A Treatise on the Soul - Tertullian
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Translated by Peter Holmes, D.D.
Text edited by Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson and
first published by T&T Clark in Edinburgh in 1867. Additional
introductionary material and notes provided for the American
edition by A. Cleveland Coxe, 1886.
Chapter I. It is Not to the Philosophers that We Resort for Information
About the Soul But to God. [1475]
Having discussed with Hermogenes the single point of the origin of the soul,
so far as his assumption led me, that the soul consisted rather in an
adaptation [1476] of matter than of the inspiration [1477] of God, I now
turn to the other questions incidental to the subject; and (in my treatment
of these) I shall evidently have mostly to contend with the philosophers. In
the very prison of Socrates they skirmished about the state of the soul. I
have my doubts at once whether the time was an opportune one for their
(great) master'(to say nothing of the place), although that perhaps does not
much matter. For what could the soul of Socrates then contemplate with
clearness and serenity? The sacred ship had returned (from Delos), the
hemlock draft to which he had been condemned had been drunk, death was now
present before him: (his mind) was, [1478] as one may suppose, [1479]
naturally excited [1480] at every emotion; or if nature had lost her
influence, it must have been deprived of all power of thought. [1481] Or let
it have been as placid and tranquil so you please, inflexible, in spite of
the claims of natural duty, [1482] at the tears of her who was so soon to be
his widow, and at the sight of his thenceforward orphan children, yet his
soul must have been moved even by its very efforts to suppress emotion; and
his constancy itself must have been shaken, as he struggled against the
disturbance of the excitement around him. Besides, what other thoughts could
any man entertain who had been unjustly condemned to die, but such as should
solace him for the injury done to him? Especially would this be the case
with that glorious creature, the philosopher, to whom injurious treatment
would not suggest a craving for consolation, but rather the feeling of
resentment and indignation. Accordingly, after his sentence, when his wife
came to him with her effeminate cry, O Socrates, you are unjustly condemned!
he seemed already to find joy in answering, Would you then wish me justly
condemned? It is therefore not to be wondered at, if even in his prison,
from a desire to break the foul hands of Anytus and Melitus, he, in the face
of death itself, asserts the immortality of the soul by a strong assumption
such as was wanted to frustrate the wrong (they had inflicted upon him). So
that all the wisdom of Socrates, at that moment, proceeded from the
affectation of an assumed composure, rather than the firm conviction of
ascertained truth. For by whom has truth ever been discovered without God?
By whom has God ever been found without Christ? By whom has Christ ever been
explored without the Holy Spirit? By whom has the Holy Spirit ever been
attained without the mysterious gift of faith? [1483] Socrates, as none
can doubt, was actuated by a different spirit. For they say that a demon
clave to him from his boyhood'the very worst teacher certainly,
notwithstanding the high place assigned to it by poets and philosophers'even
next to, (nay, along with) the gods themselves. The teachings of the power
of Christ had not yet been given'(that power) which alone can confute this
most pernicious influence of evil that has nothing good in it, but is rather
the author of all error, and the seducer from all truth. Now if Socrates was
pronounced the wisest of men by the oracle of the Pythian demon, which, you
may be sure, neatly managed the business for his friend, of how much greater
dignity and constancy is the assertion of the Christian wisdom, before the
very breath of which the whole host of demons is scattered! This wisdom of
the school of heaven frankly and without reserve denies the gods of this
world, and shows no such inconsistency as to order a "cock to be sacrificed
to Aesculapius: " [1484] no new gods and demons does it introduce, but
expels the old ones; it corrupts not youth, but instructs them in all
goodness and moderation; and so it bears the unjust condemnation not of one
city only, but of all the world, in the cause of that truth which incurs
indeed the greater hatred in proportion to its fulness: so that it tastes
death not out of a (poisoned) cup almost in the way of jollity; but it
exhausts it in every kind of bitter cruelty, on gibbets and in holocausts.
[1485] Meanwhile, in the still gloomier prison of the world amongst your
Cebeses and Phµdos, in every investigation concerning (man's) soul, it
directs its inquiry according to the rules of God. At all events, you can
show us no more powerful expounder of the soul than the Author thereof. From
God you may learn about that which you hold of God; but from none else will
you get this knowledge, if you get it not from God. For who is to reveal
that which God has hidden? To that quarter must we resort in our inquiries
whence we are most safe even in deriving our ignorance. For it is really
better for us not to know a thing, because He has not revealed it to us,
than to know it according to man's wisdom, because he has been bold enough
to assume it.
Chapter II. The Christian Has Sure and Simple Knowledge Concerning the
Subject Before Us.
Of course we shall not deny that philosophers have sometimes thought the
same things as ourselves. The testimony of truth is the issue thereof. It
sometimes happens even in a storm, when the boundaries of sky and sea are
lost in confusion, that some harbour is stumbled on (by the labouring ship)
by some happy chance; and sometimes in the very shades of night, through
blind luck alone, one finds access to a spot, or egress from it. In nature,
however, most conclusions are suggested, as it were, by that common
intelligence wherewith God has been pleased to endow the soul of man. This
intelligence has been caught up by philosophy, and, with the view of
glorifying her own art, has been inflated (it is not to be wondered at that
I use this language) with straining after that facility of language which is
practised in the building up and pulling down of everything, and which has
greater aptitude for persuading men by speaking than by teaching. She
assigns to things their forms and conditions; sometimes makes them common
and public, sometimes appropriates them to private use; on certainties she
capriciously stamps the character of uncertainty; she appeals to precedents,
as if all things are capable of being compared together; she describes all
things by rule and definition, allotting diverse properties even to similar
objects; she attributes nothing to the divine permission, but assumes as her
principles the laws of nature. I could bear with her pretensions, if only
she were herself true to nature, and would prove to me that she had a
mastery over nature as being associated with its creation. She thought, no
doubt, that she was deriving her mysteries from sacred sources, as men deem
them, because in ancient times most authors were supposed to be (I will not
say godlike, but) actually gods: as, for instance, the Egyptian Mercury,
[1486] to whom Plato paid very great deference; [1487] and the Phrygian
Silenus, to whom Midas lent his long ears, when the shepherds brought him to
him; and Hermotimus, to whom the good people of Clazomenµ built a temple
after his death; and Orpheus; and Musµus; and Pherecydes, the master of
Pythagoras. But why need we care, since these philosophers have also made
their attacks upon those writings which are condemned by us under the title
of apocryphal, [1488] certain as we are that nothing ought to be received
which does not agree with the true system of prophecy, which has arisen in
this present age; [1489] because we do not forget that there have been
false prophets, and long previous to them fallen spirits, which have
instructed the entire tone and aspect of the world with cunning knowledge of
this (philosophic) cast? It is, indeed, not incredible that any man who is
in quest of wisdom may have gone so far, as a matter of curiosity, as to
consult the very prophets; (but be this as it may), if you take t he
philosophers, you would find in them more diversity than agreement, since
even in their agreement their diversity is discoverable. Whatever things are
true in their systems, and agreeable to prophetic wisdom, they either
recommend as emanating from some other source, or else perversely apply
[1490] in some other sense. This process is attended with very great
detriment to the truth, when they pretend that it is either helped by
falsehood, or else that falsehood derives support from it. The following
circumstance must needs have set ourselves and the philosophers by the ears,
especially in this present matter, that they sometimes clothe sentiments
which are common to both sides, in arguments which are peculiar to
themselves, but contrary in some points to our rule and standard of faith;
and at other times defend opinions which are especially their, own, with
arguments which both sides acknowledge to be valid, and occasionally
conformable to their system of belief. The truth has, at this rate, been
well-nigh excluded by the philosophers, through the poisons with which they
have infected it; and thus, if we regard both the modes of coalition which
we have now mentioned, and which are equally hostile to the truth, we feel
the urgent necessity of freeing, on the one hand, the sentiments held by us
in common with them from the arguments of the philosophers, and of
separating, on the other hand, the arguments which both parties employ from
the opinions of the same philosophers. And this we may do by recalling all
questions to God's inspired standard, with the obvious exception of such
simple cases as being free from the entanglement of any preconceived
conceits, one may fairly admit on mere human testimony; because plain
evidence of this sort we must sometimes borrow from opponents, when our
opponents have nothing to gain from it. Now I am not unaware what a vast
mass of literature the philosophers have accumulated concerning the subject
before us, in their own commentaries thereon'what various schools of
principles there are, what conflicts of opinion, what prolific sources of
questions, what perplexing methods of solution. Moreover, I have looked into
Medical Science also, the sister (as they say) of Philosophy, which claims
as her function to cure the body, and thereby to have a special acquaintance
with the soul. From this circumstance she has great differences with her
sister, pretending as the latter does to know more about the soul, through
the more obvious treatment, as it were, of her in her domicile of the body.
But never mind all this contention between them for pre-eminence! For
extending their several researches on the soul, Philosophy, on the one hand,
has enjoyed the full scope of her genius; while Medicine, on the other hand,
has possessed the stringent demands of her art and practice. Wide are men's
inquiries into uncertainties; wider still are their disputes about
conjectures. However great the difficulty of adducing proofs, the labour of
producing conviction is not one whit less; so that the gloomy Heraclitus was
quite right, when, observing the thick darkness which obscured the
researches of the inquirers about the soul, and wearied with their
interminable questions, he declared that he had certainly not explored the
limits of the soul, although he had traversed every road in her domains. To
the Christian, however, but few words are necessary for the clear
understanding of the whole subject. But in the few words there always arises
certainty to him; nor is he permitted to give his inquiries a wider range
than is compatible with their solution; for "endless questions" the apostle
forbids. [1491] It must, however, be added, that no solution may be found
by any man, but such as is learned from God; and that which is learned of
God is the sum and substance of the whole thing.
Chapter III. The Soul's Origin Defined Out of the Simple Words of Scripture.
Would to God that no "heresies had been ever necessary, in order that they
which are; approved may be made manifest!" [1492] We should then be never
required to try our strength in contests about the soul with philosophers,
those patriarchs of heretics, as they may be fairly called. [1493] The
apostle, so far back as his own time, foresaw, indeed, that philosophy would
do violent injury to the truth. [1494] This admonition about false
philosophy he was induced to offer after he had been at Athens, had become
acquainted with that loquacious city, [1495] and had there had a taste of
its huckstering wiseacres and talkers. In like manner is the treatment of
the soul according to the sophistical doctrines of men which "mix their wine
with water." [1496] Some of them deny the immortality of the soul; others
affirm that it is immortal, and something more. Some raise disputes about
its substance; others about its form; others, again, respecting each of its
several faculties. One school of philosophers derives its state from various
sources, while another ascribes its departure to different destinations. The
various schools reflect the character of their masters, according as they
have received their impressions from the dignity [1497] of Plato, or the
vigour [1498] of Zeno, or the equanimity [1499] of Aristotle, or the
stupidity [1500] of Epicurus, or the sadness [1501] of Heraclitus, or
the madness [1502] of Empedocles. The fault, I suppose, of the divine
doctrine lies in its springing from Judµa [1503] rather than from Greece.
Christ made a mistake, too, in sending forth fishermen to preach, rather
than the sophist. Whatever noxious vapours, accordingly, exhaled from
philosophy, obscure the clear and wholesome atmosphere of truth, it will be
for Christians to clear away, both by shattering to pieces the arguments
which are drawn from the principles of things'I mean those of the
philosophers'and by opposing to them the maxims of heavenly wisdom'that is,
such as are revealed by the Lord; in order that both the pitfalls wherewith
philosophy captivates the heathen may be removed, and the means employed by
heresy to shake the faith of Christians may be repressed. We have already
decided one point in our controversy with Hermogenes, as we said at the
beginning of this treatise, when we claimed the soul to be formed by the
breathing [1504] of God, and not out of matter. We relied even there on
the clear direction of the inspired statement which informs us how that "the
Lord God breathed on man's face the breath of life, so that man became a
living soul" [1505] 'by that inspiration of God, of course. On this point,
therefore, nothing further need be investigated or advanced by us. It has
its own treatise, [1506] and its own heretic. I shall regard it as my
introduction to the other branches of the subject.
Chapter IV. In Opposition to Plato, the Soul Was Created and Originated at
Birth.
After settling the origin of the soul, its condition or state comes up next.
For when we acknowledge that the soul originates in the breath of God, it
follows that we attribute a beginning to it. This Plato, indeed, refuses to
assign to it, for he will have the soul to be unborn and unmade. [1507]
We, however, from the very fact of its having had a beginning, as well as
from the nature thereof, teach that it had both birth and creation. And when
we ascribe both birth and creation to it, we have made no mistake: for being
born, indeed, is one thing, and being made is another,'the former being the
term which is best suited to living beings. When distinctions, however, have
places and times of their own, they occasionally possess also reciprocity of
application among themselves. Thus, the being made admits of being taken in
the sense of being brought forth; [1508] inasmuch as everything which
receives being or existence, in any way whatever, is in fact generated. For
the maker may really be called the parent of the thing that is made: in this
sense Plato also uses the phraseology. So far, therefore, as concerns our
belief in the souls being made or born, the opinion of the philosopher is
overthrown by the authority of prophecy [1509] even.
Chapter V. Probable View of the Stoics, that the Soul Has a Corporeal
Nature.
Suppose one summons a Eubulus to his assistance, and a Critolaus, and a
Zenocrates, and on this occasion Plato's friend Aristotle. They may very
possibly hold themselves ready for stripping the soul of its corporeity,
unless they happen to see other philosophers opposed to them in their
purpose'and this, too, in greater numbers'asserting for the soul a corporeal
nature. Now I am not referring merely to those who mould the soul out of
manifest bodily substances, as Hipparchus and Heraclitus (do) out of fire;
as Hippon and Thales (do) out of water; as Empedocles and Critias (do) out
of blood; as Epicurus (does) out of atoms, since even atoms by their
coherence form corporeal masses; as Critolaus and his Peripatetics (do) out
of a certain indescribable quintessence, [1510] if that may be called a
body which rather includes and embraces bodily substances;'but I call on the
Stoics also to help me, who, while declaring almost in our own terms that
the soul is a spiritual essence (inasmuch as breath and spirit are in their
nature very near akin to each other), will yet have no difficulty in
persuading (us) that the soul is a corporeal substance. Indeed, Zeno,
defining the soul to be a spirit generated with (the body, [1511] )
constructs his argument in this way: That substance which by its departure
causes the living being to die is a corporeal one. Now it is by the
departure of the spirit, which is generated with (the body, ) that the
living being dies; therefore the spirit which is generated with (the body)
is a corporeal substance. But this spirit which is generated with (the body)
is the soul: it follows, then, that the soul is a corporeal substance.
Cleanthes, too, will have it that family likeness passes from parents to
their children not merely in bodily features, but in characteristics of the
soul; as if it were out of a mirror of (a man's) manners, and faculties, and
affections, that bodily likeness and unlikeness are caught and reflected by
the soul also. It is therefore as being corporeal that it is susceptible of
likeness and unlikeness. Again, there is nothing in common between things
corporeal and things incorporeal as to their susceptibility. But the soul
certainly sympathizes with the body, and shares in its pain, whenever it is
injured by bruises, and wounds, and sores: the body, too, suffers with the
soul, and is united with it (whenever it is afflicted with anxiety,
distress, or love) in the loss of vigour which its companion sustains, whose
shame and fear it testifies by its own blushes and paleness. The soul,
therefore, is (proved to be) corporeal from this inter-communion of
susceptibility. Chrysippus also joins hands in fellowship with Cleanthes
when he lays it down that it is not at all possible for things which are
endued with body to be separated from things which have not body; because
they have no such relation as mutual contact or coherence. Accordingly
Lucretius says: [1512]
"Tangere enim et tangi nisi corpus nulla potest res."
"For nothing but body is capable of touching or of being touched."
(Such severance, however, is quite natural between the soul and the body);
for when the body is deserted by the soul, it is overcome by death. The
soul, therefore, is endued with a body; for if it were not corporeal, it
could not desert the body.
Chapter VI. The Arguments of the Platonists for the Soul's Incorporeality,
Opposed, Perhaps Frivolously.
These conclusions the Platonists disturb more by subtilty than by truth.
Every body, they say, has necessarily either an animate nature [1513] or
an inanimate one. [1514] If it has the inanimate nature, it receives
motion externally to itself; if the animate one, internally. Now the soul
receives motion neither externally nor internally: not externally, since it
has not the inanimate nature; nor internally, because it is itself rather
the giver of motion to the body. It evidently, then, is not a bodily
substance, inasmuch as it receives motion neither way, according to the
nature and law of corporeal substances. Now, what first surprises us here,
is the unsuitableness of a definition which appeals to objects which have no
affinity with the soul. For it is impossible for the soul to be called
either an animate body or an inanimate one, inasmuch as it is the soul
itself which makes the body either animate, if it be present to it, or else
inanimate, if it be absent from it. That, therefore, which produces a
result, cannot itself be the result, so as to be entitled to the designation
of an animate thing or an inanimate one. The soul is so called in respect of
its own substance. If, then, that which is the soul admits not of being
called an animate body or an inanimate one, how can it challenge comparison
with the nature and law of animate and inanimate bodies? Furthermore, since
it is characteristic of a body to be moved externally by something else, and
as we have already shown that the soul receives motion from some other thing
when it is swayed (from the outside, of course, by something else) by
prophetic influence or by madness, therefore I must be right in regarding
that as bodily substance which, according to the examples we have quoted, is
moved by some other object from without. Now, if to receive motion from some
other thing is characteristic of a body, how much more is it so to impart
motion to something else! But the soul moves the body, all whose efforts are
apparent externally, and from without. It is the soul which gives motion to
the feet for walking, and to the hands for touching, and to the eyes for
sight, and to the tongue for speech'a sort of internal image which moves and
animates the surface. Whence could accrue such power to the soul, if it were
incorporeal? How could an unsubstantial thing propel solid objects? But in
what way do the senses in man seem to be divisible into the corporeal and
the intellectual classes? They tell is that the qualities of things
corporeal, such as earth and fire, are indicated by the bodily senses'of
touch and sight; whilst (the qualities) of incorporeal things'for instance,
benevolence and malignity'are discovered by the intellectual faculties. And
from this (they deduce what is to them) the manifest conclusion, that the
soul is incorporeal, its properties being comprehended by the perception not
of bodily organs, but of intellectual faculties. Well, (I shall be much
surprised) if I do not at once cut away the very ground on which their
argument stands. For I show them how incorporeal things are commonly
submitted to the bodily senses'sound, for instance, to the organ of hearing;
colour, to the organ of sight; smell, to the olfactory organ. And, just as
in these instances, the soul likewise has its contact with [1515] the
body; not to say that the incorporeal objects are reported to us through the
bodily organs, for the express reason that they come into contact with the
said organs. Inasmuch, then, as it is evident that even incorporeal objects
are embraced and comprehended by corporeal ones, why should not the soul,
which is corporeal, be equally comprehended and understood by incorporeal
faculties? It is thus certain that their argument fails. Among their more
conspicuous arguments will be found this, that in their judgment every
bodily substance is nourished by bodily substances; whereas the soul, as
being an incorporeal essence, is nourished by incorporeal aliments'for
instance, by the studies of wisdom. But even this ground has no stability in
it, since Soranus, who is a most accomplished authority in medical science,
affords us as answer, when he asserts that the soul is even nourished by
corporeal aliments; that in fact it is, when failing and weak, actually
refreshed oftentimes by food. Indeed, when deprived of all food, does not
the soul entirely remove from the body? Soranus, then, after discoursing
about the soul in the amplest manner, filling four volumes with his
dissertations, and after weighing well all the opinions of the philosophers,
defends the corporeality of the soul, although in the process he has robbed
it of its immortality. For to all men it is not given to believe the truth
which Christians are privileged to hold. As, therefore, Soranus has shown us
from facts that the soul is nourished by corporeal aliments, let the
philosopher (adopt a similar mode of proof, and) show that it is sustained
by an incorporeal food. But the fact is, that no one has even been able to
quench this man's [1516] doubts and difficulties about the condition of
the soul with the honey-water of Plato's subtle eloquence, nor to surfeit
them with the crumbs from the minute nostrums of Aristotle. But what is to
become of the souls of all those robust barbarians, which have had no
nurture of philosopher's lore indeed, and yet are strong in untaught
practical wisdom, and which although very starvelings in philosophy, without
your Athenian academies and porches, and even the prison of Socrates, do yet
contrive to live? For it is not the soul's actual substance which is
benefited by the aliment of learned study, but only its conduct and
discipline; such ailment contributing nothing to increase its bulk, but only
to enhance its grace. It is, moreover, a happy circumstance that the Stoics
affirm that even the arts have corporeality; since at the rate the soul too
must be corporeal, since it is commonly supposed to be nourished by the
arts. Such, however, is the enormous preoccupation of the philosophic mind,
that it is generally unable to see straight before it. Hence (the story of)
Thales falling into the well. [1517] It very commonly, too, through not
understanding even its own opinions, suspects a failure of its own health.
Hence (the story of) Chrysippus and the hellebore. Some such hallucination,
I take it, must have occurred to him, when he asserted that two bodies could
not possibly be contained in one: he must have kept out of mind and sight
the case of those pregnant women who, day after day, bear not one body, but
even two and three at a time, within the embrace of a single womb. One finds
likewise, in the records of the civil law, the instance of a certain Greek
woman who gave birth to a quint [1518] of children, the mother of all
these at one parturition, the manifold parent of a single brood, the
prolific produce from a single womb, who, guarded by so many bodies'I had
almost said, a people'was herself no less then the sixth person! The whole
creation testifies how that those bodies which are naturally destined to
issue from bodies, are already (included) in that from which they proceed.
Now that which proceeds from some other thing must needs be second to it.
Nothing, however, proceeds out of another thing except by the process of
generation; but then they are two (things).
Chapter VII. The Soul's Corporeality Demonstrated Out of the Gospels.
So far as the philosophers are concerned, we have said enough. As for our
own teachers, indeed, our reference to them is ex abundanti'a surplusage of
authority: in the Gospel itself they will be found to have the clearest
evidence for the corporeal nature of the soul. In hell the soul of a certain
man is in torment, punished in flames, suffering excruciating thirst, and
imploring from the finger of a happier soul, for his tongue, the solace of a
drop of water. [1519] Do you suppose that this end of the blessed poor man
and the miserable rich man is only imaginary? Then why the name of Lazarus
in this narrative, if the circumstance is not in (the category of) a real
occurrence? But even if it is to be regarded as imaginary, it will still be
a testimony to truth and reality. For unless the soul possessed
corporeality, the image of a soul could not possibly contain a finger of a
bodily substance; nor would the Scripture feign a statement about the limbs
of a body, if these had no existence. But what is that which is removed to
Hades [1520] after the separation of the body; which is there detained;
which is reserved until the day of judgment; to which Christ also, on dying,
descended? I imagine it is the souls of the patriarchs. But wherefore (all
this), if the soul is nothing in its subterranean abode? For nothing it
certainly is, if it is not a bodily substance. For whatever is incorporeal
is incapable of being kept and guarded in any way; it is also exempt from
either punishment or refreshment. That must be a body, by which punishment
and refreshment can be experienced. Of this I shall treat more fully in a
more fitting place. Therefore, whatever amount of punishment or refreshment
the soul tastes in Hades, in its prison or lodging, [1521] in the fire or
in Abraham's bosom, it gives proof thereby of its own corporeality. For an
incorporeal thing suffers nothing, not having that which makes it capable of
suffering; else, if it has such capacity, it must be a bodily substance. For
in as far as every corporeal thing is capable of suffering, in so far is
that which is capable of suffering also corporeal. [1522]
Chapter VIII. Other Platonist Arguments Considered.
Besides, it would be a harsh and absurd proceeding to exempt anything from
the class cf corporeal beings, on the ground that it is not exactly like the
other constituents of that class. And where individual creature's possess
various properties, does not this variety in works of the same class
indicate the greatness of the Creator, in making them at the same time
different and yet like, amicable yet rivals? Indeed, the philosophers
themselves agree in saying that the universe consists of harmonious
oppositions, according to Empedocles' (theory of) friendship and enmity.
Thus, then, although corporeal essences are opposed to incorporeal ones,
they yet differ from each other in such sort as to amplify their species by
their variety, without changing their genus, remaining all alike corporeal;
contributing to God's glory in their manifold existence by reason of their
variety; so various, by reason of their differences; so diverse, in that
some of them possess one kind of perception, others another; some feeding on
one kind of aliment, others on another; some, again, possessing visibility,
while others are invisible; some being weighty, others light. They are in
the habit of saying that the soul must be pronounced incorporeal on this
account, because the bodies of the dead, after its departure from them,
become heavier, whereas they ought to be lighter, being deprived of the
weight of a body'since the soul is a bodily substance. But what, says
Soranus (in answer to this argument), if men should deny that the sea is a
bodily substance, because a ship out of the water becomes a heavy and
motionless mass? How much truer and stronger, then, is the soul's corporeal
essence, which carries about the body, which eventually assumes so great a
weight with the nimblest motion! Again, even if the soul is invisible, it is
only in strict accordance with the condition of its own corporeality, and
suitably to the property of its own essence, as well as to the nature of
even those beings to which its destiny made it to be invisible. The eyes of
the owl cannot endure the sun, whilst the eagle is so well able to face his
glory, that the noble character of its young is determined by the unblinking
strength of their gaze; while the eaglet, which turns away its eye from the
sun's ray, is expelled from the nest as a degenerate creature! So true is
it, therefore, than to one eye an object is invisible, which may be quite
plainly seen by another,'without implying any incorporeality in that which
is not endued with an equally strong power (of vision). The sun is indeed a
bodily substance, because it is (composed of) fire; the object, however,
which the eaglet at once admits the existence of, the owl denies, without.
any prejudice, nevertheless, to the testimony of the eagle. There is the
selfsame difference in respect of the soul's corporeality, which is
(perhaps) invisible to the flesh, but perfectly visible to the spirit. Thus
John, being "in the Spirit" of God, [1523] beheld plainly the souls of the
martyrs. [1524]
Chapter IX. Particulars of the Alleged Communication to a Montanist Sister.
When we aver that the soul has a body of a quality and kind peculiar to
itself, in this special condition of it we shall be already supplied with a
decision respecting all the other accidents of its corporeity; how that they
belong to it, because we have shown it to be a body, but that even they have
a quality peculiar to themselves, proportioned to the special nature of the
body (to which they belong); or else, if any accidents (of a body) are
remarkable in this instance for their absence, then this, too, results from
the peculiarity of the condition of the soul's corporeity, from which are
absent sundry qualities which are present to all other corporeal beings. And
yet, notwithstanding all this, we shall not be at all inconsistent if we
declare that the more usual characteristics of a body, such as invariably
accrue to the corporeal condition, belong also to the soul'such as form
[1525] and limitation; and that triad of dimensions [1526] 'I mean length,
and breadth and height'by which philosophers gauge al bodies. What now
remains but for us to give the soul a figure? [1527] Plato refuses to do
this, as if it endangered the soul's immortality. [1528] For everything
which has figure is, according to him, compound, and composed of parts;
[1529] whereas the soul is immortal; and being immortal, it is therefore
indissoluble; and being indissoluble, it is figureless: for if, on the
contrary, it had figure, it would be of a composite and structural
formation. He, however, in some other manner frames for the soul an effigy
of intellectual forms, beautiful for its just symmetry and tuitions of
philosophy, but misshapen by some contrary qualities. As for ourselves,
indeed, we inscribe on the soul the lineaments of corporeity, not simply
from the assurance which reasoning has taught us of its corporeal nature,
but also from the firm conviction which divine grace impresses on us by
revelation. For, seeing that we acknowledge spiritual charismata, or gifts,
we too have merited the attainment of the prophetic gift, although coming
after John (the Baptist). We have now amongst us a sister whose lot it has
been to be favoured with sundry gifts of revelation, which she experiences
in the Spirit by ecstatic vision amidst the sacred rites of the Lord's day
in the church: she converses with angels, and sometimes even with the Lord;
she both sees and hears mysterious communications; [1530] some men's
hearts she understands, and to them who are in need she distributes
remedies. Whether it be in the reading of Scriptures, or in the chanting of
psalms, or in the preaching of sermons, or in the offering up of prayers, in
all these religious services matter and opportunity are afforded to her of
seeing visions. It may possibly have happened to us, whilst this sister of
ours was rapt in the Spirit, that we had discoursed in some ineffable way
about the soul. After the people are dismissed at the conclusion of the
sacred services, she is in the regular habit of reporting to us whatever
things she may have seen in vision (for all her communications are examined
with the most scrupulous care, in order that their truth may be probed).
"Amongst other things," says she, "there has been shown to me a soul in
bodily shape, and a spirit has been in the habit of appearing to me; not,
however, a void and empty illusion, but such as would offer itself to be
even grasped by the hand, soft and transparent and of an etherial colour,
and in form resembling that of a human being in every respect." This was her
vision, and for her witness there was God; and the apostle most assuredly
foretold that there were to be "spiritual gifts" in the church. [1531]
Now, can you refuse to believe this, even if indubitable evidence on every
point is forthcoming for your conviction? Since, then, the soul is a
corporeal substance, no doubt it possesses qualities such as those which we
have just mentioned, amongst them the property of colour, which is inherent
in every bodily substance. Now what colour would you attribute to the soul
but an etherial transparent one? Not that its substance is actually the
ether or air (although this was the opinion of ¦nesidemus and Anaximenes,
and I suppose of Heraclitus also, as some say of him), nor transparent light
(although Heraclides of Pontus held it to be so). "Thunder-stones," [1532]
indeed, are not of igneous substance, because they shine with ruddy redness;
nor are beryls composed of aqueous matter, because they are of a pure wavy
whiteness. How many things also besides these are there which their colour
would associate in the same class, but which nature keeps widely apart!
Since, however, everything which is very attenuated and transparent bears a
strong resemblance to the air, such would be the case with the soul, since
in its material nature [1533] it is wind and breath, (or spirit); whence
it is that the belief of its corporeal quality is endangered, in consequence
of the extreme tenuity and subtilty of its essence. Likewise, as regards the
figure of the human soul from your own conception, you can well imagine that
it is none other than the human form; indeed, none other than the shape of
that body which each individual soul animates and moves about. This we may
at once be induced to admit from contemplating man's original formation. For
only carefully consider, after God hath breathed upon the face of man the
breath of life, and man had consequently become a living soul, surely that
breath must have passed through the face at once into the interior
structure, and have spread itself throughout all the spaces of the body; and
as soon as by the divine inspiration it had become condensed, it must have
impressed itself on each internal feature, which the condensation had filled
in, and so have been, as it were, congealed in shape, (or stereotyped).
Hence, by this densifying process, there arose a fixing of the soul's
corporeity; and by the impression its figure was formed and moulded. This is
the inner man, different from the outer, but yet one in the twofold
condition. [1534] It, too, has eyes and ears of its own, by means of which
Paul must have heard and seen the Lord; [1535] it has, moreover all the
other members of the body by the help of which it effects all processes of
thinking and all activity in dreams. Thus it happens that the rich man in
hell has a tongue and poor (Lazarus) a finger and Abraham a bosom. [1536]
By these features also the souls of the martyrs under the altar are
distinguished and known. The soul indeed which in the beginning was
associated with Adam's body, which grew with its growth and was moulded
after its form proved to be the germ both of the entire substance (of the
human soul) and of that (part of) creation.
Chapter X. The Simple Nature of the Soul is Asserted with Plato. The
Identity of Spirit and Soul.
It is essential to a firm faith to declare with Plato [1537] that the soul
is simple; in other words uniform and uncompounded; simply that is to say in
respect of its substance. Never mind men's artificial views and theories,
and away with the fabrications of heresy! [1538] Some maintain that there
is within the soul a natural substance'the spirit'which is different from
it: [1539] as if to have life'the function of the soul'were one thing; and
to emit breath'the alleged [1540] function of the spirit'were another
thing. Now it is not in all animals that these two functions are found; for
there are many which only live but do not breathe in that they do not
possess the organs of respiration'lungs and windpipes. [1541] But of what
use is it, in an examination of the soul of man, to borrow proofs from a
gnat or an ant, when the great Creator in His divine arrangements has
allotted to every animal organs of vitality suited to its own disposition
and nature, so that we ought not to catch at any conjectures from
comparisons of this sort? Man, indeed, although organically furnished with
lungs and windpipes, will not on that account be proved to breathe by one
process, and to live by another; [1542] nor can the ant, although
defective in these organs, be on that account said to be without
respiration, as if it lived and that was all. For by whom has so clear an
insight into the works of God been really attained, as to entitle him to
assume that these organic resources are wanting to any living thing? There
is that Herophilus, the well-known surgeon, or (as I may almost call him)
butcher, who cut up no end of persons, [1543] in order to investigate the
secrets of nature, who ruthlessly handled [1544] human creatures to
discover (their form and make): I have my doubts whether he succeeded in
clearly exploring all the internal parts of their structure, since death
itself changes and disturbs the natural functions of life, especially when
the death is not a natural one, but such as must cause irregularity and
error amidst the very processes of dissection. Philosophers have affirmed it
to be a certain fact, that gnats, and ants, and moths have no pulmonary or
arterial organs. Well, then, tell me, you curious and elaborate investigator
of these mysteries, have they eyes for seeing withal? But yet they proceed
to whatever point they wish, and they both shun and aim at various objects
by processes of sight: point out their eyes to me, show me their pupils.
Moths also gnaw and eat: demonstrate to me their mandibles, reveal their
jaw-teeth. Then, again, gnats hum and buzz, nor even in the dark are they
unable to find their way to our ears: [1545] point out to me, then, not
only the noisy tube, but the stinging lance of that mouth of theirs. Take
any living thing whatever, be it the tiniest you can find, it must needs be
fed and sustained by some food or other: show me, then, their organs for
taking into their system, digesting, and ejecting food. What must we say,
therefore? If it is by such instruments that life is maintained, these
instrumental means must of course exist in all things which are to live,
even though they are not apparent to the eye or to the apprehension by
reason of their minuteness. You can more readily believe this, if you
remember that God manifests His creative greatness quite as much in small
objects as in the very largest. If, however, you suppose that God's wisdom
has no capacity for forming such infinitesimal corpuscles, you can still
recognise His greatness, in that He has furnished even to the smallest
animals the functions of life, although in the absence of the suitable
organs,'securing to them the power of sight, even without eyes; of eating,
even without teeth; and of digestion, even without stomachs. Some animals
also have the ability to move forward without feet, as serpents, by a
gliding motion; or as worms, by vertical efforts; or as snails and slugs, by
their slimy crawl. Why should you not then believe that respiration likewise
may be effected without the bellows of the lungs, and without arterial
canals? You would thus supply yourself with a strong proof that the spirit
or breath is an adjunct of the human soul, for the very reason that some
creatures lack breath, and that they lack it because they are not furnished
with organs of respiration. You think it possible for a thing to live
without breath; then why not suppose that a thing might breathe without
lungs? Pray, tell me, what is it to breathe? I suppose it means to emit
breath from yourself. What is it not to live? I suppose it means not to emit
breath from yourself. This is the answer which I should have to make, if "to
breathe" is not the same thing as "to live." It must, however, be
characteristic of a dead man not to respire: to respire, therefore, is the
characteristic of a living man. But to respire is likewise the
characteristic of a breathing man: therefore also to breathe is the
characteristic of a living man. Now, if both one and the other could
possibly have been accomplished without the soul, to breathe might not be a
function of the soul, but merely to live. But indeed to live is to breathe,
and to breathe is to live. Therefore this entire process, both of breathing
and living, belongs to that to which living belongs'that is, to the soul.
Well, then, since you separate the spirit (or breath) and the soul, separate
their operations also. Let both of them accomplish some act apart from one
another'the soul apart, the spirit apart. Let the soul live without the
spirit; let the spirit breathe without the soul. Let one of them quit men's
bodies, let the other remain; let death and life meet and agree. If indeed
the soul and the spirit are two, they may be divided; and thus, by the
separation of the one which departs from the one which remains, there would
accrue the union and meeting together of life and of death. But such a union
never will accrue: therefore they are not two, and they cannot be divided;
but divided they might have been, if they had been (two). Still two things
may surely coalesce in growth. But the two in question never will coalesce,
since to live is one thing, and to breathe is another. Substances are
distinguished by their operations. How much firmer ground have you for
believing that the soul and the spirit are but one, since you assign to them
no difference; so that the soul is itself the spirit, respiration being the
function of that of which life also is! But what if you insist on supposing
that the day is one thing, and the light, which is incidental to the day, is
another thing, whereas day is only the light itself? There must, of course,
be also different kinds of light, as (appears) from the ministry of fires.
So likewise will there be different sorts of spirits, according as they
emanate from God or from the devil. Whenever, indeed, the question is about
soul and spirit, the soul will be (understood to be) itself the spirit, just
is the day is the light itself. For a thing is itself identical with that by
means of which itself exists.
Chapter XI. Spirit'A Term Expressive of an Operation of the Soul, Not of Its
Nature. To Be Carefully Distinguished from the Spirit of God.
But the nature of my present inquiry obliges me to call the soul spirit or
breath, because to breathe is ascribed to another substance. We, however,
claim this (operation) for the soul, which we acknowledge to be an
indivisible simple substance, and therefore we must call it spirit in a
definitive sense'not because of its condition, but of its action; not in
respect of its nature, but of its operation; because it respires, and not
because it is spirit in any especial sense. [1546] For to blow or breathe
is to respire. So that we are driven to describe, by (the term which
indicates this respiration'that is to say) spirit'the soul which we hold to
be, by the propriety of its action, breath. Moreover, we properly and
especially insist on calling it breath (or spirit), in opposition to
Hermogenes, who derives the soul from matter instead of from the afflatus or
breath of God. He, to be sure, goes flatly against the testimony of
Scripture, and with this view converts breath into spirit, because he cannot
believe that the (creature on which was breathed the) Spirit of God fell
into sin, and then into condemnation; and therefore he would conclude that
the soul came from matter rather than from the Spirit or breath of God. For
this reason, we on our side even from that passage, maintain the soul to be
breath and not the spirit, in the scriptural and distinctive sense of the
spirit; and here it is with regret that we apply the term spirit at all in
the lower sense, in consequence of the identical action of respiring and
breathing. In that passage, the only question is about the natural
substance; to respire being an act of nature. I would not tarry a moment
longer on this point, were it not for those heretics who introduce into the
soul some spiritual germ which passes my comprehension: (they make it to
have been) conferred upon the soul by the secret liberality of her mother
Sophia (Wisdom), without the knowledge of the Creator. [1547] But (Holy)
Scripture, which has a better knowledge of the soul's Maker, or rather God,
has told us nothing more than that God breathed on man's face the breath of
life, and that man became a living soul, by means of which he was both to
live and breathe; at the same time making a sufficiently clear distinction
between the spirit and the soul, [1548] in such passages as the following,
wherein God Himself declares: "My Spirit went forth from me, and I made the
breath of each. And the breath of my Spirit became soul." [1549] And
again: "He giveth breath unto the people that are on the earth, and Spirit
to them that walk thereon." [1550] First of all there comes the (natural)
soul, that is to say, the breath, to the people that are on the earth,'in
other words, to those who act carnally in the flesh; then afterwards comes
the Spirit to those who walk thereon,'that is, who subdue the works of the
flesh; because the apostle also says, that "that is not first which is
spiritual, but that which is natural, (or in possession of the natural soul,
) and afterward that which is spiritual." [1551] For, inasmuch as Adam
straightway predicted that "great mystery of Christ and the church,"
[1552] when he said, "This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh;
therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto
his wife, and they two shall become one flesh," [1553] he experienced the
influence of the Spirit. For there fell upon him that ecstasy, which is the
Holy Ghost's operative virtue of prophecy. And even the evil spirit too is
an influence which comes upon a man. Indeed, the Spirit of God not more
really "turned Saul into another man," [1554] that is to say, into a
prophet, when "people said one to another, What is this which is come to the
son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets? " [1555] than did the evil
spirit afterwards turn him into another man'in other words, into an
apostate. Judas likewise was for a long time reckoned among the elect
(apostles), and was even appointed to the office of their treasurer; he was
not yet the traitor, although he was become fraudulent; but afterwards the
devil entered into him. Consequently, as the spirit neither of God nor of
the devil is naturally planted with a man's soul at his birth, this soul
must evidently exist apart and alone, previous to the accession to it of
either spirit: if thus apart and alone, it must also be simple and
un-compounded as regards its substance; and therefore it cannot respire from
any other cause than from the actual condition of its own substance.
Chapter XII. Difference Between the Mind and the Soul, and the Relation
Between Them.
In like manner the mind also, or animus, which the Greeks designate Nous, is
taken by us in no other sense than as indicating that faculty or apparatus
[1556] which is inherent and implanted in the soul, and naturally proper to
it, whereby it acts, whereby it acquires knowledge, and by the possession of
which it is capable of a spontaneity of motion within itself, and of thus
appearing to be impelled by the mind, as if it were another substance, as is
maintained by those who determine the soul to be the moving principle of the
universe [1557] 'the god of Socrates, Valentinus' "only-begotten" of his
father [1558] Bythus, and his mother Sige. How confused is the opinion of
Anaxagoras! For, having imagined the mind to be the initiating principle of
all things, and suspending on its axis the balance of the universe;
affirming, moreover, that the mind is a simple principle, unmixed, and
incapable of admixture, he mainly on this very consideration separates it
from all amalgamation with the soul; and yet in another passage he actually
incorporates it with [1559] the soul. This (inconsistency) Aristotle has
also observed: but whether he meant his criticism to be constructive, and to
fill up a system of his own, rather than destructive of the principles of
others, I am hardly able to decide. As for himself, indeed, although he
postpones his definition of the mind, yet he begins by mentioning, as one of
the two natural constituents of the mind, [1560] that divine principle
which he conjectures to be impassible, or incapable of emotion, and thereby
removes from all association with the soul. For whereas it is evident that
the soul is susceptible of those emotions which it falls to it naturally to
suffer, it must needs suffer either by the mind or with the mind. Now if the
soul is by nature associated with the mind, it is impossible to draw the
conclusion that the mind is impassible; or again, if the soul suffers not
either by the mind or with the mind, it cannot possibly have a natural
association with the mind, with which it suffers nothing, and which suffers
nothing itself. Moreover, if the soul suffers nothing by the mind and with
the mind, it will experience no sensation, nor will it acquire any
knowledge, nor will it undergo any emotion through the agency of the mind,
as they maintain it will. For Aristotle makes even the senses passions, or
states of emotion And rightly too. For to exercise the senses is to suffer
emotion, because to suffer is to feel. In like manner, to acquire knowledge
is to exercise the senses; and to undergo emotion is to exercise the senses;
and the whole of this is a state of suffering. But we see that the soul
experiences nothing of these things, in such a manner as that the mind also
is affected by the emotion, by which, indeed, and with which, all is
effected. It follows, therefore, that the mind is capable of admixture, in
opposition to Anaxagoras; and passible or susceptible of emotion, contrary
to the opinion of Aristotle. Besides, if a separate condition between the
soul and mind is to be admitted, so that they be two things in substance,
then of one of them, emotion and sensation, and every sort of taste, and all
action and motion, will be the characteristics; whilst of the other the
natural condition will be calm, and repose, and stupor. There is therefore
no alternative: either the mind must be useless and void, or the soul. But
if these affections may certainly be all of them ascribed to both, then in
that case the two will be one and the same, and Democritus will carry his
point when he suppresses all distinction between the two. The question will
arise how two can be one'whether by the confusion of two substances, or by
the disposition of one? We, however, affirm that the mind coalesces with
[1561] the soul,'not indeed as being distinct from it in substance, but as
being its natural function and agent. [1562]
Chapter XIII. The Soul's Supremacy.
It next remains to examine where lies the supremacy; in other words, which
of the two is superior to the other, so that with which the supremacy
clearly lies shall be the essentially superior substance; [1563] whilst
that over which this essentially superior substance shall have authority
shall be considered as the natural functionary of the superior substance.
Now who will hesitate to ascribe this entire authority to the soul, from the
name of which the whole man has received his own designation in common
phraseology? How many souls, says the rich man, do I maintain? not how many
minds. The pilot's desire, also, is to rescue so many souls from shipwreck,
not so many minds; the labourer, too, in his work, and the soldier on the
field of battle, affirms that he lays down his soul (or life), not his mind.
Which of the two has its perils or its vows and wishes more frequently on
men's lips'the mind or the soul? Which of the two are dying persons, said to
have to do with the mind or the soul? In short, philosophers themselves, and
medical men, even when it is their purpose to discourse about the mind, do
in every instance inscribe on their title-page [1564] and table of
contents, [1565] "De Anima" ("A treatise on the soul"). And that you may
also have God's voucher on the subject, it is the soul which He addresses;
it is the soul which He exhorts and counsels, to turn the mind and intellect
to Him. It is the soul which Christ came to save; it is the soul which He
threatens to destroy in hell; it is the soul (or life) which He forbids
being made too much of; it is His soul, too (or life), which the good
Shepherd Himself lays down for His sheep. It is to the soul, therefore, that
you ascribe the supremacy; in it also you possess that union of substance,
of which you perceive the mind to be the instrument, not the ruling power.
Chapter XIV. The Soul Variously Divided by the Philosophers; This Division
is Not a Material Dissection.
Being thus single, simple, and entire in itself, it is as incapable of being
composed and put together from external constituents, as it is of being
divided in and of itself, inasmuch as it is indissoluble. For if it had been
possible to construct it and to destroy it, it would no longer be immortal.
Since, however, it is not mortal, it is also incapable of dissolution and
division. Now, to be divided means to be dissolved, and to be dissolved
means to die. Yet (philosophers) have divided the soul into parts: Plato,
for instance, into two; Zeno into three; Panµtius, into five or six;
Soranus, into seven; Chrysippus, into as many as eight; and Apollophanes,
into as many as nine; whilst certain of the Stoics have found as many as
twelve parts in the soul. Posidonius makes even two more than these: he
starts with two leading faculties of the soul,'the directing faculty, which
they designate and the rational faculty, which they call
,'and ultimately subdivided these into seventeen [1566] parts.
Thus variously is the soul dissected by the different schools. Such
divisions, however, ought not to be regarded so much as parts of the soul,
as powers, or faculties, or operations thereof, even as Aristotle himself
has regarded some of them as being. For they are not portions or organic
parts of the soul's substance, but functions of the soul'such as those of
motion, of action, of thought, and whatsoever others they divide in this
manner; such, likewise, as the five senses themselves, so well known to
all'seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling. Now, although they have
allotted to the whole of these respectively certain parts of the body as
their special domiciles, it does not from that circumstance follow that a
like distribution will be suitable to the sections of the soul; for even the
body itself would not admit of such a partition as they would have the soul
undergo. But of the whole number of the limbs one body is made up, so that
the arrangement is rather a concretion than a division. Look at that very
wonderful piece of organic mechanism by Archimedes,'I mean his hydraulic
organ, with its many limbs, parts, bands, passages for the notes, outlets
for their sounds, combinations for their harmony, and the array of its
pipes; but yet the whole of these details constitute only one instrument. In
like manner the wind, which breathes throughout this organ at the impulse of
the hydraulic engine, is not divided into separate portions from the fact of
its dispersion through the instrument to make it play: it is whole and
entire in its substance, although divided in its operation. This example is
not remote from (the illustration) of Strato, and ¦nesidemus, and
Heraclitus: for these philosophers maintain the unity of the soul, as
diffused over the entire body, and yet in every part the same. [1567]
Precisely like the wind blown in the pipes throughout the organ, the soul
displays its energies in various ways by means of the senses, being not
indeed divided, but rather distributed in natural order. Now, under what
designations these energies are to be known, and by what divisions of
themselves they are to be classified, and to what special offices and
functions in the body they are to be severally confined, the physicians and
the philosophers must consider and decide: for ourselves, a few remarks only
will be proper.
Chapter XV. The Soul's Vitality and Intelligence. Its Character and Seat in
Man.
In the first place, (we must determine) whether there be in the soul some
supreme principle of vitality and intelligence [1568] which they call "the
ruling power of the soul"' for if this be not admitted, the
whole condition of the soul is put in jeopardy. Indeed, those men who say
that there is no such directing faculty, have begun by supposing that the
soul itself is simply a nonentity. One , a Messenian, and amongst
the medical profession Andreas and Asclepiades, have thus destroyed the
(soul's) directing power, by actually placing in the mind the senses, for
which they claim the ruling faculty. Asclepiades rides rough-shod over us
with even this argument, that very many animals, after losing those parts of
their body in which the soul's principle of vitality and sensation is
thought mainly to exist, still retain life in a considerable degree, as well
as sensation: as in the case of flies, and wasps, and locusts, when you have
cut off their heads; and of she-goats, and tortoises, and eels, when you
have pulled out their hearts. (He concludes), therefore, that there is no
especial principle or power of the soul; for if there were, the soul's
vigour and strength could not continue when it was removed with its
domiciles (or corporeal organs). However, Dicµarchus has several authorities
against him'and philosophers too'Plato, Strato, Epicurus, Democritus,
Empedocles, Socrates, Aristotle; whilst in opposition to Andreas and
Asclepiades (may be placed their brother) physicians Herophilus,
Erasistratus, Diocles, Hippocrates, and Soranus himself; and better than all
others, there are our Christian authorities. We are taught by God concerning
both these questions'viz. that there is a ruling power in the soul, and that
it is enshrined [1569] in one particular recess of the body. For, when one
reads of God as being "the searcher and witness of the heart; " [1570]
when His prophet is reproved by His discovering to him the secrets of the
heart; [1571] when God Himself anticipates in His people the thoughts of
their heart, [1572] "Why think ye evil in your hearts? " [1573] when
David prays "Create in me a clean heart, O God," [1574] and Paul
declares, "With the heart man believeth unto righteousness," [1575] and
John says, "By his own heart is each man condemned; " [1576] when,
lastly, "he who looketh on a woman so as to lust after her, hath already
committed adultery with her in his heart," [1577] 'then both points are
cleared fully up, that there is a directing faculty of the soul, with which
the purpose of God may agree; in other words, a supreme principle of
intelligence and vitality (for where there is intelligence, there must be
vitality), and that it resides in that most precious part [1578] of our
body to which God especially looks: so that you must not suppose, with
Heraclitus, that this sovereign faculty of which we are treating is moved by
some external force; nor with Moschion, [1579] that it floats about
through the whole body; nor with Plato, that it is enclosed in the head; nor
with Zenophanes, that it culminates in the crown of the head; nor that it
reposes in the brain, according to the opinion of Hippocrates; nor around
the basis of the brain, as Herophilus thought; nor in the membranes thereof,
as Strato and Erasistratus said; nor in the space between the eyebrows, as
Strato the physician held; nor within the enclosure [1580] of the breast,
according to Epicurus: but rather, as the Egyptians have always taught,
especially such of them as were accounted the expounders of sacred
truths; [1581] in accordance, too, with that verse of Orpheus or
Empedocles:
"Namque homini sanguis circumcordialis est sensus." [1582]
"Man has his (supreme) sensation in the blood around his heart."
Even Protagoras [1583] likewise, and Apollodorus, and Chrysippus,
entertain this same view, so that (our friend) Asclepiades may go in quest
of his goats bleating without a heart, and hunt his flies without their
heads; and let all those (worthies), too, who have predetermined the
character of the human soul from the condition of brute animals, be quite
sure that it is themselves rather who are alive in a heartless and brainless
state.
Chapter XVI. The Soul's Parts. Elements of the Rational Soul.
That position of Plato's is also quite in keeping with the faith, in which
he divides the soul into two parts'the rational and the irrational. To this
definition we take no exception, except that we would not ascribe this
twofold distinction to the nature (of the soul). It is the rational element
which we must believe to be its natural condition, impressed upon it from
its very first creation by its Author, who is Himself essentially rational.
For how should that be other than rational, which God produced on His own
prompting; nay more, which He expressly sent forth by His own afflatus or
breath? The irrational element, however, we must understand to have accrued
later, as having proceeded from the instigation of the serpent'the very
achievement of (the first) transgression' which thenceforward became inherent
in the soul, and grew with its growth, assuming the manner by this time of a
natural development, happening as it did immediately at the beginning of
nature. But, inasmuch as the same Plato speaks of the rational element only
as existing in the soul of God Himself, if we were to ascribe the irrational
element likewise to the nature which our soul has received from God, then
the irrational element will be equally derived from God, as being a natural
production, because God is the author of nature. Now from the devil proceeds
the incentive to sin. All sin, however, is irrational: therefore the
irrational proceeds from the devil, from whom sin proceeds; and it is
extraneous to God, to whom also the irrationalis an alien principle. The
diversity, then, between these two elements arises from the difference of
their authors. When, therefore, Plato reserves the rational element (of the
soul) to God alone, and subdivides it into two departments the irascible,
which they call , and the concupiscible, which they designate by
the term (in such a way as to make the first common to us and
lions, and the second shared between ourselves and flies, whilst the
rational element is confined to us and God)'I see that this point will have
to be treated by us, owing to the facts which we find operating also in
Christ. For you may behold this triad of qualities in the Lord. There was
the rational element, by which He taught, by which He discoursed, by which
He prepared the way of salvation; there was moreover indignation in Him, by
which He inveighed against the scribes and the Pharisees; and there was the
principle of desire, by which He so earnestly desired to eat the pass over
with His disciples. [1584] In our own cases, accordingly, the irascible
and the concupiscible elements of our soul must not invariably be put to the
account of the irrational (nature), since we are sure that in our Lord these
elements operated in entire accordance with reason. God will be angry, with
perfect reason, with all who deserve His wrath; and with reason, too, will
God desire whatever objects and claims are worthy of Himself. For He will
show indignation against the evil man, and for the good man will He desire
salvation. To ourselves even does the apostle allow the concupiscible
quality. "If any man," says he, "desireth the office of a bishop, he
desireth a good work." [1585] Now, by saying "a good work," he shows us
that the desire is a reasonable one. He permits us likewise to feel
indignation. How should he not, when he himself experiences the same? "I
would," says he, "that they were even cut off which trouble you." [1586]
In perfect agreement with reason was that indignation which resulted from
his desire to maintain discipline and order. When, however, he says, "We
were formerly the children of wrath," [1587] he censures an irrational
irascibility, such as proceeds not from that nature which is the production
of God, but from that which the devil brought in, who is himself styled the
lord or "master" of his own class, "Ye cannot serve two masters," [1588]
and has the actual designation of "father: ""Ye are of your father the
devil." [1589] So that you need not be afraid to ascribe to him the
mastery and dominion over that second, later, and deteriorated nature (of
which we have been speaking), when you read of him as "the sewer of tares,
and the nocturnal spoiler of the crop of corn. [1590]
Chapter XVII. The Fidelity of the Senses, Impugned by Plato, Vindicated by
Christ Himself.
Then, again, when we encounter the question (as to the veracity of those
five senses which we learn with our alphabet; since from this source even
there arises some support for our heretics. They are the faculties of
seeing, and hearing, and smelling, and tasting, and touching. The fidelity
of these senses is impugned with too much severity by the Platonists,
[1591] and according to some by Heraclitus also, and Diocles, and
Empedocles; at any rate, Plato, in the Timµus, declares the operations of
the senses to be irrational, and vitiated [1592] by our opinions or
beliefs. Deception is imputed to the sight, because it asserts that oars,
when immersed in the water, are inclined or bent, notwithstanding the
certainty that they are straight; because, again, it is quite sure that
distant tower with its really quadrangular contour is round; because also it
will discredit the fact of the truly parallel fabric of yonder porch or
arcade, by supposing it to be narrower and narrower towards its end; and
because it will join with the sea the sky which hangs at so great a height
above it. In the same way, our hearing is charged with fallacy: we think,
for instance, that is a noise in the sky which is nothing else than the
rumbling of a carriage; or, if you prefer it [1593] the other way, when
the thunder rolled at a distance, we were quite sure that it was a carriage
which made the noise. Thus, too, are our faculties of smell and taste at
fault, because the selfsame perfumes and wines lose their value after we
have used them awhile. On the same principle our touch is censured, when the
identical pavement which seemed rough to the hands is felt by the feet to be
smooth enough; and in the baths a stream of warm water is pronounced to be
quite hot at first, and beautifully temperate afterwards. Thus, according to
them, our senses deceive us, when all the while we are (the cause of the
discrepancies, by) changing our opinions. The Stoics are more moderate in
their views; for they do not load with the obloquy of deception every one of
the senses, and at all times. The Epicureans, again, show still greater
consistency, in maintaining that all the senses are equally true in their
testimony, and always so'only in a different way. It is not our organs of
sensation that are at fault, but our opinion. The senses only experience
sensation, they do not exercise opinion; it is the soul that opines. They
separated opinion from the senses, and sensation from the soul. Well, but
whence comes opinion, if not from the senses? Indeed, unless the eye had
descried a round shape in that tower, it could have had no idea that it
possessed roundness. Again, whence arises sensation if not from the soul?
For if the soul had no body, it would have no sensation. Accordingly,
sensation comes from the soul, and opinion from sensation; and the whole
(process) is the soul. But further, it may well be insisted on that there is
a something which causes the discrepancy between the report of the senses
and the reality of the facts. Now, since it is possible, (as we have seen),
for phenomena to be reported which exist not in the objects, why should it
not be equally possible for phenomena to be reported which are caused not by
the senses, but by reasons and conditions which intervene, in the very
nature of the case? If so, it will be only right that they should be duly
recognised. The truth is, that it was the water which was the cause of the
oar seeming to be inclined or bent: out of the water, it was perfectly
straight in appearance (as well as in fact). The delicacy of the substance
or medium which forms a mirror by means of its luminosity, according as it
is struck or shaken, by the vibration actually destroys the appearance of
the straightness of a right line. In like manner, the condition of the open
space which fills up the interval between it and us, necessarily causes the
true shape of the tower to escape our notice; for the uniform density of the
surrounding air covering its angles with a similar light obliterates their
outlines. So, again, the equal breadth of the arcade is sharpened or
narrowed off towards its termination, until its aspect, becoming more and
more contracted under its prolonged roof, comes to a vanishing point in the
direction of its farthest distance. So the sky blends itself with the sea,
the vision becoming spent at last, which had maintained duly the boundaries
of the two elements, so long as its vigorous glance lasted. As for the
(alleged cases of deceptive) hearing, what else could produce the illusion
but the similarity of the sounds? And if the perfume afterwards was less
strong to the smell, and the wine more flat to the taste, and the water not
so hot to the touch, their original strength was after all found in the
whole of them pretty well unimpaired. In the matter, however, of the
roughness and smoothness of the pavement, it was only natural and right that
limbs like the hands and the feet, so different in tenderness and
callousness, should have different impressions. In this way, then, there
cannot occur an illusion in our senses without an adequate cause. Now if
special causes, (such as we have indicated, ) mislead our senses add
(through our senses) our opinions also, then we must no longer ascribe the
deception to the senses, which follow the specific causes of the illusion,
nor to the opinions we form; for these are occasioned and controlled by our
senses, which only follow the causes. Persons who are afflicted with madness
or insanity, mistake one object for another. Orestes in his sister sees his
mother; Ajax sees Ulysses in the slaughtered herd; Athamas and Agave descry
wild beasts in their children. Now is it their eyes or their phrenzy which
you must blame for so vast a fallacy? All things taste bitter, in the
redundancy of their bile, to those who have the jaundice. Is it their taste
which you will charge with the physical prevarication, or their ill state of
health? All the senses, therefore, are disordered occasionally, or imposed
upon, but only in such a way as to be quite free of any fault in their own
natural functions. But further still, not even against the specific causes
and conditions themselves must we lay an indictment of deception. For, since
these physical aberrations happen for stated reasons, the reasons do not
deserve to be regarded as deceptions. Whatever ought to occur in a certain
manner is not a deception. If, then, even these circumstantial causes must
be acquitted of all censure and blame, how much more should we free from
reproach the senses, over which the said causes exercise a liberal sway!
Hence we are bound most certainly to claim for the senses truth, and
fidelity, and integrity, seeing that they never render any other account of
their impressions than is enjoined on them by the specific causes or
conditions which in all cases produce that discrepancy which appears between
the report of the senses and the reality of the objects. What mean you,
then, O most insolent Academy? You overthrow the entire condition of human
life; you disturb the whole order of nature; you obscure the good providence
of God Himself: for the senses of man which God has appointed over all His
works, that we might understand, inhabit, dispense, and enjoy them, (you
reproach) as fallacious and treacherous tyrants! But is it not from these
that all creation receives our services? Is it not by their means that a
second form is impressed even upon the world?'so many arts, so many
industrious resources, so many pursuits, such business, such offices, such
commerce, such remedies, counsels, consolations, modes, civilizations, and
accomplishments of life! All these things have produced the very relish and
savour of human existence; whilst by these senses of man, he alone of all
animated nature has the distinction of being a rational animal, with a
capacity for intelligence and knowledge'nay, an ability to form the Academy
itself! But Plato, in order to disparage the testimony of the senses, in the
Phµdrus denies (in the person of Socrates) his own ability to know even
himself, according to the injunction of the Delphic oracle; and in the
Theµtetus he deprives himself of the faculties of knowledge and sensation;
and again, in the Phµdrus he postpones till after death the posthumous
knowledge, as he calls it, of the truth; and yet for all he went on playing
the philosopher even before he died. We may not, I say, we may not call into
question the truth of the (poor vilified) senses, [1594] lest we should
even in Christ Himself, bring doubt upon [1595] the truth of their
sensation; lest perchance it should be said that He did not really "behold
Satan as lightning fall from heaven; " [1596] that He did not really hear
the Father's voice testifying of Himself; [1597] or that He was deceived
in touching Peter's wife's mother; [1598] or that the fragrance of the
ointment which He afterwards smelled was different from that which He
accepted for His burial; [1599] and that the taste of the wine was
different from that which He consecrated in memory of His blood. [1600]
On this false principle it was that Marcion actually chose to believe that
He was a phantom, denying to Him the reality of a perfect body. Now, not
even to His apostles was His nature ever a matter of deception. He was truly
both seen and heard upon the mount; [1601] true and real was the draught
of that wine at the marriage of (Cana in) Galilee; [1602] true and real
also was the touch of the then believing Thomas. [1603] Read the
testimony of John: "That which we have seen, which we have heard, which we
have looked upon with our eyes, and our hands have handled, of the Word of
life." [1604] False, of course, and deceptive must have been that
testimony, if the witness of our eyes, and ears, and hands be by nature a
lie.
Chapter XVIII. Plato Suggested Certain Errors to the Gnostics. Functions of
the Soul.
I turn now to the department of our intellectual faculties, such as Plato
has handed it over to the heretics, distinct from our bodily functions,
having obtained the knowledge of them before death. [1605] He asks in the
Phµdo, What, then, (do you think) concerning the actual possession of
knowledge? Will the body be a hindrance to it or not, if one shall admit it
as an associate in the search after knowledge? I have a similar question to
ask: Have the faculties of their sight and hearing any truth and reality for
human beings or not? Is it not the case, that even the poets are always
muttering against us, that we can never hear or see anything for certain? He
remembered, no doubt, what Epicharmus the comic poet had said: "It is the
mind which sees, the mind that hears'all else is blind and deaf." To the
same purport he says again, that man is the wisest whose mental power is the
clearest; who never applies the sense of sight, nor adds to his mind the
help of any such faculty, but employs the intellect itself in unmixed
serenity when he indulges in contemplation for the purpose of acquiring an
unalloyed insight into the nature of things; divorcing himself with all his
might from his eyes and ears and (as one must express himself) from the
whole of his body, on the ground of its disturbing the soul, and not
allowing it to possess either truth or wisdom, whenever it is brought into
communication with it. We see, then, that in opposition to the bodily senses
another faculty is provided of a much more serviceable character, even the
powers of the soul, which produce an understanding of that truth whose
realities are not palpable nor open to the bodily senses, but are very
remote from men's everyday knowledge, lying in secret'in the heights above,
and in the presence of God Himself. For Plato maintains that there are
certain invisible substances, incorporeal, celestial, [1606] divine, and
eternal, which they call ideas, that is to say, (archetypal) forms, which
are the patterns and causes of those objects of nature which are manifest to
us, and lie under our corporeal senses: the former, (according to Plato, )
are the actual verities, and the latter the images and likenesses of them.
Well, now, are there not here gleams of the heretical principles of the
Gnostics and the Valentinians? It is from this philosophy that they eagerly
adopt the difference between the bodily senses and the intellectual
faculties,'a distinction which they actually apply to the parable of the ten
virgins: making the five foolish virgins to symbolize the five bodily
senses, seeing that these are so silly and so easy to be deceived; and the
wise virgin to express the meaning of the intellectual faculties, which are
so wise as to attain to that mysterious and supernal truth, which is placed
in the pleroma. (Here, then, we have) the mystic original of the ideas of
these heretics. For in this philosophy lie both their ¦ons and their
genealogies. Thus, too, do they divide sensation, both into the intellectual
powers from their spiritual seed, and the sensuous faculties from the
animal, which cannot by any means comprehend spiritual things. From the
former germ spring invisible things; from the latter, visible things which
are grovelling and temporary, and which are obvious to the senses, placed as
they are in palpable forms. [1607] It is because of these views that we
have in a former passage stated as a preliminary fact, that the mind is
nothing else than an apparatus or instrument of the soul, [1608] and that
the spirit is no other faculty, separate from the soul, but is the soul
itself exercised in respiration; although that influence which either God on
the one hand, or the devil on the other, has breathed upon it, must be
regarded in the light of an additional element. [1609] And now, with
respect to the difference between the intellectual powers and the sensuous
faculties, we only admit it so far as the natural diversity between them
requires of us. (There is, of course, a difference) between things corporeal
and things spiritual, between visible and invisible beings, between objects
which are manifest to the view and those which are hidden from it; because
the one class are attributed to sensation, and the other to the intellect.
But yet both the one and the other must be regarded as inherent in the soul,
and as obedient to it, seeing that it embraces bodily objects by means of
the body, in exactly the same way that it conceives incorporeal objects by
help of the mind, except that it is even exercising sensation when it is
employing the intellect. For is it not true, that to employ the senses is to
use the intellect? And to employ the intellect amounts to a use of the
senses? [1610] What indeed can sensation be, but the understanding of
that which is the object of the sensation? And what can the intellect or
understanding be, but the seeing of that which is the object understood? Why
adopt such excruciating means of torturing simple knowledge and crucifying
the truth? Who can show me the sense which does not understand the object of
its sensation, or the intellect which perceives not the object which it
understands, in so clear away as to prove to me that the one can do without
the other? If corporeal things are the objects of sense, and incorporeal
ones objects of the intellect, it is the classes of the objects which are
different, not the domicile or abode of sense and intellect; in other words,
not the soul (anima) and the mind (animus). By what, in Short, are corporeal
things perceived? If it is by the soul, [1611] then the mind is a
sensuous faculty, and not merely an intellectual power; for whilst it
understands, it also perceives, because without the perception there is no
understanding. If, however, corporeal things are perceived by the soul, then
it follows that the soul's power is an intellectual one, and not merely a
sensuous faculty; for while it perceives it also understands, because
without understanding there is no perceiving. And then, again, by what are
incorporeal things understood? If it is by the mind, [1612] where will be
the soul? If it is by the soul, where will be the mind? For things which
differ ought to be mutually absent from each other, when they are occupied
in their respective functions and duties. It must be your opinion, indeed,
that the mind is absent from the soul on certain occasions; for (you
suppose) that we are so made and constituted as not to know that we have
seen or heard something, on the hypothesis [1613] that the mind was
absent at the time. I must therefore maintain that the very soul itself
neither saw nor heard, since it was at the given moment absent with its
active power'that is to say, the mind. The truth is, that whenever a man is
out of his mind, [1614] it is his soul that is demented'not because the
mind is absent, but because it is a fellow-sufferer (with the soul) at the
time. [1615] Indeed, it is the soul which is principally affected by
casualties of such a kind. Whence is this fact confirmed? It is confirmed
from the following consideration: that after the soul's departure, the mind
is no longer found in a man: it always follows the soul; nor does it at last
remain behind it alone, after death. Now, since it follows the soul, it is
also indissolubly attached to it; just as the understanding is attached to
the soul, which is followed by the mind, with which the understanding is
indissolubly connected. Granted now that the understanding is superior to
the senses, and a better discoverer of mysteries, what matters it, so long
as it is only a peculiar faculty of the soul, just as the senses themselves
are? It does not at all affect my argument, unless the understanding were
held to be superior to the senses, for the purpose of deducing from the
allegation of such superiority its separate condition likewise. After thus
combating their alleged difference, I have also to refute this question of
superiority, previous to my approaching the belief (which heresy propounds)
in a superior god. On this point, however, of a (superior) god, we shall
have to measure swords with the heretics on their own ground. [1616] Our
present subject concerns the soul, and the point is to prevent the insidious
ascription of a superiority to the intellect or understanding. Now, although
the objects which are touched by the intellect are of a higher nature, since
they are spiritual, than those which are embraced by the senses, since these
are corporeal, it will still be only a superiority in the objects'as of
lofty ones contrasted with humble'not in the faculties of the intellect
against the senses. For how can the intellect be superior to the senses,
when it is these which educate it for the discovery of various truths? It is
a fact, that these truths are learned by means of palpable forms; in other
words, invisible things are discovered by the help of visible ones, even as
the apostle tells us in his epistle: "For the invisible things of Him are
clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood by the things
that are made; " [1617] and as Plato too might inform our heretics: "The
things which appear are the image [1618] of the things which are
concealed from view," [1619] whence it must needs follow that this world
is by all means an image of some other: so that the intellect evidently uses
the senses for its own guidance, and authority, and mainstay; and without
the senses truth could not be attained. How, then, can a thing be superior
to that which is instrumental to its existence, which is also indispensable
to it, and to whose help it owes everything which it acquires? Two
conclusions therefore follow from what we have said: (1) That the intellect
is not to be preferred above the senses, on the (supposed) ground that the
agent through which a thing exists is inferior to the thing itself; and (2)
that the intellect must not be separated from the senses, since the
instrument by which a thing's existence is sustained is associated with the
thing itself.
Chapter XIX. The Intellect Coeval with the Soul in the Human Being. An
Example from Aristotle Converted into Evidence Favourable to These Views.
Nor must we fail to notice those writers who deprive the soul of the
intellect even for a short period of time. They do this in order to prepare
the way of introducing the intellect'and the mind also'at a subsequent time
of life, even at the time when intelligence appears in a man. They maintain
that the stage of infancy is supported by the soul alone, simply to promote
vitality, without any intention of acquiring knowledge also, because not all
things have knowledge which possess life. Trees, for instance, to quote
Aristotle's example, [1620] have vitality, but have not knowledge; and
with him agrees every one who gives a share to all animated beings of the
animal substance, which, according to our view, exists in man alone as his
special property,'not because it is the work of God, which all other
creatures are likewise, but because it is the breath of God, which this
(human soul) alone is, which we say is born with the full equipment of its
proper faculties. Well, let them meet us with the example of the trees: we
will accept their challenge, (nor shah we find in it any detriment to our
own argument; ) for it is an undoubted fact, that whilst trees are yet but
twigs and sprouts, and before they even reach the sapling stage, there is in
them their own proper faculty of life, as soon as they spring out of their
native beds. But then, as time goes on, the vigour of the tree slowly
advances, as it grows and hardens into its woody trunk, until its mature age
completes the condition which nature destines for it. Else what resources
would trees possess in due course for the inoculation of grafts, and the
formation of leaves, and the swelling of their buds, and the graceful
shedding of their blossom, and the softening of their sap, were there not in
them the quiet growth of the full provision of their nature, and the
distribution of this life over all their branches for the accomplishment of
their maturity? Trees, therefore, have ability or knowledge; and they derive
it from whence they also derive vitality'that is, from the one source of
vitality and knowledge which is peculiar to their nature, and that from the
infancy which they, too, begin with. For I observe that even the vine,
although yet tender and immature, still understands its own natural
business, and strives to cling to some support, that, leaning on it, and
lacing through it, [1621] it may so attain its growth. Indeed, without
waiting for the husbandman's training, without an espalier, without a prop,
whatever its tendrils catch, it will fondly cling to, [1622] and embrace
with really greater tenacity and force by its own inclination than by your
volition. It longs and hastens to be secure. Take also ivy-plants, never
mind how young: I observe their attempts from the very first to grasp,
objects above them, and outrunning everything else, to hang on to the
highest thing, preferring as they do to spread over walls with their leafy
web and woof rather than creep on the ground and be trodden under by every
foot that likes to crush them. On the other hand, in the case of such trees
as receive injury from contact with a building, how do they hang off as they
grow and avoid what injures them! You can see that their branches were
naturally meant to take the opposite direction, and can very well understand
the vital instincts [1623] of such a tree from its avoidance of the wall.
It is contented (if it be only a little shrub) with its own insignificant
destiny, which it has in its foreseeing instinct thoroughly been aware of
from its: infancy, only it still fears even a ruined building. On my side,
then, why should I not contend for these wise and sagacious natures of
trees? Let them have vitality, as the philosophers permit it; but let them
have knowledge too, although the philosophers disavow it. Even the infancy
of a log, then, may have an intellect (suitable to it): how much more may
that of a human being, whose soul (which may be compared with the nascent
sprout of a tree) has been derived from Adam as its root, and has been
propagated amongst his posterity by means of woman, to whom it has been
entrusted for transmission, and thus has sprouted into life with all its
natural apparatus, both of intellect and of sense! I am much mistaken if the
human person, even from his infancy, when he saluted life with his infant
cries, does not testify to his actual possession of the faculties of
sensation and intellect by the fact of his birth, vindicating at one and the
same time the use of all his senses'that of seeing by the light, that of
hearing by sounds, that of taste by liquids, that of smell by the air, that
of touch by the ground. This earliest voice of infancy, then, is the first
effort of the senses, and the initial impulse of mental perceptions.
[1624] There is also the further fact, that some persons understand this
plaintive cry of the infant to be an augury of affliction in the prospect of
our tearful life, whereby from the very moment of birth (the soul) has to be
regarded as endued with prescience, much more with intelligence. Accordingly
by this intuition [1625] the babe knows his mother, discerns the nurse,
and even recognises the waiting-maid; refusing the breast of another woman,
and the cradle that is not his own, and longing only for the arms to which
he is accustomed. Now from what source does he acquire this discernment of
novelty and custom, if not from instinctive knowledge? Holy does it happen
that he is irritated and quieted, if not by help of his initial intellect?
It would be very strange indeed that infancy were naturally so lively, if it
had not mental power; and naturally so capable of impression and affection,
if it had no intellect. But (we hold the contrary): for Christ, by
"accepting praise out of the mouth of babes and sucklings," [1626] has
declared that neither childhood nor infancy is without sensibility,
[1627] 'the former of which states, when meeting Him with approving shouts,
proved its ability to offer Him testimony; [1628] while the other, by
being slaughtered, for His sake of course, knew what violence meant.
[1629]
Chapter XX. The Soul, as to Its Nature Uniform, But Its Faculties Variously
Developed. Varieties Only Accidental.
And here, therefore, we draw our conclusion, that all the natural properties
of the soul are inherent in it as parts of its substance; and that they grow
and develope along with it, from the very moment of its own origin at birth.
Just as Seneca says, whom we so often find on our side: [1630] "There are
implanted within us the seeds of all the arts and periods of life. And God.
our Master, secretly produces our mental dispositions; "that is, from the
germs which are implanted and hidden in us by means of infancy, and these
are the intellect: for from these our natural dispositions are evolved. Now,
even the seeds of plants have, one form in each kind, but their development
varies: some open and expand in a healthy and perfect state, while others
either improve or degenerate, owing to the conditions of weather and soil,
and from the appliance of labour and care; also from the course of the
seasons, and from the occurrence of casual circumstances. In like manner,
the soul may well be [1631] uniform in its seminal origin, although
multiform by the process of nativity. [1632] And here. local influences,
too, must be taken into account. It has been said that dull and brutish
persons are born at Thebes; and the most accomplished in wisdom and speech
at Athens, where in the district of Colythus [1633] children speak'such
is the precocity of their tongue'before they are a month old. Indeed, Plato
himself tells us, in the Timµus, that Minerva, when preparing to found her
great city, only regarded the nature of the country which gave promise of
mental dispositions of this kind; whence he himself in The Laws instructs
Megillus and Clinias to be careful in their selection of a site for building
a city. Empedocles, however, places the cause of a subtle or an obtuse
intellect in the quality of the blood, from which he derives progress and
perfection in learning and science. The subject of national peculiarities
has grown by this time into proverbial notoriety. Comic poets deride the
Phrygians for their cowardice; Sallust reproaches the Moors for their
levity, and the Dalmatians for their cruelty; even the apostle brands the
Cretans as "liars." [1634] Very likely, too, something must be set down
to the score of bodily condition and the state of the health. Stoutness
hinders knowledge, but a spare form stimulates it; paralysis prostrates the
mind, a decline preserves it. How much more will those accidental
circumstances have to be noticed, which, in addition to the state of one's
body or one's health, tend to sharpen or to dull the intellect! It is
sharpened by learned pursuits, by the sciences, the arts, by experimental
knowledge, business habits, and studies; it is blunted by ignorance, idle
habits, inactivity, lust, inexperience, listlessness, and vicious pursuits.
Then, besides these influences, there must perhaps [1635] be added the
supreme powers. Now these are the supreme powers: according to our
(Christian) notions, they are the Lord God and His adversary the devil; but
according to men's general opinion about providence, they are fate and
necessity; and about fortune, it is man's freedom of will. Even the
philosophers allow these distinctions; whilst on our part we have already
undertaken to treat of them, on the principles of the (Christian) faith, in
a separate work. [1636] It is evident how great must be the influences
which so variously affect the one nature of the soul, since they are
commonly regarded as separate "natures." Still they are not different
species, but casual incidents of one nature and substance'even of that which
God conferred on Adam, and made the mould of all (subsequent ones). Casual
incidents will they always remain, but never will they become!specific
differences. However great, too, at present is the variety of men's
maunders, it was not so in Adam, the founder of their race. But all these
discordances ought to have existed in him as the fountainhead, and thence to
have descended to us in an unimpaired variety, if the variety had been due
to nature.
Chapter XXI. As Free-Will Actuates an Individual So May His Character
Change.
Now, if the soul possessed this uniform and simple nature from the beginning
in Adam, previous to so many mental dispositions (being developed out of
it), it is not rendered multiform by suck various development, nor by the
triple [1637] form predicated of it in "the Valentinian trinity" (that we
may still keep the condemnation of that heresy in view), for not even this
nature is discoverable in Adam. What had he that was spiritual? Is it
because he prophetically declared "the great mystery of Christ and the
church? " [1638] "This is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh: she
shall be called Woman. Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother,
and he shall cleave unto his wife; and they two shall be one flesh."
[1639] But this (gift of prophecy) only came on him afterwards, when God
infused into him the ecstasy, or spiritual quality, in which prophecy
consists. If, again, the evil of sin was developed in him, this must not be
accounted as a natural disposition: it was rather produced by the
instigation of the (old) serpent as far from being incidental to his nature
as it was from being material in him, for we have already excluded belief in
"Matter." [1640] Now, if neither the spiritual element, nor what the
heretics call the material element, was properly inherent in him (since, if
he had been created out of matter, the germ of evil must have been an
integral part of his constitution), it remains that the one only original
element of his nature was what is called the animal (the principle of
vitality, the soul), which we maintain to be simple and uniform in its
condition. Concerning this, it remains for us to inquire whether, as being
called natural, it ought to be deemed subject to change. (The heretics whom
we have referred to) deny that nature is susceptible of any change,
[1641] in order that they may be able to establish and settle their
threefold theory, or "trinity," in all its characteristics as to the several
natures, because "a good tree cannot produce evil fruit, nor a corrupt tree
good fruit; and nobody gathers figs of thorns, nor grapes of brambles."
[1642] If so, then "God will not be able any longer to raise up from the
stones children unto Abraham; nor to make a generation of vipers bring forth
fruits of repentance." [1643] And if so, the apostle too was in error
when he said in his epistle, "Ye were at one time darkness, (but now are ye
light in the Lord: )" [1644] and, "We also were by nature children of
wrath; " [1645] and, "Such were some of you, but ye are washed."
[1646] The statements, however, of holy Scripture will never be discordant
with truth. A corrupt tree will never yield good fruit, unless the better
nature be grafted into it; nor will a good tree produce evil fruit, except
by the same process of cultivation. Stones also will become children of
Abraham, if educated in Abraham's faith; and a generation of vipers will
bring forth the fruits of penitence, if they reject the poison of their
malignant nature. This will be the power of the grace of God, more potent
indeed than nature, exercising its sway over the faculty that underlies
itself within us'even the freedom of our will, which is described as
(of independent authority); and inasmuch as this faculty is
itself also natural and mutable, in whatsoever direction it turns, it
inclines of its own nature. Now, that there does exist within us naturally
this independent authority , we have already shown in
opposition both to Marcion [1647] and to Hermogenes. [1648] if, then,
the natural condition has to be submitted to a definition, it must be
determined to be twofold'there being the category of the born and the
unborn, the made and not-made. Now that which has received its constitution
by being made or by being born, is by nature capable of being changed, for
it can be both born again and re-made; whereas that which is not-made and
unborn will remain for ever immoveable. Since, however, this state is suited
to God alone, as the only Being who is unborn and not-made (and therefore
immortal and unchangeable), it is absolutely certain that the nature of all
other existences which are born and created is subject to modification and
change; so that if the threefold state is to be ascribed to the soul, it
must be supposed to arise from the mutability of its accidental
circumstances, and not from the appointment of nature.
Chapter XXII. Recapitulation. Definition of the Soul.
Hermogenes has already heard from us what are the other natural faculties of
the soul, as well as their vindication and proof; whence it may be seen that
the soul is rather the offspring of God than of matter. The names of these
faculties shall here be simply repeated, that they may not seem to be
forgotten and passed out of sight. We have assigned, then, to the soul both
that freedom of the will which we just now mentioned, and its dominion over
the works of nature, and its occasional gift of divination, independently of
that endowment of prophecy which accrues to it expressly from the grace of
God. We shall therefore now quit this subject of the soul's disposition, in
order to set out fully in order its various qualities. [1649] The soul,
then, we define to be sprung from the breath of God, immortal, possessing
body, having form, simple in its substance, intelligent in its own nature,
developing its power in various ways, free in its determinations, subject to
be changes of accident, in its faculties mutable, rational, supreme, endued
with an instinct of presentiment, evolved out of one (archetypal soul). It
remains for us now to consider how it is developed out of this one original
source; in other words, whence, and when, and how it is produced.
Chapter XXIII. The Opinions of Sundry Heretics Which Originate Ultimately
with Plato.
Some suppose that they came down from heaven, with as firm a belief as they
are apt to entertain, when they indulge in the prospect of an undoubted
return thither. Saturninus, the disciple of Menander, who belonged to
Simon's sect, introduced this opinion: he affirmed that man was made by
angels. A futile, imperfect creation at first, weak and unable to stand, he
crawled upon the ground like a worm, because he wanted the strength to
maintain an erect posture; but afterwards having, by the compassion of the
Supreme Power (in whose image, which had not been fully understood, he was
clumsily formed), obtained a slender spark of life, this roused and righted
his imperfect form, and animated it with a higher vitality, and provided for
its return, on its relinquishment of life, to its original principle.
Carpocrates, indeed, claims for himself so extreme an amount of the supernal
qualities, that his disciples set their own souls at once on an equality
with Christ (not to mention the apostles); and sometimes, when it suits
their fancy, even give them the superiority'deeming them, forsooth, to have
partaken of that sublime virtue which looks down upon the principalities
that govern this world. Apelles tells us that our souls were enticed by
earthly baits down from their super-celestial abodes by a fiery angel,
Isreal's God; and ours, who then enclosed them firmly within our sinful
flesh. The hive of Valentinus fortifies the soul with the germ of Sophia, or
Wisdom; by means of which germ they recognise, in the images of visible
objects, the stories and Milesian fables of their own . I am sorry from
my heart that Plato has been the caterer to all these heretics. For in the
he imagines that souls wander from this world to that, and thence back
again hither; whilst in the he supposes that the children of God, to
whom had been assigned the production of mortal creatures, having taken for
the soul the germ of immortality, congealed around it a mortal body, 'thereby
indicating that this world is the figure of some other. Now, to procure
belief in all this 'that the soul had formerly lived with God in the heavens
above, sharing His ideas with Him, and afterwards came down to live with us
on earth, and whilst here recollects the eternal patterns of things which it
had learnt before' he elaborated his new formula, ,
which means that "learning is reminiscence; "implying that the souls which
come to us from thence forget the things amongst which they formerly lived,
but that they afterwards recall them, instructed by the objects they see
around them. Forasmuch, therefore, as the doctrines which the heretics
borrow from Plato are cunningly defended by this kind of argument, I shall
sufficiently refute the heretics if I overthrow the argument of Plato.
Chapter XXIV. Plato's Inconsistency. He Supposes the Soul Self-Existent, Yet
Capable of Forgetting What Passed in a Previous State.
In the first place, I cannot allow that the soul is capable of a failure of
memory; because he has conceded to it so large an amount of divine quality
as to put it on a par with God. He makes it unborn, which single attribute I
might apply as a sufficient attestation of its perfect divinity; he then
adds that the soul is immortal, incorruptible, incorporeal'since he believed
God to be the same'invisible, incapable of delineation, uniform, supreme,
rational, and intellectual. What more could he attribute to the soul, if he
wanted to call it God? We, however, who allow no appendage to God [1650]
(in the sense of equality), by this very fact reckon the soul as very far
below God: for we suppose it to be born, and hereby to possess something of
a diluted divinity and an attenuated felicity, as the breath (of God),
though not His spirit; and although immortal, as this is an attribute of
divinity, yet for all that passible, since this is an incident of a born
condition, and consequently from the first capable of deviation from
perfection and right, [1651] and by consequence susceptible of a failure
in memory. This point I have discussed sufficiently with Hermogenes.
[1652] But it may be further observed, that if the soul is to merit being
accounted a god, by reason of all its qualities being equal to the
attributes of God, it must then be subject to no passion, and therefore to
no loss of memory; for this defect of oblivion is as great an injury to that
of which you predicate it, as memory is the glory thereof, which Plato
himself deems the very safeguard of the senses and intellectual faculties,
and which Cicero has designated the treasury of all the sciences. Now we
need not raise the doubt whether so divine a faculty as the soul was capable
of losing memory: the question rather is, whether it is able to recover
afresh that which it has lost. I could not decide whether that, which ought
to have lost memory, if it once incurred the loss, would be powerful enough
to recollect itself, Both alternatives, indeed, will agree very well with my
soul, but not with Plato's. In the second place, my objection to him will
stand thus: (Plato, ) do you endow the soul with a natural competency for
understanding those well-known ideas of yours? Certainly I do, will be your
answer. Well, now, no one will concede to you that the knowledge, (which you
say is) the gift of nature, of the natural sciences can fail. But the
knowledge of the sciences fails; the knowledge of the various fields of
learning and of the arts of life fails; and so perhaps the knowledge of the
faculties and affections of our minds fails, although they seem to be
inherent in our nature, but really are not so: because, as we have already
said, [1653] they are affected by accidents of place, of manners and
customs, of bodily condition, of the state of man's health'by the influences
of the Supreme Powers, and the changes of man's free-will. Now the
instinctive knowledge of natural objects never fails, not even in the brute
creation. The lion, no doubt, will forget his ferocity, if surrounded by the
softening influence of training; he may become, with his beautiful mane, the
plaything of some Queen Berenice, and lick her cheeks with his tongue. A
wild beast may lay aside his habits, but his natural instincts will not be
forgotten. He will not forget his proper food, nor his natural resources,
nor his natural alarms; and should the queen offer him fishes or cakes, he
will wish for flesh; and if, when he is ill, any antidote be prepared for
him, he will still require the ape; and should no hunting-spear be presented
against him, he will yet dread the crow of the cock. In like manner with
man, who is perhaps the most forgetful of all creatures, the knowledge of
everything natural to him will remain in-eradicably fixed in him,'but this
alone, as being alone a natural instinct. He will never forget to eat when
he is hungry; or to drink when he is thirsty; or to use his eyes when he
wants to see; or his ears, to hear; or his nose, to smell; or his mouth, to
taste; or his hand, to touch. These are, to be sure, the senses, which
philosophy depreciates by her preference for the intellectual faculties. But
if the natural knowledge of the sensuous faculties is permanent, how happens
it that the knowledge of the intellectual faculties fails, to which the
superiority is ascribed? Whence, now, arises that power of forgetfulness
itself which precedes recollection? From long lapse of time, he says. But
this is a shortsighted answer. Length of time cannot be incidental to that
which, according to him, is unborn, and which therefore must be deemed most
certainly eternal. For that which is eternal, on the ground of its being
unborn, since it admits neither of beginning nor end of time, is subject to
no temporal criterion. And that which time does not measure, undergoes no
change in consequence of time; nor is long lapse of time at all influential
over it. If time is a cause of oblivion, why, from the time of the soul's
entrance into the body, does memory fail, as if thenceforth the soul were to
be affected by time? for the soul, being undoubtedly prior to the body, was
of course not irrespective of time. Is it, indeed, immediately on the
soul's entrance into the body that oblivion takes place, or some time
afterwards? If immediately, where will be the long lapse of the time which
is as yet inadmissible in the hypothesis? [1654] Take, for instance, the
case of the infant. If some time afterwards, will not the soul, during the
interval previous to the moment of oblivion, Still exercise its powers of
memory? And how comes it to pass that the soul subsequently forgets, and
then afterwards again remembers? How long, too, must the lapse of the time
be regarded as having been, during which the oblivion oppressed the soul?
The whole course of one's life, I apprehend, will be insufficient to efface
the memory of an age which endured so long before the soul's assumption of
the body. But then, again, Plato throws the blame upon the body, as if it
were at all credible that a born substance could extinguish the power of one
that is unborn. There exist, however, among bodies a great many differences,
by reason of their rationality, their bulk, their condition, their age, and
their health. Will there then be supposed to exist similar differences in
obliviousness? Oblivion, however, is uniform and identical. Therefore bodily
peculiarity, with its manifold varieties, will not become the cause of an
effect which is an invariable one. There are likewise, according to Plato's
own testimony, many proofs to show that the soul has a divining faculty, as
we have already advanced against Hermogenes. But there is not a man living,
who does not himself feel his soul possessed with a presage and augury of
some omen, danger, or joy. Now, if the body is not prejudicial to
divination, it will not, I suppose, be injurious to memory. One thing is
certain, that souls in the same body both forget and remember. If any
corporeal condition engenders forgetfulness, how will it admit the opposite
state of recollection? Because recollection, after forgetfulness, is
actually the resurrection of the memory. Now, how should not that which is
hostile to the memory at first, be also prejudicial to it in the second
instance? Lastly, who have better memories than little children, with their
fresh, unworn souls, not yet immersed in domestic and public cares, but
devoted only to those studies the acquirement of which is itself a
reminiscence? Why, indeed, do we not all of us recollect in an equal degree,
since we are equal in our forgetfulness? But this is true only of
philosophers! But not even of the whole of them. Amongst so many nations, in
so great a crowd of sages, Plato, to be sure, is the only man who has
combined the oblivion and the recollection of ideas. Now, since this main
argument of his by no means keeps its ground, it follows that its entire
superstructure must fall with it, namely, that souls are supposed to be
unborn, and to live in the heavenly regions, and to be instructed in the
divine mysteries thereof; moreover, that they descend to this earth, and
here recall to memory their previous; existence, for the purpose, of course,
of supplying to our heretics the fitting materials for their systems.
Chapter XXV. Tertullian Refutes, Physiologically, the Notion that the Soul
is Introduced After Birth.
I shall now return to the cause of this digression, in order that I may
explain how all souls are derived from one, when and where and in what
manner they are produced. Now, touching this subject, it matters not whether
the question be started by the philosopher, by the heretic, or by the crowd.
Those who profess the truth care nothing about their opponents, especially
such of them as begin by maintaining that the soul is not conceived in the
womb, nor is formed and produced at the time that the flesh is moulded, but
is impressed from without upon the infant before his complete vitality, but
after the process of parturition. They say, moreover, that the human seed
having been duly deposited ex concubiter in the womb, and having been by
natural impulse quickened, it becomes condensed into the mere substance of
the flesh, which is in due time born, warm from the furnace of the womb, and
then released from its heat. (This flesh) resembles the case of hot iron,
which is in that state plunged into cold water; for, being smitten by the
cold air (into which it is born), it at once receives the power of
animation, and utters vocal sound. This view is entertained by the Stoics,
along with ¦nesidemus, and occasionally by Plato himself, when he tells us
that the soul, being quite a separate formation, originating elsewhere and
externally to the womb, is inhaled [1655] when the new-born infant first
draws breath, and by and by exhaled [1656] with the man's latest breath.
We shall see whether this view of his is merely fictitious. Even the medical
profession has not lacked its Hicesius, to prove a traitor both to nature
and his own calling. These gentlemen, I suppose, were too modest to come to
terms with women on the mysteries of childbirth, so well known to the
latter. But how much more is there for them to blush at, when in the end
they have the women to refute them, instead of commending them. Now, in such
a question as this, no one can be so useful a teacher, judge, or witness, as
the sex itself which is so intimately concerned. Give us your testimony,
then, ye mothers, whether yet pregnant, or after delivery (let barren women
and men keep silence),'the truth of your own nature is in question, the
reality of your own suffering is the point to be decided. (Tell us, then, )
whether you feel in the embryo within you any vital force [1657] other
than your own, with which your bowels tremble, your sides shake, your entire
womb throbs, and the burden which oppresses you constantly changes its
position? Are these movements a joy to you, and a positive removal of
anxiety, as making you confident that your infant both possesses vitality
and enjoys it? Or, should his restlessness cease, your first fear would be
for him; and he would be aware of it within you, since he is disturbed at
the novel sound; and you would crave for injurious diet, [1658] or would
even loathe your food'all on his account; and then you and he, (in the
closeness of your sympathy, ) would share together your common ailments'so
far that with your contusions and bruises would he actually become
marked,'whilst within you, and even on the selfsame parts of the body,
taking to himself thus peremptorily [1659] the injuries of his mother!
Now, whenever a livid hue and redness are incidents of the blood, the blood
will not be without the vital principle, [1660] or soul; or when disease
attacks the soul or vitality, (it becomes a proof of its real existence,
since) there is no disease where there is no soul or principle of life.
Again, inasmuch as sustenance by food, and the want thereof, growth and
decay, fear and motion, are conditions of the soul or life, he who
experiences them must be alive. And, so, he at last ceases to live, who
ceases to experience them. And thus by and by infants are still-born; but
how so, unless they had life? For how could any die, who had not previously
lived? But sometimes by a cruel necessity, whilst yet in the womb, an infant
is put to death, when lying awry in the orifice of the womb he impedes
parturition, and kills his mother, if he is not to die himself. Accordingly,
among surgeons' tools there is a certain instrument, which is formed with a
nicely-adjusted flexible frame for opening the uterus first of all, and
keeping it open; it is further furnished with an annular blade, [1661] by
means of which the limbs within the womb are dissected with anxious but
unfaltering care; its last appendage being a blunted or covered hook,
wherewith the entire f£tus is extracted [1662] by a violent delivery.
There is also (another instrument in the shape of) a copper needle or spike,
by which the actual death is managed in this furtive robbery of life: they
give it, from its infanticide function, the name of , the
slayer of the infant, which was of course alive. Such apparatus was
possessed both by Hippocrates, and Asclepiades, and Erasistratus, and
Herophilus, that dissector of even adults, and the milder Soranus himself,
who all knew well enough that a living being had been conceived, and pitied
this most luckless infant state, which had first to be put to death, to
escape being tortured alive. Of the necessity of such harsh treatment I have
no doubt even Hicesius was convinced, although he imported their soul into
infants after birth from the stroke of the frigid air, because the very term
for soul, forsooth, in Greek answered to such a refrigeration! [1663]
Well, then, have the barbarian and Roman nations received souls by some
other process, (I wonder; ) for they have called the soul by another name
than ? How many nations are there who commence life [1664] under
the broiling sun of the torrid zone, scorching their skin into its swarthy
hue? Whence do they get their souls, with no frosty air to help them? I say
not a word of those well-warmed bed-rooms, and all that apparatus of heat
which ladies in childbirth so greatly need, when a breath of cold air might
endanger their life. But in the very bath almost a babe will slip into life,
and at once his cry is heard! if, however, a good frosty air is to the soul
so indispensable a treasure, then beyond the German and the Scythian tribes,
and the Alpine and the Argµan heights, nobody ought ever to be born! But the
fact really is, that population is greater within the temperate regions of
the East and the West, and men's minds are sharper; whilst there is not a
Sarmatian whose wits are not dull and humdrum. The minds of men, too, would
grow keener by reason of the cold, if their souls came into being amidst
nipping frosts; for as the substance is, so must be its active power. Now,
after these preliminary statements, we may also refer to the case of those
who, having been cut out of their mother's womb, have breathed and retained
life'your Bacchuses [1665] and Scipios. [1666] If, however, there be
any one who, like Plato, [1667] supposes that two souls cannot, more than
two bodies could, co-exist in the same individual, I, on the contrary, could
show him not merely the co-existence of two souls in one person, as also of
two bodies in the same womb, but likewise the combination of many other
things in natural connection with the soul'for instance, of demoniacal
possession; and that not of one only, as in the case of Socrates' own demon;
but of seven spirits as in the case of the Magdalene; [1668] and of a
legion in number, as in the Gadarene. [1669] Now one soul is naturally
more susceptible of conjunction with another soul, by reason of the identity
of their substance, than an evil spirit is, owing to their diverse natures.
But when the same philosopher, in the sixth book of The Laws, warns us to
beware lest a vitiation of seed should infuse a soil into both body and soul
from an illicit or debased concubinage, I hardly know whether he is more
inconsistent with himself in respect of one of his previous statements, or
of that which he had just made. For he here shows us that the soul proceeds
from human seed (and warns us to be on our guard about it), not, (as he had
said before, ) from the first breath of the new-born child. Pray, whence
comes it that from similarity of soul we resemble our parents in
disposition, according to the testimony of Cleanthes, [1670] if we are
not produced from this seed of the soul? Why, too, used the old astrologers
to cast a man's nativity from his first conception, if his soul also draws
not its origin from that moment? To this (nativity) likewise belongs the
inbreathing of the soul, whatever that is.
Chapter XXVI. Scripture Alone Offers Clear Knowledge on the Questions We
Have Been Controverting.
Now there is no end to the uncertainty and irregularity of human opinion,
until we come to the limits which God has prescribed. I shall at last retire
within our own lines and firmly hold my ground there, for the purpose of
proving to the Christian (the soundness of) my answers to the Philosophers
and the Physicians. Brother (in Christ), on your own foundation [1671]
build up your faith. Consider the wombs of the most sainted women instinct
with the life within them, and their babes which not only breathed therein,
but were even endowed with prophetic intuition. See how the bowels of
Rebecca are disquieted, [1672] though her child-bearing is as yet remote,
and there is no impulse of (vital) air. Behold, a twin offspring chafes
within the mother's womb, although she has no sign as yet of the twofold
nation. Possibly we might have regarded as a prodigy the contention of this
infant progeny, which struggled before it lived, which had animosity
previous to animation, if it had simply disturbed the mother by its
restlessness within her. But when her womb opens, and the number of her
offspring is seen, and their presaged condition known, we have presented to
us a proof not merely of the (separate) souls of the infants, but of their
hostile struggles too. He who was the first to be born was threatened with
detention by him who was anticipated in birth, who was not yet fully brought
forth, but whose hand only had been born. Now if he actually imbibed life,
and received his soul, in Platonic style, at his first breath; or else,
after the Stoic rule, had the earliest taste of animation on touching the
frosty air; what was the other about, who was so eagerly looked for, who was
still detained within the womb, and was trying to d