If time is the cause of forgetfulness, why is it that from the moment the soul is introduced into the body its memory begins to slip away, as though from that point onward the soul were undergoing time—the soul which without doubt did not exist prior to the body without being, likewise, without time? But once it has entered the body, does it forget immediately, or somewhat later? If immediately, what multitude of time is there as yet to be reckoned? (Infancy, forsooth.) If somewhat later, then in that interval, before the times of forgetfulness, the soul will still act while mindful. And what sort of thing is it, that afterward it should forget and again afterward recollect? Moreover, at whatever time forgetfulness rushed upon it, what measure of time, again, will here be reckoned? The whole course of a lifetime, I suppose, will not suffice to overthrow the memory of so long an age before the body.
But again Plato shifts the cause to the body, as though this too were worthy of belief—that a begotten substance should extinguish the power of an unbegotten one. Yet great and manifold are the differences of bodies, according to race, according to size, according to constitution, according to age, according to health. Shall the differences of forgetfulnesses, then, also be estimated accordingly? But forgetfulness is uniform; therefore a multiform bodily nature will not be the cause of a uniform result. Likewise many proofs, with Plato himself as witness, have established the soul's power of divination, which we have already set before Hermogenes. And indeed there is no man who does not himself at some time feel his own soul to be prophetic, an augur of an omen or a danger or a joy. If the body does not obstruct divination, neither, I suppose, will it hinder memory.
In the very same body, surely, souls both forget and recollect. If some principle of the body strikes in forgetfulness, how will it admit recollection, which is its contrary (since even recollection itself, after forgetfulness, is memory come back to life)? That which opposes the first memory, why does it not also thwart the second? Finally, who would remember better than little children, as being fresher souls, as not yet plunged into domestic and public cares, as owed to their studies alone—whose learnings become recollections? Nay, why do we not all recollect equally, since we all forget equally? But only the philosophers do—and not even all of these.
Plato, forsooth, alone in so great a forest of nations, in so vast a meadow of the wise, both forgot and recollected the Ideas. Therefore, even if this principal argumentation in no way holds together, that whole doctrine to which it was fitted is likewise overthrown—namely, that souls should be believed to be both unbegotten, and to have dwelt in the heavenly places and been conscious of divine things there, and to have been brought down from thence, and here to recollect—so as plainly to furnish occasions to the heretics. XXV. That the soul and the flesh are conceived together. Now then I will return to the cause of this digression, that I may render an account how souls overflow from one, and when and where and by what principle they are taken up; concerning which matter it makes no difference whether the question arise from a philosopher, or from a heretic, or from the common crowd.
It matters nothing to the professors of truth what its adversaries hold, especially adversaries as bold as are those first men who presume that the soul is not conceived in the womb, nor moulded and produced together with the fashioning of the flesh, but is impressed from without upon the infant only after birth is already accomplished and while it is not yet alive; and that for the rest the seed, set apart from intercourse in the female parts and quickened by natural motion, thickens into the substance of flesh alone; that this, being brought forth and steaming from the furnace of the womb and loosened by heat—like iron glowing hot and then plunged into cold water—being thus struck by the rigor of the air, both seizes upon animal life and gives back a vocal sound.
This the Stoics hold, together with Aenesidemus, and at times Plato himself, when he says that in like manner a soul, strange and an exile from the womb, is drawn in at the first breath of the infant being born, just as it is led out at the last expiration. We shall see whether he framed this as his settled opinion. Nor was there lacking even among the physicians one Hicesius, a betrayer both of nature and of his own art. They were ashamed, I suppose, to lay down that which the women would recognize. And how much more blush-worthy an issue, to be refuted by women rather than confirmed! For in a matter of this kind there is no one so fit a master, arbiter, and witness as that very sex.
Answer, you mothers—you who are pregnant, you who have borne children (let the barren and the males keep silence): the truth of your nature is sought, the faithful testimony of your experience is called upon. Do you perceive in the fetus any liveliness other than your own—by which the flanks throb, the sides quiver, the whole compass of the belly is beaten, and the region of the weight is everywhere shifted? Are not these motions your joys and your sure security, that you thus trust the infant both to live and to play? And if its restlessness cease, do you not first take fright for it? And does it not already hear within you, when it is startled at a new sound? And do you not crave certain foods for its sake, and for its sake also loathe others?
Do you not also share your states of health with each other by turns—the child indeed sharing even in your bruises, by which it too within is marked upon the same limbs, taking to itself the injuries of the mother? If the livid and red of blood is a passion, without a soul there will be no blood; if every accession of health is such, without a soul there will be no health; if nourishment, fasting, growths, decreases, fear, motion are functions of the soul, he who performs them lives. Finally, he ceases to live who ceases to function. Finally, the dead too are brought forth; and how, unless they were also once alive? And how were they dead, unless they were first alive? And yet even in the very womb the infant is sometimes slaughtered by a necessary cruelty, when, turned crosswise at the delivery, it denies its own birth—a matricide, unless doomed to die.
And so there is, among the instruments of physicians, both the device by which the hidden parts are first compelled to open by a twisting adjustment (they call it the ring-knife), by which the members are cut within at anxious discretion; and the blunt hook, by which the whole crime is drawn out in violent delivery. There is also a bronze spike, by which the very throat-cutting is directed in blind brigandage—the embryo-slayer they call it, from its office in infanticide, being the destroyer of the living infant, to be sure. This Hippocrates possessed, and Asclepiades, and Erasistratus, and even Herophilus the dissector of adults, and the gentler Soranus himself—all certain that the conceived thing is an animate being, and therefore pitying such most unhappy infancy, that it might rather be slain than be torn to pieces alive.
Concerning which necessity of crime Hicesius, I believe, did not even doubt, when he brought the soul in upon the already-born from the stroke of the cold air, because even the very word for soul among the Greeks corresponds to cooling. Are the barbarian and Roman nations, then, animated in some other way, because they have named the soul by something other than 'psyche'? But how many nations are reckoned under the most burning zone, scorched even in their color? Whence comes a soul to those for whom there is no rigor of air? I say nothing of the heats of bedchambers and of all the provision of warmth necessary there for women in labor, to be fanned upon whom is a very great danger. In the baths themselves the fetus almost slips forth, and at once its wailing is heard.
For the rest, if the rigor of the air is the treasure-house of the soul, then outside Germany and Scythia and the Alps and the Argaeus mountains no one ought to have been born. But in fact peoples are more numerous under the eastern and southern temperature, and their talents are readier, while all the Sarmatians are sluggish even in mind. For minds too would come forth keener from the cold regions, if souls came from the little chills; for it is with the substance that the power comes. These things being thus established beforehand, we can also call to mind those who, when the mother's womb was cut open, drew in air alive—certain men of the line of Liber and the Scipios.
But if anyone, like Plato, does not suppose that two souls can meet together in one, just as neither can two bodies, I would have shown him not only two souls heaped together into one—just as bodies also are, in the case of embryos—but indeed many other things joined together with the soul: namely, the substance of a demon, and not of one only, as in Socrates himself, but even of a sevenfold spirit, as in the Magdalene, and of a legionary number, as in the Gerasene—so that a soul is the more easily joined with a soul, from the kinship of substance, than a wicked spirit is joined with a soul, from the diversity of nature. And yet the same Plato, warning in the sixth book of the Laws to beware lest the corruption of the seed, from some baseness of intercourse, engender a stain upon body and soul, I know not whether he lapsed rather from his former or from this latter opinion.
For he shows that the soul is introduced from the seed, which he warns must be cared for, and not from the first breath of the newborn. Whence, I ask, do we also answer to our parents in the likeness of the soul, as regards native dispositions, according to the testimony of Cleanthes, if we are not also brought forth from the seed of the soul? And why did the ancient astrologers direct the horoscope of a man from the beginning of conception, if there is not from that point a soul also, to which equally pertains—if it is anything—the breath? XXVI. But all the inconsistency of human opinion reaches only up to the boundaries of god. Now I will gather my steps into our own lines, that what I have answered to philosophers and physicians, I may prove to a Christian. Upon your own foundation, brother, build up your faith.
Behold the living wombs of the most holy women—the infants there not only already breathing, but even prophesying. Behold, the inward parts of Rebecca are disturbed, and the birth is still far off, and there is no impulse of air. Behold, the twofold offspring tumults in the mother's places, and as yet there are nowhere two peoples. A portentous wantonness of an infancy, perhaps, striving before it is moist, spirited before it is animated—if only it had merely troubled the mother by its leaping. But when the birth is opened and the number is inspected and the augury is recognized, I think that now not only are the souls of the infants proved, but also their contendings. He who had come first to be born was held back by him whom he had come before, though not yet more fully brought forth, but only born as to the hand.
And if the one himself imbibed his soul at the first breath after the Platonic manner, or plucked it from the rigor of the air after the Stoic fashion, what of that other who was being awaited, who was still held back within and already held back the one outside? Not yet breathing, I suppose, he had seized his brother's heel; even now, warm from the mother, he desired to have come forth first. O infant both emulous and vigorous and already, I believe, contentious—because alive! Behold also singular conceptions, and indeed more monstrous ones, of a barren woman and of a virgin, who by this very fact might have brought forth imperfect ones, in the subversion of nature—the one being numbed as to seed, the other untouched. It would have been fitting, if anything, that those should be born without a soul who had not been duly conceived; but even they live, each in his own womb.
Elizabeth exults—John within had leaped; Mary glorifies the Lord—Christ within had prompted her. The mothers recognize their offspring by turns, being themselves recognized in turn by those infants who were assuredly living, who were not only souls but also spirits. So also you read the voice of god to Jeremiah: 'Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.' If god forms in the womb, he also breathes upon it from the form of the beginning: 'and god formed man and breathed into him the breath of life.' Nor could god have known man in the womb, save as a whole man: 'and before you came forth from the belly, I sanctified you.' And a body still dead? By no means at all: for god is of the living, not of the dead. XXVII. How, then, is the animate being conceived?
Is the substance of both, body and soul, welded together at the same time, or does one of them precede? Nay, we say that both are conceived and formed and perfected together, just as also brought forth together, and that no moment intervenes in conception during which the order might be arranged. For consider the last things in the light of the first: if death is defined as nothing other than the disjunction of body and soul, the contrary of death, life, will be defined as nothing other than the conjunction of body and soul; if the disjunction befalls both substances at once through death, this must have prescribed that the form of conjunction likewise befalls both substances alike through life. Further, we acknowledge life from conception, because we vindicate the soul from conception; for from that point is life, from which is soul.
Equally, therefore, are those things welded together into life which are equally separated in death. Then, if we assign primacy to the one and secondariness to the other, the times of the seed too must be distinguished according to the condition of that order. And when will the seed of the body be deposited, when that of the soul? Nay, if the times of the seeds are to be divided, the materials too will be held to be diverse, from the distance of the times. For even though we shall confess two kinds of seed, corporeal and animal, we yet vindicate them as undivided, and in this manner contemporaneous and of the same moment. Let us therefore not be ashamed of a necessary exposition. Nature is to be venerated, not blushed at. It was lust, not the state itself, that defiled intercourse. It is excess, not the state, that is unchaste; since the state is blessed before god:
'Increase and multiply into a multitude'; but excess is accursed—adulteries and fornications and brothels. In this solemn office of the sexes, then, which unites male and female—in intercourse, I mean, the common act—we know that both soul and flesh function together: the soul by concupiscence, the flesh by operation; the soul by instinct, the flesh by act. By a single impulse of both, therefore, the whole man being shaken, the seed of the whole man is discharged, having its fluid from the corporeal substance and its warmth from the animal. And if 'soul' is a cold name among the Greeks, why does the body grow cold once it is withdrawn?
Finally—that I may still venture rather by modesty than by proof—in that very heat of the ultimate pleasure by which the generative fluid is expelled, do we not perceive something of the soul also going forth, and thereby do we not grow faint and languid with a diminution of the light? This will be the animal seed, forthwith from the distillation of the soul, just as that fluid, the corporeal seed, is from the refining of the flesh. Most faithful are the examples of the beginning. From the clay is the flesh in Adam. What else is clay but a rich liquid? Thence will be the generative fluid. From the breath of god is the soul. What else is the breath of god but the vapor of the spirit? Thence will be that which we breathe out through that fluid.
Since, therefore, in the beginning two things diverse and divided—clay and breath—had joined into one man, and both substances, now blended in the one, had mingled also their seeds, and thence handed down the form for propagating the race, so that now too the two, though diverse, yet united, flow forth alike, and being alike sown in their own furrow and field, alike sprout forth a man from both substances, in whom again their own seed lies, according to its kind—just as has been prescribed for every generative condition. Therefore from one man is all this overflowing abundance of souls, nature observing, to be sure, the edict of god: 'Increase and multiply into a multitude.' For even in the very preface of the work of the one man, 'let us make man,' all posterity was foretold in the plural:
'and let them have dominion over the fishes of the sea.' No wonder—the promise of the harvest is in the seed. XXVIII. Against Plato, that the living are not made from the dead. What now is that old saying, in the memory of Plato, concerning the reciprocal running to and fro of souls—that those departing hence go thither, and again come hither, and are made, and that thereafter it likewise holds that the living are made anew from the dead? Pythagorean, as some will have it; divine, Albinus reckons it, of Mercury the Egyptian, perhaps. But there is no divine saying save of the one god, wherewith the prophets, wherewith the apostles, wherewith Christ himself thundered.
Moses is far more ancient even than Saturn—by about nine hundred years—let alone than his great-grandsons, and certainly far more divine, who arranged the courses of the human race from the beginning of the world too, by individual births, by name and by time, being sufficiently proved in the divinity of his work by the divination of his utterance. But if the Samian sophist is Plato's authority for the perpetually revolving return of souls, ever by an alternating substitution of the dead and the living, certainly that Pythagoras, though good in other respects, yet in order to construct this opinion leaned not only upon a base but even upon a rash lie. Learn, you who do not know, and believe with us. He feigns death, hides in an underground place, and condemns himself there to endurance for seven years;
meanwhile, from his sole confidante and helper, his mother, he learns what he was to report about the deceased descendants, so as to gain credit for the matter. When he thought he had sufficiently marred his fleshly appearance to attain the full horror of a long-dead man, he emerges from the recesses of his deceit as one restored from the dead. Who would not have believed that he had come back to life whom he had believed to have died—hearing, above all, from him those things about the dead descendants which he could not have seemed to learn except among the dead? Thus 'the living are made from the dead' is an old saying. What of it, even if it were more recent? Truth does not require antiquity, nor does falsehood shun novelty. I hold it plainly false, though of noble antiquity; and why not false, whose testimony too is from what is false?
How shall I believe that Pythagoras does not lie, who lies in order that I may believe? How will he persuade me that he had formerly, before Pythagoras, been Aethalides and Euphorbus and Pyrrhus the fisherman and Hermotimus, so as to persuade me that the living are made from the dead—he who has again perjured himself as Pythagoras? For by how much the more credible it would have been that he himself, of his own accord, had returned once into life, than that another and yet another so many times had done so, by so much the more he has deceived in the harder things, who has lied in the softer. 'But he recognized the shield of Euphorbus, of old consecrated at Delphi, and called it his own, and proved it by marks commonly unknown.' Look to his underground vault, and, if it holds, believe.
For he who contrived such a trick, with injury to his good health, with fraud—condemned for seven years of life beneath the earth to hunger, sloth, and shadow—for whom the loathing of the sky was of such moment, what rashness would he not have approached, what curiosity would he not have attempted, to arrive at the mark of that shield? But what if he found it in some more obscure histories? What if he drank in some little golden breaths of a fame surviving from a tradition now fallen away? What if he learned it from the temple-keeper, an inspection having been secretly bought? We know too that magic is permitted to explore hidden things through spirits that descend, and attendant familiars, and pythonic spirits. For did not even Pherecydes, the teacher of Pythagoras, divine—not to say dream—perhaps by these arts?
What if the same demon that was in Euphorbus, who did the deeds of blood, was in him too? Finally, he who had proved himself to be Euphorbus from the token of the shield—why did he recognize none of his Trojan fellow-soldiers equally well? For they too would by now have come back to life, if the living were made from the dead. XXIX. It is agreed indeed that the dead are made from the living, yet not for that reason also that the living are made from the dead. For from the beginning the living were prior, whence from the beginning likewise the dead were later, and from no other source than from the living. The former had a source whence rather to arise, provided it was not from the dead. The latter had no source whence rather to be derived, save from the living. Therefore if from the beginning the living were not from the dead, why afterward from the dead? Had that source, whatever it be, of the origin failed? Or did nature repent of the form? And how is that form preserved in the dead?
Is it not the case that, because from the beginning the dead were from the living, therefore they are always from the living? For either the form of the beginning would have persevered in both cases, or it would have changed in both—so that, if the living had afterward to be made from the dead, it ought likewise to follow that the dead too are not made from the living. If the faith of the institution ought not to be everywhere equal, contraries are not on all sides reformed from contraries by alternation. For we too will set in opposition the contrarieties of the born and the unborn, of sight and blindness, of youth and old age, of wisdom and folly.
And yet, not for that reason does the unborn come forth from the born, because the contrary is made from the contrary; nor sight again from blindness, because from sight blindness befalls; nor youth again come to life from old age, because from youth old age withers; nor folly again be dulled from wisdom, because from folly wisdom is sharpened. These things too Albinus, fearing for his Plato, subtly seeks to distinguish as kinds of contrarieties—as though these were not as absolutely set among contrarieties as those which he interprets according to his master's opinion—life, I mean, and death. And yet life is not restored from death, because death is derived from life. XXX. But what shall we answer to the rest?
First, then, if the living were from the dead, just as the dead are from the living, altogether one and the same number of all men would always have held fast—namely, that number which had first entered into life. For the living are prior to the dead, then the dead are from the living, and again the living from the dead. And while this is always from the same ones, so there are always just as many who are from the same ones. For neither would more nor fewer have gone forth than returned.
But we find, according to the records even of human antiquities, that the human race has gradually grown to overflowing, while Aborigines, or wanderers, or exiles, or various glory-seekers, seize lands—as the Scythians seized the Parthian lands, as the Temenidae seized the Peloponnese, as the Athenians seized Asia, as the Phrygians seized Italy, as the Phoenicians seized Africa—while regular migrations, which they call colonies, by design of relieving overpopulation, hurl swarms of a nation into other territories. For the original stocks now both remain in their own seats and elsewhere have lent out their nationhood the more abundantly. Certainly the very world itself is manifestly more cultivated day by day and better equipped than of old.
All things are now accessible, all things known, all things busy with commerce; most pleasant estates have blotted out formerly notorious wildernesses, tilled fields have subdued the forests, flocks have put wild beasts to flight, sands are sown, rocks are planted, marshes are drained; there are as many great cities now as there were once cottages. Now neither do islands strike terror nor do crags affright; everywhere is a house, everywhere a people, everywhere a commonwealth, everywhere life. The greatest testimony to the throng of humanity: we are burdensome to the world, the elements scarcely suffice for us, our necessities grow straiter, and there are complaints among all men, since now nature does not sustain us. In truth, plague and famine and wars and the engulfings of cities are to be reckoned as remedies, a sort of pruning of the overgrown human race.
And yet, though axes of this kind fell the greatest force of mortals at a single stroke, never has the world once, after a thousand years, dreaded that restitution of theirs which brings the living back from the dead. For this too an equal force of loss and of restitution would have made perceptible, if the living were made from the dead. But why after a thousand years and not at once are the living made from the dead—since, if what has been expended be not at once replenished, there would be a peril of the whole being consumed, the failure forestalling the restitution, because the passage of this life, being far shorter than a period of a thousand years and therefore more easily extinguished before it be rekindled, would not have balanced the account? Therefore that which, in this manner, would have failed if the living were made from the dead, since it did not fail, is proof that it is not to be believed that the living are made from the dead. XXXI.
Now indeed, if the living come from the dead, then surely single souls come from single ones. Therefore the souls of individual bodies ought to have returned singly into individual bodies. But if two and three and even five are taken up again from one and the same womb, the living will not come from the dead, since they will not be single from single. And moreover in this way the pattern of the beginning is signified, since even now many souls are brought forth from one. Again, since souls depart at various ages, why do they return at one age? For all are steeped in infancy, since it is as an infant that one returns. But how strange it is that an old man, once dead, should return an infant!
If the soul decreases outwardly by regressing in age, how much more should it have returned more advanced after a thousand years, or at least of the same age as at its death, so as to recover again the span of life it had left behind? But even if the very same souls were always brought round again, granted that not with the same bodily forms, granted not with the same lots of fate either, they ought nevertheless to bring back with them at least the former properties of their talents and pursuits and affections; since they would be reckoned the same in vain if they lacked the very things by which they might be proved the same. 'How do you know,' you say, 'whether it may not happen thus secretly, but the condition of the thousand-year span destroys the possibility of recognizing them, because they return unknown to you?' Yet I do know that it is not so, when you set Pythagoras and Euphorbus before me.
For behold, it is quite well established that Euphorbus was a military and warlike soul, even from the very glory of his consecrated shields. But Pythagoras was so idle and unwarlike that, shunning the battles of Greece in his day, he preferred the tranquillity of Italy, devoted to geometry and astronomy and music, a stranger to the pursuit and disposition of Euphorbus. And that Pyrrhus spent his time in catching fish, while Pythagoras on the contrary abstained even from eating them, as one refraining from animals. Aethalides moreover and Hermotimus had partaken even of the bean among their common fare, but Pythagoras handed down to his disciples that they must not so much as pass through a bean-field. How then are the same souls recovered, which will be proved the same neither in talents, nor in habits, nor even now in diet?
As it is now, out of so great a census of Greece only four souls are recounted. But indeed why of Greece's census alone, seeing that neither from every nation nor from every age and rank, nor finally from every sex, do both metempsychosis and metensomatosis occur daily; why does Pythagoras alone recognize himself as now one and now another, and not I too? Or if it is a privilege of philosophers, and of Greeks at that—as though Scythians and Indians did not also philosophize—why does Epicurus remember no one of himself in the past, nor Chrysippus, nor Zeno, nor even Plato himself, whom perhaps we might have believed to be Nestor on account of the honey of his eloquence? XXXII. ON METEMPSYCHOSIS AND METENSOMATOSIS.
But Empedocles, because he had raved himself into being a god, on that account, I suppose, disdained to recall himself as any hero, and said, 'I was a bush and a fish.' Why not rather also a gourd, so insipid, and a chameleon, so puffed up? Clearly, like a fish, lest he should rot away by some too well-preserved burial, he preferred to be roasted by hurling himself into Aetna. And thenceforth in him metensomatosis came to an end, like a summer supper after the roast. Just so, then, here too we must needs contend against a still more monstrous presumption, one that rolls beasts back out of men and men out of beasts. Let the bushes see to it, and the sorrels too, lest we be compelled to laugh rather than to teach.
We say that the human soul can in no way be transferred into beasts, even if according to the philosophers it is reckoned to consist of elemental substances. For whether the soul be fire, or water, or blood, or breath, or air, or light, we must consider that there are animals contrary to each of these several kinds: to fire, those that are cold—snakes, lizards, salamanders, and whatever will be produced from the rival element, namely from water; likewise contrary to water are those creatures that are dry and juiceless: for locusts, butterflies, and chameleons delight in droughts; again contrary to blood are those that lack its crimson—snails, little worms, and the greater census of fishes;