On the Soul and Its Origin

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1–1.17 · 1.18–1.31 · 1.32–2.12 · 2.13–3.2 · 3.3–3.19 · 3.20–4.11 · 4.12–4.26 · 4.27–4.39

1. 1.1Augustine thanks Renatus for sending him the two books of Vincentius Victor that criticize his writings.
2. 1.2Augustine takes no offence at Victor’s criticism, excuses his motives, and says the recent convert from the Rogatists should be corrected gently.
3. 1.3Victor is eloquent but verbose and young; the danger is that his eloquence may make error attractive.
4. 1.4Augustine argues that if the soul is made from God himself, it would be God’s changeable nature; it was made by God from nothing.
5. 1.5Victor’s view that soul and spirit are bodies would make man three bodies, a tolerable error of one who does not know incorporeal likenesses of bodies.
6. 1.6Victor’s claim that the soul “deserved to be defiled through the flesh” cannot say what the soul deserved before it had flesh.
7. 1.7Appeal to God’s foreknowledge cannot explain why God would plunge innocent souls into sinful flesh.
8. 1.8Victor explains how the infant’s soul is freed from sin but not how it deserved to become sinful.
9. 1.9If the soul’s desert was good, grace is not grace; if bad, there was evil desert before sin; Victor must retract.
10. 1.10Victor promises heaven to unbaptized infants and prescribes eucharistic offerings for them; Augustine replies that only baptism or martyrdom makes a member of Christ.
11. 1.11The penitent thief counts as a martyr baptized in blood (or perhaps by the water from Christ’s side); his case gives no ground for promising heaven or a middle place to unbaptized infants.
12. 1.12The Dinocrates story is not canonical and does not say the boy was unbaptized; he may have lapsed after baptism.
13. 1.13Even granting offerings for the unbaptized, Victor cannot account for the countless infants of unbelievers who die unbaptized with no one to offer for them.
14. 1.14Victor must choose between saying unbaptized infants are freed from original sin or that a just God damns wholly innocent souls.
15. 1.15Augustine rejects four explanations, including pre-existent sin and condemnation for sins God foresaw but that were never committed.
16. 1.16Excluding four false answers leaves Victor only Pelagianism; better to share Augustine’s hesitation about the soul’s origin.
17. 1.17Isaiah 42:5 shows God gives breath, but not whether by propagation or new inbreathing, just as God gives bodies that come from seed.
18. 1.18Isaiah’s “breath” and “spirit” may be parallelism referring to the Holy Spirit given at Pentecost.
19. 1.19The Greek word pnoē, translated variously, often signifies the Spirit or divine inspiration; even a plain “gives a soul” would not settle the soul’s origin.
20. 1.20Other readings of Isaiah 42:5 are orthodox, but none decides whether the soul is given by propagation or by new inbreathing.
21. 1.21Isaiah 57:16 shows God makes every soul but not how.
22. 1.22Zechariah 12:1 says God forms man’s spirit within him, as he forms the eye, without deciding how.
23. 1.23The Maccabean mother’s words show God gives soul and spirit, as he gives limbs, but not how.
24. 1.24Victor’s claim that the soul is neither from transmission nor from nothing is false; if not from transmission, it is from nothing.
25. 1.25Like the Maccabean mother, Augustine confesses he does not know how his soul came into his body, and rejects Victor’s comparing him to cattle for it.
26. 1.26Paul’s present tense “gives” in Acts 17:25 does not show God gives souls always or without propagation, just as God clothes the grass that grows from seed.
27. 1.27Paul’s “all things are from God” in 1 Cor 11:12 covers bodies too, so “from God” does not exclude propagation.
28. 1.28“From one blood” (Acts 17:26) may stand for the whole man by synecdoche, just as “in whom all sinned” may; neither text decides the question.
29. 1.29Genesis 2:23 is argued both ways: the propagationists note that no breath was breathed into Eve, their opponents that Adam said only “flesh of my flesh.”
30. 1.30Scripture’s silence about Eve’s soul decides nothing either way.
31. 1.31Arguing from “flesh of my flesh” resembles the Apollinarian argument from “the Word was made flesh”; both sides need unambiguous texts.
32. 1.32Augustine closes by warning that souls from God’s breath, not from nothing, would be divine by nature.
33. 1.33The view of new souls may be defended, but not in Victor’s way, whose errors Augustine lists.
34. 1.34Defenders of new souls must avoid the four errors and find certain Scripture, or else confess ignorance rather than fall into Pelagianism.
35. 1.35Augustine sends the book to Renatus for circulation, hopes for Victor’s correction, and thanks Renatus.
36. 2.1Augustine writes to the presbyter Peter, who reportedly kissed Victor and thanked him for what he learned, asking what exactly he learned.
37. 2.2If Peter learned that soul and spirit are distinct yet named interchangeably, he learned nothing dangerous to be ignorant of.
38. 2.3Peter surely knew already that the soul has senses distinct from the body’s.
39. 2.4Peter cannot have needed Victor to learn that the soul is not part of God; Augustine fears rather that he learned an error.
40. 2.5Augustine distinguishes what is from God by begetting or procession (the Son and the Spirit, of one nature with the Father) from creatures made by God from nothing or from other creatures.
41. 2.6The first soul was made from nothing; to hold it was made from God’s nature is a blasphemous error, less excusable in a presbyter than in a recent convert.
42. 2.7Augustine asks Peter to confirm or deny the rumour and to say what useful thing he learned; the corporeality of the soul is not essential doctrine.
43. 2.8Victor rightly holds that souls are judged at death, but his claim that the soul seeks food only for the body cannot explain the rich man’s thirst in Luke 16.
44. 2.9Victor avoids Tertullian’s corporeal God but makes the incorporeal God breathe out a corporeal soul from himself, unlike the Son who is begotten of the same nature.
45. 2.10Resemblance of character between parents and children decides nothing; Peter has not truly learned that souls are not transmitted.
46. 2.11Victor’s words imply both that the soul had a blessed state before the flesh and that it deserved to be defiled, contradicting his own denial of pre-existence.
47. 2.12Victor’s phrase “deserved to be sinful, which could not have been sinful” is self-contradictory.
48. 2.13Victor applies Wisdom 4 to infants who die unbaptized, implying absurdly that baptism would have corrupted them and that God’s predestination can be thwarted.
49. 2.14Victor separates paradise and the Father’s mansions from the kingdom of heaven to give unbaptized infants a blessed place, citing the thief and Dinocrates.
50. 2.15Victor “decrees” eucharistic sacrifices for unbaptized infants on the example of 2 Maccabees, but those sacrifices were for the circumcised.
51. 2.16Victor goes further, allowing unbaptized souls the kingdom of heaven after the resurrection while admitting that Christ’s words in John 3:5 oppose it.
52. 2.17Victor, though admitting original sin, goes beyond the condemned Pelagians by promising unbaptized infants paradise and the kingdom, against John 3:5, Rom 5:18 and Mark 16:16.
53. 2.18Unable to reconcile God’s justice with infants’ damnation on his view, Victor scorned Augustine’s caution and was “shipwrecked” by promising them paradise and the kingdom.
54. 2.19Victor’s texts on God giving, making, or forming souls do not decide how, since God also gives bodies through seed.
55. 2.20Texts naming a part (blood, flesh) or the whole (man, woman) cut both ways by synecdoche; unambiguous testimonies are needed.
56. 2.21The question of the soul’s origin remains open; Victor’s answer defames God’s nature and still cannot explain the infants of unbelievers.
57. 2.22Victor professed readiness to be corrected and asked Peter to destroy what was unworthy; Peter should not be less teachable than he.
58. 2.23Peter should correct Victor, not flatter him, and state publicly what, if anything, he approved, lest readers drink error on his authority.
59. 3.1Augustine addresses Victor himself in love, to correct him lest he become a new heretic.
60. 3.2Augustine warns Victor against taking the name of the dead Rogatist bishop Vincentius and trusting a vision of him, which may be Satan disguised as an angel of light.
61. 3.3The soul must be made by God, not from God; a particle of God’s breath would be of God’s nature, as a flame lit from a lamp is of the same nature.
62. 3.4Victor’s comparison of blowing up a wineskin fails: our breath comes from the air, not from our soul, and is constantly taken in and given back.
63. 3.5Augustine invites Victor to test his wineskin comparison by holding his breath after blowing.
64. 3.6The proper comparison is that God, being almighty, makes a living breath from nothing, as we make lifeless breath from the air.
65. 3.7Elisha’s breathing on the Shunammite’s son did not give the boy a soul; God restored it at the prophet’s prayer, and the text does not say he breathed three times.
66. 3.8God will not give souls forever, since generation will end, though God himself always is.
67. 3.9The soul had no good desert before the flesh; that notion was condemned in the Priscillianists.
68. 3.10Victor contradicts himself, and any desert of the soul before the flesh is not catholic.
69. 3.11The soul cannot have deserved to become sinful before any sin.
70. 3.12Neither the thief nor Dinocrates proves that unbaptized infants are forgiven; either may have been baptized, and the Dinocrates account is not canonical.
71. 3.13Seventh error: those predestined to baptism cannot be snatched from God’s predestination.
72. 3.14Eighth error: Wisdom 4:11–14 concerns baptized saints who die young, not unbaptized infants.
73. 3.15Ninth error: the mansions of the Father’s house cannot lie outside the kingdom of God.
74. 3.16Augustine states a possible objection distinguishing the kingdom of God from the kingdom of heaven.
75. 3.17Christ’s words to Nicodemus exclude the unreborn from the kingdom of God itself, so no mansion of God’s house is open to them.
76. 3.18Tenth error: Christian sacrifice is not to be offered for the unbaptized; Victor, a layman, presumed to “decree” it.
77. 3.19Eleventh error: promising paradise and later the kingdom to the unbaptized, which even Pelagius did not dare.
78. 3.20Augustine holds Victor to his own profession of readiness to be corrected quickly.
79. 3.21Augustine encourages Victor, praising his gifts but urging him to correct the chief errors.
80. 3.22Augustine lists Victor’s eleven errors.
81. 3.23Victor should renounce the eleven errors; his professed readiness for correction keeps him catholic if it is sincere.
82. 4.1Book 4, to Victor: Augustine welcomes free criticism but says Victor has attacked points that need admitting or defending, not correcting.
83. 4.2Victor had censured Augustine’s silence on the soul’s origin as beastlike ignorance of oneself.
84. 4.3Victor’s standard would make everyone beastlike, since no one knows all of human nature, not even the body, which anatomists dissect.
85. 4.4Victor, who misunderstood even his own breathing, cannot teach the origin of souls; Augustine would gladly be taught if he could.
86. 4.5Augustine wants to learn either the soul’s origin or whether it may be known in this life, perhaps being among things too high for us (Sirach 3).
87. 4.6The soul knows less of its own body and workings than of God; it is no shame that it cannot recall its own origin.
88. 4.7Most people cannot know how they move their bodies or where they think, which only anatomists learn from outside.
89. 4.8We cannot grasp even ourselves; forgetting how we began is no beastliness.
90. 4.9Augustine’s friend Simplicius could recite Virgil and Cicero backwards but did not know it until tested: the mind does not know its own powers.
91. 4.10The workings of memory and understanding show how deep and unknown our present nature is.
92. 4.11We do not know the power of our own understanding or will, as Peter did not know his when he promised to die for Christ.
93. 4.12Paul, caught up to the third heaven, did not know whether he was in the body; forgetting one’s origin is no beastliness.
94. 4.13Not knowing what to pray for, as Paul confessed, matters more than not knowing one’s origin; the Spirit may teach it if it is good for us.
95. 4.14If knowledge of the soul’s origin comes from Scripture, Victor should not have made it a mark of human nature distinguishing us from beasts.
96. 4.15Scripture shows that God gives souls but not how; the psalm about beasts concerns those who hope for nothing after death, not those who confess ignorance.
97. 4.16Augustine prefers to leave the soul’s origin hidden rather than aid heretics, holding only that all born of Adam are condemned unless reborn in Christ, according to God’s predestination.
98. 4.17Augustine turns to whether the soul is corporeal, asking Victor how he defines a body.
99. 4.18Incorporeal does not mean empty, since Victor admits God is incorporeal; air is a body, as vessels pressed into water show.
100. 4.19Victor’s reasoning that the soul is body but not spirit is inconsistent and would make spirit a body too.
101. 4.20Victor’s corporeal inner man and inmost spirit, moulded to the body, could not be renewed to the image of the incorporeal God.
102. 4.21Recognition and form do not require a body: we know ourselves and God, and Scripture speaks of the form of doctrine and the form of God.
103. 4.22Names apply to incorporeal things like the fruit of the Spirit; imploring help does not imply a body, or no one could pray to God.
104. 4.23Bodily terms for the soul in the parable are figurative, as for God, wings, the tongue’s hands, and the face of sin.
105. 4.24Abraham’s bosom is the hidden place of rest, not a bodily lap.
106. 4.25Dream images, which the soul holds in memory in vast number, are likenesses of bodies, not bodies, showing the soul is not corporeal.
107. 4.26Perpetua’s dream of wrestling as a man shows a bodily likeness in the soul that is not a body.
108. 4.27Dinocrates appeared with his wound, which shows the soul bears likenesses of bodily things, not a body that can be wounded or killed.
109. 4.28Victor’s view would give an amputee’s soul one adult and one infant hand; dreams show likenesses of bodies, and Scripture calls the dead sleepers.
110. 4.29Amputees dream of themselves both whole and maimed, and Samuel appeared clothed: these are likenesses, though the feelings are real.
111. 4.30The truest knowledge of a person is of life and will, not bodily form; so the rich man could recognize Abraham.
112. 4.31Augustine distinguishes bodily sight, imaginative sight of likenesses, and intellectual sight of things like faith, hope, and love, where we are renewed in God’s image and there is no sex.
113. 4.32If the soul had a real female body, as Victor holds, it would be female, yet he denies the soul sex; better to call its members a likeness.
114. 4.33The phoenix is irrelevant; a soul with real male or female members would have sex, which Victor denies, so it has no real body.
115. 4.34Likenesses of bodies in dreams and prophetic visions, as in Revelation, are truthful signs, not bodies.
116. 4.35Augustine sets aside the question of angels’ bodies and concludes his argument that the soul is incorporeal.
117. 4.36Spirit properly names the rational part of the soul (the mind), yet the whole soul may also be called spirit, as all Jacob’s seed and the ten tribes were both called Israel.
118. 4.37Scripture calls even the souls of irrational beasts “spirit”, so “spirit” is a general name for the soul as well as a name for its rational part.
119. 4.38Augustine repeats the eleven errors, urges Victor to learn not to know, and restates his own positions.
120. 4.39Augustine invites Victor to visit him for further correction and warns him against seeking applause.