BOOK ONE. TO RENATUS. Your sincerity toward us, dearest brother Renatus, and your fraternal benevolence and the affection of mutual love we indeed held as proven even before; but now your friendly diligence has made it more proven to us, in that you sent me, this past summer, two books of a certain man whom I did not know at all—yet not therefore to be despised—Vincentius Victor (for so I found his name prefixed there), although, because I was absent, they were delivered to me at the end of autumn.
For how could you, my dearest one, be able or bound not to bring to my notice a matter which, when the letters of any man whatsoever had come into your hands—even though written to another—yet where my name was mentioned and read, in such a way that my words, which I had published in certain little works, were contradicted? This therefore you did, which as my most sincere and beloved friend you were bound to do. But on this account I am a little pained, that I am still less known to your holiness than I would wish, since you supposed that I would take it as though you had done me an injury by making known what another did. But how far this is from my mind—see, that I do not even complain of having suffered an injury from that man.
For when he thought certain things otherwise than I, ought he by any means to have kept silent? Whence it ought to be pleasing to me that he did not keep silent in such a way but that we can even read it. Someone might say that he ought rather to have written to me than to another about me; but because I was unknown to him, he did not dare to thrust himself upon me in the refutation of my sayings. Nor did he think I needed to be consulted where it seemed to him a matter least to be doubted, but rather that he held a fully known and certain opinion. He complied, however, with his friend, by whom he says he was compelled to write. And if in disputing he expressed something that redounded to my reproach, I would not believe he did it with the will of one reviling, but from the necessity of one who thinks differently.
For where the mind of an unknown man toward me is uncertain, I judge it better to think the better things than to blame what has not been examined. For perhaps he acted out of love for me, knowing that what he wrote could reach me, since he does not want me to err in those matters in which he rather thinks that he himself does not err. And therefore I ought even to have gratitude for the benevolence of one whose opinion I am nonetheless obliged to disapprove. And on account of this, in those things which he does not rightly understand, he seems to me still to be gently corrected, not harshly detested—especially because, as I hear, he has recently been made a Catholic, for which he is to be congratulated.
For he has been rid of the division and error of the Donatists, or rather the Rogatists, by which he was formerly held—provided, however, that he understands the Catholic truth as he ought, so that we may truly rejoice at his conversion. For he has eloquence, by which he can explain what he thinks. Hence one must deal with him, and it must be wished for him, that he think rightly, lest he make delightful things that are useless, and that whatever he has said eloquently may seem to have been said truly; although even in his very eloquence he has much to be amended and to be restrained from excessive overflowing, which in him displeased you also as a serious man, as your writings indicate. But this is either easily corrected, or, without detriment to the faith, is loved by gentle minds and tolerated by grave ones.
For we already have certain men who are foamy in speech but sound in faith. Therefore one must not despair even of this in him, that, although it is tolerable, if it persists it can nevertheless be purged and tempered and either brought or recalled to a whole and solid measure. Especially because he is reported to be a young man, so that what he lacks in experience diligence may supply, and what the crudeness of talkativeness belches forth, the maturity of age may boil down. That is troublesome and dangerous, or rather pernicious, if, when eloquence is praised, folly is persuaded, and in a precious cup a pestilential draught is drunk.
For, that I may now begin to demonstrate what things in his disputation are chiefly to be avoided: he says that 'the soul was indeed made by God and is not a part of God nor of his nature,' which is altogether true. But since he is unwilling to confess that it was made out of nothing, and mentions no other creature out of which it was made, and thus assigns God as its author in such a way that it is neither out of things not previously existing—that is, out of nothing—nor out of any thing that is not what God is,
but so that it is believed that God 'made it out of himself,' he does not perceive that he rolls back into that from which he thinks he has turned aside—namely, that the soul is nothing other than the nature of God, and thus consequently that something is made even out of the nature of God by the same God, for whom, in making, the material out of which he makes is himself who makes; and thereby that the nature of God is both mutable and, being changed for the worse, that the nature of the same God is condemned by that same God. You see, according to your faithful understanding, how this is not to be supposed, and how it is to be shut out from a Catholic heart and fled far away. For thus indeed the soul is either made from a breath, or is made itself the breath of God, in such a way that it is not out of him, but was created by him out of nothing.
For it is not to be thought of God as it is of a man, who, when he blows, cannot make a breath out of nothing, but returns the breath which he draws from this air; so as to think that certain airs were already poured around God, of which he would draw some tiny particle by breathing in and pour it back by breathing out, when he breathed into the face of man and in that way made him a soul. And even if it were so, then not out of himself, but out of some underlying breathable thing, could that be which he breathed. But far be it that we should deny that the Almighty could make the breath of life out of nothing, whereby man became a living soul.
And let us not be thrust into those straits, so as to suppose either that something already existed, which he himself was not, out of which he might make the breath, or to believe that, because we see it made mutable, he made it out of himself. For what is out of himself must necessarily be of the same nature as he himself is, and thereby also immutable; but the soul, as all confess, is mutable: therefore it is not out of himself, because it is not immutable as he is. But if it is made out of no other thing, it is made out of nothing, without doubt, yet by himself. But in that he 'contends it to be not a spirit, but a body,' what else does he wish to bring about than that we consist not of soul and body, but of two or even three bodies?
For when he says that 'we consist of spirit, soul, and body' and asserts that 'all these three are bodies,' assuredly he thinks that we are composed of three bodies. In which opinion, how great an absurdity attends him, I think must be demonstrated to him rather than to you. Yet this is a tolerable error of a man who has not yet learned that there is something which, though it be not a body, can nevertheless bear a certain likeness of a body. But who would bear that which, in the second book, when he tried to solve the most difficult question about original sin—how far it pertains to body and soul, if the soul is not derived from the parents, but breathed in new by God—striving therefore to unravel this so troublesome and so profound a question:
'Deservedly,' he says, 'through the flesh it recovers the former condition which it seemed for a little while to have lost through the flesh, so that through it it may begin to be reborn, through which it had deserved to be defiled.' You surely discern that a man who dared to undertake what exceeds his powers has fallen into so monstrous a precipice as to say that the soul deserved to be defiled through the flesh, when he can in no way say whence it derived this merit before the flesh. For if merit of sin begins from the flesh, let him say, if he can, whence before its own sin it deserved to be defiled by the flesh. For this merit, by which it was sent into sinful flesh, that it might be defiled by it, assuredly it had either from itself, or—what is much more abhorrent from the truth—from God.
For it could not have merit from the flesh before the flesh, by which merit it should be sent, to be defiled, into the flesh. If therefore it had this merit from itself, how did it have it, seeing that before the flesh it did no evil? But if it is said to have had this merit from God, who would hear this, who would bear it, who would permit it to be said with impunity? For it is not here asked what it deserved, that it should be judged worthy of condemnation after the flesh, but what it deserved before the flesh, that it should be so condemned as to be sent, to be defiled, into the flesh. Let him explain this, if he can, who dared to say that the soul deserved to be defiled through the flesh. Likewise in another place, when he proposed, as if to be unraveled, the same question in which he had entangled himself, he says, as though from the person of adversaries:
'Why,' they say, 'did God punish the soul with so unjust a chastisement, as to be willing to relegate it into the body of sin, so that it begins to be sinful by association with the flesh, which could not be sinful?' In the, as it were, rocky whirlpool of this question he certainly ought to have guarded against shipwreck, and not to have committed himself to a place from which he could extricate himself not by passing through, but perhaps by returning—that is, by repenting. For he strives to free himself by the foreknowledge of God, but in vain. For the foreknowledge of God foreknows those sinners whom he is going to heal; it does not make them. For if he frees from sin those souls which, innocent and clean, he himself entangled in sin, he heals the wound which he inflicted on us, not which he found in us.
But may God avert it, and may it be altogether far from us, that we should say that, when by the washing of regeneration God cleanses the souls of little ones, he then corrects his own evils which he himself did to them, when he mingled them, having no sin, with sinful flesh, by whose original sin they were contaminated. Yet this man, accusing them, says that they deserved to be defiled through the flesh, and cannot say whence they deserved so great an evil before the flesh. Thinking therefore in vain that he can dissolve this question by the foreknowledge of God, he still entangles himself and says: 'The soul, if it deserved to be sinful, which could not be sinful, nevertheless did not remain in sin, because, prefigured in Christ, it ought not to be in sin, as it could not be.'
What is it that he says, 'it could not be sinful' or 'it could not be in sin,' except, I believe, if it did not come into the flesh? For it could not be sinful by original sin, or in any way be in original sin, except through the flesh, if it is not derived from the parent. We see therefore that the soul is freed from sin by grace, but we do not see whence it deserved to cling to sin. What then is it that he says: 'if it deserved to be sinful, it did not however remain in sin'? For if I should ask of him why it did not remain in sin, he will most rightly answer: 'because the grace of Christ freed the soul.' As therefore he says whence the soul of the little one was freed, being sinful, so let him also say whence it deserved to be sinful.
But what does he say, to whom that which he had said before has happened? For, in order to propose this question to himself, he says: 'Other reproaches are heaped up by the querulous murmurings of those who bark against us, and, shaken as if by some whirlwind, we are again and again dashed among monstrous rocks'—if I were to say this of him, perhaps he would be angry; the words are his own—: with these premised, he proposed the question in which he might display the very rocks upon which, dashed, he was shipwrecked. For to this he was led, and upon such dreadful crags carried, driven, and fixed, that he can in no way extricate himself except by amending what he said, being unable to show by what merit the soul was made sinful—which he did not fear to say deserved, before all its own sin, to be made sinful.
Who deserves so monstrous a punishment without sin, that, conceived in another's iniquity, before it comes forth from its mother's womb, it is already not without sin? But from this penalty grace freely frees the souls of little ones who are regenerated in Christ, by no preceding merits of theirs; otherwise grace is now no longer grace. Accordingly, let this very intelligent man, to whom our hesitation—though not learned, yet cautious—in so great a depth is displeasing, say, if he can, by what merit the soul came into this penalty, from which penalty grace frees it without merit; let him say, that he may defend by some reason, if he shall be able, what he said. For I would not demand this, unless he himself had said that the soul deserved to be sinful.
Let him say whether its merit was good or evil. If good, by what good merit did it come into evil? If evil, whence any evil merit before all sin? Likewise I say: if good, then grace does not free the soul gratuitously, but according to debt, since a good merit preceded, and thus grace will now no longer be grace; but if evil, I ask what it is. Is it that it came into the flesh, into which it would not have come, unless he in whom there is no iniquity had himself sent it? Never therefore, except by hurling himself into worse things, will he manage to establish this his opinion, by which he said that the soul deserved to be sinful.
And concerning those little ones indeed, whose original sin is washed away in baptism, he found something, of whatever sort, to say, since the foreknowledge of God could in no way have harmed those predestined to eternal life by their adhering for a little while to another's sin. Which might be tolerably said, if this man did not entangle himself in his own words, saying that the soul deserved to be sinful. From which he does not at all free himself, unless it repents him to have said this.
But concerning those little ones who are overtaken by death before they are baptized in Christ, when he wished to respond, he dared 'to promise them not only paradise, but even the kingdom of heaven,' not finding by what way he might get out, lest he be compelled to say that God condemns innocent souls to eternal death—souls which, by no preceding merit, he grafts into sinful flesh. But somehow perceiving what an evil thing he had said, that the souls of little ones are redeemed into eternal life and the kingdom of heaven without any grace of Christ, and that original sin can be dissolved in them without the baptism of Christ, in which the remission of sins takes place—seeing therefore into what depth of a shipwrecking whirlpool he had cast himself:
'Indeed,' he says, 'for them I judge that assiduous oblations and the sacrifices of the holy priests are to be continually offered.' Behold another thing from which he will never get out, unless it repents him to have said it. For who would offer the body of Christ except for those who are members of Christ? And since it was said by him: 'Unless one be born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God,' and in another place: 'He who loses his soul for my sake shall find it,' no one becomes a member of Christ except either by baptism in Christ or by death for Christ.
Whence also that thief, not a follower of the Lord before the cross, but a confessor on the cross—concerning whom sometimes a prejudgment is seized upon, or an attempt is made, against the sacrament of baptism—is reckoned by holy Cyprian among the martyrs who are baptized in their own blood, which happens to very many who are not baptized when persecution is raging. For with so great a weight was it weighed, and it availed so much with him who knows how to weigh these things, that he confessed the crucified Lord, as much as if he had been crucified for the Lord. For then his faith flowered from the wood, when the faith of the disciples withered—unless it were that, by the resurrection of him at the terror of whose death it had withered, it should grow green again. For they despaired of the dying one; he hoped in the one dying with him.
they fled from the author of life, he begged the sharer of his penalty; they grieved as at the death of a man, he believed that he would reign after death; they deserted the surety of salvation, he honored the companion of the cross. In him was found the measure of a martyr, who then believed in Christ, when those who were to be martyrs failed. And this indeed was clear to the eyes of the Lord, who conferred so great a felicity at once upon one not baptized, as though washed by the blood of martyrdom. But which of us also would not consider with what faith, with what hope, with what love he could have undertaken death for the living Christ, who sought life in the dying one?
To this is added, that it is said not incredibly that the thief who then believed beside the crucified Lord was, as it were, sprinkled with a most sacred baptism by that water which gushed forth from the wound of his side—to say nothing of the fact that no one of us knows, no one proves, that he had not been baptized before he was condemned. But let each one take these things as he will, provided only that concerning baptism it be not laid down, contrary to the precept of the Savior, by the example of this thief, and that no one promise to unbaptized little ones, between damnation and the kingdom of heaven, as it were a middle place of any rest or felicity whatsoever, and anywhere.
For this even the Pelagian heresy promised them, since it neither fears damnation for the little ones, whom it thinks to have no original sin, nor hopes for them the kingdom of heaven, if they do not attain to the sacrament of baptism. But this man, although he confesses that little ones are bound by original sin, yet dared to promise them, even unbaptized, the kingdom of heaven—which not even those dared, who assert that they are altogether without any sin. Behold with what snares of presumption he entangles himself, unless it repents him to have written such things!
But concerning Dinocrates, the brother of holy Perpetua, neither is that scripture itself canonical, nor did she—or whoever wrote it—so write as to say that that boy, who died at seven years of age, had died without baptism, on whose behalf she is believed to have been heard when martyrdom was imminent, so that he might be transferred from punishments to rest. For boys of that age can already both lie and speak the truth, both confess and deny. And therefore, when they are baptized, they already both recite the creed and themselves answer for themselves to the questions asked.
Who therefore knows whether that boy, after baptism, at the time of persecution, was alienated from Christ by his impious father through idolatry, on account of which he went to death in condemnation, and did not come forth from there except by being granted to the prayers of his sister, who was about to die for Christ? But even if this be conceded to this man—which by no reasoning is conceded while the Catholic faith and the ecclesiastical rule are kept safe.
As for the claim that the sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ should be offered on behalf of unbaptized persons of whatever age, as though through such piety on the part of their own kin they might be helped to attain the kingdom of heaven — what answer will he give concerning so many thousands of infants who are born of the ungodly and never come into the hands of the godly through any pity, whether divine or human, and who depart from this life in that most tender age without the laver of regeneration? Let him say, if he can, whence these souls came to deserve to become so sinful that they are not, at the very least, set free from sin even afterward. For if I ask why they deserve to be condemned when they are not baptized, the correct answer is given me: 'because of original sin'; and likewise if I ask whence they contracted original sin.
He will answer: 'from the sinful flesh, of course.' If then I ask whence they deserved to be condemned to sinful flesh, seeing that they had done no evil before the flesh — let him here find what to answer, and how they came to be condemned to undergo the contagion of others' sins in such a way that neither does baptism regenerate the ill-begotten nor do sacrifices expiate the defiled — for in that place also these little ones were born of such parents, or are even now still being born, so that no such aid can come to their rescue — here surely all argumentation fails. For we are not asking whence souls deserved to be condemned after their partnership with sinful flesh, but by what.
...we ask whence souls deserved to be condemned to enter into partnership with sinful flesh, when they had no sin before their partnership with sinful flesh. It cannot be said: 'the briefly shared contagion of another's sin did them no harm, since in God's foreknowledge a redemption had been prepared for them.' For we are now speaking of those to whom, departing from the body before baptism, no redemption comes. It cannot be said: 'those whom baptism does not wash, frequent sacrifices offered on their behalf will cleanse, since God, foreknowing this, willed that they should for a little while cleave to others' sins without any destruction of eternal condemnation and with hope of eternal happiness.'
For we are now speaking of those whose birth among the ungodly and from the ungodly can find no such safeguards. And even if such could be applied, they would without doubt be of no benefit to the unbaptized — just as those sacrifices which he mentioned from the Book of Maccabees, offered for the dead sinners, would have profited them nothing had they not been circumcised.
Let him therefore find, if he can, what to say when he is asked what a soul — free of all sin, whether original or its own — deserved, that it should be so condemned to undergo another's original sin that it cannot be delivered from it; and let him see which of two things he chooses: whether to say that even those souls of dying infants, who depart hence without the laver of regeneration and on whose behalf no sacrifice of the Lord's body is offered, are absolved from the bond of original sin — though the Apostle teaches that from one man all go into condemnation, those namely upon whom grace does not come to their rescue that through the one they might be delivered into redemption — or to say that souls having no sin whatever, whether their own or original, and in every way innocent, simple, and pure, are punished with eternal condemnation by the just God, when He Himself inserts them, not to be delivered, into sinful flesh.
For my part I affirm that neither of these two things is to be said, nor that third thing — that souls sinned somewhere else before the flesh, so as to deserve condemnation into the flesh; for the Apostle most plainly defined that those not yet born in the flesh had done nothing good or evil, whence it is established that little ones, in that they need remission of sins, have contracted nothing but original sin — nor that fourth thing, that those souls of infants destined to die without baptism are by the just God banished into sinful flesh and condemned, because He foreknew that, had they reached the age at which they would use free will, they would have lived wickedly.
For this indeed not even he, placed in such straits, dared to say; nay rather, against this very vanity he has already spoken clearly and briefly enough, where he says that 'God would have been unjust had He willed to judge a man not yet born, apart from any completed works of his own will.' For this is what he answered when he was treating the question against those who say: 'why did God make a man whom, being foreknowing, He knew would not turn out good?' For He would not judge the unborn if He had refused to create him for this reason, that He foreknew he would not be good. And indeed, as it also seemed right to him, God ought to judge a man on his completed works, not on things foreknown and never permitted to come about.
For if sins which a man would have committed had he lived are, though not committed, condemned in one who is dead, then no benefit has been conferred upon him who was taken away lest wickedness alter his understanding — since he will be judged according to the wickedness that would have been in him, not according to the innocence that is found in him. And there could be no security concerning any dead baptized person, since even after baptism men can not only sin in whatever manner but even apostatize. What then?
If, then, one who was baptized and taken away hence would have become an apostate had he lived, shall we suppose that no benefit was conferred on him in that he was taken away lest wickedness alter his understanding, and shall we judge, on account of God's foreknowledge, that he must be judged not as a faithful member of Christ but as an apostate? For how much better, if sins not yet done, not yet even thought of, but foreknown and future are punished, that those two should have been cast out of paradise before sin, lest sin be committed in a place so holy and blessed! And what of this — that foreknowledge itself is utterly emptied out if what is foreknown will not come to be? For how is it rightly said that a future thing is foreknown, when it will not be future?
How then are sins punished which are nonexistent — that is, which were neither committed before the flesh, this present life not yet beginning, nor after the flesh, death forestalling them? Accordingly, in this interval from when the soul was sent into the flesh until it should be released from the flesh, since it is the soul of a little one and has not lived the age of free will, it finds no ground for its condemnation, baptism not having been received, except original sin. That the soul is justly condemned for this sin we do not deny, since the just law has appointed punishment for sin; but we ask why it has been condemned to undergo this sin, if it is not derived from that one sin which was committed in the first father of the human race.
Wherefore, if God does not condemn the innocent nor make guilty those whom He perceives to be innocent; and if He does not deliver souls, whether from original or from their own sins, except in the Church of Christ through the baptism of Christ; and if souls had absolutely no sin at all before the flesh; and if sins before they are committed — and much more those which have never been committed — cannot be condemned by a just law: let him say none of these four things, and, if he can, let him explain by what desert the souls of infants, which depart without baptism and are sent into condemnation, were sent into sinful flesh, though they had committed no sin, so as to find there the sin on account of which they are deservedly condemned.
Furthermore, if — avoiding these four things which sound doctrine condemns, that is, not daring to say either that souls existing without any sin are made sinful by God, or that in them original sin is loosed without the sacrament of Christ, or that they sinned somewhere before they were sent into the flesh, or that sins they never had are condemned in them — if, unwilling to say these things, since assuredly they are not to be said, he should say that little ones do not contract original sin nor have any ground for condemnation if they depart hence without receiving the sacrament of regeneration, he will fall, deserving of condemnation, into the Pelagian heresy, which is beyond doubt damnable.
That this may not befall him, how much better does he hold to my hesitation concerning the origin of the soul, that he may not dare to affirm what neither human reason comprehends nor divine authority defends, lest he be compelled to profess folly while he shrinks from confessing ignorance! Here perhaps he may say that his opinion is defended by divine authority, since he supposes that by the testimonies of the holy Scriptures he can prove that 'souls are not made from propagation, but new ones are breathed into each individual.' Let him prove it, if he can, and I will confess that I have learned from him what I was seeking with great earnestness. But let him seek — perhaps he may find some other testimony; for by these which he has already produced he has not proved it. For all that he has here adduced are certain with respect to something else;
but with respect to that which is asked concerning the origin of the soul, they are shown to be ambiguous. For it is certain that God has given men breath and spirit, the prophet saying: 'Thus says the Lord, who made heaven and founded the earth and the things that are in it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who tread it.' This testimony he wishes to be taken in the sense which he defends, so that where it says 'gives breath to the people,' it be believed not to make souls for the people from propagation, but to breathe in new ones. Let him then dare to say that God did not give us the flesh, because the origin of the flesh is drawn from the parents; and, since the Apostle says of a grain of wheat:
'God gives it a body as He has willed,' let him deny, if he dares, that wheat is born from wheat and its blade from the seed according to its kind. But if he does not dare to deny this, whence then does he know how it was said 'gives breath to the people' — whether drawing it from the parents or breathing in a new one? Whence too does he know whether 'it is a repetition of the same statement: who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who tread it,' so that both are understood to be said of one thing, and he meant to signify not the soul or the spirit by which human nature lives, but the Holy Spirit? For if the Holy Spirit could not be signified by 'breath,' the Lord would not, after the resurrection, have breathed on the disciples and said:
'Receive the Holy Spirit'; nor would it have been written in the Acts of the Apostles: 'Suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of a rushing violent wind, and there appeared to them divided tongues as of fire, which also rested upon each one of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.' What if the prophet foretold this, saying 'who gives breath to the people upon it,' and, as if explaining what he meant by 'breath,' repeated it and said 'and spirit to those who tread it'? For then it came to pass most evidently, when they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.
Or if the one hundred and twenty men who were then present in one place are not yet to be called a people, surely when at once four or five thousand believed and, being baptized, received the Holy Spirit, who would doubt that a people at once received the Holy Spirit — a multitude that was walking on the earth, that is, men treading the earth? For that which is given as pertaining to the nature of man — whether it be given from propagation or breathed in as new (neither of which, I say, is to be affirmed until one or the other becomes clear without any doubt) — is not given to those treading the earth, but to those still enclosed in the mother's womb. He gave therefore breath to the people upon the earth and spirit to those treading it, when many believing at once were filled with the Holy Spirit.
And He Himself gives it to His people — though not to all at once, but to each in his own time — until, by departing from this life and succeeding into this life, the whole number of that same people be completed; so that in this passage of holy Scripture the breath is not one thing and the spirit another, but a repetition of the same statement. Just as it is not one who 'dwells in the heavens' and another who is 'the Lord,' nor one thing to 'laugh' and another to 'mock,' but the same statement is repeated, where it is read: 'He who dwells in the heavens shall laugh at them, and the Lord shall mock them'; or, when it is said:
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dabotibigenteshereditatemtuametpossessionemtuamfinesterraenonutiquealiuddixit \'hereditatem\', aliud \'possessionem\' necaliud \'gentes\', aliud \'finesterrae\', sedeiusdemsententiaerepetitioest. etinnumerabilesinueniethuiusmodilocutionesdiuinorumeloquiorum. siaduertatquodlegit. Quodautemgraecusdicitπνοἡνhoclatiniuarieinterpretatisunt: aliquando \'flatum\', aliquando \'spiritum\', aliquando \'inspirationem\'. namhocuerbumhabentcodicesgraeciinistopropheticotestimonio, dequonuncagimus. ubidictumest: quidatflatumpopulosupeream, hocestπνοἡνipsumuerbumestetubihomoanimatusest: etinsufflauitdeusinfaciemeiusflatumuitae.
'I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession,' He surely did not say one thing by 'inheritance' and another by 'possession,' nor one thing by 'nations' and another by 'ends of the earth,' but it is a repetition of the same statement. And he will find innumerable expressions of this sort in the divine oracles, if he attends to what he reads. Now what the Greek calls πνοήν, the Latins have variously rendered: sometimes 'breath' (flatum), sometimes 'spirit' (spiritum), sometimes 'inspiration' (inspirationem). For the Greek codices have this very word in that prophetic testimony of which we are now treating, where it is said 'who gives breath to the people upon it': this is πνοήν, the very word which is also used where man was animated: 'and God breathed into his face the breath of life.'
But the very same word is also in the psalm, where it is sung: 'Let every spirit praise the Lord'; and it is likewise in the Book of Job, where it is written: 'But it is the inspiration of the Almighty that teaches.' He would not say 'breath,' but 'inspiration,' though in the Greek it is πνοή, which is also in those words of the prophet of which we are now disputing. And certainly in this place I do not know whether one ought to doubt that the Holy Spirit is signified. For the matter treated was wisdom, whence it comes to be in men: 'For it is not from the number of years,' he says, 'but the spirit is in men, and the inspiration of the Almighty is that which teaches' — so that it might be understood, by this repetition, that he had not spoken of the spirit of man in saying 'the spirit is in men.'
For he wished to show whence they have wisdom, namely that it is not from themselves, and by repeating he set it forth, saying: 'It is the inspiration of the Almighty that teaches.' Likewise in another place in the same book he says: 'The understanding of my lips understands pure things. The divine Spirit that made me, and the inspiration of the Almighty, is that which teaches me.' And here what he says 'inspiration' or 'aspiration' is in the Greek πνοή, which in those words of the prophet was rendered 'breath' (flatus). Wherefore, since it is rashly denied that it was said of the soul of man or the spirit of man:
'who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those treading it' — although in that place the Holy Spirit too can much more credibly be understood — by what reasoning then will anyone dare to define that in that passage the prophet meant to signify the soul or the spirit by which our nature lives? For assuredly, even if he had said most plainly 'who gives soul to the people upon the earth,' it would still have to be asked whether it be that God gives it from the origin of a preceding generation — just as, from the origin of a preceding generation, He nevertheless Himself gives the body not only to man or beast, but even to the seed of wheat or of any of the rest, as He has willed — or whether He breathes in a new one, as the first man received. There are also those who understand these prophetic words in such a way that what he says:
'He gave breath to the people upon it,' that is, upon the earth, they will have to be understood as meaning nothing but the soul by 'breath'; but what he added, 'and spirit to those treading it,' they think signifies the Holy Spirit — in that order, namely, by which the Apostle too says: 'Not first that which is spiritual, but that which is of the soul (natural), afterward the spiritual.' For from this prophetic statement an elegant sense too is carved out, in that he said 'to those treading it' so as to wish it understood 'to those despising it.' For those who receive the Holy Spirit, by love of heavenly things despise earthly things. All these opinions are not against the faith, whether one understands both — that is, both the breath and the spirit that pertain to human nature.
Let each one understand [as he will], whether he take both as said of the Holy Spirit, or refer the breath to the soul but the spirit to the Holy Spirit. But if the soul and spirit of man is to be understood here also, then, just as it is not to be doubted that God gives it, so it must still be asked whence He gives it: whether from propagation — as indeed He Himself gives, yet from propagation, the members of the body — or whether He distributes a new one, unpropagated, by breathing it into each individual. This we wish to be defended not by ambiguous testimonies, as this man does, but by some most certain authority of the divine oracles. By the same reasoning also, as to what God says: 'For a spirit shall go forth from me, and every breath I have made,' what He says is to be taken of the Holy Spirit:
'a spirit shall go forth from me,' of which the Saviour too says 'proceeds from the Father,' is to be taken of the Holy Spirit; but what is said, 'every breath I have made,' cannot be denied to be said of every soul. But every body too He Himself makes; yet that He makes the human body from propagation no one doubts. And thus concerning the soul, since it is agreed that it is made by Him, it is still assuredly to be inquired whence He makes it — whether from propagation, like the body, or by breathing it in, as He made the first. He added also a third testimony, because it is written: 'who fashions the spirit of man within him.' As though this were denied; but whence He fashions it, this is asked. For who but God fashions even the bodily eye of man? And I think that He fashions it not outside but within him, and yet, as is certain, from propagation.
Since therefore He fashions also the spirit of man within him, it must be asked whether by a new inbreathing or drawn from propagation. We know too that the mother of the Maccabean youths, more fruitful in virtues when her sons suffered than in offspring when they were born, thus exhorted them, saying: 'My sons, I know not how you appeared in my womb. For neither did I bestow on you spirit and soul, nor did I form for each of you the countenance and the members; but God, who made the world and all that is in it, and made the race of men and searches out the deed of all, He Himself will render to you spirit and soul again with great mercy.' These things indeed we know, but how they support this man in what he asserts we do not see.
For what Christian would deny that God bestows on men soul and spirit? But in the same way I judge that this man cannot deny that God bestows on men ear, tongue, hand, foot, and all the senses of the body, and the form and nature of all the members. For how will he deny these to be gifts of God, unless he forget that he is a Christian? But just as it is agreed that these are made and bestowed by Him from propagation, so it must also be asked whence the spirit and soul of man is effected by Him, by whom, effecting it, it is bestowed — whether from the parents, or from nothing, or (what this man affirms, but which must by all means be guarded against) from some existing nature of His breath, not created out of nothing, but out of Himself.
Since therefore the testimonies of the Scriptures which he cites by no means teach what he attempts to persuade — for as regards this question, they do not express it at all — what is it that he says: 'We steadfastly assert that the soul comes from the breath of God, not from the transmission (traduce), because it is given from God'? As though the body is given from any other source than from Him by whom it is created, from whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things — although not from His nature, but from His workmanship. 'Nor from nothing,' he says, 'because it proceeds from God.' This, plainly, we admonish is not yet to be inquired into, whether it be so; but that what he says is utterly untrue — namely, that the soul is neither from transmission nor from nothing — this, I say, without any doubt we affirm to be untrue. For it is one of two things:
if it is not from transmission, it is from nothing — unless it be from God in such a way as to be of the nature of God, which it is altogether sacrilegious to believe. But as to whether it is not from transmission, we demand or seek certain testimonies, not such as this man has adduced, by which what we seek is not shown. Would that, in so profound a question — so long as he is ignorant of what he says — he would imitate the mother of the Maccabees! For she, though she knew that she had conceived her sons of her husband and that they had been created for her by the Creator of all, whether according to the body or according to the soul and spirit, yet said: 'I know not how you appeared in my womb.' I could wish this man would say what she did not know.
For these things which I have mentioned she certainly knew: how according to the body they came into her womb, since she could not doubt that she had conceived them of her husband. She confessed also — because this too she assuredly knew — that God gave them soul and spirit, that He Himself formed for them their countenances and members. What then did she not know? Perhaps that which we too do not know: whether the soul and spirit, which God without doubt gave them, He drew from the parents, or breathed in a new one, as into the first man? But whether this, or something else concerning the constitution of human nature, she did not know, she said that she did not know; she did not rashly defend what she did not know. Yet this man would not say to her what he was not ashamed to say to us: 'Man, being placed in honor, did not understand;
he is compared to the senseless beasts and has been made like to them.' Behold, this woman said of her sons: 'I know not how you appeared in my womb,' and yet she is not compared to the senseless beasts. 'I know not,' she said; and as though they were asking her why she did not know, she added: 'For neither did I bestow spirit and soul upon you.' He therefore who bestowed it knows whence He made what He bestowed — whether He drew it from propagation or breathed in a new one — 'which I,' she says, 'know not; nor did I form for each of you the countenance and members.' He knows who formed them, whether He formed them together with the soul, or gave the soul to them when already formed. In what manner, then — whether in this way or that — her sons came into her womb, she did not know;
and yet she knew this, that all which He gave, He who gave it would render back. But let this man choose, in so deep and hidden a secret of human nature, what this woman did not know; only let him not judge her to be lying, nor compare her, though ignorant, to the senseless beasts. Whatever it was that she did not know, it assuredly pertained to the nature of man — which nevertheless a man might not know without fault. Wherefore I too say of my own soul: I know not how it came into my body — for I did not bestow it on myself; He knows who bestowed it, whether He drew it from my father or created a new one, as for the first man. I too shall know, if He Himself teach me, whenever He wills; but now I know not, nor am I, like this man, ashamed to confess that I do not know what I do not know.
'Learn,' he says; 'behold, the Apostle teaches.' I will learn plainly, if the Apostle teaches — for none but God teaches through the Apostle — but what then is it that the Apostle teaches? 'Behold,' he says, 'when he spoke with the Athenians, he set this forth steadfastly, saying: since He Himself gives to all life and spirit.' For who denies this? 'But understand,' he says, 'what the Apostle says. He says gives, not gave, recalling it to infinite and perpetual time, not pronouncing of the past and completed. And what He gives without ceasing, He always gives, just as He who gives always is.' I have set down his words, as I found them in the second book of his which you sent. Here first see how far he has advanced, while he strives to affirm what he does not know.
For he has dared to say that God gives souls to those being born, not only now and in this present age alone, but throughout infinite time, without ceasing and altogether always. 'He always gives,' he says, 'just as He who gives always is.' What the Apostle said — since it is plain enough — far be it from me to deny that I understand; but what this man says, he himself ought to understand to be against the Christian faith, and further to beware lest he say it. For when the dead shall have risen, no one will any longer be born; and therefore then He will not give souls to those being born, but will judge, together with their bodies, those souls which He gives in this present age. He does not therefore always give, although He Himself who now gives always is.
Nor yet, because the blessed Apostle said not 'gave' but 'gives,' is that thereby brought about which he wishes to establish by this — that God does not give souls from propagation. For He Himself gives, even if He gives from propagation, since He Himself gives to men both the members of the body and the senses of the body and the form of the body and altogether the substance of the body, although He gives it from propagation. For neither, because the Lord says: 'If God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven,' and He says not 'clothed,' as when He first established it, but says 'clothes,' which He does even now — shall we therefore deny that the lilies are produced from the origin of their own kind.
What then if the soul and spirit of man too is thus given by God, for as long as it is given, and yet is given from the propagation of its own kind? This I neither defend nor refute. But if it is to be defended or refuted, I admonish that it must be done by clear, not ambiguous, testimonies. Nor for that reason am I to be compared to the senseless beasts, because I declare that I do not yet know this, but rather to cautious men, because I do not dare to teach what I do not know.
But I, in turn, do not compare this man to the beasts as though repaying curse for curse; rather I admonish him as a son, that he may confess that he does not know what he does not know, and may not attempt to teach what he has not yet learned, lest he be compared not to beasts, but to those men whom the Apostle calls 'wishing to be teachers of the law, understanding neither the things they say nor those concerning which they make assertions.' For whence is it that he thus takes no care to attend to the Scriptures of which he speaks, so that, when he has read that men are 'from God,' he contends that they are 'from God' not even according to the body, but only according to soul and spirit? For what the Apostle says, 'we are from Him,' this man wishes to be referred not to the body, but only to the soul and spirit.
If therefore bodies are not from God, then false is that which is written: 'from whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things.' Then, where the same Apostle says: 'For as the woman is from the man, so also the man is through the woman,' let this man expound to us which propagation he meant to signify — that of the soul, or of the body, or of both. But he does not wish 'souls to be from propagation'; it remains, therefore, that according to himself and all who destroy the propagation of souls, the Apostle signified only the male and female body when he said: 'For as the woman is from the man, so also the man is through the woman' — because the woman was made from the man, so that the man too might afterward be born through the woman.
If therefore the Apostle, in saying these things, meant to be understood not also souls and spirits, but only the bodies of each sex, why did he immediately add: 'but all things are from God' — unless because the bodies too are from God? For thus he says: 'For as the woman is from the man, so also the man is through the woman. But all things are from God.' Let this man therefore choose of what it was said. If of bodies, then assuredly bodies too are from God. What is it then, that wherever this man reads 'from God' in the Scriptures, when men are being treated of, he wishes not also bodies, but only souls and spirits, to be understood? But if what was said, 'but all things are from God,' was said both of the body of each sex and of the soul and spirit, then according to all things the woman is from the man;
for the woman is from the man, the man through the woman, all things from God. Which 'all things,' save those of which he was speaking — that is, both that man from whom the woman is, and that woman who is from the man, and that man who is through the woman? For not that man is through the woman, from whom man the woman is; but the man who is afterward born from man through woman, just as they are born even today. And thus, if, when the Apostle said these things, he was speaking of bodies, then without doubt the bodies of each sex are from God. Furthermore, if he does not wish men's souls and spirits alone to be from God, then assuredly according to soul and spirit too the woman is from the man, and nothing will now be left to those who dispute against the propagation of souls.
But if he divides the matter in such a way as to say that the woman is from the man as regards the body, yet from God as regards the soul and spirit, how will that be true which the Apostle says, 'But all things are from God' (1 Cor. 11:12), if the woman's body is so from the man that it is not from God? Therefore, that the Apostle may rather speak the truth than that this man be preferred to the Apostle, the woman is from the man, whether according to the body alone or according to the whole.
Of which human nature consists—for we affirm none of these things as certain, but are still inquiring which of them is true—and man exists through woman, whether the whole nature of man is drawn from the father, which is born through the woman, or the flesh alone, whereon there is still a question; yet all things are from God, whereon there is no question, that is, both body and soul and spirit, both of the man and of the woman. For even if they are not born from God, nor drawn from Him, nor have flowed from Him in such a way as to be of His nature, nevertheless they are from God. For by whom they were created, established, and made, from Him they have their being. But since the Apostle, he says, in saying, 'And He Himself gives to all life and breath' (Acts 17:25), then adds:
'And He made of one blood every race of men' (Acts 17:26), he referred the soul and spirit in their origin to the Author, but the body to propagation. Nay rather, he who is unwilling rashly to deny the propagation of souls, before it becomes clearly evident whether it be so or not, has here something whereby he may understand that in these words of the Apostle 'of one' with 'blood' means 'of one man,' by that mode of speech in which the part signifies the whole. For if it is permitted to him to understand the whole from a part in what is written, 'And man was made into a living soul' (Gen. 2:7), so that there the spirit also is understood, concerning which Scripture there kept silence, why is it not permitted to others to understand thus what is said:
'Of one blood' (Acts 17:26)—so that there both soul and spirit may be understood, since the man signified by the name of blood does not consist of body alone, but also of soul and spirit? For just as he who defends the propagation of souls ought not to be overwhelmed from this, because it is written of the first man, 'In whom all have sinned' (Rom. 5:12)—for it was not said, 'in whom the flesh of all sinned,' but 'all' was said, that is, all men, since a man is not flesh alone—; therefore just as this man ought not to be overwhelmed from this, because perhaps 'all men' was so said that they should be understood according to the flesh alone, so this man ought not to press the defenders of the propagation of souls from this, because it is said:
'Every race of men of one blood' (Acts 17:26), as though on that account the flesh alone pertained to propagation. For if that which these men assert is true, namely that the soul is not from the soul, but only the flesh is from the flesh, then 'of one blood' was said in such a way that not the whole man is signified from a part, but only the flesh of one man; while that which was said, 'in whom all have sinned' (Rom. 5:12), is to be understood as the flesh alone of all men, which was thence transfused, Scripture signifying the part from the whole.
But if that is true, namely that the whole man is propagated from the whole man, that is, body, soul, and spirit, then there it was said in a proper sense, 'in whom all men have sinned,' but here in a figurative sense, 'of one blood,' the whole is signified from a part, that is, the whole man, who consists of soul and flesh, or rather, as this man loves to speak, of soul and spirit and flesh. For the divine words are accustomed to signify both the whole from a part and the part from the whole. For the whole is signified from a part where it is read, 'To Thee shall all flesh come' (Ps. 65:2), because by the flesh the whole man is understood; but the part from the whole, when Christ is said to be buried, though His flesh alone was buried.
Now as for that which is set down in this testimony of the Apostle, that 'He Himself gives to all life and breath' (Acts 17:25), according to the preceding discussion I think that it moves no one; for He Himself does give. But we are still inquiring whence He gives it, whether by a new inbreathing or by propagation. For He is most rightly said to give even the substance of the flesh, which nevertheless is not denied to be given by propagation. Now let us consider that testimony from Genesis, where the woman, having been made from the man's side, was brought to him, and he said: 'This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh' (Gen. 2:23). For this man thinks 'that Adam ought to have said, "soul of my soul" or "spirit of my spirit," if this too had been drawn from him.'
But those who assert the propagation of souls think that from this they more invincibly fortify their opinion, because, although it is written that God took a rib from the man's side and built it into a woman, it was not added that He breathed into her face the breath of life; therefore, they say, because she had already been given a soul from the man. For if she had not, they say, Holy Scripture would by no means have defrauded us of the knowledge of this matter. But to that which Adam says, 'This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,' nor says 'spirit of my spirit' or 'soul of my soul,' it can be answered by them thus.
As was shown above, so that this saying, 'my bone and flesh,' may be understood as the whole from a part, but as things which were taken away already animated, not dead. For it is not to be denied that the Omnipotent could do this, merely because no man is able to cut off anything together with a soul from human flesh. Now as to what Adam went on to add, 'She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of her man' (Gen. 2:23), why did he not rather say, whereby the opinion of these men might be confirmed, 'because her flesh was taken out of her man'? And so here those who think otherwise can say that it is not written that the flesh of the woman, but the woman, was taken out of her man; and she must be understood entirely, with soul and spirit.
For even though the soul lacks sex, yet when women are named, they are not necessarily to be understood with the soul excepted. Otherwise they would not be admonished to adorn themselves thus: 'not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly apparel, but with what befits women professing godliness, through good conduct' (1 Tim. 2:9-10). Surely godliness is within, in the soul or in the spirit, and yet they were called women, even so that they should adorn themselves within, where there is no sex. Since therefore these men have thus contended among themselves with alternating discourse, I so judge between them as to admonish both parties, lest they trust in things unknown and rashly dare to affirm what they do not know. For if it were written:
'He breathed the breath of life into the woman's face, and she was made into a living soul,' not even so would it follow that the soul is not propagated from the parents, unless this too were likewise read to be written concerning their son. For it could have come to pass that a limb without a soul, drawn from the body, needed to be given a soul, while the soul of the son was drawn from the father through the mother by the transfusion of propagation. But when it is passed over in silence, it is concealed, not denied, but neither affirmed. And on this account, wherever perhaps it is not passed over in silence, it must be established by clearer proofs. Whence neither are those who defend the propagation of souls at all helped by this, that God did not breathe into the woman's face, nor those who deny it, on this account, that Adam did not say:
'Soul of my soul,' ought to persuade themselves of what they do not know. For just as, with the same question not resolved but remaining, Scripture could keep silent that the woman received a soul by God's breathing, just as her man did, so, with the same question not resolved but remaining, Scripture could keep silent, so that Adam should not say, 'soul of my soul.' And on this account, if the soul of the first woman is from the man, the whole was signified from a part, where it is read, 'This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,' since she was taken wholly from the man, not the flesh alone. But if it is not from the man, but God breathed it into her as into the man, the part was signified from the whole, where it is read, 'She was taken out of her man,' since her flesh, not the whole, was taken.
Wherefore, since by these testimonies, so far as pertains to this matter, being certainly ambiguous, this question is not resolved, yet this I know, that men argue thus who from this think that the woman's soul is not of the man's soul, because it was not said, 'soul of my soul,' but 'flesh of my flesh,' just as the Apollinarists argue, or whoever else there are against the soul of the Lord, which they deny for this reason, that they read it written, 'The Word was made flesh' (John 1:14). 'For if the soul also,' they say, 'were there, it ought to have been said, the Word was made man.' But to these it is said that Scripture is wont to name the whole man by the name of flesh—as it is, 'And all flesh shall see the salvation of God' (Luke 3:6; Isa. 40:5);
—for flesh without a soul cannot see anything—; because in very many other places of the holy Scriptures it is shown without any ambiguity that not flesh alone, but also a human, that is, a rational, soul is in the man Christ. Whence these men also, by whom the propagation of souls is defended, could take it that the whole was said from a part, 'bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,' so that there the soul also might be understood, just as we understand that the Word was made flesh not without a soul—if, just as other testimonies teach that Christ has a human soul, so these men too by some unambiguous testimonies would establish the propagation of souls.
In like manner therefore we also admonish those who overthrow the propagation of souls, that they should assert by sure proofs that new souls are breathed in by God, and then may defend that what was said, 'bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,' was not spoken figuratively as the whole from a part, so that the soul also should be understood together, but properly of the flesh alone. Since these things are so, I see that this book must now be closed. For it contains all the things that seemed to me most necessary, whereby those who read them may know that they ought to beware, lest they consent to this man, whose two books you sent me, in this, so as to believe 'that souls are so from God's breath that they are not from nothing.'
For whoever believes this, even if he denies it in words, in the very fact cries out that souls have the substance of God and are of His kind not by gift but by nature. For that from which anyone draws the origin of his own nature—that he draws from it the kind of his own nature cannot soberly be denied by any means. But this man is so contrary to himself that he says souls are of the kind of God not by nature but by gift, and yet says that they are not made from nothing, but draw their origin from Him; and thus he does not hesitate to recall them, what he had before denied, to the nature of God.
But we by no means forbid that the inbreathing of new souls without propagation be defended—yet by those who are able to find something, either in the canonical books, which is not ambiguous, for resolving this most entangled question, or in their own reasonings,
which is not contrary to catholic truth; not by such as this man showed himself to be, who, by not finding what to say and by being unwilling to suspend his deliberation, in no way measuring his own powers, in order not to keep silent, dared to say 'that the soul deserved to be defiled through the flesh and deserved to be a sinful soul,' though it could have found no merit, whether good or bad, before the flesh; and 'that for little ones departing from the body without baptism the original sin can be loosed, and the sacrifice of the body of Christ can be offered for them,' who are not incorporated into Christ through His sacraments in His Church, 'and that these, departing from this life without the laver of regeneration, can go not only to rest, but even attain to the kingdom of heaven,' and other things very absurd.
To gather all of which together and digest them in this book seemed too long. Far be it, then, that the propagation of souls, if it is false, should be refuted by such men, and that the inbreathing of new souls, if it is true, should be defended by such men. Wherefore, whoever wish to defend that new souls are said to be breathed into the newborn, not drawn from the parents, let them by all means beware of any of those four things which I recalled above, that is: 'let them not say that sinful souls are made by God through another's original sin; let them not say that little ones who have departed without baptism can attain to eternal life and the kingdom of heaven, the original sin being dissolved by any other means whatsoever;
let them not say that souls sinned somewhere before the flesh, and were on that account deservedly thrust down into sinful flesh; let them not say that sins which were not found in them, because they were foreknown, were deservedly punished, since they were not permitted to attain to that life in which they would commit them.' Saying therefore none of those four things, since any one of them is false and impious, let them find also most certain testimonies of the Scriptures concerning this matter, and let them defend this their opinion, not only with me not forbidding it, but even favoring it and giving thanks. But if they do not find the most certain authority of the divine oracles concerning this matter, and are compelled through want to say some one of those four things, let them restrain themselves, lest through that very want they should also
be compelled to say that the souls of little ones do not have original sin, according to the Pelagian heresy, long ago damnable and most recently condemned. For it is better for a man to confess that he does not know what he does not know, than either to run into a heresy already condemned or to found a new one, while he rashly dares to defend what he does not know. As for this man's other false and absurd things, in which he strays from the path of truth not so perilously, yet nevertheless does stray, since they are many, and to himself also, if the Lord will, I wish to write something concerning his books; there perhaps I shall show them all, or, if I cannot show all, very many.
But this book, which I thought should rather be written to you—who, as a true catholic and good friend, have faithfully and kindly borne the care both of our faith and of my reputation—than to any other, you shall give to be read or copied by whomever you can, or by whomever you shall judge it ought to be given. In it I have thought that the presumption of this young man ought to be so restrained and refuted, that nevertheless I love him and wish him not to be condemned, but to be corrected, and thus to make progress in the great house, which is the catholic Church, whither the divine mercy has led him; that he may be in it a vessel sanctified unto honor, useful to the Lord, prepared for every good work, both by living well and by speaking soundly.
But further, if I ought to love him, as I do, how much more you, brother, whose good will toward me and whose catholic faith, cautious and sober, I know most excellently! Whence it came to pass that those books which displeased you, and in which you found my name set down otherwise than you would wish, you took care, with truly fraternal and plainly sincere love, to have copied and sent to me. So far therefore is it from my being angry at your charity for this, because you did it, that rather, unless you had done it, by the full right of friendship I ought to be angry. I give you therefore abundant thanks. And how I have received your deed, I have shown more manifestly by this, that I have written this book to you, as soon as I read those, without any delay. SECOND BOOK.
TO PETER THE PRESBYTER. To his most beloved lord, brother, and fellow-presbyter Peter, Augustine the bishop, greeting in the Lord. There have come to me two books of Vincentius Victor, which he wrote to your Holiness, our brother Renatus having sent them to me—a man indeed a layman, but for his own faith and that of those whom he loves prudently and religiously solicitous. When these were read, I saw a man flowing in speech not only to sufficiency, but even to redundance, yet in the matters of which he wished to speak not yet instructed as he ought; but if this shall be granted to him by the Lord's giving, he will be able to be useful to many.
For he has no small measure of ability, by which he can unfold and adorn what he thinks, if first he give effort to think rightly. For eloquent perversities are very harmful, because to less learned men, by the very fact that they are eloquent, they seem also to be true. But how you yourself received these same books, I do not know; yet nevertheless, if what I have heard is true, you are said, when they were recited, to have so leaped up for joy that, an old man and a presbyter having kissed the head of that young layman, you gave thanks that you had learned what you did not know. In which indeed I do not disapprove your humility, nay rather I even praise it, that you honored your teacher—not the man, but the very Truth which deigned to speak to you through him—if only you can show what truth you received through him.
I could wish, therefore, that by your reply you would teach me what he taught you. Far be it that I should blush to learn from a presbyter, if you did not blush to learn, with humility to be proclaimed and imitated, from a layman—if you learned true things. Accordingly, most beloved brother, I desire to know what you learned from him, that, if I already knew it, I may rejoice for you; but if I did not know it, I may learn through you. Were you then ignorant that the soul and the spirit are two certain things—according to that which is written, 'Thou hast delivered my soul from my spirit' (Job 7:15, LXX)—and that each pertains to the nature of man, so that the whole man is spirit and soul and body, but that sometimes these two together are called by the name of soul—such as is that, 'And man was made into a living soul' (Gen. 2:7);
for there the spirit also is understood—and likewise that sometimes both are called by the name of spirit—as it is, 'And bowing His head, He gave up the spirit' (John 19:30), where the soul also must necessarily be understood—and that both are of one substance? I think that you already knew these things; but if you did not know them, know that you have not learned anything which is not known at great peril. And if anything is here to be disputed more subtly, it is better dealt with together with him, whose eloquence too we already know:
whether, when the soul is spoken of, in such a way that the spirit also is understood together, both are soul, but the spirit is some part of the soul; or, as it seemed to him, the whole is called by this name from a part; whether also both are spirit, but the part of it is that which is properly called soul; or whether this too is called the whole from a part, when the spirit is so spoken of that the soul also is understood together—for so it pleases him. But these things, as I said, are both subtly discussed and are not known without any, or at least without any great, peril. And likewise, that the senses of the body are some, but those of the soul others, I marvel if this man taught you;
and that you, a man of that age and honor, before you heard this man, thought it one and the same thing, that whereby white and black are distinguished, which even sparrows see with us, and that whereby just and unjust are judged, which Tobit saw even with the lights of the flesh lost (Tob. 2:10; 4:1ff.). If this is so, assuredly, when you heard or read, 'Lighten mine eyes, lest I ever sleep in death' (Ps. 13:3), you thought of nothing but the eyes of the flesh. Or if this is obscure, certainly, when you recalled that saying of the Apostle, 'the eyes of your heart enlightened' (Eph. 1:18), you believed that we have a heart beneath the forehead and above the cheeks. Far be it that I should think this of you; therefore neither did this man teach you this.
Or if perhaps before this teaching, which you now rejoice to have found, you thought the nature of the soul to be a portion of God, you did not know that this was false, with dreadful peril. And if you learned from this man that the soul is not a portion of God, give thanks to God, as great as you can, that you did not depart from the body before you learned this; for you would have departed a great heretic and a dreadful blasphemer. In no way, however, would I have supposed even this of you, that you, a catholic man and no contemptible presbyter, felt the nature of the soul to be a portion of God. Whence, I confess to your charity, I fear lest perhaps this man taught you this, which is rather contrary to that faith which you held.
For just as I do not think that you ever in the catholic Church believed the soul to be a portion of God, or that in any way the soul and God are of the same nature, so I fear lest perhaps you have consented to this man, 'that God did not make the soul out of nothing, but that it is so from Himself as to have emanated from Himself'; for this word too this man set down among the rest, whereby in this question he strayed to a monstrous precipice. But if indeed he taught you this, I do not want you to teach me; nay rather I even want you yourself to unlearn what you had learned.
For it is too little not to believe nor to say that the soul is a part of God—for neither do we say that the Son or the Holy Spirit is a part of God, and yet we say that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are of one and the same nature—; too little, therefore, is it that we do not say the soul is a part of God; but this too is needful, that we say that it and God are not of one and the same nature. Whence he rightly indeed says 'that souls are of the kind of God by gift, not by nature,' and on this account not of all men, but of the faithful; but again he has rolled back down to that from which he had turned aside, and said that God and the soul are of the same nature—not indeed in these words, but by an open and manifest meaning.
For when he says 'that the soul is so from God, that He created it neither from another nature nor from nothing, but from His very self,' what does he attempt to persuade but that which in other words he denies, namely that the soul is of the same nature of which God is? For every nature either is God, who has no author, or is from God, because it has Him as its author. But those things which have God as their author, from whom they are, some were not made, some were made. Further, that which was not made, and yet is from Him, either was begotten by Him or proceeds from Him—that which was begotten is the only Son, that which proceeds is the Holy Spirit—and this Trinity is of one and the same nature;
for these three are one, and each single one is God, and all together one God, immutable, everlasting, without any beginning or end of time. But that nature which was made is called a creature, while the Creator is God, that is, that Trinity. A creature therefore is said to be so from God that it was not made from His nature; for it is said to be from Him
because it has Him as its author that it should be, not in such a way that it was born from Him or proceeded from Him, but was created, established, made by Him: partly from no other thing, that is, altogether from nothing, as heaven and earth, or rather all the universal matter created together with the world, the universal mass of the world; but partly from another nature already created and existing, as man from the slime, woman from man, man from parents; yet every creature is from God, but by His creating, whether from nothing or from something, not, however, by His begetting or producing it out of Himself.
If I speak these things with a catholic, admonishing rather than teaching—for I do not think they are new to you, or things heard indeed even before, yet not believed, but, as I judge, you so read my letter that here you recognize also your own faith, which is common to us in the catholic Church by the Lord's giving—; if therefore, as I had begun to say, I speak these things with a catholic, whence, I beseech you, do you believe the soul to be—I say not of each one of us, but that first one given to that first man? If from nothing, and yet made and breathed in by God, you believe that which I do;
but if from some other creature, which, as material, lay beneath the artificer God so that the soul might be made from it, as the dust from which Adam was made, or his rib from which Eve, or as the waters from which fishes and birds, or as the earth from which any land animals—that is not catholic, that is not true. But if you think that neither from nothing nor from any other creature, but from His very self, that is, from His own nature, God made or makes souls—which be far from us!—this indeed you learned from this man, but I neither congratulate nor flatter you; far, with him, have you strayed from the catholic faith.
For it is more tolerable—which indeed is false, yet, as I said, more tolerable—that you should believe the soul to have been established from some other creature, which indeed God had already made, than from the nature of God; so that that which is mutable, which sins, which becomes impious, which also, if it endure impious to the end, will be damned without end, should not, with dreadful blasphemy, be referred to the nature of God. Cast it away, brother, cast away, I beseech you, that which is plainly not faith, but the error of an execrable impiety, lest, a weighty man seduced by a youth and a layman, being a presbyter, while you suppose this to be the catholic faith, you should be reckoned out of the number of the faithful—which may the Lord avert from you.
For it must not be dealt with you as with him, nor is this so dreadful an error of yours worthy of that pardon which is that of that youth, although it has passed from him to you. He lately came to the catholic sheepfold to be healed; you are counted among the catholic shepherds. We do not want that which has come from error to the Lord's flock to be so cured, that first the ulcerous sheep should by its pestilent contagion destroy the shepherd. But if you say, 'This man did not teach me this, nor did I in any way consent to this his error, allured by the sweetness of however eloquent and ornate discourse,' I give huge thanks to God.
But I ask, on what account, having kissed his head, as it is said, did you give thanks that you had learned what up to the hearing of his disputation you were ignorant of; or, if it is false that you did and said this, this very thing I beg you would deign to intimate to us, that the empty rumor may be refuted by your letter. But if it is true that with that humility you gave thanks to the man, I rejoice indeed, if he did not teach you that which above I showed to be so detestable and to be avoided, and I do not blame you for having been grateful with such humility to a teacher, if you learned something else true and useful while he disputed; but I inquire what this may be. Or is it perhaps that the soul is not a spirit, but a body?
I do not indeed think it a great loss to Christian teaching not to know these things; and if one disputes subtly about the kinds of bodies, this is learned with more difficulty than profit. But if the Lord shall will that I write, as I desire, to that very young man, then perhaps, my beloved, you will there learn even this which he did not teach you—if, that is, you rejoice to have learned it from him. Yet lest perchance there be something else which is agreed to be useful and to pertain to the necessary faith, I beg you not to think it burdensome to write back.
For as to that which he most rightly and very wholesomely believes—that souls are judged when they have gone forth from their bodies, before they come to that judgment in which they must be judged when their bodies have already been restored to them, and be tormented or glorified in that very flesh in which they lived here—was this then something you yourself did not know? Who has become so deaf against the Gospel through such obstinacy of mind that, in the poor man who after death was carried into Abraham's bosom, and in the rich man whose torment in hell is set forth, he does not hear these things, or, having heard them, does not believe them?
But did he indeed teach you how a soul without a body could desire a drop of water from the poor man's finger, seeing that he himself confessed that the soul seeks bodily nourishment only for the sake of propping up the ruins of its corruptible body? These are his words: "Do we believe," says he, "that, because the soul seeks either food or drink, the nourishment passes over to the soul itself?" And a little later: "Hence it is understood," he says, "and proved that the sustaining supports of food do not pertain to the soul but to the body, for which, besides food, clothing too is provided by a like reasoning, so that the furnishing of pasture seems necessary to it, to which it also belongs to have clothing itself."
This opinion of his, set forth clearly enough, he further illustrated with a certain comparison and said: "But what do we think any tenant does in looking after his dwelling? Does he not, if he perceives it to shake in the roof, or the wall to totter, or the foundation to give way, seek props and heap up piles by which he may carefully and diligently shore up the threatening ruin, lest under the peril of the dwelling the safety of the dweller should seem to hang in the balance? So then," he says, "recognize that the soul too desires food for its flesh, from which without doubt it conceives that very desire."
These things indeed that young man expounded in most brilliant and most sufficient words, asserting that nourishment is required not for the soul but for the body—by the soul's care, to be sure, yet as of one dwelling in a house and propping up by provident repair the threatening ruins of the dying flesh. Let him therefore also explain to you what that soul of the rich man desired to prop up, seeing it no longer had any mortal body, and yet thirsted and asked for a drop of water from the poor man's finger. This teacher of old men has here something to exercise himself upon; let him seek and find, if he can, for what purpose that soul in hell was begging for moist nourishment, even so scanty a portion, when it no longer had any ruinous dwelling.
That he believes God to be incorporeal, I rejoice that on this point at least he is set apart from the ravings of Tertullian; for that man contended that God, like the soul, is corporeal. Dissenting from him in this, our man endeavours to persuade us of things more marvellous still: that the incorporeal God makes a breath not out of nothing, but exhales a corporeal breath out of His very self. O what a doctrine—for which every age should prick up its ears, which deserves to have aged men, indeed presbyters, as its disciples! Let him read, let him read out in an assembly what he has written; let him invite the known and the unknown, the learned and the unlearned to hear it recited. Come together, elders with the younger; learn what you did not know, hear what you had never heard.
Behold, according to this man's teaching, God creates a breath not from anything else that in some way exists, nor from that which absolutely does not exist, but from that which He Himself is: being incorporeal, He blows out a body. Therefore His own nature, before it is changed into the body of sin, He Himself changes into a body. Or does he say that He changes nothing of His own nature when He makes a breath? Then it is not when He makes it out of His very self; for He is not one thing and His nature another. Who but the most insane would think this? But if he says that God so makes a breath out of His own nature that He Himself remains entire, that is not the question; the question rather is whether that which is not from elsewhere nor out of nothing, but out of Him, is not the very thing that He is—that is, of the same nature and essence. For in the begetting of the Son too God remains entire;
but because, when He begot out of His very self, He begot nothing other than that which He Himself is. For, apart from the fact that He assumed manhood and the Word was made flesh, the Word, the Son of God, is indeed another (person), but is not another thing; that is, He is another person, but not a diverse nature. And whence is this, save that He was not created out of another or out of nothing, but was born out of Him—not that He might be better than He was, but simply that He might be, and be that which He is from whom He was born, that is, of one and the same nature, equal, coeternal, in every way alike, equally immutable, equally invisible, equally incorporeal, equally God, altogether that which the Father is, save that He is Himself the Son, not the Father?
But if He Himself remains indeed the entire God, and yet out of no source or out of another, but out of His very self creates something diverse and worse, and out of the incorporeal God a body emanates—far be it that a catholic mind should drink this in! For it is not a stream from the divine fountain, but a figment of the human heart. Now indeed, how ineptly he labours to vindicate the soul—which he thinks to be corporeal—from the passions of the body, disputing "about the infancy of the soul, about paralytics and those whose senses are impaired, about limbs of the body amputated without any cutting of the soul"—I ought to argue not with you, but rather with him; for he must sweat over it, to give an account of his own sayings, lest I should seem to wish to weary the gravity of the old man over the work of the young.
But that he disputes that the likenesses of character which are found in children do not come from the seed of the soul—this is indeed a consequence for whoever destroy the propagation of the soul; yet even those who assert this propagation do not there place the weight of their assertion. For they too see children unlike their parents in character, which they think comes about because even one and the same man often has other characters unlike his own—not by receiving another soul, of course, but by his life being changed for the better or the worse. Thus they say it is not impossible that a soul should not have the same character as that from which it was propagated, since indeed one and the same soul can now have one character, and at another time another.
Wherefore, if you believe you have learned this from him—that the soul is not derived by propagation—would that you had truly learned it! Most gladly would I hand you over to be taught by me. But it is one thing to learn, another to seem to oneself to have learned. If, then, you suppose you have learned what you still do not know, you have plainly not learned, but have rashly believed what you gladly heard; and false speech has crept upon you through sweet speech.
This I say not because I am now certain that it is false that souls are rather breathed in anew than drawn from the origin of the parents—for I still judge that this must be inquired of those who are able to teach it—but because this man has so discoursed on this matter that not only did he not solve the question which still needs discussion, but he even said such things as leave no doubt of their falsity. For, wishing to prove doubtful things, he dared to say things that are without doubt to be reproved. Or will you indeed hesitate to reprove this, that, when he was speaking of the soul, he said: "You do not wish the soul to contract from the flesh of sin a sickness, to which you may in turn see sanctification pass over through the flesh, so that through that very flesh it may repair the state through which it had lost its merit"?
"Or is it perhaps that, because in baptism the body is washed, there does not pass over to the soul or spirit that which is believed to be conferred through baptism? Deservedly then does it repair through its former flesh the condition which it had seemed for a little while to have lost through the flesh, so that through the flesh it may begin to be reborn, through which it had merited to be defiled." See in these words how greatly this teacher of yours has erred! He said that "the soul repairs its state through the flesh, through which it had lost its merit": therefore the soul had some state and some good merit before the flesh, which he wants it to repair through the flesh, when the flesh is washed by the laver of regeneration; so it had lived somewhere before the flesh in a good state and merit, which state and merit it lost when it had come into the flesh.
24:122
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He said that "it repairs through the flesh its former condition, which it had seemed for a little while to have lost through the flesh": therefore before the flesh it had an ancient condition—for that is what "former" means—and what could this have been but a blessed and praiseworthy condition? He asserts that this is repaired through the sacrament of baptism, since he does not want it to draw its origin by propagation from that (soul) which is agreed to have once been happy in paradise. How then does he elsewhere say that "he constantly asserts that the soul is not from transmission, nor from nothing, nor through its very self, nor before the body"?
Behold, in this place he wants souls to live somewhere before the body so blessedly that the same blessedness may be restored to them through baptism; and, as if forgetful of himself again, he adds and says: "so that through it—that is, through the flesh—it may begin to be reborn, through which it had merited to be defiled." Above he had signified that a good merit had been lost through the flesh; but now he signifies an evil merit, by which it came about that it came or was sent into the flesh, saying: "through which it had merited to be defiled"; for if it merits to be defiled, that is surely not a good merit. Let him say what it sinned before it was defiled through the flesh, so that it should merit to be defiled through the flesh; let him say, if he can, what he can in no way say—for he can find here absolutely nothing true to say.
Likewise, some while after he says: "The soul therefore, if it merited to be a sinner, though it could not be a sinner, nevertheless did not remain in sin, because, prefigured in Christ, it ought not to be in sin, just as it could not be." I ask you, brother, do you think you at least afterwards read these things and considered them, and thought about what you praised in the reader, or for what you gave thanks after the recitation? What, I beseech you, does this mean: "The soul therefore, if it merited to be a sinner, though it could not be a sinner"? What is "it merited" and "it could not," when it could not have merited this unless it had been a sinner, and yet would not have been unless it had been able to be one—so that, before any evil merit, by sinning it should make for itself the merit whereby, with the Lord forsaking it, it should come to other sins?
Or did he for this reason say "which could not be a sinner," because, unless it came into the flesh, it could not be a sinner? What then did it merit, that it should be sent to where it could be a sinner—a place to which, unless it had come, it could not be a sinner elsewhere? Let him say what it merited. For if it merited to be a sinner, it had already sinned in something, whereby it should merit to be a sinner again; but if it had sinned in nothing, whence did it merit to be a sinner? But perhaps these things seem obscure, or are boasted to be obscure, though they are perfectly plain. For he ought not to have said that the soul merited to be a sinner through the flesh, since he can find neither a good nor an evil merit of it before the flesh. But let us come to plainer matters.
For when he was being straitened by great difficulties—as to how souls are held bound by the bond of original sin, if they do not draw their origin from that soul which first sinned, but the Creator breathes them, pure from all contagion and propagation of sin, into sinful flesh—lest it be said to him that God, by so breathing them in, makes them guilty, he first attempted to fortify this opinion by the foreknowledge of God, "that He had prepared for them a redemption." In the sacrament of this redemption little ones are baptized, that the original sin may be washed away which they drew from the flesh; as though God amends His own deeds, in that He had made them innocent yet suffered them to be defiled.
But after it came to the point of speaking of those who are not aided by such help and expire before they are baptized, he says: "In this place I do not pledge myself as an author, but conjecture something from an example. We say that a reckoning of this kind must be held concerning infants who, predestined to the baptism of the present life, are forestalled by death before they are reborn in Christ. For we read," he says, "of such it is written: 'He was caught away, lest malice should alter his understanding, or lest deceit should beguile his soul. For this cause He hastened to lead him out from the midst of iniquity; for his soul was pleasing to God,' and: 'Being made perfect in a short time, he fulfilled long times.'" Who would disdain to have this man as a teacher?
So then, do the little ones—whom men mostly wish to be baptized, and who, while men run, die before it—if they were delayed a little while in this life, so that once baptized they died immediately, would malice alter their understanding and deceit beguile their soul; and, lest this should befall them, was it provided for them that they should be caught away before they were baptized? Therefore in that very baptism they would be changed for the worse and beguiled by deceit, if after baptism they were caught away. O doctrine to be admired and followed—nay rather, to be detested and execrated!
But this he presumed of your prudence—you who were present when he recited it—and especially of yours, to whom he wrote and to whom he handed the recited books, so that he might be confident we would believe to have been written of unbaptized infants that which was written of the immature ages of all the saints, with whom fools think ill has been dealt if they are quickly caught away from this life and could not attain to the years which men, as though for a great divine gift, wish for themselves. But what a thing it is to say that "infants predestined to the baptism of the present life are forestalled by death before they are reborn in Christ," as though some force of fortune or fate or of anything whatever does not permit God to fulfil what He predestined!
And how does He Himself catch them away, because they pleased Him? Or does He both predestine them to be baptized, and Himself not allow what He predestined to come to pass? But attend to what he further dares—he to whom our caution in so great a depth of question, more cautious than knowing, is displeasing: "I would dare to say," he says, "that these can attain to the indulgence of original sins, yet not so as to be brought into the heavenly kingdom, just as to the thief who confessed indeed but was not baptized the Lord granted not the kingdom of heaven, but paradise—though assuredly it already stood:
'He who is not born again of water and the Holy Spirit shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven'—especially because the Lord professes that there are many mansions with His Father, in which are designated the many and diverse merits of the dwellers, so that here the unbaptized may be brought to pardon, the baptized to the palm which is prepared through grace." You see the man separating paradise and the mansions which are with the Father from the kingdom of heaven, so that places of everlasting felicity may abound even for the unbaptized. And he does not see, when he says these things, that while he is so unwilling to separate the mansion of any baptized little one from the kingdom of heaven, he does not fear to separate from it the very house of God the Father, or some parts of it;
for the Lord Jesus did not say (this) of the universe of creation or of any part whatever of the universe, but: "In my Father's house are many mansions." How then shall the unbaptized be in the house of God the Father, when he cannot have God as Father unless he is reborn? Let him not be ungrateful to God, who deigned to deliver him from the division of the Donatists or the Rogatists, so as himself to seek to divide the very house of God the Father, and to place some part of it outside the kingdom of heaven, where the unbaptized may be able to dwell. And on what terms does he himself presume that he will enter the kingdom of heaven, from which kingdom he shuts out the house of the King Himself in as great a part as he pleases?
But concerning that thief who, crucified beside the Lord, hoped in the Lord who was also crucified, and concerning Dinocrates, the brother of holy Perpetua, he argues that pardon of sins and some seat of the blessed can be given even to the unbaptized—as though someone, whom it would be impious not to believe, had indicated to him that they had not been baptized. Yet concerning these I have set forth more fully what seemed to me in that book which I wrote to our brother Renatus. Your Charity will be able to know this, if you do not scorn to read it; for he will not be able to deny it to one who asks. Yet this man seethes and is choked by dreadful straits;
for perhaps more attentively than you he attends to what evil he says—namely, that apart from the baptism of Christ original sin is loosed in little ones. Then, that he may at length, even late, in this cause take refuge in the sacraments of the Church, he says: "For these, indeed, I judge that assiduous oblations and continual sacrifices of the holy priests are to be offered." Take this man, if you please, even as your censor, if it was too little to have him as a teacher—so that you may offer the sacrifice of the body of Christ even for those who are not incorporated into Christ.
For when he would dare to insert into his books a thing so novel and so alien from ecclesiastical discipline and from the rule of truth, he did not say "I think," nor "I suppose," nor "I judge (arbitror)," nor even "I suggest" or "I say," but "I decree (censeo)," so that, forsooth, if we should be offended by the novelty or perversity of the opinion, we might be terrified by the authority of his verdict. See to it yourself, brother, how you can endure this man as a teacher; but as for catholic priests who are of sound understanding—to whom you too ought to be joined—far be it that they should acquiesce to hear this man decreeing, whom they rather wish to come to his senses and to grieve, and by a most wholesome correction to repent that he thought—nay, indeed, even wrote—these things.
"But this," he says, "I maintain must be done by the example of the Maccabees falling in battle, who, when they secretly carried off things forbidden and fell in the very combat, from the priests"—he says—"we find this counsel to have been taken, that the offering of sacrifices should repair those whose souls the guilt of the forbidden thing had bound." Thus he says this, as though he had read that those sacrifices were offered for the uncircumcised, just as he decreed that these our sacrifices are to be offered for the unbaptized. For circumcision was the sacrament of that time, which prefigured the baptism of our time. Yet in comparison with himself, in what he afterwards appeared, this man still errs more tolerably.
For as though he had repented—not of that which he ought to have repented, namely that he dared to assert that to the unbaptized original sin is relaxed and indulgence given of all sins, so that they are sent into paradise, that is, a place of such great felicity, and merit to have blessed mansions in the house of God the Father, but rather as though he repented of this, that he had granted them seats of lesser blessedness outside the kingdom of heaven—he added and said:
"Or if perchance anyone should struggle against paradise having been conferred meanwhile temporarily upon the soul of the thief or of Dinocrates—for that there still remains over for them in the resurrection the reward of the kingdom of heaven, although that principal sentence stands in the way, because 'he who is not born again of water and the Holy Spirit shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven'—nevertheless let him hold in this part also my assent, not grudging it, provided that he both amplify the effect and the affection of the divine mercy and foreknowledge." These words I have copied out, having read them in his second book. Could anyone in this cause of error have a greater audacity, rashness, presumption? He himself recalls the Lord's sentence, he himself mentions it, he himself inserts it into his own writings, he himself says:
"although that principal sentence stands in the way, because 'he who is not born again of water and the Holy Spirit shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven'"—and yet he dares to raise the neck of his own verdict against the principal sentence! "Let him hold," he says, "my assent also, as one not grudging it," he who says that the souls of the unbaptized temporarily merit paradise—for on account of these he mentions the thief and Dinocrates, as it were prescribing or rather prejudging—but that in the resurrection they are transferred to better things and receive the reward of the kingdom of heaven, "although," he says, "the principal sentence stands in the way."
Now therefore, I beg you, brother, consider for yourself: whoever gives his assent to anyone against the authority of the principal sentence—what sentence will he merit from the Prince! The novel Pelagian heretics the authority of catholic councils and of the Apostolic See has most justly condemned, because they dared to give to unbaptized little ones a place of rest and salvation even outside the kingdom of heaven. Which they would not have dared, unless they denied that these have original sin, which needs to be loosed through the sacrament of baptism.
But this man, like a catholic, says that little ones are bound by original sin, and yet looses them from a bond of this kind without the laver of regeneration, and after death mercifully sends them into paradise, and after the resurrection mercifully brings them even into the kingdom of heaven. Such a merciful man did Saul seem to himself, when he spared the king whom God had commanded to be slain; but deservedly was his disobedient mercy, or merciful disobedience, reproved and condemned, that man may beware lest from Him by whom man was made he should merit mercy against His sentence. Truth thunders through the mouth of His own body: "If anyone is not born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God."
And in order to make the martyrs excepted from this sentence—those to whom it befell to be slain for Christ's name before they were washed with Christ's baptism—He says in another place: "He who shall lose his soul for my sake shall find it." And lest to anyone who has not been born again by the laver of the Christian faith the abolition of original sin should be promised, the Apostle cries: "Through the offence of one, upon all men unto condemnation." Against which condemnation the Lord, showing that there is one help of salvation, says: "He who shall believe and be baptized shall be saved; but he who shall not believe shall be condemned."
The mystery of which believing is fulfilled in little ones through the response of those by whom they are carried, lest, if it be not done, they go, all from one, into condemnation. And yet, against such manifest voices which truth sings in unison, a vanity comes forth into the midst, more senseless than merciful, and says: "Not only do little ones not go into damnation, even though no laver of the Christian faith absolve them from the bond of original sin, but they also meanwhile enjoy the felicity of paradise after death, and after the resurrection they will moreover possess the felicity of the kingdom of heaven."
Would this man dare to say these things against the most firmly founded catholic faith, if he had not dared to undertake the solving of a question about the soul's origin that exceeds his powers? For he is straitened by dreadful difficulties by those who say: Why did God punish the soul with so unjust a chastisement, that He willed to relegate it into the body of sin, where by the fellowship of the flesh it begins to be a sinner—it which could not be a sinner? For indeed they say:
"The soul could not be a sinner, unless God had mingled it with the fellowship of sinful flesh." With what justice therefore God did this—since this man could not find, especially on account of the eternal damnation of dying little ones for whom, being unbaptized, original sin was not expiated—why, then, the just and good God, sending the souls of little ones (which He foreknew the sacrament of Christian grace would not aid), free from all guilt of propagation, into a body drawn from Adam, bound them by the bond of original sin, and in this way made them liable to eternal damnation, when he could not find, nor was willing to say, that these too draw any sinful origin from that (first soul)—he chose to go forth by a miserable shipwreck rather than to curb his rash course by provident deliberation, with sails lowered and the oars of his disputation held back.
For our aged caution seemed of little worth to the young man, as though for this most troublesome and most perilous question an impulse of eloquence were more necessary than the counsel of prudence. As indeed he himself foresaw this too, but in vain; for, about to propose to himself as it were objected by adversaries these things, he says: "Hence other reproaches are heaped up by the querulous murmurings of the barkers, and hence, as by a certain whirlwind, we are again and again dashed among monstrous rocks." Having foretold these things, he proposed to himself the aforesaid most rock-strewn question, where he made shipwreck of the catholic faith, unless he repair by repenting what he broke.
That whirlwind and those rocks I avoided, being unwilling to commit my ship to them; and about this matter I wrote in such a way as to show rather the reason of my hesitation than the rashness of presumption. When he had found this little work of mine at your house, he laughed at it, and committed himself to those crags with a spirit more spirited than considered. But to what point this over-confidence of his has led him, I think you now see; and I give thanks to God the more abundantly, if you already saw it before. For when he would not restrain his headlong course on account of a doubtful excursion, he found a miserable onset, asserting that God confers on little ones who have died without Christian regeneration both paradise now and afterward the kingdom of heaven.
But as for the testimonies of the Scriptures, whatever he adduced by which he attempted, as it were, to prove that God does not draw souls from the propagation of that first (soul), but breathes them, like that first one, into each several individual—these, so far as pertains to this question, are uncertain and ambiguous, so that they can most easily be taken otherwise than he wishes. Which I have already, as I judge, sufficiently shown in that book which I wrote to our friend of whom I made mention above. For the very testimonies which he brought forward, where it is read that God either gives or makes or forms souls, do not show whence He gives them, or whence He makes or forms them: whether from the propagation of that first one, or by breathing them in, like that first one.
But this man, from the very fact that we read that God gives or makes or forms souls, at once supposes that the propagation of souls has been denied — although, by the witness of the very same Scripture, God also gives or makes or forms bodies, which nevertheless no one doubts are given, made, and formed by Him from the propagation of the seed. Likewise, because it is written that God made every race of men from one blood, or because Adam says: 'This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh' — since neither there is it said 'from one soul' nor here 'a soul from my soul' — he supposes that it is denied that the souls of children come from their parents, or that of that woman from the man; as though, indeed, if it had been said not 'from one blood' but 'from one soul,'
something other than the whole man would be understood, and yet the propagation of the body would not thereby be denied. So too, even if it had been said, 'a soul from my soul,' the flesh would by no means be denied, which it was agreed had been taken from him; for Scripture very often signifies the whole by a part, just as it signifies the part by the whole. For surely, if in that passage from which this man drew his testimony it had been written that the human race was established not 'from one blood' but 'from one man,' this would not have prejudged the case against those who deny the propagation of souls — although a man is neither soul alone nor flesh alone, but both together. For they would reply that Scripture could there have signified the part by the whole, that is, only the flesh of the man by the word 'man.'
So therefore those also who defend the propagation of souls contend that what was said, 'from one blood' — namely, 'man' by the term 'blood' — signifies the whole by a part. For just as it seems to favour those men that it was said 'from one blood' and not 'from one man,' so it seems to favour these others that it was said: 'By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, and so it passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned,' and it was not said 'in whom the flesh of all sinned.' And likewise, just as it seems to favour those that it was said, 'This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh' — since a part is named, not the whole — so again it favours these others what immediately follows there:
'She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of her man.' For, they say, it ought to have been said, 'because her flesh was taken out of her man,' if not the whole woman — that is, together with the soul — but flesh alone was taken from the man. Moreover, when both sides have been heard, whoever judges without partisan zeal
assuredly sees that those testimonies in which a part is named are not to be brought forward against those who defend the propagation of souls, because Scripture could there have signified the whole by a part — just as, when we read 'the Word was made flesh,' we understand not the flesh alone, but the whole man; nor are those passages to be brought forward against those who overthrow the propagation of souls, where not a part of the man but the whole is mentioned, because Scripture could there have signified a part by the whole — just as we confess Christ was buried, though His flesh alone was buried. And on this account we say that the propagation of souls is neither rashly to be asserted nor rashly to be overthrown, but we admonish that other testimonies must be sought which may not be found ambiguous.
Wherefore I do not yet know what this man has taught you, or for what you have given thanks. For that question remains, as it was, in which it is asked concerning the origin of souls: whether God gives, makes, and forms them for men from the propagation of that one soul which He first breathed into man, or from His own breath, as with the first man — souls which the Christian faith does not doubt that He gives, makes, and forms.
When this man attempted to solve that question, and did not weigh his own strength, in overthrowing the propagation of souls and asserting that the Creator 'breathes them pure from every contagion of sin' not from nothing but 'out of Himself,' he defamed the nature of God with the reproach of mutability, which there was no need to do; and, while he wishes to give a reason why God should not be believed unjust — if He should bind souls pure from all sin, even those whom He does not redeem by Christian regeneration, with the bond of original sin — he said things which I would not have him teach you. For he attributed as much salvation and happiness to unbaptized little ones as not even the Pelagian heresy could.
And yet, concerning so many thousands of little ones who are born of the ungodly and die among the ungodly — not those whom men, when they will, cannot succour through baptism, but those about whose baptism no one has been able or will be able even to think, nor has anyone offered or will offer for them the sacrifice which this man judged ought to be offered even for those who are not to be baptized — he found nothing to say.
If he be questioned concerning these — what their souls have deserved, that God should insert them, neither to be washed by baptism nor to be expiated by the sacrifice of Christ's body and blood, and to be damned eternally, into sinful flesh — either he will be utterly at a loss, and our hesitation will at last, though late, please him; or else he will judge that the body of Christ ought to be offered at once for all the little ones who throughout the whole world die without Christian baptism — even with their names left unspoken, since they are unknown in the Church of Christ, and though they are not incorporated into the body of Christ. Far be it from you, brother, that these things should please you; far be it that you should either rejoice to have learned such things or presume to teach them;
otherwise he himself will be found far better than you; for at the beginning of his first book he prefaced modestly and humbly, saying: 'While I desire to obey you, I have incurred the mark of presumption'; and a little later he says: 'Since I am not myself so credulous as to think that what I shall have said can be proved, and I would ever strive not even to defend my own opinion if it be judged unworthy of approval, and it is my heart's desire, once my own judgment is condemned, to follow rather what is better and more true. For as it belongs to an excellent purpose and a praiseworthy counsel to be easily led over to truer things, so it belongs to a base and obstinate judgment to be unwilling to bend more readily to the path of reason.'
For if he spoke these things truthfully and feels as he has spoken, he assuredly bears a mind of great hope. Likewise at the end of the second book he says: 'Do not think that it should perhaps be turned to your reproach, since I place the judgment of my words within your power. And lest, perchance, the gaze of some curious reader be tempted and offended by the remaining traces amid the smeared strokes of the letters, tear apart the connected sequence of the page with a severe thumb, and punish me, exempt from this correction, blotting out the inks that marked unworthy words, lest by this occasion both your judgment concerning me, whereby you greatly indulge me, and my follies which lay hidden be laughed at.'
Since therefore he has both fortified his books at the outset and secured them at the close, and has laid upon your shoulders the religious burden of correcting and amending him, let him find in you what he asked — that, being just, you may amend him in mercy and reprove him; but let not the oil of the sinner, wherewith his head might be made fat, be upon your hands and kisses — that is, the unseemly flattery of a fawner, the deceitful smoothness of a cajoler. But if you neglect to amend when you see amendment is needed, you act against charity; if, however, he seems to you not needing amendment because you think he has felt these things rightly, you are wise against the truth.
And therefore he is the better man, who is more ready to be amended (if an amender be not lacking), than you, if either knowingly you scornfully despise one in error, or unknowingly you likewise follow the error. Consider therefore all things in those same books, written to you and delivered to you, soberly and vigilantly; and you will perhaps find more to be blamed than I.
And whatever things there are in them that are to be approved and praised, if perchance there was truly anything in them of which you were ignorant and which you learned from this man's discourse, plainly profess what that thing is — so that all may know you gave thanks for this, and not for those things there which are so many and are to be disapproved: all who either heard along with you while he recited, or afterward read those same books — lest, in his ornate eloquence, as in a precious cup, they drink poison at your invitation, though you drink not, if they do not know what you drank thence and what you did not drink, and, for the sake of your praise, deem that all things there are wholesomely to be drunk. And yet, to hear and to read and to draw into memory the things that are said — what is this but to drink?
But the Lord foretold concerning His faithful ones, that even if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them. And on this account, those who read him with judgment, and, according to the rule of faith, approve what is to be approved and disapprove what is to be disapproved, even if they commit to memory the things that are to be disapproved, are injured by no poisonous depravity of the sentences. That I have admonished or reminded your gravity and religion of these things, whether out of mutual or preceding charity, I shall in no wise, by the Lord's mercy, repent of — however you may take what I judged ought to be presented to you.
But I shall render abundant thanks to Him in whose mercy it is most wholesome to trust, if this letter either finds your faith to be estranged and untouched by these depravities and errors which I have been able to point out from this man's books, or makes it so. BOOK THREE. TO VINCENTIUS VICTOR. What I have thought I ought to write to you, I wish you first to consider, most beloved son Victor: that if I despised you, I should by no means have done this. Nor yet on that account should you so abuse our humility as to think yourself thereby approved because you perceive you have not been despised; for I love you not to be followed, but to be corrected. And since I do not despair that you can be corrected, I would not have you wonder that I cannot despise one whom I love.
For if I ought to have loved you, before you were in communion with us, that you might become a Catholic, how much more ought I now to love you, already in communion, that you may not become a new heretic, and that you may be such a Catholic whom no heretic can resist! For, as far as appears from the gifts of talent which God has already lavished upon you, you will assuredly be wise, if you believe yourself not to be so, and if you piously, humbly, and earnestly beg to be made so by Him who makes men wise, and prefer not to be deceived by error rather than to be honoured by the praises of those in error. First, the title of your name in your books made me anxious for you.
For when I had inquired of those who knew you and happened to be present who Vincentius Victor might be, I heard that you had been a Donatist, or rather a Rogatist, but had lately entered into communion with the Catholic Church. And while I rejoiced as much as we are wont over those whom we know to have been freed from that error — nay rather much more, because I saw that your talent, in which I delighted in your writings, had not remained with the adversaries of the truth — there was added by those who reported it something which, amid those joys, saddened me: namely, that you wished to be surnamed 'Vincentius' because you still hold in your mind Rogatus's successor, who was called by this name, as though a great and holy man, and on this account you wished his name to be your surname.
Nor were there lacking those who said that this too had been boasted by you: that he himself had appeared to you in some vision or other, and had so aided you in composing these books — concerning which I have undertaken to deal with you in this our little work — that, as far as pertains to the matters themselves and their reasonings, he himself dictated to you the things you were to write. And if this be true, I no longer wonder that you could say those things which — if you patiently hearken to my admonition and consider and thoroughly examine those books with a Catholic mind — you will without doubt repent having said: for he indeed who, as the Apostle exposes him, transforms himself into an angel of light, has transformed himself into him for you, whom you believe to have been or to be, as it were, an angel of light.
And indeed in that manner he is less able to deceive Catholics, when he transforms himself not into angels of light, but into heretics; but I would not have you, now a Catholic, be deceived by him. Let it torment you, then, to have learned things that are true — by how much more had he rejoiced to have persuaded you of things that are false! But that you may not love a dead man, whose love can harm you and cannot profit him, I admonish you to consider briefly this: that he is assuredly not holy and just, if you have escaped the snares of the Donatist or Rogatist heretics; but if you deem him holy and just, then by entering into communion with Catholics you have perished. For you assuredly feign yourself a Catholic, if in mind you are what he was whom you love.
And you know how terribly it is written, that the Holy Spirit of discipline will flee the deceitful. But if, communicating truly, you do not feign yourself a Catholic, why do you still so love a dead heretic that you wish still to boast yourself of the name of him by whose error you are no longer held? We do not wish you to have such a surname, as though you were the monument of a dead heretic; we do not wish your book to bear such a title as we should call false, if we read it on his tomb. For we do not know that Vincentius is a victor (victorem), but vanquished (victum); and would that it were fruitfully so, even as we do not wish you to be vanquished by the truth!
But you supposed it clever and cunning that, when you call your books — which you wish to be believed dictated by his revelation to you — the books of Vincentius Victor, you meant that not so much you, Vincentius, as he wished to be called Victor, as though, by revealing to you what you should write, he had conquered error. To what end are these things to you, my son? Be rather a true, not a feigned, Catholic, lest the Holy Spirit flee you and Vincentius be able to profit you nothing — he into whom the most malignant spirit transformed himself to deceive you; for those things persuaded to you by whatever fraud are his. And if, being admonished, you correct these with pious humility and Catholic peace, they will be judged to have been the errors of a most studious young man wishing rather to be amended than to remain in them.
But if, on their behalf, he has persuaded you even to obstinate contention — which God forbid! — then, as heretical dogmas, they will needs be condemned together with their author, with pastoral and medicinal care, that is, before the dire contagions creep through the incautious multitude, when discipline is neglected not through the truth of love but under its name — a wholesome discipline. If you ask what those things are, you can indeed read my writings to our brethren, Renatus the servant of God and Peter the presbyter, to whom you thought fit to write these very things of which we treat — obeying, as you assert, the will of him who requested it. For they will without doubt give you them to read, if you wish, and will even press them upon you unasked.
Nevertheless, even here I will not keep silent about the things which I most desire to be amended in those same books of yours and in your faith. The first is, that 'you will not have the soul so made by God that He made it out of nothing, but out of Himself.' Here you do not think it follows that it is of the nature of God — because you yourself indeed recognize how impious that would be. That you may be free from this impiety, you must so speak of God as the author of the soul that it was made by Him, not out of Him. For that which is out of Him, as the only-begotten Son, is of the same nature of which He also is. But that the soul may not be of the same nature of which He is, it was indeed made by Him, but not out of Him. Either therefore say out of what, or confess out of nothing. What is it that you say, 'that it is a certain particle of the breath of God's nature'?
Do you perchance deny that the very breath of God's nature, whose breath this particle is, is of the same nature of which God is? If you deny it, then out of nothing God made even this breath also, of which you would have the soul to be a particle. Or if not out of nothing, say out of what God made it. If out of Himself, then He Himself is — which God forbid! — the material of His own work. But you say: when out of Himself He makes a breath or blast, He Himself remains whole; as though the fire of a lamp too did not remain whole, when from it another is kindled, and yet is of the same, not another, nature. But, you say, when a wineskin is inflated by us, no portion of our nature or quality is infused.
since this very thing, that the wineskin, filled with the drawn-in breath, is distended, is done without any diminution of ourselves. To these words of yours you still add and dwell upon and press home a similitude as though necessary, whereby we may understand how God, without any detriment to His own nature, both makes the soul out of Himself, and yet that which is made out of Him is not what He is. For you say: Is the inflation of a wineskin a portion of our soul? Or do we fashion men when we inflate wineskins? Or do we suffer any detriment to ourselves, when we distribute our blasts into various things? But we suffer no detriment,
when out of ourselves we transmit a blast to something, and, the full quality and entire quantity of our own breath remaining in us, we remember suffering no loss from the inflation of a wineskin. Consider how greatly you are deceived by this similitude, which seems to you elegant and fitting enough. For you say that God, being incorporeal, breathes forth the soul as corporeal, made not out of nothing but out of Himself — whereas we emit a blast which, though corporeal, is nevertheless subtler than our bodies are, and that not out of our soul but out of this air we exhale through the organs of the body. For the lungs — which the soul moves (at whose nod the other members of the body also are moved) — the soul moves like bellows to draw in and give back this airy breath.
For besides the solid and liquid nourishments, whence come food and drink, God has surrounded us with this third nourishment of the breezes. These we so take in that we can be a long while without food and drink; but without this third nourishment, which the air that stands round us on every side furnishes to us as we breathe in and breathe out, we cannot live even for a brief space of time.
But just as food and drink are not only to be taken in, but also to be discharged through the passages appointed for this, lest they injure by either not entering or not leaving, so this third airy nourishment, because it is not allowed to remain in us nor is corrupted by lingering, but is discharged as soon as it is taken in, has received not other but the same passages — that is, the mouth or the nostrils or both — by which both to enter and to depart. Prove in your own self what I say. Send forth breath by blowing, and see whether you last, if you do not take it back; take it back by breathing in, and see what straits you suffer, if you do not again send it forth. This, then, is what we do when we inflate a wineskin, as you say — which we do in order to live;
except that then we draw in a little more, in order to send out a little more, so as to compress the blowable breath — that is, wind — for filling and distending the wineskin, not by the quiet of breathing in and out, but by the impetus of panting. How then do you say: We suffer no detriment, when out of ourselves we transmit a blast to something, and, the full quality and entire quantity of our own breath remaining in us, we remember suffering no loss from the inflation of a wineskin? It is evident, my son, that if you ever did inflate a wineskin, you did not notice what you were doing. For what you lose by blowing out, you do not feel by immediately taking back.
But you can most easily learn this, if you would rather do so than defend your own words — because they have already been spoken — not by inflating a wineskin but yourself inflated, and inflate your hearers, whom you ought to build up with true things, with the empty noise of windy speech. In this matter I send you not to a master but to yourself. Send forth breath into a wineskin, and close your mouth at once and hold your nostrils, and thus at least feel that what I say is true. For when you begin to suffer intolerable straits, what will you long to take in through open mouth and nostrils, if, when you blew, you think you lost nothing? See in what evil you are, unless by drawing in you resume what by pouring out you had given back;
see what damages and detriments that inflation would have caused, had not that respiration repaired them. For unless what you had expended in filling the wineskin returned to you likewise for your own sustenance, an entrance being laid open, what would remain to you — not only wherewith to inflate it, but wherewith you yourself might live?
These things you ought to have considered when you were writing, and not to have introduced to us, by this similitude of inflated or to-be-inflated wineskins, a God who either — out of another nature which already existed, just as we make a blast out of this surrounding air — breathes forth souls; or else, what both shrinks from that similitude and abounds in impiety, a God who, without indeed any detriment to Himself, yet out of His own nature either brings forth something mutable, or, what is worse, is Himself, as it were, the material of His own work.
In order, therefore, that we may apply some similitude from our own blast to this matter, this rather is to be believed: that, just as we — not out of our nature, but because we are not omnipotent — make out of this surrounding air, which we draw in and give back as we breathe in and breathe out, a blast when we blow, one that neither lives nor feels, although we ourselves live and feel; so God — not out of His own nature, but because He is so omnipotent that He can create what He wills even out of that which is absolutely not, that is, out of nothing — can make a blast that both lives and feels, yet plainly, since He Himself is immutable, one that is mutable.
But what do you mean by what you thought should be added to this similitude as an example from the blessed Elisha, because by blowing into his face he raised the dead? Do you thus suppose that the breath of Elisha became the soul of the boy? I would not believe you have strayed so far from the truth. If, then, that same soul, which had been taken away from the living one that he might die, was restored to him that he might revive, what does it pertain to the matter that you said 'nothing was diminished from Elisha,' as though something passed from him, whence the boy might live, into the boy? But if it was said on this account, because he blew and remained whole, what need was there that you should say this of Elisha raising the dead, which you could nonetheless say of anyone blowing and raising no one?
You have indeed spoken incautiously — though far be it that you should believe the breath of Elisha became the soul of the reviving boy — in that you would not have God's first act differ from this act of the prophet in anything except that God blew once, but Elisha thrice. For you said that Elisha breathed into the face of the deceased son of that Shunammite after the manner of the primeval origin: 'And when,' you say, 'the divine power kindled the dead members, re-animated into their former vigour, through the prophet's breath, nothing was diminished from Elisha, through whose blast the dead body received a reviving soul and spirit — except that once the Lord breathed into the face of man, and he lived, whereas thrice Elisha breathed into the face of the dead, and he revived.'
Your words there sound as though only the number of blowings made a difference, so that what God did the prophet also is believed to have done. And this therefore must be amended. For there was so great a difference between that work of God and this of Elisha, that God blew the breath of life, whereby man became a living soul, while Elisha blew a breath neither feeling nor living, but figuring something for the sake of signification; and finally, that this boy might revive, the prophet did not do it by animating him, but obtained by loving that God should do it. But as to your saying that he blew thrice, either your memory, as often happens, or a fault of the manuscript deceived you. What need of more?
You need not seek any examples and arguments for establishing this, but rather your opinion is to be amended and changed. Do not therefore believe, do not say, do not teach 'that God made the soul not out of nothing, but out of His own nature,' if you wish to be a Catholic. Do not believe, nor say, nor teach 'that God gives souls through infinite time and thus always, just as He Himself is always who gives,' if you wish to be a Catholic. For there will be a time when God will not give souls, although He Himself does not cease to be. What you said, 'He always gives,' could indeed be so taken as to be understood as giving without cessation as long as men beget and are begotten, just as it is said of certain persons:
'always learning, and never coming to the knowledge of the truth'; for what is here placed, 'always,' is not so taken as though they should never cease learning — since without doubt they do not learn, when they have ceased to live in this body, or when they have begun to burn in the punishment of hell-fire. But you did not permit your word to be so taken, when you said 'He always gives,' since indeed you thought it must be referred to infinite time. And that was too little; but as though it were asked of you, that you might more openly explain how you had said 'He always gives,' you added and said: 'just as He Himself is always who gives.' This the sound and Catholic faith wholly condemns. For far be it that we should believe that God always gives souls, just as He Himself always is who gives.
For He Himself always is in such a way that He never ceases to be; but souls He will not always give, but, the age of generation being ended, He will without doubt cease to give them to those not now being born, to whom they were to be given. Do not believe, nor say, nor teach 'that the soul lost some merit through the flesh, as though it were of good merit before the flesh,' if you wish to be a Catholic. For the Apostle says that those not yet born did nothing good or evil; whence, then, could the soul have merit before the flesh, where it had done nothing good? Or will you perchance dare to say that it lived well before the flesh, when you cannot even show that it existed? How, then, do you say:
Do you not wish the soul to contract its infirmity from the flesh of sin, so that you might see sanctification pass over to it in turn through the flesh, so that through that very flesh it may restore the condition through which it had lost its worth? These teachings, by which the soul is supposed to have possessed some good condition and good desert before the flesh — in case you do not know it — the Catholic Church has already condemned, apart from the ancients, and more recently also in the Priscillianists. Do not believe, nor say, nor teach that "the soul restores its former state through the flesh and is reborn through that same flesh by which it had deserved to be defiled," if you wish to be a Catholic. For, to pass over what you said:
"By its desert, therefore, the soul restores through the flesh the former state which it had seemed for a little while to have lost through the flesh, so that through it the soul may begin to be reborn, through which it had deserved to be defiled" — that in this most immediate point you set yourself against your very self, so that you, a man who had a little before said that the soul restores through the flesh the state through which it had lost its worth — where in no way can anything but good desert be understood, which you certainly wish to be restored through the flesh in baptism — should again say that the soul deserved to be defiled through the flesh, where now not good but evil desert can be understood: so, to pass over this too, to believe outright that the soul possessed either good or evil desert before the flesh is not Catholic.
Do not believe, nor say, nor teach that "the soul deserved to become a sinner before any sin," if you wish to be a Catholic. For it is a very evil desert to have deserved to be made a sinner. And assuredly it could in no way have had so evil a desert before any sin, especially before it came into the flesh, when it could have neither evil nor good desert. How then do you say: "The soul therefore, if it deserved to be a sinner, which could not be a sinner, neither remained in sin, because, being prefigured in Christ, it ought not to be in sin, just as it could not be"? Consider what you are saying, and now cease to say it. For how did it deserve, and how could it not be a sinner?
How, I ask you, did it deserve to be a sinner, when it did not live wickedly? How, I ask you, was it made a sinner, when it could not be a sinner? Or if you say "it could not" for the reason that it could not apart from the flesh, how then did it deserve to be a sinner — by which desert it should be sent into the flesh — seeing that before the flesh it could not be a sinner, whence it should deserve anything evil? Do not believe, nor say, nor teach that "infants who die before they are baptized, being prevented by death, can attain to the pardon of original sins," if you wish to be a Catholic. For the examples that deceive you — whether of the thief who confessed the Lord on the cross, or of Dinocrates the brother of holy Perpetua — lend no support to the opinion of this error of yours.
For as to that thief, although by the divine judgment he could be reckoned among those who are purified by the confession of martyrdom, yet you do not even know whether he was not baptized. For — to pass over the belief that, being fixed near the Lord, he could have been drenched by the water flowing forth together with the blood from the Lord's side, and thus washed by that most holy baptism — what if he had been baptized in prison, which some too were afterward able to obtain secretly in the time of persecution? What if even before he was arrested? Nor for that reason could the public laws spare him, so far as pertains to the death of the body, merely because he had received the remission of sins from God.
What if, being already baptized, he had fallen into the deed and crime of robbery, and, not being void of baptism but as a penitent, received pardon for the wickednesses he committed after being baptized? Since indeed so faithful a piety appeared toward the Lord in his heart and toward us in his words. For if we contend that those of whom it is not written whether they were baptized departed this life without baptism, we slander the apostles themselves, of whom, apart from the apostle Paul, we do not know when they were baptized. But if we could come to know that they were baptized through this, that the Lord said to blessed Peter:
"He who is washed does not need to wash" — what shall we say of the others, of whom we read no such thing spoken: of Barnabas, of Timothy, of Titus, of Silas, of Philemon, of the very evangelists Mark and Luke, of countless others, whom God forbid that we should doubt were baptized, although we do not read it? And Dinocrates, a seven-year-old boy — at which age boys, when they are baptized, already recite the creed and answer for themselves to the questions asked — why it should not have seemed to you that he could have been baptized and then recalled by his impious father to the sacrileges of the Gentiles, and for this reason have been in the punishments from which he was freed by his sister's prayer, I do not know.
For neither did you read that he was never a Christian or that he died a catechumen — although that very reading is not in the canon of Scriptures from which testimonies must be produced in questions of this kind. Do not believe, nor say, nor teach that "those whom the Lord has predestined to baptism can be snatched from His predestination and die before that which the Almighty has predestined has been fulfilled in them," if you wish to be a Catholic. For I know not what power against the power of God is here granted to chances, by whose sudden onset what He has predestined is not permitted to come to pass.
There is no need to enlarge upon how great a whirlpool of impiety this error engulfs the one who errs in, since it is enough briefly to have admonished a prudent man ready to be corrected. For these are your very words: "We say," you say, "that this manner of reasoning must be held concerning infants of this kind, who, predestined to the baptism of the present life, are forestalled by death before they are reborn in Christ." So then, are those predestined to the baptism of the present life forestalled by death before they attain to it, and did God predestine what He foreknew would not come to pass, or did He not know that it would not come to pass, so that either His predestination was frustrated or His foreknowledge deceived?
You see how many things could here be said, were I not to hold to what I said a little before, so as briefly to admonish you here. Do not believe, nor say, nor teach that "concerning infants who, before they are reborn in Christ, are forestalled by death, it is written: 'He was caught away, lest wickedness should alter his understanding or deceit beguile his soul. Therefore He hastened to lead him out of the midst of iniquity; for his soul was pleasing to God,' and: 'Being made perfect in a short while, he fulfilled long times,'" if you wish to be a Catholic. For this pertains not at all to those, but rather to those who, being baptized and living devoutly, are not permitted to live here long, being made perfect not in years but in the grace of wisdom.
But this error, by which this is thought to have been said of little ones who die before they are baptized, does an intolerable injury to the sacred laver itself, if the little one who could be baptized and then caught away is for that reason caught away first, "lest wickedness alter his understanding or deceit beguile his soul" — as though in that very baptism there were believed to be this wickedness and deceit by which he would be changed for the worse and deceived, if he were not first caught away.
Then, since "his soul was pleasing to God, He hastened to lead him out of the midst of iniquity," so that He delayed not even a little, in order to fulfill what He had predestined in him — but rather chose to act against His own predestination, as though in haste, lest what had pleased Him in the unbaptized should be destroyed in baptism, as though the infant about to die would there perish, whither one must run with him lest he perish. Who then would believe, say, write, or recite that these words written in the book of Wisdom were spoken of little ones who die without baptism, if he pondered, as he ought, the matter? Do not believe, nor say, nor teach that "there are certain mansions outside the kingdom of God, which the Lord said were in His Father's house," if you wish to be a Catholic.
For He did not say, as you yourself put down this testimony: "There are many mansions with my Father" — for if He had so said, they would not have to be understood as anywhere but in His Father's house — but He plainly said: "In my Father's house are many mansions." Who then would dare to separate some parts of the house of God from the kingdom of God, so that, whereas the kings of the earth are found to reign not only in their own house nor only in their own homeland, but far and wide even beyond the sea, the King who made heaven and earth should be said not to reign in His whole house? But perhaps you will say that all things indeed belong to the kingdom of God, because He reigns in the heavens, reigns on earth, in the abysses, in paradise, in hell — for where does He not reign, whose supreme power is everywhere?
— but that the kingdom of heaven is one thing, to which it is not lawful to approach save for those washed by the laver of regeneration, on account of the Lord's true and fixed sentence, while the kingdom of the earth, or of the other parts of creation, is another thing, where there can be certain mansions of the house of God, although belonging to the kingdom of God, yet not to the kingdom of heaven, where the kingdom of God is more excellent and more blessed;
so that it comes to pass that neither are any parts and mansions of the house of God wickedly separated from the kingdom of God, and yet not all are prepared for dwellers in the kingdom of heaven, and that in those which are not in the kingdom of heaven, those may happily dwell to whom God has willed to give them even though unbaptized, so that they may be in the kingdom of God, although in the kingdom of heaven, because they are not baptized, they cannot be. Those who say this seem indeed to themselves to be saying something, because they attend carelessly to the Scriptures and do not understand in what sense the kingdom of God is spoken of, whence we pray saying: "Thy kingdom come." The kingdom of God is that where His faithful household shall reign wholly with Him, blessedly and everlastingly;
for according to the power which He has over all things, even now He assuredly reigns. What then is it that we pray, that it may come, except that we may deserve to reign with Him? But under His power will also be those who shall burn in the punishment of eternal fire. Shall we for this reason say that they too will be in the kingdom of God? For it is one thing to be honored with the gifts of the kingdom of God, another to be restrained by the laws of the kingdom of God. But that it may appear to you most manifestly that the kingdom of heaven is not to be distributed to the baptized while other parts of the kingdom of God are given to those whom it has seemed to you to be unbaptized, hear the Lord Himself, who did not say: "If anyone is not born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven," but:
"He cannot," He says, "enter into the kingdom of God." For His words on this matter to Nicodemus are these: "Amen, amen I say to you: unless one be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Behold, He did not here say "the kingdom of heaven," but "of God." And when Nicodemus had answered and said: "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" the Lord, repeating the same sentence more plainly and openly, said: "Amen, amen I say to you: unless one be born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." Behold, neither here did He say "the kingdom of heaven," but "the kingdom of God." For what He had said, "unless one be born again," He explained what it was, saying:
"unless one be born again of water and the Spirit"; and what He had said, "he cannot see," this He explained by saying, "he cannot enter." But that which He had said, "the kingdom of God," He did not repeat under any other name. Nor is it now needful to inquire and discuss whether the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven are to be understood with some difference, or whether it is one thing called by two names; it suffices that he cannot enter into the kingdom of God who has not been washed by the laver of regeneration. But how far from the truth it is to separate certain mansions established in the house of God from the kingdom of God, I think you now understand.
And therefore, as to what you supposed — that in certain mansions, which the Lord said were many in His Father's house, some would dwell who are even not born again of water and the Spirit — I admonish you, if you permit, not to defer to amend it, that you may hold the Catholic faith. Do not believe, nor say, nor teach that "the sacrifice of Christians is to be offered for those who have departed the body unbaptized," if you wish to be a Catholic, since neither do you show that the sacrifice which you mentioned from the books of the Maccabees was offered by the Jews for those who had departed the body uncircumcised. And in this opinion of yours, so novel and brought forth against the authority and discipline of the whole Church, you have even used a most insolent word, saying:
"For these, to be sure, I judge that constant offerings and the sacrifices of the holy priests are perpetually to be offered" — so that you, a layman, neither by learning submitted yourself to the priests of God, nor even by joint inquiry mingled with them, but by pronouncing judgment set yourself above them. Rid yourself of these things, my son; it is not thus that one walks in the way which Christ, humble, taught that He Himself is; no one enters through His narrow gate with this swelling. Do not believe, nor say, nor teach that "some of those who have departed from this life without the baptism of Christ do not go for the time into the kingdom of heaven, but into paradise, and afterward, however, in the resurrection of the dead attain even to the blessedness of the kingdom of heaven," if you wish to be a Catholic.
For not even the Pelagian heresy, which opines that little ones do not contract original sin, has dared to grant this to them. But you, although as a Catholic you confess that they are born with sin, yet by I know not what more perverse novelty of opinion assert that, without the baptism of salvation, they are both absolved from this sin with which they are born and introduced into the kingdom of heaven, nor do you consider how much worse you think in this cause than Pelagius. For he, dreading the Lord's sentence, by which the unbaptized are not permitted to enter into the kingdom of heaven, although he believes them free from all sin, yet does not dare to send those little ones thither; but you so despise what has been said:
"If anyone is not born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God," that — apart from the error by which you dare to separate paradise from the kingdom of God — to certain little ones (whom, being born guilty, you believe as a Catholic to have died without baptism) you do not hesitate to promise both the absolution of that guilt and, over and above, the kingdom of heaven; as though, against Pelagius, in establishing original sin, you could then be a true Catholic, if against the Lord, in destroying His sentence concerning baptism, you were a new heretic. We, most beloved, do not wish you to be a conqueror of heretics in such a way that error should conquer error, and — what is worse — the greater the lesser. For you say:
"Or if perhaps anyone should resist the notion that paradise was conferred for a time upon the soul of the thief or of Dinocrates — for that there yet remains for them in the resurrection the reward of the kingdom of heaven, although that principal sentence stands in the way, because he who is not born again of water and the Holy Spirit shall not enter into the kingdom — yet let him hold, in this part too, my assent as one who does not begrudge it, provided he both amplify the effect and the affection of the divine mercy and foreknowledge." These are your words.
Where you confess that you agree with him who says that paradise was thus conferred for a time upon certain unbaptized persons, so that there remains for them in the resurrection the reward of the kingdom of heaven, contrary to the principal sentence by which it is established that he shall not enter into that kingdom who is not born again of water and the Holy Spirit. Fearing to violate this principal sentence, Pelagius did not believe that those would enter into the kingdom of heaven without baptism whom he did not believe to be guilty; but you both confess that the little ones are guilty of original sin, and yet absolve them without the laver of regeneration, and send them into paradise, and afterward permit them even to enter into the kingdom of heaven.
These things and the like — if perchance, being more attentive and more at leisure, you can find others too in your books — amend now without any delay, if you bear a Catholic mind; that is, if you truly spoke by way of preface when you said that "you are not so credulous of yourself as to think that the things you have said can be proved, and that you always strive not even to defend your own opinion, if it be detected as unprovable, and that it is at your heart, when your judgment has been condemned as your own, rather to follow the better and the truer things." Now prove, most dear one, that you did not say these things deceitfully, so that the Catholic Church may rejoice over your disposition, not only ingenious but also cautious, pious, modest, and may not blaze up over a contentious heretical obstinacy of madness.
Now it is time that you show with how great sincerity of heart you spoke, after these good words of yours which I have recalled, that which you immediately subjoined: "For as it belongs," you say, "to a most excellent purpose and praiseworthy counsel to be easily led over to the truer things, so it belongs to a reprobate and obstinate judgment to be unwilling to be bent the more quickly to the path of reason." Be, therefore, of a most excellent purpose and praiseworthy counsel, and easy to be led over to the truer things; and be not of a reprobate and obstinate judgment, so as to be unwilling to be bent the more quickly to the path of reason. For if you uttered these things liberally, if you did not sound them on your lips only, but felt them within and genuinely in your heart, then in so great a good as your correction you have hated even delays.
For it would have been too little for you to say that it belongs to a reprobate and obstinate judgment to be unwilling to be bent to the path of reason, had you not added "the more quickly," that hereby you might show how detestable is he who never does this good, since indeed he who does it more slowly seems to you to be blamed with such severity as deservedly to be called of a reprobate and obstinate judgment. Hear therefore your own self, and use above all and most of all the fruits of your own eloquence, that you may the more quickly bend yourself to the path of reason by gravity of mind, whence you had turned yourself aside less learnedly and less advisedly by the slipperiness of your age. It is too long a task to treat and discuss all the things which I wish to be amended in your books, or rather in yourself, and at least to render you a brief account of each thing to be corrected.
Nor for that reason, however, should you despise yourself and think that your talent and eloquence are to be esteemed of little worth. Nor have I found the memory of the holy Scriptures in you to be small; but your erudition is less than befitted so great a natural gift and labor. And so I wish you neither to grow vain by attributing to yourself more than you ought, nor again to grow cold by casting yourself down and despairing. Would that I could read your writings with you, and by conversing rather than by writing show what things should be amended! This business would be more easily accomplished by conversation between us than by letters; which, if it had to be written, would require many volumes.
24:217
uerumistacapitalia, quaecertoetiamnumeroconprehendereuolui, instanterammoneo, necorrigeredifferaseteaprorsusafideetpraedicationetuafaciasaliena, utquantatibifacultasestdisputandimuneredeiutarisutiliteradaedificationem, nonaddestructionemsanaesalubrisquedoctrinae. Suntautemista, dequibus, utpotui, iamdisserui; sedbreuiterearepetendopercurram. unumest, quod \'animamnonexnihilo, seddeseipsodeumfecisse\' dixisti; alterum \'perinfinitumtempusatqueitasemperdeumanimasdare, sicutsemperestipsequidat\'; tertium \'animammeritumaliquodperdidissepercarnem, quodhabueritantecarnem\';
But these capital matters, which I have wished to comprise even within a fixed number, I urgently admonish you not to defer to correct, and to make them altogether foreign to your faith and preaching, so that with what great faculty of disputation you have, you may use the gift of God usefully unto edification, not unto the destruction of sound and wholesome doctrine. Now these are the matters of which, as I could, I have already discoursed; but I will run through them by briefly repeating. The first is that you said "the soul was made by God not out of nothing, but out of Himself"; the second, that "through infinite time and thus God gives souls always, just as He who gives is Himself always"; the third, that "the soul lost some desert through the flesh which it had before the flesh";
the fourth, that "the soul restores its former state through the flesh and is reborn through that same flesh by which it had deserved to be defiled"; the fifth, that "the soul deserved to become a sinner before any sin"; the sixth, that "infants who, before they are baptized, are prevented by death can attain to the pardon of original sins"; the seventh, that "those whom the Lord has predestined to baptism can be snatched from His predestination and die before that which the Almighty has predestined has been fulfilled in them"; the eighth, that "concerning infants who, before they are reborn in Christ, are forestalled by death, it is written: 'He was caught away, lest wickedness should alter his understanding,' and the rest that are read to that effect in the book of Wisdom";
the ninth, that "there are certain mansions outside the kingdom of God among those which the Lord said were in His Father's house"; the tenth is that "the sacrifice of Christians is to be offered for those who have departed the body unbaptized"; the eleventh, that "some of those who have departed from this life without the baptism of Christ do not for the time go into the kingdom, but into paradise, and afterward, however, in the resurrection of the dead attain even to the blessedness of the kingdom of heaven." These eleven points meanwhile, so manifestly perverse and adverse to the Catholic faith, now delay no longer to root out and cast away from your mind, your word, your pen, if you wish that we may rejoice not only that you have crossed over to the Catholic altars, but that you are truly a Catholic.
For if these things are stubbornly defended one by one, they can make as many heresies as there are opinions reckoned to be. Wherefore consider how horrible it is that all should be in one man, which would be damnable if each were single in single persons. But if you fight for them with no contention, nay rather if you assail them with faithful words and writings, you will be a more praiseworthy censor upon yourself than if you reprehended any other by right reason, and a more admirable amender of them than if you had never held those things.
May the Lord be present to your mind, and pour into your spirit by His Spirit so great a facility of humility, a light of truth, a sweetness of charity, a peace of piety, that you may prefer to be the conqueror of your own soul in true things rather than of any gainsayer in false ones. But far be it that you should think that by holding these opinions you have departed from the Catholic faith, although they be adverse to the Catholic faith, if before God, whose eye is deceived in no one's heart, you truly come to your senses and acknowledge that you said "you are not credulous of yourself, that the things you said can be proved, and that you always strive not even to defend your own opinion, if it be detected as unprovable, because it is at your heart, when your own judgment has been condemned, rather to follow the better and the truer things."
For such a mind, even in things spoken through ignorance that are not Catholic, is itself Catholic by the very premeditation and preparation for correction. But let this be the limit of this volume, where the reader may rest a little while, so that his attention may be renewed for the things that follow by a fresh beginning. THE FOURTH BOOK. TO VINCENTIUS VICTOR. Receive now also concerning myself the things I desire to say to you, if I can — that is, if He shall grant it, in whose hand are both we and our discourses.
For you reproved me, twice over expressing even my name; and although at the beginning of your book you called yourself quite conscious of your inexperience and destitute of the support of learning, while me, where you named me, you called most learned and most skilled, yet in those matters in which you seemed to yourself to know something which I either confess that I do not know, or, though I do not know it, presume that I do know, with the liberty that was fitting, you did not hesitate to reprove not only an old man and a bishop, you a youth and a layman, but even a man in your own judgment most learned and most skilled.
But I, for my part, do not know myself to be most learned and most skilled — nay rather, I most certainly know that I am not, and I do not doubt that it can happen that something may fall to the knowledge of some inexperienced and unlearned person which some learned and skilled person is ignorant of. And in this I plainly praise you, that you preferred the truth — if not the truth which you perceived, at least the one you supposed — to a man; rashly indeed, because you reckoned that you knew what you do not know, but freely, because, not standing in awe of the person, you chose to disclose what you feel. Whence you ought to understand how much greater ought to be our care to recall the Lord's sheep from their errors, if even for the sheep it is shameful to conceal the vices of the shepherds, if they have come to know any, from those same shepherds.
Oh, if only you had reproved those things of mine which are worthy of just reproof! For I ought not to deny that, just as in my very morals, so there are many things in my so many little works which can be blamed by right judgment and with no rashness. And if you yourself had reproved some of these, there perhaps I would have shown you what manner of man I would wish you to be in the things wherein you have not reproved amiss, and, as the elder and superior to you, my junior and subject, I would have exhibited the more wholesomely, the more humbly, an example of correction. But you reproved in me those things which humility does not permit me to correct, and which truth compels me partly to confess, partly to defend. And these are they:
one, that concerning the origin of the souls which after the first man have been given or are given to men, I did not dare to define anything, because I confess that I do not know; the other, that I said I know the soul to be a spirit, not a body. But in this second point you reproved two things: one, that I did not believe it to be a body; the other, that I believed it to be a spirit. For to you it seems that the soul is both a body and is not a spirit. Hear therefore my defense against your reproof, and from this occasion, whereby I clear myself to you, learn in your own self what things you should cleanse away. Recall the words of your book, where you first named me:
"I know," you say, "that very many, and easily the most skilled men, being consulted upon this matter, have kept silence, or have uttered nothing very explicit, since they withdrew a definition from their own disputations by an incomplete exposition — as I lately read set down in the letters, in your presence, of Augustine, a most learned man and a renowned and praised bishop — more modestly indeed, as I think, and more bashfully searching out the secrets of this matter, they swallowed within themselves the judgment of their own treatise, and professed that they could not thereupon determine anything. But to me, believe me, it seems more than enough absurd and incongruous to reason that man himself should be void of the knowledge of himself, or that he who is believed to have attained the knowledge of all things should be held unknown to his own self.
"But how does man differ from the beast, if he knows not how to inquire and discourse concerning his own quality and nature, so that deservedly there applies to him that which is written: 'Man, when he was in honor, did not understand; he was likened to the beasts that have no sense, and was made comparable to them'? For since the good God has made nothing without reason, and has brought forth man himself as a rational animal, capable of understanding, endowed with reason and quick with sense, who by prudent ordering distributes all things void of reason, what can be said so incongruously as that He should have defrauded him of the knowledge of himself alone?"
And whereas the wisdom of the world, which reaches out even to the knowledge of truth by an investigation that is indeed superfluous—since it cannot know Him through whom it is granted that true things be known—has nevertheless attempted to inquire into the nature of the soul, touching on some things near to, indeed akin to, the truth: how unseemly and shameful it is that any religious man should either know nothing of this very matter or should have utterly forbidden himself to know it! This most eloquent and brilliant chastisement of yours upon our ignorance so summons you to know all things pertaining to the nature of man, that, if you were to be ignorant of any of them, you would be likened to the beasts—not by my judgment, but by your own. For although you seem to attain it more strikingly by what you have said:
'Man, being in honour, understood not'—since in that honour in which you are not, we of the Church are; yet even you are in that honour of nature, whereby you are set above the beasts, to which, according to your own judgment, you would have to be compared, if you were ignorant of anything that is agreed to pertain to your nature. For you did not level this reproach only against those who are ignorant of what I am ignorant of, that is, the origin of the human soul—of which indeed I am not wholly ignorant; for I know that God breathed into the face of the first man, and man was made into a living soul; yet unless I had read this, I could not know it of myself—but you said: 'Wherein does a man differ from a beast, if he knows not how to inquire and discourse concerning his own quality and nature?'
You seem to have meant this as though a man ought so to inquire and discourse concerning the whole of his quality and nature that nothing about himself should lie hidden from him. And if that is so, then I shall now compare you to the beasts, if you do not answer me the number of your own hairs. But if you grant that, however much we may advance in this life, there are certain things pertaining to our nature that we do not know, I ask how much and to what extent you grant this—lest perchance this too be among them, that we do not in every way know the origin of our soul; although, as far as pertains to the salvation of faith, we know, with all ambiguities set aside, that the soul is given by God and is not of that nature of which God is.
Or do you perhaps think that a man's nature is to be unknown to him precisely to the extent that you do not know it, and to be known precisely to the extent that you have been able to know it—so that, if anyone knows a little less than you, you compare him to the beasts because you have been able to be more knowing than he; and thus, if anyone knows a little more than you, by that same justice he will compare you to the beasts? Tell me, then, to what extent you grant that we may not know our nature, so that our distance from the beasts may be preserved; and yet consider whether he who knows that he is ignorant of some part of it may not be further removed from the beasts than he who thinks he knows what he does not know. Certainly the whole nature of man is spirit, soul, and body; whoever, therefore, wishes to estrange the body from human nature is a fool.
Yet the physicians who are called anatomists, by dissecting through the limbs, through the veins, through the nerves, through the bones, through the marrows, through the inner vital parts—even living men, so long as they could stay alive under the hands of those probing them—have made their examination in order to know the nature of the body; and yet they did not compare us to the beasts because we are ignorant of these things. Unless perhaps you are going to say that those are to be compared to the beasts who are ignorant of the nature of the soul, not those who are ignorant of the body's. Then you ought not to have prefaced your remark thus. For you did not say, 'Wherein does a man differ from a beast, if he knows not concerning the quality and nature of his soul,' but you said, 'if he knows not how to inquire and discourse concerning his own quality and nature.'
Assuredly our quality and our nature are reckoned together with the body, although each single thing may be discoursed of separately concerning those elements of which we consist. Truly, if I wished to unfold how many things I could most knowingly dispute concerning the nature of man, I should fill many volumes; yet I confess that I am ignorant of many things. But you—to what do you wish to assign what we disputed in the earlier book concerning man's breathing? Is it to the nature of the soul?
Is it because the soul itself does this in man—or does it pertain to the body, which is moved by the soul so as to do it; or to this air, by whose reciprocation it is declared to be done; or rather to all three: namely to the soul, which moves the body; and to the body, which by its motion receives and returns the breath; and to that breeze poured round on every side, which by entering nourishes and by going out relieves? And yet you, a lettered and eloquent man, were assuredly ignorant of this, when you believed and said and wrote, and read aloud in an assembly of a summoned crowd, that out of our nature we inflate a wineskin and that in our nature we have nothing less—though you could most easily know whence we do this, not by scrutinizing the divine and human pages, but by attending to yourself, whenever you wished.
How, then, shall I entrust it to you, that you should teach me concerning the origin of souls, which I confess I do not know, when you were ignorant of the source by which you do without ceasing that which you do with your nostrils and mouth? And may the Lord grant that, being admonished by me, you should yield rather than resist a truth so ready at hand and so utterly plain, and that you should not so interrogate your lungs about inflating a wineskin as to prefer to have them inflated against me rather than to acquiesce in them as they teach you and render you a true answer, not by speaking and disputing, but by breathing in and breathing out. Accordingly, were you to correct and rebuke my ignorance concerning the origin of souls, I should not take it ill; rather, I should over and above give you great thanks—
if only you would not merely strike it from me with harsh insults, but also shake it out with true words. For if you could teach me what I do not know, I ought most patiently to endure you as you struck me not only with words but even with blows. For I confess to your charity that, as far as pertains to this question, of two things I greatly desire to know—if I can—either something concerning the origin of souls which I do not know, or whether it pertains to us to know this while we live here. For what if it is among those matters of which it is said to us: 'Seek not the things that are too high for thee, and search not into things above thy strength; but the things that the Lord hath commanded thee, think thou upon them always'?
But I desire to know this either from God Himself, who knows what He creates, or even from someone learned who knows what he says—not from a man ignorant of what he pants forth. No one recalls his own infancy; and do you think that a man, save by God's teaching, can come to know whence he began to live in his mother's womb, especially if his own human nature still lies so hidden from him that he is ignorant not only of what it holds within, but even of what accedes to it from without? So then, most beloved, will you teach me, or anyone, whence men being born are animated, you who were still up to now ignorant whence those living are so nourished that, if that nourishment be but a little withdrawn, they straightway die?
Will you teach me, or anyone, whence men are animated, you who were still up to now ignorant whence wineskins, when they are inflated, are filled? Would that, just as you do not know whence is the origin of souls, so I at least might know whether it is to be known by me in this life! For if it is among those higher things which we are forbidden to inquire into and scrutinize, it is to be feared that we may sin, not by being ignorant of it, but by seeking it. Nor ought we on that account to think it is not among those higher things, because it pertains not to the nature of God, but to our own. And what of the fact that certain things among the works of God are known with more difficulty than God Himself, insofar as He can be known? For we have learned that God is a Trinity;
but how many kinds of animals He created—at least of land animals, which could enter into Noah's ark—we are still up to now ignorant, unless perhaps you have already learned this. In the book of Wisdom, too, it is written: 'For if they were able to know so much as to be able to value the world, how did they not more easily find out the Lord thereof?' Or is it that, because this is within us, it is therefore not higher than we? For the nature of our soul is more interior than the body. As if indeed the soul could not more easily come to know the body itself from outside through the eyes of that very body, than from inside through itself. For what is there in the inward parts of the body where the soul itself is not?
And yet even whatever internal and vital parts there are, it has investigated with the eyes of the body, and whatever it could learn of them, it learned through the eyes of the body. And certainly it was there, even when it did not know those things. And since our inward organs cannot live without the soul, the soul was more easily able to vivify them than to know them.
Or is it perhaps that, for the soul's knowledge, its own body is higher than itself, and therefore, if it should wish to inquire and discourse—when the seed of man is turned into blood, when into solid flesh, when the bones begin to harden, when to be filled with marrow; how many kinds there are of veins and nerves, by what coursings and windings they irrigate and bind together the whole body; whether the skin is to be reckoned among the nerves or the teeth among the bones—for they differ, in that they lack marrow—and in what the nails differ from both, since in hardness they are like the bones, but to be pared and to grow they have in common with the hairs; what is the use of those vessels not of blood but of air, which they call arteries:
—if the soul should desire to know these and suchlike things concerning the nature of its own body, is it then to be said to a man, 'Seek not the things that are too high for thee, and search not into things above thy strength'? But if it inquires concerning its own origin, which it does not know, is that not higher nor stronger than that it should be able to grasp it?
And do you deem it absurd and contrary to reason that the soul should not know whether it was newly breathed in by God or drawn from its parents—since it does not remember this as now past, and reckons it among those things which, irrevocably, like infancy and the rest of its most recent age from the womb, it has forgotten (if indeed it was done with any consciousness of the soul when it was done)—and yet you do not deem it absurd and incongruous that the soul should not know the body subject to it, and should be wholly ignorant of that which belongs not to its past but to its present: whether it moves the veins in order to live in the body, but works the nerves as members of the body; and if that is so, why it does not move the nerves except when it wills, yet the pulse of the veins, even if it be unwilling, it plies without ceasing; from what part of the body it exercises dominion over the rest—that which they call the ἡγεμονικόν (the governing faculty)—whether from the heart or from the brain, or distributively: from the heart the motions, from the brain the sensations; or from the brain both the sensations and the voluntary motions, but from the heart the involuntary pulses of the veins; and if it does those two from the brain, why it feels even if it be unwilling, but does not move the members unless it wills?
Since, then, the soul does not do these things in the body except itself, why does it not know what it does, or whence it does it? Nor is it shameful to it that it does not know these things, and yet you deem it shameful if it should not know whence or how it was made—when it did not make itself? Or is it that, because certain persons know how and whence the soul does these things in the body, you therefore do not think that this pertains to those higher and stronger matters? But I, from this very point, raise for you a greater question: why very few know whence they do what all men do. Perhaps you will say it is because those learned the anatomical or empirical art, which the discipline of medicine contains—an art which few attain, but which the rest were unwilling to learn, though they could have, had they but willed.
Here I forbear to say why many try to learn these things and cannot, because—which is very wondrous—they are hindered by a slow intelligence from learning from others things which are done by them, in themselves and among themselves. But this very thing is the greatest question: why I do not need any art in order to know that the sun and moon and other stars are in heaven, and yet I do need an art in order to know, when I move a finger, from where I begin—from the heart or from the brain or from both or from neither—and need no teacher; and yet, that I may know what is so far above me, so high, I must wait to learn from another man whence is done by me that which is done in me.
For since we are said to think in the heart, and know what we think without any other man knowing it, yet we ourselves do not know in what part of the body we have the very heart in which we think, unless we learn it from another who does not know what we think. Nor am I unaware that, when we hear that we should love God with our whole heart, this is not said of that little particle of our flesh which lies hidden beneath the ribs, but of that power by which our thoughts are made—which is rightly called by this name, because, just as motion does not cease in the heart, whence the pulse spreads itself everywhere through the veins, so we never rest from turning something over in thought.
But nevertheless, since all sense is present to the body from the soul, why is it that even in darkness and with eyes closed we count our outward members by the bodily sense which is called touch, yet by the interior presence of the soul itself—by which it is at hand to all things that it vivifies and animates—we know none of our inward organs from within; and I judge that no one knows this: not the empiric physicians, nor the anatomists, nor the dogmatists, nor the methodists, but no man. And whoever shall have attempted to learn these things, not in vain is it said to him: 'Seek not the things that are too high for thee, and search not into things above thy strength.'
For they are not higher than our stature can reach, but than our conjecture can comprehend; and stronger than the force of human intelligence can penetrate. And yet it is not the heaven of heavens, not the dimension of the stars, not the measure of sea and lands, not the lower hell—it is we ourselves, we who are not strong enough to comprehend ourselves; we surpass, as higher and stronger, the small measure of our own knowledge; we cannot contain ourselves, and yet we are certainly not outside ourselves. Nor on that account are we to be compared to the beasts, because we do not thoroughly discover what we are; and do you think we are to be compared to the beasts if we have forgotten what we were, if indeed we ever knew it? For neither is my soul now being drawn from parents nor breathed in by God:
whichever of these He did, He did it then, when He created me; He does it not now of me or in me. That deed is done and finished; it is neither present to me nor recent. Nor do I even know this: whether I knew it and have forgotten it, or whether not even then, when it was done, could I have perceived and known it. Behold, now, now while we exist, while we live, while we know that we live, while we are most certain that we remember and understand and will—we who boast that we are great knowers of our own nature—are utterly ignorant of what our memory or understanding or will avails.
A certain friend of mine from youth, Simplicius by name, a man of excellent and marvellous memory: when he was asked by us what verses Virgil had put next-to-last in each of his books, straightway, quickly and from memory, he answered. We even asked him to say the lines above those: he said them. And we believed he could recite Virgil backwards; from whatever passage we wished, we asked him to do it: he did it. Even in prose, from whatever oration of Cicero he had committed to memory, we wished him to do this: as far up as we wished, he followed it upwards, verse by verse. When we marvelled, he called God to witness that he had not known he could do this before that experiment.
Thus, as far as pertains to his memory, his mind then came to know itself, and whenever it might come to know it, it could not do so except by attempting and experiencing; and yet before he attempted, that same man was himself. Why, then, did he not know himself? Often we presume that we shall retain something in memory, and thinking that we shall, we do not write it down; and afterwards, when we wish, it does not come into our mind, and we repent that we believed it would come and did not bind it with letters, lest it should escape; and suddenly again, when we are not seeking it, it comes to mind. Were we not ourselves, then, when we were thinking of it? And yet we are not that which we were, when we cannot think of it.
What is it, then, that in some way I know not we are withdrawn and denied to ourselves, and again in some way I know not we are brought forth to ourselves and restored to ourselves, as though we were other persons and were elsewhere, when we seek and do not find what we placed in our memory, and cannot ourselves reach ourselves, as though placed elsewhere, and then do reach ourselves when we find it? For where do we seek save with ourselves? And what do we seek save ourselves, as though we were not in ourselves and had withdrawn somewhere from ourselves? Do you not attend and shudder at so great a depth? And what else is this than our own nature—not such as it was, but such as it now is? And behold, it is more sought than comprehended. Often I have thought I would understand a question set before me, if I thought about it;
I thought about it and could not; often I did not think about it, and yet I could. Therefore the powers of my own intelligence are assuredly not known to me, and I believe they are not known to you either. But perhaps you despise me for confessing, and on this account too will compare me to the beasts. Yet I do not cease to warn, or, if you deem it not worthy, at least to admonish, that you should rather acknowledge the common infirmity in which strength is perfected, lest by presuming things unknown as known you be unable to reach the truth. For I think there is something which you too seek to understand and cannot, and yet you would not seek it, unless you hoped you could. And by this you too do not know the powers of your own intelligence, you who profess knowledge of your own nature and do not with me confess ignorance.
What shall I say of the will, where free choice is certainly preached by us? Indeed the most blessed apostle Peter wished to lay down his life for the Lord—he plainly wished it; for he was not deceiving God by promising it, but he did not know how great powers the will itself had: accordingly so great a man, who had come to know that Jesus was the Son of God, lay hidden from himself. We know, therefore, that we will or do not will something; but our will, even when it is good, how much it avails, how great powers it has, to what temptations it yields and to what it does not yield—if we do not deceive ourselves, beloved son—we do not know.
See, therefore, how many things—not past, but present—concerning our nature we are ignorant of, and that not only as regards the body, but even as regards the inner man; and yet we are not compared to the beasts. And you, because I am not wholly ignorant of the past origin of my soul, but do not fully know it—for I know it was given to me by God, and yet is not of God—did you think me worthy of so great a reproach? And when could I recount all the things we do not know concerning the nature of spirit and soul? Where we ought rather to cry out to God what he cried out in the psalm: 'Thy knowledge is become wonderful from me; it hath prevailed, I shall not be able to reach unto it.'
For why did he add 'from me,' unless because from himself he conjectured how incomprehensible was the knowledge of God, since he was not able to comprehend himself? The apostle was caught up into the third heaven and heard ineffable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter; and whether this had befallen him in the body or out of the body, he says that he does not know—and he does not dread being compared by you to the beasts. He knew that his spirit was in the third heaven, was in paradise, and yet whether he was in the body he did not know. And certainly the third heaven and paradise were not the apostle Paul himself; but his body and soul and spirit—that was himself. Behold, he knew great, high, and divine things which he himself was not;
and this he did not know, which pertained to his own nature. Who would not marvel at so great an ignorance of himself amid so great a knowledge of hidden things? Who, finally, would believe it, unless He who does not deceive said this: 'What we should pray for as we ought, we know not'? Where our intention ought most of all to be, that we may stretch ourselves out toward the things that are before; and if I have forgotten anything of my origin among the things that are behind, you compare me to the beasts—when you hear the same apostle saying: 'Forgetting the things that are behind, stretched out toward the things that are before, I follow according to my intention toward the palm of the supernal calling of God in Christ Jesus'! Or is it perhaps that, because I have said this too:
'What we should pray for as we ought, we know not,' you judge me to be laughed at and deem me like unto irrational living creatures? And perhaps that would be more tolerable. For since by right and sound judgment we prefer our future things to our past, and prayer is necessary to us not on account of what we were, but on account of what we shall be, it is assuredly far more grievous not to know what we pray for than how we came into being. But let it come into your mind, where you read this; or, by reading it again, recall it, and do not cast at me the stone of this reproach, lest it reach one to whom you do not wish it to reach. For that very Doctor of the Gentiles, the apostle, said: 'For what we should pray for as we ought, we know not'—which he taught not only by word, but also demonstrated by his own example.
For, contrary to his own advantage and to the perfecting of his salvation, he prayed in ignorance that the thorn of the flesh might depart from him, which he said had been given to him lest he be exalted by the greatness of his revelations. And because the Lord loved him, He did not do what he ignorantly asked; yet nonetheless, where he says, 'For what we should pray for as we ought, we know not,' he presently added: 'but the Spirit Himself maketh intercession with unspeakable groanings. And He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what the Spirit desireth, because He asketh for the saints according to God'—that is, 'makes the saints ask'—that Spirit, assuredly, whom God sent into our hearts crying, 'Abba, Father,' and in whom we cry, 'Abba, Father'; for both are said: that we received the Spirit crying,
'Abba, Father,' and that we received the Spirit in whom we cry, 'Abba, Father'—so that it might be explained how he said 'crying,' that is, 'making us cry,' so that by His acting we cry. Therefore let Him teach me this too, when He wills, if He knows it to be expedient for me, that I may know whence I derive my origin according to the soul. But let that Spirit teach me this, who searcheth the deep things of God, not a man who does not know whence a wineskin is inflated. Yet far be it that I should on this account compare you to the beasts; for you did not know this, not because you could not, but because you had not attended to it.
But you perhaps, although the things sought concerning the origin of souls are higher than whence we derive and return breath, nevertheless trust that you have learned these same higher things from the holy Scriptures—through which, by faith, we have learned those things which no human intelligences could trace out. For it is assuredly far more excellent to know that the flesh will rise again and will live without end, than whatever the physicians could learn by scrutinizing in it—things which the soul perceives by no sense, though by its presence it quickens all that it knows not; and it is far better to know that the soul which shall have been reborn and renewed in Christ will be blessed in eternity, than whatever we do not know concerning its memory, understanding, and will.
But these things which I have called more excellent and better we could in no way know, unless we believed the divine oracles. Perhaps, then, you suppose that you trust these oracles, so that you may not hesitate to bring forth a defined opinion concerning the origin of souls. First, if that were so, you ought not to have attributed to human nature itself the fact that a man knows how to inquire and discourse concerning his own quality and nature, but to the gift of God; for you said: 'Wherein does a man differ from a beast, if he knows not this?' What need, then, is there to read anything, in order that we may know this, if by that very thing whereby we differ from a beast we ought already to know it?
For just as you read me no book in order that I may know that I live—for my nature has it so, that I cannot but know this—so, if that also is a matter of nature, why do you bring forth to me on this matter testimonies of the Scriptures which I should believe? Do only those differ from the beast who read them? Are we not so created that we differ from the beasts even before we can attain to any letters? What is it, I ask, that you so arrogate to our nature, that by that very thing whereby it differs from the beast it should already know how to inquire and discourse concerning the origin of souls, and again make it so devoid of this knowledge that it cannot know it in a human way, unless it believe divine witnesses? And then, in this too you are deceived.
For the divine testimonies which you wished to bring to bear on the solving of this question do not disclose it. It is another thing that they demonstrate—that without which we truly cannot live piously—namely, that we have God as the giver, creator, and fashioner of our souls. But how He does it—whether by breathing them newly, or by drawing them from parents—they do not express, except concerning that one soul which He gave to the first man. Read diligently what I wrote to our brother, God's servant Renatus; for there, because I showed this, it was not necessary to write it here also.
But you would wish me to define what you yourself defined, so that I might be thrust into such straits as those into which you yourself were thrust, when against the catholic faith you spoke so many and so great things, that, if you faithfully and humbly recall and consider them, you would assuredly see how much it would have profited you had you known that you do not know what you do not know, and how much it profits you if even now you know it. For if intelligence pleases you in the nature of man—since, in truth, if it did not have it, we should, as far as pertains to souls, in no way differ from the beasts—understand what you do not understand, lest you understand nothing at all, and do not despise the man who, that he may truly understand what he does not understand, understands that he does not understand this. But whence it was said in the sacred psalm:
'Man, when he was in honour, did not understand; he was compared to the senseless beasts, and was made like unto them'—read and understand, so that you may rather humbly beware of this reproach yourself than proudly cast it at another. For this was said of those who reckon this life alone to be life, living according to the flesh and hoping for nothing after death, like the beasts—not of those who neither deny that they know what they know, and confess that they do not know what they do not know, and more safely understand their own infirmity than presume upon their own strength. Let not, therefore, my aged fear displease your youthful presumption, my son.
For I, if I cannot come to know this which we seek concerning the origin of souls—neither with God nor with any spiritual man teaching me—am more ready to defend how rightly God has willed that we should not know this, as He has willed many other things, than rashly to say what may be either so obscure.
so that not only can I not bring this to the understanding of others, but I cannot even understand it myself, or else it may actually assist the heretics who for this reason attempt to persuade men that the souls of little children are pure from all guilt — namely, lest that same guilt should run back and return upon God its author, on the ground that He had forced innocent souls (souls for whom He foreknew that not even the laver of regeneration would come to their aid) to be sinful by giving them to sinful flesh, with no grace of baptism about to help them, by which they might be freed from everlasting condemnation, seeing that countless souls of infants depart from their bodies before they are baptized. But let this be far from us.
24:270
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so that, being unwilling to refute this, I should say the very things you yourself have said: 'that the soul has deserved to be defiled through the flesh and to be sinful, though it had no prior sin whereby it could rightly be said to have deserved this,' and 'that even without baptism original sins are dissolved,' and 'that the kingdom of heaven too is granted at the last to the unbaptized.' Were I not afraid to utter these and suchlike poisons of the faith, perhaps I would not be afraid to define something on this matter.
How much better, therefore, that I should not discourse separately about the soul and affirm what I do not know, but rather hold in simplicity what I most clearly see the Apostle to have taught: that from one man all men who are born of Adam go into condemnation, unless they be so reborn in Christ as He has appointed that they be reborn, before they die in the body — those whom the most merciful Bestower of grace has predestined to eternal life, who is also to those whom He has predestined to eternal death the most just Requiter of punishment, not only on account of those sins that men willingly add, but also, even if infants add nothing, on account of original sin. This is my determination in this question: that the hidden works of God keep their own secret, while my faith remains unharmed.
Now then, so far as the Lord deigns to grant, I must also reply to that place where, speaking of the soul, you repeated my name and said: 'For we do not, as Augustine, that most skilled bishop, professes, allow it to be incorporeal and the same as spirit.' First, therefore, let us discuss whether the soul is to be reckoned incorporeal, as I have said, or corporeal, as you say; and then whether it too is called spirit according to our Scriptures, although properly not the whole of it is called spirit, but some part of it. And first I should wish to know how you define what a body is. For if there is no body except what consists of fleshly members, then neither will the earth be a body, nor the heaven, nor a stone, nor water, nor the stars, nor anything of this kind;
but if a body is whatever consists of greater and lesser parts of its own occupying greater and lesser expanses of place, then these things which I have mentioned are also bodies: air is a body, this visible light is a body, and, as the Apostle says, all celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies. But whether the soul is anything of such a kind is inquired most scrupulously and most subtly. Yet you — for which I congratulate you most heartily — affirm that God is not a body; but again you make me anxious, when you say: 'If the soul lacks a body, so as to exist, as some hold, as an airy and futile substance of empty vacuity.' For by these words of yours you seem to believe that everything which lacks a body is of an empty substance.
But if that is so, how do you dare to say that God lacks a body and yet not fear lest it follow that He is of an empty substance? Further, if God too lacks a body — which you have already confessed — and yet far be it from you to say that He is of an empty substance, then not everything that lacks a body is of an empty substance. And therefore he who says the soul is incorporeal is not obliged to have it seem to be of an empty and futile substance, since he confesses that God too, who is not anything empty, is at the same time incorporeal. But see how great a difference there is between what I say and what you suppose me to say. For I do not even say that the soul is of an airy substance: otherwise I would be confessing it to be a body.
For air indeed is a body, according to all who, when they speak of bodies, know what they are speaking of. But you, because I called the soul incorporeal, supposed that I said it was not only of empty vacuity but, for this very reason, an airy substance — whereas I said both that it is not the body which air is, and that what is filled with air cannot be empty. Your very wineskins could not warn you of this. For what else but air is compressed into them when they are inflated? And so far are they from being empty that by that same fullness they even bear up weights.
But if perhaps a breath seems to you to be one thing and air another — whereas air in motion is itself a breath, as can also be shown by a fan being waved — at any rate, take any hollow vessels whatever, which you think are empty, and, so that you may know they are full, press them down into water from the side by which they are filled, and see how no moisture can enter into them, the air by which they are full driving it back. But when they are placed with their mouth turned upward, or on their side, then they receive liquid, if any is poured in or enters, as the air goes out and escapes where an exit lies open. This could be more easily demonstrated by the deed done in your presence than in writing.
But we must not linger here any longer, since whether you understand the nature of air to be corporeal or do not understand it, you nevertheless ought not to suppose that I have said the soul is even airy, but wholly incorporeal — which you too confess God to be, whom you do not dare to call anything empty, yet cannot deny to be of an omnipotent and immutable substance. Why, then, do we fear lest the soul be of empty vacuity if it be incorporeal, when we confess that God is incorporeal and do not say that He is of empty vacuity? And so the Incorporeal was able to create the incorporeal soul, just as the Living created the living, though the Immutable created the mutable and the Omnipotent created what is far unequal to Himself. But why you should be unwilling for the soul to be a spirit, and should wish it to be a body, I do not see.
For if it is not a spirit because the Apostle distinctly named the spirit, saying: 'and may your whole spirit and soul and body,' then by the same reasoning it is not a body, because he distinctly named the body also; but if you affirm that the soul is also a body although the body is distinctly named, then allow that it is also a spirit although the spirit is distinctly named. For the soul ought to seem to you much more to be a spirit than a body, since you confess that spirit and soul are of one substance, but you do not say that soul and body are of one substance. By what reasoning, then, is the soul a body, when its nature and that of body are different, and yet is not a spirit, when its nature and that of spirit are one and the same?
What of the fact that by this reasoning of yours you are compelled to say that the spirit too is a body? For otherwise, if spirit is not a body and soul is a body, then spirit and soul are not of one and the same substance; but you confess that both, although you consider them to be two distinct things, have one substance: therefore the spirit too is a body, if the soul is a body; for otherwise they cannot be of one and the same nature. Accordingly, on your view, that which the Apostle says — 'your spirit and soul and body' — are three bodies; but of these two, soul and spirit, are bodies of one nature, while that body which is also called flesh is of a different nature. And of these three bodies, as you suppose, since one is of a different [nature],
while two are of one and the same substance, the whole man consists — one single thing, as it were, and one substance. Though you assert this, yet you are unwilling that two things of one and the same substance, that is, soul and spirit, should have the one name 'spirit,' while two things not of one and the same, but of unequal and different substance, that is, soul and body, have, as you suppose, the one name 'body.' But I pass this over, lest there be between us a controversy about names rather than about things. Let us see who the inner man is — whether soul, or spirit, or both. But, as I see you have written, you call the inner man the soul. For it was of this you were speaking when you said:
'and the substance, congealing, which could not be grasped, was forming another body within the body, massed together by the force and breath of its own nature, and thenceforth the inner man began to appear, whom the disposition of the outer man delineated, as though enclosed in the form of a bodily sheath, after the likeness of itself.' Then you infer: 'The breath of God, therefore, made the soul — nay rather, the breath from God was made the soul, a fashioned substance, corporeal according to its own nature, and like to its own body and conformed to its image.' After this, beginning to speak of the spirit, you say: 'This soul, which derived its origin from the breath of God, could not be without its own proper sense and inmost intellect, which is spirit.'
As I see, then, you would have the inner man be the soul, and the inmost be the spirit — as if the spirit itself were interior to the soul, just as the soul is to the body. Thus it comes about that, just as the body through its inner cavities receives another body, which is the soul (as you suppose), so also the soul must be believed to have inner empty spaces, by which it received a third body, the spirit; and thus the whole man consists of three: outer, inner, and inmost. Do you not yet see how many most absurd consequences pursue you, when you try to maintain that the soul is corporeal? Then tell me: which of them will be renewed in the knowledge of God according to the image of Him who created him — the inner or the inmost?
The Apostle, indeed, apart from the inner and the outer, I do not see that he knows any other, an inner one of the inner, that is, an inmost of the whole man. But choose whichever you will. He who is renewed according to the image of God — how will he receive this image, who has already taken on the image of the outer man? For if the inner man ran through the members of the outer and congealed — for you have used this very word, as though a molten cast were made from a clay mould, which itself was made from dust — how, while that form remains which was impressed upon it or expressed from the body, can it be reformed to the image of God? Or will it have two images, from the top indeed the image of God, but from below that of the body, as on a coin one speaks of 'head and ship'?
Or perhaps you say that the soul took the image of the body and the spirit takes the image of God, as though the soul is contiguous to the body and the spirit to God, and so it is the inmost man, not this inner one, that is reformed to the image of God? But you say this in vain. For if that inmost one too is so diffused through all the members of the soul as the soul is through those of the body, then it too has already taken the image of the body from the soul, just as the soul's form shaped it. And by this it has no place where it may take the image of God while this image of the body remains in it, unless — like the coin, as I said — it be formed in one way from the lower and in another from the upper part. To these absurdities, whether you will or not, the carnal thinking of bodies compels you when you think about the soul.
But God, as you yourself most rightly confess, is not a body; how, then, can a body take His image? I beseech you, brother, that you be not conformed to this world, but be reformed in the newness of your mind, and be not wise according to the flesh, since that is death. But, you say, if the soul lacks a body, what is it that that rich man recognizes in the underworld? Certainly, you say, he already knew Lazarus, but he did not know Abraham. Whence came to him the recognition of Abraham, who had died so long before? In saying this, if you think that recognition of a man cannot come about without the form of a body, then, in order that you may know yourself, I suppose you constantly gaze into a mirror, lest, if you should forget your own face, you might not be able to recognize yourself.
I ask you, what man does a man know better than himself, and whose face can he less see than his own? But who can know God, whom you too do not doubt to be incorporeal, if, as you suppose, cognition cannot come about apart from the form of a body — that is, if bodies alone can be known? And what Christian, disputing about matters so great and so difficult, would direct his mind so carelessly to the divine words as to say: 'If the soul is incorporeal, it must necessarily lack form'? Have you forgotten that you have read of the 'form of doctrine'? Then the form of doctrine is corporeal. Have you forgotten that it is written of Christ Jesus, before He had put on manhood, that He 'was in the form of God'? How then do you say:
'If the soul is incorporeal, it must necessarily lack form,' when you hear of the form of God, whom you confess not to be corporeal, and yet speak as though form could not exist except in bodies? You also say that 'names cease there where form is not distinguished, and that the appellation of names does nothing there where there is no designation of persons,' wishing hence to prove that Abraham's soul was corporeal, because it could be said: 'Father Abraham.' We have already said that form exists even where there is no body. But if you think the appellation of names does nothing where there are no bodies, count these names, I pray you:
'But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control.' And tell me whether you do not recognize the things themselves of which these are the names, or whether you so recognize them as to see in them some lineaments of bodies. Lo, to pass over the rest, tell me what shape, what members, what colour love has — love which surely, if you yourself are not empty, cannot seem to you to be anything empty. 'Whose aid was implored,' you say, 'was surely something seen and having form.' Let men hear you — and let no one implore the aid of God, since no one can see Him as corporeal!
'Finally,' you say, 'the members of the soul are there described, so that it is truly a body,' and you wish 'the whole head to be understood by the eye,' because he is said to have lifted up his eyes; 'the throat by the tongue, the hand by the finger,' because it was said: 'Send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, that he may cool my tongue.' Yet, lest by the names of members a corporeal God be prescribed to you, you say that 'by these are to be understood incorporeal powers,' because you most rightly defend that God is not corporeal. What reason, then, is there why these names of members should not make a body for you in God, yet should make one in the soul? Or indeed, when these things are said of a creature, are they to be taken properly, but when of the Creator, tropically and by transference?
Are you then going to give us corporeal wings, since it is not the Creator but the creature, that is, man, who says: 'If I take my wings like a dove'? Moreover, if the rich man had a corporeal tongue because he said 'let him cool my tongue,' then in us also, still living in the flesh, that same tongue has corporeal hands, because it is written: 'Death and life are in the hands of the tongue.' I suppose, too, that sin does not seem to you either to belong to the creature or to be a body: why then does it have a face? Or do you not hear in the Psalm: 'There is no peace in my bones from the face of my sins'?
But as for 'that bosom of Abraham,' which you reckon to be corporeal and by which you assert 'his whole body is recognized,' I fear lest in so great a matter you be thought to be acting jestingly and mockingly, not seriously and gravely. For you would not be so foolish as to imagine that the corporeal bosom of one man could carry so many souls — nay rather, to speak according to you, 'carry so many bodies of the well-deserving, whom the angels bear thither as they did Lazarus.' Unless perhaps you suppose that that one soul alone deserved to reach that same bosom. If you are not jesting and do not wish to err childishly, understand Abraham's bosom to be the remote and secret seat of rest, where Abraham is.
And therefore it was called Abraham's, not because it belongs to him alone, but because he himself was set as the father of many nations, to whom he is set forth for imitation by his primacy of faith — just as God willed to be called the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, though He is the God of innumerable ones. And do not think that I so discourse as though I deny that it can happen that the soul of a dead man, like that of a sleeper, feels either good or ill in the likeness of its own body. For in dreams too, when we endure certain hard and grievous things, it is truly we ourselves, and, unless those things pass away when we awake, we pay the gravest penalties;
but to believe that they are bodies by which we are, as it were, borne this way and that and fly about in dreams, is characteristic of a man who has thought too little vigilantly about such matters. For from these images of things seen it is most of all proved that the soul is not corporeal — unless you would call those things also bodies which, apart from ourselves, we see so many of in dreams: heaven, earth, sea, sun, moon, stars, rivers, mountains, trees, animals. He who believes these to be bodies is incredibly foolish; and yet they are altogether most like bodies. Of this kind also are those which are shown by God as bearing some significance, whether in sleep or in ecstasy. Whence these arise, that is, what their material as it were may be, who could trace out or say?
Yet without doubt it is spiritual, not corporeal. For such appearances as of bodies — yet not bodies — are both formed by the thought of the waking and contained in the depth of the memory, and out of its most hidden recesses, by I know not what marvellous and ineffable manner, they come forth when we remember and are, as it were, turned before our eyes as things brought forward. So many, then, and so great images of bodies, if the soul were a body, it could not take in by thinking nor contain in the memory. For according to your own definition, a corporeal substance does not exceed its own external body. By what magnitude, then — which it has none — does it take in the images of bodies and spaces and regions so great?
What wonder is it, then, if the soul appears also to itself in the likeness of its own body, even when it appears without a body? For it is not with its own body that it appears to itself in dreams, and yet in that very likeness of its own body it runs, as it were, through places unknown and known, and feels many things joyful or sad. But I suppose that not even you would dare to say that that figure of a body and of members which it seems to itself to have in dreams is a true body.
For in that case the mountain which it seems to itself to climb will be a true mountain, and the house which it seems to itself to enter a corporeal house, and the tree a true tree and the wood a true body of wood under which it seems to itself to lie, and the water true water which it seems to itself to draw, and all the things among which it moves as though among bodies will be bodies, if it too is a body which moves among all those things in a like image. Concerning the recorded visions of the martyrs, something must be said to you, since you too thought testimony should be adduced from that source. For holy Perpetua seemed to herself in dreams to wrestle with a certain Egyptian, having been changed into a man.
But who could doubt that in that likeness of a body it was her soul, not her body — which surely, remaining in its own feminine sex with senses lulled to sleep, was lying on the couch — while her soul was wrestling in that likeness of a masculine body? What do you say here? Was that likeness of a man truly a body, or was it not a body, although it had the likeness of a body? Choose which you will. If it was a body, why did it not preserve the form of its own sheath? For it had not found masculine genitals in that woman's flesh, from which it could thus be shaped by contracting itself and, as you say, 'congealing.'
Next, I beseech you: since the sleeper's body was still living while her soul was wrestling, it was surely in its own sheath, enclosed within all the members of the living body, and in that body it preserved its own form, from which it had been shaped — for it had not yet, as happens in death, left those joints; it had not yet, by the force of death compelling, drawn its members formed out of members away from those that form them. Whence, then, came that masculine body of the soul, in which it seemed to itself to wrestle with an adversary? But if it was not a body, and yet was something like a body, in which truly a real toil or a real joy was felt — do you now at last see how it can come about that there is in the soul a certain likeness of a body, and yet it is not itself a body?
What if some such thing takes place in the underworld, and souls recognize themselves there not in bodies, but in likenesses of bodies? For when we suffer sad things, even in dreams, though that be a likeness of corporeal members and not corporeal members, yet it is not a likeness of pain but pain itself; so also where joyful things are felt. But since holy Perpetua was not yet dead, you perhaps do not wish anything to be prescribed to you from this — though it is very much to the point — of what nature you reckon those likenesses of bodies to be which we have in dreams. And this whole case would be settled if you confess that they are both like bodies and not bodies. But nevertheless her brother Dinocrates had died;
she saw him with that wound which he had while alive and by which he was brought to death. Where now is that on which you laboured with such great efforts, when you were treating of the cutting off of members, lest the soul be thought to be cut at the same time? Behold, there was a wound in the soul of Dinocrates, which, when it was in his body, expelled it from the body by its own force. How then, according to your opinion — 'when the members of the body are cut off, it withdraws itself from the blow and, thickening itself, gathers into other parts, lest any part of it be amputated by the wound of the body' — even if something of the members is cut off from one sleeping and unaware? For you attribute such great vigilance to it, that even when occupied with the sights of dreams, if a blow rush upon it unawares, by which the flesh is struck,
it providently and swiftly withdraws itself, lest it be able to be struck and tormented or cut down. And you do not consider, prudent man, that if the soul should withdraw itself thence, that blow would not even be felt. But find what you can to reply to this — how the soul snatches away its parts and hides them within, lest, when a member of the body is cut or struck, it too be amputated and tormented — and look upon Dinocrates, and tell me why his soul did not withdraw itself from that place of the body which was being ravaged by the deadly wound, so that there should not come to be in it what appeared in his face even after the death of the body itself.
Or perhaps you now prefer that we believe these to be likenesses of bodies rather than bodies, so that, just as there appears something like a wound which is not a wound, so what is not a body may appear as though a body? For if the soul can be wounded by those who wound the body, is there not something to be feared, lest it be able to be killed by those who kill the body? Yet the Lord most plainly testifies that this cannot happen. And nevertheless the soul of Dinocrates could not die, from which his body died, and it seemed to be as though wounded, just as the body had been wounded, since it was not a body, but had, in the likeness of a body, also the likeness of a wound.
Moreover, in a not-true body there was a true misery of the soul, which was signified by the shadowed wound of the body, from which by the prayers of his holy sister it deserved to be freed. Now, what sort of thing is it to say that 'the soul receives its form from the body and is stretched out and grows with the growth of the body,' and not to consider how monstrous a soul of a youth or an old man turns out, if his arm be cut off when an infant? For the hand of the soul, as you say, contracts itself, lest it too be amputated along with the hand of the body, and, thickening itself, encloses itself into other parts of the body.
And by this, that arm of the soul, however short it was from the body from which it had received its form, will be preserved as short wherever it is preserved, because it lost the form by whose growth it could equally have grown. There goes out, then, the soul of a youth or an old man who lost his hand when he was small, having indeed two hands, because the one that fled was not amputated with the body, but the one being that of a youth or an old man, and the other, as it had first been, that of an infant. Such souls, believe me, no bodily form makes, but the deformity of error fashions. You do not seem to me able to be delivered from this error unless, with God's help, you diligently consider the visions of dreamers and thence learn that there are certain things which are not bodies, but likenesses of bodies.
For although even those things which we think of as like bodies are of that same kind, yet, as regards the dead, a more fitting conjecture is drawn from sleepers. For not without reason does holy Scripture call those who are dead 'sleepers,' unless because sleep is in a certain way a kinsman of death. Accordingly, if the soul were a body and were a corporeal figure in which it sees itself in dreams — because it had been expressed from its body — no man, when a member of the body has been amputated, would, just as he lacks it, so see himself without it in dreams, but rather always whole, because nothing of the soul itself has been amputated.
But since sometimes they see themselves whole, and sometimes, just as they are, truncated in some part or other, what else does this fact teach but that the soul, just as of the other things it perceives in dreams, so also of the body, at one time thus, at another thus, bears not the truth but the likeness? But its joy or its sadness, its delight or its offence, whether it be in bodies or in likenesses of bodies, is true. Did you not yourself say, and say truly, that 'food and clothing are not necessary for the soul, but for the body'? Why then did the rich man in the underworld desire a drop of water? Why did 'holy Samuel after death,' as you yourself also mentioned, 'appear clothed in his accustomed garment'?
Did that one desire to repair the ruins of his soul, as of flesh, by the nourishment of moisture? Had this one gone forth from the body clothed? But in the former there was a true distress, by which the soul was tortured, yet not a true body for which it sought nourishment; and the latter could so appear clothed that it was not a body, but had a likeness of a body — both the soul and the garment. For the soul does not stretch and contract itself into garments as into the members of the body, so as to be formed even from them.
But after death, what power of cognition, freed from corruptible bodies, souls receive — even those that are not good — so that they are able to behold and recognize by their inner senses others whether wicked or good, whether in those very things which are not bodies but likenesses of bodies, or in the good or evil affections of the mind, in which there are no lineaments as it were of members: who could trace this out? Whence also is that which the rich man, when he was in torments, recognized father Abraham, to whom the figure of his body was not known — whose likeness of body, although incorporeal, the soul was able to retain.
But who could rightly claim to have known some man, except in so far as he was able to know that man's life and will, which surely have neither mass nor colours? For in this way we know even our own selves more surely than we know others, because our own conscience and our will are known to us. This will we plainly see, and yet in it we behold no likeness whatever of a body. This will we cannot discern in another, however present he may be — even one whose face, when he is absent, we know, recall, and think upon. Our own face, however, we cannot know, recall, or think upon in that same way; and yet we say most truly that we ourselves are better known to us than that other man. Thus it is clear where the better and truer knowledge of a man lies.
Since, then, there is one faculty in the soul by which we perceive real bodies — which we do by the five senses of the body — another by which, apart from those very senses, we behold things like bodies yet not bodies (where too we contemplate our own selves in no other way than as things resembling bodies), and yet another by which we discern neither bodies nor likenesses of bodies, such as faith, hope, and charity, which we perceive with all the more certainty and firmness because without any colours or dimensions or anything of that sort — where ought we rather to be, and in a manner more familiarly to dwell, where we are to be renewed in the knowledge of God according to the image of him who created us? Is it not in that which I placed in the third rank? For there assuredly we bear neither any sex nor any likeness of sex.
Now that form of a male or female soul, distinguished by male and female members — if it is not a likeness of a body but a body itself — then, whether you will or not, whatever appears either as male or as female is, willy-nilly, a male, willy-nilly a female. Yet still, if according to your opinion the soul is both a body and a living body, and has swelling and pendulous breasts, and has no beard, and has a vulva and the genitals which the members of a female body have, and yet is not a female — shall I not with greater constancy say what is true:
'It has an eye, it has a tongue, it has a finger, and it has the other members like those of a body, and this whole thing is a likeness of a body, not a body' — since what I say each man may prove within himself when he imagines the bodies of those who are absent (let him prove it surely when he recalls the shapes both of himself and of others in his dreams), whereas of this monstrous thing of yours — where there is at once a true, living, feminine body and yet no feminine sex — you can produce no example in the whole nature of things? For what you say about the phoenix is wholly irrelevant to the matter under discussion. For that bird signifies the resurrection of bodies; it does not abolish the sex of souls — if indeed, as is believed, it is reborn out of its own death.
But I suppose you thought your discourse would be too little pleasing to the ear if you did not, after the manner of young men, declaim at length about the phoenix. For are there in its body male genitals, and yet it is not male; or female ones, and yet it is not female? But you, mark what you say, what you seek to establish, what you strive to persuade. You say that 'the soul, diffused through all the members, has congealed as it froze, and from the very crown of the head down to the soles of the feet, from the inmost marrow to the surface of the skin, has taken on the whole form of the whole body; and by this it has taken on, in a female's body, whatever the female organs females possess; and this is a true body, and these are true members, and yet it is not a female.'
Why, I beseech you, in a true and living body are all the members female, and yet it is not a female; in a true and living body are all the members male, and yet it is not a male? Who would presume to believe, to say, or to teach such things? Is it because souls do not beget? Then neither are he-mules and she-mules male and female. Is it because souls cannot copulate without fleshly bodies? But this too is taken away from those who are castrated; and yet, though from them both the movement and the act are removed, the form of the sex is not removed, since some remnant, however small, of the male members remains. No one ever denied that a eunuch is male.
What of this — that according to you the souls even of eunuchs have their testicles intact; and if anyone's genitals are entirely and wholly removed, they will, according to your opinion, remain wholly and altogether intact in his soul? For it knows, as you say, how to withdraw itself when that part of the flesh begins to be cut away, so that the form which was taken from it, when that thing from which it was taken is amputated, does not perish, but though it had frozen as it was poured in, is nevertheless snatched away by a most swift movement and hidden more deeply within, that it may be preserved unharmed; and yet he is not a male among the dead, though carrying with him the whole of his male genitals — a man who, when he did not have them in his body, was male on account of their place alone. These things are false, my son; if you will not have there be a sex in the soul, let there be no body either.
Not every likeness of a body is a body. Sleep, and you shall see; but when you have awakened, discern wakefully what you have seen. For in your dreams you will appear to yourself as it were corporeal; yet that will not be your body, but your soul — not a true body, but the likeness of a body. For your body will lie still, while it walks; the tongue of your body will be silent, while it speaks; your eyes will be shut, while it sees; and the members of your body will surely lie there living, not dead. And by this the congealed form, as you suppose, of your soul has not yet been drawn out as it were from its sheath, and yet in it the likeness of your flesh is discerned, whole and entire.
Of this kind of bodily likenesses, which appear like bodies yet are not bodies, are all those things which, when you read the sacred books, you fail to understand even in the prophetic visions — things by which are signified those events which take place in time, whether present, past, or future. But you are deceived in them, not because they themselves are deceptive, but because you do not take them as they ought to be taken. For where the souls of the martyrs were seen, in the same revelation was seen also the Lamb as though slain, having seven horns; there were horses and other animals, figuratively, as was fitting; there, lastly, the stars fell and heaven was folded up like a book — and yet the world did not then collapse.
All these things, therefore, if we take them wisely, although we call the visions truthful, we nevertheless do not call them true bodies. But it belongs to a more extended discourse to inquire most carefully concerning this kind of bodily likenesses: whether even the angels, whether good or evil, appear thus when they appear in the form of men or of any bodies whatever, or whether they have some true bodies and are rather seen in the truth of these; or whether indeed in dreams or in ecstasy they are discerned in these — not as bodies, but as likenesses of bodies — while to men who are awake they present true bodies to be seen and, if need be, even to be touched. But I do not think these matters are to be sought out and examined in this book. For now, let enough have been said concerning the incorporeal soul.
But if you would rather believe it to be corporeal, you must first define what a body is, lest perchance, when we are agreed about the thing itself, we should labour in vain over a mere name. Yet how many absurdities have followed upon your conceiving of such a body in the soul as those things are which by all the learned are called bodies — that is, things which by the distance of length, breadth, and height occupy spaces of place, smaller in their smaller parts and larger in their larger — this, I think, you already prudently perceive. It remains to show how, although 'spirit' is also properly said to be not the whole soul but a certain part of it — as the Apostle says: 'and may your whole spirit and soul and body' (1 Thess 5:23), or that far more expressly in the book of Job:
'Thou hast set free my soul from my spirit' (cf. Job) — yet the whole soul too may be called by this name, though this seems much rather to be a question of names, not of things. For since it is agreed that there is something in the soul which is properly named 'spirit,' and that, this being excepted, the soul is also properly named — there is now no contention about the things themselves; especially since I too say that this is properly called spirit which you also call spirit, that is, that whereby we reason and understand, when these things are so distinctly spoken of, as the Apostle says: 'and your whole spirit and soul and body.' And this spirit he seems to call also 'mind,' when he says: 'with the mind I serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin' (Rom 7:25). For the very statement is:
'And the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh' (Gal 5:17), so that what he there called 'mind' is understood here to be called 'spirit' — not, as you suppose, that 'the whole mind is called that which consists of soul and spirit,' which where you may have read I do not know. For we are not accustomed to call our 'mind' anything but our rational and intellectual part. And by this, when the same Apostle says: 'be renewed in the spirit of your mind' (Eph 4:23), what else did he say than 'be renewed in your mind'? For thus the 'spirit of the mind' is nothing other than the mind, just as 'the body of the flesh' can be nothing other than the flesh. For this too is written: 'in the putting off of the body of the flesh' (Col 2:11), where he calls the flesh 'the body of the flesh.'
He speaks indeed also in another sense of the spirit of man, which he altogether distinguishes from the mind: 'for if I pray with a tongue,' he says, 'my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful' (1 Cor 14:14). But we are not now speaking of that spirit which is distinct from the mind — that has its own difficult question of the same kind; for in many ways and in diverse significations do the divine Scriptures name 'spirit' — but of that with which we are now dealing, whereby we reason, understand, and are wise. It is agreed between us that this too is properly named spirit, in such a way that it is not the whole soul, but a certain part of it.
Yet if you deny that the soul is also spirit, on this ground — that its understanding is distinctly called spirit — you might likewise deny that the whole seed of Jacob is called Israel, since, apart from Judah, 'Israel' was also distinctly the name given to the ten tribes which were then in Samaria. But what need is there to linger here longer? Now, then, attend to that whereby we may more easily show that that which is soul is also called spirit. When you hear or read, of the Lord as he was dying, what is written: 'and bowing his head, he gave up the spirit' (John 19:30), you would have it understood as though he had signified the whole by a part, not that that which is soul can also be named spirit. But that I may be able the more readily to prove what I say, I will call you yourself as witness, more quickly and conveniently.
For you have so defined spirit that beasts appear to have not spirit but soul; for they are called irrational precisely because they have not the power of understanding and reason. Hence, when you admonished man himself to know his own nature, you spoke thus: 'For since the good God has made nothing without reason, and has brought forth man himself as a rational animal, capable of intellect, endowed with reason and lively in sense, to distribute by prudent ordering all things devoid of reason.' By these your words you have sufficiently asserted what is altogether most true — that man is endowed with reason and capable of understanding, which surely the animals devoid of reason are not.
Hence too, by divine testimony, you have compared to beasts — which certainly have no understanding — those men who do not understand. This is written also in another place: 'Be not as the horse and the mule, which have no understanding' (Ps 31:9). Since these things are so, attend also to the words by which you defined and described spirit, when you strive to distinguish it from the soul. 'This soul,' you say, 'which has its origin from the breath of God, could not be without its own sense and inmost understanding, which is spirit.' And a little after: 'and although the soul,' you say, 'animates the body, yet that which perceives, which is wise, which is vigorous, must needs be spirit.' Likewise a little after: 'the soul will be one thing,' you say, 'and the spirit another — the wisdom and the sense of the soul.'
By these words you sufficiently indicate what you hold the spirit of man to be — that is, our rational part, whereby the soul perceives and understands, not as it is perceived by the senses of the body, but as is that inmost sense from which 'sententia' (judgment) takes its name. And from this, without doubt, we are set above the beasts, in that they are devoid of reason. The beasts, therefore, have not spirit — that is, understanding and the sense of reason and wisdom — but only soul. For of them too it was said: 'let the waters bring forth creeping things of living souls' (Gen 1:20), and: 'let the earth bring forth the living soul' (Gen 1:24). That therefore you may most fully and most plainly know that that which is soul is, after the manner of the divine oracles, also called spirit — even the spirit of a beast is so named.
And certainly beasts have not that spirit which your Charity, distinguishing it from the soul, has defined. Whence it is manifest that by a general term the soul of a beast could rightly be so called, as is read in the book of Ecclesiastes: 'Who knows whether the spirit of the sons of man goes upward, and whether the spirit of the beast goes downward into the earth?' (Eccl 3:21). And likewise in the devastation of the flood it is written: 'and all flesh died that moved upon the earth, of fowls, of cattle, and of beasts, and of wild animals; and every creeping thing that moves upon the earth, and every man, and all things whatsoever that have the spirit of life' (Gen 7:21-22) — where, all the windings of doubt being removed, we understand 'spirit' to be a general name for the soul.
And indeed the signification of this name extends so widely that even God is called Spirit; and this airy breath, although it be corporeal, is in the Psalm called 'the spirit of the tempest' (Ps 148:8). Wherefore I think that that which is soul is also named spirit (according to that: 'Thou wilt take away their spirit, and they shall fail' — Ps 103:29 — and again: 'their spirit shall go forth, and shall return to its own earth' — that is, the body to its own dust — Ps 145:4). Therefore the name 'spirit' belongs to the soul from the fact that it is spiritual; the name 'soul' belongs to it from the fact that it animates the body, that is, gives it life. I judge that, admonished by these testimonies of the divine pages which I have recalled — where the soul even of a beast, which has no understanding, is read to be called spirit — you will no longer deny it.
Wherefore, if you both grasp and understand those things which have been discussed concerning the incorporeal soul, there is no reason why I should displease you because I said that I know it to be not a body but a spirit — since it is both shown not to be a body and is by a general name called spirit. Therefore, if you receive and read these books, written to you with lavished love, with love repaid; if at the beginning of your own first book you both hear yourself and are zealous, as you said, 'not to defend your own opinion if it be detected as improvable' — beware above all of those eleven things concerning which I admonished you in the earlier book: that you say not 'the soul comes from God in such a way that he created it neither out of nothing nor out of another thing, but out of his own nature';
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aut \'quodperinfinitumtempusatqueitasemperanimasdet, sicutsemperestipsequidat\'; aut \'animammeritumaliquodperdidissepercarnem, quodhabueritantecarnem\'; aut \'animampercarnemrepararehabitudinempriscamperqueipsamcarnemrenasci, perquammerueratinquinari\'; aut \'quodanimaanteomnepeccatummerueritessepeccatrix\'; aut \'infantessineregenerationisbaptismatemortuosadindulgentiamperuenireoriginaliumpeccatorum\'; aut \'eos, quosdominuspraedestinauitadbaptismum, posseantedefunginecineisquodomnipotenspraedestinauitinpleri\'; aut \'dehis, quipriusquambaptizenturexspirant, dictumessequodscriptumest:
or that 'through infinite time he thus always gives souls, just as he himself who gives is always'; or that 'the soul has lost some merit through the flesh which it had before the flesh'; or that 'the soul recovers its former condition through the flesh, and is reborn through that very flesh through which it had deserved to be defiled'; or that 'the soul, before all sin, deserved to be a sinner'; or that 'infants who die without the baptism of regeneration attain to the pardon of original sins'; or that 'those whom the Lord has predestined to baptism can die beforehand, and that which the Almighty predestined be not fulfilled in them'; or that 'concerning those who expire before they are baptized, it was said what is written:
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raptusest, nemalitiamutaretilliusintellectumatqueadhuncsensumceterapertinentia; aut \'earumaliquasmansionesextraregnumdeiesse, quasmultasindomopatrissuidominusdixitesse\'; aut \'sacrificiumcorporisetsanguinisChristiprohisquinonbaptizatidecorporeexierintofferendum\'; aut \'aliquoseorumquisineChristibaptismatemoriunturinparadisuminterimrecipiacpostmodumetregnicaelorumbeatitudinemconsequi\'. haecpraecipuecaue, fili, neccognominariVincentiusdelecteris, siuisesseuictorerroris, necte, quandoaliquidnescis, existimesscire, sed, utscias, discenescire.
He was caught up, lest malice should change his understanding' (Wis 4:11) — and other things pertaining to this sense; or that 'some of those mansions which the Lord said were many in his Father's house are outside the kingdom of God'; or that 'the sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ is to be offered for those who have departed from the body unbaptized'; or that 'some of those who die without the baptism of Christ are received meanwhile into paradise, and afterward attain even the blessedness of the kingdom of heaven.' Beware above all of these things, my son; and do not delight to be surnamed 'Victor' [Vincentius Victor], if you would be a conqueror of error; nor think, when you do not know something, that you know it; but, that you may know, learn to be ignorant.
For one sins, not by being ignorant of something among the hidden works of God, but by rashly asserting things unknown as though known, and by putting forward and defending false things as true. But my own ignorance — as to whether the souls of men are made new, or are derived from the parents (souls which, however, it is not lawful to doubt are made by God the Creator not out of his own substance) — ought either not to be reproved, or to be reproved by him from whom, by his teaching, it can also be taken away; and that souls have in themselves incorporeal likenesses of bodies, but are not themselves bodies; and that, with the distinction between soul and spirit preserved, the soul is also universally named spirit — this I think I have persuaded your Charity.
But if I have not been able to persuade you, whether nevertheless I have said those things which I ought to have said to persuade, those who read will rather judge. If indeed you desire perhaps to know any other things — of which very many in your books seem to me to need correction — let it not be burdensome for you to come, not as a disciple to a master, but as a young man to an old one, as a strong man to a weak one. For even though you ought not to have published those books, yet with greater and truer glory is anyone corrected reproved by his own confession than praised by the mouth of any who errs.
Although in the recital of those same books I do not believe that all your hearers and praisers either previously held those things which sound doctrine disapproves, or agreed with you in them; but rather, their mind's edge being blunted by the very rush and course of your recital, they could take too little notice of these things — or at least even those who could take notice praised in you not the most limpid truth of things, but the abundance of words and the ability and native talent of your genius. For very often eloquence is proclaimed and loved in the promise of a young man, even though he has not yet the maturity and trustworthiness of a teacher.
Wherefore, that you yourself may both be rightly wise, and that what you speak may not only be able to delight others but also to edify, you ought to take care over your discourses, setting aside the applause of others. About the same time a certain Vincentius Victor in Mauretania Caesariensis found, in the possession of a certain Spanish presbyter named Peter, a little work of mine, where in a certain place I confessed that I did not know, concerning the origin of the souls of individual men — whether they are propagated from that of the first man and thereafter from the parents, or whether, as to that first one, they are given singly to individuals without any propagation — yet that I did know the soul to be not a body but a spirit; and against these views of mine he wrote to that same Peter two books, which Renatus the monk sent to me from Caesarea.
Having read these, I returned four in reply: one to Renatus the monk, another to the presbyter Peter, and two to Victor himself. But that to Peter, although it has the length of a book, is nevertheless a letter, which I did not wish to separate from the other three. In all these, in which many necessary matters are discussed, I defended, concerning the origin of the souls which are given to individual men, my own hesitation, and I exposed the many errors and the perversities of his presumption. Yet the young man I treated, not as one to be too hastily detested, but as one still to be taught, with as much gentleness as I could; and from him I received writings of his own correction. Of this work the book to Renatus thus begins: 'Your sincerity, us…'; but that to Peter thus:
'To the most beloved lord, brother and fellow-presbyter Peter'; and of the two latest, addressed to Vincentius Victor, the first thus begins: 'That which I thought I ought to write to you.'