Will you then charge the sin upon taste, or upon the state of health? All the senses, therefore, are overthrown or circumvented only for a time, so that they are free from the intrinsic property of deceit. Nay, not even to the causes themselves is the reproach of deceit to be ascribed. For if these things happen by reason, reason does not deserve to be branded as deceitful. What ought to happen in this way is no lie. And so, if even the causes themselves are freed from disgrace, how much more the senses, before which the causes now freely go, since from this very fact truth and trustworthiness and integrity are especially to be vindicated for the senses—namely that they report nothing otherwise than as that reason has dictated which brings it about that anything is reported by the senses otherwise than it is in reality! What are you doing, most impudent Academy?
You overthrow the whole condition of life, you disturb the entire order of nature, you blind the very providence of God, who has set over all His works, to be understood, inhabited, administered, and enjoyed, deceitful and lying masters—the senses! Is not the whole created order ministered to us by these? Is it not through these that the second furnishing was added to the world—so many arts, so many talents, so many pursuits, occupations, offices, dealings, remedies, counsels, comforts, ways of living, culture, adornment—all of which have seasoned the whole savor of life, while through these senses alone of all creatures man is discerned to be a rational animal, capable of intelligence and knowledge, and of the Academy itself?
But indeed Plato, lest he should set any seal of testimony upon the senses, for that reason in the Phaedrus, in the person of Socrates, denies that he is able to know himself, as the Delphic inscription admonishes; and in the Theaetetus he takes from himself the power to know and to perceive; and in the Phaedrus he postpones the verdict of truth till after death—a posthumous verdict, that is—and yet, not yet dead, he was philosophizing.
It is not lawful, it is not lawful for us to call these senses into doubt, lest their trustworthiness should also be debated in the case of Christ, lest perchance it be said that He falsely beheld Satan cast down from heaven, or falsely heard the Father's voice testifying concerning Him, or was deceived when He touched Peter's mother-in-law; or that He perceived afterwards a different scent of the ointment which He accepted for His burial, or a different taste of the wine which He consecrated in memory of His own blood. For in this way even Marcion preferred to believe Him a phantom, disdaining in Him the truth of an entire body. And yet not even in His apostles was His nature made a mockery;
trustworthy was both the sight and the hearing on the mount; trustworthy also the taste of that wine, though it was water before, at the wedding in Galilee; trustworthy also the touch thereafter of the once-doubting Thomas. Recite John's attestation: 'That which we have seen,' he says, 'that which we have heard, we have seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life.' False indeed would be the testimony, if the senses of eyes and ears and hands lie by nature. XVIII. ON THINGS INTELLIGIBLE. I turn to the topic of the intelligibles, seeing how Plato, having attained their knowledge before death, has commended to the heretics that recognition of them as separate from things corporeal. For he says in the Phaedo: 'What then as regards the very possession of wisdom?
Will the body be a hindrance, or not, if one takes it along as a partner in the inquiry? Something of this kind I mean: have sight and hearing any truth for men? Or do not even the poets forever murmur to us that we hear nothing certain nor see anything certain?' He had in mind, of course, also Epicharmus the comic poet: 'The mind sees, the mind hears; the rest are deaf and blind.'
Therefore he says again that he most excels in wisdom who is wise chiefly by the mind, neither setting before himself vision nor drawing to his soul any sense of that kind, but using the pure mind itself in reflection, so as to grasp each pure reality—especially if he has departed from eyes and ears and, so to speak, from the whole body, as disturbing it and not allowing the soul to possess truth and wisdom whenever it associates with it. We see, then, that against the corporeal senses another equipment is held out as far more suitable—namely the powers of the soul, working out the intelligence of that truth whose objects are not present, nor lie beneath the corporeal senses, but are far absent from common awareness, in the secret and in the higher regions, and with God Himself.
For Plato holds that there exist certain substances, invisible, incorporeal, supramundane, divine and eternal, which he calls Ideas, that is, forms, patterns, and causes of these natural things which are manifest and subject to the corporeal senses; and that those Ideas are the truths, while these are their images. Do the heretical seeds of the Gnostics and Valentinians not already shine forth here?
For from this they seize upon the distinction between the corporeal senses and the intellectual powers, which they even fit to the parable of the ten virgins: so that the five foolish ones figured the corporeal senses—foolish, that is, because easily deceived—while the wise ones expressed the mark of the intellectual powers—wise, that is, because they attain to that hidden and heavenly truth, established with the Pleroma, the mysteries of the heretical Ideas; for such are their aeons and genealogies. And so they divide sense itself, assigning the intellectual things to their spiritual seed, but the sensible things to the animal—because the animal in no way grasps the spiritual;
and that to the former belong things invisible, but to the latter things visible and lowly and temporal, which are perceived by sense, being established in images. On these grounds, therefore, we have already laid down beforehand that the mind is nothing other than a support and structure of the soul, and that the spirit is nothing foreign but that which the soul itself is by its breath; while whatever God afterward or the devil might breathe in is to be reckoned an accession.
And now, as regards the distinction between the sensible and the intellectual, we admit nothing other than diversities of things—corporeal and spiritual, visible and invisible, public and hidden—so that the former are attributed to sense, the latter to intellect; yet with both of these assigned in service to the soul, which perceives corporeal things through the body just as it understands incorporeal things through the mind, saving this, that it also perceives while it understands. For is not perceiving also understanding, and understanding perceiving? Or what will sense be, except an understanding of the thing that is perceived? What will intellect be, except a perception of the thing that is understood? Whence these torments of racking simplicity and hanging up the truth?
Who will show me a sense that does not understand what it perceives, or an intellect that does not perceive what it understands, so as to prove that the one can exist without the other? If corporeal things are indeed perceived, but incorporeal things understood, the kinds of things are diverse—not the dwelling-places of sense and intellect, that is, not soul and mind. In short, by what are corporeal things perceived? If by the mind, then the mind is already sensible, not merely intellectual; for while it understands, it perceives, since if it does not perceive, neither does it understand. But if corporeal things are perceived by the soul, then the soul's power is already intellectual, not merely sensible; for while it perceives, it understands, since if it does not understand, neither does it perceive. Likewise, by what are incorporeal things understood?
If by the mind, where will the soul be? If by the soul, where will the mind be? For things that stand apart ought to be absent from one another, when they operate with their own functions. You will perhaps think the mind absent from the soul at times—since it comes about that we do not know we have seen or heard something, because the mind was elsewhere. So much so that I will rather contend that the soul itself neither saw nor heard, because it was elsewhere with its own power, that is, with the mind. For even when a man is deranged, it is not the soul that goes wandering that is deranged, but the mind then suffering with it—though the mishap is principally the soul's. Whence is this confirmed? From the fact that when the soul has departed, the mind too is not found in the man; thus it everywhere follows her, from whom it does not stay behind even at the end.
But when it follows and is given up, the intellect is given up to the soul in the same measure as the mind follows, to which the intellect is given up. Let intellect now be even more powerful than sense, and a better knower of mysteries—provided that it too is a proper power of the soul, as sense is. It makes no difference to me, except when intellect is for this reason preferred to sense, so that from this too it may be held to be more separate insofar as it is affirmed to be more powerful. Then, after the distinction, I must blunt even the preference, which would proceed as far as the persuasion of a more powerful god. But concerning his god too we shall make trial with the heretics on their own field. Now the title is of the soul, and this is the place for not treacherously preferring the intellect.
For even though the things attained by intellect, as spiritual, are more excellent than those attained by sense, as corporeal, the preference will belong to the things—namely of the loftier over the humbler—not of intellect over sense. For how should intellect be preferred to sense, by which it is informed toward the knowledge of truths? For if truths are apprehended through images, that is, invisible things are known through visible, since the Apostle too writes to us, 'For His invisible things, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made'; and Plato to the heretics, 'The appearances of hidden things are those which appear'; and:
'it is altogether necessary that this world be a certain image of some other'—does it seem to you that intellect uses sense as its guide and author and principal foundation, and that without it truths cannot be attained? How, then, will it be more powerful than that through which it exists, which it needs, and to which it owes all that it attains? Thus both conclusions are established: that intellect is neither to be preferred to sense (for that through which anything subsists is inferior to it), nor to be separated from sense (for that through which anything is, is with it). XIX. THAT THE INTELLECT IS ALWAYS PRESENT IN THE SOUL. But neither are those to be passed over who deprive the soul of intellect even for a little while. For thus they pave the way for afterward introducing it, like the mind, from which the intellect is supposed to proceed.
They will have it that infancy is contained by the soul alone, by which it merely lives, not so as at the same time to be wise, because not all things that live are wise. In short, trees live and yet are not wise, according to Aristotle and any other who assigns an animate substance to the universe—a thing which among us is a private possession in man, not merely as a work of God, which other things too are, but as the breath of God, which this alone is, which we say is born with all its own equipment. And if we are challenged with trees, we will embrace the example, since even in them, while they are not yet little shrubs but still stocks and shoots, even at the very moment they rise from the trenches, there is present a proper power of soul.
But according to the reckoning of time it lingers, growing together and maturing along with its own strength, until age fills out the habit by which nature performs its function. Or whence do shoots soon get grafted onto them, and leaves are shaped, and buds swell, and little flowers are adorned, and juices are seasoned, if not because in them the whole equipment of the kind rests, and, brought forth part by part, grows great? Thence, therefore, they are wise from the same source whence they live, by a property of living as much as of being wise, and that indeed from infancy, and these too from their own. For I see even a vine, still tender and unripe, yet already understanding its own tasks, and wishing to cling to something upon which, leaning and entwined, it may thrive.
In short, without waiting for the husbandman's training, without a reed, without a prop, if it touches anything, it will love it of its own accord, and indeed will embrace it more vigorously from its own instinct than at your discretion. It hastens to be secure. I see also ivy, however much you press it down, at once striving toward the heights and hanging up with none to lead the way, because it would rather be borne upon walls with its woven foliage than be trodden on the ground by a self-inflicted injury. On the other hand, when things fare ill for them from a building, how they draw back as they grow, how they flee! You may feel the branches turned elsewhere, and understand the tree's animation from its parting from the wall. It is content with the smallness which from the beginning the most provident shrub learned, fearing even collapse. Why should I not contend for these wisdoms and knowledges of trees?
Let them live as the philosophers will, but be wise as the philosophers will not; let even the infancy of wood understand—how much more that of man, whose soul, like a certain shoot led forth from the mother-stock of Adam into propagation and entrusted to the fertile hollows of the woman, has sprouted with all its own equipment as much in intellect as in sense. I lie, if the infant does not, the moment it has greeted life with a wail, thereby testify that it has itself perceived and understood the very fact that it is born, at once dedicating all its senses in that same place: sight by light, hearing by sound, taste by moisture, smell by air, touch by earth. Thus that first cry is wrung from the first motions of the senses and the first pulsings of the intellects.
There is more, in that some interpret that plaintive cry, from the prospect of a tearful life, as a voice foretelling misfortunes—that it must even be foreknown, from the very entrance into birth, let alone understood. Thereafter the infant proves its mother by the spirit, and examines its nurse by the spirit, and recognizes its bearer by the spirit, fleeing strange breasts and refusing unfamiliar cradles, longing for no one except from habit. Whence has it this judgment of novelty and of custom, if it is not wise? Whence has it to be both offended and soothed, if it does not understand? It is wondrous enough that infancy should be naturally spirited without having a mind, and naturally affectionate without having intellect.
But indeed Christ, by taking proof of praise from the mouth of sucklings and little ones, pronounced neither boyhood nor infancy dull, of which the one, coming forward with its suffrage, could offer Him testimony, while the other, slaughtered on His behalf, certainly felt the violence. XX. ON NATURAL THINGS. And so here too we conclude that all the natural properties of the soul, as substantial to it, are inherent in it, and proceed and advance together with it from the very source by which it is accounted a soul. As Seneca too, often ours, says: 'Implanted in us are the seeds of all arts and ages, and God the Master, from what is hidden, produces our talents'—that is, from the seeds implanted and hidden throughout infancy, which are also the intellects. For from these are talents produced.
Further, in the seeds of crops too there is one form of each kind, yet the developments are varied: some come out in whole condition, some respond even better, some degenerate—according to the condition of climate and soil, according to the manner of tillage and care, according to the outcome of the seasons, according to the license of chances. So too it will be possible for the soul to be uniform in seed, multiform in produce. For here also place makes a difference. It is reported that at Thebes men are born dull and stupid, at Athens most acute in wisdom and speech, where among the Colyttus quarter children speak a month earlier with precocious tongue—since Plato too in the Timaeus affirms that Minerva, when she was establishing that city, looked to nothing else than the nature of the region, which promised such talents;
whence he himself too, in the Laws, enjoins upon Megillus and Clinias to procure a suitable place for founding a city. But Empedocles set the cause of a keen or a dull disposition in the quality of the blood, while he derives the perfected and advanced condition from teaching and training. Nevertheless it is now a commonplace, the matter of national characteristics. The comic poets mock the Phrygians as timid; Sallust assails the Moors as vain and the Dalmatians as fierce; even the Apostle brands the Cretans as liars. Perhaps something may accrue also from the body and its state of health. Corpulence hinders wisdom, leanness assists it; paralysis squanders the mind, consumption preserves it. How much more will they be held from accidental things which, apart from bulk and vigor, either sharpen or blunt the mind!
Sharpening the mind are doctrines, disciplines, arts, and the business of experience—studies; blunting it are ignorances, slothfulnesses, idlenesses, lusts, inexperiences, leisures, vices; and above these, if certain powers also preside. And indeed they do preside—according to us, God the Lord and the devil His rival; according to common opinion, providence and fate and necessity and fortune and freedom of choice. For the philosophers too distinguish these, and we have already vowed to treat them according to the faith under their own heading. It is clear how great are the things that have variously disposed the one nature of the soul, so that they are commonly reckoned to be natures—when they are not species, but lots and portions of nature, and of a single substance, namely that which God conferred upon Adam and made the matrix of all;
and indeed they will be lots, not species of a single substance—that is, this moral variety, as great as it now is, will not have been so great in Adam himself, the very prince of the race. For all these things ought to have been in him, as in the fountainhead of nature, and thence to have flowed with all their variety, if there had been a variety of nature. XXI. But if the nature of the soul was uniform from the beginning in Adam, before so many talents, then it is not multiform—because uniform—through so many talents; nor triform, so that the Valentinian trinity may yet be cut down, which is not even recognized in Adam. For what was spiritual in him? If it be because he prophesied that great mystery concerning Christ and the Church: 'This is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman';
'therefore a man shall leave father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'—this came upon him afterward, when God cast upon him an ecstasy, a spiritual force, in which prophecy consists. And if evil also appeared in him, in the transgression that was committed, neither is this to be reckoned natural, since he wrought it at the instigation of the serpent—as little natural as it was material, since we have already excluded the credibility of matter also. But if neither the spiritual nor what is called the material was proper to him (even if the seed of evil had been from matter), it remains that in him alone and uniquely there was that natural thing which is accounted animal—which we have defended as simple in condition and uniform.
Concerning this it plainly remains to be asked whether that which is called natural ought to be believed changeable. For the same men deny that nature is convertible, so as to fix their trinity in individual properties, because a good tree does not bear bad fruits, nor a bad tree good ones, and no one gathers figs from thorns or grapes from brambles. Therefore, if it is so, God will neither be able to raise up children to Abraham from stones, nor make the broods of vipers bring forth fruits of repentance; and the Apostle erred in writing: 'You too were once darkness'; and: 'We too were once by nature children of wrath'; and: 'Among these you too once were, but you have been washed.' But holy sentences will never be at variance.
For a bad tree will not give good fruits, if it is not grafted; and a good tree will give bad ones, if it is not cultivated; and stones will become children of Abraham, if they are shaped into the faith of Abraham; and broods of vipers will produce the fruit of repentance, if they have spat out the venoms of malice. This will be the force of divine grace, more powerful assuredly than nature, having subject to it within us the free power of the will which is called autexousion (self-determination); and since this power is itself also natural and mutable, whichever way it is turned, nature is turned with it. That the autexousion is naturally within us we have already shown both to Marcion and to Hermogenes. What now, if the condition of nature must also be so defined that it be determined as twofold—of things born and unborn, of things made and unmade?
And thus, whatever shall have been established as born and made, its nature will admit of change: for it will be able both to be reborn and to be renewed. But the unborn and unmade will stand immovable. And since this belongs to God alone—as to the sole unborn and unmade, and therefore immortal and inconvertible—it is settled that the nature of all other things born and made is convertible and changeable; so that, even if a trinity were to be ascribed to the soul, it would be reckoned from the change of accident, not from the constitution of nature. XXII. Hermogenes has already heard from us the other natural properties of the soul, together with their defense and proof, through which the soul is known to be akin rather to God than to matter. Here they will only be named, lest they seem to have been passed over.
For we have granted it both freedom of the will, as we wrote above, and dominion over things, and divination at times—setting aside that which comes by God's grace out of prophecy. And so I will now withdraw from this review of the soul's disposition, that I may complete its arrangement. We define the soul as born of the breath of God, immortal, corporeal, having a definite shape, simple in substance, wise of itself, developing variously, free of will, subject to accident, mutable through talents, rational, dominant, divining, redounding from one. It follows now that we consider how it redounds from one—that is, whence and when and by what principle it is derived. XXIII. WHENCE THE SOUL COMES.
Certain persons believe that they have come down from the heavens, with as great a conviction as they promise that they will assuredly return thither—as Saturninus, the disciple of Menander the Simonian, introduced, affirming that man was made by angels, and that at first the work quivered, futile and feeble and unstable upon the earth, like a worm, because it lacked the strength to stand; and thereafter, out of the mercy of the supreme power, to whose image, though not fully perceived, he had been rashly framed, he obtained a little spark of life which roused and set him up and animated him more steadfastly, and which, after the departure of life, is to be brought back to the matrix.
But Carpocrates too claims just as much for himself concerning higher things, so that his disciples set their own souls on a par even with Christ, let alone the apostles, and, when they please, prefer them—souls which they have likewise conceived from a sublime virtue, as despisers of the world-ruling principalities. Apelles reports that souls were enticed by earthly foods from their supercelestial seats by a fiery angel, the god of Israel and ours, who thereafter fashioned around them the sinful flesh. The swarm of Valentinus stuffs into the soul the seed of Sophia, through which they recognize the histories and Milesian tales of their aeons from the images of visible things. In good faith, I grieve that Plato has been made the caterer of all the heretics.
For it is his teaching, both in the Phaedo, that souls departing from here pass thither, and from thence come hither again; likewise in the Timaeus, that the offspring of god, to whom the begetting of mortals had been delegated, having received the beginning of an immortal soul, moulded around it a mortal body; and moreover, that this world is the image of some other. That he might commend all these things to belief, and prove that the soul, before it came here, had of old dwelt with god in the fellowship of the Ideas, and had passed over hither from thence, and that it here reviews the things it had formerly known concerning the archetypes, he devised a new argument, that learnings are recollections, that is, that the souls coming hither from thence forget the things among which they had previously been, and thereafter, being instructed by these visible things, remember.
Since, therefore, by an argument of this kind those doctrines are insinuated by Plato which the heretics borrow, I shall sufficiently beat back the heretics if I demolish Plato's argument. XXIV. Against Plato's 'learnings and recollections.' First of all, I will not grant that the soul is capable of forgetfulness, for he conceded to it so great a divinity that it is made equal to god. He makes it unbegotten—which alone I could have armed as a testimony to its full divinity; he adds that it is immortal, incorruptible, incorporeal, since he believed god to be this also, invisible, unfigurable, uniform, primal, rational, intellectual. What more could he attribute to the soul, even if he named it god?
But we, who ascribe nothing to god by way of comparison, do for this very reason rate the soul far below god, in that we acknowledge it to be begotten, and therefore of a more diluted divinity and a slenderer felicity—as a breath, not as a spirit; and though immortal, which belongs to its divinity, yet passible, which belongs to its origin, and thus from the very beginning capable of aberration and thereby also akin to forgetfulness. Enough on this point in my discussion with Hermogenes.
For the rest: that which, in order that it might deservedly be held to be god by the equalizing of all its properties, will be subject to no passion, will thereby also be subject to no forgetfulness, since forgetfulness is as great a wrong as is the glory of that whose wrong it is—namely, memory, which Plato himself proclaimed to be the preservation of the senses and the understanding, and Cicero the treasure-house of all studies. Nor will this now even be brought into doubt, whether so divine a soul could have lost its memory, but rather whether, having lost it, it can recover it again. For that which it ought not to have forgotten, if it has forgotten it, I know not whether it is able to recollect. Thus both alternatives will fit my soul, not Plato's. In the second place I will urge: do you make the soul possessed of those Ideas by nature, or not? 'Nay, by nature,' you say.
No one, then, will grant that the natural knowledge of natural things can fall away. The knowledge of arts may fall away, and of studies; the knowledge of doctrines and disciplines may fall away; there may fall away perhaps even the knowledge of native talents and dispositions, which seem to be of nature yet are not, because, as we have premised, they stand upon accidents—according to places, and upbringings, and bodily constitutions and states of health, and dominating powers, and freedoms of the will. But the knowledge of natural things does not fail even in the beasts. Plainly the lion will forget his ferocity, being forestalled by the training of tameness, and with his whole crest of mane will become the darling of some queen Berenice, wiping her cheeks clean with his tongue. His savage manners will leave the beast, but the knowledge of natural things will remain.
The same lion will not forget its natural foods, its natural remedies, its natural terrors: even if the queen offer it fish and cakes, it will crave flesh; and if she compound an antidote for it when it languishes, the lion will seek out an ape; and though no hunting-spear be set against it, yet will it dread a cock. In like manner, even in a man perhaps the most forgetful of all, the knowledge of natural things alone will remain unblotted, as being alone truly natural—ever mindful of eating in hunger and of drinking in thirst, and that the eyes are for seeing and the ears for hearing and the nostrils for smelling and the mouth for tasting and the hand for touching. These, surely, are the senses which philosophy disparages by preferring the intellectual faculties.
If, therefore, the natural knowledge of things sensible remains, how shall that of things intelligible, which is held to be superior, perish? Whence now comes that very force of forgetfulness which precedes recollection? 'From the multitude of time,' he says. Too heedlessly said! For the quantity of time will have no bearing upon that thing which is said to be unbegotten and for that very reason above all believed to be eternal. For that which is eternal, precisely because it is also unbegotten, admitting neither beginning nor end of time, suffers no measure of time; and that which has no measure of time is neither subject to any alteration by time, nor is there any such force from the multitude of time.