On the State of the Soul 1 part 7/11

So too the element of fire, both, according to its parts, since it is spatial, receives numbers, and, according to space, since it is finite, is subject to measures. But this earthly fire has its weight directed upward, as a kind of seed of the highest fires; and the more it is fed with greater fuel and so possessed of greater powers, then — as though tending toward its homeland — by its subtle nature it bursts through the great masses of crowded air, and, did it not overcome the depth of the other element, it would reach the place to which it is borne by nature. CHAPTER V. ON THE MEASURE, NUMBER, AND WEIGHT OF THE SOUL. Behold, it has been made clear that there is nothing corporeal to which measure, weight, and number do not belong.

Now, since to these same things belong both a unity of parts and a spatial weight and a measurable magnitude, let us ask whether these three are in the soul in the same way as they are in the body. We certainly call a body great in length, breadth, and height, whose space we reckon great or small according to its capacity. Therefore any given body receives just so much of body as it is capacious of, according to its amplitude. So then, having transcended the rank of lower creation, behold the loftier creature and measure the greatness of the soul by its capacity. Behold, the human soul is capacious of wisdom, for it is capacious of that which is the object of its understanding.

Therefore, just as before it has attained wisdom it cannot be said to be capacious of wisdom, so before it becomes a partaker of it, it cannot be called wise. Here I come to inquire: do you judge that it will be a space of place, or something non-spatial, by which wisdom is contained? I judge thus: that if the wise soul is capacious of wisdom according to space, then wisdom is great according to bulk. Since the truth does not permit this to be said, that which contains is non-spatial, so that that which is contained can also be non-spatial. Behold, here you have the greatness of the human soul without bulk; now consider the principle of number.

You have observed, I think, that these are the signs of numbers in bodies: namely, that those bodies are 'numbered' which correspond to themselves in an equality of parts according to the most excellent equality of number — so that, since the sum of one to one, of two to two, and of three to three is equal, we likewise say that body is 'numbered' which, formed by fixed dimension (as, for instance, the human body), has those things that are paired so placed opposite each other that they differ from one another neither in magnitude nor in kind nor in position, as are the ears and the eyes; while those that are single, like the nose and the mouth, hold the central place and, that they may be beautiful, imitate the harmony of the highest equality.

In order, then, that we may find the truth of number in the human soul, the soul itself ought first to harmonize the principle of its own acting according to an equality of virtues, so that justice answers to wisdom, fortitude to temperance — an equality which is certainly 'numbered,' because a thing is the nearer to number the more harmonious it is. But I think that more truly 'numbered' in the soul is that whereby the same soul is in a scientific manner master of number, so that it is 'numbered' not by parts as a body is, but discerns number itself and judges according to that same number. For that three and four make seven, and these together with three make ten, nothing except the human soul can know or ever will be able to know.

Therefore, just as it became clear concerning measure, so too concerning numbers it sufficiently appears that these are in the body visibly, in the soul intellectually. It remains now that we discuss weight. It has been made plain that the weight of bodies is that by which the same bodies are naturally borne into their own regions, whence they originally arise, and do not rest until, having passed through the space of another element, they arrive at their own. But the weight of the soul is its will, which is more properly called love, by which the soul loves either itself or anything else. For whether it cherishes things incorporeal to itself, as is true wisdom, or desires bodily things for the body, as bodies are beautiful, it is carried away by the non-spatial weight of love, until it possesses the attainment of the things it loves.

Therefore the weight of a body, wherever the body carries it, draws its measures and numbers inseparably with it. Likewise weight, that is, the love of the soul toward that which it cherishes, gathers with it both memory and counsel, because it can remember or think of nothing else than that whose love makes it burn. Whence it is divinely said to man: 「Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul」 (Deut. 6:5; Matt. 22:37) — namely that, just as a body is driven by weight into its proper place, so the soul may be borne back by weight into its homeland. By this its weight, however, the soul is not only joined to others, but is itself also made firm, because, by the mediating love of counsel and mind, both mind is loved by counsel and counsel by mind. CHAPTER VI.

ON THE MEASURE, NUMBER, AND WEIGHT OF THE DIVINE TRINITY, AND IN WHAT WAY THESE THREE ARE THE TRINITY ITSELF. So too, incorporeally, the unity of the most exalted Trinity, surpassing all things, is — as men say — measure without measure, weight without weight, and number without number. The weight, then, by which these same are ineffably one with themselves, is the love of the Father and the Son; for the Apostle, properly intimating the Holy Spirit, says: 「The love of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who is given to us」 (Rom. 5:5) — evidently showing that by this weight, namely by divine love, that ineffable number and that measure are steadfastly borne whither such weight has reached.

Therefore these three are inseparable in the body, but much more so in the soul; and they are indivisible in the soul, but much more so in themselves. And just as nothing has come to exist apart from the one Creator — that is, apart from the Trinity itself — so absolutely nothing can exist that does not both subsist in threefold manner and be one. Every body, namely, will be both one and measurable and numerable and weighable; and every rational soul subsists by three indivisibles — memory, counsel, and will — by which it is capacious of measure, weight, and number, judging according to these concerning measurable, weighable, and numerable things, that is, concerning bodies.

For if the soul were a body, it certainly could not apprehend incorporeal things, just as a body too could be judged and yet could not judge concerning bodies. Therefore the likeness of the united Trinity flows through from the highest, which is God, through the middle, which is the soul, to the lowest, which are bodies — impressing on bodies the signs of itself, granting to souls also a knowledge, forming the former visibly, the latter intelligibly. Since, then, nothing apprehends a substance except essence, and nothing becomes one except by three, as we have argued above — when therefore there is as great a unity in the body, that is, in the vestige of the Trinity, as there is in the soul, that is, in the image of the Trinity, and likewise as great in the image as there is in the Trinity itself? CHAPTER VII.

HE USES PAGAN WITNESSES [TO PROVE] THAT THERE ARE NO CORPOREAL MEASURES OR SPATIAL WEIGHTS IN THE SOUL. But since now the time is other than that we should dispute more copiously concerning the preeminence of this question, I have dwelt on these matters only so far as I think sufficient for the prudent, that they may fully recognize that there are in the soul no corporeal measures, nor spatial weights, nor extensions of parts, but that there is perceived by it that which neither place contains, nor weight moves, nor division diminishes — provided only that you, learned arbiter, being skilled, shall prove able to bear a just verdict: whether that be a place which receives the non-spatial, or that be partible which cannot be cut, or that be measurable which contains the infinite.

Now I return to Philolaus, from whom I some while ago departed by a great interval — who, in the third of his volumes which he entitles 'On Rhythms and Measures' (περὶ ῥυθμῶν καὶ μέτρων), speaks thus of the human soul: 「The soul is implanted in the body through number and an immortal and likewise incorporeal harmony.」 Likewise after other things: 「The body is loved by the soul, because without it the soul cannot use the senses. After it has been led away from the body by death, it lives an incorporeal life in the universe.」 I do not now unfold the path of his reasonings and the most intricate subtleties of his questions, by which, with whatever adversary you please, Philolaus makes these things probable. And if anyone, whether by curiosity or by zeal, should be inflamed for these, he will of course draw from the very fountain itself.

Indeed, for the sake of authority it will be enough that I have cast forth the testimony of so great a philosopher to the same effect — just as it will be fitting to bring forward, in brief, the testimonies of the others after this. For wrongly is both proof and testimony demanded of anyone. Archytas of Tarentum likewise, also a Pythagorean, in that work which he produced, magnificent, 'On the Nature of Things,' after much and most subtle discussion concerning numbers, says: 「The soul is composed after the pattern of the One, which thus rules non-spatially in the body, as the One rules among numbers.」 What, I ask, can be said more sublime, what more true? Composed, namely, after the pattern of the One, because it was made after the image of the One.

And for this reason the One is the principal pattern of forms, since formable things take their forms from Him who did not begin. Hippo of Metapontum, of the same school of Pythagoras, having first set down indissoluble arguments in support of his opinion, pronounces thus concerning the soul: 「Far other is the soul, far other the body; for it flourishes when the body is sluggish, sees when the body is blind, lives when the body is dead. But whence this is, by what principle, he says he does not know.」

But I do not now so pursue the opinions of all the philosophers of the Pythagorean family as to make them my own by piling them up too copiously from books of others — thinking it enough that I have brought forth, from the very founding of the Pythagorean school, clear knowledge concerning the present question; being assured, namely, that no one of the learned will refute the fact that this very same thing was held and set forth in writing by Archippus, Epaminondas, Aristeus, Gorgiades, Diodorus, and all the successors of Pythagoras — by the multitude of whose names, not to say of whose opinions, I should fill a volume, if I wished to set forth the same.

Therefore let Plato come forth into the midst, by whom it truly becomes clear how great a good the human race neglects in itself — especially in our age, in which, although things uttered from heaven by deeds and words have so far been proclaimed that religion has been acclaimed, men, with the labor of believing now almost set aside, seek to seize the fruit of knowledge from the lukewarmness of faith, and to receive the wages of labor while the work is not accomplished.

Whence it comes that I cannot worthily enough marvel at the mind of this Plato, who indeed so many ages before the childbearing of the Virgin, before the incarnation of God, before the resurrection of man, before the unity of the supreme Trinity was preached to the nations — that the One ineffable should be three Persons in divinity — with praiseworthy daring, marvelous genius, and inimitable eloquence, sought, found, and set forth: God the Father and the paternal Mind, the Art or Counsel, and the mutual love of both these — one supreme, coeternal, undivided Divinity — and not only taught that it ought thus to be believed, but proved that it is thus.

I cannot persuade myself that the soul of this philosopher was corporeal; and if perhaps by some headlong fall of folly any soul is to be judged to be a body, those indeed I would judge corporeal which believe themselves to be a body — not thereby disparaging the genus of souls, but marking certain ones by the wickedness of their own opinion, not of my own will.

And what is to become of men whom ignorance holds to such a degree that they do not even know themselves to be unlearned, yet nonetheless claim for themselves the privilege of knowledge? While they spit out the froth of childish words into untrained ears, by one and the same lie they both deceive themselves of knowledge and beguile others by teaching — like Lysias, whom this same Plato in the Phaedrus rebukes to such a degree that he asserts it is worse to know words but be ignorant of causes, than not knowing things to be ignorant of words; judging unlearned silence preferable to garrulous inexperience. Whence Tullius too, in the first book 'On the Orator':

「Eloquence,」 he says, 「is the knowledge of grasping very many things, without which the fluency of words is empty and to be derided」; and a little after: 「For from the knowledge of things speech ought to flower forth and abound; and unless there underlies it a matter perceived and known by the speaker, it has a certain empty and almost childish utterance.」 But of this elsewhere. In the Phaedrus, moreover, Plato pronounces thus concerning the soul: 「The soul,」 he says, 「is immortal, which is ever moved by itself and is to others the cause of motion; but the body is not moved by itself.」 He did not say merely 「it moves other things,」 but:

「it is to others the cause of motion」 — this man of excellent genius observing indeed that there would be some things to which it is proper to be moved, being the cause of another's motion; for whatever is moved voluntarily is generally itself the cause of motion to itself, but whatever is moved either unknowingly or unwillingly has the causes of its motion in the one who knows or compels. Nor does it conflict with our earlier discussions that here we say the soul is moved by itself, since we say that the principal hinge of motions is in God; for this very thing is, as it were, from God to the soul, that it should move of its own accord — namely, that just as the cause of the soul's motion is its own will, so the cause of the substance which uses will is God; because, although the ability to will is to us from God, not every motion of our will will be from God.

Rather, I think that when we sin by our will, the cause of our motion is from ourselves, lest we make God the author of sins. Wherefore, if the body is not moved by itself, and that which is to itself the cause of motion is not a body — because it has the causes of its own motion within itself — the soul is not a body. The same Plato, in the book which he wrote 'On Nature' (περὶ φυσικῆς), says: 「The soul of all living beings is not corporeal, and it moves itself and is also the mover of other things which are naturally moved.」

In the Phaedo, moreover, Socrates speaks thus with Simmias and Cebes and other philosophers in this same Plato, so that, when we see there pronounced things very much in agreement with ours and exceedingly in harmony with them — things which not only avail by the prejudgment of authority, but are supported by the force of reason — we may observe that, besides the inborn vigor of the human mind, these souls indeed, which pursued things so remote, so —

approached things so hidden, saw things so concealed — for this reason, namely, breathed upon by the light of truth, that the doctrine divinely set forth for the salvation of the human race throughout the whole world might at some time, among the untaught minds of the nations unacquainted with truth, make use of the testimonies of the Gentiles, so that heathendom — the more blinded by the cloud of ignorance and hardened, as it were, into ice by the cold of unbelief — might yield to the warmth of evangelical truth, if that same truth should sound forth even from the mouths of its own adversaries. Or why should we not believe that these same things were procured for us from heaven through the philosophers, for the use of truth — things which we recognize will be useful even to refute the inexperience of our own people? Persuading Socrates, therefore, in the Phaedo, true reason thus speaks:

「As long as we have a body, and our mind is mingled with such an evil, we shall never sufficiently and fully attain that which we have long since desired. But we desire the knowledge of truth. For the body first brings upon us innumerable and infinite occupations, by which we are worn out on account of necessary sustenance and daily nourishment. Then, if any diseases assail us, they are a hindrance, so that we cannot inquire into and find out the truth. For by desires and lusts and innumerable fears, by visions of various things and appetites, and by a certain infinite madness, the body is so burdened that, because of it, we cannot even be wise in any matter.」

「And if at any time we have either had or made some leisure for philosophizing, then too, in our very thoughts, the body intrudes, bringing into the mind a throng of errors, so that, while it blinds us, we cannot see the truth through. And so this one thing in every inquiry is proved to us, and that most evidently: if we ever wish in good faith to know anything, we must withdraw from the body and consider things in the mind itself. For then we seem about to attain that which we desire and of which we profess ourselves lovers, namely when we shall have died; for as long as we live, we must despair.」

For indeed, if it is established that the soul, while mixed with the body, can perceive nothing pure, it follows that one of two things must be true: either at no time and in no place can true knowledge come to a man, or else only then, when we have departed from this life. For the soul of the dead is free and loosed from the body. But in this present time, while we live, we shall come near and cleave to knowledge only in this way: if we use the body not at all, or as little as possible, and do not surrender the soul to its fellowship except so far as is necessary. For thus we shall least of all be filled with the corrupt and turbulent nature of the body, but, so far as we can manage, we shall be pure from its contagion; and if we so act, departing uncorrupted and pure, we shall come to all things uncorrupted and pure.

I thought these words ought to be excerpted verbatim from the dialogue of that philosopher who is altogether a prince among his kind, and inserted into this volume of ours, since I judged that no one would be inclined to resist the bodily allurements of fallacies,

—anyone, that is, who, feeling these very contradictions within himself between the disparate natures of body and soul, with himself as witness, would assent in this very matter to the disputations (undisputed indeed) of by far the greatest among philosophers, and who, with reason presiding, would debate between his own soul and body what that thing might be which—as they say—if the soul be bodily, is always hindered by the obstacle of an external body confronting it from every act of discovery; or why he should arraign an external body for calling him away from the contemplation of truth, when he himself would be his own impediment, if he is a body. But on these matters I shall not argue.

Truth itself, of course, shines forth by itself, and needs no ornament or external aid, being both fairer and stronger when naked. Hence I have judged that I should make use of the hitherto-undefended testimonies of my witnesses, because only in the eyes of those who are wholly body would we entertain doubt about these sureties of truth. But what this same Plato declared concerning the soul in the Hipparchus, in the Laches, in the Protagoras, in the Symposium, in the Alcibiades, in the Gorgias, in the Crito, and what in the Timaeus too—as upon a certain citadel and a certain summit of philosophy—for the sake of the brevity I favor, I pass over.

For it makes no difference, as regards the recognition of truth, to inquire how often each man has said something on the same subject, rather than what he has perceived; because in things often repeated there is no richer knowledge of realities, since the prolixity of words is burdensome. Wherefore, in establishing the truth, one must rather consider what one thing many men have perceived, than what one man has often said. Yet I, charmed by admiration of him, have for the present business often summoned as witness Plato—in my opinion deservedly the prince of all philosophers—although, of the many things you may read there from him compared to his countless writings, the things he discoursed concerning the soul are very few indeed and not [worthy of] his [genius]. But neither did Porphyry the Platonist, many ages after Plato, anywhere dissent from his master in this same cause.

For with illustrious voice he admonished the human race of its own dignity: "If we wish to be blessed," he says, "all body must be fled." There is therefore something incorporeal in us, to which the contagion of the whole body is hostile; and what shall this be, if not the image of God? And what is the image of God, if not the human soul? And if this soul cannot be blessed within the body, and is not incorporeal, it will never be blessed, since it will not exist apart from itself. VIII. HE USES ROMAN PAGAN PHILOSOPHERS AS WITNESSES CONCERNING THE INCORPOREALITY OF THE SOUL. For the present business we have used very many testimonies of very many philosophers, and we could bring forward many out of Greece itself, if either the cause demanded it or reason allowed.

But lest we seem to have sought truth in a merely local manner—as though this same truth could be seen by one nation alone and be unknown to others—since human substance attains the truth not by region but by kind, let us cite as witnesses the Romans too, and these likewise philosophers; among whom Sextius the father and Sextius the son, with zeal inclined toward the exercise of wisdom, philosophized most excellently and rendered this verdict concerning the whole nature of the soul:

"Every soul," they say, "is incorporeal, non-spatial, and an undetectable power of some kind, which without occupying space contains and holds the body it is capable of." These men, unless I am mistaken, have entered more keenly into the hidden reasons of things than certain of our own people, who—in bedchamber disputations about hunting out the causes of sublime matters—yawning on their little couches, lulled by the pressing abundance of tepid lullabies and by some dull-witted flatterer, sleep off the drowsy suspicions of old wives' opinions; and they decree that the soul, interwoven with the flesh, is enclosed and held within the prison-bars of the body. But that fiction of an inexperience empty of truth—

—as the nature of the topics required, we both discussed in the previous book, and now, having brought forward the great testimonies of the foremost authorities on the matter, with truth aiding us, we refute it also by the powers of reason. Marcus Varro, the most learned man of his age and—on Tully's testimony—without doubt the most learned of all, what does he strive for in his works on music, on arithmetic, on geometry, and on philosophy by a certain divine disputation, if not to draw the soul away from things visible to the invisible, from local to the non-local, from corporeal to the incorporeal, by the marvelous methods of an eternal art—and, when it has slipped down into bodies (that is, into things adverse to itself), to make it master of itself? For if it had a body, a body could not be adverse to it.

Why should I now bring forward, in defense of the truth, the opinions of Zoroaster, of the Brahmins of India, of Anacharsis of Scythia, indeed of the Catos, of Marcus Cicero, of Crispus (Sallust)—who almost from the very beginning of his work grants to the soul the right of ruling and imposes upon the body the law of servitude? Why should I prove that the judgment of the whole world concerning the state of the soul rings in harmony with us—at least among those who have deservedly shone forth? IX. FROM THIS POINT HE USES ECCLESIASTICAL DOCTORS AS WITNESSES CONCERNING THE INCORPOREALITY OF THE SOUL. This same thing would surely be easy for me to do, were it not that the constrained throng of witnesses would not allow another to be added, and that either the time required or reason urged me now at last to unfold the divine oracles.

And that we may come to the very fountains of the heavenly volumes, led for the most part by those who have drawn from them more abundantly, Gregory Nazianzen in his Apologeticus proclaims that there is, of course, a great difference between soul and body, and that, just as the body is fed on corporeal things, so the soul is fattened on incorporeal ones. Blessed Ambrose, addressing the people in the church at Milan with words most learned and most cultivated, says: "Let us sequester ourselves from the body, against which, if we wish to be saved, there is a continual struggle for us." One and the same opinion of these eminent men is to be marked only by the same understanding and handled by the same discourse. Now therefore I will say what I remember often saying, whenever it has come to this place.

Ambrose persuades us that we ought to be sequestered from the body. I therefore ask who this might be, for whom it is fitting to be sequestered from the body. For we are composed of soul and body; and on this account, since the soul cannot be sequestered from its very self, there is nothing in us that can be sequestered from the body, if the soul is a body. Why, holy Ambrose, why do you teach thus? Why do you besmirch the Bride of Christ with the mire of falsehood? Why, by the impulse of a sinister preaching, do you drive her from the way of truth into the trackless precipices? Why do you assert that a body ought to be sequestered from the body? What, I ask, will this profit a man? Surely not because the nature of the inner man is subtler—which nevertheless is nothing but a body—is it therefore fitting that this same nature be dispersed and separated?

Or is it that, because in this structure of the world's mass certain things are subtler and lighter, certain things grosser and heavier, the whole framework of this solid mass ought therefore to be ruptured for the sake of the finer parts? Or will the air be more blessed, if it has not been together with water and earth?

To these false-tongued ones chattering all around in this fashion, he gives this answer: What is this bare doctrine of this newfangled schism—void of strength, alien to reason, empty of truth, hollow of vanity, swollen with pride, without an author—that springs up against us; lifted up with arrogance, cast down with lying, stuffed with abuse, filching power from the Creator and dignity from the image? This doctrine defames that very image by comparisons with corporeal substance, asserting forsooth that it profits the soul as little to be able to be separated from the body, as it is unprofitable to the air to be separated from the grosser bodies of the world's mass.

Furthermore, if there are anywhere among the nations any to whose talents the secrets of causes have yielded, come hither swiftly, scourge yourselves for your ignorance, and marvel at a new dogma: a portion of body, the fourth part of the world's solid mass, lays claim to the dignity of a soul! This, then, is forsooth the greater soul of all souls, and in proportion to its bulk, the wiser. And so now anyone will be all the more abounding in prudence, the more of this air he has drawn in according to his capacity. Nor without cause did the human race accuse Nature of injustice, in that she has produced cattle so much larger than men—the more blessed, that is, the more capacious they are!

But thus far Ambrose suffices—who indeed alone would surely suffice; yet let me make room for others too to bear witness. Aurelius Augustine—both by acuteness of intellect and by the multitude of matters and by the bulk of his work, like a certain Chrysippus in the power of argumentation, or a Zeno in subtlety of perception, or our Varro in the magnitude of his volumes, and one who by such nature and attentiveness to the disciplines has stood forth that not undeservedly he, a spiritual sophist, has dissented from those corporeal Epicureans or Cynics of our age—in his book to Jerome on the origin of the soul declares thus:

"That the soul is incorporeal, although it can be persuaded only with difficulty to the more slow-witted, yet I confess that I myself am persuaded of it." And when he proves that this is so by great reasonings and by insoluble argumentation, and on this point asks for Jerome's opinion, he recovers from Jerome only writings of his own praise; indeed, without doubt Jerome says that no one perceives anything truer about the soul, that no one can dispute anything more perfectly. Lo, here you have two most illustrious men, by far endowed with pre-eminence of virtues and of teachings, perceiving with us concerning the state of the soul, and laying you low—unarmed—by the weight of authority and the powers of reason, and making, out of two souls separated by bodies, one soul by the unity of wisdom.