On the Soul 18–24

I turn to the intellectual side, and to how Plato, separating it from the bodily, commended it to the heretics, having attained knowledge before death. For he says in the Phaedo: “What then about the actual acquisition of wisdom? Will the body be a hindrance or not, if one takes it as a partner in the inquiry? I mean something like this: do sight and hearing have any truth for men, or not? Do not even the poets always mutter this to us, that we neither hear nor see anything certain?” He remembered, no doubt, the comic poet Epicharmus too: “The mind sees, the mind hears; all else is deaf and blind.” So again he says that the one is supremely wise who is wise most by the mind, neither setting sight before himself nor dragging any such sense into his thinking, but using the pure mind itself in reflection to grasp whatever is pure in things, withdrawn above all from eyes and ears and, so to speak, from the whole body, since it disturbs the soul and does not allow it to possess truth and wisdom when it shares with it. We see, then, that against the bodily senses another apparatus is held out, as much better suited: the powers of the soul that work the understanding of that truth whose objects are not present nor subject to the bodily senses, but are far removed from common awareness, in the secret places, in the higher regions, and with God himself. For Plato holds that there are certain invisible, bodiless, supramundane, divine, and eternal substances, which he calls ideas, that is, forms, the patterns and causes of these natural things that are manifest and subject to the bodily senses; and that those are the truths, and these their images. Do the heretical seeds of the Gnostics and Valentinians not shine through already? For from here they seize on the difference between bodily senses and intellectual powers, which they also fit to the parable of the ten virgins: the five foolish ones figure the bodily senses—foolish, you see, because easily deceived—while the wise express the mark of the intellectual powers—wise, you see, because they reach that secret and heavenly truth set in the Pleroma, the mysteries of heretical ideas. For this is what their Aeons and their genealogies are. So they divide sense too: the intellectual kind from their spiritual seed, the sensible kind from the animal, since the animal can in no way grasp spiritual things; to the one belong invisible things, to the other visible, lowly, and temporal things, which are met by sense, being set in images. It is for this reason that we laid the groundwork that the mind is nothing other than a faculty and structure of the soul, and that the spirit is nothing foreign besides what the soul itself is through breath, while whatever God or the devil breathes into it later is to be reckoned an addition. And now, as to the difference between the sensible and the intellectual, we admit nothing but the difference of things—bodily and spiritual, visible and invisible, public and secret—in that the former are assigned to sense and the latter to intellect; yet both are subject to the soul, which perceives bodily things through the body just as it understands bodiless things through the mind, with this proviso, that it also perceives while it understands. For is not perceiving understanding, and understanding perceiving? Or what will sense be but the understanding of the thing perceived? What will understanding be but the sense of the thing understood? Why these tortures, racking simplicity and hanging truth on the rack? Who will show me a sense that does not understand what it perceives, or an understanding that does not perceive what it understands, so as to prove that one can exist without the other? If bodily things are perceived and bodiless things understood, it is the kinds of things that differ, not the dwellings of sense and intellect, that is, not soul and mind. In short, by what are bodily things perceived? If by the mind, then the mind is sensible too, not only intellectual; for while it understands it perceives, since if it does not perceive, it does not understand. If bodily things are perceived by the soul, then the power of the soul is intellectual too, not only sensible; for while it perceives it understands, since if it does not understand, it does not perceive. Likewise, by what are bodiless things understood? If by the mind, where will the soul be? If by the soul, where will the mind be? For things that are distinct must be apart from each other when they do their own tasks. You will indeed think that the mind is absent from the soul when we are so affected in mind that we do not know we have seen or heard something, because the mind was elsewhere. I shall maintain, on the contrary, that the soul itself neither saw nor heard, because it was elsewhere with its power, that is, the mind. For when a man goes mad, it is the soul that goes mad, the mind not being abroad but suffering with it. Rather, the mishap belongs principally to the soul. This is confirmed by the fact that when the soul has departed, the mind is not found in the man either; so it follows the soul everywhere, and does not stay behind it even at the end. And since it follows, it is also bound to it; so the understanding is bound to the soul just as the mind, to which the understanding is bound, follows it. Now let understanding be superior to sense, and a better knower of mysteries, so long as it too is a power proper to the soul, as sense is. It makes no difference to me—unless understanding is preferred to sense so that it may be held more separate by the very fact that it is declared superior. Then, after the difference, the preference too must be beaten back by me, since it would lead to persuading us of a superior god. But we shall try conclusions about God with the heretics on their own field. Now the heading is the soul, and the point is that understanding is not to be treacherously preferred. For even if what is reached by the understanding, as spiritual things, is superior to what is reached by sense, as bodily things, the preference will be one of things—the loftier over the lowlier—not of understanding over sense. For how could understanding be preferred to sense, when it is by sense that it is informed for the knowledge of truths? For if truths are grasped through images, that is, invisible things are known through visible ones—since the apostle too writes to us, “For his invisible things from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood through the things made,” and Plato to the heretics, “The things that appear are the face of hidden things,” and “This world must by all means be an image of something else”—does not the understanding there seem to use sense as its guide, author, and chief foundation, so that truths cannot be reached without it? How then will it be superior to that through which it exists, which it needs, to which it owes all that it reaches? So both conclusions follow: understanding is not to be preferred to sense, since whatever stands by means of something is inferior to it; nor to be separated from sense, since that through which a thing exists is with it.

But neither should we pass over those who deprive the soul of understanding even for a short time. For in this way they pave the road for bringing it in later, as with the mind, from which, of course, understanding comes. They would have infancy held by the soul alone, by which it only lives, not so that it also knows, since not everything that lives knows. So trees live and yet do not know, according to Aristotle and anyone else who shares animate substance with everything. With us this is a thing proper to man, not only as the work of God, which the rest are too, but as the breath of God, which this alone is—the soul that we say is born with all its equipment. And if we are challenged with trees, we shall embrace the example; for in them too, not yet shrubs but still stems and even shoots, as soon as they spring up from their trenches, the proper power of the soul is present. But according to the reckoning of time it waits, growing together and growing up with its strength, until age completes the condition in which nature does its work. Otherwise how could they soon have buds grafted in, and leaves formed, and sprouts swell, and blossoms adorn them, and juices ripen, unless all the equipment of their kind lies quiet in them and, brought forward in its parts, grows large? From the same source, then, from which they live, they also know, by the property both of living and of knowing—and that from their own infancy. For I see the vine, still tender and immature, yet already understanding its own works and wanting to cling to something, leaning on and twined around which it may make progress. Indeed, without waiting for the farmer's training, without a reed, without a prop, if it touches anything, it will embrace it of its own accord, and will clasp it more vigorously by its own talent than by your decision. It hastens to be secure. I see ivy too, press it down as much as you like, at once striving upward and hanging on with no one leading it, because it prefers to climb walls with its woven forest than to be trodden on the ground by voluntary injury. On the other hand, those to which a building does harm—how they draw back as they grow, how they shun it! You would feel that their branches are aimed elsewhere, and understand the animation of the tree from its divorce from the wall; it is content with its smallness, which it learned from the beginning as a most provident shrub, fearing even the fall. Why should I not maintain these wisdoms and knowledges of trees? Let them live, as the philosophers will; let them know, as the philosophers will not; let the infancy of wood understand—how much more that of man? For man's soul, like a shoot drawn off from the parent stock of Adam into a layer, and entrusted to the genital furrows of the woman, has sprouted with all its equipment, of understanding as well as of sense. I lie if the infant, as soon as it has greeted life with its wail, does not testify that it has perceived and understood this very fact, that it is born, dedicating all its senses at once there and then: sight by light, hearing by sound, taste by moisture, smell by air, touch by earth. So that first cry is forced out by the first utterances of the senses and the first impulses of the understanding. There is more: some interpret that tearful cry as the voice of one foreseeing the troubles of a life full of weeping, so that it must be held to have foreknowledge from the very entrance of birth, let alone understanding. From then on it tests its mother by the breath, examines its nurse by the breath, recognizes its carrier by the breath, fleeing strange breasts and refusing unknown beds, seeking no one but those it is used to. Where does it get judgment of the new and the familiar, if it does not know? Where does it get being offended and soothed, if it does not understand? It would be strange indeed for infancy to be naturally spirited without having a mind, and naturally affectionate without having understanding. But Christ, by finding praise from the mouths of sucklings and little children, declared neither childhood nor infancy dull: the one, coming to meet him with acclaim, could offer him testimony; the other, slaughtered for his sake, certainly perceived him.

Here too, then, we conclude that all the natural properties of the soul, as belonging to its substance, are present in it and advance and progress with it, from the moment it is reckoned to exist. As Seneca, so often on our side, says too: “The seeds of all arts and ages are implanted in us, and God, the master, secretly draws out our talents”—from the seeds, of course, implanted and hidden through infancy, which are the understanding too. For from these the talents are drawn out. Again, the seeds of crops have one form for each kind, yet varied developments. Some come out in their original state, some turn out even better, some degenerate, according to climate and soil, the method of labour and care, the course of the seasons, the licence of chance. So too the soul may be uniform in seed, multiform in growth. For here too place makes a difference. It is reported that at Thebes people are born dull and stupid, at Athens very sharp in wisdom and speech, where, around Colyttus, boys speak a month earlier with precocious tongues. Plato too in the Timaeus affirms that Minerva, when she was building that city, looked to nothing but the nature of the region, which promised such talents; and so he himself in the Laws instructs Megillus and Clinias to take care over the site for founding a city. But Empedocles places the cause of a sharp or a dull disposition in the quality of the blood, and derives perfection and progress from teaching and training. Still, the peculiarities of peoples are now common talk. The comic poets mock the Phrygians as cowards; Sallust lashes the Moors as fickle and the Dalmatians as fierce; the apostle too brands the Cretans as liars. Perhaps something comes from the body and from health as well. Fatness hinders wisdom, leanness furthers it; paralysis squanders the mind, consumption preserves it. How much more will those accidents count which, apart from bulk and strength, either sharpen or blunt! Sharpening are learning, training, arts, experience, business, studies; blunting are ignorance, sloth, idleness, lusts, inexperience, leisure, vices. Above these, there are also some ruling powers. Indeed there are: according to us, God the Lord and the devil his rival; according to common opinion, the fate of providence, necessity, fortune, and freedom of choice. For the philosophers distinguish these, and we have already vowed to discuss them according to the faith under their own heading. It is clear how great are the things that have placed the one nature of the soul in various conditions, so that they are commonly reckoned to nature, though they are not species but lots of one nature and substance—the one which God conferred on Adam and made the parent stock of all. So they will be lots, not species of one substance, as is shown by the fact that this moral variety, as great as it now is, was not so great in Adam himself, the first of the race. For all these things ought to have been in him as in the fountain of nature, and to have flowed from there with all their variety, if the variety were of nature.

But if the nature of the soul was uniform from the beginning in Adam, before so many dispositions, then it is not multiform, since it is uniform through so many dispositions; nor threefold, so that the Valentinian trinity may still be cut down, which is not recognized in Adam either. For what was spiritual in him? If it is because he prophesied that great sacrament concerning Christ and the church—“This bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh shall be called woman; for this reason a man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall be in one flesh”—this came to him later, when God sent upon him the ecstasy, the spiritual power in which prophecy consists. And if the evil of the committed transgression appeared in him, this too is not to be reckoned natural, since he did it at the serpent's instigation—as little natural as it is material, since we have already ruled out belief in matter. But if neither the spiritual nor the so-called material was proper to him—and if he had been from matter, the seed of evil would have been in him—it remains that there was in him only and singly the natural, which is reckoned the animal, which we maintain is simple and uniform in its state. On this it remains, of course, to ask whether what is called natural must be believed changeable. For these same people deny that nature can be converted, so as to fix their trinity in its separate properties: because “a good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor a bad tree good,” and “no one reaps figs from thorns or grapes from thistles.” If that is so, then God will not be able to raise up children to Abraham from stones, nor make the brood of vipers bear fruits of repentance; and the apostle erred in writing, “You too were once darkness,” and “We too were once by nature children of wrath, and you too were among them, but you have been washed.” But the holy sayings will never disagree. For a bad tree will not give good fruit if it is not grafted, and a good tree will give bad fruit if it is not cultivated; and stones will become children of Abraham if they are formed into the faith of Abraham; and the brood of vipers will bear the fruit of repentance if they spit out the poisons of malice. This will be the power of divine grace, stronger certainly than nature, having subject to itself in us the free power of choice, which is called autexousion; and since this too is natural and changeable, whichever way it turns, the nature turns. That free will (to autexousion) is naturally present in us we have already shown both to Marcion and to Hermogenes. And what now if the condition of nature is to be defined as twofold, of the born and the unborn, the made and the unmade? Then the nature of whatever is established as born and made will admit change; for it can be born again and made again. But what is unborn and unmade will stand immovable. Since this belongs to God alone, as alone unborn and unmade and therefore immortal and unchangeable, it is settled that the nature of all other things born and made is convertible and changeable; so that even if a threefold nature were to be ascribed to the soul, it would be reckoned from the change of something accidental, not from the constitution of nature.

The other natural properties of the soul Hermogenes has already heard from us, with their defence and proof, by which the soul is recognized as akin to God rather than to matter. Here they will only be named, so that they may not seem passed over. For we assigned to it freedom of choice, as we wrote above, and dominion over things, and at times divination, apart from what comes by the grace of God through prophecy. So I shall now leave this treatment of its constitution, in order to complete its sequence. We define the soul as born of the breath of God, immortal, bodily, having shape, simple in substance, knowing of itself, developing in various ways, free in choice, subject to accidents, changeable through dispositions, rational, ruling, divining, and overflowing from one. It follows now that we consider how it overflows from one, that is, whence, when, and in what manner it is derived.

Some believe that they came down from heaven, with as much conviction as they promise that they will undoubtedly return there. So Saturninus, disciple of Menander the Simonian, taught, affirming that man was made by angels; at first a futile, weak, and unstable work, he writhed on the ground like a worm, lacking the strength to stand; then, by the mercy of the supreme Power, in whose image, though not fully perceived, he had been rashly built, he obtained a little spark of life, which roused him, set him upright, animated him more steadily, and after his departure from life will carry him back to its parent source. Carpocrates too claims as much for himself from the higher regions, so that his disciples equal their souls with Christ, let alone the apostles, and when they wish rank them above him, as having conceived them likewise from the sublime Power that looks down on the principalities that rule the world. Apelles relates that souls were enticed from their supercelestial seats by earthly foods by a fiery angel, the God of Israel and ours, who then fashioned sinful flesh around them. The swarm of Valentinus stuffs the seed of Sophia into the soul, by which they recognize from the images of visible things the histories and Milesian tales of their Aeons. I am sorry, in good faith, that Plato has become the spice-seller of all the heretics. For his is the idea in the Phaedo that souls go from here to there and from there to here; and likewise in the Timaeus, that the offspring of God, to whom the generation of mortals had been delegated, took the immortal principle of the soul and congealed a mortal body around it; and that this world is the image of something else. To commend all this to belief—that the soul formerly lived above with God in the fellowship of the ideas, and passes from there to here, and here recalls what it formerly knew of the patterns—he worked out a new argument: mathēseis anamnēseis, that is, learning is remembering. For souls coming from there to here forget the things among which they formerly were, and then, taught by these visible things, remember them. Since, then, the things the heretics borrow are insinuated by Plato through this kind of argument, I shall sufficiently strike back at the heretics if I shatter Plato's argument.

First, I shall not grant that the soul is capable of forgetting, since Plato has granted it so great a divinity as to make it equal to God. He makes it unborn—which alone I could have armed as testimony to full divinity; he adds immortal, incorruptible, bodiless (because he believed God to be so too), invisible, shapeless, uniform, ruling, rational, intellectual. What more could he inscribe on the soul if he called it God? We, however, who weigh nothing against God, rate the soul far below God by this very fact, that we acknowledge it to have been born, and therefore of a more diluted divinity and slighter happiness, as breath, not as spirit; and if immortal, as belonging to divinity, yet passible, as belonging to birth, and therefore capable from the beginning of going astray, and so also akin to forgetting. Enough of this with Hermogenes. But a soul which, by the equalling of all its properties, could rightly be considered God, will be subject to no passion, and so not to forgetting either, since forgetting is as great an injury as the glory of what it injures, namely memory—which Plato himself proclaimed the safeguard of the senses and understanding, and Cicero the treasury of all studies. Nor will the question now be whether so divine a soul could lose its memory, but whether it could recover it once lost. For I doubt whether a soul that ought not to have forgotten, if it has forgotten, is able to remember. So both points will fit my soul, not Plato's. In the second step I shall object: do you make the soul possessed of those ideas by nature or not? By nature, you say. Then no one will grant that natural knowledge of natural arts fails. Knowledge of studies will fail, of teachings and disciplines; perhaps that of dispositions and feelings too, which seem to be of nature but are not, since, as we said before, they depend on accidents—on places, upbringing, bodily build, health, ruling powers, and freedom of choice. But knowledge of natural things does not fail even in beasts. A lion will, of course, forget his fierceness, overcome by training in gentleness, and with all his furniture of mane become the pet of some queen Berenice, licking her cheeks clean with his tongue. The beast will lose its manners; its knowledge of natural things will remain. It will not forget its natural foods, its natural remedies, its natural terrors; even if the queen offers it fish and cakes, it will want meat; and if she mixes it a theriac when it is ill, the lion will look for a monkey; and even if no hunting spear threatens it, it will still fear the cock. In the same way, in man, perhaps the most forgetful of all creatures, knowledge of natural things alone will remain unblotted, as the only natural knowledge: always remembering to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty, to see with the eyes, hear with the ears, smell with the nose, taste with the mouth, and handle with the hand. These surely are the senses which philosophy disparages by preferring the intellectual. If, then, natural knowledge of the sensible remains, how does that of the intellectual, which is held superior, perish? Where now does this power of forgetting that precedes recollection come from? From the length of time, he says. That is rather short-sighted. For quantity of time will not concern a thing called unborn and therefore believed above all to be eternal. What is eternal, because it is also unborn, admits neither beginning nor end of time and so suffers no measure of time. What has no measure of time is not subject to time by any change, nor has length of time any power over it. If time is the cause of forgetting, why does memory slip away from the moment the soul is brought into the body, as though the soul endured time from then on—the soul which, before the body, was certainly not without time? And having entered the body, does it forget at once, or some while later? If at once, what length of time will there be, not yet to be reckoned? Infancy, of course. If some while later, then in that interval before the times of forgetting will the soul still live remembering? And what sort of thing is it that it should afterwards forget and afterwards again remember? And at whatever time forgetting assailed it, how great a measure of time will be held to do this? The whole course of life, I think, will not be enough to overturn the memory of so long an age before the body. But Plato again shifts the cause to the body, as though this too were credible, that a born substance should extinguish the power of an unborn one. Yet there are great and many differences of bodies, by race, size, build, age, and health. Will there then be differences of forgetting too? But forgetting is uniform; therefore a multiform corporeality will not be the cause of a uniform result. Many proofs, moreover, on Plato's own testimony, have established the soul's power of divination, which we have already set before Hermogenes. And there is no man who has not at some time felt his own soul presaging, an augur of an omen, a danger, or a joy. If the body does not stand in the way of divination, neither, I think, will it hinder memory. Certainly in the same body souls both forget and remember. If some condition of the body strikes in forgetting, how will it admit recollection, its opposite? Because recollection itself, after forgetting, is memory returning? What opposes the first memory, why should it not also resist the second? Finally, who would remember better than little children, as newer souls, not yet immersed in domestic and public cares, given over only to the studies whose learnings become recollections? Indeed, why do we not all remember equally, since we all forget equally? But only the philosophers do. Not even all of them. Plato alone, it seems, in so great a forest of nations, in so great a meadow of sages, both forgot and remembered the ideas. So if this principal argument by no means stands, the whole thing it was fitted to is equally overthrown—that souls should be believed to be unborn, to have lived in the heavens, to have known divine things there, to have been brought down from there, and here to remember—plainly to supply opportunities to the heretics.