but contrary to breath are those that seem not to breathe, lacking lungs and windpipes—gnats, ants, moths, and this class of minute creatures; likewise contrary to air are those that, always living underground and underwater, lack the drawing of it (you would know the things rather than the names); likewise contrary to light are those that are wholly blind, or that have eyes only in the darkness of the sun—moles, bats, owls. This I set forth so as to teach from apparent and manifest substances. But for the rest, if I were to hold to the atoms of Epicurus, and see the numbers of Pythagoras, and light upon the ideas of Plato, and seize on the entelechies of Aristotle, I would perhaps find animals to set in opposition to these kinds too under the name of contrariety.
For I maintain that, out of whatever substance aforesaid the human soul might have consisted, it could not have been re-formed into animals so contrary to each several substance, nor confer upon them its census by its own transference—animals by which it would rather be excluded and rejected than admitted and received, on account of this first contrariety, which introduces a diversity of substantial state; and then all the rest also in the consequent order of each one's nature. For the human soul has been allotted also other seats, and modes of sustenance and equipment and sense and affection and mating and offspring, likewise talents, then works, joys, aversions, vices, desires, pleasures, ailments, remedies—and finally its own modes of life and issues of death.
How, then, will that soul which clung to the earth, dreading no height, no depth, wearied even by the ascent of stairs, choked even by the submersion of fishponds, afterwards vault into the air in an eagle, or dart into the sea in an eel? How likewise will one nourished on liberal and dainty and choice food chew—I do not say chaff, but thorns and the wild bitternesses of foliage, and the beasts of the dunghills, even poisons—if it should pass into a she-goat or a quail, nay even into carrion, nay even into human flesh, being surely mindful of itself, when in a bear or a lion? Thus you may reduce all the rest to incongruity.
Not to linger over arguing each point: whatever be the measure of the human soul itself, whatever its size, what will it do in animals far larger or far more minute? For it is necessary both that every body be filled by its soul and that every soul be enveloped by its body. How, then, will a man's soul fill an elephant? How likewise will it be enveloped in a gnat? If it is either stretched out or contracted so far, it will assuredly be endangered. And therefore I add: if by no reasoning is it capable of such a transference into animals that match neither the modules of its body nor the other laws of its nature, will it then perhaps be changed according to the qualities of the kinds and their life contrary to human life, itself too made contrary to the human by the change?
But indeed, if it undergoes a change, losing what it was, it will not be what it was; and if it will not be what it was, metensomatosis is dissolved, being of course not to be ascribed to that soul which, if it shall be changed, will not exist. For the metensomatosis will be said to be of that soul which would suffer it while remaining in its own state. Therefore, if it can neither be changed—lest it cease to be itself—nor remain in its state, because it does not admit contraries, I still ask for some cause worthy of belief for a transference of this kind. For even though certain men are matched with beasts on account of the qualities of their morals and talents and affections, since God also:
'man,' it says, 'has been made like the senseless beasts'—not on that account will kites come from the rapacious, and dogs from the filthy, and panthers from the fierce, or sheep from the upright, and swallows from the chattering, and doves from the chaste, as though the same substance of soul everywhere resumed its nature in the properties of animals. But substance is one thing, and the nature of a substance another; since substance is proper to each thing, whereas nature can be common. Take an example. Stone and iron are substances; the hardness of stone and of iron is the nature of the substance. Hardness they share; in substance they differ. The softness of wool, the softness of feather: let their natural qualities be alike, their substantial ones are not alike.
So too, if a man be called a savage or an upright beast, yet the soul is not the same: for even then a likeness of nature is noted, when a dissimilarity of substance is discerned. For the very fact that you judge a man to be like a beast, you confess that the soul is not the same, by calling it like, not identical. So too the divine pronouncement is discerning, matching man to the cattle by nature, not by substance. Besides, God himself would not have marked man in this way, had he known him to be cattle in substance. XXXIII.
Even when this dogma is defended under the name of judgment—that human souls are allotted kinds of animals according to their life and merits, some to be slaughtered as victims for killing, some to be broken in as servants, some to be worn out as laborers, some to be defiled as unclean creatures; and likewise to be honored and loved and cared for and desired in the most beautiful and worthiest and most useful and most delicate—here too I will say: if they are changed, they will not be the very same souls that are called to account, which deserved their fate. The rationale of judgment will be voided, if the perception of merits is lacking. But the perception of merits will be lacking, if the state of the souls has been altered. And the state of the souls is altered, if they do not persevere the same.
Likewise, if they shall persevere unto judgment—which Hermes the Egyptian also knew, saying that the soul, departed from the body, is not poured back into the soul of the universe, but remains distinct, in order, as he says, that it may render an account to the Father of the things it has done in the body—I am willing to review the justice, gravity, majesty, and dignity of the divine judgment in every case, to see whether human censure does not preside from a loftier height, with a fuller honor in either sentence, of punishments and of favors, more severe in avenging and more liberal in bestowing. What do you suppose will become of a murderer's soul?
Some beast, I suppose, destined for the shambles and the meat-market, so that it may in like manner be slaughtered, because it too slaughtered; may in like manner be flayed, because it too despoiled; may in like manner be set out as fodder, because it too made those beasts' prey whom it butchered in the woods and pathless places.
If it be judged thus, will not that soul carry away more of consolation than of punishment—that it finds its funeral among the most costly cooks, that it is buried with the seasonings of an Apicius and a Lurco, that it is brought to Ciceronian tables, that it is borne out on the most splendid platters of a Sulla, that it undergoes a banquet for its obsequies, that it is devoured by its own equals rather than by kites and wolves, so that, entombed in a human body and returned into its own kind, it may seem to have risen again, exulting against human judgments, if it has experienced them? For those judgments tear a cutthroat to pieces with various and exquisite beasts, now even trained beyond nature, and that while he yet lives—nay, easily even not dying, the end being deferred with contrived delay to the fullness of his punishment.
But even if the soul has fled beforehand from the final sword, lest the body too should escape the iron, none the less, with both his throat pierced and his ribs run through, the requital of his own crime is exacted. Thereupon he is given to the fire, that even his burial may be a punishment. In fine, it is not otherwise permitted. Yet so great is not the care of his pyre that other beasts should find his remains; certainly neither are his bones spared, nor are his ashes indulged, but are to be punished with nakedness. So great among men is the vengeance for homicide as is that very nature which is avenged. Who would not prefer the justice of the age—which the apostle too testifies is not armed with the sword in vain, and which, in raging on behalf of man, is a religious thing?
If we consider also the wages of the other crimes—the gibbets, the burnings alive, the sacks, the hooks, the crags—for whom would it not be expedient to suffer according to the sentence of Pythagoras and Empedocles? For even those who are to be punished with labors and servitudes will surely be re-embodied in asses and mules; how they will congratulate themselves over the mills and water-drawing wheels, if they recall the mines and workhouses and public works, and the very prisons, idle though they be! Likewise those who, having lived uprightly in their conduct, have commended their life to the judge—I look for rewards, but rather I find punishments. Truly a great reward for the good, to be restored into animals, whatever they be! Homer remembered himself a peacock, while Ennius dreamed it; but I would not believe poets even when awake.
And though the peacock be most beautiful and adorned with whatever color it pleases, yet its feathers are mute, yet its voice is displeasing, and poets desire nothing so much as to sing. Homer, therefore, was condemned into a peacock, not honored. He will rejoice more in the world's recompense, held to be the father of the liberal disciplines, so that he would prefer the ornaments of his fame to those of a tail. Come now, granting that poets pass into peacocks or into swans—if indeed the voice is comely even in swans—what animal will you put upon just Aeacus? What beast will befall chaste Dido? What bird will patience obtain, what beast holiness, what fish innocence? All things are the handmaids of man, all subjected, all made his chattels.
If he is to be any one of these, then there is diminished the man to whom, for the merits of his life, portraits, statues and inscriptions, public honors, and privileges are repaid; to whom the senate-house, to whom the people offer sacrifice with their votes. O divine judgments after death, more mendacious than human ones, contemptible in their punishments, disdainable in their favors, which neither the worst would fear nor the best desire, to which the wicked will hasten rather than the holy—the former, that they may the sooner escape the justice of the age; the latter, that they may the later attain it!
Well do you teach, O philosophers, and profitably do you counsel lighter punishments or rewards after death—whereas, if any judgment awaits souls, it ought to be believed heavier in the final reckoning of life than in its administration, because nothing is fuller than what is uttermost, and nothing is more uttermost than what is more divine. God, therefore, will judge more fully, because most uttermost, by an eternal sentence both of punishment and of refreshment, with souls returning not into beasts, but into their own bodies—and that once, and unto that day which the Father alone knows, so that by suspended expectation the anxiety of faith may be proved, ever watching for the day while ever ignorant of it, daily fearing what it daily hopes for. XXXIV. AGAINST THE OPINION OF SIMON THE HERETIC.
No opinion of such madness has to this day broken out under a heretical name that would refashion human souls into beasts; but we have of necessity introduced and excluded this species too, as cohering with the foregoing, so that Homer might be beaten back in the peacock just as Euphorbus in Pythagoras, and thus, by this metempsychosis or metensomatosis being likewise repelled, that other doctrine might again be struck down which has furnished something to the heretics.
For Simon the Samaritan too, in the Acts of the Apostles the would-be purchaser of the Holy Spirit—after he had been condemned by the Spirit itself along with his money unto perdition, and had wept in vain—turned to assaulting the truth, as if for the solace of revenge, propped up moreover by the powers of his art. For a display of some supposed virtue he redeemed with that same money a certain Helen of Tyre from a place of public lust, a reward worthy of himself in exchange for the Holy Spirit; and he indeed feigns himself to be the supreme Father, but her to be his first Thought (Ennoia), by which he had set about to create the angels and archangels; that she, made partner of this design, had leapt forth from the Father and darted down into the lower regions, and there, forestalling the Father's design, had generated the angelic Powers, ignorant of the Father, the fashioners of this world;
that she, not being retained by these with corresponding goodwill, lest, having departed, she should seem to be the offspring of another, was on that account consigned to every outrage, so that, being cheapened, she might nowhere be free to depart, and had even sunk down into the human form, as if to be confined in the bonds of the flesh; that thus, tossed about through many ages in one female guise after another, she had also been that Helen so ruinous to Priam, and afterward to the eyes of Stesichorus, whom she had blinded for the abuse of his song, and then had restored to sight for the satisfaction of his praise; that thereafter, migrating from bodies into bodies, she had in a final disgrace stood as a prostitute, a viler Helen, under her own title.
This one, then, is (he says) the lost sheep, to whom the supreme Father—namely Simon—had descended; and having first recovered her and carried her back—I know not whether on his shoulders or his thighs—thence he had regarded the salvation of men, as if by her vindication he would free them from those angelic Powers; and in deceiving these, being himself likewise transformed and having falsely feigned himself man to men, he had borne himself in Judaea indeed as the Son, but in Samaria as the Father. O Helen, laboring between poets and heretics, infamous now for adultery, now for whoredom—except that she is more gloriously rescued from Troy than from the brothel: from Troy by a thousand ships, from the brothel perhaps not for a thousand denarii. Blush, Simon, too slow in seeking, too inconstant in bringing her back.
But Menelaus at once pursues the lost woman, at once demands back the one snatched away, wrings her out in a ten years' war—not lurking, not deceiving, not given to quibbling. I fear that he was rather the father, who labored more vigilantly and more boldly and longer over Helen's recovery. XXXV. TO THE OPINION OF CARPOCRATES. But it was not for you alone that metempsychosis furnished this fable: from it Carpocrates too draws profit, a magician alike, a fornicator alike, though less with Helen. Why not? seeing that, in order to establish the overthrow of all divine and human discipline, he asserted that souls are re-embodied; for he held that this life is granted to no one save when all things which convict it have been expunged, because a thing is held evil not by nature, but by opinion.
And so metempsychosis necessarily impends, if in the very first passage of this life satisfaction is not made for all things unlawful (crimes, forsooth, are the tribute due to life!); and for the rest, the soul must be recalled as many times as it has contributed too little, as a debtor for its offenses, until it pays out the very last farthing, thrust again and again into the prison of the body. For to this he tempers that whole allegory of the Lord, shining forth in certain interpretations, and to be understood at first indeed simply. For the heathen man too is our adversary, walking in the same way of common life. Otherwise we should have had to go out of the world, if it were not permitted to associate with them.
To this adversary, then, he bids you show a good disposition ('love your enemies,' he says, 'and pray for those who curse you'), lest, provoked by injury through some dealing of business, he drag you off to his own judge, and, handed over to custody, you be pressed to the discharge of the whole debt. Then, if the mention of the adversary be transferred to the devil, from the observation that accompanies it, you are admonished to enter into that concord with him too which is reckoned from the covenant of faith; for you have covenanted to renounce him and his pomp and his angels. It has been agreed between you concerning this.
This will be a friendship in the observance of the pledge, that you resume nothing of his afterward from those things which you have forsworn, which you have rendered back to him, lest he cast you before God the judge as a defrauder, as a transgressor of the pact—just as we read of him elsewhere as the accuser of the saints, and, from the very name of 'devil,' the informer—and the judge deliver you to the angel of execution, and he consign you to the infernal prison, whence you shall not be released until even the least offense be paid off by the delay of the resurrection. What is more apt than these meanings? What is truer than these interpretations? For the rest, to Carpocrates: if the soul is a debtor for all crimes, who is to be understood as its enemy and adversary?
The better mind, I suppose, which has driven it toward some measure of innocence, to be forced again and again into the body, until it be caught guilty in nothing of a good life. This is 'to know the good tree from its evil fruits'—that is, to recognize the doctrine of truth from its worst precepts. I expect that heretics of this kind seize also upon the example of Elijah, as though represented in John, so that the Lord's pronouncement should serve as patron to metempsychosis: 'Elijah has already come, and they did not know him,' and elsewhere: 'and if you will hear it, this is Elijah who is to come.' Was it, then, out of the Pythagorean opinion that the Jews too were consulting John, 'Are you Elijah?'—and not out of the divine preaching: 'and behold, I will send you Elijah the Tishbite'?
But indeed their metempsychosis is the recall of a soul that has long since undergone death and been repeated in another body; whereas Elijah is to come not from a decease of life, but from a translation, nor is he to be restored to a body from which he was not taken away, but to be given back to the world from which he was translated—not from a return-after-exile of life, but from a supplement of prophecy—the very same, and both of his own name and of his own manhood. But how is John Elijah? You have the angel's word: 'and he himself,' it says, 'shall go before the people in the power and in the spirit of Elijah'—not in his soul nor in his flesh. For these substances belong each to its own man, whereas spirit and power are conferred from without by the grace of God;
and so they can also be transferred into another by the will of God, as was done of old with the spirit of Moses. XXXVI. ON THE SEX OF THE SOUL AND THE FLESH ARISING ALIKE. Into these questions we digressed, I think, from the point to which we must now return. We had established that the soul is sown in the very man and from the very man, and that there is one seed from the beginning, as also of the flesh, unto the whole examination of the race—on account, that is, of the rival opinions of philosophers and heretics, and that antiquated discourse of Plato. Now we weave the order of the treatises that follow from that point. The soul, sown in the womb together with the flesh, together with it is allotted its sex also, so equally that in the matter of sex neither substance is held to be the cause.
For if in the seeds of either substance their conception admitted some interval, so that either the flesh or the soul were sown first, it would even be possible to ascribe the property of sex to the one substance through the temporal interval of the seeds, so that either the flesh should imprint sex upon the soul, or the soul upon the flesh—seeing that Apelles too, not the painter but the heretic, setting up male and female souls before the bodies, just as he learned from Philumena, certainly makes the flesh, as the later, receive its sex from the soul. And those who superinduce the soul upon the flesh after birth—the flesh, of course, already formed—prejudge the soul's sex, male or female, from the flesh.
But the undivided seeds of both substances and the united diffusion of them undergo a common issue of the race, according to which whatever the reasoning of nature is has drawn its lines. Surely here too the pattern of the beginnings testifies to itself, since the male is fashioned earlier (for Adam was first), the female somewhat later (for Eve was after). Thus for a long while the flesh is formless, such as was plucked from Adam's side; yet it too was already a living thing, since I would acknowledge that portion of Adam then to be soul as well. Otherwise even that too would have been animated by the breath of God, had there not been, as of the flesh, so also of the soul, a transmission from Adam into the woman. XXXVII. ON THE AGE OF THE SOUL.
But the whole apparatus of sowing, building, and fashioning man in the womb some power, minister of the divine will, doubtless regulates, whatever be the plan it has been allotted to set in motion. Estimating from this, even Roman superstition invented the goddess Alemona for nourishing the fetus in the womb, and Nona and Decima from the more anxious months, and Partula who governs the birth, and Lucina who brings forth into the light. We believe angels to be the divine offices. From that point, therefore, the fetus in the womb is a man, from which the form is complete. For the law of Moses too judges an abortion liable to retaliation once the case is already that of a man, once the state of life and death is already reckoned to it, once it is already enrolled in fate—even though, while yet living in the mother, it shares in very much of its lot along with the mother.
I will say something also about the times of the soul's being born, that I may run through the order. The lawful birth is generally the entrance of the tenth month. Those who reason by numbers cultivate the number ten as thenceforth the parent of the rest, and finally as the perfecter of human birth. I, rather, will argue this measure of time toward God, so that the ten months may the more inaugurate man by the Decalogue, that we may be born in as great a number of time as we are reborn in a number of discipline. But since birth is also fuller in the seventh month, more easily than in the eighth, I will recognize the honor of the Sabbath, so that on the day on which God's creation was dedicated, in that month God's image should sometimes be brought forth.
It is granted to hasten to birth, and yet fittingly to fall in with the hebdomad, unto the auspices of resurrection and rest and the kingdom. Therefore the ogdoad does not create us; for then there will be no marriages. We have long since commended the fellowship of flesh and soul, from the very congregation of their seeds unto the perfection of the molded form; likewise now we defend it also from birth—chiefly because they grow together, but by a divided reckoning according to the condition of their kinds: the flesh by measure, the soul by talent; the flesh by outward habit, the soul by sense. But it must be denied that the soul grows in substance, lest it be said also to decrease in substance, and thus be believed even destined to fail;
but its force, in which are set the natural endowments that are retained, is—with the measure of its substance kept safe, by which it was inbreathed from the beginning—little by little brought forth along with the flesh. Set down a certain weight of gold or silver, a mass as yet rough: it has a compactness that is for the time less than it will be, yet containing within the line of its measure the whole of what the nature of gold or silver is. Then, when the mass is spread out into a plate, it is made larger than its beginning by the dilation of the fixed weight—not by addition, while it is extended, not while it is augmented; and yet in this way too it is augmented, while it is extended: for it may be augmented in habit, though it may not in state. Then too the very splendor of the gold or silver is drawn out, which had indeed been in the mass as well, but more obscure—yet not none at all.
Then too one habit after another accrues according to the pliability of the material, wherever he who works it shall have drawn it, contributing nothing to the measure except a form. So too the soul's increments are to be reckoned not as substantial, but as evocative. XXXVIII. ON FOODS, HOW THEY PERTAIN TO THE SOUL.
But although we have already established beforehand that all the soul's natural faculties belong to its very substance, pertaining to sense and intellect, out of the soul's inborn endowment, yet that they advance little by little through the stages of age and turn out variously according to circumstances, according to skills, teachings, places, and the powers that govern us — a thing which nonetheless bears upon the present partnership of flesh and soul — we say that psychic puberty coincides with the puberty of the flesh, and that both alike arise, the one by the emergence of the senses and the other by the development of the members, at about the fourteenth year; not because Asclepiades reckons wisdom to begin thence, nor because the civil laws adjust from that age the transaction of affairs, but because this too is a principle set from the very beginning.
For if Adam and Eve, from the knowledge of good and evil, perceived that they must cover their shameful parts, then from the moment we perceive this same thing we profess a knowledge of good and evil. And from these years the sex becomes both more given to blushing and more given to clothing itself; concupiscence begins to use the eyes as its agents, communicates what pleases it, understands what things are, and girds its own regions after the manner of the fig-leaf covering with an itch of desire, and leads man out of the paradise of integrity — and thence, scabbed over, into the other faults as well, faults of transgression that are not natural, since now they come not from the ordinance of nature but from vice. Otherwise, properly speaking, the one natural concupiscence is that of food alone, which God bestowed even at the beginning: 'Of every tree,' He says, 'you shall eat'; and for the second race, after the flood, He added still more:
'Behold, I have given you all things for food, as the green herb' — provision made not so much for the soul as for the flesh, though on the soul's account. For occasion must be taken away from the debater who, because the soul seems to desire nourishment, wishes on this ground too to have it understood as mortal — a thing sustained by food, which then, if food be withdrawn, grows faint, and at last, if it be taken away entirely, perishes. Now one must set forth not only who desires these things, but also for whom; and if for its own sake, yet also why and when and how far; then also that nature desires one thing, necessity another, one thing according to a property, another as a means to an end. The soul, therefore, will desire food for itself indeed by reason of necessity, but for the flesh by the nature of its property.
For assuredly the house of the soul is the flesh, and the tenant of the flesh is the soul. The tenant, therefore, will desire, from the cause and necessity of this name, things that will benefit the house throughout the whole time of his tenancy — not that he himself must be underpropped, nor that he himself must be walled up, nor that he himself must be shored with pillars, but only that he must be kept together, since he cannot be kept together otherwise than by a house held firm. Otherwise it will be permitted to the soul, when the house has collapsed through the failure of its former supports, to depart unharmed, having its own foundations and the nourishment proper to its own condition: immortality, rationality, sensibility, intellectuality, freedom of the will. (39)
All these things, bestowed on the soul by birth, that same one who at the beginning envied them now also overshadows and corrupts, so that they may neither be freely provided for nor administered as they ought. [THAT SCARCELY ANY SOUL IS WITHOUT A DEMON.] For to what man will the wicked spirit not attach itself, hunting for souls from the very gate of birth onward — invited, moreover, by all that superstition of childbirth?
Thus all are born with idolatry as their midwife, while the very wombs, still wreathed with fillets prepared before idols, profess their offspring as candidates for the demons; while in childbirth wailing is offered to Lucina and Diana; while throughout the whole week a table is set for Juno; while on the last day the Fates who write destiny (Fata Scribunda) are summoned; while even the child's first setting upon the earth is a rite sacred to the goddess Statina. Who from that time does not either vow the whole head of his son under a debt, or set apart some lock of hair, or shave off the whole with a razor, or bind it by a sacrifice, or seal it with a sacred rite — for a family, ancestral, public, or private devotion? So then the demonic spirit found Socrates too while still a boy; so also to all men are their genii assigned — 'genius' being a name for demons.