which she experiences in the Spirit by ecstatic vision amidst the sacred rites of the Lord's day in the church: she converses with angels, and sometimes even with the Lord; she both sees and hears mysterious communications;^ some men's hearts she understands, and to them who are in need she distributes reme- dies. Whether it be in the reading of Scrip- tures, or in the chanting of psalms, or in the preaching of sermons, or in the offering up of prayers, in all these religious services matter and opportunity are afforded to her of seeing visions. It may possibly have happened to us, whilst this sister of ours was rapt in the Spirit, that we had discoursed in some ineffa- ble way about the soul. After the people are dismissed at the conclusion of the sacred ser- vices, she is in the regular habit of reporting to us whatever things she may have seen in vis- ion (for all her communications are examined with the most scrupulous care, in order that their truth may be probed). " Amongst other things," says she, "there has been shown to me a soul in bodily shape, and a spirit has been in the habit of appearing to me; not, however, a void and empty illusion, but such \ as would offer itself to be even grasped by the hand, soft and transparent and of an etherial colour, and in form resembling that of a hu- man being in every respect." This was her vision, and for her witness there was God; and the apostle most assuredly foretold that there were to be "spiritual gifts" in the church. 9 Now, can you refuse to believe this, even if indubitable evidence on every point is forthcoming for your conviction? Since, then, the soul is a corporeal substance, no doubt it possesses qualities such as those which we have just mentioned, amongst them the property of colour, which is inherent in every bodily substance. Now what colour would you attribute to the soul but an etheriai transparent one? Not that its substance is actually the ether or air (although this was the opinion of yEnesidemus and Anaximenes, and I suppose of Heraclitus also, as some say of him), nor transparent light (although Heraclides of Pontus held it to be so). " Thunder-stones," '° indeed, are not of igne- ous substance, because they shine with ruddy redness; nor are beryls composed of aqueous matter, because they are of a pure wavy white- ness. How many things also besides these are there which their colour would associate in the same class, but which nature keeps widely apart! Since, however, everything which is very attenuated and transparent ^Sacramenta.
9 I Cor. xii. i-ii. [A key to our author's '" Cerauniis geraiuis.
CHAP.
A TREATISE ON THE SOUL.
bears a strong resemblance to the air, such would be the case with the soul, since in its material nature' it is wind and breath, (or spirit); whence it is that the belief of its cor- poreal quality is endangered, in consequence of the extreme tenuity and subtilty of its essence. Likewise, as regards the figure of the human soul from your own conception, you can well imagine that it is none other than the human form; indeed, none other than the shape of that body which each indi- vidual soul animates and moves about. This we may at once be induced to admit from contemplating man's original formation. For only carefully consider, after God hath breathed upon the face of man the breath of life, and man had consequently become a living soul, surely that breath must have passed through the face at once into the in- terior structure, and have spread itself through- out all the spaces of the body; and as soon as by the divine inspiration it had become con- densed, it must have impressed itself on each internal feature, which the condensation had filled in, and so have been, as it were, con- gealed in shape, (or stereotyped). Hence, by this densifying process, there arose a fix- ing of the soul's corporeity; and by the im- pression its figure was formed and moulded.
This is the inner man, different from the outer, but yet one in the twofold condition.^ It, too, has eyes and ears of its own, by means of which Paul must have heard and seen the Lord;^ it has, moreover all the other members of the body by the help of which it effects all processes of thinking and all activity in dreams. Thus it happens that the rich man in hell has a tongue and poor (Lazarus) a finger and Abraham a bosom. ■* By these features also the souls of the mar- tyrs under the altar are distinguished and known. The soul indeed which in the begin- ning was associated with Adam's body, which grew with its growth and was moulded after its form proved to be the germ both of the entire substance (of the human soul) and of that (part of) creation CHAP. X. THE SIMPLE NATURE OF THE SOUL IS ASSERTED WITH PLATO. THE IDENTITY OF SPIRIT AND SOUL.
It is essential to a firm faith to declare with Plato s that the soul is simple; in other words uniform and uncompounded; simply that is to say in respect of its substance. Never • Tradux.
' Dupliciter unus.
mind men's artificial views and tlieories, and away with the fabrications of heresy!* Some maintain that there is within the soul a natu- ral substance — the spirit — which is different from it:' as if to have life — the function of the soul — were one thing; and to emit breath — the alleged^ function of the spirit — were another thing. Now it is not in all animals that these two functions are found; for there are many which only live but do not breathe in that they do not possess the organs of res- piration— lungs and windpipes.' But of what use is it, in an examination of the soul of man, to borrow proofs from a gnat or an ant, when the great Creator in His divine arrange- ments has allotted to every animal organs of vitality suited to its own disposition and na- ture, so that we ought not to catch at any conjectures from comparisons of this sort? Man, indeed, although organically furnished with lungs and windpipes, will not on that account be proved to breathe by one process, and to live by another;" nor can the ant, although defective in these organs, be on that account said to be without respiration, as if it lived and that was all. For by whom has so clear an insight into the works of God been really attained, as to entitle him to assume that these organic resources are wanting to any living thing? There is that Herophilus, the well-known surgeon, or (as I may almost call him) butcher, who cut up no end of per- sons," in order to investigate the secrets of nature, who ruthlessly handled '= human creat- ures to discover (their form and make): I have my doubts whether he succeeded in clearly exploring all the internal parts of their structure, since death itself changes and dis- turbs the natural functions of life, especially when the death is not a natural one, but such as must cause irregularity and error amidst the very processes of dissection. Philoso- phers have affirmed it to be a certain fact, that gnats, and ants, and moths have no pul- monary or arterial organs. Well, then, tel/ me, you curious and elaborate investigator of these mysteries, have they eyes for seeing withal? But yet they proceed to whatever point they wish, and they both shun and aim at various objects by processes of sight: point out their eyes to me, show me their pupils. Moths also gnaw and eat: demonstrate to me their mandibles, reveal their jaw-teeth. Then, 6 We have here combined two readings, effigies (Oehler's) and koereses (the usual one).
7 A Ham.
8 This is the force of the subjunctive yfa/.
9 Arterias.
'o Aliunde spirabit, aliunde vivet. " In the nature of man, life and breath are inseparable-" 6p. Kaye, p. 184. " Sexcentos >2 Odit.
igo A TREATISE ON THE SOUL.
[chap. XI.
again, gnats hum and buzz, nor even in the dark are they unable to find their way to our ears:' point out to me, then, not only the noisy cube, but the stinging lance of that mouth of theirs. Take any living thing what- ever, be it the tiniest you can find, it must needs be fed and sustained by some food or other: show me, then, their organs for taking into their system, digesting, and ejecting food. What must we say, therefore? If it is by such instruments that life is maintained, these instrumental means must of course exist in all things which are to live, even though they are not apparent to the eye or to the appre- hension by reason of their minuteness. You can more readily believe this, if you remem- ber that God manifests His creative greatness quite as much in small objects as in the very largest. If, however, you suppose that God's wisdom has no capacity for forming such in- finitesimal corpuscles, you can still recognise His greatness, in that He has furnished even to the smallest animals the functions of life, although in the absence of the suitable or- gans,— securing to them the power of sight, even without eyes; of eating, even without teeth; and of digestion, even without stomachs. Some animals also have the ability to move forward without feet, as serpents, by a gliding motion; or as worms, by Vertical efforts; or as snails and slugs, by their slimy crawl. Why should you not then believe that respira- tion likewise may be effected without the bel- lows of the lungs, and without arterial canals? You would thus supply yourself with a strong proof that the spirit or breath is an adjunct of the human soul, for the very reason that some creatures lack breath, and that they lack it because they are not furnished with organs of respiration. You think it possible for a thing to live without breath; then why not suppose that a thing might breathe with- out lungs? Pray, tell me, what is it to breathe? I suppose it means to emit breath from yourself. What is it not to live? I suppose it means not to emit breath from yourself. This is the answer which I should have to make, if "to breathe" is not the same thing as " to live." It must, however, be characteristic of a dead man not to respire: to respire, therefore, is the characteristic of a living man. But to respire is likewise the characteristic of a breathing man: therefore also to breathe is the characteristic of a living man. Now, if both one and the other could possibly have been accomplished without the soul, to breathe might not be a function of the soul, but merely to live. But indeed to ' Auriura caeci.
live is to breathe, and to breathe is to live. Therefore this entire process, both of breath- ing and living, belongs to that to which living belongs — that is, to the soul. Well, then, since you separate the spirit (or breath) and the soul, separate their operations also. Let both of them accomplish some act apart from one another — the soul apart, the spirit apart. Let the soul live without the spirit; let the spirit breathe without the soul. Let one of them quit men's bodies, let the other remain; let death and life meet and agree. If indeed the soul and the spirit are two, they may be divided; and thus, by the separation of the one which departs from the one which remains, there would accrue the union and meeting together of life and of death. But such a union never will accrue: therefore they are not two, and they cannot be divided; but di- vided they might have been, if they had been (two). Still two things may surely coalesce in growth. But the two in question never will coalesce, since to live is one thing, and to breathe is another. Substances are distin- guished by their operations. How much firmer ground have you for believing that the soul and the spirit are but one, since you assign to them no difference; so that the soul is itself the spirit, respiration being the func- tion of that of which life also is! But what if you insist on supposing that the day is one thing, and the light, which is incidental to the day, is another thing, whereas day is only the light itself? There must, of course, be also different kinds of light, as (appears) from the ministry of fires. So likewise will there. be different sorts of spirits, according as they emanate from God or from the devil. When- ever, indeed, the question is about soul and spirit, the soul will be (understood to be) itself the spirit, just is the day is the light itself. For a thing is itself identical with that by means of which itself exists.
CHAP. XI. — SPIRIT — A TERM EXPRESSIVE OF AN OPERATION OF THE SOUL, NOT OF ITS NA- TURE. TO BE CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHED FROM THE SPIRIT OF GOD.
But the nature of my present inquiry obliges me to call the soul spirit or breath, because to breathe is ascribed to another substance. We, however, claim this (operation) for the soul, which we acknowledge to be an indivisi- ble simple substance, and therefore we must call it spirit in a definitive sense — not because of its condition, but of its action; not in re- spect of its nature, but of its operation; be- cause it respires, and not because it is spirit CHAP. XII.]
A TREATISE ON THE SOUL.
in any especial sense.' For to blow or breathe is to respire. So that we are driven to de- scribe, by (the term which indicates this respi- ration— that is to say) spirit — the soul which we hold to be, by the propriety of its action, breath. Moreover, we properly and especially insist on calling it breath (or spirit), in oppo- sition to Hermogenes, who derives the soul from matter instead of from the afflatus or breath of God. He, to be sure, goes flatly against the testimony of Scripture, and with this view converts breath into spirit, because he cannot believe that the (creature on which was breathed the) Spirit of God fell into sin, and then into condemnation; and therefore he would conclude that the soul came from matter rather than from the Spirit or breath of God. For this reason, we on our side, even from that passage, maintain the soul to be breath and not the spirit, in the scriptural and distinctive sense of the spirit; and here it is with regret that we apply the term spirit at all in the lower sense, in consequence of the identical action of respiring and breathing. In that passage, the only question is about the natural substance; to respire being an act of nature. I would not tarry a moment longer on this point, were it not for those heretics who introduce into the soul some spiritual germ which passes my comprehension: (they make it to have been) conferred upon the soul by the secret liberality of her mother Sophia ( Wisdoni), without the knowledge of the Crea- tor.^ But (Holy) Scripture, which has a better knowledge of the soul's Maker, or rather God, has told us nothing more than that God breathed on man's face the breath of life, and that man became a living soul, by means of which he was both to live and breathe; at the same time making a sufficiently clear distinc- tion between the spirit and the soul,^ in such passages as the following, wherein God Him- self declares: " My Spirit went forth from me, and I made the breath of each. And the breath of my Spirit became soul." •* And again: "He giveth breath unto the people that are on the earth, and Spirit to them that walk thereon." s First of all there comes the (natural) soul, that is to say, the breath, to the people that are on the earth, — in other words, to those who act carnally in the flesh; then aftenvards comes the Spirit to those who walk thereon, — that is, who subdue the works of the flesh; because the apostle also says, that "that is not first which is spiritual, but ' Proprie " by reason of its nature." 2 See the tract Adz>. PSalentin, c. xxv. in/ra. 3 Compare Adv. Hermog. xxxii. xxxiii.; also Irenaeus, v. 12, 17. [See Vol. I. p. 527, this Series.] ♦ Tertullian's reading of Isa. Ivii. 16. S Isa. xlii. 5.
that which is natural, (or in possession of the natural soul,) and afterward that which is spiritual. ' ' * For, inasmuch as Adam straight- way predicted that "great mystery of Christ and the church," ' when he said, " This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they two shall become one flesh," ^ he experi- enced the influence of the Spirit. For there fell upon him that ecstasy, which is the Holy Ghost's operative virtue of prophecy. And even the evil spirit too is an influence which comes upon a man. Indeed, the Spirit of God not more really "turned Saul into an- other man," 9 that is to say, into a prophet, when "people said one to another. What is this which is come to the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?"'" than did the evil spirit afterwards turn him into another man — in other words, into an"apostate. Judas likewise was for a long time reckoned among the elect (apostles), and was even appointed to the oiifice of their treasurer; he was not yet the traitor, although he was become fraudu- lent; but afterwards the devil entered into him. Consequently, as the spirit neither of God nor of the devil is naturally planted with a man's soul at his birth, this soul must evi- dently exist apart and alone, previous to the accession to it of either spirit: if thus apart and alone, it must also be simple and un- compounded as regards its substance; and therefore it cannot respire from any other cause than from the actual condition of its own substance.
CHAP. XII. — DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MIND AND THE SOUL, AND THE RELATION BE- TWEEN THEM.
In like manner the mind also, or animus, which the Greeks designate N0Y2, is taken by us in no other sense than as indicating that faculty or apparatus " which is inherent and implanted in the soul, and naturally proper to it, whereby it acts, whereby it acquires knowledge, and by the possession of which it is capable of a spontaneity of motion within itself, and of thus appearing to be impelled by the mind, as if it were another substance, as is maintained by those who determine the soul to be the moving principle of the uni- verse '^ — the god of Socrates, Valentinus' " only-begotten " of his father '^ By thus, and " Suggestum.
12 Comp. The Apology, c. xlviii.; August. De Civ. Dei, xiii. 17. 13 Comp. Adv. V*alentin, vii. in/ra.
A TREATISE ON THE SOUL.
[chap. xiii.
his mother Sige. How confused is the opinion of Anaxagoras! For, having imagined the mind to be the initiating principle of all things, and suspending on its axis the balance of the universe; affirming, moreover, that the mind is a simple principle, unmixed, and incapable of admixture, he mainly on this very consid- eration separates it from all amalgamation with the soul; and yet in another passage he actually irfcorporates it with - the soul. This (inconsistency) Aristotle has also observed; but whether he meant his criticism to be con- structive, and to fill up a system of his own, rather than destructive of the principles of others, I am hardly able to decide. As for himself, indeed, although he postpones his definition of the mind, yet he begins by men- tioning, as one of the two natural constituents of the mind,^ that divine principle which he conjectures to be impassible, or incapable of emotion, and thereby removes from all asso- ciation with the soul. For whereas it is evi- dent that the soul is susceptible of those emotions which it falls to it naturally to suffer, it must needs suffer either by the mind or with the mind. Now if the soul is by nature associated with the mind, it is impossible to draw the conclusion that the mind is impassible; or again, if the soul suffers not either by the mind or with the mind, it cannot possibly have a natural association with the mind, with which it suffers nothing, and which suffers nothing itself. Moreover, if the soul suffers nothing by the mind and with the mind, it will experience no sensation, nor will it ac- quire any knowledge, nor will it undergo any emotion through the agency of the mind, as they maintain it will. For Aristotle makes even the senses passions, or states of emotion. And rightly too. For to exercise the senses is to suffer emotion, because to suffer is to feel. In like manner, to acquire knowledge is to exercise the senses; and to undergo emotion is to exercise the senses; and the whole of this is a state of suffering. But we see that the soul experiences nothing of these things, in such a manner as that the mind also is not affected by the emotion, by which, indeed, and with which, all is effected. It follows, therefore, that the mind is capable of admixture, in opposition to Anaxagoras; and passi- ble or susceptible of emotionj contrary to the opinion of Aristotle. Besides, if a separate condition between the soul and mind is to be admitted, so that they be two things in sub- stance, then of one of them, emotion and sen- sation, and every sort of taste, and all action ' Addicit.
» Alteram aoimi genus.
and motion, will be the characteristics; whilst of the other the natural condition will be calm, and repose, and stupor. There is therefore no alternative: either the mind must be use- less and void, or the soul. But if these affec- tions may certainly be all of them ascribed to both, then in that case the two will be one and the same, and Democritus will carry his point when he suppresses all distinction be- tween the two. The question will arise how two can be one — whether by the confusion of two substances, or by the disposition of one? We, however, affirm that the mind coalesces with 3 the soul, — not indeed as being distinct from it in substance, but as being its natural function and agent. •♦ CHAP. XIII. — THE soul's SUPREMACY.
It next remains to examine where lies the supremacy; in other words, which of the two is superior to the other, so that that with which the supremacy clearly lies shall be the essentially superior substance;s whilst that over which this essentially supei-ior substance shall have authority shall be considered as the natural functionary of the superior substance. Now who will hesitate to ascribe this entire authority to the soul, from the name of which the whole man has received his own designa- tion in common phraseology? How many souls, says the rich man, do I maintain? not how many minds. The pilot's desire, also, is to rescue so many souls from shipwreck, not so many minds; the labourer, too, in his work, and the soldier on the field of battle, affirms that he lays down his soul (or life), not his mind. Which of the two has its perils or its vows and wishes more frequently on men's lips — the mind or the soul? Which of the two are dying persons, said to have to do with the mind or the soul? In short, philosophers themselves, and medical men, even when it is their purpose to discourse about the mind, do in every instance inscribe on their title- page* and table of contents,^ ''' De Anivia'" {'^ A treatise oti the soul"). And that you