On the Soul and Its Origin 1.32–2.12

This being so, I see that this book must now be closed. For it contains all that seemed to me most necessary, so that those who read it may know that they must take care not to agree with this man, whose two books you sent me, in believing that souls are from God’s breath in such a way that they are not from nothing. For whoever believes this, even if he denies it in words, in fact proclaims that souls have the substance of God and are his offspring not by gift but by nature. For it can by no means soberly be denied that one derives the kind of one’s nature from that from which one derives the origin of one’s nature. But this man so contradicts himself that he says souls are God’s offspring not by nature but by gift, and yet says they were not made from nothing but derive their origin from him; and so he does not hesitate to bring them back to the nature of God, which he had denied before.

We do not at all forbid the inbreathing of new souls without propagation to be defended, but by those who can find something either in the canonical books which is not ambiguous for untying this most entangled question, or in their own reasonings which is not contrary to catholic truth; not by such a one as this man has shown himself to be, who, not finding what to say and unwilling to suspend his deliberation, not measuring his strength at all, dared—rather than keep silent—to say that the soul deserved to be defiled through the flesh and deserved to be sinful, though he could find no desert of it, good or bad, before the flesh; that original sin can be loosed for little children who leave the body without baptism; that the sacrifice of the body of Christ should be offered for those who have not been incorporated into Christ by his sacraments in his church; that those who depart this life without the washing of regeneration not only go to rest but can even reach the kingdom of heaven; and many other very absurd things, which it seemed too long to collect and set out in this book. Far be it, then, that the propagation of souls, if it is false, should be refuted by such people, and the inbreathing of new souls, if it is true, defended by such people.

Therefore, whoever wishes to defend the view that new souls are breathed into those being born, not drawn from parents, let them in every way beware of any of those four things I mentioned above; that is, let them not say that souls are made sinful by God through another’s original sin; let them not say that little children who have departed without baptism can reach eternal life and the kingdom of heaven, original sin having been loosed by some other means; let them not say that souls sinned somewhere before the flesh and for this desert were thrust down into sinful flesh; let them not say that sins not found in them were deservedly punished because they were foreknown, although they were not permitted to reach the life in which they would commit them. Saying none of these four things, then, since each of them is false and impious, let them also find the most certain testimonies of the Scriptures on this matter, and let them defend this opinion of theirs not only without my forbidding it but even with my favour and thanks. But if they do not find a most certain authority of the divine oracles on this matter, and are compelled by want to say one of those four things, let them restrain themselves, lest through that very want they be compelled to say also that the souls of little children do not have original sin, according to the Pelagian heresy, long deserving condemnation and very recently condemned. For it is better for a man to confess that he does not know what he does not know than either to fall into a condemned heresy or to found a new one while rashly daring to defend what he does not know. As for the other false and absurd things of this man, in which he strays from the path of truth not so dangerously but still strays, since they are many, and since I wish, if the Lord wills, to write something to him too about his books, I shall there perhaps show them all, or, if I cannot show all, most of them.

This book, which I thought should be written to you rather than to anyone else, since you have taken care of our faith and of my reputation faithfully and kindly as a true catholic and a good friend, you will give to be read or copied to those you can, or to those to whom you judge it should be given. In it I thought the presumption of this young man should be checked and refuted in such a way that I nevertheless love him and wish him not to be condemned but corrected, and so to make progress in the great house, which is the catholic church, to which the divine mercy has brought him, that he may be in it a vessel for honour, sanctified, useful to the Lord, always ready for every good work, both by living well and by speaking soundly. Moreover, if I ought to love him, as I do, how much more you, brother, whose goodwill toward me and whose cautious and sober catholic faith I know very well! Hence it came about that, with truly brotherly and plainly sincere love, you took care to have those books, which displeased you and in which you found my name placed otherwise than you would wish, copied and sent to me. So far am I, then, from being angry with your charity because you did this, that rather, if you had not done it, I should have had every right of friendship to be angry. I therefore give you abundant thanks. And how I received what you did I have shown the more plainly by writing this book to you without any delay as soon as I had read those books.

Two books of Vincentius Victor, which he wrote to your holiness, have reached me; our brother Renatus sent them to me, a layman indeed, but prudently and devoutly concerned for his own faith and that of those he loves. Having read them, I saw a man flowing in speech not only to sufficiency but even to overflowing, but not yet instructed as he ought to be in the matters he chose to speak about; if this is granted him by the Lord’s gift, he will be able to be useful to many. For he has no small ability by which to set out and adorn what he thinks, if he first takes pains to think rightly. For perverse things eloquently put are very harmful, because to less educated people they seem true because they are eloquent. How you yourself received these books I do not know; but if what I have heard is true, you are said, when they were read aloud, to have leapt up with such joy that you, an old man, kissed the head of that young man, and you, a presbyter, that of a layman, and thanked him for teaching you what you did not know. In this indeed I do not disapprove of your humility; rather, I even praise it, that you honoured your teacher, and not the man but the truth itself which deigned to speak to you through him—provided, however, that you can show what truth you received through him. So I should like you to teach me in your reply what he taught you. For far be it from me to blush to learn from a presbyter, if you did not blush to learn from a layman, with a humility to be proclaimed and imitated, if you learned true things.

So, dearly beloved brother, I want to know what you learned from him, so that, if I already knew it, I may congratulate you, and if I did not know it, I may learn it through you. Did you then not know that soul and spirit are two particular things—according to what is written, “You have released my soul from my spirit”—and that both belong to the nature of man, so that the whole man is spirit and soul and body; but that sometimes these two are together called by the name of soul—as in “and man became a living soul”, for there the spirit too is understood—and likewise that sometimes both are called by the name of spirit—as in “and bowing his head he gave up the spirit”, where the soul too must be understood—and that both are of one substance? I think you already knew these things; but if you did not, know that you have not learned anything which is dangerous not to know. And if anything here needs subtler discussion, it is better done with him, whose eloquence we already know: whether, when the word soul is used so that the spirit is understood at the same time, both are soul, and the spirit is something of the soul, or whether, as he thought, the whole is called by this name from a part; or again whether both are spirit, and part of it is what is properly called soul, or whether this too is called the whole from a part when the word spirit is used so that the soul is understood at the same time—for this is his view. But these things, as I said, are discussed subtly and are not known without any danger, or at least without great danger.

Likewise, I should be surprised if he taught you that some senses belong to the body and others to the soul, and that you, a man of such age and rank, thought before you heard him that that by which white and black are distinguished—which even sparrows see along with us—is one and the same as that by which just and unjust are discerned, which Tobit saw even when he had lost the lights of his flesh. If that is so, then certainly, when you heard or read, “Enlighten my eyes, lest I ever fall asleep in death”, you thought only of the eyes of the flesh. Or if this is obscure, certainly, when you recalled that saying of the apostle, “the eyes of your heart enlightened”, you believed that we have a heart under the forehead and above the cheeks. Far be it from me to think this of you; so he did not teach you this either.

Or if perhaps, before this man’s teaching, which you now rejoice to have found, you thought that the nature of the soul was a portion of God, you plainly did not know, to your horrible danger, that this is false. And if you learned from him that the soul is not a portion of God, give God all the thanks you can that you did not leave the body before you learned it; for you would have left it a great heretic and a horrible blasphemer. Yet I would by no means think even this of you, that you, a catholic man and a presbyter not to be despised, held the nature of the soul to be a portion of God. Hence, I confess to your love, I fear that he may perhaps have taught you what is rather contrary to the faith you held.

For just as I do not think you ever believed in the catholic church that the soul is a portion of God, or that the soul and God are in any way of the same nature, so I fear that you may perhaps have agreed with this man that God did not make the soul from nothing, but that it is from him in such a way that it emanated from him; for he used this very word among the others by which he strayed into an enormous precipice on this question. But if he taught you this, I do not want you to teach it to me; rather, I want you yourself to unlearn what you had learned. For it is not enough not to believe or say that the soul is a part of God—for we do not say that the Son or the Holy Spirit is a part of God, and yet we say that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are of one and the same nature—it is not enough, then, that we do not say the soul is a part of God; we must also say that it and God are not of one and the same nature. Hence he says rightly that souls are God’s offspring by gift, not by nature, and therefore not all souls but those of the faithful; but again he rolled back to what he had avoided and said that God and the soul are of the same nature, not indeed in these words, but in an open and manifest meaning. For when he says the soul is from God in such a way that he created it neither from another nature nor from nothing, but from himself, what is he trying to persuade us of but what he denies in other words, namely, that the soul is of the same nature as God? For every nature either is God, who has no author, or is from God, because it has him as author. But of the nature that has God as author, from whom it is, some was not made, some was made. Further, that which was not made and yet is from him is either begotten by him or proceeds from him—what is begotten is the only Son, what proceeds is the Holy Spirit—and this Trinity is of one and the same nature; for these three are one, and each is God, and all together are one God, unchangeable, everlasting, without any beginning or end in time. But that nature which was made is called creature, while the Creator is God, namely that Trinity. The creature, then, is said to be from God in such a way that it was not made from his nature; it is said to be from him because it has him as the author of its being, not so that it was born or proceeded from him, but so that it was created, founded, made by him: partly from no other thing, that is, from absolutely nothing, as heaven and earth, or rather the whole matter of the whole mass of the world, created together with the world; partly from another nature already created and existing, as the man from clay, the woman from the man, a human being from parents; yet every creature is from God, but by his creating it either from nothing or from something, not by his begetting or producing it from himself.

If I speak these things with a catholic, reminding rather than teaching—for I do not think they are new to you, or even heard before but not believed; rather, as I suppose, you read my letter in such a way as to recognize in it your own faith as well, which by the Lord’s gift is common to us in the catholic church—if, then, as I had begun to say, I speak these things with a catholic, from what, I beg you, do you believe the soul to be—I do not mean the soul of each of us, but the first soul given to that first man? If from nothing, and yet made and breathed in by God, you believe what I believe. But if from some other creature which lay beneath God the craftsman as material from which a soul might be made—as the dust from which Adam was made, or his rib from which Eve was made, or as the waters from which fish and birds were made, or the earth from which all land animals were made—that is not catholic, it is not true. But if you think that God made or makes souls neither from nothing nor from any other creature, but from himself, that is, from his own nature—God forbid!—then indeed you have learned this from him, but I do not congratulate or flatter you; you have strayed with him far from the catholic faith. For it would be more tolerable—it is indeed false, but, as I said, more tolerable—for you to believe that the soul was formed from some other creature which God had already made than from the nature of God; so that its being changeable, its sinning, its becoming ungodly, and, if it persists in ungodliness to the end, its being damned without end, would not be referred with horrible blasphemy to the nature of God. Cast away, brother, cast away, I beg you, this thing which is not faith at all but an error of accursed impiety, lest you, a serious man led astray by a young man, and a presbyter by a layman, while you think this the catholic faith, be removed from the number of the faithful—which may the Lord turn away from you. For you are not to be dealt with as he is, nor is this so horrible error of yours worthy of the same pardon as that young man’s, even though it passed from him to you. He has lately come into the catholic fold to be healed; you are counted among the catholic shepherds. We do not want the sheep which has come from error to the Lord’s flock to be cured in such a way that the ulcerous sheep first destroys the shepherd by pestilent contagion.

But if you say, “He did not teach me this, nor did I in any way agree with this error of his, enticed by the sweetness of his speech, however eloquent and ornate”, I give God great thanks. But I ask why, having kissed his head, as is said, you thanked him for learning what you had not known until you heard his discussion; or, if it is false that you did and said this, I ask you to be so good as to let us know it, so that an empty rumour may be refuted by your letter. But if it is true that you thanked the man with such humility, I rejoice indeed if he did not teach you what I showed above to be detestable and to be guarded against, and I do not blame you for being grateful with such humility to a teacher, if you learned something else true and useful from his discussion; but I ask what this is. Is it perhaps that the soul is not spirit but body? I do not think it a great loss to Christian doctrine not to know such things, and if one discusses the kinds of bodies subtly, this is learned with more difficulty than profit. But if the Lord wills that I write to that young man himself, as I wish, your love will perhaps learn there how far he did not teach you even this, if indeed you rejoice to have learned it from him. But lest there be something else which is agreed to be useful and to belong to necessary faith, I ask you not to find it burdensome to reply.

For as to what he most rightly and very wholesomely believes—that souls are judged when they have left their bodies, before they come to that judgment in which, their bodies restored, they must be judged and tormented or glorified in the very flesh in which they lived here—did you really not know this yourself? Who has become so deaf against the gospel with such obstinacy of mind as not to hear these things in the case of that poor man who after death was carried to Abraham’s bosom, and of that rich man whose torments in hell are set forth, or, having heard them, not to believe them? But did he teach you how a soul without a body could long for a drop of water from the poor man’s finger, when he himself admitted that the soul seeks bodily nourishment only to prop up the ruins of its corruptible body? These are his words: “Because the soul,” he says, “seeks food or drink, do we believe that the nourishment passes into it?” And a little later: “From this,” he says, “it is understood and proved that the support of food belongs not to the soul but to the body, for which clothing is also provided besides food on a similar principle, so that a supply of nourishment seems necessary to that to which it belongs also to have clothing.” He added, illustrating this opinion of his, set out clearly enough, with a certain comparison, and said: “What do we think a tenant provides for his dwelling? If he perceives that it is shaking in its roof or tottering in its wall or giving way in its foundation, does he not look for props and heap up supports by which to shore up the threatening ruin carefully and diligently, lest with the danger to the dwelling the peril of the dweller seem to hang in the balance? So then recognize,” he says, “that the soul too desires food for its flesh, from which it undoubtedly conceives the desire itself.” These are the views that young man set out in most splendid and most ample words, asserting that nourishment is sought not for the soul but for the body, by the soul’s care indeed, but as by one dwelling in a house and propping up by provident repair the threatening ruins of the dying flesh. Let him explain to you, then, what ruin that rich man’s soul wished to prop up, when it certainly no longer had a mortal body, and yet was thirsty and asked for a drop of water from the poor man’s finger. Here this teacher of old men has something to exercise himself on; let him seek and find, if he can, for what purpose that soul in the underworld begged for liquid nourishment, even so little, when it no longer had its ruinous dwelling.

That he believes God to be incorporeal, I congratulate him on being separated at least in this from the ravings of Tertullian; for he contended that God, like the soul, is corporeal. Disagreeing with him in this, this man tries to persuade us of things more marvellous: that the incorporeal God does not make it from nothing, but breathes out from himself a corporeal breath. O teaching to which every age should prick up its ears, which deserves to have aged men, even presbyters, as its disciples! Let him read, let him read in the assembly what he has written; let him invite known and unknown, learned and unlearned, to hear him recite. Elders with the young, come together; learn what you did not know, hear what you had never heard! See, on his teaching, God creates the breath neither from something else that in some way exists, nor from that which does not exist at all, but from that which he himself is; though he is incorporeal, he breathes out a body. So he himself changes his own nature into a body, before it is changed in the body of sin. Or does he say that he changes nothing of his nature when he makes the breath? Then he does not make it from himself; for he himself is not one thing and his nature another. What utter madman would think that? But if he says that God makes the breath from his nature in such a way that he himself remains whole, that is not the question; the question is whether what is not from elsewhere nor from nothing, but from him, is not what he is, that is, of the same nature and essence. For when the Son is begotten he also remains whole; but because when he begot him from himself, he begot nothing other than what he himself is. For apart from his having assumed a man and the Word having been made flesh, the Word, the Son of God, is indeed another, but not another thing; that is, he is another person, but not a different nature. And why so, except because he was not created from another thing or from nothing, but born from him—not so as to be better than he was, but simply so as to be, and to be what he is from whom he was born, that is, of one and the same nature, equal, coeternal, in every way like, equally unchangeable, equally invisible, equally incorporeal, equally God, altogether what the Father is, except that he is the Son, not the Father? But if God indeed remains whole himself, and yet creates, neither from nothing nor from another thing, but from himself, something different and worse, and a body emanates from the incorporeal God, far be it that a catholic mind should drink this in! For it is not a stream from the divine fountain but a fiction of the human heart.

Now as for how ineptly he labours to free the soul, which he thinks corporeal, from the passions of the body, discussing the infancy of the soul, paralytics and the suppressed senses of the soul, and bodily limbs amputated without cutting the soul, I ought to deal with him rather than with you; for it is he who must sweat to give an account of what he said, lest we seem to want to weary the gravity of an old man with the work of a young one. As for his arguing that the likenesses of character found in children do not come from the seed of the soul, it follows indeed that all who destroy the propagation of the soul should think this; but neither do those who assert it rest the weight of their assertion there. For they see also children unlike their parents in character, which they think happens because even one and the same man often has characters unlike his own former ones, not by receiving another soul but by his life being changed for better or worse. So they say it is not impossible for a soul not to have the character of the soul from which it was propagated, since one and the same soul can have one character now and another at another time. Therefore, if you believe you learned from him that the soul is not from transmission, I wish you had truly learned it! I would most gladly put myself in your hands to be taught; but it is one thing to learn, another to seem to oneself to have learned. If, then, you think you have learned what you still do not know, you have not really learned it, but rashly believed what you gladly heard, and false speaking crept in on you through sweet speaking. I do not say this because I am already certain it is false that souls are breathed in new rather than drawn from the origin of the parents—for I think this must still be sought from those who can teach it—but because he discussed this matter in such a way that not only did he fail to solve the question, which is still to be examined, but also said things whose falsity is beyond doubt; for while wanting to prove doubtful things, he dared to say things that are without doubt to be rejected.

Or will you hesitate to reject what he said when speaking of the soul: “You do not want the soul to contract sickness from the flesh of sin, to which in turn you see sanctification pass through the flesh, so that through it the soul may regain the state through which it had lost its desert? Or because the body is washed in baptism, does what is believed to be conferred through baptism not pass to the soul or spirit? Deservedly, then, it regains through the flesh the ancient condition which it had seemed to lose for a little while through the flesh, so that it begins to be reborn through that by which it had deserved to be defiled.” See in these words how greatly this teacher of yours has erred! He said the soul regains through the flesh the state through which it had lost its desert: so the soul had some state and some good desert before the flesh, which he wants it to regain through the flesh when the flesh is washed by the washing of regeneration; so it had lived somewhere before the flesh in a good state and desert, which state and desert it lost when it came into the flesh. He said it regains through the flesh its ancient condition, which it had seemed to lose for a little while through the flesh: so it had before the flesh an old condition—for that is what “ancient” means—and what could that be but a blessed and praiseworthy condition? This he asserts is restored through the sacrament of baptism, although he will not have the soul draw its origin by propagation from that soul which, it is agreed, was once happy in paradise. How then does he say in another place that he firmly asserts that the soul is not from transmission, nor from nothing, nor through itself, nor before the body? See, in this place he wants souls to live somewhere before the body so blessedly that the same blessedness is given back to them through baptism; and as though forgetting himself again, he adds and says: “so that it begins to be reborn through that,” that is, through the flesh, “by which it had deserved to be defiled.” Above he signified that a good desert had been lost through the flesh, but now he signifies a bad desert, by which it came about that it came or was sent into the flesh, by saying, “by which it had deserved to be defiled”; for if it deserves to be defiled, it is certainly not a good desert. Let him say what it sinned before it was defiled through the flesh, so that it deserved to be defiled through the flesh; let him say it, if he can—which he by no means can, because he cannot find anything true to say here at all.

Again a little later he says: “If, then, the soul deserved to be sinful, which could not have been sinful, yet it did not remain in sin, because, prefigured in Christ, it ought not to be in sin, just as it could not be.” I ask you, brother, do you think you read and considered these words at least afterward, and reflected on what you praised when he read aloud, or for what you gave thanks after the reading? What does it mean, I beg you: “If, then, the soul deserved to be sinful, which could not have been sinful”? What does “deserved” and “could not” mean, when it could not deserve this unless it had been sinful, and it would not have been so unless it could have been, so that, sinning before any bad desert, it made itself a desert by which, the Lord forsaking it, it came to other sins? Or did he say, “which could not have been sinful”, because it could not have been sinful unless it came into the flesh? What, then, did it deserve, that it should be sent where it could be sinful, whereas, had it not come there, it could not be sinful elsewhere? Let him say what it deserved. For if it deserved to be sinful, it had already sinned somehow, so as to deserve to be sinful again; but if it had not sinned at all, how did it deserve to be sinful? But these things may perhaps seem obscure, or be alleged to be obscure, though they are perfectly plain. For he ought not to have said that the soul deserved to be sinful through the flesh, when he will be able to find no desert of it, good or bad, before the flesh.