On the Soul and Its Origin 3.20–4.11

These and similar things, if perhaps you can find others too in your books by more attentive and leisurely reading, correct now without any delay, if you have a catholic mind, that is, if you spoke truly in your preface when you said that you do not yourself trust that what you have said can be proved, that you always strive not to defend even your own opinion if it is found improbable, and that it is your heart’s desire, condemning your own judgment, to follow rather the better and truer things. Prove now, dearest one, that you did not say these things deceitfully, so that the catholic church may rejoice in your disposition, not only talented but also cautious, devout, and modest, and that heretical madness may not blaze up from contentious obstinacy. Now is the time to show with what sincerity of heart, after these good words of yours which I have recalled, you said what you added immediately: “For as it belongs,” you say, “to an excellent purpose and a praiseworthy counsel to be easily brought over to truer things, so it belongs to a perverse and obstinate judgment to be unwilling to be quickly bent to the path of reason.” Be, then, of excellent purpose and praiseworthy counsel, and be easily brought over to truer things; and do not be of perverse and obstinate judgment, unwilling to be quickly bent to the path of reason. For if you said these things generously, if you did not sound them on your lips but felt them inwardly and genuinely in your heart, you hate even delays in so great a good as your correction. For it was not enough for you to say that it belongs to a perverse and obstinate judgment to be unwilling to be bent to the path of reason unless you added “quickly”, so as to show how accursed is he who never does this good, since he who does it more slowly seems to you blameworthy with such severity as to be rightly said to be of perverse and obstinate judgment. Listen, then, to yourself, and you above all and most of all make use of the fruits of your own eloquence, so as to bend yourself back to the path of reason, with gravity of mind, more quickly than you had turned yourself aside from it, with too little learning and too little counsel, through the slipperiness of youth.

It would be too long to treat and discuss all the things I want corrected in your books, or rather in yourself, and to give you even a brief reason for each correction. Yet do not therefore despise yourself and think that your talent and eloquence are of small account. Nor have I found your memory of the holy Scriptures to be small; but your learning is less than befitted so great a disposition and labour. So I do not want you either to become vain by attributing to yourself more than you ought, or again to grow cold by casting yourself down and despairing. Would that I could read your writings with you and show what should be corrected by conversation rather than by writing! This business would be done more easily by talking between ourselves than by letters; which, if it had to be written, would need many volumes. But these capital points, which I wished to include in a definite number, I urgently admonish you not to delay correcting and to make wholly foreign to your faith and preaching, so that, great as your faculty for discussion is by God’s gift, you may use it profitably for the building up, not the destruction, of sound and wholesome doctrine.

These are the points which I have already discussed as well as I could; but I will run through them again briefly. The first is that you said God made the soul not from nothing but from himself; the second, that God gives souls through infinite time and so always, just as he who gives always is; the third, that the soul lost through the flesh some desert which it had before the flesh; the fourth, that the soul regains its ancient condition through the flesh and is reborn through the same flesh through which it had deserved to be defiled; the fifth, that the soul deserved to be sinful before any sin; the sixth, that infants overtaken by death before they are baptized can reach forgiveness of original sins; the seventh, that those whom the Lord predestined to baptism can be snatched from his predestination and die before what the Almighty predestined has been fulfilled in them; the eighth, that of infants overtaken by death before they are reborn in Christ it is written, “He was snatched away, lest wickedness should change his understanding”, and the rest that is read to this effect in the book of Wisdom; the ninth, that some of the mansions which the Lord said are in his Father’s house are outside the kingdom of God; the tenth, that the sacrifice of Christians should be offered for those who have left the body unbaptized; the eleventh, that some of those who have departed this life without the baptism of Christ go for the meantime not into the kingdom but into paradise, and afterward, in the resurrection of the dead, attain even to the blessedness of the kingdom of heaven.

These eleven, then, very plainly perverse and opposed to the catholic faith, do not now hesitate at all to root out and cast away from your mind, your speech, and your pen, if you want us to rejoice that you have not only passed over to the catholic altars but are truly catholic. For if each of these is obstinately defended, they can make as many heresies as there are opinions counted. So consider how dreadful it is that all should be in one man which would each be damnable in separate men. But if you fight for them with no contention, and indeed fight them down with faithful words and writings, you will be more praiseworthy as a censor of yourself than if you rebuked anyone else with right reason, and more admirable as their corrector than if you had never held them. May the Lord be present to your mind and pour into your spirit by his Spirit such readiness of humility, light of truth, sweetness of charity, and peace of devotion that you may prefer to be victor over your own mind in true things than over any opponent in false ones. But far be it that you should think that by holding these opinions you have departed from the catholic faith, although they are opposed to the catholic faith, if before God, whose eye is deceived in no one’s heart, you come to your senses and find that you spoke truly when you said that you do not yourself trust that what you have said can be proved, and that you always strive not to defend even your own opinion if it is found improbable, since it is your heart’s desire, condemning your own judgment, to follow rather the better and truer things. For this disposition, even in things said out of ignorance that are not catholic, is catholic by that very forethought and readiness for correction. But let this be the end of this volume, where the reader may rest a little, so that his attention may be renewed from another beginning for what follows.

Now hear also what I wish to say to you about myself, if I can—that is, if he grants it in whose hand are both we and our words. For you criticized me, even stating my name twice; and although at the beginning of your book you said that you were quite conscious of your inexperience and without the support of learning, while you called me, where you named me, most learned and most skilled, yet in the matters in which you thought you knew what I either confess I do not know or, though I do not know it, presume to know, you did not hesitate, with the freedom that was fitting, to criticize not only an old man, you a young one, and a bishop, you a layman, but even a man most learned and most skilled in your own judgment. But I do not know that I am most learned and most skilled; indeed I know most certainly that I am not, and I do not doubt that it can happen that some unskilled and unlearned person knows something of which a learned and skilled person is ignorant. And in this I plainly praise you, that you preferred the truth—if not the truth you grasped, certainly the truth you thought you grasped—to a man: rashly indeed, because you thought you knew what you do not know, but freely, because, not standing in awe of a person, you chose to disclose what you think. From this you should understand how much greater our care ought to be to call the Lord’s sheep back from errors, if it is shameful even for the sheep to hide from the shepherds themselves the faults of the shepherds, if they know of any. O that you had criticized those things of mine which deserve just criticism! For I must not deny that, as in my conduct itself, so in my many small works there are many things which can be blamed with right judgment and no rashness. If you had criticized some of these, I might perhaps have shown you there what I would wish you to be in things in which you are not wrongly criticized, and I, the elder and the one set over you, would have shown you, the younger and the one under me, an example of correction, all the more wholesome for being more humble. But you criticized in me things which humility does not compel me to correct, and which truth compels me partly to admit and partly to defend.

These are the points: one, that I did not dare to define anything about the origin of the souls which after the first man were or are given to human beings, because I confess that I do not know; the other, that I said I know the soul to be spirit, not body. But in this second point you criticized two things: one, that I did not believe it to be a body; the other, that I believed it to be spirit. For you think that the soul both is a body and is not spirit. Hear, then, my defence against your criticism, and on this occasion, in which I defend myself to you, learn in yourself what you should clear away. Recall the words of your book where you first named me: “I know,” you say, “that very many men, and easily the most skilled, when consulted on this matter have kept silence or said nothing more explicit, withdrawing a definition from their discussions once the exposition had begun—as I recently read, contained in the writings of Augustine, a most learned man and a celebrated bishop, at your house—more modestly indeed, as I suppose, and with more reserve, searching the secrets of this matter, they swallowed the judgment of their treatise within themselves and professed that they could determine nothing on it. But to me, believe me, it seems more than absurd and inconsistent with reason that man should be without knowledge of himself, or that he who is believed to have attained knowledge of all things should be held unknown to himself. For how does a man differ from a beast if he does not know how to inquire and discourse about his own quality and nature, so that what is written may rightly apply to him: ‘Man, when he was in honour, did not understand; he was likened to the beasts of burden and compared to them’? For since the good God created nothing without reason, and brought forth man himself as a rational animal, capable of understanding, possessed of reason, and lively in sense, to arrange with prudent order all things devoid of reason, what could be said so unfittingly as that he cheated him of knowledge of himself alone? And since the wisdom of the world, which stretches itself toward the knowledge of the truth by an investigation that is indeed superfluous, because it cannot know him through whom true things may be known, has nevertheless tried to discern some things about the nature of the soul that are near, indeed akin, to the truth, how unbecoming and shameful it is that any religious man should either know nothing about this very matter or should have forbidden himself altogether to know it!”

This most eloquent and splendid chastisement of our ignorance of yours compels you to know everything that belongs to the nature of man, so that, if you are ignorant of any of it, you are compared to the beasts, not by my judgment but by your own. For although you seem to touch us more pointedly when you said, “Man, when he was in honour, did not understand”, since we are in the honour of the church, in which you are not, yet you too are in that honour of nature by which you are set above the beasts, with whom by your own judgment you must be compared if you do not know anything of what is agreed to belong to your nature. For you did not spatter with this criticism only those who do not know what I do not know, that is, the origin of the human soul—which indeed I do not know entirely; for I know that God breathed into the face of the first man and man became a living soul; which, however, had I not read it, I could not know by myself—but you said: “How does a man differ from a beast if he does not know how to inquire and discourse about his own quality and nature?” You seem to have meant this as though a man ought to be able to inquire and discourse about the whole of his quality and nature in such a way that nothing of himself is hidden from him. If that is so, I will compare you to the beasts at once if you do not tell me the number of your hairs. But if you grant that, however much we progress in this life, we do not know some things belonging to our nature, I ask how much and how far you grant it, lest perhaps this too be among them, that we do not wholly know the origin of our soul; although, as far as concerns the salvation of faith, we know without any evasion that the soul was given by God and that it is not of the same nature as God. Or do you perhaps think that each person may be ignorant of his own nature just so far as you are ignorant of it, and must know it just so far as you have been able to know it, so that, if anyone is a little more ignorant than you, you compare him to the beasts because you could be more knowing than he; and so, if anyone knows it a little more than you, he will by the same justice compare you to the beasts? Tell us, then, how far you allow us to be ignorant of our nature, so that our distance from the beasts may be kept safe; and consider, however, lest he be further from the beasts who knows that he does not know something of it than he who thinks he knows what he does not know. The whole nature of man is certainly spirit, soul, and body; so whoever would separate the body from human nature is foolish. Yet the physicians called anatomists have examined by dissection even living men, as long as they could live in the hands of those searching them, through limbs, veins, nerves, bones, marrow, and the vital organs within, in order to know the nature of the body; and yet they did not compare us to the beasts because we do not know these things. Unless perhaps you are going to say that those are to be compared to the beasts who do not know the nature of the soul, not those who do not know that of the body. Then you ought not to have spoken as you did. For you did not say, “How does a man differ from a beast if he does not know about the quality and nature of his soul?”, but you said, “if he does not know how to inquire and discourse about his own quality and nature.” Our quality and our nature is certainly reckoned together with the body, although each of the parts of which we consist is discussed separately. But how much I could discuss with full knowledge about the nature of man, if I wished to set it out, I would fill several volumes; yet I confess that I am ignorant of much.

But to what do you want what we discussed in the previous book about man’s breath to belong: to the nature of the soul, because it does this in man; or to that of the body, which is moved by it so as to do it; or to that of this air, by whose going and coming it is shown to be done; or rather to all three—to the soul, which moves the body, and to the body, which by its motion takes in and gives back breath, and to this air spread around on every side, which nourishes by entering and relieves by going out? And yet you, a lettered and eloquent man, certainly did not know this when you believed and said and wrote and read in an assembled crowd that we blow up a wineskin out of our nature and that we have nothing less in our nature, although you could have known very easily from what we do this, not by searching divine and human pages, but by paying attention to yourself, had you wished. How then shall I entrust myself to you to teach me about the origin of souls, which I confess I do not know, when you did not know from what you do what you do without ceasing with your nostrils and mouth? And may the Lord grant that, admonished by me, you yield rather than resist a truth so ready to hand and so very plain, and do not so question your lungs about the blowing up of a wineskin as to prefer to keep them puffed up against me rather than to agree with them when they teach you and give you the true answer, not by speaking and disputing, but by breathing in and out. So I would not take it amiss that you reprove and rebuke my ignorance about the origin of souls—indeed, I would even give you great thanks—if you not only struck it with harsh reproaches but also knocked it out of me with true statements. For if you could teach me what I do not know, I ought to bear it most patiently if you beat me not only with words but even with fists.

For I confess to your love that, as far as this question is concerned, I greatly desire to know one of two things, if I can: either what I do not know about the origin of souls, or whether it belongs to us to know this while we live here. For what if it is among those things of which it is said to us: “Do not seek what is higher than you, and do not search into what is stronger than you; but think always on what the Lord has commanded you”? But I desire to know this either from God himself, who knows what he creates, or else from some learned man who knows what he says, not from a man who does not know what he breathes. No one remembers his own infancy, and do you think a man can know, unless God teaches him, how he began to live in his mother’s womb—especially if human nature is still so hidden from him that he does not know not only what it has within but even what comes to it from outside? Will you, dearest one, then teach me or anyone how people are ensouled when they are born, you who did not know until now how the living are so nourished that if that nourishment is withdrawn a little they die at once? Will you teach me or anyone how people are ensouled, you who did not know until now how wineskins are filled when they are blown up? Would that, just as you do not know what the origin of souls is, I at least knew whether it must be known by me in this life! For if it is among those higher things which we are forbidden to inquire into and search out, we must fear lest we sin, not by not knowing it, but by seeking it. For we ought not to think that it is not among those higher things merely because it concerns not God’s nature but ours.

What of the fact that some things in God’s works are known with more difficulty than God himself, so far as he can be known? For we have learned that God is a Trinity; but how many kinds of animals he created, at least of land animals, which could enter Noah’s ark, we do not know to this day, unless perhaps you have already learned it. In the book of Wisdom also it is written: “For if they were able to know so much that they could appraise the world, how did they not more easily find its Lord?” Or is it that, because this is within us, it is therefore not higher than we are? For the nature of our soul is more inward than the body. As though the soul could not know the body itself more easily from outside through the eyes of that very body than from inside through itself! For what is there in the entrails of the body where it is not present? And yet it has investigated even all the internal and vital parts with the eyes of the body, and whatever it could learn of them it learned through the eyes of the body. And certainly it was there even when it did not know them. And although our inner organs cannot live without the soul, the soul could more easily give them life than know them. Or is its body perhaps higher for its knowledge than itself, and so, if it wishes to inquire and discourse on when the seed of man is turned into blood and when into solid flesh; when the bones begin to harden and when to fill with marrow; how many kinds of veins and nerves there are; by what courses and windings the former water the whole body and the latter bind it; whether the skin is to be counted among the nerves, whether the teeth among the bones—for they differ in lacking marrow—and how the nails differ from both, since they are like them in hardness but have it in common with the hair to be cut and to grow; what the use is of the veins that carry not blood but air, which they call arteries—if the soul desires to know these and suchlike things about the nature of its body, must a man then be told, “Do not seek what is higher than you, and do not search into what is stronger than you”, but if it inquires what it does not know about its own origin, is that not too high or too strong for it to grasp? And do you think it absurd and inconsistent with reason that the soul should not know whether it was breathed in new by God or drawn from the parents, when it does not remember this, now past, and counts it among the things it has irrecoverably forgotten, like infancy and the rest of the age just out of the womb—if indeed it happened with any awareness on its part when it happened—and do you not think it absurd and inconsistent that it should not know the body subject to it, and be wholly ignorant, not about its past but about its present: whether it moves the veins so as to live in the body and the nerves so as to work with the members of the body; and if so, why it does not move the nerves unless it wills, while it keeps up the pulse of the veins without interruption even if it does not will; from which part of the body it rules the others, which they call the hēgemonikon—whether from the heart or from the brain, or divided, the motions from the heart and the senses from the brain, or the senses and voluntary motions from the brain and the involuntary pulses of the veins from the heart; and, if it does those two things from the brain, why it feels even if it does not will, but does not move the limbs unless it wills? Since, then, no one but itself does these things in the body, why does it not know what it does or from where it does it? And it is not shameful for it not to know these things, and you think it shameful if it does not know from what or how it was made, when it did not make itself? Or, because some people know how and from where it does these things in the body, do you not think that this belongs to those higher and stronger things?

But from this I raise a greater question for you: why very few know from what they do what all do. Perhaps you will say that it is because they have learned the anatomical or empirical art, which the discipline of medicine includes, and which few attain, while the rest did not wish to learn these things, although they could have if they had wished. Here I pass over asking why many try to learn these things and cannot, because—which is very surprising—they are hindered by a slow mind from learning from others what is done by themselves and in themselves. But this is the greatest question: why I need no art to know that the sun and moon and other stars are in the sky, and yet need an art to know, when I move my finger, where I begin from—from the heart, or the brain, or both, or neither—and why I need no teacher to know what is so far above me, but wait to learn from another man from what is done by me what is done in me. For though we are said to think in the heart, and we know what we think without any other man knowing it, yet we do not know in what part of the body we have the heart itself in which we think, unless we learn it from another who does not know what we think. Nor am I unaware that when we hear that we are to love God with the whole heart, this is not said of that little piece of our flesh that lies hidden under the ribs, but of that power by which thoughts come about; which is rightly called by this name, because just as motion does not cease in the heart, from which the pulse spreads through the veins in every direction, so we do not rest from turning something over in thought. Yet since all sensation is present to the body too from the soul, why is it that even in darkness and with eyes closed we can count our limbs outwardly by the bodily sense called touch, but by the inner presence of the soul itself, by which it is present to all it enlivens and ensouls, we know none of our inward organs from within? I think no one knows this—not the empirical physicians, nor the anatomists, nor the dogmatists, nor the methodists—no human being.

And whoever has tried to learn these things is not told in vain, “Do not seek what is higher than you, and do not search into what is stronger than you.” For they are not higher than our stature can reach, but than our conjecture can grasp, and stronger than the power of human wit can penetrate; and yet it is not the heaven of heaven, not the measurement of the stars, not the extent of sea and lands, not the lower hell: it is we who are unable to grasp ourselves; it is we who, higher and stronger than ourselves, exceed the small measure of our knowledge; we cannot contain ourselves, and certainly we are not outside ourselves. Nor are we to be compared to the beasts because we do not wholly find what we are; and do you think we are to be compared to the beasts if we have forgotten what we were—if indeed we ever knew it? For my soul is not now being drawn from my parents or breathed in by God: whichever of these he did, he did it when he created me; he is not doing it now from me or in me. That act is done and finished; it is neither present to me nor recent. I do not even know whether I knew it and have forgotten, or whether even then, when it was done, I could perceive and know it.

See, now, right now, while we exist, while we live, while we know that we live, while we are most certain that we remember and understand and will, we who boast that we are great knowers of our own nature do not know at all what our memory or understanding or will can do. A friend of mine from youth, named Simplicius, a man of excellent and marvellous memory, when he was asked by us what lines Virgil had spoken in each book before the last ones, at once answered quickly and from memory. We asked him also to say the lines before those: he said them. And we believed he could recite Virgil backwards; we asked him to do it from any place we chose: he did it. We wanted him to do this with prose too, from any speech of Cicero’s he had committed to memory: he followed it backwards as far as we wished. When we marvelled, he called God to witness that he had not known he could do this before that test. So, as far as memory is concerned, his mind then learned itself, and whenever it might learn itself, it could not except by trying and testing; and certainly before it tried, it was the same: why then did it not know itself?

Often we presume that we will keep something in memory, and when we think so we do not write it down, and afterward, when we want it, it does not come to mind, and we regret having believed it would come and not having tied it down in writing so that it would not escape; and suddenly again, when we are not looking for it, it occurs to us. Were we not ourselves when we were thinking it? And yet we are not what we were when we cannot think it. What is it, then, that in some unknown way we are withdrawn and denied to ourselves, and likewise in some unknown way brought forth to ourselves and given back to ourselves, as if we were others and were elsewhere when we seek and do not find what we placed in our memory, and cannot reach ourselves as if placed elsewhere, and then reach ourselves when we find it? For where do we seek except in ourselves? And what do we seek but ourselves, as if we were not in ourselves and had withdrawn somewhere from ourselves? Do you not notice and shudder at so great a depth? And what is this but our nature—not what it was, but what it is now? And see, it is sought more than it is grasped. Often I thought I would understand a question put to me if I thought about it; I thought and could not. Often I thought I could not, and yet I could. So the powers of my understanding are certainly not known to me, and I believe not to you either.

But perhaps you despise me for confessing this and will compare me to the beasts for this too. But I do not cease to advise you, or, if you do not deign to be advised, certainly to remind you, to recognize rather our common weakness, in which power is made perfect, lest by presuming unknown things to be known you be unable to reach the truth. For I think there is something which you too seek to understand and cannot, and yet you would not seek it unless you hoped you could. And so you too do not know the powers of your understanding, you who profess knowledge of your nature and do not confess ignorance with me. What shall I say of the will, where free choice is certainly proclaimed by us? The most blessed apostle Peter wished to lay down his life for the Lord; he plainly wished it; for he was not deceiving God in promising it; but he did not know how much strength the will itself had. So so great a man, who had known that Jesus is the Son of God, was hidden from himself. We know, then, that we will or do not will something; but how much our will, even when it is good, can do, how much strength it has, to what temptations it yields and to what it does not yield—if we do not deceive ourselves, dear son, we do not know.