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[TRANSLATED BY PETER HOLMES, D.D.]
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(3) of matter than of the inspiration(4) 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,(5) as one may suppose,(6) naturally excited(6) at every emotion;
or if nature had lost her influence, it must have been deprived of all
power of thought.(7) Or let it have been as placid and tranquil so you
please, inflexible, in spite of the claims of natural duty,(8) 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?(9) 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:"(1) 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.(2)
Meanwhile, in the still gloomier prison of the world amongst your
Cebeses and Phaedos, 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.
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,(3) to whom Plato paid very great deference;(4) 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
Clazomenae built a temple after his death; and Orpheus; and Musaeus;
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,(5) 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;(6)
because we do not forget that there have been false proph- ets, 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(1) 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.(2) 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.
Would to God that no "heresies had been ever necessary, in order
that they which are; approved may be made manifest!"(3) 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.(4) The apostle, so far back as his own time, foresaw, indeed,
that philosophy would do violent injury to the truth.(5) This
admonition about false philosophy he was induced to offer after he had
been at Athens, had become acquainted with that loquacious city,(6) 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."(1) 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(2) of Plato, or the vigour(3) of Zeno, or the equanimity(4) of
Aristotle, or the stupidity(5) of Epicurus, or the sadness(6) of
Heraclitus, or the madness(7) of Empedocles. The fault, I suppose, of
the divine doctrine lies in its springing from Judaea(8) 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(9) 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"(10)—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,(11) and its own heretic. I shall regard it as my
introduction to the other branches of the subject.
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.(12) 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;(13) 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(14) even.
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,(15) 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,(1))
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:(2)
"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.
These conclusions the Platonists disturb more by subtilty than by
truth. Every body, they say, has necessarily either an animate
nature(3) or an inanimate one.(4) 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(1) 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(2) 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.(3) 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(4) 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).
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.(1) 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(2) 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,(3) 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.(4)
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 differencs; 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,(1)
beheld plainly the souls of the martyrs.(2)
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(3) and limitation; and that triad of
dimensions(4)—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?(5) Plato refuses to do this, as if it endangered the
soul's immortality.(6) For everything which has figure is, according to
him, compound, and composed of parts;(7) 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;(8) 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, m 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.(9) 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 Aenesidemus 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,"(10)indeed, are not of igne-ous 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(1) 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.(2) It, too, has eyes and ears of its own, by means
of which Paul must have heard and seen the Lord;(3) 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.(4) 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
It is essential to a firm faith to declare with Plato(5) 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!(6) Some
maintain that there is within the soul a natural substance—the
spirit—which is different from it:(7) as if to have life—the function
of the soul—were one thing; and to emit breath—the alleged(8)
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.(9) 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;(10) 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,(11) in order to
investigate the secrets of nature, who ruthlessly handled(12) 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:(1) 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.
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.(1) For to
blow or breathe is to respire. So that we are driven to describe, by
(the term which indicates this respi-ration—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.(2) 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,(3) 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."(4) And
again: "He giveth breath unto the people that are on the earth, and
Spirit to them that walk thereon."(5) 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."(6) For, inasmuch as Adam straightway predicted that "great
mystery of Christ and the church,"(7) 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,"(8) 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,"(9) 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?"(10) 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.
In like manner the mind also, or animus, which the Greeks
designate NO US , is taken by us in no other sense than as indicating
that faculty or apparatus(11) 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(12)—the god of Socrates, Valentinus' "only-begotten" of his
father(13) 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(1) 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,(2) 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(3) the soul,—not indeed as being distinct from it in substance,
but as being its natural function and agent.(4)
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;(5) 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(6) and table of contents,(7) "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.
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; Panaetius, 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 hgemonikon ; and the rational faculty, which they call
logikon ,—and ultimately subdivided these into seventeen(1) 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 AEnesidemus, and Heraclitus: for these
philosophers maintain the unity of the soul, as diffused over the
entire body, and yet in every part the same.(2) 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.
In the first place, (we must determine) whether there be in the
soul some supreme principle of vitality and intelligence(3) which they
call "the ruling power of the soul"— to hgemonikon 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
Dicaearchus, 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, Dicaearchus 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(3)
in one particular recess of the body. For, when one reads of God as
being "the searcher and witness of the heart;"(2) when His prophet is
reproved by His discovering to him the secrets of the heart;(3) when
God Himself anticipates in His people the thoughts of their heart,(4)
"Why think ye evil in your hearts?"(5) when David prays "Create in me a
clean heart, O God,"(6) and Paul declares, "With the heart man
believeth unto righteousness,"(7) and John says, "By his own heart is
each man condemned;"(8) when, lastly, "he who looketh on a woman so as
to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his
heart,"(9)—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(10) 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,(11) 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(12) 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;(13) in accordance, too, with that
verse of Orpheus or Empedocles:
"Namque homini sanguis circumcordialis est sensus."(14)
"Man has his (supreme) sensation in the blood around his heart."
Even Protagoras(15) 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.
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 esentially 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 ex- traneous to God, to whom
also the irrational is 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 qumikon , and the concupiscible, which they
designate by the term epiqumhtikon (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—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.(1) 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."(2) 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."(3) 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,"(4) 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,"(5) and has the actual
designation of "father:" "Ye are of your father the devil."(6) 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.(7)
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,(8) and according to some by Heraclitus
also, and Diocles, and Empedocles; at any rate, Plato, in the Timoeus,
declares the operations of the senses to be irrational, and vitiated(9)
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(10) 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 re- proach) 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
Phoedrus denies (in the person of Socrates) his own ability to know
even himself, according to the injunction of the Delphic oracle; and in
the Theoetetus he deprives himself of the faculties of knowledge and
sensation; and again, in the Phoedrus 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,(1) lest we should even in Christ Himself, bring doubt upon(2)
the truth of their sensation; lest perchance it should be said that He
did not really "behold Satan as lightning fall from heaven;"(3) that He
did not really hear the Father's voice testifying of Himself;(4) or
that He was deceived in touching Peter's wife's mother;(5) or that the
fragrance of the ointment which He afterwards smelled was different
from that which He accepted for His burial;(6) and that the taste of
the wine was different from that which He consecrated in memory of His
blood.(7) 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;(8) true and
real was the draught of that wine at the marriage of (Cana in)
Galilee;(9) true and real also was the touch of the then believing
Thomas.(10) 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."(11) 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.
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.(12) He
asks in the Phoedo, 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,(13) 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 AEons 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.(1) 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,(2) 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.(3) 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?(4) 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,(5) 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,(6) 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 occasons; for (you suppose) that we are so made and
constituted as not to know that we have seen or heard something, on the
hypothesis(7) 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,(8) 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.(9) 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 follow- ing
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.(1) 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;"(2) and as Plato too might
inform our heretics: "The things which appear are the image(3) of the
things which are concealed from view,"(4) 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.
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,(5) 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,(1) 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,(2) 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(3) 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.(4) 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(5) 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,"(6) has declared that neither
childhood nor infancy is without sensibility,(7)—the former of which
states, when meeting Him with approving shouts, proved its ability to
offer Him testimony;(8) while the other, by being slaughtered, for His
sake of course, knew what violence meant.(9)
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:(10) "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(1) uniform in its seminal origin, although multiform
by the process of nativity.(2) 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(3) children speak—such is
the precocity of their tongue—before they are a month old. Indeed,
Plato himself tells us, in the Timoeus, 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
Tree 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."(4) 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(5) 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.(6) 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.
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(7) 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?"(8) "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."(9) 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."(10) 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,(1) 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."(2) 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."(3) 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:)"(4) and, "We also were by
nature children of wrath;"(5) and, "Such were some of you, but ye are
washed."(6) 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 autexousios (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 ( to autexousion ), we have already shown in
opposition both to Marcion(7) and to Hermogenes.(8) 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.
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.(9) 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.
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, Israel's God; and ours, who then enclosed them firmly
within our sinful flesh. The hive of Valen-tinus 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 AEons. I am sorry from my heart that Plato has been
the caterer to all these heretics. For in the Phoedo he imagines that
souls wander from this world to that, and thence back again hither;
whilst in the Timoeus 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, maqhseis anamnhseis , 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.
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, incorpo-real-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(1)
(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,(2) and by consequence
susceptible of a failure in memory. This point I have discussed
sufficienly with Hermogenes.(3) 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,(1) 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?(2) 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.
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 AEnesidemus, 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(1) when
the new-born infant first draws breath, and by and by exhaled(2) 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(3)
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,(4) 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(5) 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,(6) 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,(1) 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 foetus is extracted(2) 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 embruosqakths , 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!(3) 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
yukh ? How many nations are there who commence life(4) 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 Argaean 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(5) and Scipios.(6) If, however, there
be any one who, like Plato,(7) 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;(8) and of a legion in number, as in the
Gadarene.(9) 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,(10) 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.
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(1) 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,(2) 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 detain (the other) outside? I suppose he had not yet breathed
when he seized his brother's heel;(3) and was still warm with his
mother's warmth, when he so strongly wished to be the first to quit the
womb. What an infant! so emulous, so strong, and already so
contentious; and all this, I suppose, because even now full of life!
Consider, again, those extraordinary conceptions, which were more
wonderful still, of the barren woman and the virgin: these women would
only be able to produce imperfect offspring against the course of
nature, from the very fact that one of them was too old to bear seed,
and the other was pure from the contact of man. If there was to be
bearing at all in the case, it was only fitting that they should be
born without a soul, (as the philosopher would say,) who had been
irregularly conceived. However, even these have life, each of them in
his mother's womb. Elizabeth exults with joy, (for) John had leaped in
her womb;(4) Mary magnifies the Lord, (for) Christ had instigated her
within.(5) The mothers recognise each their own offspring, being
moreover each recognised by their infants, which were therefore of
course alive, and were not souls merely, but spirits also. Accordingly
you read the word of God which was spoken to Jeremiah, "Before I formed
thee in the belly, I knew thee."(6) Since God forms us in the womb, He
also breathes upon us, as He also did at the first creation, when "the
Lord God formed man, and breathed into him the breath of life."(7) Nor
could God have known man in the womb, except in his entire nature: "And
before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee."(8) Well,
was it then a dead body at that early stage? Certainly not. For "God is
not the God of the dead, but of the living."
How, then, is a living being conceived? Is the substance of both
body and soul formed together at one and the same time? Or does one of
them precede the other in natural formation? We indeed maintain that
both are conceived, and formed, and perfectly simultaneously, as well
as born together; and that not a moment's interval occurs in their
conception, so that, a prior place can be assigned to either.(9) Judge,
in fact, of the incidents of man's earliest existence by those which
occur to him at the very last. As death is defined to be nothing else
than the separation of body and soul,(10) life, which is the opposite
of death, is susceptible of no other definition than the conjunction of
body and soul. If the severance happens at one and the same time to
both substances by means of death, so the law of their combination
ought to assure us that it occurs simultaneously to the two substances
by means of life. Now we allow that life begins with conception,
because we contend that the soul also begins from conception; life
taking its commencement at the same moment and place that the soul
does. Thus, then, the processes which act together to produce
separation by death, also combine in a simultaneous action to produce
life. If we assign priority to (the formation of) one of the natures,
and a subsequent time to the other, we shall have further to determine
the precise times of the semination, according to the condition and
rank of each. And that being so, what time shall we give to the seed of
the body, and what to the seed of the soul? Besides, if different
periods are to be assigned to the seminations then arising out of this
difference in time, we shall also have different substances.(1) For
although we shall allow that there are two kinds of seed—that of the
body and that of the soul—we still declare that they are inseparable,
and therefore contemporaneous and simultaneous in origin. Now let no
one take offence or feel ashamed at an interpretation of the processes
of nature which is rendered necessary (by the defence of the truth).
Nature should be to us an object of reverence, not of blushes. It is
lust, not natural usage, which has brought shame on the intercourse of
the sexes. It is the excess, not the normal state, which is immodest
and unchaste: the normal condition has received a blessing from God,
and is blest by Him: "Be fruitful, and multiply, (and replenish the
earth.)"(2) Excess, however, has He cursed, in adulteries, and
wantonness, and chambering.(3) Well, now, in this usual function of the
sexes which brings together the male and the female in their common
intercourse, we know that both the soul and the flesh discharge a duty
together: the soul supplies desire, the flesh contributes the
gratification of it; the soul furnishes the instigation, the flesh
affords the realization. The entire man being excited by the one effort
of both natures, his seminal substance is discharged, deriving its
fluidity from the body, and its warmth from the soul. Now if the soul
in Greek is a word which is synonymous with cold,(4) how does it come
to pass that the body grows cold after the soul has quitted it? Indeed
(if I run the risk of offending modesty even, in my desire to prove the
truth), I cannot help asking, whether we do not, in that very heat of
extreme gratification when the generative fluid is ejected, feel that
somewhat of our soul has gone from us? And do we not experience a
faintness and prostration along with a dimness of sight? This, then,
must be the soul-producing seed, which arises at once from the out-drip
of the soul, just as that fluid is the body-producing seed which
proceeds from the drainage of the flesh. Most true are the examples of
the first creation. Adam's flesh was formed of clay. Now what is clay
bug an excellent moisture, whence should spring the generating fluid?
From the breath of God first came the soul. But what else is the breath
of God than the vapour of the spirit, whence should spring that which
we breathe out through the generative fluid? Forasmuch, therefore, as
these two different and separate substances, the clay and the breath,
combined at the first creation in forming the individual man, they then
both amalgamated and mixed their proper seminal rudiments in one, and
ever afterwards communicated to the human race the normal mode of its
propagation, so that even now the two substances, although diverse from
each other, flow forth simultaneously in a united channel; and finding
their way together into their appointed seed-plot, they fertilize with
their combined vigour the human fruit out of their respective natures.
And inherent in this human product is his own seed, according to the
process which has been ordained for every creature endowed with the
functions of generation. Accordingly from the one (primeval) man comes
the entire outflow and redundance of men's souls—nature proving
herself true to the commandment of God, "Be fruitful, and multiply."(5)
For in the very preamble of this one production, "Let us make man,"(6)
man's whole posterity was declared and described in a plural phrase,
"Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea," etc.(7) And no
wonder: in the seed lies the promise and earnest of the crop.
What, then, by this time means that ancient saying, mentioned by
Plato,(8) concerning the reciprocal migration of souls; how they remove
hence and go thither, and then return hither and pass through life, and
then again depart from this life, and afterwards become alive from the
dead? Some will have it that this is a saying of Pythagoras; Albinus
supposes it to be a divine announcement, perhaps of the Egyptian
Mercury.(9) But there is no divine saying, except of the one true God,
by whom the prophets, and the apostles, and Christ Himself declared
their grand message. More ancient than Saturn a good deal (by some nine
hundred years or so), and even than his grandchildren, is Moses; and he
is certainly much more divine, recounting and tracing out, as he does,
the course of the human race from the very beginning of the world,
indicating the several births (of the fathers of mankind) according to
their names and their epochs; giving thus plain proof of the divine
character of his work, from its divine authority and word. If, indeed,
the sophist of Samos is Plato's authority for the eternally revolving
migration of souls out of a constant alternation of the dead and the
living states, then no doubt did the famous Pythagoras, however
excellent in other respects, for the purpose of fabricating such an
opinion as this, rely on a falsehood, which was not only shameful, but
also hazardous. Consider it, you that are ignorant of it, and believe
with us. He feigns death, he conceals himself underground, he condemns
himself to that endurance for some seven years, during which he learns
from his mother, who was his sole accomplice and attendant, what he was
to relate for the belief of the world concerning those who had died
since his seclusion;(1) and when he thought that he had succeeded in
reducing the frame of his body to the horrid appearance of a dead old
man, he comes forth from the place of his concealment and deceit, and
pretends to have returned from the dead. Who would hesitate about
believing that the man, whom he had supposed to have died, was come
back again to life? especially after hearing from him facts about the
recently dead,(1) which he evidently could only have discovered in
Hades itself! Thus, that men are made alive after death, is rather an
old statement. But what if it be rather a recent one also? The truth
does not desire antiquity, nor does falsehood shun novelty. This
notable saying I hold to be plainly false, though ennobled by
antiquity. How should that not be false, which depends for its evidence
on a falsehood?—How can I help believing Pythagoras to be a deceiver,
who practises deceit to win my belief? How will he convince me that,
before he was Pythagoras, he had been AEthalides, and Euphorbus, and
the fisherman Pyrrhus, and Hermotimus, to make us believe that men live
again after they have died, when he actually perjured himself
afterwards as Pythagoras. In proportion as it would be easier for me to
believe that he had returned once to life in his own person, than so
often in the person of this man and that, in the same degree has he
deceived me in things which are too hard to be credited, because he has
played the impostor in matters which might be readily believed. Well,
but he recognised the shield of Euphorbus, which had been formerly
consecrated at Delphi, and claimed it as his own, and proved his claim
by signs which were generally unknown. Now, look again at his
subterranean lurking-place, and believe his story, if you can. For, as
to the man who devised such a tricksty scheme, to the injury of his
health, fraudulently wasting his life, and torturing it for seven years
underground, amidst hunger, idleness, and darkness—with a profound
disgust for the mighty sky—what reckless effort would he not make,
what curious contrivance would he not attempt, to arrive at the
discovery of this famous shield? Suppose now, that he found it in some
of those hidden researches; suppose that he recovered some slight
breath of report which survived the now obsolete tradition; suppose him
to have come to the knowledge of it by an inspection which he had
bribed the beadle to let him have,—we know very well what are the
resources of magic skill for exploring hidden secrets: there are the
catabolic spirits, which floor their victims;(2) and the paredral
spirits, which are ever at their side(3) to haunt them; and the
pythonic spirits, which entrance them by their divination and
ventriloquistic(4) arts. For was is not likely that Pherecydes also,
the master of our Pythagoras, used to divine, or I would rather say
rave and dream, by such arts and contrivances as these? Might not the
self-same demon have been in him, who, whilst in Euphorbus, transacted
deeds of blood? But lastly, why is it that the man, who proved himself
to have been uphorbus by the evidence of the shield, did not also
recognise any of his former Trojan comrades? For they, too, must by
this time have recovered life, since men were rising again from the
dead:
CHAP, XXIX.—THE PYTHAGOREAN DOCTRINE REFUTED BY ITS OWN FIRST PRINCIPLE, THAT LIVING MEN ARE FORMED FROM THE DEAD.
It is indeed, manifest that dead men are formed from living ones;
but it does not follow from that, that living men are formed from dead
ones. For from the beginning the living came first in the order of
things, and therefore also from the beginning the dead came afterwards
in order. But these proceeded from no other source except from the
living. The living had their origin in any other source (you please)
than in the dead; whilst the dead had no source whence to derive their
beginning, except from the living. If, then, from the very first the
living came not from the dead, why should they afterwards (be said to)
come from the dead? Had that original source, whatever it was, come to
an end? Was the form or law thereof a matter for regret? Then why was
it preserved in the case of the dead? Does it not follow that, because
the dead came from the living at the first, therefore they always came
from the living? For either the law which obtained at the beginning
must have continued in both of its relations, or else it must have
changed in both; so that, if it had become necessary for the living
afterwards to proceed from the dead, it would be necessary, in like
manner, for the dead also not to proceed from the living. For if a
faithful adherence to the institution was not meant to be perpetuated
in each respect, then contraries cannot in due alternation continue to
be re-formed from contraries. We, too, will on our side adduce against
you certain contraries, of the born and the unborn, of vision(1) and
blindness, of youth and old age, of wisdom and folly. Now it does not
follow that the unborn proceeds from the born, on the ground that a
contrary issues from a contrary; nor, again, that vision proceeds from
blindness, because blindness happens to vision; nor, again, that youth
revives from old age, because after youth comes the decrepitude of
senility; nor that folly(2) is born with its obtuseness from wisdom,
because wisdom may possibly be sometimes sharpened out of folly.
Albinus has some fears for his (master and friend) Plato in these
points, and labours with much ingenuity to distinguish different kinds
of contraries; as if these instances did not as absolutely partake of
the nature of contrariety as those which are expounded by him to
illustrate his great master's principle—I mean, life and death. Nor is
it, for the matter of that, true that life is restored out of death,
because it happens that death succeeds(3) life.
But what must we say in reply to what follows? For, in the first
place, if the living come from the dead, just as the dead proceed from
the living, then there must always remain unchanged one and the
selfsame number of mankind, even the number which originally introduced
(human) life. The living preceded the dead, afterwards the dead issued
from the living, and then again the living
from the dead. Now, since this process was evermore going on with the same persons, therefore they, issuing from the same, must always have remained in number the same. For they who emerged (into life) could never have become more nor fewer than they who disappeared (in death). We find, however, in the records of the Antiquities of Man,(4) that the human race has progressed with a gradual growth of population, either occupying different portions of the earth as aborigines, or as nomade tribes, or as exiles, or as conquerors—as the Scythians in Parthia, the Temenidae in Peloponnesus, the Athenians in Asia, the Phrygians in Italy, and the Phoenicians in Africa; or by the more ordinary methods of emigration, which they call apaikiai ] or colonies, for the purpose of throwing off redundant population, disgorging into other abodes their overcrowded masses. The aborigines remain still in their old settlements, and have also enriched other districts with loans of even larger populations. Surely it is obvious enough, if one looks at the whole world, that it is becoming daily better cultivated and more fully peopled than anciently. All places are now accessible, all are well known, all open to commerce; most pleasant farms have obliterated all traces of what were once dreary and dangerous wastes; cultivated fields have subdued forests; flocks and herds have expelled wild beasts; sandy deserts are sown; rocks are planted; marshes are drained; and where once were hardly solitary cottages, there are now large cities. No longer are (savage) islands dreaded, nor their rocky shores feared; everywhere are houses, and inhabitants, and settled government, and civilised life. What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint), is our teeming population: our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly supply us from its natural elements; our wants grow more and more keen, and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, whilst Nature fails in affording us her usual sustenance. In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race; and yet, when the hatchet has once felled large masses of men, the world has hitherto never once been alarmed at the sight of a restitution of its dead coming back to life after their millennial exile.(5) But such a spectacle would have become quite obvious by the balance of mortal loss and vital recovery, if it were true that the dead came back again to life. Why, however, is it after a thousand years, and not at the moment, that this return from death is to take place, when, supposing that the loss is not at once supplied, there must be a risk of an utter extinction, as the failure precedes the compensation? Indeed, this furlough of our present life would be quite disproportioned to the period of a thousand years; so much briefer is it, and on that account so much more easily is its torch extinguished than rekindled. Inasmuch, then, as the period which, on the hypothesis we have discussed, ought to intervene, if the living are to be formed from the dead, has not actually occurred, it will follow that we must not believe that men come back to life from the dead (in the way surmised in this philosophy).
Again, if this recovery of life from the dead take place at all,
individuals must of course resume their own individuality. Therefore
the souls which animated each several body must needs have returned
separately to their several bodies. Now, whenever two, or three, or
five souls are re-enclosed (as they constantly are) in one womb, it
will not amount in such cases to life from the dead, because there is
not the separate restitution which individuals ought to have; although
at this rate, (no doubt,) the law of the primeval creation is signally
kept,(1) by the production still of several souls out of only one!
Then, again, if souls depart at different ages of human life, how is it
that they come back again at one uniform age? For all men are imbued
with an infant soul at their birth. But how happens it that a man who
dies in old age returns to life as an infant? If the soul, whilst
disembodied, decreases thus by retrogression of its age, how much more
reasonable would it be, that it should resume its life with a richer
progress in all attainments of life after the lapse of a thousand
years! At all events, it should return with the age it had attained at
its death, that it might resume the precise life which it had
relinquished. But even if, at this rate, they should reappear the same
evermore in their revolving cycles, it would be proper for them to
bring back with them, if not the selfsame forms of body, at least their
original peculiarities of character, taste, and disposition, because it
would be hardly
possible(2) for them to be regarded as the same, if they were deficient in those characteristics by means of which their identity should be proved. (You, however, meet me with this question): How can you possibly know, you ask, whether all is not a secret process? may not the work of a thousand years take from you the power of recognition, since they return unknown to you? But I am quite certain that such is not the case, for you yourself present Pythagoras to me as (the restored) Euphorbus. Now look at Euphorbus: he was evidently possessed of a military and warlike soul, as is proved by the very renown of the sacred shields. As for Pythagoras, however, he was such a recluse, and so unwarlike, that he shrank from the military exploits of which Greece was then so full, and preferred to devote himself, in the quiet retreat of Italy, to the study of geometry, and astrology, and music—the very opposite to Euphorbus in taste and disposition. Then, again, the Pyrrhus (whom he represented) spent his time in catching fish; but Pythagoras, on the contrary, would never touch fish, abstaining from even the taste of them as from animal food. Moreover, AEthalides and Hermotimus had included the bean amongst the common esculents at meals, while Pythagoras taught his disciples not even to pass through a plot which was cultivated with beans. I ask, then, how the same souls are resumed, which can offer no proof of their identity, either by their disposition, or habits, or living? And now, after all, (we find that) only four souls are mentioned as recovering life(3) out of all the multitudes of Greece. But limiting ourselves merely to Greece, as if no transmigrations of souls and resumptions of bodies occurred, and that every day, in every nation, and amongst all ages, ranks, and sexes, how is it that Pythagoras alone experiences these changes into one personality and another? Why should not I too undergo them? Or if it be a privilege monopolized by philosophers—and Greek philosophers only, as if Scythians and Indians had no philosophers—how is it that Epicurus had no recollection that he had been once another man, nor Chrysippus, nor Zeno, nor indeed Plato himself, whom we might perhaps have supposed to have been Nestor, from his honeyed eloquence?
But the fact is, Empedocles, who used to dream that he was a god,
and on that account, I suppose, disdained to have it thought that he
had ever before been merely some hero, declares in so many words: "I
once was Thamnus, and a fish." Why not rather a melon, seeing that he
was such a fool; or a cameleon, for his inflated brag? It was, no
doubt, as a fish (and a queer one too!) that he escaped the corruption
of some obscure grave, when he preferred being roasted by a plunge into
AEtna; after which accomplishment there was an end for ever to his
metensw - matwsis or putting himself into another body—(fit only now
for) a light dish after the roast-meat. At this point, therefore, we
must likewise contend against that still more monstrous presumption,
that in the course of the transmigration beasts pass from human beings,
and human beings from beasts. Let (Empedocles') Thamnuses alone. Our
slight notice of them in passing will be quite enough: (to dwell on
them longer will inconvenience us,) lest we should be obliged to nave
recourse to raillery and laughter instead of serious instruction. Now
our position is this: that the human soul cannot by any means at all be
transferred to beasts, even when they are supposed to originate,
according to the philosophers, out of the substances of the elements.
Now let us suppose that the soul is either fire, or water, or blood, or
spirit, or air, or light; we must not forget that all the animals in
their several kinds have properties which are opposed to the respective
elements. There are the cold animals which are opposed to
fire—water-snakes, lizards, salamanders, and what things soever are
produced out of the rival element of water. In like manner, those
creatures are opposite to water which are in their nature dry and
sapless; indeed, locusts, butterflies, and chameleons rejoice in
droughts. So, again, such creatures are opposed to blood which have
none of its purple hue, such as snails, worms, and most of the fishy
tribes. Then opposed to spirit are those creatures which seem to have
no respiration, being unfurnished with lungs and windpipes, such as
gnats, ants, moths, and minute things of this sort. Opposed, moreover,
to air are those creatures which always live under ground and under
water, and never imbibe air—things of which you are more acquainted
with the existence than with the names. Then opposed to light are those
things which are either wholly blind, or possess eyes for the darkness
only, such as moles, bats, and owls. These examples (have I adduced),
that I might illustrate my subject from clear and palpable natures. But
even if I could take in my hand the "atoms" of Epicurus, or if
my eye could see the "numbers" of Pythagoras, or if my foot could stumble against the "ideas" of Plato, or if I could lay hold of the "entelechies" of Aristotle, the chances would be, that even in these (impalpable) classes I should find such animals as I must oppose to one another on the ground of their contrariety. For I maintain that, of whichsoever of the before-mentioned natures the human soul is composed, it would not have been possible for it to pass for new forms into animals so contrary to each of the separate natures, and to bestow an origin by its passage on those beings, from which it would have to be excluded and rejected rather than to be admitted and received, by reason of that original contrariety which we have supposed it to possess,(1) and which commits the bodily substance receiving it to an interminable strife; and then again by reason of the subsequent contrariety, which results from the development inseparable from each several nature. Now it is on quite different conditions(2) that the soul of man has had assigned to it (in individual bodies(3) ) its abode, and aliment, and order, and sensation, and affection, and sexual intercourse, and procreation of children; also (on different conditions has it, in individual bodies, received especial) dispositions, as well as duties to fulfil, likings, dislikes, vices, desires, pleasures, maladies, remedies—in short, its own modes of living, its own outlets of death. How, then, shall that (human) soul which cleaves to the earth, and is unable without alarm to survey any great height, or any considerable depth, and which is also fatigued if it mounts many steps, and is suffocated if it is submerged in a fish-pond,—(how, I say, shall a soul which is beset with such weaknesses) mount up at some future stage into the air in an eagle, or plunge into the sea in an eel? How, again, shall it, after being nourished with generous and delicate as well as exquisite viands, feed deliberately on, I will not say husks, but even on thorns, and the wild fare of bitter leaves, and beasts of the dung-hill, and poisonous worms, if it has to migrate into a goat or into a quail?—nay, it may be, feed on carrion, even on human corpses in some bear or lion? But how indeed (shall it stoop to this), when it remembers its own (nature and dignity)? In the same way, you may submit all other instances to this criterion of incongruity, and so save us from lingering over the distinct consideration of each of them in turn. Now, whatever may be the measure and whatever the mode of the human soul, (the question is forced upon us,) what it will do in far larger animals, or in very diminutive ones? It must needs be, that every individual body of whatever size is filled up by the soul, and that the soul is entirely covered by the body. How, therefore, shall a man's soul fill an elephant? How, likewise, shall it be contracted within a gnat? If it be so enormously extended or contracted, it will no doubt be exposed to peril. And this induces me to ask another question: If the soul is by no means capable of this kind of migration into animals, which are not fitted for its reception, either by the habits of their bodies or the other laws of their being, will it then undergo a change according to the properties of various animals, and be adapted to their life, notwithstanding its contrariety to human life—having, in fact, become contrary to its human self by reason of its utter change? Now the truth is, if it undergoes such a transformation, and loses what it once was, the human soul will not be what it was; and if it ceases to be its former self, the metensomatosis, or adaptation of some other body, comes to nought, and is not of course to be ascribed to the soul which will cease to exist, on the supposition of its complete change. For only then can a soul be said to experience this process of the metensomatosis, when it undergoes it by remaining unchanged in its own (primitive) condition. Since, therefore, the soul does not admit of change, lest it should cease to retain its identity; and yet is unable to remain unchanged in its original state, because it fails then to receive contrary (bodies),—I still want to know some credible reason to justify such a transformation as we are discussing. For although some men are compared to the beasts because of their character, disposition, and pursuits (since even God says, "Man is like the beasts that perish"(1)), it does not on this account follow that rapacious persons become kites, lewd persons dogs, ill-tempered ones panthers, good men sheep, talkative ones swallows, and chaste men doves, as if the selfsame substance of the soul everywhere repeated its own nature in the properties of the animals (into which it passed). Besides, a substance is one thing, and the nature of that substance is another thing; inasmuch as the substance is the special property of one given thing, whereas the nature thereof may possibly belong to many things. Take an example or two. A stone or a piece of iron is the substance: the hardness of the stone and
the iron is the nature of the substance. Their hardness combines objects by a common quality; their substances keep them separate. Then, again, there is softness in wool, and softness in a feather: their natural qualities are alike, (and put them on a par;) their substantial qualities are not alike, (and keep them distinct.) Thus, if a man likewise be designated a wild beast or a harmless one, there is not for all that an identity of soul. Now the similarity of nature is even then observed, when dissimilarity of substance is most conspicuous: for, by the very fact of your judging that a man resembles a beast, you confess that their soul is not identical; for you say that they resemble each other, not that they are the same. This is also the meaning of the word of God (which we have just quoted): it likens man to the beasts in nature, but not in substance. Besides, God would not have actually made such a comment as this concerning man, if He had known him to be in substance only bestial
Forasmuch as this doctrine is vindicated even on the principle of
judicial retribution, on the pretence that the souls of men obtain as
their partners the kind of animals which are suited to their life and
deserts,—as if they ought to be, according to their several
characters, either slain in criminals destined to execution, or reduced
to hard work in menials, or fatigued and wearied in labourers, or
foully disgraced in the unclean; or, again, on the same principle,
reserved for honour, and love, and care, and attentive regard in
characters most eminent in, rank and virtue, usefulness, and tender
sensibility,—I must here also remark, that if souls undergo a
transformation, they will actually not be able to accomplish and
experience the destinies which they shall deserve; and the aim and
purpose of judicial recompense will be brought to nought, as there will
be wanting the sense and consciousness of merit and retribution. And
there must be this want of consciousness, if souls lose their
condition; and there must ensue this loss, if they do not continue in
one stay. But even if they should have permanency enough to remain
unchanged until the judgment,—a point which Mercurius AEgyptius
recognised, when he said that the soul, after its separation from the
body, was not dissipated back into the soul of the universe, but
retained permanently its distinct individuality, "in order that it
might render," to use his own words, "an account to the Father of those
things which it has done in the body;" —(even supposing all this, I
say,) I still want to examine the justice, the solemnity, the majesty,
and the dignity of this reputed judgment of God, and see whether human
judgment has not too elevated a throne in it—exaggerated in both
directions, in its office both of punishments and rewards, too severe
in dealing out its vengeance, and too lavish in bestowing its favour.
What do you suppose will become of the soul of the murderer? (It will
animate), I suppose, some cattle destined for the slaughter-house and
the shambles, that it may itself be killed, even as it has killed; and
be itself flayed, since it has fleeced others; and be itself used for
food, since it has cast to the wild beasts the ill-fated victims whom
it once slew in woods and lonely roads. Now, if such be the judicial
retribution which it is to receive, is not such a soul likely to find
more of consolation than of punishment, in the fact that it receives
its coup de grace from the hands of most expert practitioners—is
buried with condiments served in the most piquant styles of an Apicius
or a Lurco, is introduced to the tables of your exquisite Ciceros, is
brought up on the most splendid dishes of a Sylla, finds its obsequies
in a banquet, is devoured by respectable (mouths) on a par with itself,
rather than by kites and wolves, so that all may see how it has got a
man's body for its tomb, and has risen again after returning to its own
kindred race—exulting in the face of human judgments, if it has
experienced them? For these barbarous sentences of death consign to
various wild beasts, which are selected and trained even against their
nature for their horrible office the criminal who has committed murder,
even while yet alive; nay, hindered from too easily dying, by a
contrivance which retards his last moment in order to aggravate his
punishment. But even if his soul should have anticipated by its
departure the sword's last stroke, his body at all events must not
escape the weapon: retribution for his own crime is yet exacted by
stabbing his throat and stomach, and piercing his side. After that he
is flung into the fire, that his very grave may be cheated.(1) In no
other way, indeed, is a sepulture allowed him. Not that any great care,
after all, is bestowed on his pyre, so that other animals light upon
his remains. At any rate, no mercy is shown to his bones, no indulgence
to his ashes, which must be punished with exposure and nakedness. The
vengeance which is inflicted among men upon the homicide is really as
great as that which is imposed by nature. Who would not prefer the
justice of the world, which, as
the apostle himself testifies, "beareth not the sword in vain,"(2) and which is an institute of religion when it severely avenges in defence of human life? When we contemplate, too, the penalties awarded to other crimes—gibbets, and holocausts, and sacks, and harpoons, and precipices—who would not think it better to receive his sentence in the courts of Pythagoras and Empedocles? For even the wretches whom they will send into the bodies of asses and mules to be punished by drudgery and slavery, how will they congratulate themselves on the mild labour of the mill and the water-wheel, when they recollect the mines, and the convict-gangs, and the public works, and even the prisons and black-holes, terrible in their idle, do-nothing routine? Then, again, in the case of those who, after a course of integrity, have surrendered their life to the Judge, I likewise look for rewards, but I rather discover punishments. To be sure, it must be a handsome gain for good men to be restored to life in any animals whatsoever! Homer, so dreamt Ennius, remembered that he was once a peacock; however, I cannot for my part believe poets, even when wide awake. A peacock, no doubt, is a very pretty bird, pluming itself, at will, on its splendid feathers; Jut then its wings do not make amends for its voice, which is harsh and unpleasant; and there is nothing that poets like better than a good song. His transformation, therefore, into a peacock was to Homer a penalty, not an honour. The world's remuneration will bring him a much greater joy, when it lauds him as the father of the liberal sciences; and he will prefer the ornaments of his fame to the graces of his tail! But never mind! let poets migrate into peacocks, or into swans, if you like, especially as swans have a respectable voice: in what animal will you invest that righteous hero AEacus? In what beast will you clothe the chaste and excellent Dido? What bird shall fall to the lot of Patience? what animal to the lot of Holiness? what fish to that of Innocence? Now all creatures are the servants of man; all are his subjects, all his dependants. If by and by he is to become one of these creatures, he is by such a change debased and degraded he to whom, for his virtues, images, statues, and titles are freely awarded as public honours and distinguished privileges, he to Whom the senate and the people vote even sacrifices! Oh, what judicial sentences for gods to pronounce, as men's recompense after death! They are more mendacious than any human judgments; they are contemptible as punishments, dis- gusting as rewards; such as the worst of men could never fear, nor the best desire; such indeed, as criminals will aspire to, rather than saints,—the former, that they may escape more speedily the world's stern sentence,—the latter that they may more tardily incur it. How well, (forsooth), O ye philosophers do you teach us, and how usefully do you advise us, that after death rewards and punishments fall with lighter weight! whereas, if any judgment awaits souls at all, it ought rather to be supposed that it will be heavier at the conclusion of life than in the conduct(1) thereof, since nothing is more complete than that which comes at the very last—nothing, moreover, is more complete than that which is especially divine. Accordingly, God's judgment will be more full and complete, because it will be pronounced at the very last, in an eternal irrevocable sentence, both of punishment and of consolation, (on men whose) souls are not to transmigrate into beasts, but are to return into their own proper bodies. And all this once for all, and on "that day, too, of which the Father only knoweth;"(2) (only knoweth,) in order that by her trembling expectation faith may make full trial of her anxious sincerity, keeping her gaze ever fixed on that day, in her perpetual ignorance of it, daily fearing that for which she yet daily hopes.
No tenet, indeed, under cover of any heresy has as yet burst upon
us, embodying any such extravagant fiction as that the souls of human
beings pass into the bodies of wild beasts; but yet we have deemed it
necessary to attack and refute this conceit, as a consistent sequel to
the preceding opinions, in order that Homer in the peacock might be got
rid of as effectually as Pythagoras in Euphorbus; and in order that, by
the demolition of the metempsychosis and metensomatosis by the same
blow, the Found might be cut away which has furnished no inconsiderable
support to our heretics. There is the (infamous) Simon of Samaria in
the Acts of the Apostles, who chaffered for the Holy Ghost: after his
condemnation by Him, and a vain remorse that he and his money must
perish together,(3) he applied his energies to the destruction of the
truth, as if to console himself with revenge. Besides the support with
which his own magic arts furnished him, he had recourse to imposture,
and purchased a Tyrian woman of the name of Helen out of a brothel,
with the same money which he had offered for the Holy Spirit,—a
traffic worthy of the wretched man. He actually reigned himself to be
the Supreme Father, and further pretended that the woman was his own
primary conception, wherewith he had purposed the creation of the
angels and the archangels; that after she was possessed of this purpose
she sprang forth from the Father and descended to the lower spaces, and
there anticipating the Father's design had produced the angelic powers,
which knew nothing of the Father, the Creator of this world; that she
was detained a prisoner by these from a (rebellious) motive very like
her own, lest after her departure from them they should appear to be
the offspring of another being; and that, after being on this account
exposed to every insult, to prevent her leaving them anywhere after her
dishonour, she was degraded even to the form of man, to be confined, as
it were, in the bonds of the flesh. Having during many ages wallowed
about in one female shape and another, she became the notorious Helen
who was so ruinous to Priam, and afterwards to the eyes of Stesichorus,
whom, she blinded in revenge for his lampoons, and then restored to
sight to reward him for his eulogies. After wandering about in this way
from body to body, she, in her final disgrace, turned out a viler Helen
still as a professional prostitute. This wench, therefore, was the lost
sheep, upon whom the Supreme Father, even Simon, descended, who, after
he had recovered her and brought her back—whether on his shoulders or
loins I cannot tell—cast an eye on the salvation of man, in order to
gratify his spleen by liberating them from the angelic powers.
Moreover, to deceive these he also himself assumed a visible shape; and
reigning the appearance of a man amongst men, he acted the part of the
Son in Judea, and of the Father in Samaria. O hapless Helen, what a
hard fate is yours between the poets and the heretics, who have
blackened your fame sometimes with adultery, sometimes with
prostitution! Only her rescue from Troy is a more glorious affair than
her extrication from the brothel. There were a thousand ships to remove
her from Troy; a thousand pence were probably more than enough to
withdraw her from the stews. Fie on you, Simon, to be so tardy in
seeking her out, and so inconstant in ransoming her! How different from
Menelaus! As soon as he has lost her, he goes in pursuit of her; she is
no sooner ravished than he begins his search; after a ten years'
conflict he boldly rescues her: there is no lurking, no deceiving, no
cavilling. I am really afraid that he was a much better "Father," who
laboured so much more vigilantly, bravely, and perseveringly, about the
recovery of his Helen.
However, it is not for you alone, (Simon), that the
transmigration philosophy has fabricated this story. Carpocrates also
makes equally good use of it, who was a magician and a fornicator like
yourself, only he had not a Helen.(1) And why should he not? since he
asserted that souls are reinvested with bodies, in order to ensure the
overthrow by all means of divine and human truth. For, (according to
his miserable doctrine,) this life became consummated to no man until
all those blemishes which are held to disfigure it have been fully
displayed in its conduct; because there is nothing which is accounted
evil by nature, but simply as men think of it. The transmigration of
human souls, therefore, into any kind of heterogeneous bodies, he
thought by all means indispensable, whenever any depravity whatever had
not been fully perpetrated in the early stage of life's passage. Evil
deeds (one may be sure) appertain to life. Moreover, as often as the
soul has fallen short as a defaulter in sin, it has to be recalled to
existence, until it "pays the utmost farthing,"(2) thrust out from time
to time into the prison of the body. To this effect does he tamper with
the whole of that allegory of the Lord which is extremely clear and
simple in its meaning, and ought to be from the first understood in its
plain and natural sense. Thus our "adversary" (therein mentioned(3) )
is the heathen man, who is walking with us along the same road of life
which is common to him and ourselves. Now "we must needs go out of the
world,"(4) if it be not allowed us to have conversation with them. He
bids us, therefore, show a kindly disposition to such a man. "Love your
enemies," says He, "pray for them that curse you,"(5) lest such a man
in any transaction of business be irritated by any unjust conduct of
yours, and "deliver thee to the judge" of his own (nation(6)), and you
be thrown into prison, and be detained in its close and narrow cell
until you have liquidated all your debt against him.(7) Then, again,
should you be disposed to apply the term "adversary" to the devil, you
are advised by the (Lord's) injunction, while you are in the way with
him," to make even with him such a compact as may be deemed compatible
with the requirements of your true faith. Now the compact you have made
respecting him is to renounce him, and his pomp, and his angels. Such
is your agreement in this matter. Now the friendly understanding you
will have to carry out must arise from your observance of the compact:
you must never think of getting back any of the things which you have
abjured, and have restored to him, lest he should summon you as a
fraudulent man, and a transgressor of your agreement, before God the
Judge (for in this light do we read of him, in another passage, as "the
accuser of the brethren,"(8) or saints, where reference is made to the
actual practice of legal prosecution); and lest this Judge deliver you
over to the angel who is to execute the sentence, and he commit you to
the prison of hell, out of which there will be no dismissal until the
smallest even of your delinquencies be paid off in the period before
the resurrection.(9) What can be a more fitting sense than this? What a
truer interpretation? If, however, according to Carpocrates, the soul
is bound to the commission of all sorts of crime and evil conduct, what
must we from his system understand to be its "adversary" and foe? I
suppose it must be that better mind which shall compel it by force to
the performance of some act of virtue, that it may be driven from body
to body, until it be found in none a debtor to the claims of a virtuous
life. This means, that a good tree is known by its bad fruit—in other
words, that the doctrine of truth is understood from the worst possible
precepts. I apprehend(10) that heretics of this school seize with
especial avidity the example of Elias, whom they assume to have been so
reproduced in John (the Baptist) as to make our Lord's statement
sponsor for their theory of transmigration, when He said, "Elias is
come already, and they knew him not;"(11) and again, in another
passage, "And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to
come."(12) Well, then, was it really in a Pythagorean sense that the
Jews approached John with the inquiry, "Art thou Elias?"(13) and not
rather in the sense of the divine pre- diction, "Behold, I will send
you Elijah" the Tisbite?(1) The fact, however, is, that their
metempsychosis, or transmigration theory, signifies the recall of the
soul which had died long before, and its return to some other body. But
Elias is to come again, not after quitting life (in the way of dying),
but after his translation (or removal without dying); not for the
purpose of being restored to the body, from which he had not departed,
but for the purpose of revisiting the world from which he was
translated; not by way of resuming a life which he had laid aside, but
of fulfilling prophecy,—really and truly the same man, both in respect
of his name and designation, as well as of his unchanged humanity. How,
therefore could John be Elias? You have your answer in the angel's
announcement: "And he shall go before the people," says he, "in the
spirit and power of Elias"—not (observe) in his soul and his body.
These substances are, in fact, the natural property of each individual;
whilst "the spirit and power" are bestowed as external gifts by the
grace of God and so may be transferred to another person according to
the purpose and will of the Almighty, as was anciently the case with
respect to the spirit of Moses.(2)
For the discussion of these questions we abandoned, if I remember
rightly, ground to which we must now return. We had established the
position that the soul is seminally placed in man, and by human agency,
and that its seed from the very beginning is uniform, as is that of the
soul also, to the race of man; (and this we settled) owing to the rival
opinions of the philosophers and the heretics, and that ancient saying
mentioned by Plato (to which we referred above).(3) We now pursue in
their order the points which follow from them. The soul, being sown in
the womb at the same time as the body, receives likewise along with it
its sex; and this indeed so simultaneously, that neither of the two
substances can be alone regarded as the cause of the sex. Now, if in
the semination of these substances any interval were admissible in
their conception, in such wise that either the flesh or the soul should
be the first to be conceived, one might then ascribe an especial sex to
one of the substances, owing to the difference in the time of the
impregnations, so that either the flesh would impress its sex upon the
soul, or the soul upon the sex; even as Apelles (the heretic, not the
painter(4)) gives the priority over their bodies to the souls of men
and women, as he had been taught by Philumena, and in consequence makes
the flesh, as the later, receive its sex from the soul. They also who
make the soul supervene after birth on the flesh predetermine, of
course, the sex of the previously formed soul to be male or female,
according to (the sex of) the flesh. But the truth is, the seminations
of the two substances are inseparable in point of time, and their
effusion is also one and the same, in consequence of which a community
of gender is secured to them; so that the course of nature, whatever
that be, shall draw the line (for the distinct sexes). Certainly in
this view we have an attestation of the method of the first two
formations, when the male was moulded and tempered in a completer way,
for Adam was first formed; and the woman came far behind him, for Eve
was the later formed. So that her flesh was for a long time without
specific form (such as she afterwards assumed when taken out of Adam s
side); but she was even then herself a living being, because I should
regard her at that time in soul as even a portion of Adam. Besides,
God's afflatus would have animated her too, if there had not been in
the woman a transmission from Adam of his soul also as well as of his
flesh.
Now the entire process of sowing, forming, and completing the
human embryo in the womb is no doubt regulated by some power, which
ministers herein to the will of God, whatever may be the method which
it is appointed to employ. Even the superstition of Rome, by carefully
attending to these points, imagined the goddess Alemona to nourish the
foetus in the womb; as well as (the goddesses) Nona and Decima, called
after the most critical months of gestation; and Partula, to manage and
direct parturition; and Lucina, to bring the child to the birth and
light of day. We, on our part, believe the angels to officiate herein
for God. The embryo therefore becomes a human being in the womb from
the moment that its form is completed. The law of Moses, indeed,
punishes with due penalties the man who shall cause abortion, inasmuch
as there exists already the rudiment of a human being,(5) which has
imputed to it even now the condition of life and death, since it is
already liable to the issues of both, although, by living still in the
mother, it for the most part shares its own state with the mother. I
must also say something about the period of the soul's birth, that I
may omit nothing incidental in the whole process. A mature and regular
birth takes place, as a general rule, at the commencement of the tenth
month. They who theorize respecting numbers, honour the number ten as
the parent of all the others, and as imparting perfection to the human
nativity. For my own part, I prefer viewing this measure of time in
reference to God, as if implying that the ten months rather initiated
man into the ten commandments; so that the numerical estimate of the
time needed to consummate our natural birth should correspond to the
numerical classification of the rules of our regenerate life. But
inasmuch as birth is also completed with the seventh month, I more
readily recognize in this number than in the eighth the honour of a
numerical agreement with the sabbatical period; so that the month in
which God's image is sometimes produced in a human birth, shall in its
number tally with the day on which God's creation was completed and
hallowed. Human nativity has sometimes been allowed to be premature,
and yet to occur in fit and perfect accordance with an hebdomad
sevenfold number, as an auspice of our resurrection, and rest, and
kingdom. The ogdoad, or eightfold number, therefore, is not concerned
in our formation;(1) for in the time it represents there will be no
more marriage.(2) We have already demonstrated the conjunction of the
body and the soul, from the concretion of their very seminations to the
complete formation of the foetus. We now maintain their conjunction
likewise from the birth onwards; in the first place, because they both
grow together, only each in a different manner suited to the diversity
of their nature—the flesh in magnitude, the soul in intelligence—the
flesh in material condition, the soul in sensibility. We are, however,
forbidden to suppose that the soul increases in substance, lest it
should be said also to be capable of diminution in substance, and so
its extinction even should be believed to be possible; but its inherent
power, in which are contained all its natural peculiarities, as
originally implanted in its being, is gradually developed along with
the flesh, without impairing the germinal basis of the substance, which
it received when breathed at first into man. Take a certain quantity of
gold or of silver—a rough mass as yet: it has indeed a compact
condition, and one that is more compressed at the moment than it will
be; yet it contains within its contour what is throughout a mass of
gold or of silver. When this mass is afterwards extended by beating it
into leaf, it becomes larger than it was before by the elongation of
the original mass, but not by any addition thereto, because it is
extended in space, not increased in bulk; although in a way it is even
increased when it is extended: for it may be increased in form, but not
in state. Then, again, the sheen of the gold or the silver, which when
the metal was any in block was Inherent in it no doubt really, but yet
only obscurely, shines out in developed lustre. Afterwards various
modifications of shape accrue, according to the feasibility in the
material which makes it yield to the manipulation of the artisan, who
yet adds nothing to the condition of the mass but its configuration. In
like manner, the growth and developments of the soul are to be
estimated, not as enlarging its substance, but as calling forth Its
powers.
Now we have already(3) laid down the principle, that all the
natural properties of the soul which relate to sense and intelligence
are inherent in its very substance, and spring from its native
constitution, but that they advance by a gradual growth through the
stages of life and develope themselves in different ways by accidental
circumstances, according to men's means and arts, their manners and
customs their local situations, and the influences of the Supreme
Powers;(4) but in pursuance of that aspect of the association of body
and soul which We have now to consider, we maintain that the puberty of
the soul coincides with that of the body, and that they attain both
together to this full growth at about the fourteenth year of life,
speaking generally,—the former by the suggestion of the senses, and
the latter by the growth of the bodily members; and (we fix on this
age) not because, as Asclepiades supposes, reflection then begins, nor
because the civil laws date the commencement of the real business of
life from this period, but because this was the appointed order from
the very first. For as Adam and Eve felt that they must cover their
naked- ness after their knowledge of good and evil so we profess to
have the same discernment of good and evil from the time that we
experience the same sensation of shame. Now from the before-mentioned
age (of fourteen years) sex is suffused and clothed with an especial
sensibility, and concupiscence employs the ministry of the eye, and
communicates its pleasure to another, and understands the natural
relations between male and female, and wears the fig-tree apron to
cover the shame which it still excites, and drives man out of the
paradise of innocence and chastity, and in its wild pruriency falls
upon sins and unnatural incentives to delinquency; for its impulse has
by this time surpassed the appointment of nature, and springs from its
vicious abuse. But the strictly natural concupiscence is simply
confined to the desire of those aliments which God at the beginning
conferred upon than. "Of every tree of the garden" He says, "ye shall
freely eat;"(1) and then again to the generation which followed next
after the flood He enlarged the grant: "Every moving thing that liveth
shall be meat for you; behold, as the green herb have I given you all
these things,"(2)—where He has regard rather to the body than to the
soul, although it be in the interest of the soul also. For we must
remove all occasion from the caviller, who, because the soul apparently
wants ailments, would insist on the soul's being from this circumstance
deemed mortal, since it is sustained by meat and drink and after a
time loses its rigour when they are withheld, and on their complete
removal ultimately droops and dies. Now the point we must keep in view
is not merely which particular faculty it is which desires these
(aliments), but also for what end; and even if it be for its own sake,
still the question remains, Why this desire, and when felt, and how
long? Then again there is the consideration, that it is one thing to
desire by natural instinct, and another thing to desire through
necessity; one thing to desire as a property of being, another thing to
desire for a special object. The soul, therefore, will desire meat and
drink—for itself indeed, because of a special necessity; for the
flesh, however, from the nature of its properties. For the flesh is no
doubt the house of the soul, and the soul is the temporary inhabitant
of the flesh. The desire, then, of the lodger will arise from the
temporary cause and the special necessity which his very designation
suggests,—with a view to benefit and improve the place of his
temporary abode, while sojourning in it; not with the view, certainly,
of being himself the foundation of the house, or himself its walls, or
himself its support and roof, but simply and solely with the view of
being accommodated and housed, since he could not receive such
accommodation except in a sound and well-built house. (Now, applying
this imagery to the soul,) if it be not provided with this
accommodation, it will not be in its power to quit its dwelling-place,
and for want of fit and proper resources, to depart safe and sound, in
possession, too, of its own supports, and the aliments which belong to
its own proper condition,—namely immortality, rationality,
sensibility, intelligence, and freedom of the will.
All these endowments of the soul which are bestowed on it at
birth are still obscured and depraved by the malignant being who, in
the beginning, regarded them with envious eye, so that they are never
seen in their spontaneous action, nor are they administered as they
ought to be. For to what individual of the human race will not the evil
spirit cleave, ready to entrap their souls from the very portal of
their birth, at which he is invited to be present in all those
superstitious processes which accompany childbearing? Thus it comes to
pass that all men are brought to the birth with idolatry for the
midwife, whilst the very wombs that bear them, still bound with the
fillets that have been wreathed before the idols, declare their
offspring to be consecrated to demons: for in parturition they invoke
the aid of Lucina and Diana; for a whole week a table is spread in
honour of Juno; on the last day the fates of the horoscope(3) are
invoked; and then the infant's first step on the ground is sacred to
the goddess Statina. After this does any one fail to devote to
idolatrous service the entire head of his son, or to take out a hair,
or to shave off the whole with a razor, or to bind it up for an
offering, or seal it for sacred use—in behalf of the clan, of the
ancestry, or for public devotion? On this principle of early possession
it was that Socrates, while yet a boy, was found by the spirit of the
demon. Thus, too, is it that to all persons their genii are assigned,
which is only another name for demons. Hence in no case (I mean of the
heathen, of course) is there any nativity which is pure of idolatrous
superstition. It was from this circumstance that the apostle said, that
when either of the parents was sanctified, the children were holy;(1)
and this as much by the prerogative of the (Christian) seed as by the
discipline of the institution (by baptism, and Christian education).
"Else," says he, "were the children unclean" by birth:(1) as if he
meant us to understand that the children of believers were designed for
holiness, and thereby for salvation; in order that he might by the
pledge of such a hope give his support to matrimony, which he had
determined to maintain in its integrity. Besides, he had certainly not
forgotten what the Lord had so definitively stated: "Except a man be
born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of
God;"(2) in other words, he cannot be holy.
Every soul, then, by reason of its birth, has its nature in Adam
until it is born again in Christ; moreover, it is unclean all the while
that it remains without this regeneration;(3) and because unclean, it
is actively sinful, and suffuses even the flesh (by reason of their
conjunction) with its own shame. Now although the flesh is sinful, and
we are forbidden to walk in accordance with it,(4) and its works are
condemned as lusting against the spirit,(5) and men on its account are
censured as carnal,(6) yet the flesh has not such ignominy on its own
account. For it is not of itself that it thinks anything or feels
anything for the purpose of advising or commanding sin. How should it,
indeed? It is only a ministering thing, and its ministration is not
like that of a servant or familiar friend—animated and human beings;
but rather that of a vessel, or something of that kind: it is body, not
soul. Now a cup may minister to a thirsty man; and yet, if the thirsty
man will not apply the cup to his mouth, the cup will yield no
ministering service. Therefore the differentia, or distinguishing
property, of man by no means lies in his earthy element; nor is the
flesh the human person, as being some faculty of his soul, and a
personal quality; but it is a thing of quite a different substance and
different condition, although annexed to the soul as a chattel or as an
instrument for the offices of life. Accordingly the flesh is blamed in
the Scriptures, because nothing is done by the soul without the flesh
in operations of concupiscence, appetite, drunkenness, cruelty,
idolatry, and other works of the flesh,—operations, I mean, which are
not confined to sensations, but result in effects. The emotions of sin,
indeed, when not resulting in effects, are usually imputed to the soul:
"Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after, hath already in his heart
committed adultery with her."(7) But what has the flesh alone, without
the soul, ever done in operations of virtue, righteousness, endurance,
or chastity? What absurdity, however, it is to attribute sin and crime
to that substance to which you do not assign any good actions or
character of its own! Now the party which aids in the commission of a
crime is brought to trial, only in such a way that the principal
offender who actually committed the crime may bear the weight of the
penalty, although the abettor too does not escape indictment. Greater
is the odium which falls on the principal, when his officials are
punished through his fault. He is beaten with more stripes who
instigates and orders the crime, whilst at the same time he who obeys
such an evil command is not acquitted.
There is, then, besides the evil which supervenes on the soul
from the intervention of the evil spirit, an antecedent, and in a
certain sense natural, evil which arises from its corrupt origin. For,
as we have said before, the corruption of our nature is another nature
having a god and father of its own, namely the author of (that)
corruption. Still there is a portion of good in the soul, of that
original, divine, and genuine good, which is its proper nature. For
that which is derived from God is rather obscured than extinguished. It
can be obscured, indeed, because it is not God; extinguished, however,
it cannot be, because it comes from God. As therefore light, when
intercepted by an opaque body, still remains, although it is not
apparent, by reason of the interposition of so dense a body; so
likewise the good in the soul, being weighed down by the evil, is,
owing to the obscuring character thereof, either not seen at all, its
light being wholly hidden, or else only a stray beam is there visible
where it struggles through by an accidental outlet. Thus some men are
very bad, and some very good; but yet the souls of all form but one
genus: even in the worst there is something good, and in the best there
is something bad. For God alone is without sin; and the only man
without sin is Christ, since Christ is also God. Thus the divinity of
the soul bursts forth in prophetic forecasts in consequence of its
primeval good; and being conscious of its origin, it bears testimony to
God (its author) in exclamations such as: Good God! God knows! and
Good-bye!(1) Just as no soul is without sin, so neither is any soul
without seeds of good. Therefore, when the soul embraces the faith,
being renewed in its second birth by water and the power from above,
then the veil of its former corruption being taken away, it beholds the
light in all its brightness. It is also taker up (in its second birth)
by the Holy Spirit, just as in its first birth it is embraced by the
unholy spirit. The flesh follows the soul now wedded to the Spirit, as
a part of the bridal portion—no longer the servant of the soul, but of
the Spirit. O happy marriage, if in it there is committed no violation
of the nuptial vow!
It now remains (that we discuss the subject) of death, in order
that our subject-matter may terminate where the soul itself completes
it; although Epicurus, indeed, in his pretty widely known doctrine, has
asserted that death does not appertain to us. That, says he, which is
dissolved lacks sensation; and that which is without sensation is
nothing to us. Well, but it is not actually death which suffers
dissolution and lacks sensation, but the human person who experiences
death. Yet even he has admitted suffering to be incidental to the
being to whom action belongs. Now, if it is in man to suffer death,
which dissolves the body and destroys the senses, how absurd to say
that so great a susceptibility belongs not to man! With much greater
precision does Seneca say: "After death all comes to an end, even
(death) itself." From which position of his it must needs follow that
death will appertain to its own self, since itself comes to an end; and
much more to man, in the ending of whom amongst the "all," itself also
ends. Death, (says Epicurus) belongs not to us; then at that rate, life
belongs not to us. For certainly, if that which causes our dissolution
have no relation to us, that also which compacts and composes us must
be unconnected with us. If the deprivation of our sensation be nothing
to us, neither can the acquisition of sensation have anything to do
with us. The fact, however, is, he who destroys the very soul, (as
Epicurus does), cannot help destroying death also. As for ourselves,
indeed, (Christians as we are), we must treat of death just as we
should of the posthumous life and of some other province of the soul,
(assuming) that we at all events belong to death, if it. does not
pertain to us. And on the same principle, even sleep, which is the very
mirror of death, is not alien from our subject-matter.
Let us therefore first discuss the question of sleep, and
afterwards in what way the soul encounters(2) death. Now sleep is
certainly not a supernatural thing, as some philosophers will have it
be, when they suppose it to be the result of causes which appear to be
above nature. The Stoics affirm sleep to be "a temporary suspension of
the activity of the senses;"(3) the Epicureans define it as an
intermission of the animal spirit; Anaxagoras and Xenophanes as a
weariness of the same; Empedocles and Parmenides as a cooling down
thereof; Strato as a separation of the (soul's) connatural spirit;
Democritus as the soul's indigence; Aristotle as the interruption(4) of
the heat around the heart. As for myself, I can safely say that i have
never slept in such a way as to discover even a single one of these
conditions. Indeed, we cannot possibly believe that sleep is a
weariness; it is rather the opposite, for it undoubtedly removes
weariness, and a person is refreshed by sleep instead of being
fatigued. Besides, sleep is not always the result of fatigue; and even
when it is, the fatigue continues no longer. Nor can I allow that sleep
is a cooling or decaying of the animal heat, for our bodies derive
warmth from sleep in such a way that the regular dispersion of the food
by means of sleep could not so easily go on if there were too much heat
to accelerate it unduly, or cold to retard it, if sleep had the alleged
refrigerating influence. There is also the further fact that
perspiration indicates an over-heated digestion; and digestion is
predicated of us as a process of concoction, which is an operation
concerned with heat and not with cold. In like manner, the immortality
of the soul precludes belief in the theory that sleep is an
intermission of the animal spirit, or an indigence of the spirit, or a
separation of the (soul's) connatural spirit. The soul perishes if it
undergoes diminution or intermis- sion. Our only resource, indeed, is
to agree with the Stoics, by determining the soul to be a temporary
suspension of the activity of the senses, procuring rest for the body
only, not for the soul also. For the soul, as being always in motion,
and always active, never succumbs to rest,—a condition which is alien
to immortality: for nothing immortal admits ,any end to its operation;
but sleep is an end of operation. It is indeed on the body, which is
subject to mortality, and on the body alone, that sleep graciously
bestows(1) a cessation from work. He, therefore, who shall doubt
whether sleep is a natural function, has the dialectical experts
calling in question the whole difference between things natural and
supernatural—so that what things he supposed to be beyond nature he
may, (if he likes,) be safe in assigning to nature, which indeed has
made such a disposition of things, that they may seemingly be accounted
as beyond it; and so, of course, all things are natural or none are
natural, (as occasion requires.) With us (Christians), however, only
that can receive a hearing which is suggested by contemplating God, the
Author of all the things which we are now discussing. For we believe
that nature, if it is anything, is a reasonable work of God. Now reason
presides over sleep; for sleep is so fit for man, so useful, so
necessary, that were it not for it, not a soul could provide agency
for recruiting the body, for restoring its energies, for ensuring its
health, for supplying suspension from work and remedy against labour,
and for the legitimate enjoyment of which day departs, and night
provides an ordinance by taking from all objects their very colour.
Since, then, sleep is indispensable to our life, and health, and
succour, there can be nothing pertaining to it which is not reasonable,
and which is not natural. Hence it is that physicians banish beyond the
gateway of nature everything which is contrary to what is vital
healthful, and helpful to nature; for those maladies which are inimical
to sleep—maladies of the mind and of the stomach—they have decided to
be contrariant to nature, and by such decision have determined as its
corollary that sleep is perfectly natural. Moreover, when they declare
that sleep is not natural in the lethargic state, they derive their
conclusion from the fact that it is natural when it is in its due and
regular exercise. For every natural state is impaired either by defect
or by excess, whilst it is maintained by its proper measure and amount.
That, therefore, will be natural in its condition which may be rendered
non-natural by defect or by excess. Well, now, what if you were to
remove eating and drinking from the conditions of nature? if in them
lies the chief incentive to sleep. It is certain that, from the very
beginning of his nature, man was impressed with these instincts (of
sleep).(2) If you receive your instruction from God, (you will find)
that the fountain of the human race, Adam, had a taste of drowsiness
before having a draught of repose; slept before he laboured, or even
before he ate, nay, even before he spoke; in Order that men may see
that sleep is a natural feature and function, and one which has
actually precedence over all the natural faculties. From this primary
instance also we are led to trace even then the image of death in
sleep. For as Adam was a figure of Christ, Adam's sleep shadowed out
the death of Christ, who was to sleep a mortal slumber, that from the
wound inflicted on His side might, in like manner (as Eve was formed),
be typified the church, the true mother of the living. This is why
sleep is so salutary, so rational, and is actually formed into the
model of that death which is general and common to the race of man.
God, indeed, has willed (and it may be said in passing that He has,
generally, in His dispensations brought nothing to pass without such
types and shadows) to set before us, in a manner more fully and
completely than Plato's example, by daily recurrence the outlines of
man's state, especially concerning the beginning and the termination
thereof; thus stretching out the hand to help our faith more readily by
types and parables, not in words only, but also in things. He
accordingly sets before your view the human body stricken by the
friendly power of slumber, prostrated by the kindly necessity of repose
immoveable in position, just as it lay previous to life, and just as it
will lie after life is past: there it lies as an attestation of its
form when first moulded, and of its condition when at last
buried—awaiting the soul in both stages, in the former previous to its
bestowal, in the latter after its recent withdrawal. Meanwhile the soul
is circumstanced in such a manner as to seem to be elsewhere active,
learning to bear future absence by a dissembling of its presence for
the moment. We shall soon know the case of Hermotimus. But yet it
dreams in the interval. Whence then its dreams? The fact is, it cannot
rest or be idle altogether, nor does it confine to the still hours of
sleep the nature of its immortality. It proves itself to possess a
constant motion; it travels over land and sea, it trades, it is
excited, it labours, it plays, it grieves, it rejoices, it follows
pursuits lawful and unlawful; it shows what very great power it has
even without the body, how well equipped it is with members of its own,
although betraying at the same time the need it has of impressing on
some body its activity again. Accordingly, when the body shakes off its
slumber, it asserts before your eye the resurrection of the dead by its
own resumption of its natural functions. Such, therefore, must be both
the natural reason and the reasonable nature of sleep. If you only
regard it as the image of death, you initiate faith, you nourish hope,
you learn both how to die and how to live, you learn watchfulness, even
while you sleep.
With regard to the case of Hermotimus, they say that he used to
be deprived of his soul in his sleep, as if it wandered away from his
body like a person on a holiday trip. His wife betrayed the strange
peculiarity. His enemies, finding him asleep, burnt his body, as if it
were a corpse: when his soul returned too late, it appropriated (I
suppose) to itself. the guilt of the murder. However the good citizens
of Clazomenae consoled poor Hermotimus with a temple, into which no
woman ever enters, because of the infamy of this wife. Now why this
story? In order that, since the vulgar belief so readily holds sleep to
be the separation of the soul from the body, credulity should not be
encouraged by this case of Hermotimus. It must certainly have been a
much heavier sort of slumber: one would presume it was the nightmare,
or perhaps that diseased languor which Soranus suggests in opposition
to the nightmare, or else some such malady as that which the fable has
fastened upon Epimenides, who slept on some fifty years or so.
Suetonius, however, informs us that Nero never dreamt, and Theopompus
says the same thing about Thrasymedes; but Nero at the close of his
life did with some difficulty dream after some excessive alarm. What
indeed would be said, if the case of Hermotimus were believed to be
such that the repose of his soul was a state of actual idleness during
sleep, and a positive separation from his body? You may conjecture it
to be anything but such a licence of the soul as admits of flights away
from the body without death, and that by continual recurrence, as if
habitual to its state and constitution. If indeed such a thing were
told me to have happened at any time to the soul—resembling a total
eclipse of the sun or the moon—I should verily suppose that the
occurrence had been caused by God's own interposition, for it would not
be unreasonable for a man to receive admonition from the Divine Being
either in the way of warning or of alarm, as by a flash of lightning,
or by a sudden stroke of death; only it would be much the more natural
conclusion to believe that this process should be by a dream, because
if it must be supposed to be, (as the hypothesis we are resisting
assumes it to be,) not a dream, the occurrence ought rather to happen
to a man whilst he is wide awake.
We are bound to expound at this point what is the opinion of
Christians respecting dreams, as incidents of sleep, and as no slight
or trifling excitements of the soul, which we have declared to be
always occupied and active owing to its perpetual movement, which again
is a proof and evidence of its divine quality and immortality. When,
therefore, rest accrues to human bodies, it being their own especial
comfort, the soul, disdaining a repose which is not natural to it,
never rests; and since it receives no help from the limbs of the body,
it uses its own. Imagine a gladiator without his instruments or arms,
and a charioteer without his team, but still gesticulating the entire
course and exertion of their respective employments: there is the
fight, there is the struggle; but the effort is a vain one.
Nevertheless the whole procedure seems to be gone through, although it
evidently has not been really effected. There is the act, but not the
effect. This power we call ecstasy, in which the sensuous soul stands
out of itself, in a way which even resembles madness.(1) Thus in the
very beginning sleep was inaugurated by ecstasy: "And God sent an
ecstasy upon Adam, and he slept."(2) The sleep came on his body to
cause it to rest, but the ecstasy fell on his soul to remove rest: from
that very circumstance it still happens ordinarily (and from the order
results the nature of the case) that sleep is combined with ecstasy. In
fact, with what real feeling, and anxiety, and suffering do we
experience joy, and sorrow, and alarm in our dreams! Whereas we should
not be moved by any such emotions, by what would be the merest fan-
tasies of course, if when we dream we were masters of ourselves,
(unaffected by ecstasy.) In these dreams, indeed, good actions are
useless, and crimes harmless; for we shall no more be condemned for
visionary acts of sin, than we shall be crowned for imaginary
martyrdom. But how, you will ask, can the soul remember its dreams,
when it is said to be without any mastery over its own operations? This
memory must be an especial gift of the ecstatic condition of which we
are treating, since it arises not from any failure of healthy action,
but entirely from natural process; nor does it expel mental
function—it withdraws it for a time. It is one thing to shake, it is
another thing to move; one thing to destroy, another thing to agitate.
That, therefore, which memory supplies betokens soundness of mind; and
that which a sound mind ecstatically experiences whilst the memory
remains unchecked, is a kind of madness. We are accordingly not said to
be mad, but to dream, in that state; to be in the full possession also
of our mental faculties,(1) if we are at any time. For although the
power to exercise these faculties(2) may be dimmed in us, it is still
not extinguished; except that it may seem to be itself absent at the
very time that the ecstasy is energizing in us in its special manner,
in such wise as to bring before us images of a sound mind and of
wisdom, even as it does those of aberration.
We now find ourselves constrained to express an opinion about the
character of the dreams by which the soul is excited. And when shall we
arrive at the subject of death? And on such a question I would say,
When God shall permit: that admits of no long delay which must needs
happen at all events. Epicurus has given it as his opinion that dreams
are altogether vain things; (but he says this) when liberating the
Deity from all sort of care, and dissolving the entire order of the
world, and giving to all things the aspect of merest chance, casual in
their issues, fortuitous in their nature. Well, now, if such be the
nature of things, there must be some chance even for truth, because it
is impossible for it to be the only thing to be exempted from the
fortune which is due to all things. Homer has assigned two gates to
dreams,(3)—the horny one of truth, the ivory one of error and
delusion. For, they say, it is possible to see through horn, whereas
ivory is untransparent. Aristotle, while expressing his opinion that
dreams are in most cases untrue, yet acknowledges that there is some
truth in them. The people of Telmessus will not admit that dreams are
in any case unmeaning, but they blame their own weakness when unable to
conjecture their signification. Now, who is such a stranger to human
experience as not sometimes to have perceived some truth in dreams? I
shall force a blush from Epicurus, If I only glance at some few of the
more remarkable instances. Herodotus(4) relates how that Astyages, king
of the Medes, saw in a dream issuing from the womb of his virgin
daughter a flood which inundated Asia; and again, in the year which
followed her marriage, he saw a vine growing out from the same part of
her person, which overspread the whole of Asia. The same story is told
prior to Herodotus by Charon of Lampsacus. Now they who interpreted
these visions did not deceive the mother when they destined her son for
so great an enterprise, for Cyrus both inundated and overspread Asia.
Philip of Macedon, before he became a father, had seen imprinted on the
pudenda of his consort Olympias the form of a small ring, with a lion
as a seal. He had concluded that an offspring from her was out of the
question (I suppose because the lion only becomes once a father), when
Aristodemus or Aristophon happened to conjecture that nothing of an
unmeaning or empty import lay under that seal, but that a son of very
illustrious character was portended. They who know anything of
Alexander recognise in him the lion of that small ring. Ephorus writes
to this effect. Again, Heraclides has told us, that a certain woman of
Himera beheld in a dream Dionysius' tyranny over Sicily. Euphorion has
publicly recorded as a fact, that, previous to giving birth to
Seleucus, his mother Laodice foresaw that he was destined for the
empire of Asia. I find again from Strabo, that it was owing to a dream
that even Mithridates took possession of Pontus; and I further learn
from Cal-listhenes that it was from the indication of a dream that
Baraliris the Illyrian stretched his dominion from the Molossi to the
frontiers of Macedon. The Romans, too, were acquainted with dreams of
this kind. From a dream Marcus Tullius (Cicero) had learnt how that
one, who was yet only a little boy, and in a private station, who was
also plain Julius Octavius, and personally unknown to (Cicero) himself,
was the destined Augustus, and the suppressor and destroyer of (Rome's)
civil discords. This is recorded in the Commentaries of Vitellius. But
visions of this prophetic kind were not confined to predictions of
supreme power; for they indicated perils also, and catastrophes: as,
for instance, when Caesar was absent from the battle of Philippi
through illness, and thereby escaped the sword of Brutus and Cassius,
and then although he expected to encounter greater danger still from
the enemy in the field, he quitted his tent for it, in obedience to a
vision of Artorius, and so escaped (the capture by the enemy, who
shortly after took possession of the tent); as, again, when the
daughter of Polycrates of Samos foresaw the crucifixion which awaited
him from the anointing of the sun and the bath of Jupiter.(1) So
likewise in sleep revelations are made of high honours and eminent
talents; remedies are also discovered, thefts brought to light, and
treasures indicated. Thus Cicero's eminence, whilst he was still a
little boy, was foreseen by his nurse. The swan from the breast of
Socrates soothing men, is his disciple Plato. The boxer Leonymus is
cured by Achilles in his dreams. Sophocles the tragic poet discovers,
as he was dreaming, the golden crown, which had been lost from the
citadel of Athens. Neoptolemus the tragic actor, through intimations in
his sleep from Ajax himself, saves from destruction the hero's tomb on
the Rhoetean shore before Troy; and as he removes the decayed stones,
he returns enriched with gold. How many commentators and chroniclers
vouch for this phenomenon? There are Artemon, Antiphon, Strato,
Philochorus, Epi- charmus, Serapion, Cratippus, and Dionysius of
Rhodes, and Hermippus—the entire literature of the age. I shall only
laugh at all, if indeed I ought to laugh at the man who fancied that he
was going to persuade us that Saturn dreamt before anybody else; which
we can only believe if Aristotle, (who would fain help us to such an
opinion,) lived prior to any other person. Pray forgive me for
laughing. Epicharmus, indeed, as well as Philochorus the Athenian,
assigned the very highest place among divinations to dreams. The whole
world is full of oracles of this description: there are the oracles of
Amphiaraus at Oropus, of Amphi-lochus at Mallus, of Sarpedon in the
Troad, of Trophonius in Boeotia, of Mopsus in Cilicia, of Hermione in
Macedon, of Pasiphae in Laconia. Then, again, there are others, which
with their original foundations, rites, and historians, together with
the entire literature of dreams, Hermippus of Berytus in five portly
volumes will give you all the account of, even to satiety. But the
Stoics are very fond of saying that God, in His most watchful
providence over every institution, gave us dreams amongst other
preservatives of the arts and sciences of divination, as the especial
support of the natural oracle. So much for the dreams to which credit
has to be ascribed even by ourselves, although we must interpret them
in another sense. As for all other oracles, at which no one ever
dreams, what else must we declare concerning them, than that they are
the diabolical contrivance of those spirits who even at that time dwelt
in the eminent persons themselves, or aimed at reviving the memory of
them as the mere stage of their evil purposes, going so far as to
counterfeit a divine power under their shape and form, and, with equal
persistence in evil, deceiving men by their very boons of remedies,
warnings, and forecasts,—the only effect of which was to injure their
victims the more they helped them; while the means whereby they
rendered the help withdrew them from all search after the true God, by
insinuating into their minds ideas of the false one? And of course so
pernicious an influence as this is not shut up nor limited within the
boundaries of shrines and temples: it roams abroad, it flies through
the air, and all the while is free and unchecked. So that nobody can
doubt that our very homes lie open to these diabolical spirits, who
beset their human prey with their fantasies not only in their chapels
but also in their chambers.
We declare, then, that dreams are inflicted on us mainly by
demons, although they sometimes turn out true and favourable to us.
When, however, with the deliberate aim after evil, of which we have
just spoken, they assume a flattering and captivating style, they show
themselves proportionately vain, and deceitful, and obscure, and
wanton, and impure. And no wonder that the images partake of the
character of the realities. But from God—who has promised, indeed, "to
pour out the grace of the Holy Spirit upon all flesh, and has ordained
that His servants and His handmaids should see visions as well as utter
prophecies"(2)—must all those visions be regarded as emanating, which
may be compared to the actual grace of God, as being honest, holy,
prophetic, inspired, instructive, inviting to virtue, the bountiful
nature of which causes them to overflow even to the profane, since God,
with grand impartiality, "sends His showers and sunshine on the just
and on the unjust."(1) It was, indeed by an inspiration from God that
Nebuchadnezzar dreamt his dreams;(2) and almost the greater part of
mankind get their knowledge of God from dreams. Thus it is that, as the
mercy of God super-abounds to the heathen, so the temptation of the
evil one encounters the saints, from whom he never withdraws his
malignant efforts to steal over them as best he may in their very
sleep, if unable to assault them when they are awake. The third class
of dreams will consist of those which the soul itself apparently
creates for itself from an intense application to special
circumstances. Now, inasmuch as the soul cannot dream of its own accord
(for even Epicharmus is of this opinion), how can it become to itself
the cause of any vision? Then must this class of dreams be abandoned to
the action of nature, reserving for the soul, even when in the ecstatic
condition, the power of enduring whatever incidents befall it? Those,
moreover, which evidently proceed neither from God, nor from diabolical
inspiration, nor from the soul, being beyond the reach as well of
ordinary expectation, usual interpretation, or the possibility of being
intelligibly related, will have to be ascribed in a separate category
to what is purely and simply the ecstatic state and its peculiar
conditions.
They say that dreams are more sure and clear when they happen
towards the end of the night, because then the vigour of the soul
emerges, and heavy sleep departs. As to the seasons of the year, dreams
are calmer in spring, since summer relaxes, and winter somehow hardens,
the soul; while autumn, which in other respects is trying to health, is
apt to enervate the soul by the lusciosness of its fruits. Then, again,
as regards the position of one's body during sleep, one ought not to
lie on his back, nor on his right side, nor so as to wrench(3) his
intestines, as if their cavity were reversely stretched: a palpitation
of the heart would ensue, or else a pressure on the liver would produce
a painful disturbance of the mind. But however this be, I take it that
it all amounts to ingenious conjecture rather than certain proof
(although the author of the conjecture be no less a man than Plato);(4)
and possibly all may be no other than the result of chance. But,
generally speaking, dreams will be under control of a man's will, if
they be capable of direction at all; for we must not examine what
opinion on the one hand, and superstition on the other, have to
prescribe for the treatment of dreams, in the matter of distinguishing
and modifying different sorts of food. As for the superstition, we have
an instance when fasting is prescribed for such persons as mean to
submit to the sleep which is necessary for receiving the oracle, in
order that such abstinence may produce the required purity; while we
find an instance of the opinion when the disciples of Pythagoras, in
order to attain the same end, reject the bean as an aliment which would
load the stomach, and produce indigestion. But the three brethren, who
were the companions of Daniel, being content with pulse alone, to
escape the contamination of the royal dishes,(5) received from God,
besides other wisdom, the gift especially of penetrating and explaining
the sense of dreams. For my own part, I hardly know whether fasting
would not simply make me dream so profoundly, that I should not be
aware whether I had in fact dreamt at all. Well, then, you ask, has not
sobriety something to do in this matter? certainly it is as much
concerned in this as it is in the entire subject: if it contributes
some good service to superstition, much more does it to religion. For
even demons require such discipline from their dreamers as a
gratification to their divinity, because they know that it is
acceptable to God, since Daniel (to quote him again) "ate no pleasant
bread" for the space of three weeks.(6) This abstinence, however, he
used in order to please God by humiliation, and not for the purpose of
producing a sensibility and wisdom for his soul previous to receiving
communication by dreams and visions, as if it were not rather to effect
such action in an ecstatic state. This sobriety, then, (in which our
question arises,) will have nothing to do with exciting ecstasy, but
will rather serve to recommend its being wrought by God.
As for those persons who suppose that infants do not dream, on
the ground that all the functions of the soul throughout life are
ac-complished according to the capacity of age, they ought to observe
attentively their tremors, and nods, and bright smiles as they sleep,
and from such facts understand that they are the emotions of their soul
as it dreams, which so readily escape to the surface through the
delicate tenderness of their infantine body. The fact, however, that
the African nation of the Atlantes are said to pass through the night
in a deep lethargic sleep, brings down on them the censure that
something is wrong in the constitution of their soul. Now either
report, which is occasionally calumnious against barbarians, deceived
Herodotus,(1) or else a large force of demons of this sort domineers in
those barbarous regions. Since, indeed, Aristotle remarks of a certain
hero of Sardinia that he used to withhold the power of visions and
dreams from such as resorted to his shrine for inspiration, it must lie
at the will and caprice of the demons to take away as well as to confer
the faculty of dreams; and from this circumstance may have arisen the
remarkable fact (which we have mentioned(2) ) of Nero and Thrasymedes
only dreaming so late in life. We, however, derive dreams from God.
Why, then, did not the Atlantes receive the dreaming faculty from God,
because there is really no nation which is now a stranger to God, since
the gospel flashes its glorious light through the world to the ends of
the earth? Could it then be that rumour deceived Aristotle, or is this
caprice still the way of demons? (Let us take any view of the case),
only do not let it be imagined that any soul is by its natural
constitution exempt from dreams.
We have by this time said enough about sleep, the mirror and
image of death; and likewise about the occupations of sleep, even
dreams. Let us now go on to consider the cause of our departure
hence—that is, the appointment and course of death—because we must
not leave even it unquestioned and unexamined, although it is itself
the very end of all questions and investigations. According to the
general sentiment of the human race, we declare death to be "the debt
of nature." So much has been settled by the voice of God;(3) such is
the contract with everything which is born: so that even from this the
frigid conceit of Epicurus is refuted, who says that no such debt is
due from us; and not only so, but the insane opinion of the Samaritan
heretic Menander is also rejected, who will have it that death has not
only nothing to do with his disciples, but in fact never reaches them.
He pretends to have received such a commission from the secret power of
One above, that all who partake of his baptism become immortal,
incorruptible and instantaneously invested with resurrection-life. We
read, no doubt, of very many wonderful kinds of waters: how, for
instance, the vinous quality of the stream intoxicates people who drink
of the Lyncestis; how at Colophon the waters of an oracle-inspiring
fountain(4) affect men with madness; how Alexander was killed by the
poisonous water from Mount Nonacris in Arcadia. Then, again, there was
in Judea before the time of Christ a pool of medicinal virtue. It is
well known how the poet has commemorated the marshy Styx as preserving
men from death; although Thetis had, in spite of the preservative, to
lament her son. And for the matter of that, were Menander himself to
take a plunge into this famous Styx, he would certainly have to die
after all; for you must come to the Styx, placed as it is by all
accounts in the regions of the dead. Well, but what and where are those
blessed and charming waters which not even John Baptist ever used in
his preministrations, nor Christ after him ever revealed to His
disciples? What was this wondrous bath of Menander? He is a comical
fellow, I ween.(5) But why (was such a font) so seldom in request, so
obscure, one to which so very few ever resorted for their cleansing? I
really see something to suspect in so rare an occurrence of a sacrament
to which is attached so very much security and safety, and which
dispenses with the ordinary law of dying even in the service of God
Himself, when, on the contrary, all nations have "to ascend to the
mount of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob," who demands of
His saints in martyrdom that death which He exacted even of His Christ.
No one will ascribe to magic such influence as shall exempt from death,
or which shall refresh and vivify life, like the vine by the renewal of
its condition. Such power was not accorded to the great Medea
herself—over a human being at any rate, if allowed her over a silly
sheep. Enoch no doubt was translated,(6) and so was Elijah;(7) nor did
they experience death: it was postponed, (and only postponed,) most
certainly: they are reserved for the suffering of death, that by their
blood they may extinguish Antichrist.(1) Even John underwent death,
although concerning him there had prevailed an ungrounded expectation
that he would remain alive until the coming of the Lord.(2) Heresies,
indeed, for the most pan spring hurriedly into existence, from examples
furnished by ourselves: they procure their defensive armour from the
very place which they attack. The whole question resolves itself, in
short, into this challenge: Where are to be found the men whom Menander
himself has baptized? whom he has plunged into his Styx? Let them come
forth and stand before us—those apostles of his whom he has made
immortal? Let my (doubting) Thomas see them, let him hear them, let him
handle them—and he is convinced.
But the operation of death is plain and obvious: it is the
separation of body and soul. Some, however, in reference to the soul's
immortality, on which they have so feeble a hold through not being
taught of God, maintain it with such beggarly arguments, that they
would fain have it supposed that certain souls cleave to the body even
after death. It is indeed in this sense that Plato, although he
despatches at once to heaven such souls as he pleases,(3) yet in his
Republic(4) exhibits to us the corpse of an unburied person, which was
preserved a long time without corruption, by reason of the soul
remaining, as he says, unseparated from the body. To the same purport
also Democritus remarks on the growth for a considerable while of the
human nails and hair in the grave. Now, it is quite possible that the
nature of the atmosphere tended to the preservation of the
above-mentioned corpse. What if the air were particularly dry, and the
ground of a saline nature? What, too, if the substance of the body
itself were unusually dry and arid? What, moreover, if the mode of the
death had already eliminated from the corpse all corrupting matter? As
for the nails, since they are the commencement of the nerves, they may
well seem to be prolonged, owing to the nerves themselves being relaxed
and extended, and to be protruded more and more as the flesh fails. The
hair, again, is nourished from the brain, which would cause it endure
for a long time as its secret aliment and defence. Indeed, in the case
of living persons themselves, the whole head of hair is copious or
scanty in proportion to the exuberance of the brain. You have medical
men (to attest the fact). But not a particle of the soul can possibly
remain in the body, which is itself destined to disappear when time
shall have abolished the entire scene on which the body has played its
part. And yet even this partial survival of the soul finds a place in
the opinions of some men; and on this account they will not have the
body consumed at its funeral by fire, because they would spare the
small residue of the soul. There is, however, another way of accounting
for this pious treatment, not as if it meant to favour the relics of
the soul, but as if it would avert a cruel custom in the interest even
of the body; since, being human, it is itself undeserving of an end
which is also inflicted upon murderers. The truth is, the soul is
indivisible, because it is immortal; (and this fact) compels us to
believe that death itself is an indivisible process, accruing
indivisibly to the soul, not indeed because it is immortal, but because
it is indivisible. Death, however, would have to be divided in its
operation, if the soul were divisible into particles, any one of which
has to be reserved for a later stage of death. At this rate, a part of
death will have to stay behind for a portion of the soul. I am not
ignorant that some vestige of this opinion still exists. I have found
it out from one of my own people. I am acquainted with the case of a
woman, the daughter of Christian parents,(5) who in the very flower of
her age and beauty slept peacefully (in Jesus), after a singularly
happy though brief married life. Before they laid her in her grave, and
when the priest began the appointed office, at the very first breath of
his prayer she withdrew her hands from her side, placed them in an
attitude of devotion, and after the holy service was concluded restored
them to their lateral position. Then, again, there is that well-known
story among our own people, that a body voluntarily made way in a
certain cemetery, to afford room for another body to be placed near to
it. If, as is the case, similar stories are told amongst the heathen,
(we can only conclude that) God everywhere manifests signs of His own
power—to His own people for their comfort, to strangers for a
testimony unto them. I would indeed much rather suppose that a portent
of this kind happened form the direct agency of God than from any
relics of the soul: for if there were a residue of these, they would be
certain to move the other limbs; and even if they moved the hands, this
still would not have been for the purpose of a prayer. Nor would the
corpse hav been simply content to have made way for its neighbour: it
would, besides, have benefited its own self also by the change of its
position. But from whatever cause proceeded these phenomena, which you
must put down amongst signs and portents, it is impossible that they
should regulate nature. Death, if it once falls short of totality in
operation, is not death. If any fraction of the soul remain, it makes a
living state. Death will no more mix with life, than will night with
day.
Such, then, is the work of death—the separation of the soul from
the body. Putting out of the question fates and fortuitous
circumstances, it has been, according to men's views, distinguished in
a twofold form—the ordinary and the extraordinary. The ordinary they
ascribe to nature, exercising its quiet influence in the case of each
individual decease; the extraordinary is said to be contrary to nature,
happening in every violent death. As for our own views, indeed, we know
what was man's origin, and we boldly assert and persistently maintain
that death happens not by way of natural consequence to man, but owing
to a fault and defect which is not itself natural; although it is easy
enough, no doubt, to apply the term natural to faults and circumstances
which seem to have been (though from the emergence of an external
cause(1) ) inseparable to us from our very birth. If man had been
directly appointed to die as the condition of his creation,(2) then of
course death must be imputed to nature. Now, that he was not thus
appointed to die, is proved by the very law which made his condition
depend on a warning, and death result from man's arbitrary choice.
Indeed, if he had not sinned, he certainly would not have died. That
cannot be nature which happens by the exercise of volition after an
alternative has been proposed to it, and not by necessity—the result
of an inflexible and unalterable condition. Consequently, although
death has various issues, inasmuch as its causes are manifold, we
cannot say that the easiest death is so gentle as not to happen by
violence (to our nature). The very law which produces death, simple
though it be, is yet violence. How can it be otherwise, when so close a
companionship of soul and body, so inseparable a growth together from
their very conception of two sister substances, is sundered and
divided? For although a man may breathe his last for joy, like the
Spartan Chilon, while embracing his son who had just conquered in the
Olympic games; or for glory, like the Athenian Clidemus, while
receiving a crown of gold for the excellence of his historical
writings; or in a dream, like Plato; or in a fit of laughter, like
Publius Crassus,—yet death is much too violent, coming as it does upon
us by strange and alien means, expelling the soul by a method all its
own, calling on us to die at a moment when one might live a jocund life
in joy and honour, in peace and pleasure. That is still a violence to
ships: although far away from the Capharean rocks, assailed by no
storms, without a billow to shatter them, with favouring gale, in
gliding course, with merry crews, they founder amidst entire security,
suddenly, owing to some internal shock. Not dissimilar are the
shipwrecks of life,—the issues of even a tranquil death. It matters
not whether the vessel of the human body goes with unbroken timbers or
shattered with storms, if the navigation of the soul be overthrown.
But where at last will the soul have to lodge, when it is bare
and divested of the body? We must certainly not hesitate to follow it
thither, in the order of our inquiry. We must, however, first of all
fully state what belongs to the topic before us, in order that no one,
because we have mentioned the various issues of death, may expect from
us a special description of these, which ought rather to be left to
medical men, who are the proper judges of the incidents which appertain
to death, or its causes, and the actual conditions of the human body.
Of course, with the view of preserving the truth of the soul's
immortality, whilst treating this topic, I shall have, on mentioning
death, to introduce phrases about dissolution of such a purport as
seems to intimate that the soul escapes by degrees, and piece by piece;
for it withdraws (from the body) with all the circumstances of a
decline, seeming to suffer consumption, and suggests to us the idea of
being annihilated by the slow process of its departure. But the entire
reason of this phenomenon is in the body, and arises from the body. For
whatever be the kind of death (which operates on man), it undoubtedly
produces the destruction either of the matter, or of the region, or of
the passages of vitality: of the matter, such as the gall and the
blood; of the region, such as the heart and the liver; of the passages,
such as the veins and the ar- teries. Inasmuch, then, as these parts of
the body are severally devastated by an injury proper to each of them,
even to the very last ruin and annulling of the vital powers—in other
words, of the ends, the sites, and the functions of nature—it must
needs come to pass, amidst the gradual decay of its instruments,
domiciles, and spaces, that the soul also itself, being driven to
abandon each successive part, assumes the appearance of being lessened
to nothing; in some such manner as a charioteer is assumed to have
himself failed, when his horses, through fatigue, withdraw from him
their energies. But this assumption applies only to the circumstances
of the despoiled person, not to any real condition of suffering.
Likewise the body's charioteer, the animal spirit, fails on account of
the failure of its vehicle, not of itself—abandoning its work, but not
its vigour—languishing in operation, but not in essential
condition—bankrupt in solvency, not in substance—be-cause ceasing to
put in an appearance, but not ceasing to exist. Thus every rapid
death—such as a decapitation, or a breaking of the neck,(1) which
opens at once a vast outlet for the soul; or a sudden ruin, which at a
stroke crushes every vital action, like that inner ruin
apoplexy—retards not the soul's escape, nor painfully separates its
departure into successive moments. Where, however, the death is a
lingering one, the soul abandons its position in the way in which it is
itself abandoned. And yet it is not by this process severed in
fractions: it is slowly drawn out; and whilst thus extracted, it causes
the last remnant to seem to be but a part of itself. No portion,
however, must be deemed separable, because it is the last; nor, because
it is a small one, must it be regarded as susceptible of dissolution.
Accordant with a series is its end, and the middle is prolonged to the
extremes; and the remnants cohere to the mass, and are waited for, but
never abandoned by it. And I will even venture to say, that the last of
a whole is the whole; because while it is less, and the latest, it yet
belongs to the whole, and completes it. Hence, indeed, many times it
happens that the soul in its actual separation is more powerfully
agitated with a more anxious gaze, and a quickened loquacity; whilst
from the loftier and freer position in which it is now placed, it
enunciates, by means of its last remnant still lingering in the flesh,
what it sees, what it hears, and what it: is beginning to know. In
Platonic phrase, indeed, the body is a prison,(2) but in the apostle's
it is "the temple of God,"(3) because it is in Christ. Still, (as must
be admitted,) by reason of its enclosure it obstructs and obscures the
soul, and sullies it by the concretion of the flesh; whence it happens
that the light which illumines objects comes in upon the soul in a more
confused manner, as if through a window of horn. Undoubtedly, when the
soul, by the power of death, is released from its concretion with the
flesh, it is by the very release cleansed and purified: it Is,
moreover, certain that it escapes from the veil of the flesh into open
space, to its clear, and pure, and intrinsic light; and then finds
itself enjoying its enfranchisement from matter, and by virtue of its
liberty it recovers its divinity, as one who awakes out of sleep passes
from images to verities. Then it tells out what it sees; then it exults
or it fears, according as it finds what lodging is prepared for it, as
soon as it sees the very angel's face, that arraigner of souls, the
Mercury of the poets.
To the question, therefore, whither the soul is withdrawn, we now
give an answer. Almost all the philosophers, who hold the soul's
immortality, notwithstanding their special views on the subject, still
claim for it this (eternal condition), as Pythagoras, and Empedocles,
and Plato, and as they who indulge it with some delay from the time of
its quitting the flesh to the conflagration of all things, and as the
Stoics, who place only their own souls, that is, the souls of the wise,
in the mansions above. Plato, it is true, does not allow this
destination to all the souls, indiscriminately, of even all the
philosophers, but only of those who have cultivated their philosophy
out of love to boys. So great is the privilege which impurity obtains
at the hands of philosophers! In his system, then, the souls of the
wise are carried up on high into the ether: according to Arius,(4) into
the, air; according to the Stoics, into the moon. I wonder, indeed,
that they abandon to the earth the souls of the unwise, when they
affirm that even these are instructed by the wise, so much their
superiors. For where is the school where they can have been instructed
in the vast space which divides them? By what means can the pupil-souls
have resorted to their teachers, when they are parted from each other
by so distant an interval? What profit, too, can any instruction afford
them at all in their posthumous state, when they are on the brink of
perdition by the universal fire? All other souls they thrust down to
Hades, which Plato, in his Phoedo,(1) describes: as the bosom of the
earth, where all the filth of the world accumulates, settles, and
exhales, and where every separate draught of air only renders denser
still the impurities of the seething mass.
By ourselves the lower regions (of Hades) are not supposed to be
a bare cavity, nor some subterranean sewer of the world, but a vast
deep space in the interior of the earth, and a concealed recess in its
very bowels; inasmuch as we read that Christ in His death spent three
days in the heart of the earth,(2) that is, in the secret inner recess
which is hidden in the earth, and enclosed by the earth, and
superimposed on the abysmal depths which lie still lower down. Now
although Christ is God, yet, being also man, "He died according to the
Scriptures,"(3) and "according to the same Scriptures was buried."(4)
With the same law of His being He fully complied, by remaining in Hades
in the form and condition of a dead man; nor did He ascend into the
heights of heaven before descending into the lower parts of the earth,
that He might there make the patriarchs and prophets partakers of
Himself.(5) (This being the case), you must suppose Hades to be a
subterranean region, and keep at arm's length those who are too proud
to believe that the souls of the faithful deserve a place in the lower
regions.(6) These persons, who are "servants above their Lord, and
disciples above their Master,"(7) would no doubt spurn to receive the
comfort of the resurrection, if they must expect it in Abraham's bosom.
But it was for this purpose, say they, that Christ descended into hell,
that we might not ourselves have to descend thither. Well, then, what
difference is there between heathens and Christians, if the same prison
awaits them all when dead? How, indeed, shall the soul mount up to
heaven, where Christ is already sitting at the Father's right hand,
when as yet the archangel's trumpet has not been heard by the command
of God,(8)—when as yet those whom the coming of the Lord is to find on
the earth, have not been caught up into the air to meet Him at His
coming,(9) in company with the dead in Christ, who shall be the first
to arise?(10) To no one is heaven opened; the earth is still safe for
him, I would not say it is shut against him. When the world, indeed,
shall pass away, then the kingdom of heaven shall be opened. Shall we
then have to sleep high up in ether, with the boy-loving worthies of
Plato; or in the air with Arius; or around the moon with the Endymions
of the Stoics? No, but in Paradise, you tell me, whither already the
patriarchs and prophets have removed from Hades in the retinue of the
Lord's resurrection. How is it, then, that the region of Paradise,
which as revealed to John in the Spirit lay under the altar,(11)
displays no other souls as in it besides the souls of the martyrs? How
is it that the most heroic martyr Perpetua on the day of her passion
saw only her fellow-martyrs there, in the revelation which she received
of Paradise, if it were not that the sword which guarded the entrance
permitted none to go in thereat, except those who had died in Christ
and not in Adam? A new death for God, even the extraordinary one for
Christ, is admitted into the reception-room of mortality, specially
altered and adapted to receive the new-comer. Observe, then, the
difference between a heathen and a Christian in their death: if you
have to lay down your life for God, as the Comforter(12) counsels, it
is not in gentle fevers and on soft beds, but in the sharp pains of
martyrdom: you must take up the cross and bear it after your Master, as
He has Himself instructed you.(13) The sole key to unlock Paradise is
your own life's blood.(14) You have a treatise by us,(15) (on
Paradise), in which we have established the position that every soul is
detained in safe keeping in Hades until the day of the Lord.
There arises the question, whether this takes place immediately
after the soul's de- parture from the body; whether some souls are
detained for special reasons in the meantime here on earth; and whether
it is permitted them of their own accord, or by the intervention of
authority, to be removed from Hades(1) at some subsequent time? Even
such opinions as these are not by any means lacking persons to advance
them with confidence. It was believed that the unburied dead were not
admitted into the infernal regions before they had received a proper
sepulture; as in the case of Homer's Patroclus, who earnestly asks for
a burial of Achilles in a dream, on the ground that he could not enter
Hades through any other portal, since the souls of the sepulchred dead
kept thrusting him away.(2) We know that Homer exhibited more than a
poetic licence here; he had in view the fights of the dead.
Proportioned, indeed, to his care for the just honours of the tomb, was
his censure of that delay of burial which was injurious to souls. (It
was also his purpose to add a warning), that no man should, by
detaining in his house the corpse of a friend, only expose himself,
along with the deceased, to increased injury and trouble, by the
irregularity(3) of the consolation which he nourishes with pain and
grief. He has accordingly kept a twofold object in view in picturing
the complaints of an unburied soul: he wished to maintain honour to the
dead by promptly attending to their funeral, as well as to moderate the
feelings of grief which their memory excited. But, after all, how vain
is it to suppose that the soul could bear the rites and requirements of
the body, or carry any of them away to the infernal regions! And how
much vainer still is it, if injury be supposed to accrue to the soul
from that neglect of burial which it ought to receive rather as a
favour! For surely the soul which had no willingness to die might well
prefer as tardy a removal to Hades as possible. It will love the
undutiful heir, by whose means it still enjoys the light. If, however,
it is certain that injury accrues to the soul from a tardy interment of
the body—and the gist of the injury lies in the neglect of the
burial—it is yet in the highest degree unfair, that should receive all
the injury to which the faulty delay could not possibly be imputed, for
of course all the fault rests on the nearest relations of the dead.
They also say that those souls which are taken away by a premature
death wander about hither and thither until they have completed the
residue of the years which they would have lived through, had it not
been for their untimely fate. Now either their days are appointed to
all men severally, and if so appointed, I cannot suppose them capable
of being shortened; or if, notwithstanding such appointment, they may
be shortened by the will of God, or some other powerful influence, then
(I say) such shortening is of no validity, if they still may be
accomplished in some other way. If, on the other hand, they are not
appointed, there cannot be any residue to be fulfilled for unappointed
periods. I have another remark to make. Suppose it be an infant that
dies yet hanging on the breast; or it may be an immature boy; or it may
be, once more, a youth arrived at puberty: suppose, moreover, that the
life in each case ought to have reached full eighty years, how is it
possible that the soul of either could spend the whole of the shortened
years here on earth after losing the body by death? One's age cannot be
passed without one's body, it being by help of the body that the period
of life has its duties and labours transacted. Let our own people,
moreover, bear this in mind, that souls are to receive back at the
resurrection the self-same bodies in which they died. Therefore our
bodies must be expected to resume the same conditions and the same
ages, for it is these particulars which impart to bodies their especial
modes. By what means, then, can the soul of an infant so spend on earth
its residue of years, that it should be able at the resurrection to
assume the state of an octogenarian, although it had barely lived a
month? Or if it shall be necessary that the appointed days of life be
fulfilled here on earth, must the same course of life in all its
vicissitudes, which has been itself ordained to accompany the appointed
days, be also passed through by the soul along with the days? Must it
employ itself in school studies in its passage from infancy to boyhood;
play the soldier in the excitement and vigour of youth and earlier
manhood; and encounter serious and judicial responsibilities in the
graver years between ripe manhood and old age? Must it ply trade for
profit, turn up the soil with hoe and plough, go to sea, bring actions
at law, get married, toil and labour, undergo illnesses, and whatever
casualties of weal and woe await it in the lapse of years? Well, but
how are all these transactions to be managed without one's body? Life
(spent) without life? But (you will tell me) the destined period in
question is to be bare of all incident whatever, only to be
accomplished by merely elapsing. What, then, is to prevent its being
fulfilled in Hades, where there is absolutely no use to which you can
apply it? We therefore maintain that every soul, whatever be its age on
quitting the body, remains unchanged in the same, until the time shall
come when the promised perfection shall be realized in a state duly
tempered to the measure of the peerless angels. Hence those souls must
be accounted as passing an exile in Hades, which people are apt to
regard as carried off by violence, especially by cruel tortures, such
as those of the cross, and the axe, and the sword, and the lion; but we
do not account those to be violent deaths which justice awards, that
avenger of violence. So then, you will say, it is all the wicked souls
that are banished in Hades. (Not quite so fast, is my answer.) I must
compel you to determine (what you mean by Hades), which of its two
regions, the region of the good or of the bad. If you mean the bad,
(all I can say is, that) even now the souls of the wicked deserve to be
consigned W those abodes; if you mean the good why should you judge to
be unworthy of such a resting-place the souls of infants and of
virgins, and(1) those which, by reason of their condition in life were
pure and innocent?
It is either a very fine thing to be detained in these infernal
regions with the Aori, or souls which were prematurely hurried away; or
else a very bad thing indeed to be there associated with the
Biaeothanati, who suffered violent deaths. I may be permitted to use
the actual words and terms with which magic rings again, that inventor
of all these odd opinions—with its Ostanes, and Typhon, and Dardanus,
and Damigeron, and Nectabis, and Berenice. There is a well-known
popular bit of writing,(2) which undertakes to summon up from the abode
of Hades the souls which have actually slept out their full age, and
had passed away by an honourable death, and had even been buried with
full rites and proper ceremony. What after this shall we say about
magic? Say, to be sure, what almost everybody says of it—that it is an
imposture. But it is not we Christians only whose notice this system of
imposture does not escape. We, it is true, have discovered these
spirits of evil, not, to be sure, by a complicity with them, but by a
certain knowledge which is hostile to them; nor is it by any procedure
which is attractive to them, but by a power which subjugates them that
we handle (their wretched system)—that manifold pest of the mind of
man, that artificer of all error, that destroyer of our salvation and our soul at one swoop.(3) In this way, even by magic, which is indeed only a second idolatry, wherein they pretend that after death they become demons, just as they were supposed in the first and literal idolatry to become gods (and why not? since the gods are but dead things), the before-mentioned Aori Biaeothanati are actually invoked,—and not unfairly,(4) if one grounds his faith on this principle, that it is clearly credible for those souls to be beyond all others addicted to violence and wrong, which with violence and wrong have been hurried away by a cruel and premature death and which would have a keen appetite for reprisals. Under cover, however, of these souls, demons operate, especially such as used to dwell in them when they were in life, and who had driven them, in fact, to the fate which had at last carried them off. For, as we have already suggested,(5) there is hardly a human being who is unattended by a demon; and it is well known to many, that premature and violent deaths, which men ascribe to accidents, are in fact brought about by demons. This imposture of the evil spirit lying concealed in the persons of the dead, we are able, if I mistake not, to prove by actual facts, when in cases of exorcism (the evil spirit) affirms himself sometimes to be one of the relatives(6) of the person possessed by him, sometimes a gladiator or a bestiarius,(7) and sometimes even a god; always making it one of his chief cares to extinguish the very truth which we are proclaiming, that men may not readily believe that all souls remove to Hades, and that they may overthrow faith in the resurrection and the judgment. And yet for all that, the demon, after trying to circumvent the bystanders, is vanquished by the pressure of divine grace, and sorely against his will confesses all the truth. So also in that other kind of magic, which is supposed to bring up from Hades the souls now resting there, and to exhibit them to public view, there is no other expedient of imposture ever resorted to which operates more powerfully. Of course, why a phantom becomes visible, is because a body is also attached to it; and it is no difficult matter to delude the external vision of a man whose mental eye it is so easy to blind. The serpents which emerged from the magicians' rods, certainly appeared to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians as bodily substances. It is true that the verity of Moses swallowed up their lying deceit.(1) Many attempts were also wrought against the apostles by the sorcerers Simon and Elymas,(2) but the blindness which struck (them) was no enchanter's trick. What novelty is there in the effort of an unclean spirit to counterfeit the truth? At this very time, even, the heretical dupes of this same Simon (Magus) are so much elated by the extravagant pretensions of their art, that they undertake to bring up from Hades the souls of the prophets themselves. And I suppose that they can do so under cover of a lying wonder. For, indeed, it was no less than this that was anciently permitted to the Pythonic (or ventriloquistic) spirit(3)—even to represent the soul of Samuel, when Saul consulted the dead, after (losing the living) God.(3) God forbid, however, that we should suppose that the soul of any saint, much less of a prophet, can be dragged out of (its resting-place in Hades) by a demon. We know that "Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light"(5)—much more into a man of light—and that at last he will "show himself to be even God,"(6) and will exhibit "great signs and wonders, insomuch that, if it were possible, he shall deceive the very elect."(7) He hardly(8) hesitated on the before-mentioned occasion to affirm himself to be a prophet of God, and especially to Saul, in whom he was then actually dwelling. You must not imagine that he who produced the phantom was one, and he who consulted it was another; but that it was one and the same spirit, both in the sorceress and in the apostate (king), which easily pretended an apparition of that which it had already prepared them to believe as real—(even the spirit) through whose evil influence Saul's heart was fixed where his treasure was, and where certainly God was not. Therefore it came about, that he saw him through whose aid he believed that he was going to see, because he believed him through whose help he saw. But we are met with the objection, that in visions of the night dead persons are not unfrequently seen, and that for a set purpose.(9) For instance, the Nasamones consult private oracles by frequent and lengthened visits to the sepulchres of their relatives, as one may find in Heraclides, or Nymphodorus, or Herodotus;(10) and the Celts, for the game purpose, stay away all night at the tombs of their brave
chieftains, as Nicander affirms. Well, we admit apparitions of dead persons in dreams to be not more really true than those of living persons; but we apply the same estimate to all alike—to the dead and to the living, and indeed to all the phenomena which are seen. Now things are not true because they appear to be so, but because they are fully proved to be so. The truth of dreams is declared from the realization, not the aspect. Moreover, the fact that Hades is not in any case opened for (the escape of) any soul, has been firmly established by the Lord in the person of Abraham, in His representation of the poor man at rest and the rich man in torment.(11) No one, (he said,) could possibly be despatched from those abodes to report to us how matters went in the nether regions,—a purpose which, (if any could be,) might have been allowable on such an occasion, to persuade a belief in Moses and the prophets. The power of God has, no doubt, sometimes recalled men's souls to their bodies, as a proof of His own transcendent rights; but there must never be, because of this fact, any agreement supposed to be possible between the divine faith and the arrogant pretensions of sorcerers, and the imposture of dreams, and the licence of poets. But yet in all cases of a true resurrection, when the power of God recalls souls to their bodies, either by the agency of prophets, or of Christ, or of apostles, a complete presumption is afforded us, by the solid, palpable, and ascertained reality (of the revived body), that its true form must be such as to compel one's belief of the fraudulence of every incorporeal apparition of dead persons.
All souls, therefore; are shut up within Hades: do you admit
this? (It is true, whether) you say yes or no: moreover, there are
already experienced there punishments and consolations; and there you
have a poor man and a rich. And now, having postponed some stray
questions(12) for this part of my work, I will notice them in this
suitable place, and then come to a close. Why, then, cannot you suppose
that the soul undergoes punishment and consolation in Hades in the
interval, while it awaits its alternative of judgment, in a certain
anticipation either of gloom or of glory? You reply: Because in the
judgment of God its matter ought to be sure and safe, nor should there
be any inkling beforehand of the award of His sentence; and also
because (the soul) ought to be covered first by its vestment(1) of the
restored flesh, which, as the partner of its actions, should be also a
sharer in its recompense. What, then, is to take place in that
interval? Shall we sleep? But souls do not sleep even when men are
alive: it is indeed the business of bodies to sleep, to which also
belongs death itself, no less than its mirror and counterfeit sleep. Or
will you have it, that nothing is there done whither the whole human
race is attracted, and whither all man's expectation is postponed for
safe keeping? Do you think this state is a foretaste of judgment, or
its actual commencement? a premature encroachment on it, or the first
course in its full ministration? Now really, would it not be the
highest possible injustice, even(2) in Hades, if all were to be still
well with the guilty even there, and not well with the righteous even
yet? What, would you have hope be still more confused after death?
would you have it mock us still more with uncertain expectation? or
shall it now become a review of past life, and an arranging of
judgment, with the inevitable feeling of a trembling fear? But, again,
must the soul always tarry for the body, in order to experience sorrow
or joy? Is it not sufficient, even of itself, to suffer both one and
the other of these sensations? How often, without any pain to the body,
is the soul alone tortured by ill-temper, and anger, and fatigue, and
very often unconsciously, even to itself? How often, too, on the other
hand, amidst bodily suffering, does the soul seek out for itself some
furtive joy, and withdraw for the moment from the body's importunate
society? I am mistaken if the soul is not in the habit, indeed,
solitary and alone, of rejoicing and glorifying over the very tortures
of the body. Look for instance, at the soul of Mutius Scoevola as he
melts his right hand over the fire; look also at Zeno's, as the
torments of Dionysius pass over it.(3) The bites of wild beasts are a
glory to young heroes, as on Cyrus were the scars of the bear.(4) Full
well, then, does the soul even in Hades know how to joy and to sorrow
even without the body; since when in the flesh it feels pain when it
likes, though the body is unhurt; and when it likes it feels joy though
the body is in pain. Now if such sensations occur at its will during
life, how
much rather may they not happen after death by the judicial appointment of God! Moreover, the soul executes not all its operations with the ministration of the flesh; for the judgment of God pursues even simple cogitations and the merest volitions. "Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her already in his heart."(5) Therefore, even for this cause it is most fitting that the soul, without at all waiting for the flesh, should be punished for what it has done without the partnership of the flesh. So, on the same principle, in return for the pious and kindly thoughts in which it shared not the help of the flesh, shall it without the flesh receive its consolation. Nay more,(6) even in matters done through the flesh the soul is the first to conceive them, the first to arrange them, the first to authorize them, the first to precipitate them into acts. And even if it is sometimes unwilling to act, it is still the first to treat the object which it means to effect by help of the body. In no case, indeed, can an accomplished fact be prior to the mental conception(7) thereof. It is therefore quite in keeping with this order of things, that that part of our nature should be the first to have the recompense and reward to which they are due on account of its priority. In short, inasmuch as we understand "the prison" pointed out in the Gospel to be Hades,(8) and as we also interpret "the uttermost farthing"(9) to mean the very smallest offence which has to be recompensed there before the resurrection,(10) no one will hesitate to believe that the soul undergoes in Hades some compensatory discipline, without prejudice to the full process of the resurrection, when the recompense will be administered through the flesh besides. This point the Paraclete has also pressed home on our attention in most frequent admonitions, whenever any of us has admitted the force of His words from a knowledge of His promised spiritual disclosures.(11) And now at last having, as I believe, encountered every human opinion concerning the soul, and tried its character by the teaching of (our holy faith,) we have satisfied the curiosity which is simply a reasonable and necessary one. As for that which is extravagant and idle, there will evermore be as great a defect in its information, as there has been exaggeration and self-will in its researches.
TERTULLIAN.
PART SECOND.
INTRODUCTION, BY THE AMERICAN EDITOR.
THE Second Class of Tertullian's works, according to the logical
method I have endeavoured to carry out, is that which includes his
treatises against the heresies of his times. In these, the genius of
our author is brilliantly illustrated, while, in melancholy fact, he is
demonstrating the folly of his own final lapse and the wickedness of
that schism and heresy into which he fell away from Truth. Were it not
that history abounds in like examples of the frailty of the human
intellect and of the insufficiency of "man that walketh to direct his
steps," we should be forced to a theory of mental decay to account for
inconsistencies so gross and for delusions so besotted. "Genius to
madness is indeed allied," and who knows but something like that
imbecility which closed the career of Swift(1) may have been the fate
of this splendid wit and versatile man of parts? Charity, admiration
and love force this inquiry upon my own mind continually, as I explore
his fascinating pages. And the order in which the student will find
them in this series, will lead, I think, to similar reflections on the
part of many readers. We observe a natural bent and turn of mind, even
in his Catholic writings, which indicate his perils. These are more and
more apparent in his recent works, as his enthusiasm heats itself into
a frenzy which at last becomes a rage. He breaks down by degrees, as in
orthodoxy so also in force and in character. It is almost like the
collapse of Solomon or of Bacon. And though our own times have produced
no example of stars of equal magnitude, to become falling-stars, we
have seen illustrations the most humiliating, of those calm words of
Bishop Kaye: "Human nature often presents the curious phenomenon of an
union of the most opposite qualities in the same mind; of vigour,
acuteness and discrimination on some subjects, with imbecility, dulness
and bigotry on others." Milton, himself another example of his own
threnode, breaks forth in this splendid utterance of lyrical confession:
"God of our fathers what is man?
Nor do I name of men the common rout,
That, wandering loose about,
Grow up and perish as the summer fly,
Heads without name, no more remembered,
But such as thou hast solemnly elected,
With gifts and graces eminently adorned,
To some great work, thy glory
And people's safety, which in part they effect."
And here, I must venture a remark on the ambiguity of the
expressions concerning our author's Montanism. In the treatise against
Marcion, written late in his career, TertuIlian identifies himself with
the Church and strenuously defends its faith and its apostolic order.
In only rare instances does his weakness for the "new prophecy" crop
out, and then, it is only as one identifies himself with a school
within the church. Precisely so Fenelon maintained his milder
Montanism, without a thought of deserting the Latin Church. Afterwards
Fenelon drew back, but at last poor Tertullian fell away. So with the
Jansenists. They credited the miracles and the convulsions (or
ecstasies) of their school,(2) and condemned those who rejected them,
as Tertullian condemns the Psychics. The great expounder of the Nicene
Faith (Bp. Bull) does indeed speak very decidedly of Tertullian as a
lapser, even when he wrote his first book against Marcion. His
semi-schismatic position must be allowed. But, was it a formal lapse at
that time? The English non-jurors were long in communion with the
Church, even while they denounced their brethren and the
"Erastianizing" clergy, much as Tertullian does the Psychics. St.
Augustine speaks of Tertullianists(1) with great moderation, and notes
the final downfall of our author as something distinct from
Tertullianism. When we reflect, therefore, that only four of all his
varied writings (now extant) are proofs of an accomplished lapse, ought
we not carefully to maintain the distinction between the Montanistic
Tertullian and Tertullian the Montanist? Bishop Bull, it seems to me
would not to this way of putting it, when we consider his own
discrimination in the following weighty words. He says:
"A clear distinction must be made between those works which
Tertullian, when already a Montanist, wrote specifically in defence of
Montanism against the church, and those which he composed, as a
Montanist indeed, yet not in defence of Montanism against the church,
but rather, in defence of the common doctrines of the church—and of
Montanus, in opposition to other heretics."
Now in arranging the works of this second class, the Prescription
comes logically first, because, written in Orthodoxy, it forcibly
upholds the Scriptural Rule of Faith, the Catholic touchstone of all
professed verity. It is also a necessary Introduction to the great work
against Marcion which I have placed next in order; giving it the
precedence to which it is entitled in part: on chronological ground, in
part because of the general purity of its material with the exhibition
it presents of the author's mental processes and of his very gradual
decline from Truth.
Very fortunate were the Edinburgh Editors in securing for this
work and some others, the valuable labours of Dr. Holmes, of whom I
have elsewhere given some biographical particulars. The merit and
fulness of his annotations are so marked, that I have been spared a
great deal of work, such as I was forced to bestow on the former
volumes of this American Edition. But on the other hand these pages
have given me much patient study and toil as an editor, because of the
"shreds and patches" in which Tertullian comes to us, in the Edinburgh
Series; and because of some typographical peculiarities, exceptional in
that Series itself, and presenting complications, when transferred to a
new form of mechanical arrangement. For example, apart from some
valuable material which belongs to the General Preface, and which I
have transferred accordingly, the following dislocations confronted me
to begin with: The Marcion is presented to us in Volume VII. apart from
the other writings of Tertullian. At the close of Vol. XI. we reach
the Ad Nationes, of which Dr. Holmes is the translator, another hand
(Mr. Thelwall's) having been employed on former pages of that volume.
It is not till we reach Volume XV. that Tertullian again appears, but
this volume is wholly the work of Dr. Holmes. Finally, in Volume
XVIII., we meet Tertullian again, (Mr. Thelwall the able translator),
but, here is placed the "Introduction" to all the works of Tertullian,
which, of course, I have, transferred to its proper place. I make these
explanations by no means censoriously, but to point out at once the
nature of my own task, and the advantage that accrues to the reader, by
the order in which the works of the great Tertullian appear in this
edition, enabling him to compare different or parallel passages, aIl
methodically arranged in consecutive pages, without a minute's search,
or delay.
Now, as to typographical difficulties to which I have referred,
Dr. Holmes marks all his multiplied and useful notes with brackets,
which are almost always superfluous, and which in this American Edition
are used to designate my own contributions, when printed with the text,
or apart from Preface and Elucidations. These, therefore, I have
removed necessarily and with no appreciable loss to the work, but great
gain to the beauty of the page. But, again, Dr. Holmes' translations
are all so heavily bracketed as to become an eyesore, and the
disfigured pages have been often complained of as afflictive to the
reader. Many words strictly implied by the original Latin, and which
should therefore be ummarked, are yet put between brackets. Even minute
words (and, or to wit, or again,) when, in the nature of the case the
English idiom requires them, are thus marked. I have not retained these
blemishes; but when an inconsiderable word or a repetition does add to
the sense, or qualify it, I have italicized such words, throwing more
important interpolations into parenthetical marks, which are less
painful to the sight than brackets. I have found them quite as
serviceable to denote the auxiliary word or phrase; and where the
author himself uses a parenthesis, I have observed very few instances
in which a sensible reader would confound it with the translator's
efforts to eke out the sense. Sometimes, an awkward interpolation has
been thrown into a footnote. Occasionally the crabbed sentences of the
great Carthaginian are so obscure that Dr. Holmes has been unable to
make them lucid, although, with the original in hand, he probably felt
a force in his own rendering which the mere English reader must fail to
perceive. In a few such instances, noting the fact in the margin, I
have tried to bring out the sense, by slight modifications of
punctuation and arrangement. Occasionally too I have dropped a
superfluous interpolation (such e.g. as to conclude, or let me say
again,) when I have found that it only served to clog and overcharge a
sentence. Last of all, Dr. Holmes' headings have sometimes been
condensed, to avoid phrases and sentences immediately recurring in the
chapter.(1) These purely mechanical parts require a terse form of
statement, like those in the English Bible, and I have frequently
reduced them on that model, dropping redundant adverbs and adjectives
to bring out the catchwords.