On the Nature of Man 3–4

It is hard to see how the union of the soul with a soulless body comes about, for the matter is perplexing. And if man is composed not only of these but of mind as well, as some hold, it is still more perplexing; and if man is something else besides these, as some have said, there is no solving it. For all things that come together into the existence of one substance are wholly united, and all things united are altered and do not remain what they were before, as is seen with the elements: when they are united they become something else. How then can the soul, which is bodiless and a substance in its own right, be united to a body and become part of the living creature while keeping its own substance unconfused and incorrupt? Either soul and body must be united and both altered and corrupted together, like the elements; or, because of the absurdities just mentioned, they are not united but lie side by side, like dancers in a chorus or a pebble beside a pebble; or they are blended, like wine and water. But it was shown in the discussion of the soul that the soul cannot lie side by side with the body; for then only the part of the body next to the soul would be ensouled, and the part not in contact with it soulless; besides, things set side by side cannot be called one, such as pieces of wood, say, or iron, or anything of the kind. And the blending of wine and water destroys both together: the mixture is neither pure water nor wine. Yet even such a blending happens by juxtaposition, though it escapes the senses because of the fineness of what is blended. This is clear from the fact that they can be separated again: a sponge soaked in oil draws up the water pure, and so does papyrus. But it is wholly impossible to separate perceptibly things exactly united. If, then, they are neither united, nor set side by side, nor blended, what is the reason for calling the living creature one? Because of this difficulty Plato will not have the living creature consist of soul and body, but holds it to be a soul using a body and, as it were, clothed with the body. But this account too has a difficulty. How can the soul be one with its clothing? A tunic is not one with the person who wears it.

Ammonius, the teacher of Plotinus, solved the question in this way. He said that intelligible things are of such a nature that they are united with what can receive them, like things that are corrupted together, and yet when united remain unconfused and incorrupt, like things set side by side. With bodies, union always produces alteration of the things that come together, since they are changed into other bodies, as the elements into compounds, foods into blood, and blood into flesh and the other parts of the body. But with intelligible things union occurs, but alteration does not follow. For the intelligible is not of a nature to be altered in its substance; it either withdraws or perishes into non-being; it does not admit change. But neither does it perish into non-being, for then it would not be immortal. And the soul, being life, if it were changed in the blending, would be altered and would no longer be life; and what would it contribute to the body if it did not give it life? So the soul is not altered in the union. Since it has been shown that intelligibles are unalterable in substance, it necessarily follows that when they are united they are not corrupted together with the things to which they are united. The soul, then, is united to the body, and united without confusion. That it is united, sympathy shows, for the whole living creature is in sympathy with itself, being one. That it remains unconfused is clear from the way the soul, in a manner, separates from the body in sleep, leaving it lying like a corpse and only breathing life into it so that it does not perish entirely, while by itself it is active in dreams, foretelling the future and drawing near to intelligible things. The same happens when it contemplates by itself some intelligible thing; for then too, as far as it can, it separates itself from the body and comes to be by itself, so as to apply itself to the things that are. Being bodiless, it has passed through the whole, like things corrupted together, while remaining incorrupt, like things unconfused, preserving its own unity, changing the things in which it comes to be according to its own life, and not changed by them. As the sun by its presence changes the air into light, making it luminous, and the light is united with the air, at once unconfused and poured through it, so the soul, united to the body, remains wholly unconfused. It differs only in this: the sun, being a body and bounded in place, is not everywhere its light is, as neither is fire, for fire too stays bound in the wood or in the wick, as in a place; but the soul, being bodiless and not bounded by place, passes whole through the whole, both of its own light and of the body, and there is no part lit by it in which it is not wholly present. For it is not held by the body; rather it holds the body. Nor is it in the body as in a vessel or a wineskin; rather the body is in it. For intelligibles are not hindered by bodies, but pass through, pervade, and go through every body, and cannot be confined by bodily place. Being intelligible, they are in intelligible places, either in themselves or in the intelligibles above them: so the soul is sometimes in itself, when it reasons, and sometimes in the mind, when it understands. When it is said to be in the body, then, it is not said to be in the body as in a place, but as in a relation and by being present, as God is said to be in us. For we say the soul is bound by the body by relation, inclination and disposition toward something, as we say the lover is bound by the beloved, not bodily nor spatially, but by relation. Being without magnitude, mass, or parts, the soul is superior to bounding by parts. For what has no parts, by what place can it be bounded? Place exists together with bulk; for place is the limit of the container, by which it contains what is contained. If someone says, “Then my soul is in Alexandria and in Rome and everywhere,” he fails to notice that he is speaking of place again; for “in Alexandria,” and in general “in this or that,” is a place. But the soul is not in a place at all, but in a relation; for it has been shown that it cannot be contained by a place. So when an intelligible comes into relation with some place or with some thing that is in a place, we say by a looser use of words that it is there, because of its activity there, taking the place in place of the relation and the activity. For when we ought to say “it acts there,” we say “it is there.”

This account would fit even more purely and above all the union of God the Word with the man, in which, united, he remained unconfused and uncircumscribed; though not in the manner of the soul. For the soul, being among the things that are multiplied, seems also to suffer somehow along with the body because of their kinship, and sometimes to master it and sometimes to be mastered; but God the Word, in no way altered by the communion with the body and the soul, nor sharing in their weakness, but imparting to them his own divinity, becomes one with them, remaining in what he was before the union. This manner of blending or union is new: he is blended and yet remains altogether unmixed, unconfused, incorrupt and unchanged, not suffering with them but only acting with them, not corrupted or altered with them, but increasing them while himself not diminished by them; besides remaining unchangeable and unconfused, since he has no share in any alteration at all. Porphyry is a witness to this, he who moved his tongue against Christ; and the testimonies of enemies on our behalf are strong and admit no contradiction. This Porphyry, then, in the second book of his Miscellaneous Questions, writes word for word as follows: “We must not despair, then, of the possibility that some substance is taken up to complete another substance and becomes part of a substance while remaining in its own nature after completing another substance, becoming one with another while preserving its own unity; and, what is more, not itself changed, but changing those things in which it comes to be into its own activity by its presence.” He says this about the union of soul and body. If the account is true of the soul because it is bodiless, much more is it true of God the Word, who is incomparably and truly bodiless. This directly stops the mouths of those who attempt to accuse the union of God with man. For many of the Greeks make it a laughing-stock, saying that it is impossible, incredible and unfitting for the divine to come together with a mortal nature by blending and union. But we, using their own reputable men as witnesses, rid ourselves of the charge.

Some, and especially the Eunomians, say that God the Word was united to the body not in substance but according to the powers of each; for it was not the substances that were united or blended, but the powers of the body were blended with the divine powers; and the powers of the body, they say, are the senses, which, blended [with the divine powers], produced the union. But no one, I think, would grant them that the senses are bodily powers. For it was clearly distinguished earlier what is proper to the body, what to the soul, and what to both together; and among the things proper to both together we placed the senses that work through organs, while the organs themselves we said belong to the body. It is better, then, as was said before, to hold that the union of the substances takes place without confusion according to the proper nature of bodiless things, the more divine being in no way harmed by the inferior, but the inferior only benefited by the more divine. For a purely bodiless nature passes unhindered through all things, but nothing passes through it; so that by passing through all things it is united, and by nothing passing through it, it remains unmixed and unconfused. The manner of the union, then, is not good pleasure, as some men of reputation think; nature is the cause. That he took a body one might reasonably say happened by good pleasure; but that what was united was not confused happens according to the proper nature of God, not by good pleasure. As for the ranks of souls and their ascents and descents, which Origen introduces, they have nothing to do with the divine Scriptures and do not agree with the doctrines of the Christians; so they must be passed over.

Every body is a compound of the four elements and has come to be from them. Directly, the bodies of blooded animals come from the four humours, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile; those of bloodless animals from the other humours and from what corresponds in them to blood. “Directly” is said when a thing comes to be immediately from those very things; so that the four humours are compounds of the four elements, and the parts of like substance, which are parts of the body, are compounds of the humours. They compare black bile to earth, phlegm to water, blood to air, and yellow bile to fire. Every compound of elements is either solid, liquid, or breath. Aristotle holds that the bodies of animals come directly from blood alone; for from it all the parts of the animal are directly nourished and grow, and the seed too has its origin from blood. But since it did not seem right that the hardest bones and the softest flesh and fat should come from one and the same thing, Hippocrates was the first to hold that the bodies of animals are put together directly from the four humours, the harder parts from the more earthy and coarser humours, the soft from the softer. And the four humours are often found in the blood, as can be seen in blood-letting, sometimes the watery phlegm abounding in it, sometimes black or yellow bile; so that on this point the men seem in a way to agree with one another.

Of the parts in animals, some are of like substance, others of unlike substance. Of like substance are brain, membrane, sinew, marrow, bone, tooth, cartilage, glands, ligaments, membranes, fibres, hairs, nails, flesh, veins, arteries, ducts, fat, skin, and their immediate elements, as it were: blood (pure blood, that is), phlegm, and black and yellow bile. (The tendon is compound, made of ligaments and sinewy fibres.) Of unlike substance are the head, the chest, the hands, the feet, and the other limbs of man. For the head is not divided into heads, as a sinew is into sinews, a vein into veins, and flesh into flesh; and every part of unlike substance is composed of parts of like substance, as the head of sinews, flesh, bones and the like; these they also call organic parts. The definition of parts of like substance is this: those whose parts are like the whole and like one another; and “like” here must be taken to mean “the same.”

Not every animal has all the parts of the body; some are defective. Some are footless, like fish and snakes; others headless, like crabs, crayfish and some swimming creatures, which have their sense organs in the breast because they have no head; others lack lungs, those that do not breathe air; others have no bladder, like birds and all that do not pass urine. The hard-shelled creatures lack most limbs, for their being alive consists in a few parts. Some seem not to have parts which they do have, as deer seem not to have yellow bile, because they have it scattered in the intestines and invisible. But man has all the parts, and complete, and so arranged that they could not well be otherwise. There is great difference among animals in the position of the parts too: some have the teats on the chest, some on the belly, some under the thighs; some two, some four, some more; for nature has made the number of teats roughly match the number of the young. Whoever wishes to gather these matters precisely should read Aristotle's History of Animals; for it is not the task of the present writing to treat them exactly, but to set out some sketches and outlines. Let us pass, then, to the account of the elements, which follows in order.