On the Soul 25–32

Now I shall return to the cause of this digression, to explain how souls overflow from one, when, where, and in what manner they are derived. On this matter it makes no difference whether the question comes from a philosopher, a heretic, or the common crowd. To those who profess the truth, its adversaries are of no account—especially such bold ones as these first, who presume that the soul is not conceived in the womb, nor compacted and produced with the fashioning of the flesh, but is impressed from outside on the infant, not yet alive, once the birth has been poured forth. The seed from intercourse, they say, set apart in the woman's parts and quickened by natural motion, thickens into the substance of flesh alone; and this, brought forth and steaming from the furnace of the womb, relaxed by heat like red-hot iron plunged there into cold water, is struck by the chill of the air and both seizes the power of life and utters a vocal sound. This the Stoics hold, with Aenesidemus, and at times Plato himself, when he says that the soul, being otherwise foreign and exiled from the womb, is brought in with the first breath of the newborn infant, just as it is led out with the last breath. We shall see whether he devised this from his own opinion. Among the physicians too there was Hicesius, a betrayer both of nature and of his own art. They were ashamed, I think, to lay down what women would recognize. But how much more blushing the outcome, to be refuted by women rather than approved! For in this matter no one is so fit a teacher, judge, and witness as the sense of that sex itself. Answer, you mothers, you who are pregnant, you who have given birth—let the barren and the males keep silent—it is the truth of your nature that is sought, the reliability of your experience that is consulted: whether you feel any liveliness in the fetus other than your own, from which your flanks throb, your sides quiver, the whole curve of the belly is struck, the region of the weight shifts everywhere; whether these movements are your joy and sure reassurance, because you are confident that the infant thus both lives and plays; whether, if its restlessness stops, you fear for it first; whether it already hears within you, when it is startled by a new sound; whether you crave strange foods for it and also loathe foods for it; whether you share illnesses with one another, so that even from your bruises it is marked inside in the same members, taking to itself the mother's injuries. If bruising and redness are an affection of the blood, there will be no blood without a soul; if illness is an attack on the soul, there will be no illness without a soul; if nourishment, hunger, growth, decline, fear, and movement are the business of the soul, whoever performs them will be alive. Indeed he ceases to live who ceases to perform them. Indeed some are also brought forth dead: how, unless they were alive too? And who are dead, unless those previously alive? Why, even while still in the womb the infant is slaughtered by a necessary cruelty, when, lying crosswise at the exit, it prevents the birth and would kill its mother, unless it is to die itself. So among the physicians' weapons there is an instrument by which the hidden parts are first forced open by a twisting adjustment; with a ring-knife, by which the limbs are cut inside with anxious judgment; with a blunt hook, by which the whole crime is drawn out in a violent delivery. There is also a bronze needle, by which the very slaughter is directed in blind robbery: they call it embryosphaktēs, “fetus-slayer,” from its office of infanticide—surely the destroyer of a living infant. Hippocrates had this, and Asclepiades, and Erasistratus, and Herophilus, the dissector even of adults, and Soranus himself, the gentler one, certain that what is conceived is a living being, and so pitying such most unhappy infancy that it should first be killed, lest it be torn apart alive. Of the necessity of this crime Hicesius too, I believe, had no doubt, though he brings the soul upon those already born by the blow of cold air, because even the word for soul among the Greeks comes from cooling. You should answer: are barbarian and Roman peoples then animated differently, because they have named the soul something other than psychē? And how many nations are reckoned under the hottest sky, their very colour baked? Where do they get a soul, who have no chill of air? I say nothing of the heat of bedchambers and all the provision of warmth necessary there for women in labour, on whom it is most dangerous for any draught to blow. In the very baths, almost, the fetus slips out, and at once its wail is heard. Moreover, if the chill of the air is the treasury of the soul, no one should have been born outside Germany, Scythia, the Alps, and Argaeus. Yet peoples are more numerous in the eastern and southern climate, and their talents readier, while all Sarmatians are sluggish even in mind. For minds would also turn out more knowing from cold, if souls came from chill; for substance and power go together. With these foundations laid, we may also recall those who drew in air alive after their mother's womb was cut open, some Liber or Scipio. But if anyone, like Plato, thinks that two souls cannot come together in one, any more than bodies, I would show him not only two souls gathered into one, as also bodies, in pregnancies, but many other things joined with the soul—of a demon, that is, and not only one, as in Socrates himself, but even seven spirits, as in Magdalene, and a legion in number, as in the Gerasene—so that a soul will more easily be joined with a soul by partnership of substance than an evil spirit by difference of nature. But when the same Plato in the sixth book of the Laws warns to beware lest corruption of the seed through some baseness of intercourse supply a stain to body and soul, I do not know whether he has fallen away more from his former opinion or from this one. For he shows that the soul is brought in from the seed, which he warns must be cared for, not from the first breath of the newborn. From where, I ask you, do we also resemble our parents in soul, in disposition, according to the testimony of Cleanthes, if we are not also drawn from the seed of the soul? And why did the ancient astrologers too direct a man's nativity from the beginning of conception, if the soul is not also from then? To it equally belongs the breath, whatever it is.

But every inconsistency of human opinion ends at the boundaries set by God. I shall now draw my steps back within our own lines, to prove to the Christian what I have answered to philosophers and physicians. Build your faith, brother, on your own foundation. Look at the living wombs of the most holy women, and at the infants there not only breathing but even prophesying. See, the inward parts of Rebecca are disturbed, though the birth is still far off and there is no blow of air. See, a double fetus is in tumult in the mother's parts, though there are as yet no two peoples. It would perhaps have been a portentous petulance of an infancy contending before it lived, spirited before it was animated, if it had only troubled its mother by leaping. But when the birth opens, and the number is seen, and the augury recognized, then, I think, not only the souls of the infants are proved, but their struggles too. The one who had got ahead to be born was held back by the one he had got ahead of, who was not yet fully brought forth, born only as far as his hand. And if the first drank in his soul from the first breath in Platonic fashion, or plucked it from the chill of the air in Stoic form, what of the one who was waited for, who was still held inside and was already holding onto the one outside? Not yet breathing, I suppose, he had seized his brother's heel; still warm from his mother, he wanted to have come out first. O infant, both rival and strong and already contentious—because, I believe, alive! Look also at the singular conceptions, and indeed the more extraordinary ones, of the barren woman and the virgin, who for this very reason might have borne imperfect offspring, as an overturning of nature, the one being numb to seed, the other untouched. If anyone should have been born without a soul, it would have been those who were not duly conceived. But they too are alive, each in his own womb. Elizabeth exults—John had stirred her from within; Mary glorifies the Lord—Christ had moved her from within. The mothers recognize each other's offspring, recognized in turn by them, who were certainly alive, and were not only souls but spirits too. So also you read God's word to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” If God forms in the womb, he also breathes in, as in the original pattern: “And God formed man and breathed into him the breath of life.” Nor would God have known man in the womb unless whole: “And before you came out of the womb, I sanctified you.” Was it still a dead body? Certainly not. For he is the God of the living, not of the dead.

How, then, is a living being conceived? Is the substance of both body and soul formed together, or does one of them come first? We say that both are conceived, formed, and perfected together, just as they are also brought forth together, and that no moment intervenes in conception in which a precedence could be arranged. Consider the last things first. If death is defined as nothing other than the separation of body and soul, life, the opposite of death, will be defined as nothing other than the union of body and soul. If separation befalls both substances at once through death, the pattern of union must have ordained this, which comes equally to both substances through life. Now we recognize life from conception, because we claim the soul from conception; for life begins where the soul does. So they are compacted together into life that are separated together into death. Then, if we give first place to one and second to the other, the times of the seed too must be distinguished according to the order of rank. And when will the seed of the body be placed, when that of the soul? Indeed, if the times of the seeds are divided, the materials too will be held to differ by the distance of times. For even if we confess two kinds of seed, bodily and soul-seed, we nonetheless claim that they are undivided, and in this way contemporaneous and of the same moment. So let us not be ashamed of a necessary explanation. Nature is to be revered, not blushed at. It is lust, not the condition, that has defiled intercourse. It is excess, not the state, that is shameless, since the state is blessed by God: “Increase and multiply.” But excess is cursed: adulteries, debaucheries, and brothels. So in this solemn function of the sexes which unites male and female—I mean ordinary intercourse—we know that soul and flesh act together: the soul by desire, the flesh by deed; the soul by impulse, the flesh by act. So with the whole man shaken by one impulse of both, the seed of the whole man is foamed out, having moisture from the bodily substance and heat from the soul's. And if soul is a cold name among the Greeks, why does the body grow cold when the soul is taken from it? Indeed—to risk modesty rather than proof—in that very heat of the final pleasure, when the generative fluid is expelled, do we not feel something of the soul too going out? And so we grow faint and languid, with a dimming of the light. This will be the soul-seed, coming straight from the distillation of the soul, just as that fluid is the bodily seed, from the draining of the flesh. The examples of the beginning are most faithful. The flesh in Adam was from clay. What else is clay but a rich liquid? From this will be the generative fluid. The soul was from the breath of God. What else is the breath of God but a vapour of spirit? From this will be what we breathe out through that fluid. Since, then, in the beginning two different and separate things, clay and breath, combined to make one man, the two substances, now blended in one, also mixed their seeds, and thenceforth handed on the pattern for propagating the race, so that now too the two, though different, yet united, flow out together, and, sown together in their furrow and field, together sprout a man from both substances, in whom again his seed is present according to his kind, as has been appointed for every generative condition. So from one man comes this whole overflowing of souls, nature observing God's command: “Increase and multiply.” For even in the very preface of the work of one man, “Let us make man,” all posterity was announced in the plural: “and let them rule over the fish of the sea.” No wonder: the promise of the harvest is in the seed.

What, now, is that ancient saying, mentioned by Plato, about the reciprocal traffic of souls: that those departing from here go there and come back here again, and live, and then depart from life, and again the living are made from the dead? Pythagorean, as some would have it; Albinus thinks it divine, perhaps of the Egyptian Mercury. But no saying is divine except that of the one God, by which the prophets, the apostles, and Christ himself thundered. Moses is much older, even than Saturn, by about nine hundred years, let alone his great-grandchildren, and certainly much more divine, since he set out the course of the human race from the beginning of the world through each generation by name and by date, sufficiently proving the divinity of his work by the divining power of his voice. But if the Samian sophist is Plato's source for the recurring return of souls in endless alternation of dead and living, certainly that Pythagoras, though good in other respects, resorted, in order to build up this opinion, to a lie not only disgraceful but reckless. Learn it, you who do not know, and believe it with us. He feigns death, he hides underground, he condemns himself to seven years' endurance there; meanwhile he learns from his mother, his sole confidante and helper, what he would report about those who had since died, to make the story credible. When he thought he had sufficiently altered his bodily appearance to the full horror of an old corpse, he emerges from the shrine of his deceit as if returned from the dead. Who would not believe that he had come back to life, whom he had believed dead, especially hearing from him things about those who had since died which, it seemed, he could have learned only in the underworld? So the saying that the living come from the dead is older. What if it were newer too? Truth does not need antiquity, nor does falsehood avoid novelty. I hold it plainly false, though noble by antiquity. Why should it not be false, when its very testimony comes from a falsehood? How shall I believe that Pythagoras does not lie, when he lies so that I will believe? How will he persuade me that he was formerly, before Pythagoras, Aethalides and Euphorbus and Pyrrhus the fisherman and Hermotimus, in order to persuade me that the living are made from the dead—he who perjured himself about being Pythagoras again? For as much more credible as it would have been that he himself had returned to life once as himself than so often as one man after another, so much did he deceive in the harder things, who lied in the easier. But, they say, the shield of Euphorbus had been dedicated long before at Delphi; he recognized it, called it his own, and proved it by marks unknown to the public. Look at his underground chamber and, if you can, believe. For a man who devised such a trick, with injury to his health, with the defrauding of his life, tormented seven years under the earth by hunger, idleness, and darkness, and who so disdained the sky—what recklessness would he not approach, what curiosity would he not attempt, to come to know that shield? What if he found it in some more obscure histories? What if he drew some faint breaths of report surviving from a tradition now lapsed? What if he learned it by a secret inspection bought from the temple-keeper? We know too that magic claims to use, for exploring hidden things, spirits that bring down, familiar spirits, and pythonic spirits. Did not Pherecydes too, Pythagoras' teacher, perhaps divine—not to say dream—by these arts? What if the same demon was in him that did the bloody deeds in Euphorbus? Finally, if he proved himself Euphorbus from the evidence of the shield, why did he not likewise recognize any of his Trojan fellow soldiers? For they too would have come back to life by now, if the living were made from the dead.

It is agreed that the dead are made from the living, but not, for that reason, the living from the dead. For from the beginning the living came first, and so from the beginning the dead came later—from nowhere but the living. The former had some other source to arise from, as long as it was not the dead; the latter had no other source to be derived from except the living. If, then, from the beginning the living did not come from the dead, why later from the dead? Had that fountain of origin, whatever it is, failed? Or did the pattern cause regret? And how is it preserved in the dead? Is it not the case that, because from the beginning the dead came from the living, therefore always from the living? For either the pattern of the beginning would have persisted on both sides, or it would have changed on both; so that if the living had later to be made from the dead, likewise the dead would have to be made not from the living. If the constancy of the original institution did not have to be kept equal, then contraries do not everywhere alternate by being re-formed from contraries. For we too shall set out the contraries of born and unborn, sight and blindness, youth and old age, wisdom and folly; yet it does not follow that the unborn comes from the born because a contrary comes from a contrary, nor sight again from blindness because blindness befalls sight, nor youth come back to life from old age because old age withers out of youth, nor folly blunted again out of wisdom because wisdom is sharpened out of folly. Here Albinus too, anxious for his Plato, subtly tries to distinguish kinds of contraries—as though these were not placed among contraries as absolutely as those which he interprets according to his master's opinion, I mean life and death. Yet life is not given back from death because death is brought from life.

And what shall we answer to the rest? First: if the living came from the dead as the dead from the living, one and the same number of all men would always have remained—the number, that is, which first entered life. For the living came before the dead, then the dead from the living, and again the living from the dead. And since this would always be from the same people, there would always be as many as came from the same. For neither more nor fewer would have gone out than came back. But we find in the records of human antiquities that the human race has grown steadily, as Aborigines, whether wanderers, exiles, or men seeking glory, occupy lands: as the Scythians the Parthian lands, the Temenidae the Peloponnese, the Athenians Asia, the Phrygians Italy, the Phoenicians Africa; while also regular migrations, which they call apoikiai, send out swarms of the nation into other territories by design, to unburden the population. For the Aborigines both remain now in their own seats and have lent out their stock at interest elsewhere. Certainly the world itself is plainly more cultivated and better furnished day by day than before. Everything is now accessible, everything known, everything busy with trade; the most pleasant estates have blotted out once-famous wildernesses, ploughlands have tamed forests, flocks have routed wild beasts, sands are sown, rocks are opened up, marshes drained; there are now more cities than there were once huts. Islands no longer frighten, nor do cliffs terrify; everywhere a house, everywhere a people, everywhere a commonwealth, everywhere life. The greatest testimony to the multitude of mankind: we are a burden to the world; the elements scarcely suffice for us; our needs press harder, and complaints are on everyone's lips, since nature no longer sustains us. In truth, plagues and famine and wars and cities swallowed up must be counted as a remedy, a kind of pruning of the overgrown human race. And yet, though axes of this kind cut down a very great mass of mortals at once, the world has never once been startled, after a thousand years, by a restoration of it that brought back the living from the dead. For an equal force of loss and restoration would have made this perceptible, if the living came from the dead. And why after a thousand years and not at once, the living from the dead? For if what was spent were not replaced at once, there would be a danger of total consumption, the failure outrunning the restoration, since this supply of life would not match the millennial period, being so much shorter and therefore more easily extinguished than rekindled. So since what would in this way have perished … if the living came from the dead, has not perished, it is not to be believed that the living come from the dead.

Next, if the living come from the dead, then surely one from one. So the souls of single bodies ought to return, as single souls, into single bodies. But if two and three and five at once are taken up in one womb, the living will not be from the dead, since not one from one. And in this way the pattern of the beginning is marked, since even now several souls are brought forth from one. Again, since souls depart at various ages, why do they return at one age? For all begin again from infancy. What sort of thing is it that an old man who has died should return an infant? If the soul decreases outside the body, its age going backwards, how much more fitting would it be for it to return further advanced after a thousand years—or at least at the age of its death, so as to receive again the span it had left? Moreover, even if the same souls always came round again, though they did not also bring back the same forms of bodies, they ought at least to bring with them the former characteristics of their dispositions, pursuits, and affections, since it would be rash to hold them to be the same if they lacked the things by which they could be proved the same. How do you know, you say, whether it does not happen so in secret, but the condition of the thousand-year age destroys the ability to recognize, since they return there unknown? But I know it does not happen so, when you oppose to me Pythagoras as Euphorbus. For see, it is well established that Euphorbus was a soldierly and warlike soul, from the very glory of the shields dedicated to him; but Pythagoras was so sedentary and unwarlike that, avoiding the battles then in Greece, he preferred the quiet of Italy, devoted to geometry, astronomy, and music, a stranger to the pursuits and inclinations of Euphorbus. Pyrrhus too spent his time catching fish, Pythagoras on the contrary would not even eat them, abstaining from living creatures. Aethalides and Hermotimus had fallen upon beans too among common foods, but Pythagoras taught his disciples not even to walk through a bean-field. How then are the same souls recovered, which will be proved the same neither in dispositions, nor in customs, nor in diet? And now, out of so great a census of Greece, only four souls are recalled. And why only from the census of Greece, when transmigrations of souls and re-embodiments would be happening every day in every nation, every age and rank, and finally every sex—why does Pythagoras alone recognize himself as one man after another, and not I too? Or if it is the privilege of philosophers, and of Greeks at that—as though Scythians and Indians did not philosophize too—why did Epicurus remember no former self, or Chrysippus, or Zeno, not even Plato himself, whom we might perhaps have believed to be Nestor because of the honey of his eloquence?

But Empedocles, who had raved that he was a god, disdained, I suppose, for that reason to remember himself as any of the heroes: “I was a bush and a fish,” he says. Why not rather a melon, being so insipid, and a chameleon, being so puffed up? Clearly as a fish, so as not to rot in some more preserved burial, he preferred to be roasted, by throwing himself into Etna. And from then on transmigration was finished for him, like a summer supper after the roast. So here too we must fight against the more monstrous presumption that turns beasts out of men and men out of beasts. Let the bushes see to themselves. It may be done quickly, too, lest we be forced to laugh more than to teach. We say that the human soul can in no way be transferred into beasts, even if, according to the philosophers, it were reckoned to consist of elemental substances. For whether the soul is fire, or water, or blood, or spirit, or air, or light, we must consider the contraries in each kind among living creatures. To fire are opposed those that are cold—snakes, lizards, salamanders—and also whatever is produced from the rival element, water. Likewise contrary to water are those that are dry and juiceless; indeed locusts, little butterflies, and chameleons delight in dryness. Again, contrary to blood are those that lack its crimson: snails, little worms, and the greater number of fish. Contrary to spirit are those that do not seem to breathe, lacking lungs and windpipes: gnats, ants, moths, and small creatures of this kind. Again, contrary to air are those that always live under the earth or under the water and lack the drawing in of it—you will know the things better than their names. Again, contrary to light are those that are wholly blind or have eyes only for darkness: moles, bats, owls. I say this to teach from visible and evident substances. But if I held the atoms of Epicurus, saw the numbers of Pythagoras, came upon the ideas of Plato, and seized the entelechies of Aristotle, I would perhaps find animals in these kinds too to set against them under the name of contrariety. For I maintain that, whatever of the substances named above the human soul consisted of, it could not have been refashioned into animals so contrary to each substance, and contribute its being to them by its transfer, from which it would rather be shut out and rejected than admitted and received, by reason of this first contrariety, which produces a difference of substantial state, and then of the other contrarieties that follow in order from each nature. For the human soul has been allotted other dwellings, food, equipment, senses, affections, intercourse, and offspring; likewise dispositions, and also works, joys, weariness, vices, desires, pleasures, illnesses, remedies, and finally its own ways of life and ends of death. How then will that soul which clung to the earth, fearless of no height and no depth, tired out even by climbing stairs, choked even by sinking in fishponds, afterwards leap on the air in an eagle, or dart about the sea in an eel? How, likewise, will a soul brought up on generous, delicate, and well-prepared foods chew—I do not say chaff—but thorns and the wild bitterness of leaves, and the beasts of dung-heaps, even the poisons of worms, if it passes into a goat or a quail; indeed, carrion, and even human flesh, if it remembers itself, as it must, in a bear or a lion? So you will reduce the rest to incongruity, lest we linger pleading each case. Whatever the measure and size of the human soul itself, what will it do in animals far larger or smaller? For it is necessary both that every body be filled by the soul and that every soul be covered by the body. How then will a man's soul fill an elephant? How likewise will it be covered in a gnat? If it is so stretched or contracted, it will surely be endangered. So I add: if it is in no way capable of such a transfer into animals, not matching them either in the dimensions of their bodies or in the other laws of its nature, will it then be changed according to the qualities of the kinds and their life, contrary to human life, becoming itself contrary to the human by the change? But if it admits change and loses what it was, it will not be what it was; and if it will not be what it was, the transmigration is dissolved, since it cannot be ascribed to the soul which, if it is changed, will not be what it was. For transmigration would be said of that soul only which underwent it while remaining in its own state. If, then, it can neither be changed, lest it cease to be itself, nor remain in its state, because it does not admit contraries, I still look for some credible reason for such a transfer. For even if some men are likened to beasts by the qualities of their characters, dispositions, and feelings—since God too says, “Man has been likened to the senseless beasts”—it does not follow that kites will come from the rapacious, dogs from the filthy, panthers from the fierce, or sheep from the honest, swallows from the chatterers, and doves from the chaste, as though the same substance of the soul everywhere repeated its nature in the properties of animals. Substance is one thing, the nature of the substance another; for substance is proper to each thing, but nature can be common. Take an example. Stone and iron are substances; hardness is the nature of the substance of stone and iron. The hardness is shared; the substance differs. The softness of wool, the softness of a feather: their natural qualities match, their substantial ones do not. So too, if a man is called a savage beast or an honest one, the soul is still not the same. For the likeness of nature is noted precisely when the unlikeness of substance is observed. By the very fact that you judge a man like a beast, you confess that the soul is not the same, by saying “like,” not “itself.” So too the divine pronouncement is wise, likening man to cattle by nature, not by substance. Besides, God would not have censured man in this way if he had known him to be cattle in substance.