To Tatian on the Soul

Contents

1. 0The author explains that Tatian asked for a treatise on the soul argued without Scripture, to refute the heterodox, and that he will proceed in an orderly way.
2. 1The author lists the questions to be treated (whether the soul is corporeal, simple, immortal, a substance, rational), promises to argue from common notions, and begins: the soul, known only by thought, is known from its operations.
3. 2The body moves neither by outside force nor by nature like fire, since a dead body does not move; so it is moved by a soul, which gives it life.
4. 3The soul is a substance, because it receives contraries such as justice and injustice while remaining itself, and because what gives life to a substance cannot itself lack substance.
5. 4The soul is incorporeal: it adds no bulk to the body, is not moved from without or within as bodies are, is nourished by reason, and has no color, size, or shape.
6. 5Being incorporeal, the soul is simple, uncompounded and without parts.
7. 6The soul is immortal: nothing that exists destroys itself; being simple it cannot be dissolved; being self-moved it never ceases; and its own evils, the vices, do not take away its life.
8. 7The soul is rational, as shown by its invention of useful arts, by the mind's correcting the senses to grasp things as they are, and by its planning everything inwardly before acting.