On the Making of Man

If those who excel in virtue had to be honoured with gifts of money, the whole world of riches, as Solomon says, would seem too small to match your virtue, since the gratitude owed to your holiness is greater than any honour paid in wealth. But the holy Pascha demands the customary offering of love, and we bring it to your magnanimity: a gift, O man of God, smaller than would be worthy to offer you, yet not short of our ability. The gift is a discourse, like a poor garment woven, not without toil, from the poverty of our understanding. The subject of the discourse will perhaps seem bold to many, yet it was judged not unfitting. For he alone has contemplated God’s creation worthily who was truly created according to God and had his soul formed in the image of the Creator: Basil, our common father and teacher, who by his own contemplation made the lofty ordering of the universe easy for many to grasp, and made the world, established by God in true wisdom, known to those who were brought to contemplation through his understanding. … the aim of our contemplation, second to none of the wonders in the world, and perhaps even greater than each of the things we know, because nothing else among existing things has been made like God except the creation of man. So we may expect fair-minded hearers to pardon readily what is said, even if the discourse falls far short of its worth. For it is necessary, I think, to leave nothing unexamined of all that concerns man: what we believe happened before, what we expect to come to pass later, and what is seen now. For our effort would be convicted of falling short of its promise if, when man is set before us for contemplation, anything that bears on the subject were passed over. Moreover, the things about him that seem contrary, because what is seen in our nature now is not the same as what was at the beginning, ought to be joined by some necessary sequence, both from the guidance of Scripture and from what is found by reasoning, so that the whole subject may agree in connection and order, the things that seem contrary being brought to one and the same end, as the divine power finds hope for what is beyond hope and a way for what has no way. For clarity’s sake I thought it well to set the discourse before you in chapter headings, so that you may know in brief the subject of each of the particular arguments of the whole treatise.

In which there is a partial account of the nature of the world, and a fuller narrative of the things that came before the genesis of man. “This is the book of the genesis of heaven and earth,” says Scripture, when all that is seen had been completed and each existing thing had been separated and had withdrawn to its proper place; when the heavenly body had encompassed all things in a circle, and the heavy, downward-tending bodies, earth and water, holding each other together, had taken the middle place of the universe. And the divine art and power was laid up in the nature of things as a bond and stability of what had come to be, guiding all things with a twofold operation. For by rest and motion it contrived genesis for what was not and continuance for what is: about the heavy and immovable element of the unmoving nature, as about a fixed axle, it drives the swiftest motion of the pole round in a circle like a wheel, and through each preserves both indissoluble, the revolving substance by its swift motion compressing the solid earth all around, while the firm and unyielding element, by its immovable fixity, continually intensifies the whirling of the things that revolve about it. And an equal intensity was produced in each of the two that are opposed in their operation, in the stationary nature and in the unresting revolution: for neither is the earth moved from its own base, nor does the heaven ever relax its vehemence or slacken its motion. These were prepared first, according to the wisdom of the Maker, as a kind of beginning of the whole machine of existing things; the great Moses showing, I think, when he says that heaven and earth were made by God “in the beginning,” that all things seen in creation, brought into being by the divine will, are the offspring of motion and rest. Since, then, heaven and earth stand diametrically opposed to each other in the contrariety of their operation, the creation between the opposites, sharing in part in what lies beside it, itself mediates between the extremes, so that the joining of the opposites to each other through the middle becomes evident. For air imitates in a way the ever-moving and subtle nature of the fiery substance, both in the lightness of its nature and in its aptness for motion. Yet it is not such as to be alien from kinship with fixed things, neither always remaining unmoved nor perpetually flowing and dispersing; but by its affinity to each it becomes a kind of borderland of the contrariety of operations, at once mixing and dividing in itself things naturally apart. In the same way the liquid substance too is fitted by a double quality to each of the opposites. For in being heavy and downward-tending it has kinship with the earthy; but in sharing a flowing and moving operation it is not wholly alien from the moving nature; and through it, too, there is a certain mixture and meeting of the opposites, weight being changed into motion and motion not being fettered by weight, so that things that stand furthest apart in nature come together, united with one another through what mediates between them. Or rather, to speak precisely, not even the very nature of the opposites is entirely unmixed with the other in its properties, so that, I think, all things seen in the world incline toward one another, and creation is in accord with itself, being found in the properties of the opposites. For since motion is understood not only as change of place but is also seen in turning and alteration, and on the other hand the immovable nature does not admit the motion of alteration, the wisdom of God exchanged the properties, producing changelessness in what is ever moving and change in what is unmoving. It arranged this perhaps by a certain providence, so that the property of the divine nature, which is to be unchangeable and immovable, might not, if seen in any created thing, cause the creature to be thought God. For whatever happens to move or be altered could no longer be supposed to be Godhead. For this reason the earth is stationary but not unchangeable, while the heaven, having no changeability, has no stability either; so that the divine power, interweaving change with the nature that stands still and motion with the nature that does not change, might bind both to each other by the exchange of their properties and make them alien from the supposition of divinity. For, as has been said, neither of these could be thought to belong to the more divine nature, neither what is unstable nor … what is altered. Now, then, all things had arrived at their own end. For, as Moses says, the heaven and the earth and all things between were finished, and each was adorned with its fitting beauty: the heaven with the rays of the luminaries, the sea and the air with the creatures that swim and fly, and the earth with every variety of plants and animals, all of which, empowered by the divine will, it brought forth together at once. The earth was full of seasonable things, bringing forth fruits together with flowers; the meadows were full of all that grows on them; and all the ridges and summits, all that is sloping and all that is level, and all that lies in the hollows, were crowned with fresh grass and the varied beauty of the trees, just risen from the earth yet already shot up to their perfect beauty. And all things rejoiced, as one would expect, and the animals brought to life by God’s command leapt about, roaming the thickets in herds by their kinds, while every sheltered and shady place rang all around with the songs of musical birds. The sight of the sea too, as one would expect, was of the same kind, as it settled into quiet and calm in the gathering of its depths, where harbours and havens, hollowed out of their own accord on the shores by the divine will, reconciled the sea with the land; and the gentle motions of the waves vied in beauty with the flowers of the meadows, rippling gracefully on their very surface under light and harmless breezes. And all the wealth of creation, on land and sea, was ready, but the one …

Why man came last after the creation. For not yet had that great and precious thing, man, come to dwell in the world of existing things. It was not reasonable that the ruler should appear before those he was to rule; rather, once his dominion had first been prepared, it followed that the king should be shown forth. When, then, the Maker of all had prepared beforehand a kind of royal lodging for the one who was to reign (this was the earth and islands and sea, and the heaven arched above them like a roof), wealth of every kind was stored in this palace. By wealth I mean the whole creation, all that is in plants and shoots, and all that has sense and breath and life. And if materials too must be counted as wealth, those that for some beauty of colour are thought precious by human eyes, such as gold and silver and those stones that men love, then, having hidden an abundance of all these in the bosom of the earth as in royal treasuries, he thus shows forth man in the world, to be a spectator of some of its wonders and lord of others, so that through his enjoyment he might have knowledge of the Giver, and through the beauty and greatness of what he sees might trace out the power of the Maker, which is beyond speech and beyond reason. For these reasons man was brought in last after the creation: not as something worthless cast away among the last, but as one fitted to be king of his subjects from his very birth. And as a good host does not bring his guest into the house before the food is prepared, but when he has prepared everything fittingly and brightened the house, the couch, and the table with their proper adornments, then, when everything needed for the meal is ready, brings the diner to his hearth, so in the same way the rich and lavish host of our nature, having adorned the dwelling with beauties of every kind and prepared this great and varied banquet, then brings man in, giving him as his task not the acquiring of what was not there but the enjoyment of what was. And for this reason he lays down for him a twofold basis of his constitution, mixing the divine with the earthly, so that through both he may have a natural and proper relation to each enjoyment, enjoying God through the more divine nature, and the good things of the earth through the sense that is akin to them.

That the nature of man is more precious than all the visible creation. But it is worth not passing over this point either without consideration: that while this great world and its parts were laid down as elements for the constitution of the universe, creation was, so to speak, improvised by the divine power, coming into being together with the command; but counsel precedes the making of man, and what is to be is sketched out beforehand by the Craftsman in the description of the word: what it should be like, to what archetype it should bear a likeness, for what purpose it will come to be, what it will do once it has come to be, and over what it will rule. The word considers everything beforehand, so that man received a dignity older than his genesis, having obtained rule over existing things before he came into being. For “God said,” it says, “Let us make man according to our image and likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and the beasts of the earth, and the birds of heaven, and the cattle, and all the earth.” O wonder! A sun is made, and no counsel precedes it; the heaven likewise, though nothing in creation is equal to them. Such a wonder is established by a word alone, the account indicating neither whence, nor how, nor anything else of the kind. So too with each of the rest: ether, stars, the air between, sea, earth, animals, plants; all are brought into being by a word. Only to the making of man does the Maker of all approach with circumspection, so as to prepare beforehand the material for his constitution, to make his form like an archetypal beauty, and, having set before himself the purpose for which he would come to be, to fashion for him a nature suited and proper to his operations, fitted for the purpose set before it.

That the making of man signifies in every respect his ruling power. For as in this life craftsmen shape a tool to suit its use, so the best of craftsmen fashioned our nature as a kind of vessel fitted for the exercise of kingship, preparing it, both by the excellences of the soul and by the very form of the body, to be such as to be fitted for kingship. For the soul shows at once its royal and exalted character, far removed from the lowliness of a private person, in that it has no master and governs itself, ruling sovereignly by its own will. Whose is this but a king’s? And besides this, to have become the image of the nature that rules over all means nothing else than that our nature was created royal from the first. For as, by human custom, those who make images of rulers both copy the stamp of their form and represent their royal dignity by the wrapping of the purple, and the image too is customarily called “the king,” so human nature too, since it was prepared to rule others, was set up through its likeness to the King of all as a kind of living image, sharing with the archetype both the dignity and the name: not clothed in purple, nor signifying its dignity by sceptre and diadem (for the archetype is not in these either), but clothed with virtue instead of the purple, which is the most royal of all garments; supported by the blessedness of immortality instead of the sceptre; and adorned with the crown of righteousness instead of the royal diadem; so that in everything it is shown, in the dignity of kingship, to have been made exactly like the archetypal beauty.

That man is a likeness of the divine kingship. The divine beauty is not made splendid by some shape or comeliness of form or beauty of colour, but is contemplated in ineffable blessedness according to virtue. As painters, then, transfer human forms to their panels by means of colours, laying on the copy the proper and corresponding tints so that the archetypal beauty may be transferred exactly to the likeness, so think of our Maker too: painting the image, as it were with tints, by the laying on of virtues, to resemble his own beauty, he showed in us his own sovereignty. Many and varied are the colours, so to speak, of the image, by which the true form is portrayed: not red and white or some blending of these with each other, nor a touch of black that outlines eyebrow and eyes and by some mixture shades the hollows of the features, nor all such things as painters’ hands have contrived; but instead of these, purity, freedom from passion, blessedness, estrangement from all evil, and all things of that kind, by which the likeness to the divine is formed in human beings. With such hues the Creator of his own image painted our nature. And if you also examine the other things by which the divine beauty is characterized, you will find that in them too the likeness in the image that is in us is exactly preserved. The Godhead is mind and word; for “in the beginning was the Word.” And the prophets, according to Paul, have “the mind of Christ,” who speaks in them … you see in yourself both word and understanding, an imitation of the true Mind and Word. Again, God is love and the fount of love. For this is what the great John says: “Love is from God,” and “God is love.” This the Fashioner of our nature has made our feature too; for “by this,” he says, “all will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” If this is absent, then, the whole stamp of the image is transformed. The divine sees all things and hears all things and searches out all things. You too have the perception of existing things through sight and hearing, and the [understanding] that inquires into and searches out existing things.

An examination of the kinship of the mind with the [divine] nature, in which the doctrine of the Anomoeans is also refuted in passing. And let no one suppose me to say that the divine, like human activity, lays hold of existing things by various faculties. For it is not possible to conceive in the simplicity of the Godhead the variety and multiplicity of perceptive activity. Not even in us are the faculties that perceive things many, even though we lay hold of the things of life in many ways through the senses. For there is one faculty, the mind itself that is set within us, which passes through each of the sense organs and grasps existing things. It is this that contemplates through the eyes what appears; it is this that understands through the hearing what is said; it loves what pleases it and turns away from what is not to its liking; and it uses the hand for whatever it wishes, holding by it and pushing away whatever it judges profitable, making use of the organ’s cooperation for this. If, then, in man, even though the organs prepared by nature for sense happen to be different, what acts and moves through them all and uses each suitably for its purpose is one and the same, not changing its nature along with the differences of its activities, how could anyone discern a multiplicity of parts in the substance of God because of the variety of his powers? For “he who formed the eye,” as the Prophet says, and “he who planted the ear,” stamped these activities on human nature as a kind of distinguishing marks, after the patterns in himself. For “let us make man,” he says, “according to our image.” But where is the heresy of the Anomoeans? What will they say to such a word? How will they preserve the emptiness of their doctrine in the face of what has been said? Will they say that it is possible for one image to be made like different forms? If the Son is unlike the Father in nature, how does he fashion one image of the different natures? For he who said, “Let us make man according to our image,” and by the plural form indicated the Holy Trinity, would not have mentioned the image in the singular if the archetypes were unlike one another. For it would not be possible for one likeness to be shown forth from things that do not agree with each other; but if the natures were different, he would certainly have set up different images of them as well, fashioning the one that corresponds to each. But since the image is one, while the archetype of the image is not one, who is so out of his mind as not to know that things made like one and the same thing are certainly alike to one another too? This is why, perhaps cutting off this evil at the very making of human life, the word says, “Let us make man according to our image and likeness.”

Why man is bare of natural weapons and coverings. But what does the uprightness of his form mean? And why are the powers needed for life not grown into the body? Instead man is brought into life naked of natural coverings, unarmed and poor, lacking everything needed for his use, by all appearances more worthy of pity than of being called happy: not armed with projecting horns, nor with sharp claws, nor with hoofs or teeth, nor with a sting that carries a deadly poison by nature, such as many animals possess in themselves for defence against what harms them; nor is his body covered with a wrapping of hair. And yet perhaps one appointed to rule over the others ought to have been fenced about by nature with weapons of his own, so as not to need help from others for his own safety. As it is, the lion, the boar, the tiger, the leopard, and any other such animal have a power from nature sufficient for their safety. The bull has its horn, the hare its speed, the gazelle its leap and the security of its eye; another animal has its size, others their trunk, the birds their wings, the bee its sting; and in all, some one thing for their safety is implanted by nature. Man alone of all is slower than the swift runners, smaller than those of great bulk, and easier to catch than those protected by natural weapons. “And how,” someone will say, “has such a one been allotted rule over all?” But I think it is not hard to show that what seems a lack in our nature is an occasion for ruling over our subjects. For if man had such power as to outrun the horse in swiftness, and to have a foot that could not be worn down because of its hardness, supported on hoofs or claws, and to carry horns and stings and talons on himself, he would first of all have been something beastly and fearsome to meet, with such things grown on his body; and then he would have neglected his rule over the others, needing nothing from the cooperation of his subjects. But as it is, the needs of life have for this reason been distributed among each of the creatures yoked under us, so as to make our rule over them necessary. The slowness and sluggishness of our body brought the horse to our use and tamed it. The nakedness of our flesh made the keeping of sheep necessary, which supplies what our nature lacks from the yearly yield of wool. The fact that the means of life must also be brought to us from elsewhere has yoked the beasts of burden to such services. Again, our inability to eat grass like the cattle has made the ox subject to our life, easing our living by its own labours. And since teeth and biting were needed to overcome some of the other animals by wounding them with teeth, the dog, together with its speed, has offered its own jaw for our use, becoming as it were a living sword for man. And iron has been devised by men, stronger than projecting horns and sharper than claws; it does not grow on us always, as those do on the beasts, but, having fought with us when the moment requires, it remains by itself for the rest of the time. And in place of the crocodile’s scales it is possible to make that very creature our armour, putting on its hide when the moment requires; or, if not, iron is shaped by art for this purpose too, and, having served at the moment for war, leaves the soldier free of the burden again in peace. The wing of birds also serves our life, so that by our ingenuity we are not left behind even by the swiftness of flight. For some of them become tame and help hunters, and others are brought under our use through them by ingenuity. Moreover, art, having by ingenuity made our arrows winged, gives us the swiftness of flight for our needs by means of the bow. And the fact that our feet are tender and easily hurt in walking makes the help of our subjects necessary; for from them we can fit sandals to our feet.

Why the form of man is upright, and that the hands were given because of reason; in which there is also some philosophical discussion of the difference between souls. Man’s form is upright, stretched up toward heaven, and looks upward. These too are marks of rule and signify his royal dignity. For the fact that man alone among existing things is so made, while the bodies of all others are bent downward, clearly shows the difference in dignity between those who bow under his dominion and the authority that rises above them. For in all the others the front limbs of the body are feet, because what is bent over needed something to support it; but in the making of man the limbs became hands. For the upright form one base was sufficient for its need, securing his stance safely on two feet. Besides, the service of the hands works together with the need of speech. And anyone who called the service of the hands a property of rational nature would not be entirely wrong, not only running in thought to this common and obvious fact, that we signify speech in letters through the skill of our hands (for this too is not without a share in the gift of reason, that we speak through letters and in a way converse by the hand, preserving sounds by the shapes of the written characters); but I, looking to something else, say that the hands work together with the utterance of speech. But before examining this, let us consider a point that was passed over. For the order of the things that came to be almost escaped us: why the sprouting of what grows from the earth comes first, then the irrational animals follow, and so, after these were made, man. For perhaps we learn from this not only what is understood at first sight, that grass seemed useful to the Creator for the sake of the animals, and the cattle for the sake of man, which is why their food came before the beasts, and before man came what was to serve human life. Rather, it seems to me that by this Moses discloses a hidden doctrine and hands on in secret words the philosophy of the soul, which outside learning also imagined but did not clearly understand. For by this the word teaches us that the vital and psychic power is seen in three differences. One kind is only a power of growth and nourishment, supplying what is suitable for the increase of what is nourished; it is called natural, and is seen in plants. For even in things that grow one can recognize a certain vital power that has no share in sense. There is another form of life besides this, which has this one and has also taken on the management of sense; this is in the nature of irrational creatures. For they are not only nourished and grow, but also have the activity of sense and perception. But perfect life in a body is seen in the rational, I mean the human, nature, which is nourished and has sense, shares in reason, and is governed by mind. The division of the matter might be put to us in this way. Of existing things, some are intelligible and some bodily. Let the division of the intelligible into its own kinds be left aside for now, for our discussion is not about these. Of the bodily, some has no share in life at all, and some shares in vital activity. Again, of the living body, some lives with sense and some has no share in sense. Then the sentient is divided again into rational and irrational. For this reason the lawgiver says that after lifeless matter there came first, as a kind of foundation for the form of living things, this natural life, which came to exist beforehand in the sprouting of plants; then he goes on to the genesis of the creatures governed by sense. And since, in the same sequence, among those that have been allotted life through flesh, the sentient can exist by themselves even apart from the intellectual nature, while the rational could not come to be in a body otherwise than mixed with the sentient, for this reason man was made last, after the plants and the cattle, nature advancing in due sequence, as by a road, toward perfection. For this rational animal, man, is blended of every form of soul. He is nourished by the natural form of soul; and to the power of growth the sentient power was added, standing by its own nature midway between the intellectual and the more material substance, as much coarser than the one as it is purer than the other. Then there comes about a kind of affinity and blending of the intellectual substance with the fine and luminous element of the sentient nature, so that man has his constitution in these three. So too we have learned from the Apostle, in what he said to the Ephesians, praying for them that the complete grace of body, soul, and spirit be kept at the coming of the Lord; he says “body” for the nourishing part, signifies the sentient by “soul,” and the intellectual by “spirit.” In the same way the Lord in the Gospel teaches the scribe to set before every commandment the love of God that is exercised with the whole heart and soul and mind. For here too the word seems to me to express the same difference, calling the more bodily state “heart,” the middle one “soul,” and the higher nature, the intellectual and reasoning power, “mind.” Hence the Apostle also knows three differences of choice: he names one the fleshly, which is busied with the belly and its pleasures; another the psychic, which stands midway between virtue and vice, rising above the one but not purely sharing in the other; and another the spiritual, which sees the perfection of the life according to God. So he says to the Corinthians, reproaching their love of pleasure and their passions, “You are fleshly,” and unable to receive the more perfect doctrines; and elsewhere, comparing the middle with the perfect, he says, “The psychic man does not receive the things of the Spirit, for they are foolishness to him; but the spiritual man judges all things, and is himself judged by no one.” As, then, the psychic man has risen above the fleshly, by the same proportion the spiritual has risen above him. If, then, Scripture says that man came to be last, after every living thing, the lawgiver is doing nothing else than teaching us the philosophy of the soul, seeing that the perfect comes last by a necessary sequence of order. For in the rational the rest are also included, and in the sentient the natural form certainly exists as well; but that is seen only in what is material. Fittingly, then, nature, I mean the properties of life, makes its ascent as by steps from the lesser to the perfect. Since, then, man is a rational animal, the instrument of the body had to be made suited to the needs of speech. As one can see musicians producing their music according to the kind of instrument, not piping on lyres nor playing the lyre on pipes, in the same way the construction of the organs had to be suited to speech, so that it might resound fittingly for the use of words, shaped by the vocal parts. For this reason the hands were joined to the body. For though one could count up countless uses in life for which these skilful and serviceable instruments, the hands, are useful, readily pursuing every art and every activity in war and peace … yet before all others nature added them to the body for the sake of speech. For if man had had no hands, the parts of his face would certainly have been formed, like those of the quadrupeds, to suit the need of feeding: the face would have been long and tapering toward the nostrils, and the lips of the mouth would have projected, calloused, firm, and thick, fit for tearing up grass; and between the teeth there would lie a tongue of another kind, fleshy, resistant, and rough, helping the teeth to work what came under them; or moist and loose at the sides, like that of dogs and the other flesh-eaters, flowing through the gaps between their jagged teeth. If, then, the hands had not been present in the body, how could articulate voice have been formed in it, when the construction of the parts of the mouth was not shaped for the use of speech? So man would necessarily have had to bleat, or bray, or bark, or neigh, or bellow like oxen or asses, or give out some beastly roar. But as it is, since the hand has been set in the body, the mouth is at leisure for the service of speech. The hands, then, have proved to be a property of rational nature, the Fashioner having devised through them ease for speech.

That the form of man was made as an instrument for the use of speech. Since, then, the Maker bestowed on our formation a godlike grace, placing in the image the likenesses of his own goods, he gave the rest of his goods to human nature out of his generosity; but of mind and wisdom it cannot properly be said that he gave them, but rather that he shared them, adorning the image with the proper adornment of his own nature. Since, then, the mind is something intellectual and incorporeal, it would have had its grace incommunicable and unmixed, if its movement were not made manifest by some contrivance. For this reason it needed in addition this instrumental construction, so that, touching the vocal parts like a plectrum, it might express its inward movement by the quality of the sounds it shapes. And as someone skilled in music who, through some affliction, has no voice of his own but wishes to make his skill known, might make melody with other voices, publishing his art through pipes or lyre, so too the human mind, the inventor of thoughts of every kind, being unable by the bare soul to show the movements of its understanding to those who hear through the bodily senses, like a skilled musician touches these living instruments and makes its hidden thoughts known by the sound produced in them. The music of the human instrument is a kind of mixture of pipe and lyre, sounding together with each other at the same time as in a concert. For the breath, forced up through the windpipe from the vessels that receive the air, when the speaker’s impulse toward voice tightens that part, strikes against the projections inside that encircle this pipe-like passage, and so imitates in a way the sound made by the pipe, being whirled round in a circle by the membrane-like projections. The palate receives the sound from below in its own hollow, splitting the voice by the twin pipes that run to the nostrils and, as by projecting scales, by the cartilages around the strainer, and so makes the sound more resonant. The cheek and the tongue and the arrangement about the pharynx, by which the chin is relaxed when hollowed and is stretched when giving a high tone, all these play the part of the plectrum’s movement on the strings, in varied and manifold ways, adjusting the tones to the need at the moment with great speed. And the opening and closing of the lips does the same as those who check the breath of the pipe with their fingers, in keeping with the harmony of the melody.

That the mind works through the senses. Since, then, the mind makes the music of speech in us through this instrumental construction, we have become rational; we would not, I think, have the gift of speech if we had to supply the body’s need with our lips, the heavy and toilsome service of eating. But as it is, the hands have taken this ministry on themselves and have left the mouth free for the service of speech. The activity of the instrument is twofold: one for producing sound, the other for receiving thoughts from outside. And the one does not mix with the other, but each remains in the activity to which it was assigned by nature, not troubling its neighbour: the hearing does not speak, nor does the voice hear. For the voice is always putting something forth, while the hearing, though it receives continually, is never filled, as Solomon says somewhere. And this seems to me one of the things in us most worthy of wonder: what is the breadth of that inner space into which flows everything that is poured in through the hearing? Who are the recorders of the words brought into it, and what are the storerooms of the thoughts placed in the hearing? And how, when many thoughts of every kind are heaped on one another, does no confusion or error arise from the piling up of what lies within? One might wonder equally at the activity of sight. For through it likewise the mind grasps what is outside the body and draws to itself the images of the things that appear, inscribing the marks of visible things within itself. And as if there were a spacious city receiving those who flock to it through different entrances, and all do not run together to the same place in the city, but some go to the market, some to houses, others to the churches, or the squares, or the lanes, or the theatres, each moving about according to his own mind, so I see the city of the mind too, that is founded within us, filled by the different entrances of the senses; and the mind, sorting and examining each thing that enters, stores it in the proper places of knowledge. And as in the example of the city it often happens that people of the same tribe and kin do not enter by the same gate, one coming in by one entrance and another by another as it happens, yet, once within the circuit of the wall, they are together again, being intimate with one another; and the opposite can be found too, for strangers who do not know one another use a single entrance into the city, yet their companionship at the entrance does not join them to one another, since even inside they can separate to their own kin: something like this I see also in the wide space of the mind. For often one knowledge is gathered for us from different sense organs, the same thing being divided in many parts among the senses. And again, conversely, it is possible to learn many varied things from one of the senses, things that in no way agree with each other in nature. For example (for it is better to make the argument clear by an illustration), let the question be about the property of flavours: what is pleasant to the sense and what is to be shunned by those who taste. By experience, then, the bitterness of gall and the agreeable quality of honey have been found. These being different, the same thing brings in one knowledge, entering the understanding in many parts: by taste, by smell, by hearing, often also by touch and by sight. For one who has seen honey, and heard its name, and taken it by taste, and recognized its scent by smell, and tested it by touch, has recognized the same thing through each of the sense organs. And again we are taught varied and manifold things through one sense, since the hearing receives every kind of sound, and the perception of the eyes has its activity undiscriminating in beholding things of different kinds; for it meets white and black and all things opposite in colour alike. So taste, so smell, so the apprehension by touch: each, by its own perception, puts in us the knowledge of things of every kind.

That the nature of the mind cannot be seen. What, then, is the mind in its own nature, which divides itself among the sense faculties and through each suitably takes up the knowledge of existing things? That it is something other than the senses, I do not think any sensible person doubts. For if it were the same as sense, it would certainly have its affinity with only one of the things done by sense, since it is itself simple and nothing varied is seen in what is simple. But as it is, since all agree that touch is one thing and smell another, and the rest likewise are disposed toward each other without communion or mixture, and since the mind is present to each equally and suitably, we must certainly suppose it to be something other than the sensible nature, so that no variety may be mingled with the intelligible. “Who has known the mind of the Lord?” says the Apostle. But I say besides this: Who has understood his own mind? Let those who bring the nature of God within their own comprehension tell us whether they have understood themselves, whether they have recognized the nature of their own mind. Is it something of many parts and much compounded? And how is the intelligible in composition? Or what is the manner of blending things of different kinds? Or is it simple and uncompounded? Then how is it scattered into the many parts of sense? How is there variety in unity? How is there unity in variety? But I have recognized the solution of these difficulties by running back to the very word of God: “Let us make man,” he says, “according to our image and according to our likeness.” For the image, as long as it falls short in nothing of what is conceived in the archetype, is properly an image; but in whatever respect it falls away from likeness to the prototype, in that respect it is not an image. Since, then, one of the things contemplated about the divine nature is the incomprehensibility of its substance, it is entirely necessary that the image should imitate the archetype in this too. For if the nature of the image were comprehended while the prototype was beyond comprehension, the contrariety of what is seen in them would prove the image defective. But since the nature of our mind, which is according to the image of the Creator, escapes knowledge, it has an exact likeness to what is above it, marking out the incomprehensible nature by its own unknowability.

An examination of where the ruling faculty is to be thought to reside; in which there is also a natural account of tears and laughter, and a natural speculation on the communion of matter, nature, and mind. Let all conjectural idle talk be silent, then, of those who shut up the intellectual activity in certain bodily parts. Some of them place the ruling faculty in the heart; others say that the mind dwells in the brain, holding such notions on the strength of some superficial plausibilities. He who assigns the rule to the heart makes its local position the proof of his argument, because it seems somehow to hold the middle place of the whole body, so that voluntary movement is easily distributed from the middle to the whole body and so goes forth into activity. And he makes the sorrowful and angry disposition of man a witness for his argument, because such passions seem somehow to move this part along with them in sympathy. Those who dedicate the brain to reasoning say that the head has been built by nature like a citadel of the whole body, and that the mind dwells in it like a king, guarded all around by the senses as by messengers or shield-bearers. These too make a sign of such a supposition the fact that the reasoning of those whose meninges have been injured is displaced from its settled state, and that those whose heads are heavy with drunkenness fall into ignorance of what is fitting. Each of those who stand by these opinions also adds some more natural causes for this supposition about the ruling faculty. The one says that the movement of the understanding is akin to the fiery, because both fire and the understanding are ever moving; and since it is agreed that heat springs from the region of the heart, he says that the movement of the mind is blended with the mobility of heat, and so declares the heart, in which the heat is contained, to be the receptacle of the intellectual nature. The other says that the meninx (for so they name the membrane that encloses the brain) is a kind of foundation and root of all the sense organs, and by this he confirms his own argument, as though the intellectual activity were seated nowhere else than in that part on which the ear, fitted to it, strikes the sounds that fall upon it; and sight, grown together with the base of the seat of the eyes, makes its impression inward through the images that fall on the pupils; and the qualities of vapours are distinguished in it by the drawing in of smells; and the sense of taste is tested by the judgment of the meninx, which from close by has mixed in certain sensitive nerve-like outgrowths of itself, through the vertebrae of the neck, at the strainer-like passage, with the muscles there. For my part, I say it is true that the thinking part of the soul is often disturbed by the dominance of afflictions, and that reason is dulled in its natural activity by some bodily circumstance; and that the heart is a kind of source of the body’s fiery element, being moved along with angry impulses. And besides, that the meninx underlies the sense organs, as those who give natural accounts of such things say, enfolding the brain in itself and moistened by the vapours from it, I do not reject what is said, since I hear it from those who have given their time to anatomical studies. … the body, everything that is hindered from transpiration is pushed together into the hollows in the depth; hence, when the breathing organs are constricted by what surrounds them, the drawing of breath often becomes more violent by nature, which widens what was narrowed so as to open what had collapsed. Such a gasp we make a symptom of grief, calling it a groan and a sigh. Moreover, what seems to oppress the region about the heart is a discomfort not of the heart but of the mouth of the stomach, from the same cause, I mean the collapse of the passages: the vessel that holds the bile, under the constriction, pours that sharp and biting fluid into the mouth of the stomach. A proof of this is that the complexion of grieving people becomes sallow and jaundiced, as the bile, from the excessive pressure, spreads its own fluid into the veins. But the opposite affection too, I mean that of gladness and laughter, establishes the argument still more. For in some way the body’s passages are relaxed and loosened by pleasure in those who have been gladdened by some pleasant news. For as there, through grief, the fine and invisible exhalations of the passages close up, and, compressing the inner disposition of the organs, force up the moist vapour to the head and the meninges, and this, when much of it has been held in the hollows of the brain, is pushed out through the passages at its base to the eyes, the contraction of the brows drawing out the moisture in drops (and the drop is called a tear); so think with me that, from the opposite disposition, when the passages are widened more than usual, some air is drawn through them into the depth, and from there is pushed out again by nature through the passage of the mouth, all the organs, and especially the liver, as they say, pushing out such air together by a certain shaking and seething movement. Hence nature, contriving some ease for the passage of the air, widens the passage about the mouth, stretching the cheeks on either side about the breath. And the name of what happens is laughter. Neither, then, should the ruling faculty be reckoned to the liver on this account, nor should the seat of the mind be thought to be in the heart because of the boiling of the blood about the heart in angry dispositions; rather, these things are to be referred to the particular constitutions of bodies. We must think that the mind touches each of the parts equally, according to the ineffable principle of their blending. And if some put forward Scripture to us on this point, as bearing witness that the ruling faculty is in the heart, we will not accept the argument without examination. For he who mentioned the heart also mentioned the kidneys, saying, “God, who tries hearts and kidneys,” so that they must either shut up the intellectual faculty in both or in neither. And though I have been taught that the intellectual activities are dulled, or even become wholly inactive, in a certain disposition of the body, I do not make this a sufficient proof that the power of the mind is confined to some place, as though it were shut out of its proper space by inflammations arising in the parts. For such an opinion is bodily: that when a vessel is already occupied by something put into it, something else cannot find room in it. For the intelligible nature neither lingers in the empty spaces of bodies nor is pushed out by an excess of flesh. But since the whole body has been made like a musical instrument, just as it often happens with those who know how to make music but cannot show their skill because the uselessness of their instruments does not admit their art (for an instrument destroyed by time, or broken by a fall, or made useless by rust or mould, remains mute and inactive, even if it is blown by one thought to excel in the art of piping), so too the mind, passing through the whole instrument and touching each of the parts suitably for its intellectual activities, according to its nature, did its proper work in those that are in their natural state, but in those too weak to receive its skilful movement remained ineffective and inactive. For the mind is somehow naturally at home with what is in its natural state, and estranged from what has been displaced from it. And it seems to me that there is a more natural speculation on this point, through which one may learn one of the more refined doctrines. Since the most beautiful and most excellent good of all is the divine itself, toward which all things incline that have a desire for the beautiful, we say for this reason that the mind too, since it came to be according to the image of the most beautiful, itself remains in beauty as long as it shares, as far as is possible, in the likeness to the archetype; but if it should somehow come to be outside this, it is stripped of the beauty in which it was. And as we said that the mind is adorned by the likeness to the prototypal beauty, being shaped like a mirror by the form of what appears in it, by the same analogy we reckon that the nature governed by it is attached to the mind and is itself adorned by the beauty that lies beside it, becoming as it were a mirror of a mirror; and that the material element of our existence, about which the nature is seen, is ruled and held together by it. As long, then, as each holds to the other, the communion of true beauty passes through all in proportion, beautifying what is next by what is above it. But when some rupture of this good union occurs, or the superior conversely comes to follow the inferior, then the unseemliness of matter itself, when it is left alone without nature, is displayed (for matter in itself is something formless and unconstructed), and by its formlessness the beauty of the nature, which is beautified by the mind, is destroyed along with it. And so the transmission of the ugliness of matter passes through the nature to the mind itself, so that the image of God is no longer seen in the form of what was fashioned. For the mind, putting the idea of the good behind it like a mirror turned away, casts off the reflections of the shining of the good and takes the impress of the formlessness of matter into itself. And in this way the genesis of evil comes about, arising beside it through the withdrawal of the beautiful. Everything is beautiful that happens to be in affinity with the first good; whatever comes to be outside relation to and likeness with it is certainly without share in the beautiful. If, then, according to the account we have considered, the true good is one, and the mind itself has its being beautiful by having come to be according to the image of the beautiful, and the nature held together by the mind is like an image of an image, it is shown by these things that our material part holds together and is maintained when it is governed by the nature, but is dissolved and falls apart again when it is separated from what maintains and holds it together and is torn away from its union with the beautiful. And this happens in no other way than when the nature turns the opposite way, its desire not inclining toward the beautiful but toward what needs to be beautified. For it is entirely necessary that what is made like matter, which is destitute of its own form, should be transformed along with it into what is unseemly and without beauty. But these things have been examined by us by the way, following from the argument, having come in through our contemplation of the subject. For the question was whether the intellectual power is seated in some one part of us or extends through all equally. Since those who confine the mind to local parts bring forward, to establish their supposition, the fact that the understanding does not prosper in those whose meninges are in an unnatural state, the argument showed that in every part of the human compound in which each faculty naturally operates, the power of the soul equally remains inactive when the part does not remain in its natural state. And for this reason the speculation set out above fell into the discussion as a consequence, by which we learn that in the human compound the mind is governed by God, and our material life by the mind, when it remains in its natural state; but if it is turned aside from nature, it is also estranged from the activity of the mind. But let us return to where we began. In those who have not been turned aside from their natural condition by some affliction, the mind exercises its proper power; it is strong in those who are sound, and is powerless again in those that cannot contain its activity. For the doctrine about these things can also be confirmed by other arguments; and, if it is not burdensome to the ears of those already wearied by the discussion, let us treat these too briefly, as far as we are able.

An account of the causes of sleep, yawning, and dreams. This material and flowing life of bodies, always advancing by motion, has the power of its being in this, that it never ceases from motion. As a river flowing by its own impulse keeps full the channel through which it happens to be carried, yet is not seen with the same water always in the same place, but part of it has run on and part flows in after it, so too the material part of this present life is exchanged through a kind of motion and flow by the continual succession of opposites, so that it can never stand still from change, but, through its inability to rest, has an unceasing motion that alternates through like things. And if ever it should stop moving, it will certainly stop being as well. For example, emptying has succeeded fullness, and filling has come in again in place of emptiness. Sleep has relaxed the tension of waking; then waking has braced what was relaxed. And neither of these remains continually, but both give way at each other’s coming, nature thus renewing itself by the alternations, so that, partaking of each in turn, it passes without a break from the one to the other. For if the living creature were continually tense in its activities, this would cause a kind of breaking and tearing of the overstrained parts; and a continual relaxation of the body brings about a kind of collapse and dissolution of its structure. But to have each in moderation at the proper time is a power for the continuance of nature, which by its continual passing to opposite states rests itself in each from the other. So, finding the body braced by waking, nature produces a loosening of the tension by sleep, resting the sense faculties from their activities for a time, unyoking them like horses after the chariot races. A timely relaxation is necessary to the constitution of the body, so that nourishment may be spread without hindrance through the whole body by the passages in it, no tension blocking its way. For as, when the sun shines with warmer rays on the soaked earth, misty vapours are drawn up from its depth, so something similar happens in the earth that is in us, when the food is made to boil up within by the natural heat. These vapours, being naturally upward-tending and airy, and breathing toward what lies above, come into the regions of the head, like smoke seeping into the joints of a wall; then from there they are dispersed, exhaled into the passages of the sense organs, and through them sense is necessarily idle, giving way before the passage of those vapours. For the eyes are seized by the eyelids, as by a leaden weight (I mean such a heaviness) letting the lid down over the eyes. And the hearing, thickened by these same vapours, as if a door had been set against the organs of hearing, keeps quiet from its natural activity. And such an affection is sleep, when sense is at rest in the body … And for this reason, if the arrangement about the sense organs is constricted by the exhalation from within, but sleep is hindered by some need, the sinewy part, being filled with the vapours, is naturally stretched of itself, so that by the stretching the part thickened by the vapours may be thinned out, as people do who wring the water out of garments by twisting them hard. And since the parts about the throat are round, and the sinewy part abounds in them, when the thickness of the vapours must be driven out of these as well (since it is impossible to stretch a round part in a straight line unless it is stretched according to its circular shape), for this reason, when the breath is held back in the yawn, as the chin is hollowed downward toward the uvula and all the inner parts are stretched into the form of a circle, that sooty thickness held in the parts is breathed out with the passage of the breath. And this often happens after sleep too, when some of those vapours have been left in those places undigested and not breathed out. From these things, then, the human mind clearly shows that it holds to the nature: when the nature is in good order and awake, it too works with it and is moved; but when the nature is relaxed in sleep, it remains unmoved, unless perhaps someone should suppose that the fancies of dreams are a movement of the mind exercised during sleep. But we say that only the sensible and coherent activity of the understanding ought to be referred to the mind; while the fanciful nonsense of sleep we think is a set of phantoms of the mind’s activity, moulded at random by the more irrational form of the soul. For it necessarily happens that the soul, released from the senses by sleep, is also outside the activities of the mind. For the mind’s blending with the human being comes about through the senses; when the senses cease, then, the understanding too must be idle. A proof of this is that the dreamer often seems to be in absurd and impossible situations, which would not happen if the soul were then governed by reason and understanding. But it seems to me that, when the more honourable powers of the soul are at rest (I mean the activities of mind and sense), only its nourishing part is active during sleep; and certain images and echoes of what was done in waking, both by sense and by the understanding, which were impressed on it by the memory-form of the soul, are painted again as it happens, an echo of memory remaining in that form of the soul. In these, then, the man has fancies, not led by any connection to the intercourse of appearances, but wandering among confused and inconsequent illusions. And as in bodily activities, when one of the parts acts in its own way according to the power naturally set in it, a certain sympathy arises in the part at rest with the part that is moving, so in the soul too, if one part of it happens to be at rest and another moving, the whole is affected along with the part. For the natural unity cannot be wholly torn apart, even when one of its powers prevails in part through its activity. But just as, when we are awake and busy, the mind prevails and sense serves, yet the power that governs the body does not leave them (for the mind provides the food for the need, sense received what was provided, and the nourishing power of the body made its own what was given), so in sleep too the rule among these powers is somehow reversed in us; and when the more irrational prevails, the activity of the others ceases but is not entirely quenched. While the nourishing power is then hastening through sleep to digestion and occupying the whole nature with itself, the power of sense is neither entirely torn from it (for what has once grown together cannot be cut apart) nor can its activity shine out, being hampered by the idleness of the sense organs in sleep. By the same reasoning, since the mind is joined to the sentient form of the soul, it would follow to say that when this is moved it is moved with it, and when this rests it rests with it. As happens naturally with fire, when it is covered on every side with chaff and no breath fans the flame, it neither consumes what lies near it nor is wholly put out, but instead of a flame a kind of vapour passes out through the chaff into the air, while if it gets some breath it turns the smoke into flame: in the same way the mind, covered over during sleep by the inactivity of the senses, is neither able to shine out through them nor yet wholly quenched, but moves, as it were, like smoke, partly acting and partly unable to act. And as a musician who strikes the plectrum on the slackened strings of a lyre does not bring forth the melody in rhythm (for what is not tightened will not sound), but his hand often moves with skill, bringing the plectrum to the places of the notes, yet there is no sound except a kind of meaningless and disordered hum in the movement of the strings; so, when the instrumental construction of the sense organs has been relaxed by sleep, either the artist is wholly at rest, if the instrument suffers complete relaxation from some fullness and heaviness, or he will act feebly and dimly, since the instrument of sense does not receive his art exactly. For this reason memory is confused, and foreknowledge, drowsing under ambiguous veils, has fancies in images of what is pursued in waking, and has often revealed something of what is to come. For by the fineness of its nature it has some advantage over bodily coarseness in being able to see something of reality. Yet it cannot make what it says clear in a straightforward way, so that the teaching of what lies ahead is plain and evident; rather, the disclosure of the future is oblique and ambiguous, what those who interpret such things call a riddle. So the cupbearer presses the cluster into Pharaoh’s cup; so the baker imagined himself carrying baskets: each thought himself, in his dreams too, to be about the business he was busy with when awake. For the images of their accustomed occupations, impressed on the foreknowing part of the soul, enabled them at the time to divine what would come to pass, through such a prophecy of the mind. And if Daniel and Joseph and those like them were taught beforehand the knowledge of the future by divine power, with no sense clouding them, this has nothing to do with the present argument. For no one would reckon these things to the power of dreams, since in consequence he would certainly also think that the manifestations of God that occur in waking are not a vision but a sequence of nature working of its own accord. As, then, while all men are governed by their own mind, there are a few who are counted worthy of open communion with God, so, while the fancy in sleep arises naturally in all alike and equally, some, not all, share in a more divine manifestation through dreams; for all the rest, even if some foreknowledge of something arises from dreams, it arises in the manner described. And if both the Egyptian and the Assyrian tyrant were guided by God to knowledge of the future, what was arranged through them is something different: the hidden wisdom of the saints had to be made manifest, so that it might not pass through life useless to the community. For how would Daniel have been known to be such a man, if the enchanters and magicians had not failed to discover the vision? And how would the nation of the Egyptians have been saved, with Joseph shut up in prison, if the interpretation of the dream had not brought him out into their midst? These things, then, are something else and must not be reckoned with common fancies. But this ordinary sight of dreams is common to all, arising in many ways and many forms in our fancies. For either, as was said, the echoes of the day’s occupations remain in the memory of the soul, or often the state of the dreams is shaped by the particular dispositions of the body. So the thirsty man seems to be among springs, and the man in need of food at feasts, and the young man, when his youth is in its vigour, has fancies matching his passion. I also learned another cause of what happens in sleep while attending one of my friends who had been seized by frenzy. Weighed down by food given him beyond his strength, he cried out, blaming those standing around for having filled intestines with dung and laid them on him. And when his body was already hastening to sweat, he accused those present of keeping water ready to drench him as he lay, and did not stop crying out until the outcome explained the causes of such complaints. For suddenly much sweat poured over his body, and his bowels, relaxed, showed the heaviness in his intestines. What his nature suffered, then, when its sobriety had been dulled by the disease, being affected along with the affliction of the body, not insensible of what troubled it but unable to make clear what pained it because of the delirium of the disease, would probably, if the thinking part of the soul had been lulled not by sickness but by natural sleep, have become a dream to one so disposed, the flow of sweat being signified by water and the burden of the food by the weight of intestines. Many who are trained in medicine also think that the sights of dreams that come to the sick differ according to the differences of their afflictions: some to those with stomach complaints, others to those whose meninges are injured, others again to those in fevers; not the same to those troubled by bile and by phlegm, and others again to the plethoric and to the wasted. From this one can see that the nourishing and growing power of the soul has something of the intellectual sown together with it through the blending, which in a way becomes like the particular disposition of the body and is adapted in its fancies to the prevailing affliction. Moreover, for many, dreams are also shaped according to the state of their characters. The brave man has some fancies, the coward others; the dreams of the licentious are of one kind, those of the chaste of another; the generous man has fancies about some things and the greedy about others; it is never the understanding but the more irrational disposition in the soul that forms such fancies, moulding in dreams too the images of what it was occupied with in waking practice.

That the mind is not in a part of the body; in which there is also a distinction between the movements of the body and of the soul. But we have wandered far from our subject. For the argument set out to show that the mind is not bound to any one part of the body but touches the whole equally, producing its movement in a way suited to the nature of the part it is acting on. There are cases, though, in which the mind even follows the natural impulses, becoming as it were their servant. For often the nature of the body leads the way, implanting either the sense of what pains or the desire for what delights, so that it supplies the first beginnings, producing an appetite for food or, in general, an impulse toward some pleasure, while the mind takes up such impulses and by its own ingenuity helps to procure for the body the means of getting what it longs for. This is not so in all, but only in those of a more slavish disposition, who have enslaved reason to the impulses of nature and, with the alliance of the mind, flatter in a servile way what is pleasant to the senses. In the more perfect it is not so; for the mind leads, choosing what is profitable by reason and not by passion, and the nature follows in the steps of the leader. And since the argument found three differences in the vital power, one that is nourished without sense, another that is nourished and grows but has no share in rational activity, and the rational and perfect one, which extends through every power, so that it is present in those others too and has the advantage of the intellectual, let no one suppose from this that three souls are joined together in the human compound, each seen within its own bounds, so as to think human nature a conglomerate of many souls. Rather, the true and perfect soul is one in nature, the intellectual and immaterial soul, which is mingled with the material nature through the senses. And everything material, lying in change and alteration, will move toward growth if it shares in the animating power; but if it falls away from the vital activity it will turn its movement into corruption. Neither, then, does sense exist without material substance, nor does the activity of the intellectual power take place without sense.

That the rational soul is properly a soul, while the others are called souls only by sharing the name; in which there is also the point that the power of the mind extends through the whole body, touching each part suitably. If some created things have the nourishing activity, and others again are governed by the power of sense, while the former do not share in sense nor the latter in the intellectual nature, and someone suspects a plurality of souls on this account, such a person will not be laying down the difference of souls according to the distinguishing account. For everything conceived among existing things, if it is perfectly what it is, is also properly called by the name it bears; but what is not in every respect that which it is named has the name to no purpose. For example, if someone shows real bread, we say that the name is properly applied to the thing. But if someone set beside the natural loaf one made of stone, which had the same shape, equal size, and likeness of colour, so as to seem in most respects the same as the prototype, but lacked the ability to be food, we should say on this account that the stone had obtained the name of bread not properly but by misuse. And all things that by the same reasoning are not wholly what they are called have their name by misuse. So, then, since the soul has its perfection in the intellectual and rational, everything that is not this may share the name of soul, but is not really a soul, but a kind of vital activity classed under the name of soul. That is why the one who gave the law on each matter gave the nature of the irrational creatures, too, as not far removed from this vegetative life, for man’s use, to be like vegetables to those who partake of them. For “you shall eat all flesh,” he says, “as the green herbs.” For it seems to have only a small advantage, in its activity of sense, over what is nourished and grows without it. Let this teach the lovers of the flesh not to let their understanding run much after what appears to the senses, but to occupy themselves with the advantages of the soul, since the true soul is seen in these, while sense is found equally in the irrational creatures. But the course of the argument has turned aside to another point. For what was set before our contemplation was not that the activity of the mind is more honourable than the material part of our existence among the things conceived in man, but that the mind is not contained in any one part of us, but is equally in all and through all, neither enclosing them from outside nor held within them. For these things are properly said of jars or other bodies placed inside one another. But the communion of the mind with the bodily has an ineffable and inconceivable connection: it is neither within (for the incorporeal is not held in a body), nor surrounding from outside (for incorporeal things do not enclose anything); but in a way that is impossible to explain or understand the mind, approaching the nature and touching it, is seen both in it and about it, neither seated within it nor enfolding it, but in a way that cannot be spoken or conceived, except that when the nature prospers in its own order the mind too becomes active, and if some fault befalls the nature, the movement of the understanding also limps in that respect.

A contemplation of the divine saying, “Let us make man according to our image and likeness”; in which it is examined what the meaning of the image is, and whether what is subject to passion and mortality is made like the blessed and passionless, and how there is male and female in the image when these are not in the prototype. But let us take up again the divine word, “Let us make man according to our image and likeness.” How small and unworthy of the grandeur of man are the fancies of some outside the faith, who magnify the human, as they thought, by comparing it with this world! For they say that man is a little world, composed of the same elements as the universe. Those who by the pomp of this name bestow such praise on human nature have not noticed that they are dignifying man with the properties of the gnat and the mouse. For in these too there is a blending of these four elements, since a larger or smaller share of each of these elements is certainly seen in every living thing, without which nothing that shares in sense can by nature exist. What great thing is it, then, for man to be thought a stamp and likeness of the world, when the heaven passes away, the earth is altered, and all that is contained in them passes away with the passing of what contains them? In what, then, according to the teaching of the Church, does the greatness of man consist? Not in his likeness to the created world, but in his having come to be according to the image of the nature of the Creator. What, then, is the meaning of the image, you will perhaps say? How is the incorporeal made like the body? How is the temporal made like the eternal, what is altered by change like the unalterable, what is subject to passion and corruption like the passionless and incorruptible, what always dwells and is reared with evil like what is unmixed with all evil? For there is a great gap between what is conceived in the archetype and what has come to be according to the image. For the image, if it has the likeness to the prototype, is properly called by that name; but if the imitation strays from what lies before it, such a thing is something else and not its image. How, then, is man, this mortal, passionate, short-lived thing, the image of the pure, undefiled, and ever-existing nature? The true account of this only the very Truth could know clearly; but we, as far as we are able, tracking down the truth by conjectures and surmises, form these views about what is sought. Neither does the divine word lie when it says that man came to be according to the image of God, nor is the pitiable wretchedness of human nature like the blessedness of the passionless life. For if anyone compared our state with God, one of two things would have to be admitted: either that the divine is subject to passion, or that the human is free from passion, so that the account of likeness might be found to hold for both on equal terms. But if neither is the divine subject to passion nor is our state outside passion, then some other account remains by which we say that the divine word is true which says that man came to be in the image of God. We must take up the divine Scripture itself again, then, to see whether the writing gives us some guidance toward what is sought. After saying, “Let us make man according to our image,” and for what purposes “let us make,” it adds this statement: “And God made man; according to the image of God he made him; male and female he made them.” It has already been said earlier that this statement was proclaimed beforehand to overthrow heretical impiety, so that, taught that the only-begotten God made man according to the image of God, we may by no reasoning separate the Godhead of the Father and the Son, since Holy Scripture equally names each of them God, both the one who made man and the one according to whose image he came to be. But let the discussion of these things be left aside, and let us turn our inquiry to the matter in hand: how the divine is blessed and the human is wretched, and yet Scripture calls the latter like the former. We must examine the words carefully, then. For we shall find that what came to be according to the image is one thing, and what is now shown in wretchedness is another. “God made man,” it says; “according to the image of God he made him.” The creation of what came to be according to the image is complete. Then it makes a resumption of the account of the making, and says, “Male and female he made them.” For I think it is known to everyone that this is understood as outside the prototype: for “in Christ Jesus,” as the Apostle says, “there is neither male nor female.” Yet the word says that man was divided into these. The making of our nature, then, is twofold: one part made like the divine, the other divided according to this difference. For the word hints at something of this kind by the arrangement of what is written, first saying, “God made man; according to the image of God he made him,” and then adding to what was said, “male and female he made them,” which is foreign to what is conceived of God. For I think that by these words a great and lofty doctrine is handed down by divine Scripture. The doctrine is this. Of two things that stand furthest apart from each other, the divine and incorporeal nature and the irrational and brutish life, the human is in the middle. For in the human compound one can see a share of each of these: of the divine, the rational and intelligent element, which does not admit the difference of male and female; of the irrational, the bodily constitution and formation divided into male and female. For each of these is certainly in everyone who shares in human life. But the intellectual comes first, as we have learned from him who recounted the making of man in order, while the communion and kinship with the irrational is something added to man afterward. For first he says that “God made man according to the image of God,” showing by these words, as the Apostle says, that in such a one there is no male and female. Then he adds the properties of human nature: “male and female he made them.” What, then, do we learn from this? And let no one be indignant with me for bringing the argument to the point in hand from a distance. God is in his own nature whatever good can be grasped in thought; or rather, being beyond every good that is conceived and comprehended, he creates human life for no other reason than that he is good. Being such, and having set out for this reason on the creation of human nature, he would not have shown the power of his goodness by halves, giving some of what belongs to him and grudging a share in the rest; rather, the perfect form of goodness lies in this, both in bringing man from non-being into being and in making him lack nothing of the good things. But since the list of particular goods is long, it is not easy to set it out in number. For this reason the word gathered them all together and signified them in a comprehensive phrase, by saying that man came to be according to the image of God. For this is the same as saying that he made human nature a sharer in every good. For if the divine is the fullness of goods, and this is its image, then the image has its likeness to the archetype in being full of every good. In us, then, there is the form of every beauty, every virtue and wisdom, and everything that is conceived as better. And one among all these is to be free from necessity and not yoked to any natural domination, but to have one’s will, by its own authority, directed to what seems good. For virtue is something without a master and voluntary; what is compelled and forced cannot be virtue. Since, then, the image bears the stamp of the prototypal beauty in all respects, if it did not have a difference in some respect, it would no longer be a likeness at all, but would be shown to be the very same thing in every respect, without any variation. In what, then, do we see the difference between the divine itself and what has been made like the divine? In this: that the one exists uncreated, while the other has come into existence through creation. And the difference of this property in turn has produced a sequence of other properties. For it is agreed in every way and altogether that the uncreated nature is unchangeable and always the same, while the created cannot exist without alteration. For the very passage from non-being into being is a kind of motion and alteration of what was not, changed into being by the divine will. And as the Gospel calls the stamp on the coin the image of Caesar, from which we learn that in its outward form there is a likeness of what is portrayed to Caesar, but in the material there is a difference, so too in the present argument, considering instead of a stamp the things seen in the divine and the human nature, in which the likeness lies, we find the difference in the underlying subject, which is seen in the uncreated and the created. Since, then, the one is always the same, while the other, having come into being through creation, began its existence from alteration and has a kinship with such change, for this reason he who knows all things before their genesis, as the prophecy says, following, or rather perceiving beforehand by his power of foreknowledge, the direction in which the movement of human choice would incline by its sovereignty and self-determination, since he saw what would be, devised in addition for the image the difference of male and female, which no longer looks to the divine archetype but, as has been said, has been made akin to the more irrational nature. The cause of such a further device only those who were eyewitnesses of the truth and ministers of the word could know. But we, as far as is possible, picturing the truth by conjectures and images, set out what has come to mind not as a definite pronouncement, but will offer it to the fair-minded among our hearers in the form of an exercise. What, then, is it that we have thought about these things? When the word says that God made man, by the indefiniteness of the expression it indicates all humanity. For the creature is not yet named Adam here, as the history says in what follows; the name given to the man created is not that of a particular man but that of the universal. By the universal name of the nature, then, we are led to suppose something of this kind: that by divine foreknowledge and power all humanity is included in the first making. For we must think that nothing is indefinite to God among the things made by him, but that each existing thing has some limit and measure, measured out by the wisdom of the Maker. Just as a particular man is bounded by the size of his body, and the measure of his existence is the magnitude that coincides with the surface of the body, so I think that the whole fullness of humanity was encompassed, as in one body, by the God of all by his power of foreknowledge; and that this is what the word teaches when it says, “And God made man; according to the image of God he made him.” For the image is not in a part of the nature, nor is the grace in some one of those seen in it; rather, such a power extends equally to the whole race. A sign of this is that mind is seated in all alike: all have the power of understanding and deliberating, and all the other things through which the divine nature is portrayed in what has come to be according to it. The man who was manifested at the first making of the world and the one who will come to be at the consummation of all are alike: they bear the divine image equally in themselves. That is why the whole was named one man, because to the power of God nothing is past and nothing future, but even what is expected is held, equally with the present, by the all-embracing activity. The whole nature, then, extending from the first to the last, is one image of Him who is; but the difference of the race into male and female was added last to what was formed, for this reason, as I think.

What we must say to those who raise the difficulty: if procreation came after sin, how would souls have come to be if the first human beings had remained sinless? But before examining the matter in hand, it is perhaps better to look for the solution of the objection brought forward by those who contend with us. For they say that before sin Scripture records neither birth nor labour pains nor the impulse to procreation; but when they had been banished from paradise after sin, and the woman had been condemned to the punishment of labour pains, then Adam came to know his wife as a husband, and then procreation began. If, then, there was no marriage in paradise, nor labour pains, nor birth, they say it necessarily follows that human souls would not have come to exist in multitude unless the grace of immortality had fallen into mortality, and marriage preserved the nature through those born afterward, bringing in their offspring in place of those departing; so that sin, by entering human life, was in a way profitable. For the human race would have remained in the pair of the first-formed, had not the fear of death stirred nature to succession. But here again the true account, whatever it may be, would be clear only to those who, like Paul, have been initiated into the secrets of paradise. Ours is this. When the Sadducees once contradicted the doctrine of the resurrection, and brought forward that much-married woman who had belonged to seven brothers to establish their own doctrine, and then asked whose she would be after the resurrection, the Lord answered the argument, not only teaching the Sadducees but also revealing the mystery of the life in the resurrection to all who came after. “For in the resurrection,” he says, “they neither marry nor are given in marriage; for they can no longer die, for they are equal to the angels, and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.” And the grace of the resurrection promises us nothing else than the restoration of the fallen to their ancient state. For the grace we look for is a kind of return to the first life, bringing back into paradise the one who was cast out of it. If, then, the life of those who are restored is akin to that of the angels, it is clear that the life before the transgression was a kind of angelic life; and that is why our return to the ancient state of our life is likened to the angels. Yet, as has been said, though there is no marriage among them, the armies of the angels are in countless myriads; for so Daniel described them in his visions. In the same way, then, if no turning aside and falling away from equality of honour with the angels had come upon us through sin, we too would not have needed marriage in order to multiply. Rather, whatever the manner of increase in the nature of the angels, unspeakable and inconceivable by human conjectures, yet certainly existing, that would also have worked in human beings, made a little lower than the angels, increasing humanity to the measure determined by the counsel of its Maker. And if anyone is perplexed, asking about the manner of the genesis of human beings if man had not needed the help of marriage, we will ask him in turn about the manner of the angelic existence: how they are in countless myriads, being one substance and yet numbered as many. For we shall give a fitting answer to the one who asks, “How would man have existed without marriage?” by saying, “As the angels exist without marriage”; for that man was like them before the transgression is shown by his restoration to that state. These things having been thus clarified, we must return to our former argument: how, after the making of the image, God devised in addition for what he formed the difference of male and female. For this I say the speculation we have just gone through is useful. For he who brought all things into being and fashioned man as a whole by his own will to the divine image did not wait to see the number of souls brought to its proper fullness by gradual additions of offspring; rather, having perceived by his foreknowing activity the whole of human nature in its fullness at once, and having honoured it with an exalted lot equal to the angels, since he foresaw by his power of sight that its choice would not keep a straight course toward the good and would therefore fall away from the angelic life, so that the multitude of human souls might not be cut short by falling from that manner by which the angels were increased to their multitude, he therefore built into the nature a means of increase suited to those who had slipped into sin, implanting in humanity, instead of the angelic magnificence, the brutish and irrational manner of succession from one another. From this, it seems to me, the great David too, pitying the misery of man, lamented our nature in such words as these: “Man, being in honour, did not understand,” meaning by honour the equality of honour with the angels. “Therefore,” he says, “he was compared to the senseless cattle and became like them.” For truly he became brutish who received this flowing genesis into his nature because of his inclination toward the material.

That our irrational passions have their occasions from our kinship with irrational nature. For I think that from this beginning the particular passions too, issuing as from a spring, flood human life. A proof of my words is the kinship of the passions, which appears alike in us and in the irrational creatures. For it is not right to ascribe the first beginnings of the passionate disposition to human nature, which was formed in the divine likeness. But since the life of the irrational creatures entered this world first, and man too, for the reason stated, took something of their nature (I mean the manner of generation), he thereby shared also in the other things seen in that nature. For the likeness of man to the divine is not in anger, nor is the transcendent nature marked by pleasure; cowardice and boldness, the desire for more, hatred of being worsted, and all such things are far from the stamp that befits God. These, then, human nature drew to itself from the irrational part. For the things by which irrational life was secured for its own preservation became passions when they were transferred to human life. For carnivorous animals are preserved by anger, and love of pleasure preserves the prolific animals; cowardice preserves the weak, and fear the one easily caught by stronger animals, and gluttony the bulky. And failing to obtain anything pleasant is an occasion of pain in the irrational creatures. All these and such things entered along with the brutish manner of generation into the constitution of man. And let me be allowed to sketch the human image in words by a kind of sculptor’s marvel. For as one can see in sculptures those double-carved figures which those who practise such arts contrive to astonish the beholder, carving two faces on one head, so man seems to me to bear a double likeness to opposites: formed by the godlike element of his understanding toward the divine beauty, and bearing kinship with the brutish by the impulses that arise from passion. And often reason itself is made brutish by its inclination and disposition toward the irrational, covering the better with the worse. For when someone drags the activity of his understanding down to these things and forces his reasoning to become the servant of the passions, a kind of perversion of the good stamp into the irrational image takes place, the whole nature being re-stamped toward it, reason as it were cultivating the beginnings of the passions and increasing them from few to many. For by lending its own cooperation to the passion, it has produced an abundant and luxuriant crop of absurdities. So love of pleasure had its beginning from our likeness to the irrational, but grew in human transgressions, producing so many varieties of sins of pleasure as are not to be found among the irrational creatures. So the rising toward anger is akin to the impulse of the irrational creatures, but it grows by the alliance of our reasonings. For from there come resentment, envy, falsehood, treachery, hypocrisy; all these are the fruit of the mind’s evil cultivation. For if the passion were stripped of the alliance of the reasonings, the anger left would be short-lived and feeble, like a bubble, coming to be and at once perishing. So the gluttony of swine brought in greed, and the high spirit of the horse became the beginning of pride; and all the particular things that took their start from brutish irrationality became vice through the evil use of the mind. So too, conversely, if reason takes command of such movements, each of them is changed into a form of virtue. For anger produces courage, cowardice caution, fear obedience, hatred aversion from vice, and the power of love the desire for what is truly beautiful. High spirit in the character lifts it above the passions and keeps its mind unenslaved by evil. The great Apostle too praises this kind of elevation, constantly urging us to set our minds on the things above. And so one may find that every such movement, lifted up along with the loftiness of the understanding, is conformed to the beauty of the divine image. But since the inclination of sin is heavy and downward-tending, the other result happens more often; for the ruling part of the soul is dragged down by the weight of the irrational nature more than the heavy and earthy is lifted up by the height of the understanding. For this reason our misery often causes the divine gift to go unrecognized, plastering the passions of the flesh like an ugly mask over the beauty of the image. Those who look at such things, then, and do not readily agree that the divine form is in them, are in a way pardonable. But one can see the divine image in human beings through those who have lived upright lives. For if someone who is passionate and fleshly makes it hard to believe that man has been adorned with divine beauty, the man lofty in virtue and pure from defilements will surely confirm for you the higher estimate of human beings. For example (for it is better to show the argument by an example), one of those notorious for wickedness, Jeconiah perhaps, or anyone else remembered for evil, has smeared over the beauty of his nature with the defilement of wickedness; but in Moses and those like him the form of the image was kept pure. In those, then, in whom the beauty has not been obscured, the proof of what is said is plain: that man has become an imitation of God. But perhaps someone is ashamed that our life, like that of the irrational creatures, is sustained by eating, and for this reason thinks man unworthy to be considered formed according to the image of God. Let him hope that exemption from this service will one day be given to our nature in the life we look for. For, as the Apostle says, “the kingdom of God is not food and drink”; and the Lord declared that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Moreover, since the resurrection shows us a life equal to the angels, and there is no eating among the angels, there is sufficient ground for believing that man, who will live like the angels, will be freed from such a service.

To those who say that the enjoyment of the goods we hope for will again consist in eating and drinking, because Scripture says that man at the beginning lived by these in paradise. But perhaps someone will say that man will not return to the same form of life, if formerly we lived by eating and afterward shall be released from such a service. But when I listen to Holy Scripture, I do not know only bodily food or the enjoyment that comes through the flesh; I know another kind of nourishment too, having a certain analogy with that of the body, whose enjoyment passes to the soul alone. “Eat of my bread,” Wisdom bids the hungry; and the Lord blesses those who hunger for such food, and says, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.” And the great Isaiah bids those able to hear his sublimity, “Drink joy.” There is also a prophetic threat against those who deserve punishment, that they will be punished with famine; but the famine is not a lack of bread and water, but a failure of the word. For he does not speak of a famine of bread or a thirst for water, but of a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. It is fitting, then, to think of a fruit worthy of God’s planting in Eden (Eden means “delight”), and not to doubt that man is nourished by it, and not at all to think of this transitory and perishing food in connection with the life in paradise. “From every tree in the paradise,” he says, “you may eat for food.” Who will give to one who hungers healthily that tree in paradise, which embraces every good, whose name is “every,” in which the word grants man a share? For in the general and transcendent word every form of good is naturally united with itself, and the whole is one. And who will keep me from tasting the mixed and ambiguous tree? For it is certainly not unclear to the more discerning what that “every” is, whose fruit is life, and again what this mixed thing is, whose end is death. For he who generously set before man the enjoyment of “every” tree, by some reason and providence certainly keeps man from sharing in the things that are mixed. And I think I should take the great David and the wise Solomon as teachers of the interpretation of this saying. For both consider the grace of the permitted delight to be one, the truly good itself, which is indeed every good: David saying, “Delight yourself in the Lord,” and Solomon naming Wisdom itself, which is the Lord, “a tree of life.” The “every tree,” then, whose food the word gives to the one formed according to God, is the same as the tree of life. Set over against this tree is another tree, whose food is the knowledge of good and evil, not bearing each of the opposites separately as fruit, but blossoming with a confused and mixed fruit blended of opposite qualities. The author of life forbids eating it, but the serpent counsels it, in order to prepare the entrance for death. And he becomes persuasive in his counsel by colouring the fruit with a fair appearance, so that it might be seen with pleasure and provoke the appetite to taste it.

What the life in paradise was, and what the forbidden tree was. What, then, is that which has the knowledge of good and evil blended together, decked out with the pleasures of sense? Perhaps I shall not miss the truth by much if I use the meaning of “knowable” as a starting point for the contemplation. For I think that “knowledge” is not to be understood here by Scripture as science; rather, I find from the usage of Scripture a certain difference between “knowledge” and “discernment.” For the Apostle says that to discern the good from the evil with understanding belongs to a more perfect habit and to trained senses; that is why he gives the command to test all things, and says that discernment is proper to the spiritual man. But knowledge does not everywhere indicate understanding and information in its meaning, but a disposition toward what is pleasing; as in “The Lord knew those who are his,” and he says to Moses, “I knew you above all”; while of those condemned for wickedness he who knows all things says, “I never knew you.” The tree, then, from which mixed knowledge is borne as fruit is among the forbidden things. And that fruit, which has the serpent as its advocate, is mixed of opposites, perhaps for this reason: that evil is not set out bare, appearing by itself in its own nature. For vice would be ineffective if it were not coloured with some good that draws the deceived person to desire it. But as it is, the nature of evil is in a way mixed, having destruction hidden in its depth like a snare, while in the deceit of its appearance it displays an image of something good. The beautiful colour of the material seems good to lovers of money; but the love of money becomes the root of all evils. Who would slip into the foul mire of licentiousness, if the one dragged into the passion by this bait did not think pleasure something good and desirable? So too the other sins, which have their ruin hidden, seem desirable at first, and through some deceit are pursued as good by the unwary. Since, then, the many judge the good to be what delights the senses, and there is a certain sameness of name between what is good and what seems good, for this reason the desire that arises toward evil as toward good was named by Scripture “knowledge of good and evil,” “knowledge” expressing a kind of disposition toward and blending with. It says that the fruit of the forbidden tree is neither absolutely evil, because it is decked with good, nor purely good, because evil lies hidden beneath it, but mixed of both, and it said that the taste of it leads those who touch it to death; all but openly crying out the doctrine that the truly good is simple and uniform in nature, foreign to all duplicity and to union with its opposite, while evil is varied and adorned, thought to be one thing and proved by experience to be another; and the knowledge of it, that is, the taking of it up by experience, becomes the beginning and occasion of death and corruption. For this reason the serpent points out the evil fruit of sin, not showing the evil openly as it was by nature (for man would not have been deceived by evil that was manifest), but making what appeared bright with a certain beauty and bewitching the taste with some pleasure to the senses, he seemed persuasive to the woman, as Scripture says: “And the woman saw,” it says, “that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasing to the eyes to see and beautiful to contemplate”; and taking of its fruit she ate. And that eating became the mother of death for human beings. This, then, is the mixed fruit-bearing, the word clearly explaining the sense in which that tree was named the tree of what is knowable of good and evil: that, like the malice of poisons seasoned with honey, inasmuch as it sweetens the sense it seems good, but inasmuch as it destroys the one who touches it, it becomes the extreme of all evil. When, then, the evil poison had worked against the life of man, then man, that great thing and name, the image of the divine nature, became like vanity, as the Prophet says. The image, then, is akin to the better of the things we perceive in ourselves; but whatever in life is painful and miserable is far from the likeness to the divine.

That the resurrection is hoped for as a consequence, not so much from the proclamation of Scripture as from the very necessity of things. But vice is not so strong as to prevail over the power of the good, nor is the folly of our nature stronger and more lasting than the wisdom of God. For it is not possible that what is changeable and altering should be more powerful and lasting than what is always the same and fixed in the good. Rather, the divine counsel has unchangeableness in every way and altogether, while the changeableness of our nature does not remain fixed even in evil. For what is always moving, if its progress is toward the good, will never cease from its forward course because what it travels through is without limit; for it will find no end of what it seeks, by grasping which it might at some time stop its motion. But if it should incline to the opposite, when it has finished the course of vice and reached the extreme measure of evil, then the ever-moving character of its impulse, finding no natural stopping place, when it has run through the extent of vice, necessarily turns its motion toward the good. For since vice does not advance without limit but is held within necessary bounds, the succession of the good accordingly takes over at the limit of vice. And so, as has been said, the ever-moving character of our nature runs back at last to the good way, made prudent by the memory of its former misfortunes not to be caught again in the same things. Our course, then, will again be among good things, because the nature of vice is confined within necessary limits. For as those skilled in astronomy say that the whole world is full of light, and that darkness is produced by being shaded by the interposition of the body of the earth (but that this is enclosed in the shape of a cone behind the sun’s ray, according to the shape of the spherical body, while the sun, exceeding the earth many times in size and enfolding it all around on every side with its rays, joins the meetings of the light at the end of the cone; so that, by hypothesis, if anyone had the power to pass the measure to which the shadow extends, he would certainly be in light not interrupted by darkness), so I think we must think about ourselves too: that when we have passed the limit of vice and are at the extremity of the shadow of sin, we shall live again in light, since the nature of good things exceeds the measure of vice infinitely. Paradise, then, again; again that tree, which is indeed the tree of life; again the grace of the image and the dignity of rule. It does not seem to me that our hope is any of those things which are now subjected by God to men for the needs of life, but the hope is of another kingdom, the account of which remains among things unspoken.

To those who say: if the resurrection is something beautiful and good, why has it not happened already, but is hoped for after certain periods of time? But let us keep to the sequence of what we have examined. For perhaps someone, his mind winged by the sweetness of hope, thinks it a burden and a loss not to come sooner to those good things which are beyond human sense and knowledge, and finds hard the stretch of time between him and what he longs for. But let him not be distressed, like a child impatient at a short delay of its pleasures. For since all things are governed by reason and wisdom, it is entirely necessary to think that nothing that happens is without a share in reason itself and the wisdom in it. You will ask, then, what this reason is, by which the change from this painful life to what we long for does not happen at once, but this heavy and bodily life, extended to certain fixed times, waits for the end of the completion of all, so that then human life, freed as from a bridle, may run back unrestrained and free to the blessed and passionless life. Whether the account comes near the truth of what is sought, the Truth itself would know clearly; but what came into our mind is this. I resume, then, our first statement. “Let us make man,” says God, “according to our image and likeness. And God made man; according to the image of God he made him.” The image of God, then, which is seen in all human nature, had its completion; but Adam had not yet come to be. For the earthy formation is called Adam by a name drawn from its derivation, as those versed in the Hebrew tongue say. That is why the Apostle too, who was specially trained in the ancestral tongue of the Israelites, calls the man from the earth “earthy,” as if translating the name of Adam into Greek. Man, then, came to be according to the image: the universal nature, the godlike thing. And it came to be by the all-powerful wisdom, not as a part of the whole, but the whole fullness of the nature at once. He saw it, who holds all the limits of things in his grasp, as the Scripture says: “In his hand are the ends of the earth”; he saw it, who knows all things even before their genesis, embracing in his knowledge how great humanity will be in number in its individuals. And since he perceived in our formation the inclination toward the worse, and that, having of its own will fallen away from equality of honour with the angels, it would take to itself fellowship with what is lowly, for these reasons he mixed something of the irrational with his own image. For the difference of male and female is not in the divine and blessed nature; but, transferring the property of the irrational constitution to man, he grants the race its increase not in accordance with the loftiness of our creation. For it was not when he made what is according to the image that he added to man the power to grow and multiply, but when he divided him by the difference of male and female, then he says, “Grow and multiply, and fill the earth.” For this is not proper to the divine nature but to the irrational, as the history indicates when it relates that these words were spoken by God first to the irrational creatures. So, if he had added to man the power to grow by this word before putting the difference of male and female on the nature, we would not have needed this form of generation by which the irrational creatures are born. … the end of time, without interval; so that it is no longer possible for one who has reached the last and highest point of time’s fullness, since no part is left over beyond that extremity, to undergo this periodic change through death. Rather, the trumpet of the resurrection needs only to sound, awakening the dead and changing those left in life, like those altered by the resurrection, all at once to incorruption, so that the weight of the flesh no longer presses downward or holds its bulk to the earth, but it travels aloft through the air. “For we shall be caught up,” he says, “in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord.” Let him wait, then, for the time that necessarily extends along with human increase. For the patriarchs with Abraham too had the desire to see the good things, and did not cease seeking the heavenly country, as the Apostle says; yet they are still in the hope of the grace, since God foresaw something better for us, in Paul’s words, “so that,” he says, “they should not be made perfect apart from us.” If, then, they bear the delay, having seen the good things from afar by faith and hope alone and greeted them, as the Apostle testifies, placing the certainty of the enjoyment of what they hoped for in considering faithful the one who promised, what must the many of us do, for whom perhaps there is not even a hope of better things from the lives we have lived? Even the Prophet’s soul fainted with desire, and he confesses this lover’s passion in his psalm, saying that his soul longs and faints to be in the courts of the Lord, even if he were to be cast aside among the last, since it is greater and more honourable to be last there than to be first in the tents of sinners in this life. Yet he bore the delay, calling the life there blessed and counting a short share in it more honourable than thousands of years: “Better,” he says, “is one day in your courts than thousands.” But he was not impatient with the necessary ordering of things, and thought it enough for human blessedness to have the good things through hope. That is why he says at the end of the psalm, “O Lord God of hosts, blessed is the man who hopes in you.” Neither, then, should we be distressed at the short delay of what we hope for, but be earnest that we may not be cast out from what we hope for. For if someone told one of the less experienced beforehand that at the season of summer the harvest of fruits will take place, and the granaries will be full and the table loaded with food at the time of plenty, it would be foolish to hurry the coming of the season, when he ought to be sowing seed and preparing the fruits for himself by diligence. For the season will certainly come at the appointed time, whether he wishes it or not; but the one who has prepared an abundance of fruits for himself and the one who is overtaken by the hour bare of all preparation will not see it alike. So, I think, since it is plain to all through the divine proclamation that the time of the change will come, we should not busy ourselves about times (for he said it is not for us to know times and seasons), nor search out calculations by which one may weaken the soul’s hope of the resurrection, but, relying on faith in what is expected, purchase the coming grace beforehand by good conduct.

That one who admits the beginning of the world’s constitution must necessarily also agree about its end. But if someone, seeing the present movement of the world carried on in a sequence, by which the interval of time is perceived, should say that the foretold stopping of moving things cannot happen, such a person clearly does not believe that heaven and earth were made by God in the beginning either. For one who grants a beginning to motion certainly does not doubt about an end; and one who does not accept the end did not accept the beginning either. But as we understand that the ages were framed by the word of God, believing, as the Apostle says, that what is seen came to be from what does not appear, we shall use the same faith regarding the word of God that foretold the necessary stopping of existing things. The “how” must be set aside from curious inquiry; for there too we accepted by faith that what is seen was framed from things that do not yet appear, passing over the search for what is beyond reach. And yet the argument there suggested many difficulties to us, giving no small occasions for doubting what we believe. For there too it was possible for the contentious, by plausible reasoning in sequence, to overturn faith, so as not to think true the account of material creation which Holy Scripture upholds when it affirms that the genesis of all existing things is from God. For those who hold the opposite view, constructing matter as co-eternal with God, use such arguments as these for their doctrine. If God is simple in nature and immaterial, without quality and without magnitude, uncompounded and foreign to circumscription by shape, while all matter is apprehended in extension by dimension and does not escape the apprehensions of the senses, being known in colour, shape, bulk, size, resistance, and the other things seen in it, none of which can be conceived in the divine nature, what means is there for matter to be produced from the immaterial, or the dimensional nature from what has no dimension? For if they are believed to have come into existence from him, clearly, being in him in some ineffable way, they so came forth into genesis. But if the material was in him, how is he immaterial who has matter in himself? And so too with all the other things by which the material nature is characterized: if quantity is in God, how is God without quantity? If the compound is in him, how is he simple, without parts, and uncompounded? So that the argument forces him either to be necessarily material, because matter came into existence from him, or, if one avoids this, it is necessary to suppose that matter was brought to him from outside for the making of the universe. If, then, it was outside God, there was certainly something else besides God, conceived together with the unbegotten by the principle of its own property; so that two things without beginning and unbegotten are apprehended together in the argument at the same time: what acts with art, and what receives this skilful activity. And if, from this necessity, one supposes that matter lay eternal beneath the Creator of all things, how great a support for his own doctrines will the Manichee find, who sets up the material cause, as unbegotten, beside the good nature! But we have believed, hearing the Scripture say that all things are from God; and we do not think it right to busy ourselves about how they were in God, which is beyond our reason, believing that all things are within the reach of the divine power: both to bring the non-existent into existence and to put upon what exists the qualities it pleases. Consistently, then, as we consider the power of the divine will sufficient for existing things to come into existence from non-being, so, referring the dissolution of what has been constituted to the same power, we shall take our faith into nothing beyond what is reasonable. And yet perhaps it would be possible, by some ingenuity of argument, to persuade those who quibble about matter not to imagine that they are attacking a case left undefended.

A reply to those who say that matter is co-eternal with God. For the view of matter that holds it to have come into existence from the intelligible and immaterial does not appear to be outside what follows by reason. For we shall find that all matter is composed of certain qualities, and if it were stripped of these, it could nowhere be grasped by thought by itself. Yet each form of quality is separated from the underlying subject by reason; and reason is an intellectual, not a bodily, way of seeing. For example, when an animal or a piece of wood, or anything else of material constitution, is set before our contemplation, we have perceived by conceptual division many things about the subject, the account of each of which is unmixed with what is seen together with it. For the account of colour is one thing, that of weight another, again that of quantity, and that of the particular property perceived by touch. For softness and being two cubits long and the rest of what has been mentioned do not coincide in their account either with one another or with the body. For a proper defining account is conceived for each of them according to what it is, sharing nothing with any other quality seen about the subject. If, then, colour is intelligible, and resistance too is intelligible, and quantity and the rest of such properties, and if, when each of these is taken away from the subject, the whole account of the body is dissolved along with it, it would follow to suppose that the concurrence of those things whose absence we found to be the cause of the body’s dissolution produces the material nature. For as there is no body to which colour, shape, resistance, extension, weight, and the other properties do not belong, while each of these is not body but is found to be something other than body in its own particular account, so, conversely, wherever the things mentioned come together, they produce bodily existence. But if the apprehension of these properties is intellectual, and the divine is intelligible in nature, it is nothing unlikely that these intellectual starting points for the genesis of bodies should have come into existence from the incorporeal nature, the intelligible nature bringing into existence the intelligible powers, and their concurrence with one another bringing the material nature into being. But let these things be examined by us in passing; we must bring the argument back to faith, by which we have accepted that all things came into existence from non-being, and, having been taught by Scripture that they will again be transformed into another state, we do not doubt it.

How one even of those outside might be brought to believe Scripture when it teaches about the resurrection. But perhaps someone, looking at bodies that have been dissolved and judging the divine by the measure of his own power, says that the account of the resurrection is impossible, saying that it cannot be that what now moves will stop and what now does not move will rise. Let such a person take as the first and greatest proof of the truth of the resurrection the trustworthiness of its proclaimer. The credibility of what is said has its certainty from the fulfilment of the other things foretold. For since divine Scripture has set out many sayings of every kind, it is possible, by seeing how the rest of what was said stands as to falsehood or truth, to understand through them the doctrine of the resurrection as well. For if in the other matters the sayings are proved false and wide of the truth, this too is certainly not free of falsehood; but if all the others have experience bearing witness to their truth, it would follow to consider the prediction about the resurrection true as well, through them. Let us recall, then, one or two of the things foretold, and set their outcome against the predictions, so as to know through them whether the word looks to the truth. Who does not know how the people of Israel flourished in old times, rising up against all the powers in the world? What a palace there was in the city of Jerusalem! What walls, what towers, what magnificence of the temple! These were thought worthy of wonder even by the Lord’s disciples, who, filled with admiration at what they saw, asked the Lord to look at them, as the history of the Gospel shows, saying to him, “What works, and what buildings!” But he showed those who admired the present the desolation that would come upon the place and the disappearance of that beauty, saying that nothing of what they saw would be left after a little while. Again, at the time of his passion, the women followed lamenting the unjust sentence against him, for they did not yet look to the purpose of what was happening; but he counselled them to be silent about what was happening to him, for it was not worth tears, and to put off their mourning and lamenting to the true time for tears, when the city would be surrounded by besiegers and its sufferings come to such distress that the one not born would be thought most blessed. In this he also foretold the horror of the mother who ate her child, saying that in those days the barren womb would be called blessed. Where, then, is that palace? Where is the temple? Where are the walls? Where the bulwarks of the towers? Where is the power of the Israelites? Are they not scattered, one here and one there, over almost the whole world? And did not the palace fall in ruins with their overthrow? For it seems to me that the Lord foretold these and similar things not for the sake of the events themselves (for what great gain was the prediction of things certain to happen to those who heard it? They would have known by experience what would happen even without learning it beforehand), but so that through them their faith in greater things might follow in sequence. For the witness of deeds in the one is also a demonstration of the truth in the other. For as, if a farmer were explaining the power of seeds and someone with no experience of farming happened to disbelieve him, it would be enough for the husbandman, as proof of the truth, to show the power in one seed of those lying in the bushel and to guarantee the rest by it; for one who has seen the single grain of wheat or barley, or whatever happens to be in the full bushel, become an ear after it was cast into the clod, would no longer, because of the one, disbelieve about the rest either; so the truth admitted in the other things foretold seems to me enough to testify to the mystery of the resurrection. Or rather, there is the experience of the resurrection itself, which we have learned not so much by words as by the deeds themselves. For since the wonder of the resurrection was great and beyond belief, beginning with lesser works of wonder he gently accustoms our faith, as it were, to the greater. For as a mother, nursing her infant suitably, at first puts milk through the breast into its soft and tender mouth, and when it is already cutting teeth and growing brings it bread, not rough and unprepared, lest the soft and untrained gums be chafed by the hardness of the food, but ground by her own teeth, she makes it measured and suited to the strength of the one receiving it; then, as its strength increases, she gently leads the infant, accustomed to softer food, to more solid nourishment: so the Lord, nursing and feeding human faintheartedness with miracles like an immature infant, first gives a prelude of the power of the resurrection in a disease despaired of, which was great as an achievement, yet not such as to be disbelieved when told. For by rebuking the fever that was violently burning Simon’s mother-in-law, he made so great a change in the evil that she, who was already expected to die, was strong enough to serve those present. Then he adds a little to his power, and, when the royal official’s son lay in admitted danger (for so the history says, that he was about to die, while the father cried, “Come down before my child dies”), he works again the raising of one believed about to die, accomplishing the miracle with greater power in not even coming near the place, but sending life from afar by the strength of his command. Again, in sequence, he goes up to higher miracles. For having set out to the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue, he willingly delayed on the way, making public the healing of the woman with the flow of blood, who had been hidden, so that during this time death might take hold of the sick girl. When, then, the soul had just been separated from the body, and the mourners were wailing in loud lament over the calamity, he raised the girl to life again by his word of command, as from sleep, leading human weakness by a kind of road and sequence to what is greater. … What is it that is said? That she had no hope of children to heal the misfortune of her loss, for the woman was a widow. She had no other to look to in place of the one departed, for he was her only son. How great the evil in this is, anyone not estranged from nature can easily see. Him alone she had known in labour pains, him alone she had nursed at her breasts; he alone made her table bright, he alone was the cause of brightness in the house, playing, studying, exercising, rejoicing, in processions, in wrestling schools, in gatherings of youth: all that is sweet and precious to a mother’s eyes, he alone was. Already of the age for marriage, the scion of the family, the branch of succession, the staff of old age. And the mention of his age was another lament. For to say “young man” was to speak of the flower of youth withered, just growing green with down, his beard not yet thick, still shining with the beauty of his cheeks. What, then, was the mother likely to suffer over him? Her heart would be burning as with fire, so that she drew out her lament bitterly over him, clinging to the body as it lay, so as not to hasten his burial but to take her fill of her grief, drawing out her laments over him as long as possible. Nor did the word pass this over: “For when Jesus saw her,” it says, “he had compassion; and he came and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said to the dead man, ‘Young man, I say to you, arise’; and he gave him back alive to his mother.” Now, when the dead man had been dead no short time and was all but laid in the tomb, the Lord performs a greater miracle, with the same command. The working of miracles proceeds still higher, so that what was seen might come nearer to the disbelieved wonder of the resurrection. One of the Lord’s companions and friends was ill; the sick man’s name was Lazarus. And the Lord declines to visit his friend, being far from the sick man, so that death might find room and power, in the absence of the Life, to do its own work through the disease. In Galilee the Lord tells his disciples what had happened to Lazarus, and also of his intention to go to him to raise him who lay dead. But they were very afraid because of the cruelty of the Jews, thinking it hard and dangerous to be again in Judea in the midst of those who sought to kill; and so, delaying and putting off, they made their return from Galilee late. But authority prevailed, and the disciples were led by the Lord to be initiated, as it were, in Bethany into the preliminary rites of the general resurrection. It was already four days after his death; all that was customary had been done for the departed; the body was hidden in a tomb. It was probably already swollen and dissolving into corruption, the body mouldering in the dampness of the earth and necessarily falling apart. The thing was one to shrink from, nature being forced to give back to life what had been dissolved into stench. Then the disbelieved work of the general resurrection is brought to demonstration by a more evident miracle. For it is not someone rising from a severe illness, nor one at his last breath brought back to life, nor a child just dead restored to life, nor a young man about to be carried to the tomb released from his bier; but a man past his prime, a corpse, stale, already swollen and decomposing, so that even his friends could not bear for the Lord to approach the tomb because of the offensiveness of the decayed body within it, made alive by a single call, confirms the proclamation of the resurrection, that is, what is expected in general, which we have learned by experience in a part. For as, at the renewal of the universe, the Apostle says that the Lord himself will descend with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel, and by a trumpet will raise the dead to incorruption, so now too the one in the tomb, shaking off death like a kind of sleep at the voice of command, and shaking from himself the corruption that had come upon his dead state, springs from the tomb whole and sound, not hindered from coming out even by the bands of the grave clothes about his feet and hands. Are these things small for faith in the resurrection of the dead? Do you seek to have your judgment on this confirmed by other things as well? But it seems to me that not in vain did the Lord say to those at Capernaum, as though speaking to himself in the person of men, “You will surely say to me this proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself.’” For having accustomed people to the miracle of the resurrection in other bodies, he had to confirm the word in his own humanity. You saw the proclamation at work in others: those about to die, the child that had just ceased to live, the young man at the tomb, the decayed corpse, all alike released to life by one command. Do you seek also those who came to death through wounds and blood, lest some weakness of the life-giving power in their case undo the grace? See him whose hands were pierced through with nails; see him whose side was pierced by the spear. Pass your fingers through the marks of the nails; thrust your hand into the wound from the spear. You can surely guess how far the point was likely to have gone in, reckoning its passage inward by the breadth of the scar. For a wound that admitted the entrance of a human hand shows how far within the depth the iron had gone. If, then, he has been raised, it would be easy to utter the apostolic saying: “How do some say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” Since, then, every prediction of the Lord is shown to be true by the witness of events, and we have learned this not by word only but have received the demonstration of the promise in deed from those who themselves returned to life by resurrection, what occasion is left to those who do not believe? Shall we not bid farewell to those who by philosophy and empty deceit lead astray the simple faith, and hold to the bare confession, having learned briefly from the Prophet the manner of the grace, in the words, “You will take away their spirit, and they will fail and return to their dust. You will send forth your Spirit, and they will be created, and you will renew the face of the earth”? Then also he says that the Lord rejoices in his works, when sinners fail from the earth. For how will anyone be named from sin, when sin does not exist?

That the resurrection is not beyond what is probable. But there are some who, because of the weakness of human reasoning, judge the divine power by our measures and maintain that what is beyond our capacity is not possible for God either. For they point to the disappearance of those long dead and the remains of those reduced to ashes by fire, and besides these they bring forward in argument the carnivorous animals, and the fish that has taken into its own body the flesh of a shipwrecked man, and has itself in turn become human food and passed by digestion into the bulk of the one who ate it. And they go through many such petty things, unworthy of the great power and authority of God, to overturn the doctrine, as though God could not restore to man what is his own by the same roads in reverse. But let us cut short in a few words their long detours of logical vanity, admitting that the dissolution of the body into the things from which it was composed does take place; and not only that, according to the divine word, earth is dissolved into earth, but that air and moisture too go to what is akin to them, and each of the things in us passes to its kin, even if the human body has been mixed by being eaten with carnivorous birds or the fiercest beasts, even if it has come under the teeth of fish, even if it has been changed by fire into vapours and dust. But wherever one may carry man in hypothesis by argument, he is certainly within the world; and the inspired word teaches that this is held in the hand of God. If, then, you are not ignorant of anything in your own palm, do you think God’s knowledge weaker than your own power, so that it could not find out exactly what is contained within the divine span?

That it is possible, when the human body has been dissolved into the elements of the universe, for each to have his own restored again from the common stock. But perhaps, looking at the elements of the universe, you think it hard, when the air in us has been poured back into its kindred element, and the hot and the moist and the earthy have likewise been mixed with their kinds, for what is ours to run back from the common stock to its own. Do you not reckon, then, by human examples, that not even this exceeds the bounds of the divine power? You have surely seen somewhere among human dwellings a common herd of animals, made up from a common stock; yet when it is divided again among its owners, familiarity with their homes and the marks put upon them restore to each his own. If you think of something like this about yourself, you will not miss the mark. For since the soul is disposed by a natural attachment and affection toward the body that dwelt with it, there is in it, secretly, through the blending, a kind of attachment to and recognition of what is its own, as though certain marks had been put on it by nature, by which the common stock remains unconfused, being distinguished by what is particular. Since, then, the soul draws again to itself what is akin and its own, what labour, tell me, would there be for the divine power to hinder the concourse of what belongs together, hastening to its own by some ineffable attraction of nature? That certain marks of our compound remain with the soul even after the dissolution is shown by the dialogue in Hades: the bodies had been committed to the tomb, but some bodily mark of recognition remained with the souls, by which Lazarus was recognized and the rich man was not unknown. It is nothing beyond what is probable, then, to believe that the return of the rising bodies takes place again from the common to the particular, especially for one who examines our nature more carefully. For our being is not wholly in flux and change; for then it would be altogether incomprehensible, having no stability by nature. But by a more exact account, some things in us are stable and others proceed by alteration. For the body is altered by growth and diminution, putting on its successive ages like garments; but through every change the form remains unchanged in itself, not departing from the marks once set on it by nature, but appearing with its own signs of recognition in all the body’s changes. Let us except from the argument the alteration from disease that befalls the form; for the disfigurement of disease takes over the form like a strange mask, and when this has been removed by the word, as in the case of Naaman the Syrian, or of those whose stories are told in the Gospel, the form hidden by the affliction appeared again through health in its own marks of recognition. It is not what flows and passes away in alteration, then, but what is stable and remains the same in our compound, that the godlike element of the soul grows to. And since the particular variations of the blending change the differences of form, and the blending is nothing else than the mixture of the elements (we call elements those that underlie the construction of the universe, of which the human body too is composed), since the form necessarily remains with the soul like the impression of a seal, the things that took the stamp of the seal are not unknown to it; but at the time of the reconstitution it receives back to itself whatever fits the stamp of the form, and those certainly fit which were stamped by the form at the beginning. It is nothing beyond what is probable, then, for what is one’s own to return again from the common stock to the individual. It is said too that quicksilver, poured out of its vessel onto a sloping and dusty place, is scattered over the ground in small globules, mixing with nothing it meets; but if one gathers together what has been scattered in many places, it flows back of its own accord to its kind, not hindered by anything in between from mixing with itself. Something of this kind, I think, we must understand about the human compound too: if only the signal is given by God, the corresponding parts are of their own accord united again with their own, no toil arising for the one who reconstitutes the nature through them. For in the things that grow from the earth too, we see no labour on nature’s part in changing wheat or millet or any other seed of grain or pulse into stalk and beard and ear; for the suitable nourishment passes without effort, of its own accord, from the common stock to the particular property of each of the seeds. If, then, while a common moisture underlies all growing things, each of those nourished by it has drawn what suits it for the increase of what is its own, what is new if, in the account of the resurrection too, the drawing of what is its own by each of those who rise happens in the same way as with seeds? So from all these things it can be learned that the proclamation of the resurrection contains nothing beyond what is known by experience. And yet we have passed over in silence the best known of our facts, I mean the first beginning of our constitution. For who does not know the wonder-working of nature, what the mother’s womb receives and what it produces? Do you not see how simple in a way and uniform is what is cast into the inward parts as the beginning of the body’s constitution? But what account will express the variety of the compound that is constructed? And who, not having learned such a thing in our common nature, would think it possible that this small and worthless thing is the beginning of so great a reality? I call it great, looking not only at the formation of the body, but at what is worthy of wonder before this, I mean the soul itself and what is seen in it.

To those who say that souls existed before bodies, or conversely that bodies were formed before souls; in which there is also a refutation of the fables about transmigration of souls. Perhaps it is not outside the treatise before us to examine the question disputed in the churches about soul and body. For some of those before us, by whom the treatise On First Principles was composed, thought it right to say that souls pre-exist, like a people in a commonwealth of their own; that there too examples of vice and virtue are set before them; and that the soul that remains in the good stays without experience of union with the body, but if it slips away from participation in the good, it slides down to this life and so comes to be in a body. Others, attending to the order of the making of man according to Moses, say that the soul is second to the body in time, since God first took dust from the earth and formed man, and then gave him a soul by breathing into him. And by this argument they show the flesh to be more honourable than the soul, what was formed beforehand than what was introduced afterward. For they say that the soul came to be for the sake of the body, so that what was formed might not be without breath and motion; and everything that comes to be for the sake of something is certainly less honourable than that for whose sake it comes to be. As the Gospel says that the soul is more than food and the body more than clothing, because the latter exist for the sake of the former; for the soul was not made for the sake of food, nor bodies for the sake of clothing, but since these existed, those were invented in addition for their need. Since, then, the account is open to criticism in both suppositions, both of those who tell fables of souls living beforehand in some state of their own and of those who think they are made later than the bodies, it would be necessary to leave nothing that is said in these doctrines unexamined. To exercise the arguments on both sides exactly and to uncover all the absurdities inherent in the suppositions would need much time and many words; but having briefly examined each of the views mentioned, as far as possible, we shall take up our subject again. Those who stand by the former account and teach that the commonwealth of souls is older than the life in the flesh do not seem to me to be clean of the Greek doctrines, the fables they tell about transmigration into other bodies. For if anyone examines it exactly, he will find their argument necessarily dragged down to this: what they say one of their wise men said, that the same man became a man, then put on the body of a woman, flew with the birds, grew as a bush, and obtained the life of water creatures. In my judgment the one who said this of himself was not far from the truth. For such doctrines, saying that one soul passed through so many things, are truly worthy of the chattering of frogs or jackdaws, or the stupidity of fish, or the insensibility of oaks. And the cause of such absurdity is the opinion that souls pre-exist. For the starting point of such a doctrine leads the argument on in sequence to what is next and adjacent, and goes on telling marvels until it reaches this point. For if the soul, torn away from the higher commonwealth by some vice, after once tasting bodily life, as they say, becomes a man again, and life in the flesh is admitted to be certainly more subject to passion than the eternal and incorporeal life, then the soul that comes to be in such a life, in which there are more occasions of sin, must necessarily come to be in greater vice and be more passionately disposed than before. Now the passion of a human soul is likeness to the irrational; and having become akin to this, it changes into a brutish nature; and once it has set out on the road of vice, it never ceases its progress toward evil even when it has come to be in an irrational creature. For the halting of evil is the beginning of the impulse toward virtue, and virtue does not exist in irrational creatures. It will necessarily always be altered for the worse, then, always advancing to what is less honourable and always finding what is worse than the nature in which it is. And as the sentient lies below the rational, so from this too the fall to the insensible takes place. Thus far their argument proceeds, and though it moves outside the truth, it at least takes one absurdity from another by some sequence. But from here their doctrine is made into a fable by things that do not hang together. For the sequence points to the complete destruction of the soul. For the soul that has once slipped from the lofty commonwealth will be able to stop at no measure of vice, but through its attachment to the passions will pass from the rational to the irrational, and from that will be transferred to the insensibility of plants; and the lifeless borders in some way on the insensible, and the non-existent follows this. So that altogether, by the sequence, the soul will, according to them, pass into non-being. Its return to the better will therefore necessarily be impossible. And yet they bring the soul back from a bush to the man. They show from this, then, that life in a bush is more honourable than the incorporeal existence. For it has been shown that the progress of the soul toward the worse will probably go down to what is lower still; and below the insensible nature lies the lifeless, to which the starting point of their doctrine leads the soul by sequence. But since they do not want this, either they shut the soul up in the insensible, or, if they bring it back from there to human life, they will show the life of a tree, as has been said, to be more honourable than the first state, if from that state the fall into vice took place, while from this the return to virtue takes place. Such an argument, then, is shown to be headless and incomplete, which maintains that souls live by themselves before the life in the flesh and are bound to bodies because of vice. As for those who say the soul is younger than the body, the absurdity was established above. The account of both, then, is equally to be rejected. I think we must direct our own doctrine in truth through the middle of the suppositions. It is this: neither to think, with the Greek error, that souls revolving with the universe, weighed down by some vice, fall to the earth through inability to keep pace with the swiftness of the motion of the pole; nor again to say that man was first formed in thought like a clay statue and that the soul came to be for its sake. For then the intellectual nature would be shown to be less honourable than the clay figure.

An establishment of the doctrine that the cause of existence of soul and body is one and the same. Since man, who is constituted of soul and body, is one, we must suppose one common beginning of his constitution, so that he may not become older and younger than himself, the bodily element in him coming first and the other later. Rather, we must say that by the foreknowing power of God, according to the account given a little earlier, the whole fullness of humanity pre-existed, the prophecy bearing witness to this, which says that God knows all things before their genesis; but in the making of each individual we must not place one before the other, neither the soul before the body nor the reverse, so that man may not be at variance with himself, divided by the difference in time. For since our nature is conceived as twofold, according to the apostolic teaching, the outward man and the hidden man, if the one pre-existed and the other came afterward, the power of the Maker would be shown to be imperfect, not sufficient for the whole at once, but dividing the work and busying itself with each of the halves in turn. But as we say that in wheat or in any other seed the whole form of the ear is contained in potency, the blade, the stalk, the joints in between, the grain, the beard, and that none of these, by the account of its nature, pre-exists or comes into being before the others in the nature of the seed, but that the power lying in the seed is made manifest in a certain natural order, while no other nature is introduced into it, by the same reasoning we suppose that the human seed too has the power of its nature contained together in the first beginning of its constitution, and that this power is unfolded and made manifest by a natural sequence as it advances to perfection, not taking anything from outside as a means of perfection, but itself advancing in sequence to perfection. So that we may say neither that the soul exists before the body nor the body without the soul, but that there is one beginning of both, which according to the higher account was laid down in the first will of God, and according to the other comes into existence at the beginnings of genesis. For as one cannot see the articulation of the limbs in what is placed in the womb for the conception of the body before its formation, so neither can one perceive in it the properties of the soul before they advance into activity. And as no one would doubt that what is placed there is formed into the differences of joints and inward parts, not by some other power coming in from outside but by the power lying within it changing into activity, so by analogy one may suppose the same about the soul: that even if it is not made known by any activities in what is seen, it is no less in it. For the form of the man who is to be constituted is in it in potency, but is hidden because it cannot appear before the necessary sequence. So too the soul is in it, even though it does not appear, and it will be manifested by its own proper activity, advancing along with the growth of the body. For the power for conception is not secreted from a dead body but from one that is living and animate. For this reason we say it is reasonable not to think that what is sent forth from a living body as the beginning of life is dead and lifeless. For what is lifeless in flesh is also dead, and deadness comes about by privation of soul; and no one would say that the privation is older than the possession, as one would if he maintained that the lifeless, which is dead, is older than the soul. And if anyone should seek a clearer proof that the part which becomes the beginning of the animal being formed is alive, it is possible to understand it by the other signs too by which the animate is distinguished from the dead. For we take it as a sign of life in human beings that something is warm, active, and moving; but what is chilled and motionless in bodies is nothing else than deadness. Since, then, we see that this of which we are speaking is warm and active, we infer from these things that it is not lifeless either. But as, with regard to its bodily part, we do not say that it is flesh and bones and hair and all that is seen in the human being, but that it is each of these in potency, though not yet appearing in visible form, so too with regard to the part belonging to soul, we say that the rational, the desiring, and the spirited element, and all that is seen in the soul, have their place in it, not yet appearing, but that the activities of the soul grow along with the subject in proportion to the formation and perfection of the body. For as man, when perfected in maturity, has the activity of the soul shining through, so at the beginning of his constitution he shows in himself the cooperation of the soul suited and proportioned to the present need, in its preparing for itself, through the material placed there, the dwelling that suits it. For we do not think it possible for the soul to be fitted to buildings not its own, as the seal in wax cannot be fitted to another engraving. … to be taught its own nature; for it is possible, having understood the manner of life and learned how the body is fitted for every vital activity, to know with what the natural power of the soul was occupied at the first formation of what comes to be. So it is clear from this too, to those who consider it carefully, that what was torn from the living body and placed for the planting of the living creature did not become dead and lifeless in the workshop of nature. For we also cast into the earth the kernels of fruits and the cuttings of roots, not with the vital power lying in their nature deadened, but preserving in themselves the property of the original, hidden but certainly alive. The surrounding earth does not put such a power into them from outside, introducing it of itself; for then even dead pieces of wood would be brought to sprout. Rather, it makes manifest the power lying in them, nursing the plant with its own moisture and perfecting it into root, bark, pith, and the outgrowths of branches. This could not happen unless some natural power had been placed in it together with it, which, drawing to itself from what lies around the nourishment that is akin and suitable, became a bush or a tree or an ear of grain or one of the shrubby growths.

A brief, more medical contemplation of the construction of the body. The exact construction of our body each person teaches himself from what he does, how he lives, and what he perceives, having his own nature as his teacher. It is also possible to learn everything exactly by taking up the inquiries on these matters laboriously set down in books by those wise in such things. Some of them were taught by dissection how each of the parts in us is placed; others also considered and described the purpose for which all the parts of the body came to be, so that from this a sufficient knowledge of the human constitution has come to those who study it. But if anyone wants the Church to be his teacher in all these things, so as to need nothing from the voice outside (for this is the law of the spiritual sheep, as the Lord says, not to listen to a stranger’s voice), we will also treat the account of these things briefly. We have noticed three things about the nature of the body for whose sake each of the parts in us has been constructed. Some are for living, some for living well, and others are fitted for the succession of offspring. All the things in us without which human life cannot exist we have noticed in three parts: in the brain, the heart, and the liver. Those that are a kind of addition of goods and a generosity of nature, which grants man to live well by them, are the organs of sense. For such things do not constitute life, since a man often goes on living no less when some of them have failed; but without these activities it is impossible to share in the pleasures of life. The third aim looks to what follows and to succession. There are also certain other things besides these, which underlie all in common for the continuance of life, bringing in suitable supplies by themselves, such as the stomach and the lung: the one fanning the fire of the heart with breath, the other bringing nourishment into the inner organs. Since, then, the construction in us is divided in this way, one can clearly see that the power of living is not carried on in us in a single way through one thing; rather, nature has distributed the means of our constitution among several parts and makes the contribution of each necessary to the whole. So too the things that nature contrived for the security and beauty of life are more numerous and differ greatly from one another. But I think we must first distinguish briefly the first principles of the things that contribute to the constitution of our life. Let the matter of the whole body, which underlies all the limbs in common, be passed over in silence for now; for the general science of nature will contribute nothing to our purpose in this particular inquiry. Since it is agreed by all, then, that there is in us a share of all the things seen in the world as elements, the hot and the cold, and the other pair conceived as the moist and the dry, we must treat the particulars. We see, then, three powers that govern life: one warms the whole with heat; another moistens with fluid what is warmed, so that the living creature may be preserved in the middle by the equal strength of the opposite qualities, neither the moist being parched by an excess of heat nor the heat quenched by the prevalence of the moistening; and the third power holds together by itself, in a kind of joining and harmony, the separate joints, fitting them with its own ligaments and sending into all the self-moving and voluntary power; when it fails, the part becomes paralysed and deadened, having no share in the voluntary breath. But before these it is worth considering the skill of our nature in the very making of the body. Since what is hard and resistant does not admit the activities of sense, as can be seen in the bones in us and in the plants in the earth (in which we perceive a form of life in growing and being nourished, yet the resistance of the subject did not admit sense), for this reason a kind of wax-like construction had to underlie the activities of sense, able to be sealed with the impressions of perception, neither so confused by excessive moisture (for the impression would not remain in what is liquid) nor resisting by excessive solidity (for what does not yield takes no impressions), but midway between softness and firmness, so that the living creature might not lack the finest of nature’s activities, I mean the movement of sense. But since what is soft and yielding, having none of the activity of firm things, would certainly be motionless and without joints, like the sea-lungs (jellyfish), for this reason nature mixes into the body the firmness of the bones; and having united these to one another by a natural fitting, and bound their joinings tight with the ligaments of the sinews, it then grew around them the flesh that receives the senses, enclosed by a surface less easily hurt and of greater tension. On this firm nature of the bones, then, as on load-bearing pillars, it set the whole weight of the body; but it did not make the bone undivided through the whole. For man would have remained motionless and inactive if he had been so constructed, like a tree remaining in one place, with neither the alternation of the legs bringing his motion forward nor the service of the hands being of use to life. But as it is, by this device it contrived that the instrument should be able to move about and act, putting into the body the impulse and power for motions by the voluntary breath that passes through the sinews. From this comes the service of the hands, varied and versatile and fitted for every device; from this the turnings of the neck, the bending and raising of the head, the activity of the jaw, the opening of the eyelids at a nod, and the movements of the other joints, which are worked by certain sinews drawn tight or relaxed as by some machine. And the power passing through these has a kind of self-commanded impulse, working by a voluntary breath, by some economy of nature, in each part. The membrane of sinew that encloses the brain was shown to be the root and beginning of all movements of the sinews. We do not think we need busy ourselves further, then, about which vital part is of this kind, since the power of motion has been shown to be in it. That the brain contributes something very great to life is clearly shown by what happens in the opposite case. For if the membrane around it suffers some wound or rupture, death at once follows the injury, nature not holding out against the wound even for an instant; as when a foundation is pulled away the whole building is shaken down along with the part. That, then, whose injury plainly brings the destruction of the whole living creature would properly be acknowledged to hold the cause of life. And since, in those who have ceased to live, the heat that lay in their nature is quenched and the dead body grows cold, for this reason we have recognized the cause of life in heat too. For it is entirely necessary to acknowledge that the living creature is constituted by the presence of that whose failure was followed by deadness. Of such a power we recognized the heart as a kind of spring and beginning, from which pipe-like passages branch out in many directions, one from another, and pour a fiery and hot breath through the whole body. And since some nourishment had certainly to be provided by nature together with the heat (for fire cannot remain by itself unless it is nourished by what suits it), for this reason the channels of blood, starting from the liver as from a spring, travel together with the hot breath everywhere through the body, so that neither, isolated from the other, may destroy the nature by becoming a disorder. Let this teach those who do not keep to equality, being taught by nature that greed is a destructive disorder. But since only the divine needs nothing, while human poverty needs things from outside for its own constitution, for this reason nature brings in flowing matter from outside to these three powers by which, we said, the whole body is governed, admitting what suits them by different entrances. To the spring of blood, which is the liver, it has supplied provision by food. For what is continually brought in by food makes the springs of blood gush forth through the liver, as the snow on the mountain increases the springs at its foot by its own moisture, pressing its proper fluid down through the depth into the veins below. … The breath of the heart is brought in through the neighbouring organ, which is called the lung and is the receptacle of the air, drawing in the outer air by breathing through the windpipe that lies in it and reaches to the mouth. In the middle of it the heart is enclosed, and, imitating the activity of ever-moving fire, it too moves without ceasing, as the bellows do in forges: it draws to itself from the lung beside it, filling its hollows by expansion, and fanning its own fiery element, it breathes it into the arteries attached to it. And it does not cease doing this, drawing from outside into its own hollows by expansion, and sending what is its own into the arteries by contraction. This seems to me also to be the cause of this involuntary breathing of ours. … For the mind is occupied with other things, or is wholly at rest when it is relaxed in sleep, yet the breathing of air does not cease, though choice contributes nothing to it. … contracting and collapsing, it necessarily presses out and sends forth the breath left in its hollows; and drawing back and opening, it draws the air by suction into the emptied space through its expansion. And this is the cause of this involuntary breathing: the inability of the fiery element to be at rest. For since activity in motion is proper to heat, and we recognized its beginnings in the heart, the continual motion in this part produces the unceasing rush and inflow of air through the breath. For this reason too, when the fiery element is intensified against nature, the breathing of those burning with fever becomes more frequent, as if the heart were hastening to quench the blaze within it with fresher breath. But since our nature is poor and in need in every way of what is required for its own constitution, it is not only poor in air of its own, and in the breath that rouses the heat, which is continually brought in from outside for the preservation of the living creature, but also has as something acquired the nourishment that supports the bulk of the body. For this reason it fills up what is lacking with food and drink, nature having put into the body a power that draws in what is lacking and expels what is superfluous. And for this too the fire of the heart provides no small cooperation to nature. For since the heart is the most important of the vital parts, according to the account given, enkindling each of the parts with the hot breath, our Fashioner made it active on every side by the effectiveness of its power, so that no part of it might be left idle and useless for the economy of the whole. For this reason, having placed the lung behind it, by its continual motion it draws that organ toward itself, widening the passages for the drawing in of air, and, lifting it up again, causes what is held in it to be breathed out. And in front, grown against the space of the upper stomach, it makes it warm and moves it to its own activities, rousing it not to draw in breath but to receive suitable nourishment. For the entrances of breath and of food lie near each other; they run alongside each other lengthwise and end at the top in equal measure, so as to open into one another and end their passages in one mouth, from which the entrance is made, by the one for food and by the other for breath. But toward the depth the close joining of the pair of passages does not remain throughout; for the heart, falling in the middle between the seats of the two, gives to the one the power for breathing and to the other the power for nourishment. For it is the nature of the fiery to seek the matter that feeds it, which necessarily happens with the receptacle of food. For the more it is fired by the neighbouring heat, the more it draws in what feeds the heat; and such an impulse we call appetite. And when the container of food has grasped sufficient matter, not even so is the activity of the fire at rest; but as in a melting pot it makes a kind of fusion of the matter, and having dissolved and liquefied what was solid, pours it out as from a funnel into the passages that follow. Then, separating the coarser from the pure, it leads the fine part through certain channels to the gates of the liver, and pushes the material sediment of the food into the wider passages of the intestines, and by turning it about for a time in their many windings it keeps the food in the inward parts, so that it may not, being easily discharged through a straight passage, at once rouse the living creature to appetite, and man never cease from such occupation, like the nature of the irrational creatures. And since the liver especially needed the cooperation of heat for turning the fluids into blood, and it stands apart from the heart in position (for it was not possible, I think, for one beginning and root of vital power to be crowded beside the other), so that nothing in the economy might be harmed by its distance from the warming substance, a sinewy passage (those wise in these matters call it an artery), receiving the fiery breath of the heart, carries it to the liver, opening into it somewhere near the entrance of the fluids; and, boiling up the moisture by its heat, it deposits in the fluid something of its kinship with fire, staining the form of the blood red with its fiery colour. Then twin channels, starting from there, each enclosing in its tube its own content, breath and blood, so that the fluid may travel easily, being carried along and lightened by the motion of the heat, are spread in many branches over the whole body, dividing into countless beginnings and branchings of channels in every part. And the two beginnings of the vital powers, mixed with each other, the one that sends heat everywhere through the body and the one that sends moisture, bring from their own resources, as a necessary loan, an offering to the more principal power of the vital economy. This is the power seen in the meninges and the brain, from which comes every movement of the joints, every contraction of the muscles, every voluntary breath sent into the individual parts, which shows our earthy statue active and moving, as if by some machine. For the purest of the heat and the finest of the moisture from each power, united by a kind of mixture and blending, nourish and sustain the brain through their vapours. From it in turn the exhalation, refined to its purest, anoints the membrane that encloses the brain, which, extending like a pipe from above into the depth through the successive vertebrae, conducting itself and the marrow lying within it, ends together with the base of the spine; and it itself, like a charioteer, gives the impulse and power of each movement and rest to all the junctions of bones and joints and the beginnings of the muscles. For this reason it seems to me to have been thought worthy of a safer guard: in the head it is enclosed all round by a double wall of bones, and in the vertebrae by the projections of the spines and the various interlacings of their shape, by which it is guarded in all freedom from injury, having its safety from the guard that surrounds it. One might suppose the same about the heart too: that it has been fitted as a safe house, fortified all around by the hardest enclosures of bones. For behind is the spine, secured on either side by the shoulder blades; on each side the position of the ribs, enfolding the middle, makes it hard to injure; and in front the breastbone and the pair of collarbones are set as a defence, so that its safety may be guarded on every side from things troubling it from outside. And as can be seen in farming, when rain from the clouds or the flow of channels makes the ground beneath soaked through (let a garden be supposed for the argument, nourishing in itself countless varieties of trees and every form of plants that grow from the earth, whose shape and quality and particular colour are seen in each with great difference), while so many things are nourished by moisture in the one place, the power that moistens each is one in nature, but the property of the things nourished changes the moisture into different qualities. For the same moisture becomes bitter in wormwood, changes into a deadly juice in hemlock, and becomes one thing in one plant and another in another, in saffron, in balsam, in the poppy: in one it is heated, in another cooled, in another it has a middle quality. In the bay and the rush and the like it is fragrant; in the fig and the pear it is sweetened; through the vine it became grape and wine; and the juice of the apple, the red of the rose, the brightness of the lily, the dark blue of the violet, the purple of the hyacinth’s dye, and everything that can be seen on earth, sprouting from one and the same moisture, is distinguished into so many differences of shape, form, and quality. Something of this kind is worked wonderfully by nature, or rather by the Lord of nature, in our living field too. Bones and cartilage, veins, arteries, sinews, ligaments, flesh, skin, fat, hair, glands, nails, eyes, nostrils, ears, all such things and countless others besides, separated from one another by different properties, are nourished by one form of food suitably to their own nature, so that the food, when it comes near each of the subjects, is altered according to whatever it approaches, becoming proper and natural to the property of the part. For if it comes to the eye, it is blended with the part that sees and distributed suitably to each of the differences of the coats of the eye. If it flows to the parts of hearing, it is mixed with the nature of hearing; in the lip it becomes lip; in bone it solidifies, in marrow it softens; it is strengthened with the sinew, stretched with the surface, passes into nails, and is made fine by suitable vapours for the generation of hair: if it is carried through crooked passages, producing curlier and twisted hair, if the progress of the hair-making vapours is straight, producing straight and long hair. But our argument has wandered far from the subject, plunging into the works of nature and trying to sketch how and of what each of our parts has been constituted, both those for living and those for living well, and whatever else we noticed besides these in the first division. For our purpose was to show that the seminal cause of our constitution is neither an incorporeal soul nor a soulless body, but that from animate and living bodies a living and animate creature is generated at the first; and that human nature receives it and nurses it like a nurse with her own powers; and that it is nourished in both respects, and shows its growth suitably in each part. For at once, through this skilful and knowing formation, it shows the power of the soul interwoven with it, appearing more dimly at first, then shining out together with the perfecting of the instrument. It is as one can see with sculptors. The artist sets out to show the form of some animal in stone; having proposed this, he first breaks the stone from the material it is joined to; then, cutting away what is superfluous, he advances it in a way, by the first outline, toward the imitation he intends, so that even one without experience can guess from what appears the aim of the art. Working on it again, he brings it nearer to the likeness of what he is labouring at. Then, having worked the perfect and exact form into the material, he brings his art to its end; and the stone that was shapeless a little before is a lion, or whatever the artist happens to have made: not because the material has been changed into the form, but because the form has been wrought upon the material. One who reckons something like this about the soul will not miss what is probable. For we say that nature, the artisan of all things, taking the part from the man out of matter of the same kind, fashions a statue within itself. And as the form followed the gradual working of the stone, more dimly at first, more perfectly after the completion of the work, so too in the carving of the instrument the form of the soul appears in proportion to its subject, imperfect in the imperfect and perfect in the perfect. But it would have been perfect from the beginning, had not our nature been mutilated by vice. For this reason the fellowship with passionate and animal generation did not allow the divine image to shine forth at once in what was formed, but brings man to perfection by a certain road and sequence through the more material and animal properties of the soul. The great Apostle too teaches such a doctrine in his letter to the Corinthians, saying, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away the things of the child.” Not that another soul entered the man besides the one perceived in the boy; rather, the more childish understanding is done away and the manly one arises, the same soul showing imperfection in the one and perfection in the other. For as we say that things that grow and increase live, and no one would call lifeless all those that share in life and natural motion, yet one cannot say that such life shares in a perfect soul either. For a certain activity of soul arising in plants did not reach as far as the movements of sense. And again, a certain power of soul arising by addition in the irrational creatures did not itself reach the end either, not containing in itself the gift of reason and understanding. That is why we say that the true and perfect soul is the human one, recognized through every activity. And if anything else shares in life, we call it animate by a certain misuse of customary speech, not because the soul in these is perfect, but because there are certain parts of the activity of soul, which, we have learned, were added in man too, according to Moses’ mystical account of man’s making, through his kinship with the passionate. That is why Paul, counselling those willing to listen to hold to perfection, also sets out the way they may attain what they are earnest for, saying that one must put off the old man and put on the new, which is being renewed according to the image of the one who created him. But let us all return to that godlike grace in which God created man in the beginning, when he said, “Let us make man according to our image and likeness.” To him be the glory and the power to the ages of ages. Amen.