On the Soul

Contents

Reading pages: 1–9 · 10–17 · 18–24 · 25–32 · 33–42 · 43–52 · 53–58

1. 1Socrates' calm talk of the soul's immortality before his death was studied composure, not knowledge of truth; knowledge of the soul must be learned from God, its author.
2. 2Philosophers sometimes stumbled on the truth, but they distort it with their own arguments; the Christian must separate truth from their reasoning and learn about the soul from God's writings.
3. 3Because philosophers are the forerunners of heretics, Christians must counter their confused theories of the soul with the Lord's teaching; the soul's origin from God's breath has already been settled.
4. 4Against Plato, who held the soul unborn and unmade, the soul had a beginning: it was both made and born.
5. 5Many philosophers, especially the Stoics Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, argued that the soul is a body.
6. 6The Platonist arguments that the soul is bodiless fail: the soul moves and is moved, is perceived like other things, and is fed by food, as the physician Soranus shows.
7. 7The Gospel story of the rich man and Lazarus, whose souls suffer and are comforted in the underworld, proves that the soul has a kind of body.
8. 8The soul differs from other bodies without ceasing to be a body; it is invisible to the flesh but visible to the spirit, as John saw the souls of the martyrs.
9. 9The soul has dimensions, colour, and human shape, as a Christian prophetess saw in a vision; God's breath took on the form of Adam's body when it filled him.
10. 10The soul is one simple substance; breathing and living are the same act, so the “spirit” by which we breathe is not a second substance but the soul itself.
11. 11The soul may be called “spirit” because it breathes, but it is one simple substance; the Spirit of God or an evil spirit comes upon it later, as with Adam, Saul, and Judas.
12. 12The mind is not a separate substance but a faculty of the soul, against Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and the Valentinians.
13. 13The soul, not the mind, holds the sovereign place: ordinary speech, the philosophers, and above all Scripture speak of the soul as the whole person.
14. 14The soul is one and indivisible; the “parts” philosophers count are really its powers and functions, as one water organ has many pipes.
15. 15The soul has a ruling part, and Scripture places it in the heart, as many philosophers and physicians also held.
16. 16Reason is natural to the soul from God, while the irrational came from the devil through sin; anger and desire can be rational, as they were in Christ.
17. 17Against the Academics, the senses are reliable, since apparent errors have natural causes; to doubt them would make even the witness to Christ's real body untrustworthy.
18. 18Plato and the Gnostics wrongly separate intellect from sense; both are powers of the one soul, and the intellect depends on the senses for its knowledge.
19. 19The soul has understanding from infancy, as even plants show a kind of knowing; the newborn's cry and recognition of its mother prove it, and Christ received praise from infants.
20. 20The soul is uniform in its nature but develops variously through place, body, training, and ruling powers, as seeds grow differently in different soils.
21. 21Against the Valentinian three natures, the soul is one and changeable: grace and free will can turn bad trees good and make stones children of Abraham.
22. 22Tertullian sums up his definition of the soul: born of God's breath, immortal, bodily, shaped, simple, free, rational, and propagated from one original soul.
23. 23Heretics claim that souls came down from heaven, drawing on Plato's teaching that souls pre-existed and that learning is recollection; refuting Plato refutes them.
24. 24Plato's doctrine that learning is recollection fails: a godlike soul could not forget, natural knowledge is never lost, and time or the body cannot explain forgetting.
25. 25Against those who say the soul enters at birth with the first breath, pregnant women know the fetus is alive in the womb; physicians' instruments for killing it show the same, so the soul is present from conception.
26. 26Scripture shows that children live in the womb: Jacob and Esau struggled before birth, John leapt at Christ's presence, and God knew Jeremiah before he was born.
27. 27Body and soul are conceived together from one act of intercourse, each from its own kind of seed, so that all human souls derive from Adam's.
28. 28The doctrine that souls pass back and forth between the living and the dead rests on Pythagoras, who faked his own death and return from the underworld.
29. 29Plato's argument from contraries fails: the dead come from the living, but the living do not therefore come from the dead.
30. 30If the living came from the dead, the human population would stay the same; but mankind has grown so much that the earth can scarcely support it.
31. 31Transmigration makes no sense: souls would return one to one and at the same age, and Pythagoras' supposed former lives were utterly unlike his own.
32. 32The human soul cannot pass into animals, whose natures, sizes, and ways of life are contrary to it; Scripture likens men to beasts only in character, not substance.
33. 33Transmigration as reward and punishment would make divine judgment weaker than human courts; God will judge once and finally, with souls returning to their own bodies.
34. 34Simon Magus built his myth of Helen, his fallen “first Thought,” on transmigration; Tertullian ridicules it by comparing Simon to Menelaus.
35. 35Carpocrates used transmigration to excuse every sin, twisting Christ's parable of the adversary; nor does John the Baptist's being “Elijah” mean reincarnation, since he came only in Elijah's spirit and power.
36. 36Soul and body receive their sex together at conception, as the pattern of Adam and Eve shows, Eve's soul too having come from Adam.
37. 37The fetus is a human being once formed, as the law of Moses on abortion shows; after birth the soul grows with the body not in substance but in its powers, as gold is beaten out.
38. 38The soul's maturity comes with bodily puberty, as sexual shame came with Adam and Eve's knowledge; the soul desires food only for its house, the flesh, and does not die when the body fails.
39. 39Pagan birth rites hand children over to demons from birth; the children of believers are called holy, but only baptism by water and the Spirit makes one truly holy.
40. 40Every soul is unclean in Adam until it is born anew in Christ; the flesh is only the soul's instrument, so sin belongs chiefly to the soul.
41. 41The soul's inherited corruption overshadows but cannot extinguish the good God gave it; in the new birth of baptism it recovers its light and is wedded to the Holy Spirit.
42. 42Against Epicurus and Seneca, death does concern us, since it is what the whole man undergoes; the treatise now turns to death and to sleep, its image.
43. 43Sleep is natural, a rest for the body but not the soul; God made it an image of death and of resurrection, as Adam's sleep prefigured Christ's death and the church born from his side.
44. 44The story that Hermotimus' soul left his body in sleep is better explained as a heavy sleep or disorder; the soul does not wander from the body without death.
45. 45In dreams the soul, restless while the body sleeps, is in a natural “ecstasy” like Adam's; dream deeds carry neither guilt nor merit.
46. 46Many true dreams are recorded in history, against Epicurus; but dreams at pagan oracles, like the oracles themselves, are the work of demons.
47. 47Dreams come from demons, from God (as he promised through the Spirit), from the soul itself, or from the nature of ecstasy.
48. 48Theories linking dreams to time, season, posture, or diet are unproven; but fasting, like Daniel's, commends the soul's ecstasy to God.
49. 49Infants dream too, and no nation is naturally without dreams; reports otherwise are false or the work of demons.
50. 50Death is the debt of nature for all; Menander's claim that his baptism exempts from death is refuted, for even Enoch and Elijah will die, and the apostle John died.
51. 51Death separates the whole soul from the body at once; reports of corpses that seem to move are signs from God, not proof that part of the soul remains.
52. 52Death is not natural to man but the result of sin; every death, even a peaceful one, is a violent tearing apart of soul and body.
53. 53In a slow death the soul only seems to decline because its bodily instruments fail; at the moment of release it sees clearly and perceives, from the angel who summons it, what awaits it.
54. 54The philosophers send only the souls of the wise upward and the rest to an underworld; their schemes are inconsistent.
55. 55All souls go to the underworld to await the resurrection, as Christ himself descended there; only martyrs enter paradise at once.
56. 56Neither the unburied nor those who die young or violently linger on earth; every soul goes at once to the underworld and remains at the age it died until the resurrection.
57. 57Magic's claim to summon the dead is demonic deceit, as with the witch of Endor; no soul returns from the underworld except when God raises the dead bodily.
58. 58All souls wait in the underworld, where they already taste punishment or comfort before the final judgment and the resurrection of the flesh.