On the Soul and Its Origin

Chapter 1: Renatus’s Kindness

Dearest brother Renatus, we already had clear proof of your sincerity toward us, your brotherly kindness, and the affection of our mutual love. Now you have given us still clearer proof by sending me two books written by someone I knew nothing about, though that was no reason to despise him. His name is Vincentius Victor, for that is how I found his name written at the beginning of his work. You sent the books in the summer of last year, but because I was away from home, they did not reach me until the end of autumn.

With your great affection for me, how could you have lacked either the means or the desire to bring writings of this kind to my attention if they came into your hands, whoever wrote them, even if they were addressed to someone else? How much less could you have failed to do so when my own name appeared in them, especially in an argument against words I had published in some short treatises? In doing all this, you have acted just as I knew my sincere and beloved friend would act.

Chapter 2: Receiving Victor’s Criticism

I am somewhat saddened, however, that your Holiness has understood me less well than I would wish. You supposed that I would receive your message as though you had injured me by telling me what someone else had done. You can see how far that feeling is from my mind: I do not complain of having suffered any wrong even from him. When he held views different from mine, was he obliged to remain silent? Surely I should be pleased that he spoke in a way that allowed us to read what he had to say.

I certainly think he should have written directly to me rather than to someone else about me. But because he was unknown to me, he did not venture to approach me personally to refute my words. He thought there was no need to consult me on a matter about which, in his own judgment, he was especially unlikely to be doubted, holding an opinion he considered perfectly well known and certain. Moreover, he was obeying a friend who, he tells us, compelled him to write.

If he expressed anything insulting to me during the controversy, I would rather suppose that he did so because he had to disagree with me than because he wished to treat me rudely. Whenever someone’s attitude toward another person is uncertain and unknown, I think it better to suppose the kinder motive than to find fault with a motive that has not been established. Perhaps he even acted out of love for me. He may have known that what he wrote could reach me and been unwilling for me to remain mistaken on points about which he especially considers himself free from error.

I should therefore be grateful for his kindness, although I must disapprove of his opinion. Where his views are wrong, he seems to me to deserve gentle correction rather than harsh condemnation. This is especially so because, if I have been correctly informed, he has recently become a catholic, something for which he should be congratulated. He has freed himself from the schism and errors of the Donatists, or rather the Rogatists, in which he was previously involved. If he understands catholic truth as he should, we can indeed rejoice at his conversion.

Chapter 3: Eloquence and Its Dangers

He has the eloquence to explain what he thinks. We must deal with him accordingly and hope that he will hold sound views. We must hope that he will not make useless things seem desirable or make whatever he expresses eloquently appear to have been established as true.

Yet his very readiness to speak may leave him much to correct and much excessive wording to prune away. This characteristic has indeed offended you, a serious-minded person, as your own writings show. But this fault is either easily corrected or, if frivolous minds delight in it and serious minds put up with it, does no harm to their faith. We already have among us people whose speech is frothy but whose faith is sound.

We need not despair, then, that this quality in him may be moderated and purified, though it could be tolerated even if it remained. His expression may be expanded or restrained until it meets a thoroughly sound standard. This is especially possible because he is said to be young. Diligence may supply what his inexperience lacks, and maturity may digest what raw talkativeness cannot. The troublesome, dangerous, and destructive thing is when folly gains approval because of eloquence, and a poisonous drink is swallowed from a precious cup.

Chapter 4: Created by God, Not from God

I will now point out the chief things to avoid in his controversial argument. He says that the soul was indeed made by God, but that it is not a part of God or of God’s nature. This is entirely true. Yet he refuses to admit that it was made out of nothing and names no other created thing from which it was made. He makes God its author in such a sense that God must be understood to have made it neither from anything nonexistent, that is, from nothing, nor from anything existing apart from God, but from his very self.

He hardly realizes that his thoughts have circled back to the position he thinks he has avoided: that the soul is nothing other than God’s nature. By his reasoning, God himself would have made something from his own nature, using his own very self as the material from which he made it. God’s nature would thus be changeable, and through a change for the worse, God’s very nature would incur condemnation from God himself!

You can readily see how unworthy all this is of your intelligent faith, how foreign to a catholic heart, and how carefully it must be avoided. Whether the soul is made from the breath or God’s breath is made into the soul, it was created by him out of nothing, not out of himself.

This is unlike the case of a human being breathing. A person cannot produce a breath out of nothing, but returns to the air the breath inhaled from it. We might suppose something similar of God: that air surrounded him, that he drew some of it in by inhaling and sent it out again by exhaling when he breathed into the human face and so formed a soul. If that were the process, what he breathed out would have come from the surrounding air, not from his very self.

But far be it from us to say that the Almighty could not have made out of nothing the breath of life by which the human being might become a living soul. We must not force ourselves into such a difficulty that we must either think something already existed apart from God, from which he formed the breath, or suppose that he formed from himself something we see to be subject to change.

Whatever comes out of his own being must necessarily share his nature and therefore be unchangeable. But the soul, as everyone agrees, is changeable. It therefore does not come out of his being, because it is not unchangeable as he is. If, however, it was not made from anything else, it was undoubtedly made out of nothing, but by God himself.

Chapter 5: Is the Soul a Body?

As for his contention “that the soul is not spirit, but body,” what else can he mean to establish except that we consist, not of soul and body, but of two or even three bodies? He says that we consist of spirit, soul, and body, and asserts that all three are bodies. It follows that he thinks we are made up of three bodies.

I think the absurdity of this conclusion needs to be demonstrated to him rather than to you. Still, this is not an intolerable error in someone who has not yet discovered that something can exist which, though not bodily, can nevertheless bear some resemblance to a body.

Chapter 6: How Could the Soul Deserve Defilement?

But what he says in his second book is plainly intolerable. There he tries to solve a very difficult question about original sin: how it belongs to both body and soul if the soul is not transmitted from the parents but is breathed afresh by God into a human being. Struggling to explain this difficult and profound point, he expresses his view as follows: “Through the flesh the soul fitly recovers its primitive condition, which it seemed to have gradually lost through the flesh, in order that it may begin to be regenerated by the very flesh by which it had deserved to be polluted.”

You see how this man, daring to undertake something beyond his powers, has fallen over such a precipice that he says the soul deserved to be defiled by the body. Yet he could not explain how the soul had incurred this desert before it took on flesh. If it first acquired its desert of sin from the flesh, let him tell us, if he can, how, before sin, it deserved to be contaminated by the flesh.

This desert, which sent the soul into sinful flesh to be polluted by it, must have come either from the soul itself or, much more offensively to our minds, from God. Before being clothed in flesh, the soul certainly could not have received from that flesh the guilt for which it was sent into flesh to be defiled by it. If it acquired that guilt from itself, how did it do so, seeing that it committed no sin before taking on flesh? But if anyone alleges that the guilt came from God, who could listen to such blasphemy? Who could endure it? Who could allow it to be alleged without challenge?

Remember, the question here is not what guilt condemned the soul after it became embodied. The question is what guilt it had before entering the flesh, for which it was condemned to be clothed in flesh and thereby polluted. Let him explain this to us, if he can, since he has dared to say that the soul deserved to be defiled by the flesh.

Chapter 7: Foreknowledge Does Not Cause Sin

Elsewhere, when he brings forward for explanation the same question in which he has entangled himself, he speaks in the voice of certain objectors: “Why, they ask, did God inflict upon the soul so unjust a punishment as to be willing to relegate it into a body, when, by reason of its association with the flesh, that begins to be sinful which could not have been sinful?”

Surely, amid the reefs of such a question, he should have guarded against shipwreck. He should not have ventured into dangers he could not hope to pass through safely, where his only chance of safety lay in turning back, that is, in repentance. He tries to free himself by appealing to God’s foreknowledge, but without success. God’s foreknowledge only identifies beforehand the sinners he intends to heal. For if God frees from sin souls that he himself involved in sin when they were innocent and pure, he would be healing a wound he had inflicted on us, rather than one he found in us.

May God forbid it! Far be it from us to say that when God cleanses infants’ souls by the washing of regeneration, he corrects evils he himself produced in them by joining their previously sinless souls to sinful flesh, so that they would be contaminated by its original sin. As for the souls this accuser alleges deserved pollution by the flesh, he is quite unable to tell us how they deserved so great an evil before their union with the flesh.

Chapter 8: Deliverance Does Not Explain Guilt

Vainly supposing that he could solve this question through God’s foreknowledge, he continues to flounder and says: “If the soul deserved to be sinful which could not have been sinful, yet neither did it remain in sin, because, as prefigured in Christ, it was not bound to be in sin, even as it was unable to be.”

What can he mean by “which could not have been sinful” or “was unable to be in sin” except, I suppose, that it could not have been sinful if it had not entered the flesh? For if the soul is not transmitted from the parent, it could not have been sinful through original sin, or involved in original sin at all, except through the flesh.

We see, then, that it is freed from sin through grace, but we do not see how it deserved to become involved in sin. What does he mean by these words: “If the soul deserved to be sinful, yet neither did it remain in sin”? If I asked him why it did not remain in sin, he would quite properly answer, “Because the grace of Christ delivered it from sin.” Since he tells us how an infant’s soul came to be freed from its sinfulness, let him also tell us how it came to deserve to be sinful.