Praeparatio Evangelica 15 part 2/5

We now beg that those from the same hearth who are pleased to hold, even against Plato's own view, that the world is ungenerated, may not stand in our way. For it is only fair that they grant us pardon, if concerning what Plato himself thought, we place our trust in the very words with which he, being himself a Greek, spoke plainly and clearly with his own mouth to us Greeks.

For, he says, God, having taken over all that was visible, not at rest but moving discordantly and disorderly, brought it into order out of disorder, judging this to be in every way better than that. And that he did not admit this account of generation as a matter of riddles, nor merely for the sake of clarity, but in earnest, is shown all the more by the words in which the Father of all things spoke to it concerning this matter after the fashioning of the universe.

'For since,' he says (and he speaks to the gods), 'you have come into being, you are not immortal, nor altogether indissoluble; yet you shall by no means be dissolved, since you have obtained my will as your guarantee.'

But, as I said, with those who murmur softly among us from within, being as they are friends, we would settle matters in a friendly way and with mild and gentle refutations, in quietness. For it seems that Aristotle has actually shifted these men too, since, on the one hand, they were unable to withstand the accusation against the doctrine, but, on the other hand, were unwilling to attribute to Plato the reputation of having been caught out in falsehood.

But according to what we have heard, Plato holds that the world came to be as the most beautiful work by the most beautiful of craftsmen, and he has invested the maker of the universe with the power by which he made the world, which previously did not exist, and, having made it, will forever, if he so wills, preserve it safe. And since, on this account, the world is understood by him to be both generated and imperishable, which of the Peripatetics will confirm these things for us?

Now we must comfort the ally of these men, by pointing out that it is not at all necessary that whatever has come into being must therefore perish, nor again is it necessary that whatever will not perish must therefore be ungenerated. For we should not concede that the only cause of imperishability is being ungenerated, nor should we leave what has come into being without any help against change unto destruction.

From where, then, could we get help on these matters from Aristotle—a man who does not conduct his argument about these things carelessly or merely for its own sake, but who directly and outrightly opposes Plato, forcing what has come into being into the necessity of perishing, and asserting that what does not perish acquires its imperishability solely from the fact of not having come into being, and who does not even leave God any power by the exercise of which he might do some good—since, he says, that which has not previously come to be would never come to be?

So far is he from helping Plato's argument through these statements that he has actually, by what he said, frightened away some even of those devoted to Plato and made them abandon the doctrine—men who were unable to perceive that, according to the very nature of these matters taken by themselves, it was impossible, apart from the will and power of God, to conceive of either what has come into being as imperishable, or of what does not perish as having been generated.

But when someone posits the best cause, the one from God, one must, having taken this as the leader of all things, declare it to be inferior to none of the other causes. For it is absurd to say both that a thing perishes because it has come into being—unless God wills otherwise, in which case it does not perish—and yet that something which is ungenerated has the strength not to perish, while the will of God is somehow insufficient to preserve as imperishable something that has come into being.

And the builder is capable of constructing a house that did not exist before; another is capable of making a statue exist that previously did not exist; another, having fashioned a ship out of raw material, has furnished it to those in need; and each of the other craftsmen, as many as pursue the productive arts, possess this power of bringing something out of non-being into being—shall then the King of all and the best of craftsmen not even share in as much power as a human craftsman, and shall he, for us, have no part at all in bringing anything into being? Not so—if indeed we are even in some small measure able to grasp the reasoning proper to a divine cause.

But is he able to make and to will beautiful things (for he is good, and in one who is good there is no envy about anything at all), yet not able to preserve and safeguard what has come into being? Yet even the other craftsmen are capable of both. The builder and the shipwright, at any rate, not only construct new ships and houses, but are also able to come to the aid of those being destroyed by time, replacing the worn-out parts with others in their place.

So this much at least must certainly be conceded also to God. For how could one who is capable of making a whole thing be incapable of doing so in part? Something new, then, must indeed come to be, if one is to be a maker at all, and the good work must also be preserved entirely; for it belongs to an evil disposition to wish to destroy what has come to be well.

There is no greater bond for the preservation of things that have come into being than the will of God. Or is it that many things which have partaken of human zeal and will—nations, cities, and works—having come to be, remain for an immense span of time even after the one who willed them no longer exists, while the things that have partaken of God's purpose, and have come to be both through him and by him—shall these, then, perish and not endure, even while the one who made them is still present?

By the compulsion of what cause could this happen, against the very purpose of God? Is it by the necessity arising from the created things themselves? But this necessity, in accepting to be brought into order, has already confessed its own defeat at the hands of God. Is it, then, by some external cause contending against God? But no such cause exists; nor, in the case of those things which God has already mastered and set in order, is it fitting any longer to think of him as inferior in any respect in these matters—unless, that is, we are altogether deceiving ourselves while discoursing about the greatest and most divine power.

But indeed, it seems we are being carried away by our eagerness into a discourse concerning the truth itself. Yet clear enough is also what we set out to show: that those who do not even grant the world a beginning of generation could hardly be teachers concerning the origin of the world. And now, concerning the fifth substance of bodies which Aristotle introduced, the following must be set forth.

Concerning, then, the so-called elements, from which the first bodies are composed, Plato, following the evident clarity concerning them, just as those before him did, declared that these are agreed to be four: fire, earth, air, and water, and that all the rest come to be from the combination of these. Aristotle, however, as it seems, hoping to appear more accomplished in wisdom by adding some further body over and above these, added to the four apparent bodies a fifth substance—making very splendid and generous use of nature indeed, but failing to perceive that one engaged in natural philosophy ought not to legislate, but rather to inquire into the facts of nature itself.

Now for the demonstration that there are four primary natures of bodies—which the Platonists indeed need—the Peripatetic would not merely fail to contribute anything, but would practically be the sole one to stand in opposition. For when we say that every body is either hot or cold, or wet or dry, or soft or hard, or light or heavy, or rare or dense, and find that nothing else besides these four could partake of any of these qualities—(for if hot, then either fire or air; if cold, water or earth; and if dry, fire or earth; if wet, water or air; and if soft, air or fire; if hard, water or earth; and light and rare, such as fire and air; heavy and dense, water and earth)—and when we perceive from all the other simple properties as well that there could be no other body besides these—this man alone stands opposed, claiming that a body can exist which has no part in any of these: a body that is neither heavy nor light, neither soft nor hard, neither wet nor, indeed, dry—all but saying 'a body that is not a body.' For he has left it its name, but has taken away all the properties by which a body is by nature constituted.

So then, either by persuading us of what he himself says, he will draw us away from Plato's view, or, by confirming Plato's views, he will depart from his own opinions; so that he is in no way useful for the doctrines of Plato.

Further, Plato holds that all bodies, being viewed as resting upon one and the same underlying matter, are able to turn and change into one another; whereas Aristotle, in the case of that substance, insists in every way upon its being unaffected, imperishable, and unchangeable—so that he may not seem to be the begetter of some easily-despised thing—saying, in fact, nothing at all remarkable or original of his own, but merely transferring to what does not properly belong there the very things which Plato had rightly observed about other matters, just like certain of the sculptors who came later.

For those sculptors, by imitating the head of this man, the chest of another, and the girdle of yet another, and combining into one whole things sometimes not fitting together, have persuaded themselves that they had produced something of their own. And indeed the whole, which someone might accuse of being ill-proportioned, is truly theirs; but the parts gathered together within it, insofar as they possess anything beautiful, are not their own.

In the same way, Aristotle too, having heard from Plato that there is a certain intelligible substance, in itself incorporeal, colorless, and untouchable, neither coming into being nor perishing, neither turning nor changing, but ever remaining in the same state and in the same way; and again, having heard concerning the heavenly bodies that they are divine, imperishable, and unaffected bodies—composed and glued together, out of both of these, things that do not harmonize with one another. For, taking from the one the property of being a body, and from the other the property of being unaffected, he fashioned a body that is unaffected.

Now in the case of statues, even if what is composed from disparate parts is not beautiful, it is certainly not impossible for it to come to be. At any rate, Homer teaches us such things too: 'In eyes,' he says, 'and head he was like unto Zeus who delights in thunder, in his girdle like Ares, and in his chest like Poseidon.' But a body that is unaffected could never come to be. For, being bound together with a nature that is affectable and changeable, it necessarily must be affected along with that to which it is yoked. But if something were truly unaffected, this must be released and free from that which is subject to being affected; so that it would be separate from matter, and, being separated from matter, it would necessarily have to be acknowledged as incorporeal. Let us, then, further turn our attention to these other points as well, in which he shows Aristotle to differ from Plato.

Next, there follow many points on which they differ. For the one says that the heavenly bodies derive the greater part of their form from fire, while the other says that fire has no share whatsoever in the heavenly bodies. And the one says that god kindled light in the second circuit reckoned from the earth, so that it might shine upon the whole heaven as much as possible—declaring this concerning the sun; but the other, since he does not wish the sun to be fire, yet knows light to be either pure fire or something of the nature of fire, does not allow light to have been kindled around it.

Further, the one, while granting incorruptibility according to kind to all the heavenly bodies, says that certain proportionate departures and accessions occur in them; and he is compelled to say this by the following considerations: as departures, the sun's rays and the heat that comes about through an efflux from it; as accessions, the fact that its apparent size remains equal—for it would not wish to appear of equal size while receiving nothing in return for what it lets go.

But Aristotle wishes them to remain altogether in the same substance, with nothing departing from them nor coming to them.

Further, the one, in addition to the common motion of the stars—according to which all the stars, both fixed and wandering, move bound in their spheres—also assigns them another motion, a motion which happens to be both most beautiful in itself and fitting to their bodily nature (for being spherical, each would naturally move with a kind of spherical motion, revolving in place); but the other takes away from them even this motion by which they move as ensouled beings, and leaves them only the motion that happens to them from the surrounding bodies, as to soulless things.

And indeed he also says that the appearance produced in us, as though the stars were moving, is an affection of our sight, which is incapable and as it were trembling, but that there is no truth in it—as though Plato took his conviction about the motion from this sense-appearance, and not from the reasoning which teaches that it is necessary that each of these, being a living creature and having both soul and body, should move with its own proper motion (for every body that is moved from outside is soulless, but that which is moved from within and of itself is ensouled); and that, being moved, since it is divine, it moves with the most beautiful motion; and since the most beautiful motion is that in a circle, it moves in this manner.

But sense-perception would be attested by reason as speaking truly in some things, yet it itself did not furnish the conviction concerning the motion. Now, concerning the motion of the universe—that it does not occur in any circle—being overcome by the clear evidence of the senses, he was not able to contradict Plato; but even here his fine discovery of the fifth body provided him a point of difference from Plato.

For Plato, there being four bodies, all of which naturally move with a simple and straight motion—fire toward the outside, earth toward the middle, and the others toward what is between—assigned the circular motion to the soul; but he, just as he assigned a different motion to each different body, so too assigned the circular motion, as though it were some bodily motion, to the fifth body—thus easily deceiving himself in everything.

For bodies moving in a straight line, their weights and lightnesses supplied the origin of motion; but the fifth body, sharing neither in weight nor in lightness, would be, rather, a cause of unmovedness.

For bodies moving in a straight line, it is not shape but inclination that has the cause of motion; not only will a body placed in the middle of something homogeneous have no reason to incline in any direction, but also a body placed within a circle of any kind will have no cause for an inclination toward any one point—toward the dawn and the sun, or to the left, or forward, or backward.

Further, for the other bodies, when thrust out from their proper places, their tendency back toward these places causes them to move again of themselves; but for that fifth body, which never departs from its own places, it would be fitting to remain still.

And, with respect to the other bodies, once the fifth is set aside, Aristotle appears to be contending out of a love of contradiction, refusing to say the same things as Plato. For when Plato inquired whether there is a body that is heavy by nature or light by nature, and since these seemed to be spoken of in relation to 'up' and 'down,' having considered whether there is anything that is by nature 'down' and 'up' or not, and having demonstrated precisely that, according to the affinities of bodies for their places, 'down' is said of that toward which each is carried, and 'up' is said of that which is foreign to each, from which they withdraw; and having, according to this same relation, distributed both the heavy and the light; and having, in addition to this, demonstrated that it is not reasonable to call either the middle or the periphery of them 'up' or 'down'—

—this man takes the opposite position, thinking it necessary to overthrow that man's views from every side, and he forces himself to call what moves toward the middle 'heavy,' and what moves toward the periphery 'light'; and he says that the place in the middle is 'down,' and the place at the periphery is 'up.'

But concerning the cosmos, and the things of which it is composed, and the heavenly bodies, these two stand so far apart from one another. Such, then, are their views. But Moses and the oracles of the Hebrews busy themselves with none of this—and reasonably so, since it was judged that occupying oneself with these matters brings no benefit toward the rectification of life.

But what should we say concerning the soul? For these things are clear not only to philosophers but by now almost to all laymen as well: that Plato leaves the soul as immortal, and has composed many arguments concerning this, demonstrating in various and all sorts of ways that the soul is immortal.

And great too has been the zealous ambition of those devoted to Plato's teachings, who contend on behalf of both the doctrine and Plato himself. For this is nearly the very thing that holds together the man's entire school of thought.

For the foundation of the ethical doctrines followed upon the immortality of the soul, since it was through the divinity of the soul that it was able to preserve the greatness, splendor, and vigor of virtue; and all the affairs of nature, through the governance exercised by the soul, gained the capacity to be well governed.

'For every soul,' he says, 'cares for everything soulless, and traverses the whole heaven, coming to be at different times in different forms.' Moreover, matters of knowledge and wisdom too have, for Plato, been bound up with the immortality of the soul. For all learning is recollection, and he does not think that inquiry and learning—from which knowledge comes—can be preserved in any other way.

But if the soul is not immortal, there is no recollection either. And if not this, then neither is there learning. Since, then, absolutely all of Plato's doctrines are hung upon and depend from the divinity and immortality of the soul, whoever does not concede this overturns the entire philosophy of Plato.

Who, then, is the first to have attempted to set himself in opposition with proofs, and to strip the soul of its immortality and all its other power? And who else before Aristotle did so? For of the rest, some conceded that it continues to exist, while others, even if not this, at any rate attributed to the soul some power within the body, and a certain motion, and works and actions.

But he, to the very degree that Plato had exalted the reality of the soul—declaring it the origin of generation, the fosterling of God, and the president of all things—strove contentiously, to that same degree, to cast it down and dishonor it, and all but declared the soul to be nothing at all.

For he says the soul is neither spirit, nor fire, nor a body at all, but nor even incorporeal in the sense of being able to exist and move on its own account—but rather, as far as it concerns the body, it is unmoved, and, so to speak, soulless. Indeed, he dared, or rather was compelled, to do such a thing as this: to strip from the soul even its primary functions—deliberating, thinking, expecting, remembering, reasoning.

For he—the 'secretary of nature,' as they call him—says these are not motions of the soul. Truly, then, this man is quite trustworthy for understanding anything about external things, seeing that he has so thoroughly erred concerning his own soul as not even to follow that he is thinking! For it is not the soul, he says, but the man who performs each of these activities, while the soul itself is unmoved.

Following him, then, Dicaearchus—being competent to see the logical consequence—did away with the whole hypostasis of the soul. For that the soul is something invisible and unmanifest is clear, so that we would not grant that the soul exists on account of its activity as perceived by the senses; but it is its motions, though it is itself unmanifest, that seem to compel us to acknowledge that the soul is something real.

For everyone seems to understand these things as belonging to the soul: deliberating, considering, and thinking in whatever manner. For whenever we observe the body and its powers, and reflect that such activities are not of the body, we grant that there is in us something else, that which deliberates, and that this is the soul. For from what other source would we have come to believe concerning the soul?

If, then, someone takes away those very things by which the soul is chiefly manifest, and attaches them to some other thing, he has left neither anything by which it appears to exist, nor anything by which it might seem to be of any use. What help, then, is there for one who wishes the soul to be immortal, from one who kills the soul? And what teaching about the manner of motion, according to which we call the soul self-moved, can come from those who do not grant it any motion at all?

Yes—but as to the immortality of the mind, one might say that he shares common ground with Plato. For even if he is not willing that the whole soul be immortal, he does agree that the mind, at least, is divine and incorruptible. What, then, is the substance and nature of mind—whence it comes, from where it is infused into human beings, and to where it departs again—this he himself alone would know, if indeed he understands anything of what he says about mind, and is not, by wrapping the intractability of the matter in the obscurity of his language, evading refutation—just as cuttlefish procure their elusiveness from the darkness of the ink they emit.

But in every respect, he differs from Plato even in these matters. For the one says it is impossible for mind to subsist without soul, while the other separates mind from soul. And as to immortality, the one gives it to mind together with the soul, as not being possible otherwise, but the other says that this belongs to mind alone, when it is separated from the soul. And he did not think it fitting for the soul to depart from the body, because this pleased Plato, but forced the mind to be torn away from the soul, because Plato recognized such a thing to be impossible. These, then, are the words of Atticus. And I will append to them also the words of Plotinus, which run in the following manner.

One might examine the doctrine of entelechy in the following way, as to how it is said regarding the soul: that the soul, in the composite of soul and body, holds the rank of form in relation to matter—the ensouled body—yet not the form of every body, nor of body as such, but of a natural, organic body, having life potentially.

If, then, it is like that to which it has been compared—as the shape of a statue is to the bronze—then, when the body is divided, the soul must be divided along with it; and when some part is cut off, a portion of the soul must be cut off with the part that has been amputated; and there should be no withdrawal of the soul in sleep, if indeed the entelechy must be attached to that of which it is the entelechy; and, in truth, there should not even be sleep at all.

And indeed, if it were an entelechy, there should also be no conflict between reason and desire; rather, the whole would experience one and the same affection throughout, not being at variance with itself. And perhaps only sensations could occur on this view, but thoughts would be impossible. Therefore they themselves introduce the mind as another, different soul, which they posit as immortal.

The reasoning soul, then, must necessarily be an entelechy—if this term is to be used at all—in some other way than this. Nor is the sensitive soul an inseparable entelechy either: for if it too retains the impressions of sense-objects even when they are absent, it will not hold them together with the body; but if they are not present in this way, as forms and images, then it is impossible for it to receive them otherwise—and yet they are indeed present in this manner. Therefore it is not an inseparable entelechy.

And indeed, the desiring faculty too—that which desires not food nor drink, but other things beyond those of the body—is not itself an inseparable entelechy either. It remains, then, that the vegetative faculty is the one that might seem to present a point of dispute: whether perhaps it, in this manner, is an inseparable entelechy.

But it does not appear that this is so either. For if the origin of every plant is around the root, and growth occurs around the root while the rest of the body grows, and—in many plants—the lower parts die off, evidently the soul, having abandoned the other parts, has contracted into some one part. Therefore it was not present throughout the whole as an inseparable entelechy. For, again, it exists, before the plant has grown, in the small bulk of the seed.

If, then, it can come from a larger plant into a small part, and from a small part extend to the whole, what prevents it from being separated altogether? And how could it, being without parts, become the divisible entelechy of a divisible body? Moreover, the same soul comes to be the soul of another animal, out of one; how then could the soul of the former become that of the one that follows, if it were the entelechy of only one body?

This is evident from animals that change into other animals. Therefore, the soul does not have its being by being the form of something, but is a substance—not receiving its being from being established in a body, but existing even before becoming this, e.g. the soul of an animal; the body will not generate the soul.

What, then, is its substance? But if it is neither a body nor an affection of a body, but action and production, and many things both in it and from it—being a substance apart from bodies—of what sort is it? Is it not clear that it is what we say is truly substance? For everything corporeal would be said to be a becoming rather than a substance—coming into being and perishing, and never really being, but preserved by participation in Being, to the extent that it partakes of it. And since we have gone through the words of Plotinus, it is not out of place to consider also what has been said by Porphyry, in his work Against Boethus, concerning the soul.

Against the one who says the soul is entelechy, and yet supposes that it, though being entirely unmoved, nonetheless moves the body, one must say: whence come the states of enthusiasm/possession in the living creature, in which it understands nothing of what it sees and says, while the soul beholds both the future and what is not present, and is moved accordingly? And whence, also, in the constitution of the living being, come the deliberations, considerations, and volitions of the soul as soul of a living being—being inclinations of the soul, and not of the body?

Then next he adds: 'To liken the soul to heaviness, or to uniform and unmoved bodily qualities, in virtue of which the subject either moves or is of a certain quality, would be the mark of one who has completely fallen away—whether willingly or unwillingly—from the dignity proper to soul, and who has in no way perceived that it is by the presence of the soul that the body of the living being has become endowed with life, just as by the presence of fire the adjacent water becomes hot, though cold in itself; and just as by the rising of the sun the air, which is dark without its illumination, has become lit.'

But the heat of the water was neither the heat of the fire, nor the fire itself; nor was the light in the air the light innate to the sun. In the same way, neither is the 'ensoulment' of the body—which resembles heaviness and a bodily quality—the soul itself, which has been stationed within the body, on account of which the body has partaken of a certain vital breath.

Then next, after other things, he adds: 'Now, as for the other things that others have said about the soul, they bring shame upon us. For how is the theory not shameful, which posits the soul as the entelechy of a natural, organic body? And how is it not full of disgrace, the theory that declares it to be some kind of breath, or an intelligent fire kindled or tempered by the surrounding cooling and, as it were, quenching of the air, or that posits it as a collection of atoms, or altogether declares it to be generated from the body? This very doctrine, in the Laws, he declared to be the doctrine of impious men, and impious. All these accounts, then, are full of shame. But at one who says the soul is a self-moved substance, no one,' he says, 'could be ashamed.'

Further, whereas Plato says that the soul orders all things, pervading through all things, and that it is this by which the rest too would concede that each thing is governed, and that nature is nothing other than soul—and evidently not an irrational soul—and from these premises concludes that everything happens according to providence, if indeed also according to nature: on none of these points does Aristotle agree with us.

For he says nature is not soul, and that things on earth are governed by nature. For there are, he supposes, different causes for each different class of things: for those things that have fate as their cause, he posits fate; for those under the moon, nature; for human affairs, prudence, providence, and soul. He thus displays cleverness in such divisions, but does not perceive their necessity.

For if there were not some one animate power pervading through the whole and binding and holding all things together, the universe could not be either reasonably or well administered. And it would be a mark of the very same blindness both to hope that a city could ever fare well without unity, and to suppose that one could preserve, by mere argument, this universe as being altogether beautiful—as indeed it appears to be—without having bound and fitted it together through the communion of some one, similar principle.

And he says that whatever it is that governs each thing is something of such a kind as to be a principle of motion, yet he is unwilling for this to be soul—even though Plato himself demonstrates that, for all things that are moved, the soul is the principle and source of motion. And whatever would be the work of a rational and prudent soul—namely, to do nothing in vain—this he attributes to nature, yet he does not grant it the name 'soul,' as though things were understood from their names rather than from their powers.