Not that air is its very substance—although this seemed so to Aenesidemus and to Anaximenes, and, I suppose, according to some, to Heraclitus—nor that light is, although this pleased Heraclides of Pontus. For neither is the substance of thunder-stones fiery merely because they gleam with a ruddy glow, nor is the material of beryls watery merely because they ripple with a strained brightness (for how many other things does colour associate that nature dissociates!). But because everything fine and translucent is a rival of air, this the soul will be, inasmuch as breath and spirit are its offshoot, since indeed by the very fineness of its subtlety it is endangered as regards the certainty of its corporeity.
So conceive also of its shape, now from your own perception, that no shape is to be assigned to the human soul except the human, and indeed that of the very body which each one has carried about. Let the contemplation of our origin lead us to understand this for the present. For recall that, when God had breathed the breath of life into man's face, and man had become a living soul, the whole man indeed—straightway through the face that breath was transmitted into the inward parts and diffused throughout all the spaces of the body, and at the same time, condensed by the divine inbreathing, it was expressed in every inner line which, being condensed, it had filled, and, as it were, congealed into a shape. Hence, therefore, both the corporeity of the soul was made solid by the condensation, and its shape formed by the impression.
This will be the inner man, another the outer, twofold yet one, that inner one also having its own eyes and ears, by which the people ought to have heard and seen the Lord, having also the other members, by which it both makes use of them in thoughts and functions in dreams. Thus the rich man in the lower world has a tongue, and the poor man a finger, and there is Abraham's bosom. By these outlines the souls of the martyrs also beneath the altar are understood. For from the beginning the soul, formed together and configured with the body in Adam, made it, as of its whole substance, so also the seed of this condition. X. ON THE SIMPLICITY OF THE SUBSTANCE, AND THAT IT IS ITSELF ALSO SPIRIT. It pertains to the state of faith to determine the soul to be simple, according to Plato—that is, uniform—only, however, with respect to the name of substance.
Let the arts and disciplines look to it, let the shapes also look to it. For some wish that another natural substance, the spirit, is inherent in it, as though it were one thing to live, which comes from the soul, and another to breathe, which is done by the spirit. For not all animals have both; for most only live, but do not also breathe, in that they do not have the organs of the spirit, lungs and arteries. But what sort of thing is it, in the examination of the human soul, to look to the arguments of the gnat and the ant, when God the Craftsman has tempered the vital functions proper to all animals according to the disposition of each kind, so that no conjecture is to be seized from thence?
For neither will man, if he is constructed with lungs and arteries, breathe from one source and live from another on that account, nor will the ant, if it lacks members of this kind, on that account be denied to breathe, as though it were merely living. But to whom has it been so open to inspect the works of God, that he might presume these to be lacking to anything? That Herophilus, physician or butcher, who dissected six hundred bodies to scrutinize nature, who hated man in order to know him—I do not know whether he clearly explored all his internal parts, since death itself altered what had been alive, and by a death not simple, but itself erring amid the artifices of dissection. The philosophers have assuredly declared that gnats and ants and moths lack lungs and arteries. Tell me, most curious inspector, do they have eyes for seeing?
And yet they go where they wish, and avoid and seek out what they know by seeing: designate the eyes, mark out the pupils. But moths also gnaw: point out the mandibles, produce the molars. But gnats also make a shrill sound, not blind even in the darkness of hearing: show likewise the trumpet and the lance of that mouth of theirs. Whatever animal, though of a single point in size, must necessarily be nourished by something: exhibit the members for transmitting, digesting, and voiding the food. What then shall we say? If life is sustained through these, these will surely be present in all things that live, even if they are not seen, even if they are not apprehended, because of their smallness. This you would believe the more, if you would recall that God is as great a Craftsman in the least things as in the greatest.
But if you do not think that God's genius can be contained in such minute little bodies, in this way too acknowledge His magnificence, in that He has instructed small animals to live nonetheless without the necessary members, with sight preserved even without eyes, and eating without little teeth, and digestion without bowels; just as certain creatures even move without feet by a flowing impulse, as snakes, and by a rising effort, as worms, and by a foaming creep, as slugs. So then, why do you not think that breathing too takes place without the bellows of lungs and without the pipes of arteries, so that you should embrace as a great argument the notion that spirit is added to the human soul on this ground: that there are things which lack spirit, and that they lack spirit for this reason, that they are not constructed with breathing organs?
Do you think that something lives without spirit, yet do not think it breathes without lungs? What is it, I ask you, to breathe? To drive breath out of oneself, I suppose. What is it to live? Not to drive breath out of oneself, I suppose. For this I shall have to answer, if to breathe is not the same as to live. But it will belong to the dead not to drive breath: therefore it belongs to the living to drive breath. But it belongs also to the one breathing to drive breath: therefore to breathe also belongs to the living. If either could have run its course without the soul, breathing would not have belonged to the soul, but only being moist. But in fact to live is to breathe, and to breathe is to live. Therefore this whole thing, both to breathe and to live, belongs to that to which living also belongs, that is, to the soul. Finally, if you separate the spirit by nature, separate also its operations:
let both act separately in a divided way, the soul apart, the spirit apart; let the soul live without the spirit, let the spirit breathe without the soul; let one abandon bodies, let the other remain, let death and life come together. For if soul and spirit are two, they can be divided, so that by their division—one departing, the other abiding—a concurrence of death and life may occur. But it will by no means occur; therefore they will not be two which cannot be divided, though they could be divided if they had existed as two. "But it is permissible for two things also to be combined." But they will not be combined, if to live is one thing and to breathe another: their operations distinguish the substances.
And how much more firm is it now that you should believe them one, since you allow no distance between them, so that the soul itself is spirit, since to breathe belongs to the very same to which living also belongs? For what, if you should wish that day be reckoned one thing, and light another, which is added to the day, when the day itself is light? Plainly there will be also other kinds of light, as from the service of fires. For there will be also other species of spirit, as from God, as from the devil. So, when soul and spirit are treated of, the soul itself will be spirit, just as the day itself is light. For that very thing is something, through which something is.
XI. But that I should call the soul spirit, the reasoning of the present question compels me, because breathing is ascribed to another substance. While we claim this for the soul, which we acknowledge to be uniform and simple, we must under a certain condition call it spirit, not by the name of a state, but of an act, nor under the title of substance, but of an operation, because it breathes, not because it is properly a spirit. For to blow is also to breathe. So the soul, which we defend as breath by its property, we now pronounce spirit out of necessity; but against Hermogenes, who contends that it is from matter, not from the breath of God, we defend it as breath properly. For he, against the very faith of Scripture, turns breath into spirit, so that—since it is incredible that the Spirit of God should come into transgression and presently into judgement—the soul may rather be believed to be from matter than from the Spirit of God.
For this reason we, both there defend it as breath, not spirit, according to Scripture and according to the distinction of the spirit, and here pronounce it spirit, however reluctantly, according to the community of breathing and blowing. There the question is about substance; for breathing is an act of substance.
Nor need I say more about this, except on account of the heretics, who cram into the soul some spiritual seed, conferred from the hidden bounty of the mother Sophia without the Maker's knowledge, whereas Scripture, more conscious of its own Maker God, has promulgated nothing further than that God breathed into man's face the breath of life, and man was made into a living soul, through which he thereafter both lives and breathes—the difference of spirit and soul being sufficiently declared in the following writings, God Himself pronouncing: "The spirit went forth from Me, and every breath I made." For the soul also is breath made from spirit. And again: "Who gave breath to the people upon the earth, and spirit to those who tread it."
For first the soul, that is, breath, to the people walking on the earth, that is, acting carnally in the flesh; afterwards the spirit to those who tread the earth, that is, who subdue the works of the flesh, because the Apostle also says that not first is that which is spiritual, but that which is animal, afterwards the spiritual. For even though Adam straightway prophesied that great mystery concerning Christ and the church: "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh"—he underwent an accession of the spirit: for an ecstasy fell upon him, the power of the Holy Spirit that works prophecy. For an evil spirit too is an accidental thing.
Finally, just as the Spirit of God afterwards turned Saul into another man, that is, into a prophet, when it was said, "What is this to the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?"—so also the evil spirit afterwards turned him into another man, namely into an apostate. Judas too, for some time reckoned among the elect even to the office of the money-bag, though already a defrauder, yet not yet a betrayer—afterwards the devil entered into him. Therefore, if neither the spirit of God nor of the devil is sown together with the soul from birth, it is established that the soul alone exists before the coming of either spirit; and if alone, then also simple and uniform in respect of the name of substance, and thus breathing from no other source than from the lot of its own substance. XII. ON THE MIND.
Accordingly, by the mind, or whether it is what the Greeks call nous, we understand nothing else than a faculty of the soul, inborn and implanted and proper by birth, whereby it acts, whereby it is wise, which, having it with itself out of itself, it moves with itself within itself; and so it seems to be moved by that faculty as by another substance—as those wish who even decree the mind to be the mover of the universe, that god of Socrates, that Only-begotten of Valentinus, from the father Bythos and the mother Sige. How confused is the opinion of Anaxagoras!
For having devised the mind as the beginning of all things, and hanging the pivot of the universe upon its axle, and affirming it to be pure and simple and unmixable, by this very title above all he sets it apart from any mixture with the soul, and yet elsewhere he declares the same to be the soul. This also Aristotle noted, though I do not know whether he was more ready to fill up his own views than to empty out those of others. Finally, he too, while deferring the definition of the mind, meanwhile pronounced there to be another kind of mind, that divine one, which again, showing it to be impassible, he too took away and removed from fellowship with the soul.
For since it is established that the soul is capable of suffering those things which it has been allotted to suffer, either it will suffer through the mind and with the mind, if it is combined with the mind—then the mind cannot be introduced as impassible—or if the soul suffers neither through the mind nor with the mind, it will not be combined with it, with which and to which it suffers nothing. Furthermore, if the soul suffers nothing through it and with it, then it will neither perceive nor be wise nor be moved through it, as they wish. For Aristotle too makes the senses passions. Why not? For to perceive is also to suffer, because to suffer is to perceive. Likewise to be wise is to perceive, and to be moved is to perceive. Thus the whole is to suffer. But we see the soul experiencing none of these things but that it is reckoned also to the mind, because through it and with it the thing is transacted.
Now therefore the mind is both mixable, against Anaxagoras, and passible, against Aristotle. But if a distinction is admitted, so that in substance the mind and the soul are two things, to the one will belong passion and sensation and all discernment and act and motion, but to the other leisure and rest and torpor and no cause at all—and either the mind will be idle or the soul. But if it is established that all these things are attributed to both, then both will be one, and Democritus will prevail, removing the difference; and it will be asked how both are one—whether from the confusion of two substances, or from the disposition of one. But we say that the mind is so combined with the soul, not as another in substance, but as an office of the substance. XIII.
In addition to this, it remains to consider where the principality lies, that is, what presides over what; so that the one whose principality shall have appeared may be the mass of the substance, but that over which the mass of the substance presides may be reckoned into the natural office of the substance. Indeed, who will not grant to the soul the whole sum, by whose name the mention of the whole man has been entitled? "How many souls do I feed," says the rich man—he does not say "minds"; and the pilot wishes the souls saved, not the minds; and the peasant at his work and the soldier in battle affirms that he stakes his soul, not his mind. Whose perils or vows are more renowned, the mind's or the soul's? And what are the dying said to be doing—their mind or their soul?
Finally, the philosophers themselves and the physicians themselves, however much they are also going to dispute about the mind, nevertheless each one has inscribed the very face of his work and the forehead of his subject-matter as "On the Soul." And that you may learn also from God, God always addresses the soul, He calls upon and summons the soul, that it may turn its mind to Him. It is the soul that Christ came to save; it is the soul He threatens to destroy in Gehenna; it is the soul He forbids to be valued too highly; it is the soul that He, the good Shepherd, also lays down for His sheep. You have the principality of the soul; you have in it also the union of substance, of which understand that the mind is the instrument, not the patron. XIV. Otherwise it is singular and simple and wholly of its own, no more built up from another source than divisible from itself, because it is not even dissoluble.
For if it is built up and dissoluble, it is already not immortal. And so, because it is not mortal, it is neither dissoluble nor divisible. For to be divided is to be dissolved, and to be dissolved is to die. But it is divided into parts—now into two by Plato, now into three by Zeno, now into five by Aristotle, and into six by Panaetius, into seven by Soranus, even into eight in Chrysippus, even into nine in Apollophanes, but also into twelve among certain of the Stoics, and into two more than that in Posidonius, who, beginning from two titles—the principal, which they call hegemonikon, and the rational, which they call logikon—thence carried it on to seventeen; thus one set of species after another divide the soul.
But things of this kind will be held to be not so much parts of the soul as powers and faculties and operations, just as Aristotle also judged concerning certain of them. For they are not members of the animal substance, but capacities: such as the motive, the active, the cogitative, and whatever they distinguish in this manner, as also those five most well-known senses themselves—sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. And although they have assigned to all these certain dwelling-places, individually, in the body, not on that account will this distribution of the soul pertain to sections of the soul, since not even the body itself is so divided into members as those wish the soul to be. On the contrary, from a multitude of members one body is produced, so that this very division is rather a combination.
Behold the most prodigious munificence of Archimedes—I mean the hydraulic organ—so many members, so many parts, so many joints, so many passages for voices, so many contrivances of sounds, so many combinations of modes, so many ranks of pipes, and yet all will be one mass. So too the spirit, which there pants from the pressure of water, will not on that account be separated into parts because it is administered through parts—solid indeed in substance, but divided in operation. This example is not far from Strato and Aenesidemus and Heraclitus; for they too maintain the unity of the soul, which, diffused throughout the whole body and everywhere itself, like breath in a pipe through hollow passages, thus flashes forth through the organs of sense in various ways, not so much cut up as dispensed.
By what titles all these are to be named, and by what divisions arising from itself they are to be held, and by what measurements in the body they are set apart, the physicians together with the philosophers will rather consider; for us a few things will suffice. XV. ON THE RULING PART. First of all, whether there is some highest vital and sapiential degree in the soul, which they call hegemonikon, that is, the principal—because, if it be denied, the whole state of the soul is imperilled. Finally, those who deny the principal have first reckoned the soul itself to be nothing. A certain Messenian, Dicaearchus, and among the physicians Andreas and Asclepiades, thus took away the principal, while they wish the senses to be in the mind itself, to which the principal is vindicated.
Asclepiades is also carried along by that argument, that most animals, when those parts of the body in which the principal is thought chiefly to reside have been removed, still both live to some extent and are wise nonetheless—as flies and wasps and locusts, if you cut off their heads; as goats and tortoises and eels, if you remove their hearts. And therefore, he says, there is no principal, since, if there had been one, once it was lost along with its seats, the vigour of the soul would not persist.
But more philosophers also stand against Dicaearchus—Plato, Strato, Epicurus, Democritus, Empedocles, Socrates, Aristotle—and more physicians against Andreas and Asclepiades—Herophilus, Erasistratus, Diocles, Hippocrates, and Soranus himself—and now more than all of them the Christians, who by God's teaching are led concerning both points, that there is a principal in the soul, and that it is consecrated in a certain recess of the body. For if we read that God is the searcher and inspector of the heart; if His prophet too is proved by discerning the secrets of the heart; if God Himself, considering the heart, forestalls it in the people: "Why do you think evil in your hearts?"; if David also:
"Create in me a clean heart, O God"; and Paul says that with the heart one believes unto righteousness; and John says that each one is reproached by his own heart; if finally he who shall have looked upon a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery in his heart—then both things become clear at once: both that there is a principal in the soul, which the divine intention addresses, that is, the sapiential and vital power (for that which is wise is alive), and that it is held in that treasure-house of the body upon which God looks. So that you should think that this principal is neither agitated from without, according to Heraclitus; nor fanned throughout the whole body, according to Moschion; nor enclosed in the head, according to Plato; nor rather presiding in the crown, according to Xenocrates; nor lodged in the brain, according to Hippocrates; but not either around the base of the brain, as Herophilus holds, nor in the little membranes, as Strato and Erasistratus, nor in the middle of the eyebrows, as Strato the Physicist, nor in the whole cuirass of the breast, as Epicurus; but where both the Egyptians declared, and those who seemed to be commentators on things divine, as also that verse of Orpheus or Empedocles:
"for the blood around the heart in man is his perception." Protagoras too, Apollodorus too, and Chrysippus think these things—so that, refuted even by these, Asclepiades may go seek his goats that bleat without a heart, and drive off his flies that flit about without a head; and let all now know that they themselves rather live without heart and brain who have prejudged the disposition of the human soul from the condition of beasts. XVI. There is also that which pertains to faith, that Plato divides the soul in two ways, into rational and irrational. To which definition we too indeed give our applause, but not so that both should be reckoned to nature. For the rational is to be believed natural, which is inborn in the soul from the beginning, namely from a rational Author.
For what is not rational, which God produced even by His command, much less that which He specifically sent forth by His own inbreathing? But the irrational is to be understood as later, as that which came about from the serpent's instigation—that very admission of transgression—and thereafter grew ingrained and grew up together in the soul after the likeness now of naturalness, because it befell straightway in the first beginning of nature. But since the same Plato calls the rational alone natural, as in the soul of God Himself, if we too ascribe the irrational to nature, which our soul obtained from God, the irrational will equally be of God, inasmuch as it is natural, because God is the Author of nature. But in fact the injection of fault is from the devil, and every fault is irrational;
therefore the irrational is from the devil, from whom fault also comes, being foreign to God, from whom the irrational is alien. Accordingly, the diversity of fault in these things arises from the distinction of their authors. Accordingly, when Plato, setting apart the rational for God alone, subdivides two kinds from the irrational—the irascible, which they call thymikon, and the concupiscible, which they call epithymetikon—so that the former indeed is common to us and to lions, but the latter to us and to flies, while the rational, moreover, is common with God: I see that I must reconsider concerning this too, on account of those things which are found in Christ. For behold, this whole triad exists also in the Lord:
There is also the rational faculty, by which He teaches, by which He discourses, by which He lays out the ways of salvation; and the faculty of indignation, by which He inveighs against the scribes and Pharisees; and the faculty of desire, by which He longs to eat the Passover with His disciples. Therefore among us indignation and desire are not always to be reckoned as springing from the irrational, since we are certain that in the Lord they ran their course rationally. God will be indignant rationally, that is, with those with whom He ought; and God will desire rationally, that is, the things worthy of Himself. For He is indignant at evil and desires the good, namely salvation. The Apostle too grants us desire: 'If any man desires the office of a bishop, he desires a good work'; and in calling it a good work he shows the desire to be rational. He also concedes indignation.
And why not, since he himself took it up? 'Would that they were even cut off,' he says, 'who unsettle you.' Rational too is that indignation which arises from zeal for discipline. But when he says, 'We too were once by nature children of wrath,' he brands the irrational sort of indignation, as being not of that nature which is from God, but of that which the devil introduced—he too being called a lord of his own order: 'You cannot serve two masters'; and he too surnamed a father: 'You are of your father the devil.' Do not be afraid to ascribe to him too a property of another nature, a later and adulterous one, since you read of him as the over-sower of wild oats and the nocturnal corrupter of the crop of grain. XVII. ON THE FIVE SENSES.
There touches upon us also that question of the five senses, which we learn in our first schooling, since from this too the heretics contrive something. There is sight and hearing and smell and taste and touch. The trustworthiness of these the Academics condemn rather harshly; and according to some, so did Heraclitus and Diocles and Empedocles, and certainly Plato in the Timaeus, when he pronounces the faculty of sensation irrational and entangled with mere opinion. And so falsehood is charged against sight, because it asserts that oars in water are bent or broken, contrary to the true knowledge of their soundness; because it persuades us that a square tower at a distance is round; because it slanders a perfectly even portico as narrower at its far end; because it joins the sky, suspended at so great a height, to the sea.
Likewise hearing is accused of deception, as when we take a rumbling for something heavenly and it is a cart; or when, while a thunderstorm threatens, we believe for certain that the sound comes from a cart. So too smell and taste are impeached, seeing that the same perfumes and the same wines are depreciated by later use. So too touch is reproached, seeing that the same pavements are believed rougher to the hands, smoother to the feet; and in the baths the same pool of warm water is reported as scalding at first, then as most temperate. 'To such a degree,' they say, 'are we thus deceived even by the senses, while we change our verdicts.' The Stoics more moderately do not burden every sense, nor at all times, with the charge of lying. The Epicureans more consistently defend a truthfulness equal in all and perpetual, but by another road.
For it is not the sense that lies, they say, but the opinion. For the sense undergoes an impression, it does not form an opinion; it is the soul that forms opinion. They have thus cut off both opinion from sense and sense from soul. But whence comes opinion, if not from sense? In short, unless sight had perceived the tower as round, there would be no opinion of roundness. And whence comes sense, if not from the soul? In short, a body lacking soul will lack sense also. Thus sense is from the soul, and opinion from sense, and the soul is the whole. But it will be far better proposed that there is assuredly something which causes anything to be reported by the senses otherwise than it is in reality. Now if that which is not in reality can be reported, why should it not likewise be possible for something to be reported through that which is not in the senses, but in those causes which intervene under their own name?
And so it will be allowed to review these causes. For that an oar should appear bent or broken in water, the water is the cause; for outside the water the oar is whole to the sight. And the softness of that substance from which a mirror is formed out of light—according as it is struck or moved—thus, by quivering the image, distorts the straight line. Likewise, that the appearance of a tower should deceive, the condition of distance forces it into the open; for the uniformity of the surrounding air, clothing the angles with equal light, obliterates the lines. So too the even shape of a portico is sharpened at its end, while the line of vision, crowded together in the confined space, is there attenuated, even as it is extended. So too the sky is united to the sea where the vision is used up—which, so long as it is strong, keeps them divided. But what else deceives hearing than the resemblance of sounds?
And if afterwards the perfume breathes less, and the wine tastes less, and the pool is less hot, in almost all cases the first force is the whole. As for the rough and the smooth, it is with reason that the hands and feet disagree—the one being tender members, the other calloused. Therefore in this way no deception of the senses will be without a cause. But if causes deceive the senses, and opinions through the senses, then falsehood is to be placed neither in the senses, which follow the causes, nor in the opinions, which are guided by the senses that follow the causes. Those who are mad see one thing for another, as Orestes saw his mother in his sister, and Ajax saw Ulysses in the herd, and Athamas and Agave saw beasts in their children. Will you charge this falsehood upon the eyes, or upon the furies? Those who are jaundiced by an overflow of bile find all things bitter.