine says he has not yet found how the soul inherits Adam's sin without itself being derived from Adam, and prefers to inquire rather than assert rashly.
Letter 144.7Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine asks Optatus to state the grounds of the view he claims is 'full of truth', against the older clergy who held the soul is inherited.
Letter 144.8Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine asks Optatus from what God makes souls, if not by propagation, and rejects the view that souls are embodied for sins of a former life.
Letter 144.10Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine points out that proving God makes souls does not refute those who hold that he makes them from the parents, as he does bodies.
Letter 144.11Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine quotes Optatus's question to the bishops of Caesarea, which set inheritance of souls against God's being the author of all.
Letter 144.12Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine argues that belief in the inheritance of souls is no more incompatible with God's authorship than the inheritance of bodies.
Letter 144.13Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine urges Optatus to refute those who deny that God makes souls, but to seek clear Scripture before condemning those who hold that souls are inherited yet made by God.
Letter 144.14Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine distinguishes whether God makes all souls (certain) from how he makes them (open), and warns Optatus not to fall into Pelagianism by denying the inheritance of souls.
Letter 144.15Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine defends suspending judgment on the soul's origin, following Paul's 'I do not know; God knows'.
Letter 144.16Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine says he would rather know the time of Christ's coming than the origin of his soul, and is not even sure it is given us to know the latter.
Letter 144.17Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine lists what he knows about the soul, including that all are born in sin and need rebirth, but confesses that he does not know how souls originate.
Letter 144.19Jerome · ca. 370–419 · Augustine adds that he could equally show the defenders of inherited souls that their view is not proven.
Ancoratus 33.4Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Lucianists deny Christ a soul so as to ascribe his passions to the Word.
Ancoratus 33.6Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · The Word took flesh and soul, to which the passions belong.
Ancoratus 34.3Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Christ speaks of his own soul.
Ancoratus 35.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Opponents note that Scripture speaks of the Father's “soul.”
Ancoratus 35.2Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · They say “soul” is figurative.
Ancoratus 35.3Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · They claim Christ's “soul” is likewise figurative.
Ancoratus 35.6Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Scripture's summary words include all parts, so the Savior took a soul.
Ancoratus 48.5Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · Souls remain individual in God's many mansions.
Ancoratus 55.9Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · The soul is created, not a part of God.
Ancoratus 56.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · The soul is divisible, as Hebrews says.
Ancoratus 59.2Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · “Souls” in Scripture means whole persons.
Ancoratus 76.5Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · The mind is the soul's governor and discerner.
Ancoratus 78.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · “Soul” or “body” can each stand for the whole person.
Ancoratus 78.4Epiphanius of Salamis · 374 · The mind is a faculty of the soul, not a separate hypostasis.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 5.1.3Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The Stoics teach reincarnation and that the soul is part of God.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 5.2.4Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Reincarnation would place a part of God in the bodies of beasts.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 26.9.4Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · They claim to rescue the soul scattered in all food.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 26.9.5Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · One soul is scattered in all living things.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 26.10.7Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Only souls with this knowledge pass the rulers.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 26.10.8Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The serpent-ruler swallows ignorant souls and returns them to animal bodies.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 27.2.3Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Jesus' soul remembered what it had seen above and received powers.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 27.4.4Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · They believe that doing every deed in one life frees the soul from reincarnation.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 31.23.4Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Souls are good or evil by nature; only good ones receive the seed.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 36.2.8Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Body stays, soul goes to the Demiurge, the spirit rises higher.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 36.4.3Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Epiphanius asks where body, soul, and spirit come from.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 40.2.7Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · They teach that souls feed the archons.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 40.2.8Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The knowing soul ascends past the archons.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 42.4.6Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Marcion teaches salvation of souls only and the transmigration of souls.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 44.4.12Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Christ took a human soul as well as flesh.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 44.5.8Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Christ's own soul shows souls are not foreign to him.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 48.5.6Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · In sleep the body rests but the soul keeps its reason.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 48.5.7Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The soul remains active in dreams.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.4.5Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Origen taught the pre-existence of souls.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.4.6Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · He derived “body” and “soul” from binding and cooling.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.21.5Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · He said the soul must be freed from the body.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.22.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Methodius questions the body as the soul’s prison.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.23.13Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The soul sins through the body.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.44.1Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The Lord taught the soul’s immortality.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.44.2Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Wisdom 3 on the souls of the righteous.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.44.5Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · Either Christ spoke truly of the soul’s immortality or falsely.
Panarion (Adversus Haereses), Haer. 1-64 64.44.6Epiphanius of Salamis · 374-377 · The transfiguration shows souls are immortal.
On Cain and Abel 1.4Ambrose · ca. 375-378 · Cain and Abel stand for two opposed outlooks born in one soul, self-reliance and reliance on God, like Esau and Jacob struggling in Rebecca's womb.
On Cain and Abel 2.36Ambrose · ca. 375-378 · For those with good hope, death is a departure: the soul is incorruptible and returns to its higher home; likewise the prophets shared Israel's captivity to keep the people faithful.
On Paradise 6Ambrose · ca. 375-378 · Paradise is the soul, in which the virtues are planted and the tree of life is wisdom from the Father.
On Paradise 12Ambrose · ca. 375-378 · Paradise is the fruitful soul; Adam is the mind and Eve the senses, and the soul has been given aids against danger.
Apostolic Constitutions 6.11.7Anonymous · ca. 380 · The soul is incorporeal, immortal, rational and free.
Apostolic Constitutions 7.38.5Anonymous · ca. 380 · God forms man in the womb, gives him an immortal soul, and promises resurrection.
On Noah 92Ambrose · ca. 378-384 · Against the varied opinions of philosophers on the soul, Moses teaches that the rational soul comes from God's breath, while blood is the soul of the flesh, the seat of life and pleasure.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 17Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina asks whether Gregory fears that the soul perishes with the body; he admits that faith in its survival rests on command rather than reason, and she replies that such doubt destroys virtue.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 19Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Gregory, at Macrina’s request, states the materialist objection: when the body dissolves into its elements, the soul either is one of them and so perishes, or has nowhere to be.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 21Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina answers that such arguments are those of the Stoics and Epicureans who opposed Paul at Athens; Epicurus, denying providence, thought life a bubble because he trusted only the senses.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 23Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina argues that those who deny the soul because it is unlike the elements must also deny that the living body has a soul, and even that God, who is unlike them, sustains the world.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 27Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · From the ordered motions of the heavens one infers one divine power holding the universe together; and since man is a little world, the visible body likewise points to the hidden, intelligible soul.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 29Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina says the soul teaches us about itself, defines it as a created, living, intellectual substance that gives life and perception to the body, and illustrates by the physician who diagnoses her illness through his senses guided by mind.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 31Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · The senses learn only because mind works through them (“mind sees, mind hears”), as in the astronomical reasoning by which we know the sun’s size and the moon’s borrowed light.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 33Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina ends her argument from astronomy: the eye alone could not teach the phases of the moon without a mind seeing through it. Gregory objects that thought might be a natural power of matter, like the workings of machines.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 35Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Gregory asks whether thought might be a mechanical power of matter, like an automaton; Macrina replies that the inventor who designs such machines in his mind proves the existence of an intelligent soul, and begins to explain how the water-organ was devised.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 39Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Gregory accepts that mind differs from what appears but asks what it positively is; Macrina answers that it can be known by negation, as not colour, shape, weight, or any material property; Gregory fears that nothing then remains.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 41Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina rebukes the view that what sense cannot grasp does not exist, since that would abolish God; the mind is not the same as God but like him as his image, as a small piece of glass reflects the whole sun.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 43Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina argues that, as God is present in all things though unlike them, the soul, though unlike the elements, can exist and remain present to the scattered elements of its body after death.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 45Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Gregory objects that when the body’s elements scatter, the soul, being indivisible, could cling to only one of them, like a shipwrecked sailor clutching a single plank.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 47Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina argues that the indivisible soul, like the art that fused gold and silver, remains present to the separated elements without being divided. Gregory objects that her definition leaves out desire and anger.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 49Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Gregory argues that if desire and anger are intellectual they would be separate souls; Macrina replies that the question is old, and that Christians must take Scripture, not pagan philosophy such as Plato’s chariot image, as their rule.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 51Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina sets aside Plato and Aristotle and dialectical proofs, taking Scripture as her rule: since the soul is God’s likeness, nothing foreign to God, such as anger or desire, belongs to its essence; and the definition of man as rational does not include them.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 53Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Since anger and desire are common to animals, they cannot define human nature; Moses, free from both yet fully human, shows they are not of the soul’s essence.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 55Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina defines anger, desire, and the related passions and concludes that they are around the soul but not the soul, like warts growing on its thinking part.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 57Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Gregory points out that Scripture praises desire, anger, fear, and grief in the saints; Macrina distinguishes the soul’s godlike power of contemplation and judgment, its own by nature, from movements like anger and fear, which came upon it from outside and can be used for good or ill.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 59Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina explains that creation advanced from plants to animals to man, who contains all forms of life; reason alone is proper to man and bears God’s image, while anger, fear, and the like came from his kinship with the animals.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 63Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Gregory asks for Scripture’s witness; Macrina cites the parable of the wheat and the tares: the soul’s impulses are the good seed, and sin sowed beside them an error about the good that turned them toward the brutish.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 67Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Gregory asks where Hades is; Macrina explains that Hades means the soul’s passage into the invisible, and that even if it is under the earth this does not harm the doctrine, since the spherical earth is surrounded alike on every side.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 69Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina declines to fix Hades in any place, since the soul is incorporeal; Gregory raises Phil 2:10, and Macrina begins to explain that the “heavenly, earthly, and under the earth” are three states of rational beings, not places.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 71Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina reads Phil 2:10 as the final harmony of all rational beings (angels, the living, the dead, and even the demons) in confessing Christ, when evil has been destroyed. Gregory, satisfied that the soul survives, asks to return to the main argument.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 73Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Gregory asks how the soul will recognize its elements once the body’s form is gone; Macrina answers with the image of a painter who can unmix colours and still recognize each and remix them.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 75Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · The soul, like the painter who knows each separated colour, remains with each of its body’s elements until they come together again in the resurrection; Macrina states the objection that a body made of other matter would be a new man, not the same one.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 77Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Gregory concludes that the soul guards its elements and at God’s signal will draw them together again like ropes tied to one point; Macrina adds the example of a potter’s vessels owned by different masters.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 83Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina interprets the chasm as the gulf made by contrary choices in life, Abraham’s bosom as the haven of goods awaiting those who endured hardship as he did, and the flame as the soul’s deprivation of those goods.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 85Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · The soul’s presence to its scattered elements explains the bodily terms (finger, eye, tongue) in the parable; Hades is a formless state of life, not a place; the parable also shows the rich man’s concern for his living brothers.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 87Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina teaches that one should be detached from the flesh by virtue during life, so as not to need a further cleansing after death; souls attached to the flesh carry its foulness with them, as ghosts seen near tombs suggest. Gregory notes a difficulty about the passions.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 89Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Gregory objects that if desire is removed by purification the soul can no longer long for God; Macrina answers that the purified soul’s contemplative power is drawn by the beautiful itself, and so is united with God.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 97Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Since the good is limitless, love has no end; God draws every soul, as his own, to himself; souls nailed to material things suffer as they are pulled free, like bodies dragged from earthquake ruins, but this pain is not God’s revenge, only the cost of being drawn to good.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 109Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Pagans and Christians agree the soul returns to a body of the world’s elements, but transmigration into animals and plants confuses all natures into one, which is absurd.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 111Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · If souls passed into animals and plants, one could not reap, prune, or kindle a fire without fear of harming kin; and the related myth that pre-existent souls fall into bodies for their sins is equally untenable.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 113Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · The doctrine of a cycle of falls and ascents is self-contradictory: it makes heaven the source of vice and the life of plants a purification, and leaves the soul forever unstable.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 115Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · The transmigration doctrine confuses changeless heaven with passion and makes the world’s very existence begin from vice, since every birth would require a soul to fall by sin.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 117Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Linking souls’ falls to matings, plantings, and births is absurd, leaves souls homeless if people stay unmarried, and makes life begin by chance and evil, which denies providence.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 125Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Macrina asks when souls begin: not before bodies (that leads to the absurd fall of souls), nor after them, since the embryo already moves and grows, which nothing without soul can do.
On the Soul and the Resurrection, Migne page 127Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 379–380 · Soul and body begin together, the soul’s powers unfolding with the body’s growth; when humanity reaches its full number, birth and death will cease and a stable, indissoluble life will follow.
On the Making of Man 8Gregory of Nyssa · 379 · Man’s upright form and his hands mark his rule; the order of creation (plants, animals, man) teaches the three levels of soul, and the hands free the mouth to serve speech.
On the Making of Man 10Gregory of Nyssa · 379 · The mind works through the senses: the hands free the mouth for speech, and the senses are like gates through which many kinds of knowledge enter the city of the mind, there to be sorted and stored.
On the Making of Man 11Gregory of Nyssa · 379 · The mind, which is distinct from the senses, cannot comprehend its own nature; this unknowability is itself a mark of its likeness to the incomprehensible God whose image it is.
On the Making of Man 12Gregory of Nyssa · 379 · The mind is not housed in the heart or the brain but touches the whole body, as a musician uses an instrument; when the nature turns from the good toward matter, beauty is lost and evil arises.
On the Making of Man 13Gregory of Nyssa · 379 · Sleep restores the body by alternating with waking; yawning and dreams have physical causes, and ordinary dreams are confused echoes of waking life and bodily states, distinct from the divine revelations given to Joseph and Daniel.
On the Making of Man 14Gregory of Nyssa · 379 · The mind is not lodged in one part of the body; in the slavish it serves bodily impulses, in the perfect it leads them; and the three levels of life do not mean three souls, for the true soul is one and intellectual.
On the Making of Man 15Gregory of Nyssa · 379 · Only the rational soul is properly called a soul, as only real bread is bread; and the mind is joined to the whole body in an inexpressible way, neither inside it nor around it.
On the Making of Man 27Gregory of Nyssa · 379 · The soul keeps the stamp of its body’s form and recognizes its own elements, so at the resurrection God can easily restore to each his own, as owners sort a mixed herd or scattered quicksilver flows together.
On the Making of Man 28Gregory of Nyssa · 379 · Gregory rejects both the pre-existence of souls (taught in On First Principles, which leads logically to absurd transmigration) and the view that the soul was created after the body.
On the Making of Man 29Gregory of Nyssa · 379 · Soul and body come into being together from one beginning: the seed contains the whole human being in potency, and the soul unfolds its powers as the body grows.
On the Making of Man 30Gregory of Nyssa · 379 · Gregory sketches the body’s structure and physiology (brain, heart, liver, nerves, breathing, digestion) to show that soul and body grow together from one beginning, the soul’s powers appearing as the body is perfected, and ends by calling all to return to the image of God.
Life of Macrina, part 6Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 380 · Gregory dreams of shining martyrs' relics, finds Macrina dying on a plank, hears her discourse on the soul and the resurrection, and her thanksgiving for God's blessings on their family.
Theological Oration 2 (Or. 28), On the Doctrine of God 22Gregory of Nazianzus · 380 · The mysteries of human nature, soul and body, senses, memory and sleep, show how little we understand even ourselves.
Chapter 11Nicetas, bishop of Remesiana · ca. 380–414 · Against heretics who deny bodily resurrection, Nicetas cites Isaiah, Christ and Paul; the soul awaits judgment in light or darkness until the resurrection, when the righteous will shine and the wicked go into darkness.
Book of Heresies 7.2Philastrius of Brescia · ca. 380s · The Samaritans deny the soul's immortality and are like the senseless cattle of the psalm.
Book of Heresies 26.2Philastrius of Brescia · ca. 380s · An impious medium cannot raise a righteous soul; Saul, departing from God, was ruled by an unclean spirit.
Book of Heresies 97.5Philastrius of Brescia · ca. 380s · The soul was made first, then the body, then the woman from the rib.
Book of Heresies 97.6Philastrius of Brescia · ca. 380s · The order is soul, body, woman, then the inbreathed grace of the Spirit.
Book of Heresies 98.1Philastrius of Brescia · ca. 380s · The inbreathing is a grace given to the soul, not the soul itself.
Book of Heresies 98.4Philastrius of Brescia · ca. 380s · The soul is made and subject to judgment, so it is not the divine breath.
Book of Heresies 99.1Philastrius of Brescia · ca. 380s · The soul was named soul by God from its creation, not after a fall from heaven.
Book of Heresies 100.2Philastrius of Brescia · ca. 380s · Animals lack a rational, immortal soul.
Book of Heresies 100.4Philastrius of Brescia · ca. 380s · Understanding belongs only to the human soul, which rules creation.
Book of Heresies 124.1Philastrius of Brescia · ca. 380s · Some teach transmigration of evil souls into animals.
Book of Heresies 126.1Philastrius of Brescia · ca. 380s · The soul is made by God from nothing, not of the elements.
Book of Heresies 150.5Philastrius of Brescia · ca. 380s · Queens, concubines and maidens signify three kinds of souls.
Catechetical Oration 10Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 385–390 · The infinite Godhead is not confined by the flesh, just as the soul is not confined by the body and a flame is united to its fuel without being shut up in it.
On the Life of Moses 353Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 385–395 · The death of the firstborn teaches us to kill the first beginnings of evil, desire and anger, as Christ taught; the blood on lintel and doorposts figures the soul rightly ordered, reason above desire and spirit, guarded by faith in Christ.
Exposition of Psalm 118 4.6.1Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · The soul, joined to an earthly body, tends to cleave to the ground, but must not let itself sink into death.
Exposition of Psalm 118 4.7.1Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Whoever lives by the body becomes flesh, like those of the flood; whoever obeys God may be called soul, like Jacob’s family.
Exposition of Psalm 118 4.7.2Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Scripture counts Jacob’s descendants as “souls.”
Exposition of Psalm 118 4.9.1Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · The soul is given life when it walks in Christ’s ways, dead to sin and alive to God.
Exposition of Psalm 118 9.13.1Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · On verse 67: Ambrose rejects a variant reading taken by some to mean the soul existed before entering the body, and follows the Septuagint.
Exposition of Psalm 118 10.7.1Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Man’s true beauty lies in what is unseen, the eternal soul joined to God.
Exposition of Psalm 118 10.10.2Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · The soul, breathed into man by God, should know its dignity and hasten to its maker.
Exposition of Psalm 118 10.15.3Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Man’s body was fashioned from dust, but the image of God is in the rational soul.
Exposition of Psalm 118 10.17.4Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Both soul and flesh are saved: the soul by knowing God, the flesh by resurrection.
Exposition of Psalm 118 10.18.1Ambrose · ca. 386-397 · Man is twofold: the body from clay, which will rise, and the soul from God’s Spirit, which rules creation.
On the Happy Life 7Augustine of Hippo · 386 (November) · Augustine leads Navigius to admit that he knows he has a body and life, and the group agrees that food nourishes the body.
On the Happy Life 8Augustine of Hippo · 386 (November) · Monica argues that the soul is fed by understanding and knowledge, and Augustine adds that the minds of the unlearned are starved or filled with vice, which is a kind of nothingness.
Letter 3.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · In a short dialogue with himself Augustine argues that the soul is better than the body, that truth lies in the understanding, and that happiness is not in sensible pleasure.
Letter 7.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine argues that the soul did not have such false images before it was joined to the body and the senses.
Letter 13.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine argues that the question of a subtle body or 'vehicle' of the soul cannot be settled, since it is neither intelligible nor perceptible to us.
Letter 104.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Poverty is never a sin and cannot cause eternal misery; death ends evils only for the righteous, as the better philosophers and Scripture agree.
Letter 120.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine teaches that the Trinity surpasses all bodily things and is to be approached through understanding the soul made in God's image, or else held by faith until the promised vision.
Letter 120.18Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine answers Consentius that justice does live in itself, since souls that lose it are called dead, and justice is the life of lives.
Letter 137.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · The mind should first wonder at itself: in sight and hearing the soul perceives things far outside the flesh in which alone it lives.
Letter 137.11Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · As soul and body form one human person, so God and man form the one person of Christ; the union of two incorporeal realities, the Word and a soul, is easier to believe than that of soul and body.
Letter 143.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine holds the soul immortal and created but admits uncertainty about its origin, inviting correction by sure reason or clear Scripture, which can never truly conflict.
Letter 143.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine illustrates with Ecclesiastes 12:7 how a traducianist could read 'dust to earth, spirit to God who gave it' as implying that souls, like flesh, descend from Adam.
Letter 143.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Ecclesiastes 12:7 fits traducianism or souls created beforehand and sent by God, but seems harder to square with souls created in each body or falling into bodies by choice.
Letter 143.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Each view of the soul's origin can answer the objection from 'God gave it'; even 'return' may mean returning to its Creator, so no view should be rashly rejected.
Letter 158.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Evodius asks whether the soul after death keeps some body of air or ether, since without bodies souls could not be in distinct places like the rich man and Lazarus.
Letter 158.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Evodius suggests that souls may keep a subtle body, citing angels, Samuel, Moses at the Transfiguration, and an apocryphal Moses writing, and that the soul may take bodily heat with it.
Letter 158.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Evodius asks whether departed souls have senses, citing demons, reported apparitions of the dead, and nocturnal prayers heard in basilicas.
Letter 159.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · In a second dream the youth showed Gennadius that he was seeing without his bodily eyes, teaching him that life and perception continue after death.
Letter 162.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · As the soul in dreams sees without bodily eyes and without a body, so at death it departs from the body without taking any body with it.
Letter 165.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Jerome writes to Marcellinus and Anapsychia, listing the opinions on the origin of the soul, referring them to his works against Rufinus and to Augustine.
Letter 166.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine states what he firmly holds: the soul is immortal in its own way but can die spiritually, and it is not a part of God, since it is changeable.
Letter 166.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine holds that the soul is incorporeal, being present whole in every part of the body, as shown by its perceiving a touch at any point.
Letter 166.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · In On Free Will Augustine left open four views on the soul's origin, leaving out the Manichaean view that it is part of God; now he asks Jerome which of the four is true, consistent with infants' need of Christ.
Letter 166.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Jerome holds that God creates each soul at birth, citing John 5:17, and referred Marcellinus to Augustine; Augustine wishes to share this view but cannot yet affirm it.
Letter 166.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine answers that the creation of new souls does not contradict God's rest, since God is multiplying a kind he already made on the sixth day, man in his image.
Letter 166.17Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · The inborn differences of intelligence also raise difficulties for the view that each soul is newly created.
Letter 166.26Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Texts like Zech 12:1, Ps 33:15, and Eccl 12:7 do not settle the question in favor of new souls; Augustine wishes the view to be true and asks Jerome for an unanswerable defense.
Letter 166.27Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · The same difficulty faces the view that pre-existing souls are sent into bodies; Augustine rejects the Origenist view of souls imprisoned for earlier sins and of endless cycles.
Letter 169.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Memory, understanding, and will illustrate, imperfectly, how the Trinity works inseparably even when one Person is shown.
Letter 169.13Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine lists his recent works: letters to Jerome on the soul and on James, a book for Orosius against the Priscillianists and Origenists, and a book against Pelagius.
Letter 180.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · The real difficulty with the creation of each new soul is not adulterous conception but the condemnation of unbaptized infants.
Letter 190.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine writes to Bishop Optatus, whose letter he read at Caesarea, on the question whether souls are propagated from Adam's soul or newly created for each person.
Letter 190.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine admits he has never reached a definite view on the origin of the soul and still hesitates between the two opinions.
Letter 190.13Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · If Optatus holds that new souls are created for each person, he must explain how they incur original condemnation without making God the author of sin or of injustice.
Letter 190.14Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · If creationism cannot explain original sin, one should not rashly adopt traducianism, especially Tertullian's materialist version.
Letter 190.15Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Even a spiritual traducianism, which preserves original sin, faces insoluble questions about how a soul could be transmitted from parent to child.
Letter 190.16Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · God is certainly the creator of every soul, but whether he makes souls from Adam's or from nothing is not clearly revealed and should not be defined by conjecture.
Letter 190.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Gen 46:26 does not prove traducianism, since 'soul' can stand for the body by metonymy and the masculine 'who came out' refers to the persons.
Letter 190.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine keeps his book to Jerome private until he receives an answer showing how new souls could incur original sin without God being its author.
Letter 236.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine describes Manichaean Hearers and Elect and their doctrines: docetism, rejection of the Old Testament, the soul as part of God, and God's mixture with darkness.
Letter 264.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 386–430 · Augustine confirms Maxima's faith that the Son took a complete human nature, rational soul and flesh, without sin, and asks for the heretics' writings to refute them.
On Order 2.6Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Licentius describes the wise man's purified soul clinging to God, served by a lower part that uses the senses and memory, which the wise man rules as a master rules a slave.
On Order 2.50Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · The soul reasons that rational truths such as numerical ratios are eternal while the world changes, so that it should flee from the mortal to the immortal and bring its own life into harmony as it brings verse and music.
Soliloquies 1.2Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Augustine says he desires to know only God and the soul, and Reason presses him on what knowledge of God would satisfy him and on what he loves in his friends.
Soliloquies 2.1Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Opening the second book with a short prayer, Augustine says that he knows he thinks but not whether he is immortal, and that he wants to live forever in order to know.
Soliloquies 2.3Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Reason argues that falsity exists only in sense, that sense requires a living soul, and that since falsity will always exist the soul must always live, and Augustine asks to go more slowly.
Soliloquies 2.4Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Augustine objects that the argument proves only that some soul always exists, not that each soul is immortal, and Reason goes on to argue that bodies cannot exist without a soul to perceive them.
Soliloquies 2.13Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Reason concludes that, since truth always remains and discipline, which is truth, is inseparably in the mind, the mind must be immortal, while Augustine voices his fear that the soul may be extinguished like a light.
Soliloquies 2.19Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Reason concludes that since the true figures of geometry, and so truth, are in the mind as in a subject, the soul is immortal, and defers the question of the untaught mind to another book.
Soliloquies 2.20Augustine of Hippo · 386–387 · Reason explains the difference between true figures known by the intelligence and the images formed by thought, using the kinds of forgetting and remembering, and closes by promising that God will grant a blessed life full of truth after this body.
Homilies on Matthew 28.2John Chrysostom · ca. 390 · Christ calms the sea as Master, not as servant like Moses; the demons, tormented by his presence, proclaim his Godhead, and Chrysostom refutes the belief that the souls of the dead become demons.
Homilies on Matthew 28.3John Chrysostom · ca. 390 · The souls of the dead do not wander on earth but are led away to await the judgment; Christ let the demons enter the swine to show their malice, the limits God sets on them, and his own power.
Homilies on Matthew 34.5John Chrysostom · ca. 390 · If bodies did not decay the cities would be full of corpses and no one would care for the soul; true beauty belongs to the soul, which colors the body even in life, and is the beauty Christians should seek.
Homilies on Matthew 55.3John Chrysostom · ca. 390 · To save one’s life wrongly is to lose it beyond recovery, for neither the whole world nor any kingdom can buy back a lost soul, as no wealth can cure an incurable body; so all our zeal belongs to the soul.
Hexameron (Exameron) 6.39Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · “Know yourself” comes from Scripture: you are your soul, not your flesh, which is only its garment.
Hexameron (Exameron) 6.42Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · Know your soul, not your possessions; the soul painted by God bears the image of Christ, which Adam lost by sin.
Hexameron (Exameron) 6.43Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · The soul is God's image and the whole of man; the body is shared with the beasts.
Hexameron (Exameron) 6.45Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · The soul, which by thought ranges over the whole world and up to heaven, is the image of God.
Hexameron (Exameron) 6.46Ambrose · ca. 387-390 · Scripture calls man a “soul,” and the soul is conformed to Christ's image and justified, not the body.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 1.14.4Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · Since the contest is of the soul, which has no sex, the reward is the same for both.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 37.23.1Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · Even the devil admits a soul is worth more than all possessions.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 37.27.1Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · The bones are those of the inner man, as the soul has eyes and nostrils.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 39.26.1Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · Against the Apollinarians, the psalm shows that Christ had a human soul as well as a body.
Explanation of Twelve Psalms 43.4.3Ambrose · ca. 387-397 · The soul, the body’s older ruler, is the one who hears; those blocked by vice and greed cannot hear the mysteries.
On the Immortality of the Soul 1Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Augustine argues that since knowledge is unchangeable and eternal, can exist only in what lives, and exists in the human mind, the mind must always live.
On the Immortality of the Soul 2Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Reason, being unchangeable, cannot be a harmony of the changeable body; so the mind, which is reason or contains it inseparably, always lives.
On the Immortality of the Soul 3Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Augustine argues that the mind can move bodies in time without itself being changed, since its intention, memory, and expectation hold together what passes, and that even if it undergoes some change, change is not the same as perishing.
On the Immortality of the Soul 4Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Since the unchangeable principles of the arts exist inseparably in the mind and cannot be lost, transferred, or begotten by it, but are found within it, the human mind is immortal.
On the Immortality of the Soul 5Augustine of Hippo · 387 · The changes the soul undergoes, through the body or its own affections, are like changes of color or shape in wax: they do not destroy the subject, and so do not threaten the soul in which unchangeable reason resides.
On the Immortality of the Soul 6Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Defining reason as the mind's gaze, its contemplation, or the truth contemplated, Augustine argues that the mind joined to reason cannot be separated from it by any power, and that reason, which supremely is, gives the mind being, so that it cannot perish.
On the Immortality of the Soul 7Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Augustine answers the objection that turning from reason makes the mind tend toward nothing, by showing that even a body, though infinitely divisible, tends toward nothing without ever reaching it; much less can the mind.
On the Immortality of the Soul 8Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Since body is made and kept in being by an incorporeal Maker who never lets it lose its form entirely, much less can the mind, which is better than any body, lose what makes it mind; so it never dies.
On the Immortality of the Soul 9Augustine of Hippo · 387 · The mind is itself a kind of life, and since nothing lacks itself, the mind cannot be deprived of life and so cannot die.
On the Immortality of the Soul 10Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Augustine refutes the view that the soul is a tempering or mixture of the body: the mind can turn away from the body to behold intelligible things, which no bodily quality could do, so it is a substance and cannot die.
On the Immortality of the Soul 11Augustine of Hippo · 387 · If the mind's being comes from the supreme being, which is truth, the only thing that could take it away would be its contrary, falsity; but falsity can only deceive, and only the living can be deceived, so nothing can destroy the mind.
On the Immortality of the Soul 13Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Augustine argues that the soul cannot be turned into a body: it cannot will it, no body is strong enough to compel it, another soul can compel it only through its own desires, which never include this, and God, who cares for the soul, would not do it.
On the Immortality of the Soul 14Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Sleep does not threaten to turn the soul into a body, since it affects only the bodily senses; true principles understood even in a dream remain true on waking, so sleep diminishes only the soul's use of the body, not its life.
On the Immortality of the Soul 15Augustine of Hippo · 387 · Because form passes from the supreme being to the body through the soul, which stands between them, the soul gives form rather than losing it, and so cannot be changed into a body.
On the Immortality of the Soul 16Augustine of Hippo · 387 · The rational soul cannot be turned into an irrational soul or a body, for it gives form rather than receiving it, and it is not in place: it is present whole in every part of the body at once, as sensation shows.
On Free Choice of the Will 3.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 387–395 · Sinful souls are still better than the brightest bodies, and God is to be praised for creating every grade of being, from unsinning angels to souls that sin and may repent; the unwise judge creatures by use rather than by reason.
On Free Choice of the Will 3.20Augustine of Hippo · ca. 387–395 · Augustine shows that, whichever account of the soul's origin is true (derived from the first soul, newly created, sent by God, or coming of its own accord), inherited ignorance and difficulty can be overcome with God's help, and God is not to blame.
On Free Choice of the Will 3.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 387–395 · Augustine declines to decide among the four accounts of the soul's origin: error about creatures is harmless if not held as certain, but error about the Creator, whose substance is the Trinity, is pernicious; what matters is where the soul is going, not where it began.
On the Catholic Way of Life and the Manichaean Way of Life 1.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 387–389 · Without deciding whether a human being is soul and body or soul alone, Augustine argues that a human being's highest good is not the body's highest good.
On the Catholic Way of Life and the Manichaean Way of Life 1.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 387–389 · Since the soul is the body's highest good, a human being's highest good must be whatever makes the soul best, and morals concern the soul.
On the Catholic Way of Life and the Manichaean Way of Life 1.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 387–389 · Paul's phrase “any other creature” shows that the mind too is a creature; it becomes like God by humble submission in love, not by proud claims to equality, and must not be drawn from him by love of the sensible world.
On the Greatness of the Soul 1Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · Evodius lists his questions about the soul; Augustine answers the first: the soul's home is God who made it, and its substance is simple and proper to itself, not made of the four elements.
On the Greatness of the Soul 2Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · The human soul is like God, made in his likeness, though, like a portrait compared with its subject, it lacks its maker's power.
On the Greatness of the Soul 3Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · The 'greatness' of the soul cannot be a bodily size, since length, breadth, and strength belong to bodies; Augustine undertakes to show that things without such extent are not nothing.
On the Greatness of the Soul 4Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · Justice is not nothing though it has no length or breadth, so the soul need not be nothing for lacking them; Evodius proposes that the soul is something like wind, which Augustine shows to be moving air with bodily extent.
On the Greatness of the Soul 5Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · Evodius first holds that the soul fills the body inside and out and is as large as it, but the vast images held in memory, of Milan and of whole worlds, show that the soul cannot be measured by the body.
On the Greatness of the Soul 13Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · Since the mind sees incorporeal things that bodily eyes cannot, it is not a body; Augustine defines it as a substance sharing in reason, fitted to rule the body.
On the Greatness of the Soul 14Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · The mind, being better than a body and even than a line, has no spatial quantity, yet like the indivisible point or the tiny pupil it has great power; size counts for nothing, and those who seek truth devoutly will find it.
On the Greatness of the Soul 15Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · Augustine defends the value of the geometric discussion, and Evodius raises two objections: the soul seems to grow with the body, and it feels a touch anywhere in the body.
On the Greatness of the Soul 17Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · Time no more enlarges the soul than size does: words like 'long-suffering' and 'greatness of mind' are transferred from bodies, and the soul's greatness, like the point's, is a matter of power, not space.
On the Greatness of the Soul 19Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · The soul 'grows' by learning only in a transferred sense, and, as with the body, its growth may be natural (good disciplines), superfluous (curious arts), or harmful (refinements of sense pleasure).
On the Greatness of the Soul 20Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · Evodius asks why the newborn soul has no skills if it is eternal; Augustine holds that learning is recollection but defers the question, since it does not bear on the soul's size.
On the Greatness of the Soul 21Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · Bodily strength does not prove that the soul grows with the body, since strength depends on training and build rather than size or age.
On the Greatness of the Soul 22Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · Strength comes from the will's impulse, the condition of the sinews, and the body's weight, as the physics of falling and colliding weights illustrates; its growth with age therefore shows no growth of the soul.
On the Greatness of the Soul 28Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · The dog's recognition of Ulysses shows only a power of sense strengthened by habit; Augustine digresses to urge the soul to withdraw from the senses, become a child again to God, and be re-formed to his image by his grace.
On the Greatness of the Soul 30Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · The definition of sense stands, since 'not being hidden' is common to sense and knowledge; and since sight perceives where the eyes are not, the soul, which gives the eyes this power, is not confined to a place, so touch does not prove the soul is spread through the body.
On the Greatness of the Soul 31Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · Evodius objects that cut-up lizards and centipedes go on moving, as if the soul were divided; Augustine tells of such an experiment with a centipede and answers that a hidden cause should not overturn conclusions already firmly proved.
On the Greatness of the Soul 32Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · As a word's meaning, its 'soul', is not divided when its sound is, though parts like luci and fer of Lucifer keep a meaning, so a cut worm's soul is not divided though its parts live; Augustine sets aside the question of the number of souls and turns to the soul's power.
On the Greatness of the Soul 33Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · Augustine describes the soul's power in seven steps: animating the body, sensation, the human arts, virtue, tranquillity, the approach to God, and the contemplation of truth, in which the soul knows God, the truth of the Church's teaching, and the certainty of the resurrection.
On the Greatness of the Soul 34Augustine of Hippo · 387–388 · Since nothing created is nearer to God than the soul, the soul must worship no creature, only the one unchangeable God; other souls are to be loved, imitated, and helped, and true religion reconciles the soul to God and makes it free.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 2.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Augustine interprets the “day” of Gen 2:4 as all time, and “the green thing of the field” as the invisible creation, the soul, before it sinned and became earthly.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 2.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · God's breathing into Adam does not mean that part of God became the human soul, as the Manichees hold; Scripture shows the soul and spirit of man were made, and their changeableness proves they are not divine.
On Genesis against the Manichaeans 2.11Augustine of Hippo · ca. 388–390 · Work in paradise was the effortless guarding of happiness; the woman, made as man's helper and subject to him, is a figure of the soul's appetite, which reason must rule, and the naming of the animals shows reason's superiority.
On True Religion 29Augustine of Hippo · ca. 389–391 · Turning from authority to reason, Augustine argues from the order of the world that the soul which gives life is above the body, and the reason which judges the senses is above both.
Homily 11Gregory of Nyssa · ca. 390–394 · On Song 5:2–4 Gregory urges wakefulness against the dreams of worldly life, describes the soul's ascent from light through cloud into the divine darkness, reads the keys "sister, close one, dove, perfect one" and the putting off of the tunic of skin as the opening of the soul to the Word, and interprets the hand through the opening either as God known only by his works or as the incarnation.
On Two Souls 1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · Restored to the catholic Church, Augustine laments that he did not see that every soul, being alive, must come from God, the source of life, and through Christ, who is the life.
On Two Souls 2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · Since life and soul are known by the intellect, which surpasses the bodily senses, souls must rank above the visible light that the Manichaeans ascribe to God, and so must also be from God.
On Two Souls 3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · Augustine sets out the argument he should have pressed on the Manichaeans: souls are known by the mind, the sun and moon by the eyes, so even the “evil” soul is better than the light they worship.
On Two Souls 4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · Even a fly's soul surpasses the sun's light, because the life that moves it is intelligible, and intelligible things rank above all sensible ones.
On Two Souls 6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · Vices are not intelligible things but failings, as a waning of light is not itself seen; what remains in a vicious soul, its life, is intelligible and ranks above all sensible things.
On Two Souls 8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · If the Manichaeans grant that whatever shines is from God, they must grant that whatever lives is from God, for souls are souls by living, and life is never a cause of failing.
On Two Souls 20Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · Even if lower souls drew us to bodily things, they would not be evil by nature; we sin by imitating what is beneath us when we are made and commanded to love spiritual things.
Sermon 62.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Christ turned away a proud volunteer but called a reluctant man away from burying his father, for unbelievers are the dead who bury the dead; God is the soul’s life as the soul is the body’s.
Sermon 65.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · A persecutor is a mortal man threatening a mortal man, and can touch only the body; the martyr, fearing God, does not fear, for the soul is untouched and the body will rise immortal.
Sermon 65.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The soul is immortal in its own way, since it gives life to the body and never ceases to live; but only God has true immortality, unchangeableness, and the soul can be killed, as Christ says.
Sermon 65.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · As the body dies when the soul leaves it, the soul dies when God, its life, leaves it; mourners speak in vain to a corpse whose dweller has gone.
Sermon 65.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · A living body may carry a dead soul: the feet that walk to adultery and the tongue that lies show that the soul is dead, because God, its life, has left it.
Sermon 65.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The death of the soul is to be mourned more than that of the body; the martyr should fear not the sword but his own tongue, lest by denying Christ he kill his soul.
Sermon 65.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · In Gehenna the body suffers everlasting punishment and the soul the absence of God; the soul should fear its own death, and the martyrs, fearing it, won their crowns.
Sermon 88.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Christ now works greater healings in the soul, giving sight to blind hearts, hearing to deaf ears, and life to dead souls.
Sermon 106.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · True almsgiving begins with mercy to one’s own soul, by judging oneself and loving God and neighbor, and by feeding the soul with Christ, the living bread; without this, even the largest gifts are nothing.
Sermon 107.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · God called the rich man a fool because he wanted many good things but did not want his soul to be good; his soul was required of him that very night.
Sermon 156.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The flesh is a small good created by God, the soul a great good, God the supreme good, Father, Son, and Spirit, one God; the flesh should live by the soul and the soul by God.
Sermon 161.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · As the soul is the life of the body, God is the life of the soul; an enemy can only drive the soul from the body, but sin drives God from the soul, a death far more to be feared.
Sermon 180.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The perjurer who seems to prosper is already dead in soul, for as the soul is the body's life, God is the soul's life and departs at perjury; his luxuries are the worms of a dead soul.
Sermon 182.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Against the Manichaean claim that the soul is part of God, Augustine argues that the soul errs and sins, which the divine nature cannot do; so we pray “Deliver us from evil,” that is, from our evil selves.
Sermon 237.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The Word, whose power is beyond even the inexplicable human word, took on a whole human being, including a rational mind, against those who denied Christ a human mind.
Sermon 240.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The Platonist philosophers taught the soul's immortality but also its endless return into bodies; God has made such wisdom foolish, and believers in the Mediator will receive their bodies back for glory.
Sermon 241.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · The beauty of creatures confesses their Creator; the philosophers, finding both body and soul changeable, rose beyond them to seek the unchangeable God.
Sermon 241.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Even Virgil's Aeneas recoiled from the doctrine of souls returning to bodies; such souls would be happy only by error, whereas the Truth gives true freedom.
Sermon 277.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391-430 · Dacian’s rage against Vincent’s corpse could do nothing to the martyr; true health is to live in the body without feeling its burden, which even a healthy mortal body imposes, as its slowness to follow the mind shows.
On the Profit of Believing 14Augustine of Hippo · ca. 391–392 · All religion exists for the sake of the soul, which errs until it gains wisdom; Augustine invites Honoratus to seek the truth with him.
Acts of the Debate with Fortunatus the Manichaean 9Augustine of Hippo · 28–29 August 392 · Augustine distinguishes Christ's humanity from God's own substance and repeats his dilemma; Fortunatus asks whether the soul is of God.
Acts of the Debate with Fortunatus the Manichaean 11Augustine of Hippo · 28–29 August 392 · Augustine argues that the soul, which sins and changes, cannot be God's substance; Fortunatus maintains that the soul is from God and presses Augustine for his own view.
Acts of the Debate with Fortunatus the Manichaean 12Augustine of Hippo · 28–29 August 392 · Augustine says the soul is from God as made by him, not as part of him; Fortunatus asks from what God made it.
Acts of the Debate with Fortunatus the Manichaean 13Augustine of Hippo · 28–29 August 392 · Augustine answers that God, being almighty, made the soul and all things from nothing.
On Faith and the Creed 8Augustine of Hippo · 393 · Christ, born of the Virgin through the Spirit, took up the whole human being, body, soul, and rational spirit, because what he did not take up would not be saved.
On Faith and the Creed 23Augustine of Hippo · 393 · Spirit, soul, and body are restored in order; the resurrection of the flesh means that this visible flesh itself will rise.
Against Jovinianus 2.10Jerome · 393 · Jerome argues that reason must govern the senses and especially eating, and that simple food is healthier than rich food.
Against Adimantus, a Disciple of Mani 12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 394 · Augustine answers Adimantus's attack on the law's “the blood is the soul”: it concerns beasts, not human souls, and is a sign like “the rock was Christ,” while 1 Cor 15:50 refers to the transformation of the body at the resurrection.
On the Faith against the Manichaeans 48Evodius of Uzalis · ca. 400-424 · Human souls, changeable and sinful, cannot be parts of the unchangeable God; they are his creatures.
Against the Epistle of Manichaeus Called Fundamental 16Augustine of Hippo · ca. 396–397 · Even the soul, though changeable, has no bulk in space: it is present whole in every part of the body at once.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 6.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine refutes the Manichaean reasons for holding meat more unclean than plants, including their myth that animals descend from aborted offspring of demons fallen from the sky.
Against Faustus the Manichaean 21.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 398–400 · Augustine praises the Creator’s art even in the lowest mortal creatures and argues that every soul naturally loves its body, as even Manichaeans show by caring for their own flesh.
Canon 21.11Anonymous · ca. 397–400 · Anathema on those who say the human soul is part of God.
Against Secundinus the Manichaean 8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399 · Augustine argues that creation, being changeable, was made from nothing by the Trinity, and uses Secundinus's own account of the soul choosing between the spirits of virtue and vice to show that the soul is changeable and so not of God's substance.
Against Secundinus the Manichaean 9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399 · Augustine rejects Secundinus's claim that the soul sins only through mingling with flesh: an unchangeable soul could not be changed by mingling, and only the confession that creation was made from nothing avoids making God changeable.
Against Secundinus the Manichaean 13Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399 · Augustine analyzes the soul's consent to evil: it must belong to the soul, so on Manichaean premises the soul itself would be evil, or else its coming would increase evil.
On the Trinity 6.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Every creature, body and soul alike, is manifold rather than simple, because its qualities can vary independently and it is changeable.
On the Trinity 10.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · The command to know oneself means to think on oneself and keep one's place under God; turning from God, the mind becomes absorbed in bodily things and carries their images within it, though it keeps its power to judge them.
On the Trinity 10.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Thinking itself a body, the mind has been identified by philosophers with blood, brain, heart, atoms, air, fire, or the body's tempering; but it is present to itself and need not seek itself as though absent.
On the Trinity 10.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · The mind fails to see itself because it has glued to itself the images of bodies it loves; to know itself it must withdraw what it has added and turn its attention back on itself.
On the Trinity 10.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Whatever the mind doubts, it cannot doubt that it lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges; since it is certain of itself and not of being any body, it is none of those bodies.
On the Trinity 12.15Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Augustine rejects Plato's doctrine of recollection and Pythagorean transmigration, explains learning by divine illumination, and proposes to seek a trinity in the knowledge of temporal things.
On the Trinity 13.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · Philosophers barely reached the soul's immortality, but faith promises immortality to the whole man, made credible by the Word becoming flesh.
On the Trinity 14.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–419 · The image of God is in the rational soul, which can know God; it always remains, though it may be deformed, and the mind always knows itself.
The Harmony of the Gospels 1.35Augustine of Hippo · ca. 399–400 · Later Platonists reinterpreted Saturn as 'full mind' and Jupiter as the world-soul; Augustine leaves the world-soul an open question, since wisdom comes only from God's wisdom.
Verses to the Grace of the Lord 31–60Pomponius · 5th century(?) · Tityrus sings that souls are of heavenly origin and are called back by God at the resurrection, and Meliboeus, persuaded, asks to be taught the way to heaven.
Exposition of the Right Faith 11Anonymous · early 5th century (probably Theodoret) · The author weighs the comparison of the union of God and man in Christ with that of soul and body, accepting it in part but rejecting it because man is a third thing from two, and the soul suffers with the body.
Greek Questions to the Christians 2.1Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · The Christian answers that the Greek questions are not true logical difficulties, and gives a series of short proofs that there is an incorporeal reality, beginning with the fact that reasoning itself is not the work of body.
Greek Questions to the Christians 2.2Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · The soul, which gives life and thought to the body and knows truth, exists by itself; God is called incorporeal and uncreated not because he belongs among incorporeal creatures but because he is beyond both body and the incorporeal.
Greek Questions to the Christians 2.5Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Short arguments that the incorporeal is better than body and that the soul is incorporeal and exists by itself.
Greek Questions to the Christians 3.21Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · Transmigration contradicts the Greek view that God makes by his being, and denying that God's works perish would deny that human beings are his work.
Questions and Answers to the Orthodox 68Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · The soul is not the blood but an invisible, immortal reality distinct from the body, as God's sparing Job's soul and Christ's saying about those who kill the body show.
Questions and Answers to the Orthodox 76–77Anonymous · 5th century (disputed) · The penitent thief's soul in paradise perceives its joys by an intellectual perception that does not need the body; and the soul separated from the body is not dead or insensible, since death belongs to the ensouled body, not to the soul.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 3.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine explains the phrase “creeping things of living souls” and refutes, from his own observation of fish at Bulla, the claim that fish have no memory.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 6.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine rejects the idea that only the souls of the first humans were made on the sixth day, since sex and bodily food imply bodies.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 6.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · God knew Jeremiah before forming him, but no one acts well or badly before birth; Adam, existing only causally in the first creation, had no merit or sin until he lived in his own time.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 6.29Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine closes Book 6 by admitting that the question of the soul's origin is very difficult and unresolved for him, and defers it to Book 7.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine turns to the human soul, states his rule of neither rashly affirming nor rashly denying what is doubtful, and notes that the Greek verb means “breathed upon.”
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine rejects the view that the soul is part of God's substance, since God is unchangeable and the soul changes.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · As a man makes breath from his body and not from his soul, so God's breathing means he made the soul from something subject to him, not from his own substance; Isa 57:16–17 calls the soul God's breath.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine asks whether God made the first soul from nothing or from some spiritual material created in the six days, as the body was made from earth.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine considers whether, as the body had earth for its material, the soul might have had a spiritual material of its own kind, while noting that earth already had a place in the world.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · An irrational soul cannot be the material of the rational soul, both because body would then be the soul's material and because it would imply transmigration, which the catholic faith rejects.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Men become like beasts by their conduct in this life; the philosophers' argument from likeness of character cannot support transmigration, which they probably meant figuratively.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.11Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Memories of former animal lives are false or demonic; the Manichees are worse than the philosophers, since they make the changeable soul God's own substance.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · The soul was not made from earth, water, air, or heavenly fire, since no body can become a bodiless soul.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.13Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine summarizes the physicians' account of air and fire in the body and of the brain as the center from which the senses are directed.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.18Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine reports the physicians' three ventricles of the brain for sensation, memory, and movement, and insists that the soul uses them as organs but is none of them.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · The soul surpasses all bodies and governs the body through light and air, which serve it as messengers and servants; when they fail, the soul departs.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · The soul is not a fifth kind of body, since it knows itself directly and holds images of bodies without being one; it is neither body nor God, and whatever its origin, it was made by God.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.22Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · If the soul did not yet exist, Augustine asks in what creature its causal reason could have been placed on the sixth day, and finds the idea of an unmentioned spiritual “parent” of souls hard to accept.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.23Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Placing the soul's causal reason in the angelic “day” would make angels the parents of souls, which is hard to say, and placing it in a bodily creature is harder still.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.25Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · If the soul pre-existed, why was it sent into the body? Augustine weighs whether it inclined to the body by its own will or came at God's bidding, in light of Rom 9:11.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 7.28Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine shows the difficulties of holding the soul made only when breathed into the body, restates his view that God created all things together, and affirms only that the soul is from God, not God's substance, bodiless, made from nothing, and immortal in its own way.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 8.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · To understand how God moves creation, one should see how the soul, not moving in place, moves the body through fixed joints, its will not being moved through place.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.1Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine opens the question of the origin of the soul, rebutting the inference that Eve's soul came from Adam's because Scripture does not say God breathed into her, while leaving the question unresolved.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine recalls his earlier conclusion that the first man's soul was made in the six days while his body's reason was made in the world as in a seed, avoiding harsher alternatives.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine sets out three possible views of the origin of souls, shows that none contradicts the six-day creation, and undertakes to examine them without rash affirmation.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · The soul is a creature of God, not body, beast, or God; if not from these, it is from nothing or from some rational spiritual creature, and the question should be settled from Scripture rather than conjecture.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · No Scripture says souls come from angels or elements; Ezekiel's spirit from the four winds is a figure of resurrection, as Christ's breath signified the Holy Spirit without being his substance.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Texts such as Isa 57:16, Ps 33:15, and Zech 12:1 fit either the propagation of souls from Adam or the creation of each soul, and may refer rather to renewal by grace.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Wis 8:19–20 seems to favor souls coming from above, but it cannot mean that souls are sent into bodies for prior merits, which contradicts Rom 9:11; some refer it to Christ's soul.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.9Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Eccl 12:7 supports neither view against the other, but shows that the first soul was made from nothing and returns to God, not to a created source.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.15Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · If an infant dies unbaptized, those who hold that new souls are given seem unable to explain its loss; Augustine suggests they might appeal to God's foreknowledge, but finds the cause hidden and decisive for neither side.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.17Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Wis 8:19–20 seems at first to favor souls sent from above, but its “good soul by lot” fits poorly with that view and can be read in favor of transmission from the parents.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.18Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · If Wis 8:19–20 is applied to Christ, his soul did not come by transmission from Adam, and his flesh, conceived of a virgin without the law of sin, was the likeness of sinful flesh; Augustine would say his soul came from where Adam's came.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · From Heb 7:4–10 Augustine argues that Christ, unlike Levi, was not tithed in Abraham, and so his soul did not come by transmission from Adam.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.20Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Traducianists may answer that Levi was in Abraham by seminal reason through concupiscence, Christ only by bodily substance; Augustine, still undecided, holds that both sides agree Christ's soul is not transmitted from Adam.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine concludes that Christ's soul either came by transmission without the stain of sin or did not come by transmission; for other souls he still wavers, holding only that the soul is not a body or a bodily harmony.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.23Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · The arguments are nearly balanced except that infant baptism weighs in favor of the transmission of souls; the church's custom of baptizing infants is an apostolic tradition not to be despised.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.24Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine warns traducianists not to think the soul a body, since that leads to thinking God a body; justice and wisdom too are bodiless.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.25Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine criticizes Tertullian's view that the soul and God are bodies, noting his admission that every body is passible, and rejects his airy, limbed soul as based on dream images.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 10.26Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine refutes Tertullian's comparison of the soul's growth to beaten gold, since a body cannot spread without thinning, and closes the book with his doubt on the soul's origin unresolved.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 12.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Paul saw the third heaven itself, not an image; what he did not know was whether his soul remained in his living body or left it as in death during the vision.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 12.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine names the three kinds of vision bodily, spiritual, and intellectual, and surveys the senses in which Scripture uses “bodily” and “spirit.”
Literal Commentary on Genesis 12.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Spiritual vision is distinguished from bodily vision while awake, but in fever, intense thought, ecstasy, or through the influence of another spirit its images can seem like bodies; meaningful images must be shown by some spirit.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 12.16Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · The five senses arise from light mixed with the elements; the spirit, superior to every body, forms the images of bodies in itself, which makes memory, speech, song, and planned action possible.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 12.20Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · When visions arise from the body, the body does not form them; a hindrance in the brain turns the soul's attention inward so that it forms or beholds images it cannot distinguish from bodies, unlike a hindrance in the eyes, as the blind show.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 12.23Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Augustine lists the many ways in which likenesses of bodies are formed in the spiritual part of the soul: perception, memory, imagination, planning, speech, dreams, illness, and rapture.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 12.24Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · The three kinds of vision form an order: bodily vision depends on spiritual, spiritual is judged by intellectual, and spiritual vision stands in the middle between the other two.
Literal Commentary on Genesis 12.35Augustine of Hippo · ca. 401–415 · Souls need their bodies at the resurrection because a natural appetite to govern a body holds them back from the full vision of God; the spiritual body will be no burden but a glory.
Apology against Rufinus 1.22Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome shows that his comment on Eph 1:4 referred election to God's foreknowledge, reported Origen's view of pre-existent souls only as "another's," and then refuted it.
Apology against Rufinus 1.25Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome defends his comment on Eph 3:1 as a set of three views (his own, Origen's, Apollinaris's) and argues that calling the body the soul's chain until the resurrection is not absurd.
Apology against Rufinus 1.28Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome quotes the passage of Origen's commentary on Eph 5:28–29 which he had reported, including the words about wives turned into men and bodies into souls that Rufinus attacked.
Apology against Rufinus 2.4Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome says Rufinus answers about the Trinity, which no one questioned, and demands his view on the origin of Christ's human soul.
Apology against Rufinus 2.8Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome quotes Rufinus's statement to Anastasius that he holds no fixed view among the three theories of the soul's origin.
Apology against Rufinus 2.9Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome mocks the grammar and confusion of Rufinus's sentences on the origin of the soul.
Apology against Rufinus 2.10Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome scorns Rufinus's professed ignorance on the origin of the soul as an evasion meant to avoid condemning Origen's doctrine of pre-existence.
Apology against Rufinus 2.12Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome lists the doctrines in Origen's works that he holds heretical and challenges Rufinus to show where Origen contradicts them.
Apology against Rufinus 3.30Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome presses Rufinus on the three theories of the soul's origin: if one is true, his professed ignorance of all three is evasion meant to protect Origen's view.
Apology against Rufinus 3.39Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome answers Rufinus's demand for the books of Pythagoras: he had spoken of Pythagorean doctrines, known through Cicero and others, and he cites the Golden Verses and Pythagorean maxims.
Apology against Rufinus 3.40Jerome · ca. 401–402 · Jerome traces the doctrine of transmigration and of learning as recollection from Pythagoras through Plato to Origen's On First Principles, and explains that he spoke of reading doctrines, not books.
Apology against Jerome 1.26Rufinus of Aquileia · ca. 401 · Rufinus quotes Jerome's Commentary on Ephesians, where "another" interpreter teaches that souls existed before the world and were cast down into bodies, and mocks Jerome with an imagined dialogue.
Apology against Jerome 1.27Rufinus of Aquileia · ca. 401 · Rufinus argues that Jerome's own commentary teaches the pre-existence of souls, and that Jerome's device of attributing it to "another" traps him either way.
Apology against Jerome 1.28Rufinus of Aquileia · ca. 401 · Rufinus quotes Jerome's Commentary on Ephesians on Eph 1:5–6, which sets out the view that differences at birth reflect souls' earlier merits.
Apology against Jerome 1.30Rufinus of Aquileia · ca. 401 · Rufinus presses the dilemma: whichever "other" is Jerome's own voice, Jerome either teaches the pre-existence of souls or condemns its denial as heretical.
Apology against Jerome 1.33Rufinus of Aquileia · ca. 401 · Rufinus sums up: Jerome's own chosen commentaries teach both the pre-existence of souls and a final reward even for the devil, the doctrines he condemns in Origen.
Apology against Jerome 1.36Rufinus of Aquileia · ca. 401 · Rufinus turns Jerome's own words against him and quotes the Ephesians commentary on the church as including angels and on knowledge of God as recollection from a former life.
Apology against Jerome 1.38Rufinus of Aquileia · ca. 401 · Rufinus quotes further passages of Jerome's Ephesians commentary, on stars not being clean, the soul made before the body, and angels and souls as the sheep and the lost sheep.
Apology against Jerome 1.40Rufinus of Aquileia · ca. 401 · Rufinus quotes Jerome's commentaries on Ephesians and Philemon describing the body as the soul's prison and the soul's return to Christ.
Apology against Jerome 2.9Rufinus of Aquileia · ca. 401 · Rufinus argues that the views Jerome condemns as pagan, the pre-existence of souls and a final end of punishment, are not impious if held to defend God's justice.
Apology against Jerome 2.27Rufinus of Aquileia · ca. 401 · Rufinus argues that Jerome's own translations of Origen's homilies omitted or softened passages on the Son, the soul, and the Trinity, which is exactly what Rufinus did.
Apology against Jerome 2.42Rufinus of Aquileia · ca. 401 · Rufinus continues his summary: Jerome's own commentaries contain the Origenist views he condemns, he broke his oath against secular books, and he praised Origen in many prefaces.
Against Felix the Manichaean 2.17Augustine of Hippo · December 404 · Augustine distinguishes what God begot of himself (the Word, equal to him and incapable of pollution) from what he made (the soul and all creatures), which could be polluted by sin and remade through the incarnate Word.
Against Felix the Manichaean 2.18Augustine of Hippo · December 404 · Augustine explains three kinds of making — from oneself (begetting), from something, and from nothing — and argues that the soul and all creation, made from nothing, are changeable while God alone is unchangeable.
Against Felix the Manichaean 2.20Augustine of Hippo · December 404 · Felix likens the polluted part of God to the polluted soul that Christ cleanses; Augustine insists that the soul is God's work, not a part of God, and that Felix must anathematize Mani.
Against Felix the Manichaean 2.21Augustine of Hippo · December 404 · Felix asks whether the soul belongs to God and is from God; Augustine answers that it is from God as his work, not of God as a part, and holds Felix to his earlier admission.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 8.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The invisible things God made through the Word, angels and the soul, are still more wonderful than the visible: the soul animates the body, orders human society, and will do far more in the resurrection body.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 15.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The woman's “husband” is the understanding, the part of the soul enlightened by Christ, which she must bring to bear so as to grasp his spiritual words.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 15.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The woman's five husbands may be the five books of Moses, but Augustine prefers to read them as the five senses that rule the soul before reason, after which the understanding should rule.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 19.11Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Unlike the soul, whose life changes and is borrowed from God, the Father and the Son have life in themselves, the Son receiving it from the Father.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 19.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The soul is alive enough to animate the body, but it is truly alive, wise, and just only when it comes to God, who is its life and light.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 20.12Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Augustine leads the hearer upward past the body, the heavenly bodies, and the changeable mind itself, to the unchangeable God.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 23.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The soul gives life to the body but is made blessed only by participation in God; this is why the Christian religion worships the one God, not many gods.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 32.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · Christ's invitation to drink concerns the inner man, and the soul, though unseen, is loved more than the body, both in ourselves and in friends.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 39.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The changeable soul becomes good, chaste, and true by participating in God's goodness and truth, while God the Father is true not by participating but by begetting the Truth.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 47.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · The soul does not die naturally, but it dies when it loses God, its life, as the body dies when it loses the soul.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 47.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · In Christ's death the soul was separated from the body but never from the Word; so neither the Word nor the soul itself is properly what lays the soul down.
Tractates on the Gospel of John 47.11Augustine of Hippo · ca. 406–420 · To lay down the soul is to die; the flesh lays down the soul by breathing it out, and in Christ this happened when the Word willed, by the Word's power.
On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 1.31Augustine of Hippo · 411–412 · The theory that souls sinned in a prior heavenly life does not explain why a virtuous person may never hear the gospel while a wicked one hears, believes, and is saved.
On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 1.32Augustine of Hippo · 411–412 · Augustine tells of a simple-minded Christian who defended Christ's name against clever blasphemers, a case the theory of souls' former lives cannot explain.
On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 1.38Augustine of Hippo · 411–412 · Augustine offers several readings of “coming into this world” in John 1:9, and concludes that even a created rational soul remains in darkness unless it believes, which infants do through the church's sacrament.
On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 1.67Augustine of Hippo · 411–412 · The deep ignorance of the newborn rational soul cannot come from sins committed after birth, and Adam was not created so; ignorance is itself an evil needing cleansing.
On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 2.59Augustine of Hippo · 411–412 · Augustine leaves open whether the soul is inherited with its guilt or created and burdened by union with sinful flesh, saying that where Scripture is unclear, inquiry should be cautious, and closes the book.
On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 3.18Augustine of Hippo · 411–412 · If souls are newly created, it is as hard to explain why innocent infant souls suffer pain and demonic assaults as why they incur original sin; Augustine leaves the question of the soul's origin open.
City of God 8.5Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine asks all the theologies and all the materialist philosophers to yield to the Platonists, and argues that since the mind is not a body, neither is God, its creator.
City of God 9.11Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine rejects the Platonist view that human souls become demons — lares, larvae, or Manes — after death, as an encouragement to wickedness.
City of God 10.2Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine notes that Plotinus, like the Gospel of John, teaches that souls and blessed beings are happy only by the light of God, not their own.
City of God 10.30Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine commends Porphyry for correcting Plato by rejecting transmigration into beasts and the endless cycle of souls, and holds that souls return once to their own bodies in the resurrection.
City of God 10.31Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine refutes the Platonist argument that the soul must be coeternal with God, since even Porphyry admits a happiness of the soul that begins in time and never ends.
City of God 11.23Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine rejects Origen's view that the world was made to imprison souls fallen from God, since Scripture calls creation very good and bodies do not match the deserts of souls.
City of God 11.27Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · All creatures cling to being, and the human mind loves knowledge more than happiness in delusion; by an inner sense it judges justice and knows that it is, knows, and loves.
City of God 12.21Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · The doctrine that the blessed must return to misery in endless cycles is impious and destroys love and hope; even Porphyry rejected it, and the souls' final freedom shows that genuinely new things happen, such as man's creation.
City of God 12.24Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · God made man in his image with a rational soul, formed Adam from dust and gave him a soul, and made Eve from his side, not with hands but by his power.
City of God 13.8Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · The martyr accepts the first death to escape the second; after death the souls of the godly rest and those of the wicked are punished until the resurrection.
City of God 13.16Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · The Platonists mock the Christian view that the soul's separation from the body is a punishment, yet Plato himself has the supreme god promise the lesser gods that they will never lose their bodies.
City of God 13.24Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · God's breath at Adam's creation gave him his soul, not the Holy Spirit, as the Greek pnoē shows; Christ's breathing on the disciples signified the Spirit of both Father and Son; the question how the unfallen would have procreated is deferred to Book 14.
City of God 14.5Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · The Platonists, less wrongly than the Manichees, still blame the body for the passions; yet their own teaching, as in Virgil, has purified souls desiring bodies, so the passions arise from the soul itself.
City of God 19.3Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Augustine reports Varro's argument, following Antiochus of Ascalon, that man is soul and body together, so that the supreme good consists of virtue and the goods of both, in a social life that mixes leisure and action.
City of God 21.3Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Pain is a sign of life, not proof of death: the soul feels pain yet is immortal, and so the risen bodies of the damned can suffer without dying.
City of God 22.4Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · Against Cicero's claim that earthly bodies cannot be in heaven, Augustine argues that the union of incorporeal souls with earthly bodies is a greater wonder than the raising of earthly bodies to heaven.
City of God 22.27Augustine of Hippo · 413–426 · If Plato's view that souls return to bodies were combined with Porphyry's that purified souls never return to evils, both would reach the Christian faith in the eternal, evil-free resurrection body.
Commentary on Jeremiah 1.2Jerome · ca. 414-419 · Jeremiah was known and set apart before birth by God's foreknowledge, not by pre-existence of the soul; some apply the verse to Christ.
Commentary on Jeremiah 4.28Jerome · ca. 414-419 · Jeremiah's curse on his birthday does not support the pre-existence of souls, as some claim, but means, like Job's, that non-existence is better than a life of torment (Jer 20:14–18).
Commentary on Jeremiah 5.61Jerome · ca. 414-419 · Hananiah, by breaking the wooden yoke, brings an iron one on the people; Jerome openly rejects Origen's reading of the yokes as kinds of bodies into which souls fall (Jer 28:12–14).
Commentary on Jeremiah 5.66Jerome · ca. 414-419 · The passage missing from the Septuagint promises the exiles' return and threatens Zedekiah's people as 'bad figs'; Jerome explains the Greek renderings and again rejects Origen's allegory of souls descending into bodies (Jer 29:14–20).
Reminder concerning the Error of the Priscillianists and Origenists 2Orosius · 414 · Orosius summarizes Priscillian's teaching on the soul's descent, astrology, the apocryphal Memoir of the Apostles, and a Trinity without distinction.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Augustine argues that if the soul is made from God himself, it would be God’s changeable nature; it was made by God from nothing.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Victor’s claim that the soul “deserved to be defiled through the flesh” cannot say what the soul deserved before it had flesh.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Victor explains how the infant’s soul is freed from sin but not how it deserved to become sinful.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.16Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Excluding four false answers leaves Victor only Pelagianism; better to share Augustine’s hesitation about the soul’s origin.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.17Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Isaiah 42:5 shows God gives breath, but not whether by propagation or new inbreathing, just as God gives bodies that come from seed.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · The Greek word pnoē, translated variously, often signifies the Spirit or divine inspiration; even a plain “gives a soul” would not settle the soul’s origin.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.20Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Other readings of Isaiah 42:5 are orthodox, but none decides whether the soul is given by propagation or by new inbreathing.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.25Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Like the Maccabean mother, Augustine confesses he does not know how his soul came into his body, and rejects Victor’s comparing him to cattle for it.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.26Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Paul’s present tense “gives” in Acts 17:25 does not show God gives souls always or without propagation, just as God clothes the grass that grows from seed.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.27Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Paul’s “all things are from God” in 1 Cor 11:12 covers bodies too, so “from God” does not exclude propagation.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.28Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · “From one blood” (Acts 17:26) may stand for the whole man by synecdoche, just as “in whom all sinned” may; neither text decides the question.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.29Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Genesis 2:23 is argued both ways: the propagationists note that no breath was breathed into Eve, their opponents that Adam said only “flesh of my flesh.”
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.30Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Scripture’s silence about Eve’s soul decides nothing either way.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.31Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Arguing from “flesh of my flesh” resembles the Apollinarian argument from “the Word was made flesh”; both sides need unambiguous texts.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.32Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Augustine closes by warning that souls from God’s breath, not from nothing, would be divine by nature.
On the Soul and Its Origin 1.34Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Defenders of new souls must avoid the four errors and find certain Scripture, or else confess ignorance rather than fall into Pelagianism.
On the Soul and Its Origin 2.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Augustine distinguishes what is from God by begetting or procession (the Son and the Spirit, of one nature with the Father) from creatures made by God from nothing or from other creatures.
On the Soul and Its Origin 2.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · The first soul was made from nothing; to hold it was made from God’s nature is a blasphemous error, less excusable in a presbyter than in a recent convert.
On the Soul and Its Origin 2.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Augustine asks Peter to confirm or deny the rumour and to say what useful thing he learned; the corporeality of the soul is not essential doctrine.
On the Soul and Its Origin 2.8Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Victor rightly holds that souls are judged at death, but his claim that the soul seeks food only for the body cannot explain the rich man’s thirst in Luke 16.
On the Soul and Its Origin 2.10Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Resemblance of character between parents and children decides nothing; Peter has not truly learned that souls are not transmitted.
On the Soul and Its Origin 2.11Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Victor’s words imply both that the soul had a blessed state before the flesh and that it deserved to be defiled, contradicting his own denial of pre-existence.
On the Soul and Its Origin 2.20Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Texts naming a part (blood, flesh) or the whole (man, woman) cut both ways by synecdoche; unambiguous testimonies are needed.
On the Soul and Its Origin 2.21Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · The question of the soul’s origin remains open; Victor’s answer defames God’s nature and still cannot explain the infants of unbelievers.
On the Soul and Its Origin 3.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · The soul must be made by God, not from God; a particle of God’s breath would be of God’s nature, as a flame lit from a lamp is of the same nature.
On the Soul and Its Origin 3.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Victor’s comparison of blowing up a wineskin fails: our breath comes from the air, not from our soul, and is constantly taken in and given back.
On the Soul and Its Origin 3.7Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Elisha’s breathing on the Shunammite’s son did not give the boy a soul; God restored it at the prophet’s prayer, and the text does not say he breathed three times.
On the Soul and Its Origin 3.22Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Augustine lists Victor’s eleven errors.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.2Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Victor had censured Augustine’s silence on the soul’s origin as beastlike ignorance of oneself.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.3Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Victor’s standard would make everyone beastlike, since no one knows all of human nature, not even the body, which anatomists dissect.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.4Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Victor, who misunderstood even his own breathing, cannot teach the origin of souls; Augustine would gladly be taught if he could.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.5Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Augustine wants to learn either the soul’s origin or whether it may be known in this life, perhaps being among things too high for us (Sirach 3).
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.6Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · The soul knows less of its own body and workings than of God; it is no shame that it cannot recall its own origin.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.14Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · If knowledge of the soul’s origin comes from Scripture, Victor should not have made it a mark of human nature distinguishing us from beasts.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.15Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Scripture shows that God gives souls but not how; the psalm about beasts concerns those who hope for nothing after death, not those who confess ignorance.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.17Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Augustine turns to whether the soul is corporeal, asking Victor how he defines a body.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.18Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Incorporeal does not mean empty, since Victor admits God is incorporeal; air is a body, as vessels pressed into water show.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.19Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Victor’s reasoning that the soul is body but not spirit is inconsistent and would make spirit a body too.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.20Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Victor’s corporeal inner man and inmost spirit, moulded to the body, could not be renewed to the image of the incorporeal God.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.25Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Dream images, which the soul holds in memory in vast number, are likenesses of bodies, not bodies, showing the soul is not corporeal.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.26Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Perpetua’s dream of wrestling as a man shows a bodily likeness in the soul that is not a body.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.27Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Dinocrates appeared with his wound, which shows the soul bears likenesses of bodily things, not a body that can be wounded or killed.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.28Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Victor’s view would give an amputee’s soul one adult and one infant hand; dreams show likenesses of bodies, and Scripture calls the dead sleepers.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.29Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Amputees dream of themselves both whole and maimed, and Samuel appeared clothed: these are likenesses, though the feelings are real.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.33Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · The phoenix is irrelevant; a soul with real male or female members would have sex, which Victor denies, so it has no real body.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.36Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Spirit properly names the rational part of the soul (the mind), yet the whole soul may also be called spirit, as all Jacob’s seed and the ten tribes were both called Israel.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.37Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Scripture calls even the souls of irrational beasts “spirit”, so “spirit” is a general name for the soul as well as a name for its rational part.
On the Soul and Its Origin 4.38Augustine of Hippo · ca. 419–420 · Augustine repeats the eleven errors, urges Victor to learn not to know, and restates his own positions.
Against Two Letters of the Pelagians 3.26Augustine of Hippo · ca. 420–421 · Augustine refuses to let the obscure question of the soul's origin undermine the clear doctrine of original sin and infant baptism.
On Care for the Dead 13Augustine of Hippo · ca. 421–422 · Augustine gives two stories, a dead father who showed his son a receipt in a dream and his own image explaining Cicero to his former pupil Eulogius, to show that likenesses, not souls, appear in dreams.
Retractations 1.4Augustine of Hippo · 426-427 · Reviewing the Soliloquies, Augustine corrects expressions about the pure knowing truth, the senses, the Father and Son being “one,” many ways to wisdom, fleeing all bodies, and learning as recollection.
Retractations 1.5Augustine of Hippo · 426-427 · Reviewing On the Immortality of the Soul, Augustine calls it obscure and corrects several statements; he then lists his unfinished books on the liberal disciplines, of which only Grammar and six books On Music were completed.
Retractations 1.7Augustine of Hippo · 426-427 · Reviewing On the Greatness of the Soul, Augustine explains that learning as “remembering” does not imply a previous life of the soul, and clarifies a phrase about being restored to oneself.
The Conferences 1.14John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · Each person will share hereafter in the kingdom he serves now; Moses shows from Scripture and reason that souls after death remain conscious and live more fully, and rejects a heretical punctuation of Luke 23:43.
The Conferences 7.12John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · In possession the spirit does not enter the soul's substance but oppresses the bodily organs of thought, as drink or fever can; God forbade the devil to do this to Job.
The Conferences 8.25John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · The devil's “father” is not another spirit, since God alone is the Father of spirits; the devil became a liar and the father of lies by his pride. Serenus closes with a prayer for the fear and love of God, and the visitors leave eager for more.
The Conferences 24.15John Cassian · ca. 426–429 · Abraham explains that all vices have one source but take different names according to which of the soul’s three parts, rational, irascible, or concupiscible, is corrupted, as one humor causes different diseases in different members.
Letter to Valerian, paragraph 2Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 432 · Man's first duty is to know his Creator and devote his life to him; next comes care for the soul, which cannot be separated from serving God, and which deserves more medicine than the body.
Letter to Valerian, paragraph 3Eucherius of Lyon · ca. 432 · The soul, the image of God and his deposit, is mistress and the flesh servant; salvation is the foundation of every other good, for nothing profits a man who gains the world and loses his soul.