Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 24 part 8/9

What of the fact that by this reasoning of yours you are compelled to say that the spirit too is a body? For otherwise, if spirit is not a body and soul is a body, then spirit and soul are not of one and the same substance; but you confess that both, although you consider them to be two distinct things, have one substance: therefore the spirit too is a body, if the soul is a body; for otherwise they cannot be of one and the same nature. Accordingly, on your view, that which the Apostle says — 'your spirit and soul and body' — are three bodies; but of these two, soul and spirit, are bodies of one nature, while that body which is also called flesh is of a different nature. And of these three bodies, as you suppose, since one is of a different [nature],

while two are of one and the same substance, the whole man consists — one single thing, as it were, and one substance. Though you assert this, yet you are unwilling that two things of one and the same substance, that is, soul and spirit, should have the one name 'spirit,' while two things not of one and the same, but of unequal and different substance, that is, soul and body, have, as you suppose, the one name 'body.' But I pass this over, lest there be between us a controversy about names rather than about things. Let us see who the inner man is — whether soul, or spirit, or both. But, as I see you have written, you call the inner man the soul. For it was of this you were speaking when you said:

'and the substance, congealing, which could not be grasped, was forming another body within the body, massed together by the force and breath of its own nature, and thenceforth the inner man began to appear, whom the disposition of the outer man delineated, as though enclosed in the form of a bodily sheath, after the likeness of itself.' Then you infer: 'The breath of God, therefore, made the soul — nay rather, the breath from God was made the soul, a fashioned substance, corporeal according to its own nature, and like to its own body and conformed to its image.' After this, beginning to speak of the spirit, you say: 'This soul, which derived its origin from the breath of God, could not be without its own proper sense and inmost intellect, which is spirit.'

As I see, then, you would have the inner man be the soul, and the inmost be the spirit — as if the spirit itself were interior to the soul, just as the soul is to the body. Thus it comes about that, just as the body through its inner cavities receives another body, which is the soul (as you suppose), so also the soul must be believed to have inner empty spaces, by which it received a third body, the spirit; and thus the whole man consists of three: outer, inner, and inmost. Do you not yet see how many most absurd consequences pursue you, when you try to maintain that the soul is corporeal? Then tell me: which of them will be renewed in the knowledge of God according to the image of Him who created him — the inner or the inmost?

The Apostle, indeed, apart from the inner and the outer, I do not see that he knows any other, an inner one of the inner, that is, an inmost of the whole man. But choose whichever you will. He who is renewed according to the image of God — how will he receive this image, who has already taken on the image of the outer man? For if the inner man ran through the members of the outer and congealed — for you have used this very word, as though a molten cast were made from a clay mould, which itself was made from dust — how, while that form remains which was impressed upon it or expressed from the body, can it be reformed to the image of God? Or will it have two images, from the top indeed the image of God, but from below that of the body, as on a coin one speaks of 'head and ship'?

Or perhaps you say that the soul took the image of the body and the spirit takes the image of God, as though the soul is contiguous to the body and the spirit to God, and so it is the inmost man, not this inner one, that is reformed to the image of God? But you say this in vain. For if that inmost one too is so diffused through all the members of the soul as the soul is through those of the body, then it too has already taken the image of the body from the soul, just as the soul's form shaped it. And by this it has no place where it may take the image of God while this image of the body remains in it, unless — like the coin, as I said — it be formed in one way from the lower and in another from the upper part. To these absurdities, whether you will or not, the carnal thinking of bodies compels you when you think about the soul.

But God, as you yourself most rightly confess, is not a body; how, then, can a body take His image? I beseech you, brother, that you be not conformed to this world, but be reformed in the newness of your mind, and be not wise according to the flesh, since that is death. But, you say, if the soul lacks a body, what is it that that rich man recognizes in the underworld? Certainly, you say, he already knew Lazarus, but he did not know Abraham. Whence came to him the recognition of Abraham, who had died so long before? In saying this, if you think that recognition of a man cannot come about without the form of a body, then, in order that you may know yourself, I suppose you constantly gaze into a mirror, lest, if you should forget your own face, you might not be able to recognize yourself.

I ask you, what man does a man know better than himself, and whose face can he less see than his own? But who can know God, whom you too do not doubt to be incorporeal, if, as you suppose, cognition cannot come about apart from the form of a body — that is, if bodies alone can be known? And what Christian, disputing about matters so great and so difficult, would direct his mind so carelessly to the divine words as to say: 'If the soul is incorporeal, it must necessarily lack form'? Have you forgotten that you have read of the 'form of doctrine'? Then the form of doctrine is corporeal. Have you forgotten that it is written of Christ Jesus, before He had put on manhood, that He 'was in the form of God'? How then do you say:

'If the soul is incorporeal, it must necessarily lack form,' when you hear of the form of God, whom you confess not to be corporeal, and yet speak as though form could not exist except in bodies? You also say that 'names cease there where form is not distinguished, and that the appellation of names does nothing there where there is no designation of persons,' wishing hence to prove that Abraham's soul was corporeal, because it could be said: 'Father Abraham.' We have already said that form exists even where there is no body. But if you think the appellation of names does nothing where there are no bodies, count these names, I pray you:

'But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control.' And tell me whether you do not recognize the things themselves of which these are the names, or whether you so recognize them as to see in them some lineaments of bodies. Lo, to pass over the rest, tell me what shape, what members, what colour love has — love which surely, if you yourself are not empty, cannot seem to you to be anything empty. 'Whose aid was implored,' you say, 'was surely something seen and having form.' Let men hear you — and let no one implore the aid of God, since no one can see Him as corporeal!

'Finally,' you say, 'the members of the soul are there described, so that it is truly a body,' and you wish 'the whole head to be understood by the eye,' because he is said to have lifted up his eyes; 'the throat by the tongue, the hand by the finger,' because it was said: 'Send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, that he may cool my tongue.' Yet, lest by the names of members a corporeal God be prescribed to you, you say that 'by these are to be understood incorporeal powers,' because you most rightly defend that God is not corporeal. What reason, then, is there why these names of members should not make a body for you in God, yet should make one in the soul? Or indeed, when these things are said of a creature, are they to be taken properly, but when of the Creator, tropically and by transference?

Are you then going to give us corporeal wings, since it is not the Creator but the creature, that is, man, who says: 'If I take my wings like a dove'? Moreover, if the rich man had a corporeal tongue because he said 'let him cool my tongue,' then in us also, still living in the flesh, that same tongue has corporeal hands, because it is written: 'Death and life are in the hands of the tongue.' I suppose, too, that sin does not seem to you either to belong to the creature or to be a body: why then does it have a face? Or do you not hear in the Psalm: 'There is no peace in my bones from the face of my sins'?

But as for 'that bosom of Abraham,' which you reckon to be corporeal and by which you assert 'his whole body is recognized,' I fear lest in so great a matter you be thought to be acting jestingly and mockingly, not seriously and gravely. For you would not be so foolish as to imagine that the corporeal bosom of one man could carry so many souls — nay rather, to speak according to you, 'carry so many bodies of the well-deserving, whom the angels bear thither as they did Lazarus.' Unless perhaps you suppose that that one soul alone deserved to reach that same bosom. If you are not jesting and do not wish to err childishly, understand Abraham's bosom to be the remote and secret seat of rest, where Abraham is.

And therefore it was called Abraham's, not because it belongs to him alone, but because he himself was set as the father of many nations, to whom he is set forth for imitation by his primacy of faith — just as God willed to be called the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, though He is the God of innumerable ones. And do not think that I so discourse as though I deny that it can happen that the soul of a dead man, like that of a sleeper, feels either good or ill in the likeness of its own body. For in dreams too, when we endure certain hard and grievous things, it is truly we ourselves, and, unless those things pass away when we awake, we pay the gravest penalties;

but to believe that they are bodies by which we are, as it were, borne this way and that and fly about in dreams, is characteristic of a man who has thought too little vigilantly about such matters. For from these images of things seen it is most of all proved that the soul is not corporeal — unless you would call those things also bodies which, apart from ourselves, we see so many of in dreams: heaven, earth, sea, sun, moon, stars, rivers, mountains, trees, animals. He who believes these to be bodies is incredibly foolish; and yet they are altogether most like bodies. Of this kind also are those which are shown by God as bearing some significance, whether in sleep or in ecstasy. Whence these arise, that is, what their material as it were may be, who could trace out or say?

Yet without doubt it is spiritual, not corporeal. For such appearances as of bodies — yet not bodies — are both formed by the thought of the waking and contained in the depth of the memory, and out of its most hidden recesses, by I know not what marvellous and ineffable manner, they come forth when we remember and are, as it were, turned before our eyes as things brought forward. So many, then, and so great images of bodies, if the soul were a body, it could not take in by thinking nor contain in the memory. For according to your own definition, a corporeal substance does not exceed its own external body. By what magnitude, then — which it has none — does it take in the images of bodies and spaces and regions so great?

What wonder is it, then, if the soul appears also to itself in the likeness of its own body, even when it appears without a body? For it is not with its own body that it appears to itself in dreams, and yet in that very likeness of its own body it runs, as it were, through places unknown and known, and feels many things joyful or sad. But I suppose that not even you would dare to say that that figure of a body and of members which it seems to itself to have in dreams is a true body.

For in that case the mountain which it seems to itself to climb will be a true mountain, and the house which it seems to itself to enter a corporeal house, and the tree a true tree and the wood a true body of wood under which it seems to itself to lie, and the water true water which it seems to itself to draw, and all the things among which it moves as though among bodies will be bodies, if it too is a body which moves among all those things in a like image. Concerning the recorded visions of the martyrs, something must be said to you, since you too thought testimony should be adduced from that source. For holy Perpetua seemed to herself in dreams to wrestle with a certain Egyptian, having been changed into a man.

But who could doubt that in that likeness of a body it was her soul, not her body — which surely, remaining in its own feminine sex with senses lulled to sleep, was lying on the couch — while her soul was wrestling in that likeness of a masculine body? What do you say here? Was that likeness of a man truly a body, or was it not a body, although it had the likeness of a body? Choose which you will. If it was a body, why did it not preserve the form of its own sheath? For it had not found masculine genitals in that woman's flesh, from which it could thus be shaped by contracting itself and, as you say, 'congealing.'

Next, I beseech you: since the sleeper's body was still living while her soul was wrestling, it was surely in its own sheath, enclosed within all the members of the living body, and in that body it preserved its own form, from which it had been shaped — for it had not yet, as happens in death, left those joints; it had not yet, by the force of death compelling, drawn its members formed out of members away from those that form them. Whence, then, came that masculine body of the soul, in which it seemed to itself to wrestle with an adversary? But if it was not a body, and yet was something like a body, in which truly a real toil or a real joy was felt — do you now at last see how it can come about that there is in the soul a certain likeness of a body, and yet it is not itself a body?

What if some such thing takes place in the underworld, and souls recognize themselves there not in bodies, but in likenesses of bodies? For when we suffer sad things, even in dreams, though that be a likeness of corporeal members and not corporeal members, yet it is not a likeness of pain but pain itself; so also where joyful things are felt. But since holy Perpetua was not yet dead, you perhaps do not wish anything to be prescribed to you from this — though it is very much to the point — of what nature you reckon those likenesses of bodies to be which we have in dreams. And this whole case would be settled if you confess that they are both like bodies and not bodies. But nevertheless her brother Dinocrates had died;

she saw him with that wound which he had while alive and by which he was brought to death. Where now is that on which you laboured with such great efforts, when you were treating of the cutting off of members, lest the soul be thought to be cut at the same time? Behold, there was a wound in the soul of Dinocrates, which, when it was in his body, expelled it from the body by its own force. How then, according to your opinion — 'when the members of the body are cut off, it withdraws itself from the blow and, thickening itself, gathers into other parts, lest any part of it be amputated by the wound of the body' — even if something of the members is cut off from one sleeping and unaware? For you attribute such great vigilance to it, that even when occupied with the sights of dreams, if a blow rush upon it unawares, by which the flesh is struck,

it providently and swiftly withdraws itself, lest it be able to be struck and tormented or cut down. And you do not consider, prudent man, that if the soul should withdraw itself thence, that blow would not even be felt. But find what you can to reply to this — how the soul snatches away its parts and hides them within, lest, when a member of the body is cut or struck, it too be amputated and tormented — and look upon Dinocrates, and tell me why his soul did not withdraw itself from that place of the body which was being ravaged by the deadly wound, so that there should not come to be in it what appeared in his face even after the death of the body itself.

Or perhaps you now prefer that we believe these to be likenesses of bodies rather than bodies, so that, just as there appears something like a wound which is not a wound, so what is not a body may appear as though a body? For if the soul can be wounded by those who wound the body, is there not something to be feared, lest it be able to be killed by those who kill the body? Yet the Lord most plainly testifies that this cannot happen. And nevertheless the soul of Dinocrates could not die, from which his body died, and it seemed to be as though wounded, just as the body had been wounded, since it was not a body, but had, in the likeness of a body, also the likeness of a wound.

Moreover, in a not-true body there was a true misery of the soul, which was signified by the shadowed wound of the body, from which by the prayers of his holy sister it deserved to be freed. Now, what sort of thing is it to say that 'the soul receives its form from the body and is stretched out and grows with the growth of the body,' and not to consider how monstrous a soul of a youth or an old man turns out, if his arm be cut off when an infant? For the hand of the soul, as you say, contracts itself, lest it too be amputated along with the hand of the body, and, thickening itself, encloses itself into other parts of the body.

And by this, that arm of the soul, however short it was from the body from which it had received its form, will be preserved as short wherever it is preserved, because it lost the form by whose growth it could equally have grown. There goes out, then, the soul of a youth or an old man who lost his hand when he was small, having indeed two hands, because the one that fled was not amputated with the body, but the one being that of a youth or an old man, and the other, as it had first been, that of an infant. Such souls, believe me, no bodily form makes, but the deformity of error fashions. You do not seem to me able to be delivered from this error unless, with God's help, you diligently consider the visions of dreamers and thence learn that there are certain things which are not bodies, but likenesses of bodies.

For although even those things which we think of as like bodies are of that same kind, yet, as regards the dead, a more fitting conjecture is drawn from sleepers. For not without reason does holy Scripture call those who are dead 'sleepers,' unless because sleep is in a certain way a kinsman of death. Accordingly, if the soul were a body and were a corporeal figure in which it sees itself in dreams — because it had been expressed from its body — no man, when a member of the body has been amputated, would, just as he lacks it, so see himself without it in dreams, but rather always whole, because nothing of the soul itself has been amputated.

But since sometimes they see themselves whole, and sometimes, just as they are, truncated in some part or other, what else does this fact teach but that the soul, just as of the other things it perceives in dreams, so also of the body, at one time thus, at another thus, bears not the truth but the likeness? But its joy or its sadness, its delight or its offence, whether it be in bodies or in likenesses of bodies, is true. Did you not yourself say, and say truly, that 'food and clothing are not necessary for the soul, but for the body'? Why then did the rich man in the underworld desire a drop of water? Why did 'holy Samuel after death,' as you yourself also mentioned, 'appear clothed in his accustomed garment'?

Did that one desire to repair the ruins of his soul, as of flesh, by the nourishment of moisture? Had this one gone forth from the body clothed? But in the former there was a true distress, by which the soul was tortured, yet not a true body for which it sought nourishment; and the latter could so appear clothed that it was not a body, but had a likeness of a body — both the soul and the garment. For the soul does not stretch and contract itself into garments as into the members of the body, so as to be formed even from them.

But after death, what power of cognition, freed from corruptible bodies, souls receive — even those that are not good — so that they are able to behold and recognize by their inner senses others whether wicked or good, whether in those very things which are not bodies but likenesses of bodies, or in the good or evil affections of the mind, in which there are no lineaments as it were of members: who could trace this out? Whence also is that which the rich man, when he was in torments, recognized father Abraham, to whom the figure of his body was not known — whose likeness of body, although incorporeal, the soul was able to retain.

But who could rightly claim to have known some man, except in so far as he was able to know that man's life and will, which surely have neither mass nor colours? For in this way we know even our own selves more surely than we know others, because our own conscience and our will are known to us. This will we plainly see, and yet in it we behold no likeness whatever of a body. This will we cannot discern in another, however present he may be — even one whose face, when he is absent, we know, recall, and think upon. Our own face, however, we cannot know, recall, or think upon in that same way; and yet we say most truly that we ourselves are better known to us than that other man. Thus it is clear where the better and truer knowledge of a man lies.

Since, then, there is one faculty in the soul by which we perceive real bodies — which we do by the five senses of the body — another by which, apart from those very senses, we behold things like bodies yet not bodies (where too we contemplate our own selves in no other way than as things resembling bodies), and yet another by which we discern neither bodies nor likenesses of bodies, such as faith, hope, and charity, which we perceive with all the more certainty and firmness because without any colours or dimensions or anything of that sort — where ought we rather to be, and in a manner more familiarly to dwell, where we are to be renewed in the knowledge of God according to the image of him who created us? Is it not in that which I placed in the third rank? For there assuredly we bear neither any sex nor any likeness of sex.

Now that form of a male or female soul, distinguished by male and female members — if it is not a likeness of a body but a body itself — then, whether you will or not, whatever appears either as male or as female is, willy-nilly, a male, willy-nilly a female. Yet still, if according to your opinion the soul is both a body and a living body, and has swelling and pendulous breasts, and has no beard, and has a vulva and the genitals which the members of a female body have, and yet is not a female — shall I not with greater constancy say what is true:

'It has an eye, it has a tongue, it has a finger, and it has the other members like those of a body, and this whole thing is a likeness of a body, not a body' — since what I say each man may prove within himself when he imagines the bodies of those who are absent (let him prove it surely when he recalls the shapes both of himself and of others in his dreams), whereas of this monstrous thing of yours — where there is at once a true, living, feminine body and yet no feminine sex — you can produce no example in the whole nature of things? For what you say about the phoenix is wholly irrelevant to the matter under discussion. For that bird signifies the resurrection of bodies; it does not abolish the sex of souls — if indeed, as is believed, it is reborn out of its own death.

But I suppose you thought your discourse would be too little pleasing to the ear if you did not, after the manner of young men, declaim at length about the phoenix. For are there in its body male genitals, and yet it is not male; or female ones, and yet it is not female? But you, mark what you say, what you seek to establish, what you strive to persuade. You say that 'the soul, diffused through all the members, has congealed as it froze, and from the very crown of the head down to the soles of the feet, from the inmost marrow to the surface of the skin, has taken on the whole form of the whole body; and by this it has taken on, in a female's body, whatever the female organs females possess; and this is a true body, and these are true members, and yet it is not a female.'

Why, I beseech you, in a true and living body are all the members female, and yet it is not a female; in a true and living body are all the members male, and yet it is not a male? Who would presume to believe, to say, or to teach such things? Is it because souls do not beget? Then neither are he-mules and she-mules male and female. Is it because souls cannot copulate without fleshly bodies? But this too is taken away from those who are castrated; and yet, though from them both the movement and the act are removed, the form of the sex is not removed, since some remnant, however small, of the male members remains. No one ever denied that a eunuch is male.

What of this — that according to you the souls even of eunuchs have their testicles intact; and if anyone's genitals are entirely and wholly removed, they will, according to your opinion, remain wholly and altogether intact in his soul? For it knows, as you say, how to withdraw itself when that part of the flesh begins to be cut away, so that the form which was taken from it, when that thing from which it was taken is amputated, does not perish, but though it had frozen as it was poured in, is nevertheless snatched away by a most swift movement and hidden more deeply within, that it may be preserved unharmed; and yet he is not a male among the dead, though carrying with him the whole of his male genitals — a man who, when he did not have them in his body, was male on account of their place alone. These things are false, my son; if you will not have there be a sex in the soul, let there be no body either.

Not every likeness of a body is a body. Sleep, and you shall see; but when you have awakened, discern wakefully what you have seen. For in your dreams you will appear to yourself as it were corporeal; yet that will not be your body, but your soul — not a true body, but the likeness of a body. For your body will lie still, while it walks; the tongue of your body will be silent, while it speaks; your eyes will be shut, while it sees; and the members of your body will surely lie there living, not dead. And by this the congealed form, as you suppose, of your soul has not yet been drawn out as it were from its sheath, and yet in it the likeness of your flesh is discerned, whole and entire.

Of this kind of bodily likenesses, which appear like bodies yet are not bodies, are all those things which, when you read the sacred books, you fail to understand even in the prophetic visions — things by which are signified those events which take place in time, whether present, past, or future. But you are deceived in them, not because they themselves are deceptive, but because you do not take them as they ought to be taken. For where the souls of the martyrs were seen, in the same revelation was seen also the Lamb as though slain, having seven horns; there were horses and other animals, figuratively, as was fitting; there, lastly, the stars fell and heaven was folded up like a book — and yet the world did not then collapse.