On the Soul

Plainly we shall not deny that philosophers have sometimes thought in agreement with us; even the discovery itself is a testimony to truth. Sometimes even in a storm, with the tracks of sky and sea confused, some harbor is struck upon by a fortunate wandering; sometimes even in darkness certain entrances and exits are found by a blind good fortune; but also many things are suggested by nature, as from a common sense with which God has deigned to endow the soul. Philosophy, having seized upon this, inflated it to the glory of its own art, out of zeal—no wonder if I say it thus—for eloquence, trained to construct anything, and persuading more by speaking than by teaching. It imposes forms upon things, now pursuing them, now stripping them; it prejudges uncertain things from certain ones, appeals to examples as though all things were to be compared; it prescribes everything, with properties differing even among similar things; it reserves nothing for divine freedom, and makes its own opinions into laws of nature.

I could bear it if it were itself natural, so as to be proven a sharer in nature by fellowship of condition. It seemed indeed to itself to have drawn also from writings which it considers sacred, because antiquity reckoned many of its authors even as gods, let alone as divine men—such as Mercury the Egyptian, to whom Plato especially was accustomed; such as Silenus the Phrygian, to whom Midas, when he was brought by shepherds, lent his great ears; such as Hermotimus, to whom the people of Clazomenae built a temple after his death; such as Orpheus, such as Musaeus, such as Pherecydes, the teacher of Pythagoras.

But what if the philosophers also trespassed upon those things which among us are condemned by the acknowledgment of the apocrypha—we being certain that nothing is to be received which does not accord with the genuine prophetic provision brought forth in its own age—since we also remember the false prophets, and much earlier the apostate spirits, who have furnished every face of the age with the cunning of such ingenuities as well? Finally, even if it is credible that each seeker of wisdom visited the very Prophets themselves in the course of his curious inquiry, yet you will find more diversity among the philosophers than fellowship, since even within their fellowship their diversity is detected. For whatever things are true and consonant with the Prophets, they either commend from another source or subvert toward another end, with the greatest injury to truth, which they cause to appear either aided by falsehoods or defended by them.

This therefore has made us and the philosophers partners in this subject matter especially: that they sometimes clothe common opinions in their own arguments, which are in some places contrary to our rule; and sometimes fortify their own opinions with common arguments, which are in some places agreeable to their rule; so that truth is nearly excluded from philosophy by the benefits conferred upon it, and thus we are pressed on both counts of this partnership adverse to truth—both to free the common opinions from the arguments of the philosophers, and to separate the common arguments from their opinions, recalling the questions to the writings of God, except plainly for those things which it will be permissible to take up without the snare of any prejudice, as simple testimony: because even from rivals testimony is sometimes necessary, if it does not benefit the rivals.

Nor am I unaware how great is the forest of this subject matter among the philosophers, in proportion also to the number of their commentators—how many varieties of opinions, how many wrestling-grounds of views, how many offshoots of questions, how many entanglements of solutions. But I have also examined medicine, the sister, as they say, of philosophy, which also claims this business for itself, as the discipline to which the account of the soul seems more properly to belong through the care of the body—whence also it greatly contradicts its sister, in that by treating the soul as it were face to face in its own dwelling it knows it better. But let the ambition of each one's excellence see to that. Philosophy has had the freedom of intellect, and medicine the necessity of craft, for extending their treatises on the soul: uncertain things are sought far and wide, presumed things are disputed even more widely.

As great as is the difficulty of proving, so great is the labor of persuading: so that rightly did that obscure Heraclitus, observing the vaster darknesses among those who examine the soul, pronounce in weariness of the questions that no one had found the limits of the soul by traveling every road. But for a Christian, few things suffice for knowledge of this matter: for what is certain is always found in few things; and he is not permitted to seek more than what it is permitted to find; for the Apostle forbids endless questions. Furthermore, it is not permitted to find more than what is learned from God; but what is learned from God is complete.

And would that no heresies had needed to arise, so that those who are approved might be made manifest, and we might have no experience at all with the philosophers concerning the soul either—the philosophers being, so to speak, the patriarchs of the heretics. For indeed the shaking of truth by philosophy was already foreseen by the Apostle at that time. For having experienced at Athens a city full of talk, when he had tasted all the vendors of wisdom and eloquence there, he conceived from that experience that forewarning edict. And so also the account of the soul, through the philosophized doctrines of men mixing water with wine.

Some deny the soul is immortal, others affirm it is more than immortal; some dispute about its substance, others about its form, others about each of its dispositions; these derive its state from one source, those lead its departure elsewhere, according as the prestige of Plato, or the vigor of Zeno, or the tenor of Aristotle, or the stupor of Epicurus, or the gloom of Heraclitus, or the frenzy of Empedocles has persuaded them. Divine teaching erred, I suppose, in rising from Judea rather than from Greece. Christ also erred in sending fishermen rather than sophists to proclaim. If therefore anything in this manner darkens the clear and pure air of truth with the fumes of philosophy, these things must be cleared away by Christians—both by striking down the original, that is philosophical, arguments, and by opposing the heavenly, that is the Lord's, definitions: so that both those things by which pagans are captured by philosophy may be destroyed, and those things by which the faithful are shaken by heresy may be blunted.

One engagement already decided against Hermogenes, as we have prefaced; because we vindicate the soul from the breath of God, not from matter; fortified there also by the unobscurable rule of divine determination: And God, it says, breathed the breath of life into the face of man, and man became a living soul—from the breath of God, that is: concerning this nothing more need be rehearsed. It has its own title and its own heretic. For the rest I shall introduce a beginning from here.

After the definition of origin, the question of state presents itself. For it follows that, having professed the soul to be from the breath of God, we assign a beginning to it. This Plato excludes, wishing the soul to be innate and uncreated; but we teach that it is both born and made, from the constitution of its beginning. Nor have we straightway erred in saying both; because, namely, being born is one thing, being made is another—the former belonging to living creatures. But distinctions, having their own places and times, sometimes also have exchanges of their passive meanings. Thus even a created thing can be said to be generated, in the sense of being brought into existence, since everything that in any way receives being is generated. For even the maker himself can be called the parent of what is made; and so Plato uses the term. Therefore, as regards our faith in the soul as made or born, the opinion of the philosopher has been repelled by the authority of prophecy as well.

Let him summon some Eubulus and Critolaus and Xenocrates, and in this place Aristotle, the friend of Plato. Perhaps they will be marshaled rather to take away the corporeality of the soul, if they have not looked at others on the contrary side—and indeed the greater number who vindicate a body for the soul. And I do not speak only of those who fashion it from manifest corporeal things: as Hipparchus and Heraclitus from fire, as Hippon and Thales from water, as Empedocles and Critias from blood, as Epicurus from atoms—if atoms also form corporeal masses from their union—as Critolaus and his Peripatetics from some fifth substance I know not what, if that too is a body, because it contains bodies; but I also cite the Stoics, who, proclaiming the soul to be spirit, nearly agreeing with us—inasmuch as breath and spirit are closely related to each other—will nonetheless readily persuade that the soul is a body.

For Zeno, defining the soul as a connate spirit, instructs in this manner: That, he says, by whose departure a living being dies, is a body; but by the departure of the connate spirit a living being dies; therefore the connate spirit is a body: but the connate spirit is the soul; therefore the soul is a body. Cleanthes also wishes that the likeness to parents which passes to children corresponds not only in the lineaments of the body but also in the marks of the soul—from the mirror, that is, of character and intellect and affections: and that the soul too is subject to bodily likeness and unlikeness; and therefore the soul is subject to likeness or unlikeness. Likewise, the passions of corporeal and incorporeal things do not communicate with each other.

But the soul suffers together with the body, sharing its pain when it is hurt by blows, wounds, and sores; and the body suffers together with the soul, curdling when the soul is afflicted by care, anguish, and love—through the diminishment of vigor, of which it testifies to shame and fear by blushing and pallor. Therefore the soul is a body, from the communion of corporeal passions. But Chrysippus also lends it a hand, establishing that corporeal things cannot be left at all by incorporeal things, because they are not even touched by them; whence also Lucretius: For nothing but a body can touch or be touched; but when the body is left by the soul, it is affected by death. Therefore the soul is a body, which, unless it were corporeal, would not leave a body.

These things the Platonists confuse by subtlety rather than by truth. Every body, they say, must necessarily be either animate or inanimate. And if it is inanimate, it will be moved from without; but if animate, from within. But the soul will be moved neither from within, as that which is not inanimate; nor from without, as that which itself rather moves the body. Therefore it does not appear to be a body, since it is not moved from any region after the manner of corporeal things. To this we shall first marvel at the incongruity of a definition that appeals to things which do not apply to the soul. For the soul cannot be called an animate body or an inanimate one; since it is itself that which makes a body animate, if it is present, or inanimate, if it is absent from it. Therefore what it makes, it cannot itself be, so as to be called animate or inanimate. For the soul is named by the name of its own substance.

But if that which is the soul cannot be called an animate or inanimate body, how shall it be appealed to under the form of animate and inanimate bodies? Next, if it belongs to a body to be moved from without by something; but we have shown above that the soul is moved also by another when it prophesies, when it rages, as that which is moved from without, as if by another: rightly shall I recognize as a body that which is moved from without by another, according to the proposition of the example. Indeed, if to be moved by another belongs to a body, how much more to move another? But the soul moves the body, and its impulses appear outwardly, on the outside. For from it comes the driving of the feet into walking, and of the hands into touching, and of the eyes into seeing, and of the tongue into speaking, as by the motion of a seal-stamp agitating the surface from within. Whence has the incorporeal soul this power?

Whence does an empty thing propel solid things? But how are the corporeal and intellectual senses seen to be divided in man? The qualities of corporeal things, they say, such as earth and fire, are reported by the corporeal senses, such as touch and sight: but those of incorporeal things are apprehended by the intellectual senses, such as benevolence or malevolence. Therefore it is established that the soul is incorporeal, since its qualities are comprehended not by corporeal but by intellectual senses. Plainly, if I shall not have excluded this step of the definition. For behold, I show that incorporeal things are subject to the corporeal senses: sound to hearing, colour to sight, odour to smell; by the example of which the soul also approaches the body, lest you say that these things are reported through the corporeal senses because they approach corporeal things. Therefore if it is established that incorporeal things too are comprehended by corporeal senses, why may not the soul also, being corporeal, be reported by incorporeal senses? Let the definition certainly be set aside.

Among the more notable arguments will also be this, that they judge every body to be nourished by corporeal things; but the soul, as incorporeal, by incorporeal things, namely by the pursuits of wisdom. But neither will this step stand, with Soranus, a most learned authority in methodical medicine, answering that the soul is nourished also by corporeal things; and indeed, that when it is failing it is very often sustained by food. Why not, since when food is taken away it wholly departs from the body? So also Soranus himself, having commented most fully on the soul in four volumes, and having tested it against all the opinions of the philosophers, vindicates the corporeal substance of the soul, even though he has deprived it of immortality. For it is not given to all to believe what belongs to Christians. As therefore Soranus himself shows by facts that the soul is nourished by corporeal things, so let the philosopher likewise show that it is fed by incorporeal things.

But no one has ever poured honeyed water from the eloquence of Plato into the mouth of one hesitating at the departure of the soul; or stuffed in crumbs from the petty talk of Aristotle. But what will so many and so great souls of rustics and barbarians do, who lack the nourishment of wisdom, yet untaught as they are, abound in prudence, and without academies and Attic porticoes and the prison of Socrates, and finally fasting from philosophy, nevertheless live? For the pursuits of learning do not profit the substance itself of the soul, but its discipline; because they do not make the soul more substantial, but more adorned. It is well, moreover, that the Stoics also affirm that the arts are corporeal. So in this way too the soul is corporeal, if it is believed to be nourished also by the arts. But the extravagant pretension of philosophy is wont for the most part not even to look before its feet: thus Thales into the well.

It is also wont, by not understanding opinions, to suspect a corruption of health: thus Chrysippus to the hellebore. Something of this sort, I think, happened to him when he denied two bodies in one, estranged from the sight and reflection of pregnant women, who daily carry not single bodies, but two and three within the compass of a single womb. There is found also in civil law a certain woman who bore a quintuplet of sons, at once mother of all, parent of a manifold single birth, the prolific mother of a single womb, who, crowded with so many bodies—I had almost said a people—was herself the sixth body. The whole condition of things will testify that bodies destined to proceed from bodies are already there, whence they proceed: that which is from another must necessarily be second; but nothing is from another except while it is being generated; but then there are two.

As regards the philosophers, this is sufficient; because as regards our own authorities, it is more than enough, for whom the corporeality of the soul will shine forth in the very Gospel. The soul of a certain man suffers in the underworld, is punished in flame, and is tormented in its tongue, and from the finger of a more fortunate soul implores the solace of a drop of water. Do you suppose that the departure of that poor man rejoicing and that rich man mourning is a figure? And what is the name of Lazarus there, if the matter is not real? But even if it is to be believed a figure, it will be a testimony of truth. For if the soul had no body, the figure of a soul would not admit the figure of a body: nor would Scripture lie about corporeal members, if they did not exist. But what is that which is transferred to the underworld after the separation from the body? Which is detained? Which is reserved for the day of judgment?

To which also Christ by dying descended? I think, to the souls of the Patriarchs. But for what reason, if there is nothing for the soul beneath the earth? For there is nothing, if it is not a body: for incorporeality is free from every kind of custody, exempt from punishment and from comfort. For that by which it is punished or comforted, that will be a body; I will render a fuller account of this at a more fitting place. Therefore if the soul has received any torment or solace in the prison or lodging-place of the underworld, in the fire, or in the bosom of Abraham, the corporeality of the soul will be proved. For incorporeality suffers nothing, having nothing through which it can suffer: or if it has, that will be a body. For in as much as everything corporeal is capable of suffering, so much is that which is capable of suffering corporeal.

It is otherwise abrupt and absurd to exclude something from the reckoning of corporeal things for this reason, that it does not equal the other corporeal examples; where there are the private distinctions of properties, through which the magnificence of the Creator is marked by the very diversity of his works; so that they are as distinct as they are equal, as friendly as they are also rival. Indeed even the philosophers themselves say that all things consist of contraries, according to the friendship and enmity of Empedocles. Thus therefore even if corporeal things are set over against incorporeal things, they also differ among themselves, so that their difference enlarges their species, not changes their genus: so that they are corporeal, thus many to the glory of God, while they are various; thus various, while they are diverse; while some have different qualities of sense from others; while some have different nourishments from others; while some are invisible, others visible; while some are heavy, others light.

For they say also that for this reason the soul must be declared incorporeal, because, when it departs, the bodies of the dead become heavier, whereas they ought to be lighter, one body's weight being removed, if the soul is a body. What then, says Soranus, if they should deny that the sea is a body, because outside the sea a ship becomes immobile and heavy? How much more powerfully then is the soul a body, which with its most light mobility carries about a body of such great weight afterwards? Moreover the soul is invisible, both by reason of the condition of its body, and by reason of the property of its substance, and also by reason of the nature of those to whom it has fallen by lot to be invisible. The eyes of owls do not know the sun; eagles endure it so as to judge the nobility of their young by the boldness of their pupils: otherwise they will not rear as legitimate the one whom the ray of the sun has turned away.

So there is something invisible to one, not to another, which is not therefore incorporeal because the power does not avail equally. For the sun is a body, since it is fire; but what the eagle confesses, the owl denies; yet not prejudicing the eagle: just so also the body of the soul is invisible perhaps to the flesh, but visible to the spirit: thus John, made to be in the Spirit of God, beholds the souls of the martyrs.

When we assert that the soul has a body of its own quality and of its own kind, this condition of its property has already prejudged from the other accidents of corpulence, either that these are present in that which we have shown to be a body, but also themselves of their own kind, in accordance with the property of the body; or even if they are not present, that it is a property of the soul's body that those things which are present in other bodies are not present in it. And yet we shall not inconsistently profess that the more customary things, and those in every way due to corpulence, are present in the soul also, such as form, such as limit, such as that threefold distinction—I mean length, and breadth, and height—by which philosophers measure bodies. What now of the fact that we also assign a figure to the soul, Plato being unwilling, as though the immortality of the soul were endangered?

For he affirms that everything figured is composite and constructed: but everything composite and constructed is dissoluble: but the soul is immortal: therefore indissoluble, as immortal, and unfigured, as indissoluble. Otherwise composite and constructed, if figured; as though figuring it in another way by intellectual forms, beautiful by justice and the disciplines of philosophy, but deformed by the contrary arts. But we inscribe upon it corporeal lines as well, not only from confidence in its corporeality by estimation, but also from the certainty of grace through revelation. For because we acknowledge spiritual gifts, we have merited to attain prophecy also after John. There is today among us a sister who has been granted the gifts of revelations, which she experiences in the church during the Lord's solemn rites through ecstasy in the spirit; she converses with angels, sometimes also with the Lord, and she sees and hears mysteries, and discerns the hearts of some, and administers remedies to those who desire them.

Now indeed, as the Scriptures are read, or Psalms are sung, or addresses are delivered, or petitions are offered up, so from thence materials are supplied to her visions. Perchance we had been discoursing of something concerning the soul, when that sister was in the spirit. After the solemn rites were concluded and the people dismissed, as is her custom she reported to us what she had seen (for she also arranges her visions most carefully, so that they may also be tested): Among other things, she said, there was shown to me a soul in bodily form, and a spirit appeared, but not of empty and void quality, but such as would even promise to be grasped, tender and luminous and of an airy colour, and in form altogether human. This is the vision, and God is witness, and the Apostle is a fitting guarantor of the gifts of grace that were to be in the Church; you, not even if the matter itself shall have persuaded you in each particular, believe!

For if the soul is a body, it is without doubt among those things which we have professed above. Likewise also the property of colour adheres to every body; what other colour then will you estimate for the soul, than airy and luminous? Not that its very substance is air, even though this seemed so to Aenesidemus and Anaximenes, and I think according to some, also to Heraclitus; nor that it is light, even though this pleased Heraclides of Pontus. For neither is the substance of thunder-stones therefore fiery because they flash with a ruddy glow; nor is the material of beryls therefore watery because they ripple with a filtered brightness. For colour also unites some things while nature separates them! For everything thin and translucent is of the nature of air; this the soul will be, in that it is breath and spirit. Indeed, by reason of the very fineness of its thinness, it is in danger of losing its corporeality.

So also conceive the figure of the soul from your own reflection as none other than the human figure of the soul, and indeed that of the body which each one has carried about. Let the contemplation of our first origin lead us to understand this. Recollect how, when God had breathed into the face of man the breath of life, man became a living soul: that entire breath was at once transmitted inward through the whole spaces of the body, condensed by the divine inspiration, having pressed its way through every inward part which it had filled when condensed, and having solidified into the form of that which it had filled. Hence therefore both the corpulence was made solid by condensation, and the figure was expressed and shaped. This then will be the inner man, different from the outer, yet one with it: having also its own eyes and ears, by which the people heard and saw the Lord; having also the other members, through which it both functions in thought and acts in dreams.

So also the rich man in the underworld has a tongue, and the poor man a finger, and so on with the rest. Through these outlines also the souls of the martyrs are understood beneath the altar. For from the beginning the soul, configured to the body in Adam, made itself the seed of the whole substance and condition of this kind.

And according to the standard of faith, the soul is simple—according to Plato, that is, uniform—under the name of substance. Let the arts and disciplines, and the heresies, look to themselves. For some wish that there is another thing naturally present in it, a spirit; as though to live, which comes from the soul, were one thing; and to breathe, which is effected by the spirit, were another: for not all animals, they say, possess both. For most live only, and do not also breathe, because they lack the organs of breath, lungs and arteries. But what sort of argument is it, in the examination of the human soul, to look to the examples of the gnat and the ant? When God the Artificer has apportioned vital functions to all animals, each according to the arrangement of its kind, so that no conjecture is to be drawn from them.

For neither will a man, because he is furnished with lungs and arteries, therefore breathe from one source and live from another; nor will an ant, because it lacks members of this kind, therefore be denied the power of breathing, as though it merely lives. But who has so penetrated the works of God as to presume that any of these things are absent from any creature? That famous Herophilus, physician or butcher, who dissected six hundred bodies in order to scrutinize nature, who hated man in order to know him—I do not know whether he clearly explored all his inner parts, since death itself was changing what had lived, and not a simple death, but one that wandered amid the very artifices of dissection. The philosophers have declared with certainty that gnats and ants and moths lack lungs and arteries. Tell me, most curious inspector—do they have eyes for seeing? And yet they proceed where they will, and avoid and seek what they know by seeing; point out the eyes, mark the pupils.

But moths also gnaw; show the mandibles, produce the molars. But gnats also make a sound, not blind even in the darkness to ears: show the trumpet and likewise the lance of that mouth. Any animal, though it be of but a single point, must be nourished by something; exhibit the members for transmitting, digesting, and excreting food. What then shall we say? If life is sustained by these things, they will be present in all things that live, even if they are not seen, even if they cannot be grasped on account of their smallness: you would the more readily believe this, if you reflect that God is as great an artificer in small things as in great.

But if you think that such tiny bodies cannot contain the ingenuity of God, even so acknowledge His magnificence in this, that He has equipped small animals to live nonetheless without the necessary members, with sight preserved even without eyes, and eating without teeth, and digestion without channels: just as some also move without feet, by a flowing impulse, as serpents; and by a rising effort, as worms; and by a foaming creep, as slugs. So also why should you not think that breathing occurs without the bellows of lungs and without the tubes of arteries? So that you embrace as a great argument the conclusion that a spirit is added to the human soul because there are things that lack spirit; and that they lack spirit because they are not furnished with respiratory members. Do you think that to live without breathing is something, yet do not think that breathing without lungs is possible? What is breathing, I ask you? To drive breath from oneself, I suppose. What is not living? Not to drive breath from oneself, I suppose.

For this is what I must answer, if breathing is not the same as living. But it will belong to the dead not to drive breath: therefore it belongs to the living to drive breath. But it also belongs to the breathing one to drive breath: therefore breathing too belongs to the living. If both could proceed without the soul, breathing would not belong to the soul, but only living. But in fact to live is to breathe, and to breathe is to live. Therefore this whole matter, both breathing and living, belongs to that to which living belongs, that is, to the soul. Finally, if you separate spirit and soul, separate also their works: let both do something in separation, the soul apart, the spirit apart; let the soul live without the spirit, let the spirit breathe without the soul; let one leave the body, let the other remain, let death and life meet together.

For if there are two, soul and spirit, they can be divided, so that by the departure of one and the remaining of the other, the concurrence of death and life may come about. But this will in no way come about: therefore those things will not be two which cannot be divided; which could be divided, if they had been two. But they may also be two things joined together. But they will not be joined together, if to live is one thing and to breathe another. Works distinguish substances: and how much more firmly now ought you to believe them one, since you grant no distinction between them, so that the soul itself is spirit, since breathing belongs to the same one to whom living belongs! For what if you wished day to have one thing and light, which falls upon the day, to be another? When day itself is light. Plainly there will also be other kinds of light, as from the service of fires.

For there will also be other species of spirit, as from God, as from the devil. So when the soul and spirit are under discussion, the soul itself will be spirit, just as day itself is light. For that by which a thing is what it is, is itself that thing.

But the logic of the present question compels me to call the soul a spirit, because breathing is ascribed to another substance: while we claim this for the soul, which we acknowledge to be uniform and simple, we must call it spirit under a definite condition; not by the name of its state, but of its act; not by the title of substance, but of function; because it breathes, not because it is properly spirit: for to blow is also to breathe. So also the soul, which we defend as breath by its proper nature, we now pronounce spirit by necessity. Otherwise, against Hermogenes, who contends that it comes from matter and not from the breath of God, we properly defend it as breath. For he, against the very testimony of Scripture, turns breath into spirit: so that, since it is incredible that the spirit of God should come into sin and then into judgment, the soul may be believed to come from matter rather than from the spirit of God.

For this reason we there defend it as breath, not spirit, according to Scripture and according to the distinction of spirit: and here we pronounce it spirit against our will, according to the common meaning of breathing and blowing. There the question is about substance: for breathing is an act of substance. Nor would I dwell longer on this, were it not for the heretics, who stuff into the soul some kind of spiritual seed, conferred by the secret generosity of their mother Sophia, unknown to the Maker—whereas Scripture, more aware of its Maker God, has proclaimed nothing more than that God breathed into the face of man the breath of life, and man was made into a living soul, through which he thenceforth both lives and breathes: sufficiently declaring the differences between spirit and soul in the subsequent texts, with 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 upon it. For first the soul, that is breath, to the people walking on the earth, that is, living carnally in the flesh; afterwards the spirit to those who tread upon the earth, that is, who subdue the works of the flesh: because the Apostle also says: Not first that which is spiritual, but that which is animal, afterwards the spiritual. For even if Adam straightway prophesied that great mystery concerning Christ and the Church: This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh; he underwent the coming of the spirit as an accident: for an ecstasy fell upon him, the power of the Holy Spirit, the worker of prophecy. For the evil spirit also is an accidental thing.

Finally, the spirit of God afterwards turned Saul into another man, that is, into a prophet, when it was said: What is this with the son of Cis? Is Saul also among the prophets? Just as the evil spirit afterwards also turned him into another man, namely an apostate. Judas too, for a time reckoned among the elect even to the office of the purse, and though already a thief, not yet however a traitor, was afterwards entered by the devil. Therefore if neither the spirit of God nor the spirit of the devil is conferred upon the soul from birth, it is established that the soul exists alone prior to the coming of either spirit: if alone, then also simple and uniform under the name of substance, and thus breathing from no other source than from the lot of its own substance.

Accordingly, the mind also—whether it be mens, nous, mind among the Greeks—we understand to be nothing other than an innate and implanted endowment of the soul, proper to it from birth, by which it acts, by which it thinks, which it carries with it so as to move itself from itself within itself, and thus appears to be moved by it as by another substance, as those wish who also determine the mind to be the mover of the universe, that god of Socrates, that Monogenes of Valentinus born of the father Bythos and the mother Sige. And yet the opinion of Anaxagoras is confused: for having devised the mind as the beginning of all things, and suspending the oscillation of the universe on its axis, and affirming it to be pure and simple and unmixed, he separates it by this very title above all from mixture with the soul; and yet elsewhere he assigns the same mind to the soul.

Aristotle also noted this, 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 himself, while deferring a definition of the mind, meanwhile pronounced it a different kind of mind—that divine one—and then, hinting again that it is also impassible, took it away, himself also removing it from fellowship with the soul. For since the soul is agreed to be passible in respect of the things it has received, it will either suffer through the mind and together with the mind, if it is joined with the mind (but an impassible mind cannot be introduced); or if the soul will not suffer through the mind nor together with the mind, it will not be joined with that with which it has nothing in common and which suffers nothing. But if the soul will suffer nothing through it and with it, then it will neither feel, nor think, nor be moved through it, as they wish.

For Aristotle also makes sensations passions. And why not? For to feel is also to suffer, because to suffer is to feel. Accordingly to think is also to feel, and to be moved is to feel: so the whole is to suffer. But we see that the soul experiences none of these things without their being attributed to the mind as well, because through it and together with it the soul is transformed. Therefore the mind is also capable of mixture, against Anaxagoras; and passible, against Aristotle. Otherwise, if a distinction is admitted, so that mind and soul are two things in substance, the passion and sensation and all thought and action and motion will belong to one; but idleness and rest and stupor and no further purpose will belong to the other; and either the mind will be idle, or the soul.

But if it is agreed that all these things are attributed to both, then both will be one, and Democritus will prevail, removing the distinction, and it will be asked how both are one—whether by the confusion of two substances, or by the disposition of one. But we say that the mind is so joined to the soul, not as another thing in substance, but as a function of the substance.

It remains to consider this further: where the primacy lies, that is, which presides over which, so that whichever has the primacy may be the substantial mass, and that over which the substantial mass presides may be reckoned the natural function of the substance. Indeed, who would not assign the whole supremacy to the soul, by whose name the mention of the whole man is entitled? How many souls do I feed, says the rich man, not minds; and the helmsman wishes souls safe, not minds; and the farmer at his work, and the soldier in battle, affirm that they lay down their soul, not their mind. Whose are the named dangers or vows—of the mind or of the soul? And what are the dying said to give up—their mind or their soul? The philosophers themselves, and the physicians themselves, though about to dispute concerning the mind as well, have each inscribed the face of the work and the front of the matter under 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. Christ came to save it, He threatens to destroy it in Gehenna, He forbids it to be valued more highly, and He Himself, the good shepherd, lays it down for His sheep. You have the primacy of the soul, you have in it also the union of substance, of which you may understand the mind to be the instrument, not the patron.

It is in every respect singular and simple, and wholly from itself; no more capable of being built up from without than of being divided from within, because it is not dissoluble. For if it can be built up, it can also be dissolved; if it can be dissolved, it is no longer immortal. Therefore, 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. Yet it is divided into parts—now into two by Plato, now into three by Zeno, now into five and six by Panaetius, into seven by Soranus, even into eight according to Chrysippus, even into nine according to Apollophanes, but into ten among certain Stoics, and into two more according to Posidonius, who, starting from two headings—the principal, which they call hegemonikon, ruling faculty, and the rational, which they call logikon, rational faculty—then cut it further into twelve: thus they divide the soul into various species one out of another.

Such things, however, will be held to be not so much parts of the soul as powers and faculties and functions, as Aristotle also judged concerning some of them. For they are not members of the animate substance, but capacities: such as the motive, the active, the cogitative, and whatever distinctions of this kind they draw; as also those five most familiar senses—sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. To all of these, even if they have assigned definite dwelling-places in the body for each, this distribution will not on that account pertain to sections of the soul; since A not even the body itself is divided into members in the way these men wish the soul to be divided. And yet from the multitude of members one body is produced, so that the very division is rather a concretion.

Behold the most wondrous munificence of Archimedes, I mean the hydraulic organ—so many members, so many parts, so many joints, so many pathways of sounds, so many compressions of tones, so many exchanges of modes, so many ranks of pipes—and all will be one mass. So also the breath which there pants from the pressure of the water will not on that account be separated into parts because it is administered through parts, being solid in substance yet 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 through the whole body and everywhere itself, shines forth variously through the sense-organs—as breath in a reed through its hollows—not so much cut apart as distributed. Under what headings all these things are named, and by what divisions from itself they are held apart, and by what stations in the body they are separated, physicians together with philosophers will rather consider; for us a few points will suffice.

First of all, whether there is in the soul some supreme vital and sapient degree, which they call hegemonikon, ruling faculty, that is, the principal—if this be denied, the whole standing of the soul is imperilled. Indeed, those who deny the principal have first of all reckoned the soul itself as nothing. A certain Dicaearchus of Messene, and from among the physicians Andreas and Asclepiades, so removed the principal while wishing the senses themselves to reside in the mind, whose principal is thereby claimed. Asclepiades also rides upon that argument, that very many animals, when those parts of the body in which the principal is most esteemed to reside have been removed, both continue to live for a time and are nonetheless sensible—as flies, wasps, and locusts, if you cut off their heads; as goats, tortoises, and eels, if you remove their hearts: and therefore there is no principal; for if there had been, once it was lost along with its seat, the vigour of the soul would not have persisted.

But more numerous philosophers stand against Dicaearchus—Plato, Strato, Epicurus, Democritus, Empedocles, Socrates, Aristotle; and physicians against Andreas and Asclepiades—Herophilus, Erasistratus, Diocles, Hippocrates, and Soranus himself; and already more numerous than all are the Christians, who are guided by God in both matters, both that there is a principal in the soul, and A the breastplate of the chest as Epicurus holds, but that it is also consecrated in a definite recess of the body. For if we read that God is the searcher and inspector of the heart; if also his prophets are proved by disclosing the hidden things of the heart; if God himself, foreknowing the reconsideration of the heart in the people, anticipated it: Why do you think evil in your hearts?

If also David: Create in me a clean heart, O God; and Paul says that with the heart one believes unto righteousness; and John says that each person is reproved by his own heart; if finally, he who has looked upon a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery in his heart—both things are at once made clear: both that there is a principal in the soul, to which the divine intention has access, that is, the sapient and vital power (for what has wisdom is alive), and that it is held in that treasury of the body toward which God looks: so that you should think neither that this principal is agitated from without according to Heraclitus, nor ventilated through the whole body according Moschion, nor enclosed in the head according to Plato, nor presiding rather in the crown of the head according to Xenocrates, nor lodged in the brain according to Hippocrates; nor near the base of the brain as Herophilus, nor in the membranes as Strato and Erasistratus, nor in the middle of the eyebrows as Strato the Natural Philosopher, nor in the to—the Egyptians declared, and those who seemed to be recorders of divine things, as also that verse of Orpheus or Empedocles: For in man the blood around the heart is understanding.

Also Protagoras, also Apollodorus and Chrysippus hold this view; so that, rebuked even by these, Asclepiades may go seek his goats bleating without a heart, and drive away his flies flitting without a head; and let all now know that they themselves live rather without heart and brain, who have prejudged the constitution of the human soul from the condition of beasts.

There is also that point bearing on the end, that Plato divides the soul in two ways, through the rational and the irrational. To this definition we too indeed give our assent, but not so that both are attributed to nature. For the rational is to be believed natural, as that which is innate in the soul from the beginning, from its rational author, of course. For what is not rational, which God brought forth even by command, let alone that which he sent forth properly by his own breath? The irrational, however, is to be understood as coming later, as that which came about through the instigation of the serpent—that very commission of transgression—and thenceforth grew and matured in the soul after the likeness of what is now natural, because it occurred at once at the very beginning of nature.

Otherwise, since the same Plato says that the rational alone belongs, as it were, to the soul of God himself, if we also ascribe the irrational to the nature which our soul has received from God, the irrational will equally belong to God, inasmuch as it is natural, because God is the author of nature. But indeed the introduction of sin is from the devil; and every sin is irrational: therefore the irrational is from the devil, from whom sin also comes; it is foreign to God, from whom the irrational is alien. Accordingly the diversity of these things comes from the distance of their authors. Accordingly, when Plato, setting apart the rational for God alone, subdivides two kinds from the rational—the indignative, which they call thymikon, spirited faculty, and the concupiscent, which they call epithymetikon, appetitive faculty—so that the former is common to us and to lions, the latter shared with flies, while the rational belongs to God—I see that I must reconsider this also, on account of what is found in Christ.

For behold this whole trinity is in the Lord as well: the rational, by which he teaches, by which he reasons, by which he lays open the ways of salvation; the indignative, by which he inveighs against the Scribes and Pharisees; and the concupiscent, by which he desires to eat the Passover with his disciples. Therefore among us the indignative and the concupiscent are not always to be reckoned as coming from the irrational, since we are certain that in the Lord they proceeded rationally. God will be indignant rationally toward those toward whom he ought to be, and God will desire rationally those things that are worthy of himself. For he will be indignant at evil, and will desire the salvation of the good. The Apostle also grants us concupiscence: If anyone desires the episcopate, he desires a good work; and by calling it a good work, he shows that the concupiscence is rational. He also allows indignation; why not, since he himself felt it? Would that they would even cut themselves off, he says, who are subverting you!

Rational also is the indignation that arises from zeal for discipline. But when he says: We were at one time by nature children of wrath, he censures the irrational indignative, as being not from that nature which is from God, but from that which the devil introduced—himself also called lord of his own order: You cannot serve two masters; and himself also surnamed father: You are of your father the devil—so that you need not fear to ascribe to him also the property of another nature, a later and adulterate one, whom you read of as the night-time sower of tares over the wheat crop and its clandestine corrupter.

The question of those five senses also falls to us—which we learn about in our earliest schooling—since from this quarter too something is furnished to the heretics. There is sight, and hearing, and smell, and taste, and touch. The Academics condemn the reliability of these rather harshly; and according to some, so do Heraclitus, Diocles, and Empedocles; certainly Plato in the Timaeus, pronouncing sensuality irrational and entangled with opinion. And so falsehood is charged against sight, because it asserts that oars in water are bent or broken, against the awareness of their integrity; because it persuades that a square tower looks round from a distance; because it defames a perfectly straight colonnade as narrower at the far end; because it joins the sky, suspended at such a height, to the sea. Likewise hearing is accused of deception: as when we think a heavenly rumbling is a wagon; or when thunder is brewing, we believe for certain that the sound comes from a wagon.

So too smell and taste are arraigned; for the same perfumes and the same wines are depreciated by later use as well. So too touch is criticized; for the same pavements are believed rougher to the hands and smoother to the feet; and in the baths, the same pool of hot water is reported as scalding at first, then as perfectly temperate. So thoroughly, they say, are we deceived by the senses even in this way, when we change our judgments. The Stoics more moderately do not charge every sense, nor always, with falsehood. The Epicureans more consistently defend an equal and perpetual truthfulness for all the senses, but by another route: for it is not the sense that lies, but opinion; for the sense undergoes, it does not opine; for it is the soul that opines. They have cut off opinion from sense, and sense from the soul. But whence comes opinion, if not from sense? For unless sight has perceived the tower as round, there is no opinion of roundness.

And whence comes sense, if not from the soul? For a body lacking a soul will also lack sense. Thus sense too is from the soul, and opinion from sense, and the soul is the whole. But it will be best proposed that there is certainly something which causes things to be reported by the senses otherwise than they are in reality. Now if something can be reported that is not in reality, why could it not equally report through that same means what is not in the senses, but in those reasons which intervene in their own right? And so it will be permissible to examine them. For as a oar appears bent or broken in water, the water is the cause. For outside the water the oar is intact to sight. But the softness of that substance, by which a mirror is made from light, vibrating the image according as it is struck or moved, overturns the line of the straight.

Likewise, that the appearance of a tower should be closed in, the condition of the intervening distance compels it in the open: for the uniformity of the surrounding air, clothing the angles with equal light, obliterates the lines. So too the uniformity of the colonnade is sharpened at the end, while the gaze, compressed in an enclosed space, is there attenuated where it is also extended. So too the sky is joined to the sea where vision is consumed; and as long as it is vigorous, so long does it divide them. What else will deceive hearing, but the similarity of sounds? And if afterwards the perfume breathes less, and the wine tastes less, and the pool is less hot, in nearly all things the first force is the whole. But as for rough and smooth, the hand and foot—tender and calloused members respectively—rightly disagree. In this way, then, no frustration of the senses will be without a cause.

But if causes deceive the senses, and through the senses opinions, then neither is the deception to be located in the senses, which follow causes, nor in the opinions, which are directed by the senses following causes. Those who are mad see some persons as others, as Orestes saw his mother in his sister, and Ajax saw Ulysses in the herd, as Athamas and Agave saw beasts in their sons. Will you reproach the eyes with this falsehood, or the madness? Those who are jaundiced with an overflow of bile find everything bitter. Will you then reproach the taste with transgression, or the illness? All the senses, therefore, are overturned or circumvented for a time, so that they lack the property of deception. Nay, not even to the causes themselves is the charge of deception to be ascribed. For if these things happen by reason, reason does not deserve to be called deception. What must happen thus is not a lie.

And so if the causes themselves are freed from reproach, how much more the senses, before which even the causes freely go! Since from this especially the truth and faithfulness and integrity of the senses is to be vindicated: that they report nothing otherwise than what that reason has ordained which causes things to be reported by the senses otherwise than they are in reality. What are you doing, most impudent Academy? You overturn the whole state of life, you throw into confusion every order of nature, you blind the very providence of God, who has set over all His works—for understanding, inhabiting, managing, and enjoying them—senses that are deceptive and lying. Are not all the conditions of existence supplied through these? Was not through these the second furnishing of the world also added? So many arts, so many talents, so many studies, businesses, duties, transactions, remedies, counsels, consolations, food, cultivation, and all adornment?

They have seasoned the whole flavor of life, since through these senses man alone among all animals is recognized as rational, capable of understanding and of the Academy itself. But Plato, lest he should set any testimony in favor of the senses, therefore even in the Phaedrus, speaking in the person of Socrates, denies that he can know himself, as the Delphic inscription advises; and in the Theaetetus he takes away from himself knowing and perceiving; and in the Phaedrus he defers the judgment of truth until after death—a posthumous judgment, that is; and yet, not yet dead, he was philosophizing.

It is not permitted, it is not permitted to us to call these senses into doubt, lest even in Christ the faith of them be deliberated; lest it be said that He falsely beheld Satan cast down from heaven, or falsely heard the voice of the Father bearing testimony concerning Him; or was deceived when He touched Peter's mother-in-law; or afterwards perceived a different fragrance of the ointment which He accepted for His burial, a different taste of the wine which He consecrated in memory of His blood. For thus Marcion preferred to believe Him a phantom, having disdained the truth of the whole body in Him.

And yet not even in His Apostles was nature mocked. Faithful were both sight and hearing on the mountain; faithful too the taste of that wine—though water before—at the wedding in Galilee; faithful too the touch of Thomas, who thereafter believed. Recite the testimony of John: What we have seen, he says, what we have heard, we have seen with our own eyes, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life. A false testimony indeed, if the sense of eyes, and ears, and hands lies by nature.

I turn to the intellectual part, and how Plato, having commended it to the heretics as separated from bodily things, attained knowledge before death. For he says in the Phaedo: What then regarding the very possession of wisdom? Will the body be an impediment, or not, if one takes it as a companion in inquiry? I mean something like this: does vision or hearing hold any truth for men, or not? Do not even the poets always hum to us that we neither hear anything certain nor see anything? He was of course mindful also of the comic poet Epicharmus: The mind sees, the mind hears; all else is deaf and blind.

And so again, he says that man surpasses in wisdom who is wisest in mind, neither setting before himself vision, nor drawing any such sense to the soul, but using the pure mind itself in reflection, to grasp each thing in its purity, withdrawing as much as possible from eyes and ears, and, as must be said, from the whole body, as disturbing and not permitting the soul to possess truth and wisdom when it communicates with it. We see, therefore, that against the bodily senses another preparation is portended as far more suitable—namely the powers of the soul, working the understanding of that truth whose objects are not present, nor subject to bodily senses, but are far removed from common awareness, in the hidden realm, and in the higher places, and with God Himself.

For Plato wishes there to be certain invisible, incorporeal, supramundane, divine and eternal substances, which he calls Ideas—that is, forms, exemplars, and causes of these natural, manifest things that are subject to bodily senses; and those, he says, are the truths, while these are their images. Do the heretical seeds of the Gnostics and Valentinians not shine through already? For from this they seize upon the distinction between bodily senses and intellectual powers, which they also apply to the parable of the ten virgins: so that the five foolish ones figured the bodily senses—foolish, that is, because easily deceived—while the wise ones expressed the mark of intellectual powers, namely wisdom, because they attain that hidden and supernal truth established in the pleroma, the mysteries of heretical ideas: for such are the aeons and their genealogies.

And so they also divide sense: the intellectual, from their spiritual seed; the sensual, from the animal, because the spiritual can in no way grasp it; and to the former belong invisible things, to the latter visible and lowly and temporal things, which are encountered by sense, established in images. For these reasons, therefore, we have established beforehand that the mind is nothing other than the soul's suggestion and structure; and that the spirit is nothing foreign, other than what the soul itself is through breath. But what God afterwards breathed in, or the devil, is to be reckoned as an addition.

And now, regarding the distinction between the sensual and the intellectual, we admit nothing other than the diversities of things—bodily and spiritual, visible and invisible, public and hidden—in that the former are attributed to sense, the latter to intellect; yet both are reckoned as subject to the soul in obedience, which perceives bodily things through the body just as it understands incorporeal things through the mind, with this preserved: that it also perceives while it understands. For is not perceiving also understanding, and understanding also perceiving? Or what will sense be, if not the understanding of the thing that is perceived? What will understanding be, if not the sense of the thing that is understood? Whence these torments for tormenting simplicity and suspending truth? Who will show me a sense not understanding what it perceives, or an understanding not perceiving what it understands, so as to prove that one can exist without the other?

If bodily things are indeed perceived by sense, and incorporeal things understood by intellect, the kinds of things are diverse, not the domiciles of sense and intellect—that is, not the soul and the mind. For by what are bodily things perceived? If by the mind, then the mind is already sensual as well, not only intellectual: for while it understands, it perceives; because if it does not perceive, neither does it understand. But if bodily things are perceived by the soul, then the power of the soul is already intellectual, not only sensual: for while it perceives, it understands; because if it does not understand, neither does it perceive. Likewise, by what are incorporeal things understood? If by the mind, where will the soul be? If by the soul, where will the mind be? Since when they are apart, they ought to be absent from one another when they operate with their respective functions.

You will think indeed that the mind is absent from the soul, whenever we are so affected in mind that we do not know that we have seen or heard something, because the mind was elsewhere; so much so that I will contend that the soul itself neither saw nor heard, because it was elsewhere with its own power—that is, the mind. For even when a man is demented, the soul is demented, not because the mind has gone abroad, but because it then suffers along with it. But the fall is primarily the soul's. This is confirmed by the fact that when the soul departs, the mind too is not found in the man: thus it follows the soul everywhere, from which it does not even remain behind at the end. But since it follows and is subject, the understanding is subject to the soul just as the mind follows that to which the understanding is subject.

Let the understanding now be even more powerful than sense, and a more powerful knower of mysteries: provided that it too is a proper power of the soul—as sense also is—it matters nothing to me, unless the understanding is preferred to sense for this reason, that from this it may be held as more separate, the more powerful it is affirmed to be. Then after the distinction I must also blunt the preference, which will go so far as to persuade of a more powerful God. But concerning God, we shall contend with the heretics on their own ground. Now the subject is the soul, and the place is for the understanding not to be preferred in a treacherous manner. For even if the things attained by understanding are more excellent—as spiritual things—than those attained by sense—as bodily things—the preference will belong to the things, namely the more sublime over the more lowly, not to understanding over sense.

For how is understanding to be preferred to sense, by which it is informed for the knowledge of truths? For if truths are apprehended through images—that is, if invisible things are known through visible things—since the Apostle also writes to us: For His invisible things from the creation of the world are seen, being understood through the things that are made; and Plato to the heretics: The face of hidden things is that which appears; and it is altogether necessary that this world be a kind of image of some other. It appears that understanding uses sense as its guide, and author, and primary foundation, and cannot attain truths without it: how then will it be more powerful than that through which it exists, which it needs, to which it owes everything it attains? Thus both conclusions are established: neither is understanding to be preferred to sense—for that through which something subsists is inferior to it—nor is it to be separated from sense: for that through which something exists is together with it.

But neither are those to be passed over who deprive the soul of understanding even for a brief span of time. For they likewise prepare the way for afterwards introducing it, as also that of the mind, from which understanding is said to proceed. They hold that infancy is contained by the soul alone, whereby it merely lives, but does not equally understand; because not all things that live also understand: in short, that trees live, yet do not understand, according to Aristotle, and whoever else extends animal substance universally, which among us is the private property of man—not only as the work of God, which the rest also are, but as the breath of God, which this alone is—whom we say is born with all its faculties complete. And if we are challenged with trees, let us embrace the example: for even in them, not yet as saplings, but still as stakes and even now as cuttings, as soon as they spring from the trenches, there is a proper force of soul.

But it lingers in proportion to the time, growing together and maturing along with its own strength, until age fills out the habit by which nature performs its function. Or whence do shoots presently get grafted upon them, and leaves formed, and buds swelled, and little flowers adorned, and juices seasoned; if not all the equipment of the kind lies dormant within them, and grows great as it is advanced through its parts? Therefore they also understand from the same source from which they live, with the property both of living and of understanding, and indeed from their own infancy. For I see even the vine, still tender and unripe, yet already understanding its own work, and wishing to cling to something, to which, once sent and entwined, it may profit; and at last, without waiting for the farmer's instruction, without a reed, without a stake, if it has touched anything, it embraces it of its own accord, and indeed more vigorously from its own nature than from your direction: it hastens to be secure.

I see also ivy, however young you please, immediately striving upward, and, with no guide going before, suspending itself; preferring to be carried upon walls, with a woven canopy of foliage, rather than to be worn down upon the ground, a voluntary injury. On the contrary, those for which the building goes ill—how they draw back as they grow! How they flee! You would perceive the branches directed elsewhere, and understand the animation of the tree from its parting from the wall; it is content with the smallness which it learned from the beginning of the most provident little shrub, fearing even ruin. These wisdoms and knowledges of trees—why should I not contend for them?

Let them live as the philosophers will; let them understand as the philosophers will not; let even the infancy of wood have understanding; how much more that of man, whose soul, like a certain cutting drawn from the stock of Adam into propagation, and committed to the generative recesses of the female with all its equipment, will put forth shoots both in understanding and in sense? I am wrong if the infant, as soon as it has greeted life with a cry, does not by that very act testify that it has felt and understood that it has been born, dedicating at once all its senses there and then—sight to the light, hearing to sound, taste to moisture, smell to air, and touch to earth. Thus that first cry is wrung from the first impulses of the senses and the first impulses of the understanding.

More than this: because of the prospect of a tearful life, some interpret that mournful cry as an augury of misfortunes; whereby the soul should be held as foreknowing from the very entrance of birth, let alone as understanding. Thereafter it also tests its mother by instinct, and examines its nurse by instinct, and recognizes its bearer by instinct, fleeing strange breasts, and refusing unknown beds, and seeking no one except from familiarity. Whence comes to it the judgment of novelty and custom, if it does not understand? Whence also is it both offended and soothed, if it does not comprehend? It is sufficiently wonderful that infancy should be naturally spirited, not having a mind; and naturally affectionate, not having understanding. But Christ, proving praise from the mouth of sucklings and little ones, pronounced neither childhood nor infancy dull: of which the one, coming forward with its testimony, was able to offer witness to him; the other, slaughtered on his behalf, certainly felt the violence.

And here therefore we conclude that all the natural properties of the soul, as its substantial attributes, are present in it, and proceed and advance along with it from the time it is reckoned, as also our Seneca often says: "The seeds of all arts and ages are implanted in us: and God as teacher brings forth talents from their hiding place." From seeds, that is, implanted and hidden through infancy, which are also the seeds of understanding. For from these talents are brought forth. Moreover, as with the seeds of crops there is one form for each kind, yet the developments are various—some come forth in their full state, others respond even better, others degenerate according to the condition of sky and soil, according to the manner of labor and care, according to the occurrence of seasons, according to the license of chances—so also the soul may be allowed to be uniform in seed, multiform in fruit: for here too there is a difference even from places.

It has been reported that at Thebes dull and brutish persons are born; at Athens, those most acute in wisdom and speech; where in the district of Colytus boys speak a month earlier, with a precocious tongue. Indeed even Plato in the Timaeus affirms that Minerva, when she was planning that city, looked to nothing other than the nature of the region, having promised such talents. Whence also he himself, in the Laws, instructs Megillus and Clinias to procure a place for the founding of a city. But Empedocles places the cause of a keen or dull disposition in the quality of the blood; and derives its perfection and progress from learning and discipline. Yet the peculiarities of nations are now a matter of common knowledge. The comic poets mock the Phrygians as cowardly; Sallust assails the Moors as vain and the Dalmatians as fierce; the Cretans as liars even the Apostle brands. Perhaps something may also come from the body and from health: fatness impedes wisdom, leanness facilitates it; paralysis squanders the mind, consumption preserves it.

How much more will those things be reckoned among accidents which, apart from corpulence and vigor, either sharpen or dull! They sharpen: learning, discipline, arts, and experience, business, studies; they dull: ignorance, sloth, idleness, lusts, inexperience, leisure, vices; and beyond these, if there are also other powers that preside. Indeed they do preside—according to us, God the Lord and the devil his rival; but according to the common opinion of providence, fate and necessity, and fortune and the freedom of the will. For these things both the philosophers distinguish, and we have already vowed to discuss them according to the faith under their own proper heading.

It appears how great are the things that have variously disposed the one nature of the soul, so that they are commonly attributed to nature, when they are not species but lots of nature and of one substance; that substance, namely, which God bestowed upon Adam and made the matrix of all: and so they will be lots, not species, of one substance, so that even this moral variety, as great as it now is, was not so great in Adam himself, the first of the race. For all these things ought to have been in him, as in the fountain of nature, and to have flowed thence with all their variety, if the variety had been of nature.

But if the nature of the soul is uniform from the beginning in Adam, before so many talents, then it is not multiform through so many talents; and therefore not threefold either, so that the Valentinian trinity may yet again be struck down, which is not recognized even in Adam. For what was spiritual in him? If it is because he prophesied that great mystery concerning Christ and the Church: This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman; therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh—this came upon him afterwards, when God sent upon him that ecstasy, the spiritual power by which prophecy consists. If also evil appeared in him through the transgression committed, neither is this to be reckoned as natural, since he acted by the instigation of the serpent—as little natural as it is material; because we have already excluded the claim of matter.

But if neither the spiritual nor what is called the material was proper to him; for if the seed of evil had been from matter, it remains that in him there was only and solely the natural, which is reckoned as the animate; which we maintain to be simple and uniform in its constitution. From this plainly there remains the question whether what is called natural ought to be believed capable of change. For the same persons deny that nature is convertible, in order to fix their trinity in its individual properties: because a good tree does not bear bad fruits, nor a bad tree good ones; and no one gathers figs from thorns, or grapes from briars. If then it is so, neither will God be able to raise up children of Abraham from stones, nor to make the offspring of vipers bring forth fruits of repentance; and the Apostle erred in writing: Ye were also sometimes darkness; and: We also were by nature children of wrath; and: Such were some of you, but ye are washed.

But the holy sentences will never be at variance. For a bad tree will not give good fruits, if it be not grafted; and a good tree will give bad ones, if it be not cultivated; and stones will become children of Abraham, if they are formed into the faith of Abraham; and the offspring of vipers will bring forth the fruit of repentance, if they have spat out the venom of malice. This will be the power of divine grace, mightier assuredly than nature, having in us the free power of the will subject to itself, which is called autexousion, self-determination; which, since it is itself also natural and changeable, whithersoever it turns, nature is turned. Now that the autexousion, the self-determining power is naturally in us, we have already shown both to Marcion and to Hermogenes. What now, if the condition of nature must also be so defined that a twofold distinction be drawn—of things born and unborn, made and unmade?

And so that which has been established as born and made, its nature will admit of change: for it will be able both to be reborn and to be remade. But what is unborn and unmade will stand immovable. Since this belongs to God alone, as alone unborn and unmade, and therefore immortal and unconvertible, it is settled that the nature of all other things that are born and made is convertible and changeable; so that even if a trinity were to be ascribed to the soul, it would be attributed to a change of accident, not to an institution of nature.

The other natural properties of the soul Hermogenes has already heard from us, together with their defense and proof, through which it is recognized as belonging to God rather than to matter. Here they will only be named, lest they seem to have been passed over. For we granted to him also freedom of the will, as we wrote above, and dominion over things, and divination at times, setting aside that which comes through the grace of God by prophecy. And so now I shall withdraw from this review of the arrangement, in order to set out its order. We define the soul as born of the breath of God, immortal, corporeal, possessed of form, simple in substance, drawing its experience from itself, variously proceeding, free in will, subject to accidents, changeable through talents, rational, dominant, endowed with divination, flowing from one. It follows now that we consider how it flows from one—that is, whence, and when, and by what means it is derived.

Some believe that they have descended from the heavens, with such conviction as they also promise without doubt that they will return thither; as Saturninus, the disciple of Menander the Simonian, introduced, affirming that man was made by angels, and that at first the work was futile and weak and unstable, and had palpitated on the earth like a worm, because the strength to stand was lacking; then, through the mercy of the supreme power, in whose image, though not fully perceived, he had been rashly constructed, he obtained a little spark of life which roused and raised him, and animated him more steadily, and after the departure of life would restore him to his source. But Carpocrates also claims as much for himself from the higher regions, so that his disciples both equate their souls with Christ himself, let alone the Apostles, and when they wish prefer them; souls which they have conceived from a lofty power that despises the mighty principalities of the world.

Apelles, solicited, reports that souls were drawn down from the supracelestial abodes by the fiery angel, the God of Israel and ours, by earthly foods, who thereupon clothed them with sinful flesh. The swarm of Valentinus stuffs the seed of Sophia into the soul, through which they recognize the histories and Milesian tales of their Aeons from the images of visible things. I grieve in good faith that Plato has been made the seasoner of all heretics. For it is his, in the Phaedo, that souls going hence go thither, and from thence hither; likewise in the Timaeus, that the offspring of God, having been delegated the generation of mortals, having received the beginning of the immortal soul, clothed it round with a mortal body: then that this world is the image of some other.

And in order to commend all these things to belief—that the soul had previously dwelt in the higher regions in commerce with ideas together with God, and from thence passes hither, and here reviews what it formerly knew from the archetypes—he elaborated a new argument: matheseis anamneses, learnings are recollections, that is, that learnings are recollections: for souls coming from thence hither forget those things in which they previously were, and then, taught by these visible things, remember them. Since therefore such things are insinuated by Plato by means of an argument of this kind, which the heretics borrow, I shall sufficiently repel the heretics if I demolish the argument of Plato.

First, I will not concede that the soul is capable of forgetfulness, because he has granted it so great a divinity as to make it equal to God: he makes it innate, which alone I could have armed as testimony to full divinity: he adds that it is immortal, incorruptible, incorporeal, because he believed God to be this also, invisible, without form, uniform, principal, rational, intellectual. What more would he proscribe to the soul, if he were to call it God? But we, who append nothing to God, by this very fact weigh the soul as far below God, in that we acknowledge it to be born, and on that account of a more diluted divinity and a more slender felicity; as a breath, not as a spirit; and if immortal, so that this belongs to its divinity, yet capable of suffering, so that this belongs to its nativity: and therefore also capable of going astray from the beginning, and hence also akin to forgetfulness. Enough of this with Hermogenes.

But that soul which, in order that it may rightly be held a god by the equalization of all properties, will be subject to no passion; so neither to forgetfulness, since forgetfulness is as great an injury as memory is a glory of that whose injury it is—memory, I say: which Plato himself called the health of the senses and the intellect, and Cicero called the treasury of all pursuits. Nor will it now be brought into doubt whether so divine a soul could have lost memory; but whether it can recover again what it has lost. For that which ought not to have forgotten, if it has forgotten, I know not whether it has the power to remember. Thus neither alternative will suit the soul—not the Platonic soul. In the second place I will object: you make the soul by nature possessed of those ideas, do you not? Yes, by nature, you say. No one therefore will grant that natural knowledge of natural arts can fall away.

Knowledge of studies may fall away, of doctrines, of disciplines, perhaps also of talents and of affections: these seem to belong to nature, yet are not, because, as we have premised, they depend on accidents—according to places, institutions, bodily constitutions, states of health, ruling powers, and the freedoms of the will. But knowledge of natural things does not fail even in beasts. Plainly a lion will forget its ferocity, overcome by the training of tameness, and with all the display of its mane, will become the darling of some queen Berenice, licking her cheeks with its tongue; its wild habits will leave the beast: the knowledge of natural things will remain. It will not forget its natural foods, its natural remedies, its natural fears; even if the queen offers it fish, even if she offers it cakes, it will desire flesh; even if she has compounded theriac for it when ailing, the lion will seek a monkey: and if no hunting-spear is set before it, it will nonetheless dread a cock.

Likewise also the most forgetful of men perhaps—the knowledge of natural things alone remaining unobliterated, as the only thing remaining—is always mindful of eating when hungry, and when thirsty, and of seeing with the eyes, and hearing with the ears, and smelling with the nostrils, and tasting with the mouth, and touching. These are certainly the senses which he disparages in favour of the intellectual faculties. Why then does the natural knowledge of sensory things remain, while that of intellectual things, which is held to be superior, perishes? From the multitude, he says, of time. Sufficiently exact. For quantity of time will not pertain to that which is said to be innate, and on that account most especially believed to be eternal. For that which is eternal, being born into eternity, admitting neither beginning nor end of time, suffers no measure of time; there is no measure of time, nor does it lie under any change, nor does it depend on the multitude of time.

If time is the cause of forgetfulness, why, when the soul is introduced into the body, does memory slip away, since the soul sustains time from that point—which soul was without doubt before the body, yet not without time? When it has entered the body, does it forget immediately, or somewhat later? If immediately, what will be the measure of time not yet to be reckoned? Infancy, of course. If somewhat later, then the soul, still mindful during the interval before the times of forgetfulness, and what manner of thing is it that it should afterward forget, and afterward again remember? But at whatever time forgetfulness rushes in, how great also will this measure of time be reckoned? The whole course of life, I suppose, is not sufficient to overturn the memory of so great a time before the body. Again Plato shifts the cause to the body. Is it credible that a born substance should extinguish an innate one?

But there are great and many differences among bodies, according to race, according to size, according to habit, according to age, according to health. Will the degrees of forgetfulness therefore also be estimated accordingly? But the soul is uniform: therefore the manifold nature of the body will not be the cause of a uniform effect. Many proofs likewise, according to Plato, have established the divination of the soul, which we have already set forth to Hermogenes. But there is no man who does not at some time feel his own soul to be prophetic, as an augur of omen, or of danger, or of joy. If the body does not obstruct divination, neither, I think, will it hinder memory. In the same body certainly souls both forget and remember. If some condition of the body induces forgetfulness, how will it admit recollection, which is contrary to it? Because even that recollection after forgetfulness is itself a revived memory. What is adverse to the first memory, why does it not also resist the second?

Finally, who would remember more readily than little children, as souls more recent, as not yet submerged in domestic and public cares, as devoted to those very studies alone, whose learning becomes their recollection? Nay, why do we not all remember equally, since we all forget equally, but only Philosophers? Not even all of these. Plato alone, forsooth, in so great a forest of nations, in so great a meadow of wise men, both forgot and remembered the ideas. Therefore if this chief argument holds together in no way, the whole of that which it was fitted to support is equally overthrown—namely, that souls should be believed both innate and conversant in heavenly places, and there acquainted with divine things, and thence brought down, and here recollecting—plainly to furnish occasions to heretics.

Now I will return to the cause of this digression, to explain how souls flow from one, when, and where, and by what means they are taken: concerning which question it matters not whether it arises from a philosopher, or from a heretic, or from the common people.

It makes no difference to the professors of truth from which of its adversaries it comes, especially those so bold as are first these who presume that the soul is not conceived in the womb, nor compacted and produced together with the fashioning of the flesh; but that after the birth has already been expelled, the soul is impressed from without upon the infant not yet alive: that otherwise, the seed sequestered in the female parts from intercourse, and quickened by natural motion, thickens into the substance of flesh alone; that this, when brought forth and steaming from the furnace of the womb, and loosened by heat, like heated iron plunged into cold water, is so struck by the rigour of the air, and catches the vital force, and gives forth vocal sound.

This is the view of the Stoics together with Aenesidemus, and at times of Plato himself, when he says that the soul, being in like manner foreign and external to the womb, is drawn in by the first breath of the newborn infant, just as it is led out by the last exhalation. We shall see whether he fixed this opinion. Nor was Hicesius wanting even among physicians, a transgressor both of nature and of his art. They were ashamed, I think, to establish what women know. But how much more blush-worthy is the outcome, to be refuted by women than to be confirmed by them? For in this matter no one is so fit a teacher, judge, and witness as the sex itself. Answer, O mothers, and you who are pregnant, and you who have given birth; let the barren and the males be silent; the truth of your nature is sought, the testimony of your experience is called upon: whether you feel any vitality in the fetus, distinct from your own?

From which your flanks throb, your sides flutter, the whole compass of the belly is pulsed, the region of the weight shifts everywhere? Whether these movements are your joys, and a sure security, in that you are thus confident that the infant both lives and plays? Whether if its restlessness ceases, you are first seized with fear for it? Whether it already hears within you, when it is startled by a new sound? Whether you also crave certain varieties of food for its sake, and also feel disgust for its sake? Whether you also share ailments with one another? It indeed to such a degree, from bruises of yours, by which it also is marked within through the same members, drawing to itself the injuries of the mother.

If a bruise and redness of blood is a condition of suffering, blood will not exist without a soul: if illness is an access of the soul, illness will not exist without a soul: if nourishment, fasting, growth, diminution, fear, movement, sensation are functions of the soul, that which performs these functions lives. Finally, it ceases to live which ceases to function. Finally also the dead are brought forth; how so, unless the living also are? But who are brought forth dead, unless those who were first alive? Moreover even in the womb itself the infant is slain by necessary cruelty, when lying crosswise at the exit it denies delivery—a matricide, unless it is to die itself.

And so among the instruments of physicians there is also an organon by which the hidden parts are first forced open, of twisted construction, with a ring-knife by which the limbs are cut within, under anxious judgment; with a blunt hook by which the whole deed is extracted by a violent delivery. There is also a bronze spike by which the actual throat-cutting is directed, in blind butchery: they call it embryosphaktes, embryo-slayer, from its office of infant-slaying, plainly the destroyer of a living infant. This Hippocrates had, and Asclepiades, and Erasistratus, and Herophilus the dissector of even greater things, and Soranus himself the milder, being certain that the conceived thing is an animal, and thus having compassion on the most wretched infancy of this kind, so that it is first killed lest it be torn apart alive.

Concerning which necessity of crime I believe Hicesius did not doubt, he who superimposes the soul upon those already born from the stroke of cold air, because even the very word for soul among the Greeks answers to the notion of cooling. Are then Barbarian and Roman peoples animated differently, because they have named the soul something other than psyche, soul? How many nations are reckoned under the most burning sky, scorched even in their colour? Whence comes the soul to those for whom there is no rigour of air? I say nothing of the indoor heat and all the preparation of warmth there necessary for women in labour, whom it is most dangerous to expose to a draught. In the very baths almost the fetus slips out, and immediately the cry is heard. But if the rigour of air is the treasury of the soul, no one ought to have been born outside of Germany, and the Alps, and the Argean mountains.

And yet peoples are more numerous in the eastern and southern climate, and their minds more agile, while all the Sarmatians are torpid even in intellect. For minds too would come forth more knowing from rigours, if souls came forth from cold blasts: for substance goes with force. With these things thus established, we can also reconsider those who, cut from their mother's womb, drew in the air alive, certain sons of Liber and Scipios.

But if anyone, like Plato, thinks likewise that two souls do not come together into one, just as bodies do not, I would have shown him not only two souls heaped together into one, just as also bodies in fetuses, but also many other things joined together with a soul—namely of a demon, and not of one only, as in Socrates himself; but also of a sevenfold spirit, as in the Magdalene; and of a legionary number, as in the Gerasene—whereby a soul may the more readily be joined together with a soul by community of substance, than an evil spirit by diversity of nature. But the same Plato, in the sixth book of the Laws, warning to take care lest the corruption of the seed from some baseness of intercourse should bring a stain upon body and soul, I know not whether he has fallen away from his former opinions more, or from this present one.

For he shows that the soul is introduced from the seed, which he advises to be cared for, not from the first breath of the newborn. Whence, I ask you, do we answer to our parents in likeness of soul also in our natural gifts, according to the testimony of Cleanthes, if we are not derived from the seed of the soul as well? But why also did the ancient astrologers work out the nativity of a man from the beginning of conception, if the soul is not present from that point, to which equally belongs whatever there is of breath?

But all inequality of human opinion extends up to the boundaries of God: I shall now gather my steps into our own lines, so that what I have answered to the Philosophers and Physicians, I may prove to the Christian. Upon your foundation, brother, build up faith: Look upon the living wombs of most holy women, where infants not only already breathe, but even prophesy. Behold, the womb of Rebecca is troubled, and the birth is still far off, and there is no impulse of air. Behold, a double offspring tumults in the places of the mother, and as yet there are nowhere two peoples. Perhaps a portentous wantonness of infancy, contending before living, spirited before being animated, if it had only disturbed the mother by leaping. But when the birth is opened, and the number is examined, and the augury is recognized, I think now not only the souls of the infants are proved, but also their strife.

He who had come first to be born was held back by the one he had forestalled, not yet fully delivered, only born by the hand. And if he himself drank in a soul from the first breath after the Platonic manner, or drew it from the chill of the air in Stoic fashion, what of him who was awaited, who was still held within and was already holding back outside? Not yet breathing, I suppose, he had seized the foot of his brother, still warm from the mother, desiring to have come forth first. O infant both rival, and strong, and long contentious! I believe because living. Look also upon singular conceptions, and indeed more monstrous ones, of a barren woman and a virgin, who by this very fact might have been able to bring forth imperfect offspring through the overturning of nature, since the one was unresponsive to seed, the other untouched.

It would have been fitting, if at all, that those should be born without a soul who had not been duly conceived; but they too live, each in his own womb. Elizabeth exults, John had stirred within; Mary glorifies the Lord, Christ had moved within. The mothers recognize their respective offspring, recognized mutually by those who were certainly living, who were not only souls but also spirits. So also to Jeremiah you read the voice of God: Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee. If God forms in the womb, and breathes from the form of the beginning: And God formed man, and breathed into him the breath of life; but God would not have known man in the womb unless wholly: And before thou camest forth from the womb, I sanctified thee: and the body still dead? By no means whatsoever; for God is of the living, not of the dead.

How then is the living being conceived? Are both substances of body and soul formed together at the same time, or does one of them precede? Nay, we say that both are conceived, and formed, and perfected simultaneously, and likewise brought forth, and that no moment intervenes in conception in which place is arranged. For reconsider from the last things the first: if death is defined as nothing other than the separation of body and soul, then life, which is the contrary of death, will be defined as nothing other than the conjunction of body and soul. If separation happens to both substances simultaneously through death, this ought to have been ordained by the form of conjunction equally befalling both substances through life. Furthermore, we acknowledge life from conception, because we claim the soul from conception. For life begins from that point whence the soul begins: therefore those things are joined together into life at the same time which are separated together into death.

Then if we give primacy to one and secondariness to the other, the times of the seed must also be distinguished according to the order of rank; and when will the seed of the body be placed, when that of the soul? Nay, if the times of the seeds are divided, different materials will also be held, by reason of the distance of times. For even if we shall confess two kinds of seed, corporeal and animate, we nevertheless claim them as undivided, and in this way contemporaneous and of the same moment. Let there be no shame therefore at a necessary interpretation: nature is to be venerated, not blushed at. Lust, not the condition, has defiled intercourse. The excess, not the state, is shameless. Indeed the state is blessed before God: Increase and multiply. But the excess is accursed: adulteries, and fornications, and brothels.

In this solemn office of the sexes therefore, which mingles male and female, in common intercourse I mean, we know that both soul and flesh function together: the soul by desire, the flesh by act; the soul by impulse, the flesh by deed. By the single impulse therefore of both, the whole man being shaken, the seed of the whole man is foamed forth, having from the corporeal substance moisture, from the animate substance warmth. And if soul is a cold name among the Greeks, why does the body grow cold when it is removed? Finally, to risk modesty still more than proof, in that very last heat of pleasure in which the generative fluid is expelled, do we not feel that something also goes out from the soul, and so we grow faint and languid with a loss of light? This will be the animate seed straightway from the distillation of the soul, just as that corporeal fluid is the seed from the refinement of the flesh. Most faithful examples from the beginning.

From clay the flesh in Adam: what else is clay but rich liquid? Thence will be the generative fluid. From the breath of God the soul: what else is the breath of God but a vapour of spirit? Thence will be that which we breathe forth through that fluid. Since therefore in the beginning two diverse and separate things, clay and breath, had compacted one man, both substances now mingled together in one have also mingled their seeds, and from that point have handed down a form for propagating the race; so that now two, though diverse, yet united, flow forth equally, and equally insinuated into their furrow and field, equally cause man to spring up from both substances, in whom again his seed is present according to kind, as has been appointed for every generative condition. Therefore from one man all this abundance of souls is produced, nature of course preserving the edict of God: Increase and multiply.

For even in the very preface of one work: Let us make man, all posterity was proclaimed in the plural: And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea. No wonder; the promise of the harvest is in the seed.

What is that ancient discourse now in the memory of Plato concerning the reciprocal passage of souls, that those departing hence go thither, and come hither again and live, and thereafter departing from life, are again made alive from the dead? Pythagorean, as they will have it, nay even divine, as Albinus judges, or perhaps of Mercury the Egyptian. But no discourse is divine except that of the one God, by which the Prophets, by which the Apostles, by which Christ himself has thundered. Moses is far more ancient even than Saturn by about nine hundred years, let alone his great-grandchildren; certainly far more divine, who set out the course of the human race from the very beginning of the world through individual births by name and time, sufficiently proving the divinity of the work by the divination of the word.

But if the Samian Sophist is the author to Plato of souls in a revolving cycle always renewed from the alternate succession of the dead and the living, certainly that Pythagoras, even if otherwise good, yet in order to construct this opinion, relied not only on a shameful but also on a reckless lie. Learn, you who do not know, and believe with us. He feigns death, hides in an underground place, condemns himself there to a patience of seven years, and meanwhile learns from his mother alone, his confidante and helper, what he was to report concerning those who had died in the meantime, to give credibility to his account; and when he seemed to himself to have sufficiently altered his bodily appearance to produce all the horror of an old corpse, he emerges from the recesses of his deceit as if restored from the underworld. Who would not believe that one had come back to life whom he had believed to have died?

Especially hearing from him things concerning those who had died in the meantime which he could not seem to have been able to know except among the dead; thus is the older account that the living are made from the dead. What then, if it is also the more recent? Neither does truth desire antiquity, nor does falsehood shun novelty. I hold plainly a falsehood, ennobled by antiquity; why not a falsehood, whose testimony also is from falsehood? How shall I believe that Pythagoras does not lie, who lies in order that I may believe? How will he persuade me that he was formerly before Pythagoras Aethalides, and Euphorbus, and Pyrrhus the fisherman, and Hermotimus, in order to persuade me that the living are made from the dead, who has again perjured himself as Pythagoras? For by as much as it would have been more credible that he himself had returned once from himself to life, than so many times as another and another, by so much also did he deceive in harder matters, who had lied in easier ones.

But he recognized the shield of Euphorbus long since consecrated at Delphi, and said it was his own, and proved it from marks unknown to the common people. Look to his underground chamber, and, if you can, believe. For one who devised such a trick, with injury to good health, with the fraud of a life tormented for seven years underground by hunger, idleness, and darkness; for whom the contempt of the sky was worth so much; what rashness would he not have approached? What curiosity would he not have attempted, in order to arrive at the knowledge of that shield? What if he found it in certain more obscure histories? What if he drank in some surviving little breezes of a tradition already faded? What if he learned it by a secret inspection of the temple-keeper bought with a bribe? We know that magic is permitted to explore hidden things through catabolics, and paredri, and pythonic spirits. For did not Pherecydes also, the master of Pythagoras, perhaps divine by these arts, not to say dream?

What if the same demon was in him who also performed the deeds of blood in Euphorbus? Finally, he who had proved himself to be Euphorbus by the argument of the shield, why did he not equally recognize any of the Trojan fellow-soldiers? For they too would have come back to life by now, if the living were made from the dead.

That the dead are made from the living is established, but it does not therefore follow that the living are also made from the dead. For from the beginning, the living came first; whence from the beginning likewise the dead came after, from none other source than from the living. Those had a source from which they might rather arise, provided it was not from the dead; these had no source from which they might more properly be derived, except from the living. If therefore from the beginning the living did not come from the dead, why afterwards from the dead? Had that source, whatever it is, of the origin run dry? Or did the form repent? And how is it preserved in the dead? Not because from the beginning the dead came from the living, does it therefore follow that always from the living? For either the form of the beginning would have persisted on both sides, or it would have changed on both sides.

If it had been necessary that the living should afterwards be made from the dead, it would likewise be necessary also that the dead should not be made from the living. If the principle of institution ought not to be equally binding, contraries are not reformed alternately from contraries in every respect. For we too will oppose the contraries of the born and the unborn, of sight and blindness, of youth and old age, of wisdom and foolishness; and yet it does not therefore follow that the unborn proceeds from the born, because a contrary comes from a contrary; nor that sight returns again from blindness, because blindness befalls from sight; nor that youth revives again from old age, because old age withers from youth; nor that foolishness is blunted anew from wisdom, because wisdom is sharpened from foolishness.

These things Albinus also, fearing for his Plato, subtly seeks to distinguish the kinds of contraries: as if even these were not placed as absolutely among contraries as those which he interprets in support of his master's opinion, I mean life and death; and yet life is not restored from death, because death is brought on from life.

But what shall we answer to the rest? For first, if the living come from the dead, just as the dead come from the living, one altogether and the same number of all would always have remained fixed—namely, that number which first entered into life; for the living came before the dead, then the dead from the living, and again the living from the dead. And since this always proceeds from the same, so always the same number from the same; and no more or fewer would have gone out than returned. But we find, even in the records of human antiquity, that the human race has gradually increased, while original peoples, or wanderers, or exiles, or the ambitious, occupy lands—as the Scythians the Parthian regions, as the Amycleans the Peloponnese, as the Athenians Asia, as the Phrygians Italy, as the Phoenicians Africa—while also the customary migrations, which they call apoikias, colonies, by the design of relieving overpopulation, pour out swarms of a people into other territories.

For the original peoples now remain in their own seats, and elsewhere they have further multiplied their kind. Certainly the world itself is there for all to see, more cultivated day by day, and better furnished than before. Everything is now accessible, everything known, everything busy; the once-famous wildernesses have been blotted out by most pleasant estates; fields have tamed the forests; flocks have driven away wild beasts; sands are sown, rocks are planted, marshes are drained; so many cities now, where once there were not even huts. Now neither islands inspire dread, nor cliffs terror; everywhere a house, everywhere a people, everywhere a commonwealth, everywhere life. The supreme testimony to the density of mankind: we are a burden to the world, the elements scarce suffice us, our needs press harder, and complaints are on every side, while now nature does not sustain us.

Truly, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and the swallowing up of cities, are to be reckoned as a remedy, as a pruning of the overgrown human race; and yet, when such axes have at one stroke cut down the greatest force of mortals, the world has never once, after a thousand years, trembled at a restoration bringing back the living from the dead. And this too would have made itself felt, if the force of loss and restoration were equal, if the living were made from the dead. But why after a thousand years, and not at once, are the living from the dead? Since if what is expended is not immediately replenished, it risks being consumed entirely, the depletion outrunning the restoration, because this provision of life would not have stretched its supplies over a thousand years of time—being far shorter, and therefore more easily extinguished before being rekindled.

Therefore, what would have perished in this manner, if the living came from the dead, since it has not perished, it must not be believed that the living come from the dead.

But now, if the living come from the dead, surely each individual from each individual. Therefore the souls of individual bodies ought to return, each one into each individual body. Moreover, if two or three or even five are taken up at once in a single womb, the living will not be from the dead, because they are not each from each. And in this way too the form of the beginning is made singular, since even now several souls are brought forth from one. Likewise, since souls depart at varying ages, why do they return as one? For all are imbued from infancy. But what manner of thing is it that an old man who has died should return as an infant? If the soul diminishes outwardly by going back in age, how much more should it have returned further advanced after a thousand years? Surely it should have returned at least coeval with its own death, so as to have received again the span of life it had left behind.

But even if the same souls were always revolving, although not also the same forms of bodies, yet they ought at least to bring back with them the former characteristics of their talents, pursuits, and affections; since they would be recklessly held to be the same, lacking those things by which they would be proved to be the same. Whence do you know, you say, whether it does indeed happen thus in secret, but the condition of a thousand years of age destroys the faculty of recollection, because they return unknown to you? But I know that it does not happen thus, since you set Pythagoras and Euphorbus before me. For behold, it is well established that Euphorbus was a martial and warlike soul, even from the very glory of the consecrated shields; but Pythagoras was so sedentary and unwarlike that, avoiding the wars of Greece at that time, he preferred the quiet of Italy, devoted to geometry and astrology and music, alien in pursuit and disposition from Euphorbus.

But also that Pyrrhus was engaged in deceiving fish; Pythagoras on the contrary not even in eating them, abstaining from animals. And Æthalides and Hermotimus had even rushed upon beans among common foods; but Pythagoras handed down to his disciples that they should not even pass through bean-fields. How then are the same souls recovered, which will be proved to be the same neither in talents, nor in habits, nor in diet? And now, out of so great a census of Greece, only four souls are counted. But also why from the census of Greece alone, so that transmigrations of souls and transmigrations of bodies do not arise daily from every nation, from every age and rank, from every sex at last—why does Pythagoras alone recognize himself as one person and then another, and not I also?

Or if it is the privilege of philosophers, and indeed of Greek ones, as though Scythians and Indians do not also philosophize, why does Epicurus remember himself as no one from the past, Chrysippus no one, Zeno no one, not even Plato himself, whom we might perhaps have believed to be Nestor, on account of the honey of his eloquence?

But indeed Empedocles, because he had raved that he was a god, for that reason, I suppose, disdained to recall himself as any one of the heroes: I was a bush and a fish, he says—why not also a gourd, so insipid, and a chameleon, so puffed up? Plainly, as a fish, lest he should rot under any condition of burial, he preferred to be roasted, by hurling himself into Etna. And from that point let the transmigration of bodies be finished in him, like a summer supper after a roast. In like manner therefore we must also contend here against the more monstrous presumption, which revolves beasts from men and men from beasts. Let the bushes look to themselves. It will be permissible to deal with this briefly, lest we be compelled to laugh more than to teach. We say that the human soul can in no way be transferred into beasts. Even if, according to the philosophers, it is composed of elemental substances.

For whether the soul be fire, or water, or blood, or spirit, or air, or light, we ought to reflect that animals of every kind are contrary to each individual species: to fire indeed those which are cold—serpents, lizards, salamanders; and now whatever will be produced from the rival element, namely water, likewise contrary things—surely those which are dry and sapless: thus locusts, papicunculi, chameleons rejoice in dryness. Likewise contrary to blood, those which lack its purple—snails, little worms, and the greater census of fishes. Contrary to spirit, those which do not seem to breathe, lacking lungs and arteries—gnats, ants, moths, and the small creatures of this kind. Likewise contrary to air, those which always live underground and underwater, lacking the breath of it. Know the things rather than the names. Likewise contrary to light, those which are wholly blind, or have eyes only for darkness—moles, bats, owls. This I say to teach from apparent and manifest substances.

But if I were also to grasp the atoms of Epicurus, and to see the numbers of Pythagoras, and to encounter the ideas of Plato, and to seize upon the entelechies of Aristotle, I might perhaps find for these species also animals which I would set in opposition by the name of contrariety. For I contend that, from whatever substance aforesaid the human soul had been constituted, it could not have been reformed into animals so contrary to each substance, and to confer upon them a census from its own transference—animals by which it would be more likely to be excluded and repelled than admitted and received; by reason of this primary contrariety, which brings together the diversity of substantial condition, and then the rest in the consequent order of each nature. For the human soul has also been allotted different abodes, and diet, and equipment, and senses, and affections, and mating, and offspring; likewise talents; then works, joys, weariness, vices, desires, pleasures, states of health, remedies; finally its own modes of life and exits of death.

How therefore shall that soul which clung to the earth, undaunted by no height, no depth, wearied even by the ascent of stairs, choked even by submersion in fish-ponds, thereafter leap through the air in an eagle, or thereafter plunge through the sea in an eel? How likewise, nourished on liberal and delicate and carefully prepared foods, shall it chew—I say not straw, but thorns, and the wild bitterness of leaves, and the dung-heap creatures, even the poisons of worms—if it has passed into a goat, or into a quail: nay even carrion, nay even human flesh, mindful surely of itself in a bear and a lion? So also you will reduce the rest to incongruity, lest we linger over pleading each case individually. Whatever the mode of the human soul itself, whatever its measure, what will it do in animals far larger or far smaller? For it is necessary both that every body be filled by a soul, and that every soul be clothed by a body.

How therefore shall the soul of a man fill an elephant? How likewise shall it be clothed in a gnat? If it is stretched out or contracted to that degree, it will assuredly be in peril. And therefore I add: if it is in no way capable of such transference into animals—not matching them in the dimensions of bodies, nor in the other laws of its own nature—will it then be changed according to the qualities of their kinds, and their life contrary to human life, itself also made contrary to the human through the change? Indeed if it undergoes change by losing what it was, it will not be what it was; and if it will not be what it was, the transmigration of bodies is dissolved—not to be ascribed, that is, to that soul which, if it is changed, will not exist. For transmigration of bodies is spoken of in relation to whatever soul undergoes it while remaining in its own condition.

Therefore if it can neither be changed, lest it not be itself, nor remain in its condition, because it does not admit contraries, I seek still some cause worthy of belief for such a transference. For even if certain men are equated with beasts on account of the qualities of their characters, and talents, and affections—because God also says: Man is made like unto the unreasoning cattle—it does not follow that kites will be made from the rapacious, and dogs from the filthy, and panthers from the harsh, or sheep from the upright, and swallows from the garrulous, and doves from the chaste; as though the same substance of the soul everywhere recovers its own nature in the properties of animals. But substance is one thing, the nature of substance another. For substance is proper to each individual thing, but nature can be common. Take an example. Substance is stone, iron; the hardness of stone and iron is the nature of the substance. Hardness is shared, substance is discordant.

The softness of wool, the softness of feather, produce their natural qualities; they do not produce their substantial ones. So also if a man is called a savage beast or an upright one, it is not the same soul. For even then a likeness of nature is noted, when a dissimilarity of substance is observed. For the very fact that you indicate a man to be like a beast is a confession that the soul is not the same; by saying like, not the very same. So also the divine pronouncement is wise, equating man with cattle in nature, not in substance. Otherwise, God would not have marked man in this way, if he had known him to be cattle in substance.

Also when this dogma is defended under the name of judgment—that human souls, according to their life and merits, obtain the lots of various kinds of animals: those to be slaughtered in slaughterhouses, those to be subdued in servile roles, those to be wearied in labor, those to be defiled among the unclean, and likewise those to be honored, and cherished, and tended, and sought after among the most beautiful, and most upright, and most useful, and most delicate—here too I will speak: If they are changed, those very souls that had deserved will not be reckoned with; the rationale of judgment will be voided if the sense of merits is absent; but the sense of merits will be absent if the condition of souls is altered; and the condition of souls is altered if the same souls do not persist.

Equally, if they do persist for judgment—which even Mercurius of Egypt knew, saying that the soul, having departed from the body, is not poured back into the universal soul, but remains defined, so that it may render account (he says) to the Father of what it did in the body—I wish to review the justice, gravity, majesty, and dignity of divine judgment; if human censure does not preside from a loftier height, I am the more impressed by the honor of both sentences, of punishments and of rewards, more severe in avenging, and more generous in bestowing. What do you suppose will become of the soul of a murderer? Some beast, I believe, destined for the slaughterhouse and the shambles, so that it is slaughtered in like manner, because it too slaughtered; flayed in like manner, because it too stripped others; set out as fodder in like manner, because it too cast to the beasts those whom it slew in forests and trackless places.

If it is thus judged, will not that soul carry away more comfort than punishment?—finding its funeral amid the most precious scarlet, being embalmed with the seasonings of Apicius and Lurco, being brought to the tables of Cicero, being borne out on the gleaming platters of Sulla, its obsequies being a banquet, being devoured by its equals rather than by kites and wolves, so that, buried in a human body and returned to its own kind, it seems to have risen again, exulting against human judgments, if it has experienced them.

For those human judgments tear the assassin apart with various and exquisite beasts, even trained beyond nature, and indeed while he is alive, nay, not easily dying, the end being carefully delayed to the fullness of punishment: but even if the soul has escaped the final sword, lest the body too escape the iron, nonetheless with throat and belly pierced and ribs transfixed, requital for its own crime is exacted; then it is given to the fire, so that even burial is a punishment: otherwise it is simply not permitted. Nor yet is there such care for the pyre that other beasts may find the remains. Certainly neither are the bones spared, nor is indulgence shown to the ashes, which are to be punished by nakedness. So great is the vengeance for homicide among men as is the very nature of the thing avenged. Who would not prefer the justice of the world, which even the Apostle attests is not armed with the sword in vain, which is devout in its savagery on behalf of man?

If we consider also the recompense for other crimes—the gibbets, and the burnings alive, and the sacks, and the hooks, and the cliffs—for whom would it not be advantageous to suffer sentence under Pythagoras and Empedocles? For even those who are to be punished with toils and servitude will be re-embodied into asses and mules—how much will they congratulate themselves on the mills and water-wheels! But let them remember the mines, and the ergastula, and the public works, and the prisons themselves, however idle. Likewise, those who by upright conduct have commended their life to the judge—I ask for their rewards; but instead I find punishments. Surely it is a great reward for the good to be restored to whatever animals? Homer remembers himself as a peacock, in the dream of Ennius; but I would not believe poets even when awake. Even if the peacock is most beautiful, and adorned with whatever color it pleases; yet its feathers are silent, yet its voice is displeasing; and poets prefer nothing so much as to sing.

Homer is therefore condemned into a peacock, not honored. He will rejoice more in the world's recompense, being held the father of the liberal arts, so as to prefer the ornaments of his fame to those of his tail. Come now, let poets pass into peacocks or into swans, if swans at least have a fair voice; what animal will you clothe upon the just man Aeacus, what beast upon the chaste woman Dido? What bird will patience obtain, what flock will holiness, what fish will innocence draw by lot? All things are servants of man, all things subject, all things enslaved. If he is to become any of these, he is diminished. Where then is he to whom, on account of the merits of his life, portraits, statues, and inscriptions, public honors, privileges are repaid? To whom the senate, to whom the people sacrifices with its votes?

O divine judgments after death more mendacious than human ones, contemptible in their punishments, despicable in their rewards, which neither the worst fear nor the best desire; toward which the wicked rather than the holy will hasten: the former, to escape the justice of the world more quickly; the latter, to attain it more slowly? Well do you teach, O philosophers, usefully do you advise, that punishments or rewards after death are lighter; when if any judgment awaits souls, it ought to be believed more weighty in the reckoning of life than in its administration: because nothing is more complete than what is most final; but nothing is more complete than what is most divine.

God therefore will judge more completely, because most finally, through an eternal sentence both of punishment and of refreshment, with souls returning not into beasts but into their own bodies: and this once, and on that day which the Father alone knows, so that by a suspenseful expectation the solicitude of faith may be proved; ever watching for the day, while ever ignorant of it; fearing daily what it hopes for daily.

No opinion of this kind of madness has indeed up to the present day burst forth under a heretical name, which would reshape human souls into beasts. But we have necessarily introduced and excluded this species as well, as one cohering with the foregoing, so that Homer might be refuted in the peacock just as Euphorbus in Pythagoras; and thus, with this metempsychosis or metensomatosis also repelled, that other doctrine might again be struck down which furnished something to the heretics. For Simon the Samaritan, in the Acts of the Apostles the would-be purchaser of the Holy Spirit, after he was condemned by the Spirit himself along with his money to destruction, wept in vain, and turned to the assault upon truth, as if for the consolation of revenge, supported also by the powers of his art, and for the pretense of some virtue redeemed with that same money a certain Helen of Tyre from a place of public lust, a worthy reward for himself in exchange for the Holy Spirit.

And he feigned himself to be the supreme Father, but her to be his first Thought, by which he had conceived the plan for angels and archangels to create the world: that she, having attained this purpose, went forth from the Father and descended into the lower regions; and there, the Father's purpose having been forestalled, she begot angelic powers, ignorant of the Father, the makers of this world; and that she was detained by these through envy, lest, upon her departure, their offspring should seem to belong to another; and that for this reason she was subjected to every indignity, so that, cheapened, she might nowhere be free to depart, and had also descended into human form, as if to be restrained by the bonds of flesh; and thus, rolled through many ages through one and another female guise, she had also been that Helen, most ruinous to Priam, and afterward to the eyes of Stesichorus, whom she had blinded for the reproach of his poem, and then restored to sight for the satisfaction of his praise; and that likewise, migrating from body to body, in her final degradation, she had stood as a prostitute under the title of a cheaper Helen: that she therefore was the lost sheep, for whose sake the supreme Father, namely Simon, descended, and having first recovered and brought her back—I know not on his shoulders or on his loins—thereafter looked to the salvation of men, as if by way of avenging their liberation from those angelic powers; to deceive whom, he himself likewise took on their form, and, counterfeiting a man to men, bore the role of Son in Judaea but of Father in Samaria.

O Helen, laboring among poets and heretics! Then infamous for adultery, now for debauchery! Except that she is more gloriously rescued from Troy than from the brothel: from Troy by a thousand ships, from the brothel perhaps not even by a thousand denarii. Blush, Simon, too slow in seeking, too inconstant in reclaiming. But Menelaus straightway pursues the lost one, straightway reclaims the stolen one, wrests her back by ten years of war, not hiding, not deceiving, not quibbling. I fear that he was rather more of a father, who labored in the recovery of Helen both more vigilantly and more boldly and more persistently.

But metempsychosis has not constructed this fable for you alone. From it also Carpocrates makes use of it, equally a magician, equally a fornicator, though with less of a Helen—why not? Since for the purpose of establishing the overthrow of all divine and human discipline, he has asserted that souls are embodied: for no one, he says, completes this life, unless all things that condemn it are discharged, because nothing is held to be evil by nature but by opinion, and therefore metempsychosis necessarily impends, if in the very first passage of this life satisfaction is not made for all unlawful things: crimes, that is, are assessed as dues of life; otherwise the soul is recalled into a body as many times as it has brought in less, remaining a debtor of sins, until it pays the last farthing, thrust again and again into the prison of the body.

For he bends that entire allegory of the Lord, shining with certain interpretations, to this end: and first it is to be understood simply; for even a pagan man is our adversary, walking the same road of common life. Otherwise, we ought to go out of the world, if it were not permitted to associate with them. To this adversary therefore he commands us to show goodwill of soul: Love your enemies, he says, and pray for those who curse you, lest, provoked by some transaction of business to an injury, he drag you before his judge, and, committed to custody, you be pressed to the repayment of the whole debt. Then if the mention of the adversary is transferred to the devil, from the accompanying observation, you are warned to enter into agreement with him also, which is reckoned from the covenant of faith: for you have covenanted to renounce him, and his pomp, and his angels. It is agreed between you concerning this.

This will be the friendship of observing the pledge, lest you afterward resume any of those things from what you abjured, which you rendered back to him, lest he accuse you before God the judge as a deceiver, as a transgressor of the covenant, as we read of him elsewhere as the accuser of the saints, and from his very name of devil as a delator, and the judge hand you over to the angel of execution, and he consign you to the prison of hell, from which you are not released until even the smallest sin is expiated by the delay of resurrection. What is more fitting than these meanings? What is truer than these interpretations? But in Carpocrates, if the soul is debtor of all crimes, who is to be understood as its enemy and adversary? I believe, the better mind, which has driven it into some innocence, to be thrust again and again into a body, until it is found guilty of nothing of the good life.

This is to understand a good tree from evil fruits, that is, to recognize the doctrine of truth from the most wicked precepts. I expect that heretics of this kind will also attack the example of Elijah, as if represented in John in such a way that the pronouncement of the Lord gives patronage to metempsychosis: Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him. And elsewhere: And if you will hear it, this is Elijah who was to come. Did the Jews then consult John from a Pythagorean opinion: Are you Elijah? And not from the divine proclamation: And behold I will send you Elijah the Tishbite? But indeed their metempsychosis is the recall of a soul that has long since died and been repeated in another body.

But Elijah is to come not from a departure from life but from a translation; nor is he to be restored to a body from which he was not taken; but to be returned to the world from which he was translated; not by a return to life, but by a completion of prophecy; the same both himself, and of his own name and his own person. But how is Elijah John? You have the voice of the angel: And he himself, it says, will go before the people in the power and spirit of Elijah, not in his soul, nor in his flesh. For these substances belong to each man's own self. But spirit and power are conferred from without, from the grace of God. And so they can also be transferred to another by the will of God, as was done of old with the spirit of Moses.

Into these questions we digressed, I think, from the point to which we must now return. We had established that the soul is sown in the very man and with the very man, and that from the beginning there is one seed, just as there is one seed of the flesh for the whole examination of the race, on account of the rival opinions of the philosophers and heretics, and that stale discourse of Plato. Now we weave the order of the treatises that follow from that point. The soul, sown in the womb together with the flesh, receives its sex together with the flesh, so that in the matter of sex neither substance is held responsible apart from the other.

For if the conception of seeds of both substances admitted some interval between them, so that either the flesh or the soul were sown first, it would also be possible to ascribe the property of sex to one substance by reason of the temporal interval between the seeds; so that either the flesh would engrave sex upon the soul, or the soul upon the flesh: since even Apelles—not the painter, but the heretic—placing souls, both male and female, before bodies, as he learned from Philumena, makes the flesh, as the later element, receive its sex from the soul. And those who superimpose the soul upon the flesh after birth, upon flesh already formed, certainly prejudge the sex of the soul as male or female from the flesh. But the undivided seeds of both substances, and their united commingling, undergo the common outcome of sex, along whatever lines that principle of nature, whatever it is, may draw them.

Certainly here too the form of the first beginnings bears witness to itself, since the male is fashioned in the earlier times. For Adam came first; the female somewhat later: for Eve came after. The flesh is unformed, such as it was taken from Adam's side; yet it is already animate, because they acknowledge that portion of Adam to be animate. And the breath of God would have animated it too, if the tradux of flesh, and likewise of soul, from Adam had not passed into her.

Now the sowing, forming, and preparing of man in the womb is modulated by some power serving as minister of the divine will, whatever that principle may be that has been allotted to set it in motion. In pondering this, even superstition fashioned for the Romans the goddess Alemona, for nourishing the fetus in the womb; and Nona and Decima, named by the more anxious mothers; and Partula, who governs birth; and Lucina, who brings the child into the light. We believe these to be offices of God. From that point, therefore, the fetus in the womb is a human being, from the time its form is complete. For even the law of Moses then judges abortion guilty of punishment in kind, when it is already a human matter, when a state of life and death is already reckoned to it, when it is already inscribed in fate, even though it still lives in the mother and shares greatly in the mother's lot.

I will say something also about the times of the soul's birth, so that I may run through the order. The lawful birth is generally at the beginning of the tenth month. Those who reckon numbers, and revere the decimal number as the parent of all the rest, regard it finally as the perfector of human birth. I, for my part, will argue this measure of time from God rather, so that ten months may inaugurate man more fittingly by the Decalogue, that we may be born in as great a number of months as the number of commandments by which we are reborn. But also when birth is complete in the seventh month, more readily than in the eighth, I shall acknowledge the honor of the sabbath, so that from the day on which God's creation was dedicated, God's image in me may sometimes be brought forth. It is granted that birth may hasten and so fittingly fall upon the hebdomad, under the auspices of resurrection and rest and the kingdom.

Therefore the ogdoad does not create us: for then there will be no marriages. The fellowship of flesh and soul we have long since commended from the very commingling of the seeds up to the perfection of the formed body. In like manner now we also defend it from birth, chiefly because they grow together, but by a different principle according to the condition of each kind; the flesh by measure, the soul by capacity; the flesh by habit, the soul by sense. But it must be denied that the soul grows in substance, lest it also be said to decrease in substance, and so be believed destined to fail. But its power, in which the natural endowments are implanted and retained, while the measure of substance in which it was breathed in from the beginning remains intact, is gradually unfolded together with the flesh.

Suppose a fixed weight of gold or silver, still a rough mass; it has a gathered form, and for the time being smaller than what it will be, yet containing within the boundary of its measure the whole of what gold or silver is by nature; then, when the mass is spread out into a sheet, it becomes greater than its beginning, through the spreading out of a fixed weight, not through addition; while it is extended, not while it is increased. Even if it is also increased in this way while it is extended; for it is permitted to grow in form, though not in state. Then also the very splendor of the gold or silver advances, which was indeed present even in the mass, but more obscure, yet not absent; then also various other forms come about according to the workability of the material, as he who works it leads it, conferring nothing upon the measure but shape. So also the growths of the soul are to be reckoned not as substantial but as progressive.

Although we have already established beforehand that all the natural properties of the soul belong to the substance itself, pertaining to sense and intellect, and proceed from the innate endowment of the soul, yet gradually through the intervals of age, and emerge variously through accidents, according to arts, according to institutions, according to places, according to the ruling powers; yet what bears upon the proposed fellowship of flesh and soul, we say that the soul's puberty also coincides with that of the flesh, and that both the one rises through the prompting of the senses and the other through the development of the members, from about the fourteenth year: not because Asclepiades reckons wisdom from that point, nor because the civil laws adapt the conduct of affairs from that age; but because this too is a principle from the beginning. For if Adam and Eve, from the knowledge of good and evil, perceived that they must cover their shameful parts, from the time we perceive this same thing, we profess the knowledge of good and evil.

From these years, moreover, the sex is more suffused with color and more clothed, and desire employs the eyes as arbiters, and communicates its pleasure, and understands what things are, and girds its own boundaries with the itch of the fig-tree's contagion, and leads man out of the paradise of integrity, thenceforth scabrous also into other faults, and into sins not natural, since now they proceed not from the institution of nature but from vice. But the properly natural desire is single, that of food alone, which God conferred even in the beginning: From every tree, he said, you shall eat; and to the second generation after the flood he added in abundance: Behold, I have given you all things for food, as the herb of the field; a provision not so much for the soul as for the flesh, though on account of the soul.

For the occasion must be taken away from the arguer who, because the soul seems to desire food, wishes it to be understood from this also that the soul is mortal, being sustained by food, and finally growing faint when food is withheld, and at last perishing when it is taken away. Moreover, it must be set forth not only who it is that desires, but also for whom; and if for itself, also why, and when, and how far; then also that nature desires one thing, necessity another, and one thing according to its own property, another for a cause. The soul will therefore desire food, for itself indeed by reason of necessity, but for the flesh by reason of natural property. For certainly the house of the soul is the flesh, and the soul is the tenant of the flesh.

The tenant will therefore desire, by reason and necessity of that name, what will profit the house, for the whole duration of its tenancy; not so as to be itself built up, nor so as to be itself fortified, nor so as to be itself propped up; but only so as to be contained: because it cannot otherwise be contained than by a house that is supported. Otherwise the soul will be free, when the house has fallen into ruin, to depart unharmed from the destitution of its own supports, possessing its own foundations and the nourishments proper to its own condition: immortality, rationality, sensibility, intellectuality, freedom of will.

All these things conferred upon the soul at birth, the same one who envied in the beginning now also overshadows and perverts, so that they are neither spontaneously perceived nor administered as they ought to be. For to which of men will the evil spirit not cling, lying in wait for souls from the very threshold of birth, either invited by it, or by all that superstition of the lying-in chamber? Thus all are born with idolatry as their midwife, while they themselves, still bound with the swaddling-bands of the womb prepared before idols, declare themselves the offspring and candidates of demons; while in childbirth there is crying out to Lucina and Diana; while throughout the whole week a table is set for Juno; while on the last day the Fates are summoned to record what has been done; while even the first placing of the infant upon the ground is a sacred rite to the goddess Statina.

Who does not from that point either devote his son's whole head to guilt, or set apart some lock of hair, or shave it all off with a razor, or bind it with a sacrifice, or seal it with a sacred rite, for a family, ancestral, public, or private vow? Thus also the demonic spirit found Socrates while still a boy. Thus also genii are assigned to all, which is the name of demons. So that scarcely any birth is clean, certainly among the pagans. Hence also the Apostle says that holy offspring are begotten from one sex sanctified by the other, both by the prerogative of the seed and by the discipline of upbringing: But otherwise, he says, they would be born unclean; wishing them to be understood as designated for holiness, and through this also for salvation, as the children of the faithful; so that by the pledge of this hope he might give patronage to the marriages which he had judged should be retained.

Otherwise he would have been mindful of the Lord's definition: Unless one is born of water and spirit, he will not enter the kingdom of God, that is, he will not be holy.

Thus every soul is reckoned in Adam until it is reckoned anew in Christ; unclean for as long as it is reckoned anew: and sinful because unclean, receiving disgrace from its fellowship with the flesh. For even if the flesh is sinful, according to which we are forbidden to walk, whose works are condemned as lusting against the spirit, on account of which the carnal are marked out, yet the flesh is not infamous in its own name. For it has no proper perception or feeling of its own, to suggest or command sinfulness. And why should it, being a minister? And a minister not like a slave or a lesser friend, which are animate names, but like a cup or some other such body, not a soul. For a cup too is the minister of one who thirsts; yet unless the one who thirsts has accommodated the cup to himself, the cup will minister nothing.

So there is no property of man in the earthly element; nor is the flesh man in such a way as to be another power of the soul and another person; but it is a thing of plainly different substance and different condition, yet given over to the soul, as furniture, as an instrument for the offices of life. The flesh therefore is rebuked in the Scriptures, because the soul can do nothing without the flesh in the working of lust, gluttony, violence, cruelty, idolatry, and the other carnal things—not in their feelings, but in their effects. And yet the feelings of sins, even without their effects, are customarily imputed to the soul. He who has looked upon a woman with desire has already committed adultery in his heart. But what can the flesh do without the soul, likewise in the working of uprightness, justice, endurance, chastity? Moreover, what kind of thing is it to pin crimes upon that to which you would not ascribe even good deeds as its own?

But the one through whom sin is committed is called to account, so that the one by whom sin is committed may be burdened, even to the accusation of its ministry. The odium is greater against the governor when his offices are assailed. The one who commands is beaten more severely, when even the one who obeys is not excused.

The evil of the soul, therefore, beyond what is built upon it by the assault of a wicked spirit, precedes from the fault of its origin, in a manner natural. For as we have said, the corruption of nature is another nature, having its own god and father, namely the very author of corruption; yet so that there is also a good in the soul, that original, that divine and genuine good, and properly natural. For that which is from God is not so much extinguished as overshadowed. For it can be overshadowed, because it is not God; it cannot be extinguished, because it is from God. And so, just as a light impeded by some obstacle remains, but does not appear, if the density of the obstacle be great enough; so also the good in the soul, oppressed by evil, according to the quality thereof, either is wholly absent, the light being hidden, or shines where it is given room, freedom being found.

Thus some are the worst and some the best, and yet all are of one kind of soul. Thus also in the worst there is something of good, and in the best not a little of the worst. For God alone is without sin, and the only man without sin is Christ, because Christ is also God. Thus also the divinity of the soul bursts forth into presentiments, from its prior good, and the consciousness of God comes forward in testimony: God is good! God sees, and, I commend to God. Therefore no soul is without guilt, because none is without the seed of good. Accordingly, when it has come to faith, reformed through the second birth of water and heavenly power, the veil of its former corruption being drawn aside, it beholds all its own light. It is also received by the Holy Spirit, just as in its former birth it was received by the profane spirit.

The flesh follows the soul as it weds the spirit, as a dowried possession, and now no longer the handmaid of the soul, but of the spirit. O blessed union, if it shall have admitted no adultery!

Concerning death there remains now, that the subject be laid down there, where the soul itself reaches its end: although Epicurus, with an opinion sufficiently common, denied that death pertains to us. "For that which is dissolved," he says, "lacks sensation, and is nothing to us." But it is not death itself that is dissolved and lacks sensation, but the man who suffers it. Yet he attributed the suffering to that whose action it is. But if it belongs to man to suffer death, the dissolver of the body and the destroyer of sensation; how absurd that so great a force should be said not to pertain to man! Far more forcibly Seneca: "After death," he says, "all things are ended, even death itself." If this is so, then death will also pertain to itself; if it too is ended, all the more does it pertain to man, in whom, among all things being ended, death itself is also ended. Death is nothing to us: therefore life also is nothing to us.

For if that by which we are dissolved is beyond us, so also is that by which we are compounded outside us. If the taking away of sensation is nothing to us, neither is the gaining of sensation anything to us. But he who destroys the soul destroys death also. By us, as concerning the life after death, and concerning the other province of the soul, so shall death be treated, to which we ourselves pertain, if it pertains to us. Finally, sleep, which is not its mirror, is not an alien subject.

Let us first dispute concerning sleep; afterwards, how the soul runs its course through death. Sleep is not at all something beyond nature, as certain philosophers hold, who reckon it among those causes which seem to be contrary to nature. The Stoics affirm that sleep is a relaxation of the sensory vigour; the Epicureans, a diminution of the animal spirit. Anaxagoras together with Xenophanes call it exhaustion; Empedocles and Parmenides, a cooling; Strato, a separation of the innate spirit; Democritus, a deficiency of spirit; Aristotle, a languor of the heat around the heart. I presume I have never slept in such a way as to recognise any of these things. Nor indeed is it to be believed that exhaustion is sleep, which is rather the contrary of exhaustion, since sleep removes it. For man is more refreshed by sleep than wearied. Moreover, sleep is not always conceived from weariness, and yet when it does arise from weariness, that weariness is already gone.

But neither shall I admit a cooling, or any languor of heat, since bodies grow so warm in sleep that the distribution of food through sleep would not easily proceed, heat being hastened and cold being retarded, if we were cooled by sleep. More than this, even sweat is an indication of the heat of digestion. Finally, we are said to digest, which is the work of heat, not of cold. Likewise, the immortality of the soul does not permit belief in a diminution of the animal spirit, or a deficiency of spirit, or a separation of the innate spirit. The soul perishes if it is diminished. It remains, if perhaps, with the Stoics, we determine sleep to be a relaxation of the sensory vigour, because it procures rest for the body alone, and not for the soul as well. For the soul, as always in motion and always active, never sinks into rest, which is alien to the condition of immortality: for nothing immortal admits an end of its own operation; but sleep is an end of operation.

Finally, to the body, to which mortality belongs, to it alone does rest flatter with an end of operation. Whoever then shall doubt concerning the natural character of sleep, has indeed dialecticians who lead into doubt the whole distinction of natural and non-natural things, so that what he may have thought to be contrary to nature, he may know can be claimed for nature, from which things have been so allotted that they seem to be apart from it, and certainly either all things are nature, or nothing is nature. Among us, however, that may be heard which the contemplation of God suggests, the author of all things concerning which inquiry is made. For we believe that if anything is of nature, it is some rational work of God.

Moreover, reason precedes sleep, so apt, so useful, so necessary, that without it no soul could suffice; the restorer of bodies, the renewer of strength, the tester of health, the pacifier of labours, the physician of toils; for the lawful enjoyment of which the day yields, the night makes law, removing even the colour of things. But if sleep is vital, healthful, helpful, nothing of such a kind is not rational, nothing not natural. So also physicians relegate everything contrary to the vital, healthful, and helpful beyond the hinges of nature. For even the ailments that rival sleep, the phrenetic and the cardiac, by judging them contrary to nature, have prejudged natural sleep; and even in lethargy, noting it as unnatural, they respond with natural testimony, when it is in its proper temperament. For every nature is either cut short by deficiency or excess, and is preserved by the property of its measure. Thus that will be natural in its state, which can be made unnatural by diminution or excess.

What if you were also to remove eating and drinking from the lots of nature? For in these too there is very much of sleep's preparation. Certainly man has been imbued with these from the beginning of his nature. If you learn from God, that fountain of the race, Adam, drank in slumber before he thirsted for rest; he slept before he laboured; nay, before he even ate; nay, before he even spoke; so that they may see that sleep, as a natural sign, is prior to all natural things. From this we are led to reckon that even then he was rehearsing the image of death. For if Adam gave a figure of Christ, the sleep of Adam was the death of Christ who was to sleep in death, so that from the wound of his side likewise the true mother of the living, the Church, might be figured. Therefore sleep also, so healthful, so rational, is fashioned even as the pattern of the common and public death.

For God, who has also elsewhere contrived nothing in his dispensation without patterns, willed, more fully than the Platonic paradigm, to conduct with us daily the lines of the human beginning and end above all, stretching forth his hand to faith, more easily aided by images and parables, as of words, so also of things. He sets before you therefore a body struck down by the friendly force of slumber, prostrated by the gentle necessity of rest, motionless in its position, such as it lay before life, and such as it will lie after life, as if awaiting the testimony of its fashioning and burial, the soul as if not yet bestowed upon it, and as if already taken away.

But the soul also so suffers as to seem to be acting elsewhere, learning by the disguise of its presence its future absence; and yet meanwhile it dreams, and does not rest, nor does it grow wholly idle, nor does it subject the nature of immortality as a slave to slumber: it proves itself always in motion; it travels by land and sea, it trades, it is driven about, it labours, it plays, it grieves, it rejoices, it pursues lawful and unlawful things; it shows how much it can do even without the body, that it is furnished with its own members, but nonetheless has need of again setting the body in motion. Thus when the body has awakened, restored to its duties, it affirms to you the resurrection of the dead. This will be both the natural reason of sleep, and the rational nature of sleep. Even through the image of death, you are initiated into faith, you meditate upon hope, you learn to die and to live, you learn to watch while you sleep.

But concerning Hermotimus. The soul, as they say, was absent during sleep, departing from the body as if by occasion of the man being about to be empty. His wife betrayed this. Enemies, finding him asleep, burned him as if dead. The soul returning too late, I suppose, imputed the homicide to itself. The citizens of Clazomenae console Hermotimus with a temple. The woman does not approach, on account of the mark of a wife. To what end is this? Lest, because it is easy for the common people to suppose that sleep is a withdrawal of the soul, this credulity also be furnished by the example of Hermotimus. It was a case of somewhat heavier slumber, as the presumption is concerning the incubus, or of an ailment, which Soranus opposes, excluding the incubus, or some such defect, which also drove Epimenides into legend, slumberous for nearly fifty years. But Suetonius says that Nero, and Theopompus that Thrasymedes, never dreamed: except that Nero scarcely did, at his final end, after his terrors.

What if Hermotimus also was such that the idleness of a soul doing nothing in sleep was believed to be a departure? You would conjecture anything rather than this licence of the soul fleeing without death, and indeed continuously in that form. For if such a thing were said to happen once, as an eclipse of the sun or moon, so also of the soul: I should indeed be persuaded that it was done by divine agency; for it would be fitting that a man should be either warned or terrified by God, as by a swift lightning bolt, with the stroke of a momentary death; if it were not rather that a dream should be believed to be nearer at hand, which ought rather to happen to one awake, if it were not rather that a dream ought to be believed.

We are held here to set forth also the Christian opinion concerning dreams, as concerning the accidents of sleep; and the not inconsiderable agitations of the soul, which we have declared to be busy and always active from the perpetuity of its motion, which is the reason of its divinity and immortality. Therefore, when rest comes to bodies, whose own solace it is, the soul, being free from another's solace, does not rest; and if it lacks the operation of the bodily members, it uses its own. Conceive a gladiator without arms, or a charioteer without his chariot, going through every posture and effort of his art. There is fighting, there is striving; but it is an empty agitation. Nevertheless the things that seem to be done are seen to be done; for they are done in act, but not in effect. This force we call ecstasy, an exit of the senses, and a kind of madness. So also in the beginning, sleep was consecrated together with ecstasy: And God sent an ecstasy upon Adam, and he slept.

For sleep came upon the body for rest; ecstasy came upon the soul against rest; and thence now the pattern, mingling sleep with ecstasy, and nature from the pattern. Finally, we are both delighted and saddened and terrified in dreams, how affectingly, and anxiously, and passionately! Whereas we should be moved by nothing, by empty images forsooth, if we dreamed in full possession of our senses. Finally also, good deeds in dreams are gratuitous, and sins are without danger; for we shall no more be condemned on account of a vision of debauchery than we shall be crowned on account of one of martyrdom. And how, you say, is the soul mindful of dreams, namely one which is not permitted to be in full possession of its senses? This will be the property of this madness, because it does not arise from the corruption of good health, but from the reason of nature. For it does not banish the mind, but calls it away. It is one thing to shake, another to move; one thing to overturn, another to agitate.

Therefore that memory is at hand is the soundness of mind; that soundness of mind, with memory preserved, is stupefied, is a kind of madness. Therefore we are not said to rave, but to dream: therefore also we are prudent, if at any time we are so: for our wisdom, though it may be overshadowed, is not extinguished. Except that this too can seem to be absent at that time; and that ecstasy also works this from its own proper nature, that it brings into us images of wisdom in the same way as also of error.

Behold, we are pressed again, even in the review of those very dreams by which the soul is tossed about, to set forth our views. And when shall we arrive at death? Here too I would say, when God shall have granted it: no long delays attend that which will come to pass. Epicurus judged dreams to be wholly vain, freeing the divinity from all concerns, dissolving the order of things, and scattering all things in passivity, as exposed to chance and fortune. But if this is so, then there will also be some outcome of truth, because it cannot be that truth alone is exempted from the chance owed to all things. Homer divided dreams between two gates, the horn gate of truth and the ivory gate of falsehood. For one can see through horn, they say, but ivory is opaque. Aristotle, reciting the opinion with greater falsehood, yet acknowledges the true one as well. The Telmessians do not dismiss any dreams as empty, but charge the weakness of conjecture.

But who is so estranged from humanity as never at some time to have experienced some faithful vision? By touching on a few of the more notable ones, I shall bring a blush to Epicurus. Herodotus reports that Astyages, king of the Medes, dreamed that the bladder of his daughter Mandane, while still a virgin, had flowed out in a flood over Asia; and likewise, a year after her marriage, that a vine had sprung up from the same place and overshadowed all Asia. Charon of Lampsacus, who preceded Herodotus, also records this. Those who interpreted this as foretelling so great a work for his son were not deceived; for indeed Cyrus both submerged and crushed Asia. Philip of Macedon, not yet a father, had seen himself sealing up the womb of his wife Olympias with a ring: the seal was a lion. He had believed that her fertility was shut up, I suppose, because a lion is a father but once.

Aristodemus or Aristophon, conjecturing that nothing is sealed up in vain, foretold that a son, and one of the greatest force, was portended. Those who know Alexander recognize the lion of the ring: so Ephorus writes. But also a certain woman of Himera dreamed of the tyranny of Dionysius over Sicily: Heraclides has recorded it. And Laodice, the mother of Seleucus, foresaw his kingship over Asia before she had yet given birth to him: Euphorion has published this. I also learn from Strabo that Mithridates obtained possession of Pontus through a dream. And from Callisthenes I learn that Baraliris ruled Illyricum from the Molossians to Macedonia through a dream. The Romans too have known dreams of this kind that proved true. Marcus Tullius, from a dream, already knew the reformer of the empire—still a boy, of private station, known only as Julius Octavius, and unknown even to himself—as Augustus and as the burier of civil tumults; this is preserved in the memoirs of Vitellius.

Nor will this be the only kind that foretells supreme powers, but also dangers and destructions; as when Caesar, sick during the battle at Philippi against the rebels Brutus and Cassius, yet escaped a still greater peril on another occasion through the vision of Artorius, having left his tent; as when the daughter of Polycrates of Samos beheld the cross in a dream, from the anointing of the sun and the bathing of Jupiter. Honours and talents are also revealed through sleep, cures are bestowed, thefts are disclosed, and treasures are conferred. Finally, even Cicero's greatness, while he was still a small child, his nurse had already beheld. The swan from the bosom of Socrates, charming men, is the disciple Plato. Cleonymus the boxer is healed by Achilles in dreams. When Athena's golden crown had been stolen from the citadel, the tragedian Sophocles found it again through dreaming.

The tragic actor Neoptolemus, at Rhoeteum in the Troad, delivered the tomb of Ajax from ruin, warned in dreams by Ajax himself; and when he removed the aged stones, he returned thence rich in gold. And how many commentators and affirming witnesses there are on this subject! Artemon, Antiphon, Strato, Philochorus, Epicharmus, Serapion, Cratippus, and Dionysius of Rhodes, Hermippus—the whole literature of the age. One thing only, perhaps, I shall laugh at: the man who thought he could persuade us that Saturn dreamed before all others—unless Aristotle also lived before all others. Forgive my laughter. But otherwise, Epicharmus even raised dreams to the highest pinnacle among the arts of divination, together with Philochorus of Athens. For the world is also furnished with oracles of this kind; such as those of Amphiaraus at Oropus, of Amphilochus at Mallus, of Sarpedon in the Troad, of Trophonius in Boeotia, of Mopsus in Cilicia, of Hermonia in Macedonia, of Pasiphae in Laconia.

All the rest, together with their origins, rites, and accounts, along with the entire subsequent history of dreams, Hermippus of Berytus will set forth most abundantly in a volume of five books. But the Stoics also prefer to think that God, most provident for human instruction, among the other aids of the arts and disciplines of divination, has also implanted dreams in us, as a peculiar consolation of a natural oracle. This much, as regards the credibility of dreams, is to be confirmed by us as well, and interpreted in such a manner.

For concerning the other oracles too, at which no one sleeps, what else shall we declare than that their rationale is that of the demonic spirits who had already at that time dwelt within those very men, or had laid claim to their memories for every scene of their malice, equally in this form counterfeiting divinity, and by the same industry deceiving even through the benefits of cures, admonitions, and predictions, which do more harm by helping, since through those things by which they help, they draw men away from the inquiry after true divinity, by the insinuation of a false one. And certainly this power is not confined, nor is it circumscribed within the bounds of shrines; it is wandering and wide-ranging, and at times free: wherefore no one should doubt that houses too lie open to demons; and that men are beset by apparitions not only in inner sanctuaries, but also in their bedchambers.

For we define that dreams are for the most part instilled by demons, even if sometimes true and gracious, yet pursuing and ensnaring with that craft of which we have spoken: how much more are they vain, and frustrating, and turbulent, mocking, and unclean. Nor is it any wonder, if the images belong to those whose deeds they are. From God, however—who has promised both the grace of the Holy Spirit upon all flesh, and that his servants and handmaidens shall prophesy and likewise dream—those things will be reckoned which shall be compared to that grace itself: whatever is honourable, holy, prophetic, revelatory, edifying, calling—whose liberality is wont to flow down even upon the profane, God making his rains and his suns equal for the just and the unjust alike; since even Nebuchadnezzar dreams by divine agency: and the greater part of mankind learn of God through visions.

Just as therefore the condescension of God reaches even to the heathen, so also the temptation of the Evil One reaches even to the saints, from whom he does not withdraw even by day, so that he may creep upon them while sleeping in whatever way he can, if he cannot do so while they are waking. A third kind will be those dreams which the soul seems to bring upon itself from the intensity of surrounding circumstances. But since it is not within our choice to dream (for Epicharmus also holds this view), how shall the soul itself be the cause to itself of any vision? Is this kind then to be left to the natural form, preserving for the soul even in ecstasy the experience of its own affairs? But those things which shall appear to arise neither from God, nor from a demon, nor from the soul, and which are beyond opinion, and beyond interpretation, and beyond the capacity of narration, shall be assigned properly to ecstasy itself and to its own rationale.

They affirm that dreams are more certain and more collected during the last hours of the night, as though the vigour of souls were now emerging, with sleep drawn out. As regards the seasons of the year, spring is more favourable for calm dreams; because summer dissolves the souls, and winter in a certain manner hardens them, and autumn, otherwise a tempter of health, dilutes them with the very vinous juices of fruits. Likewise as regards the posture of sleep itself: if one lies neither on the back, nor on the right side, nor with the inner parts pressed together as though the pouches were poured back, so that the station of the senses floats, or the mind be constricted by the strangling of the liver. But I think these things are estimated ingeniously rather than proved with certainty, even though it is Plato who estimated them; and perhaps they proceed by chance. Otherwise dreams will be within our choice, if they can be directed.

For as to what is prescribed concerning the distinguishing or curtailing of foods—now as presumption, now as superstition—the discipline of the connoisseurs must be examined: superstition, as when fasting is enjoined upon those who are to incubate at oracles, so as to induce chastity; presumption, as when the Pythagoreans for this reason also reject the bean, a burdensome and flatulence-producing food. And yet that threefold brotherhood with Daniel, content with pulse alone lest they be contaminated by the royal dishes, beyond their other wisdom, redeemed from God especially the grace of dreams—both of obtaining them and of expounding them. As for fasting, I know not whether I alone dream so much thereby that I do not perceive that I have dreamed. Does sobriety then count for nothing in this regard, you ask? Nay, all the more in this regard, as in every other. If even for superstition, much more for religion.

For thus also demons demand it from their dreamers, as a lure of divinity, because they know it to be familiar to God: because Daniel again wasted away in food during a station of three weeks; but in order to draw God by the services of humiliation, not in order to build up the sense and wisdom of the soul about to dream, as though it would not act in ecstasy. Thus sobriety will not avail for the removal of ecstasy, but for the commending of ecstasy itself, that it may take place in God.

Those who think that infants do not dream, since all the soul's activities are expressed in life according to the measure of their age, let them observe the movements and nods and smiles of infants during sleep, so that they may understand from the fact that the motions of the dreaming soul easily break through to the surface by reason of the tenderness of the flesh. But also as to the report that the Libyan people called the Atlantes pass the night in a blind sleep without dreams, it is the nature of the soul that is being impugned. Now either Herodotus has been deceived by rumour, which is sometimes slanderous even against barbarians, or a great force of demons of that kind holds dominion in that climate.

For if Aristotle also notes a certain hero of Sardinia who deprives those who incubate at his shrine of visions, it will be within the pleasures of demons both to take away dreams and to send them, so that the notable instance of Nero as a late dreamer, and of Thrasymedes, may have proceeded from this. But we also derive dreams from God. Why then should the Atlantes not dream from God either, since no nation is now a stranger to God, with the Gospel shining forth into all the earth and to the ends of the world? Is it then either that rumour has lied to Aristotle, or that the rationale of demons is still at work, lest any nature of the soul be believed to be exempt from dreams?

Enough concerning the mirror of death, that is, sleep; and likewise concerning the business of sleep, that is, dreams. Now to the origin of this departure, that is, to the order of death; for not even death itself is without its questions, though it is the end of all questions. By the common verdict of the whole human race, we declare death to be a debt owed to nature. This was stipulated by the voice of God, pledged to everything that is born; so that henceforth not the stupor of Epicurus may be spread abroad, denying that this debt pertains to us; but rather the madness of the heretic Menander the Samaritan may be spat upon, who says that death not only does not pertain to his followers, but does not even reach them. He claimed to have been sent as a legate from a heavenly and secret power, so that those who put on his baptism might become immortal, and incorruptible, and immediately partakers of resurrection. We have indeed read of many wondrous kinds of waters.

But either the vinous spring of the Lyncestae makes men drunk, or the demonic fountain of Colophon makes men mad, or the poisoned water of Nonacris in Arcadia befell Alexander. There was also a healing pool in Judaea before Christ. The poet has indeed handed down that the Stygian marshes wash away death. But Thetis also mourned her son. Yet even if Menander plunges men into the Styx, they will nonetheless have to die in order to reach the Styx: for it is said to be among the dead. What and where is this felicity of waters, which neither John the Baptist administered beforehand, nor Christ himself showed to his disciples? What is this bath of Menander? Magical against heaven. But why is it so infrequent, so hidden, that only very few are washed in it?

For I shall make suspect so great a rarity of a most secure and safe sacrament, at which there is no law even to die for God himself; whereas on the contrary, all nations are now ascending to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob, which demands death even through martyrdom, and which exacts this also from its own Christ. Nor will anyone grant so much to magic as to exempt from death, or to replant life like a vine, with age renewed. For this was not permitted even to Medea in the case of a human being, though it was permitted in the case of a ram. Enoch was translated, and Elijah, and their death has not been found—deferred, that is: for they are reserved to die, that they may extinguish Antichrist with their blood. John also died, in whom the hope that he would remain until the coming of the Lord had been vain.

For heresies for the most part spring forth from our own examples, taking thence the supports with which they fight. Finally, to be brief: where are those whom Menander himself has bathed? Whom he has plunged into his Styx? Let the ever-living Apostles come, let them stand forth; let my Thomas see them; let him hear, handle, and believe.

Now the work of death is in the midst of us: the separation of body and soul. But indeed for the immortality of the soul, which some who have not been taught by God defend feebly, they beg arguments to such a degree that they wish it to be believed that even after death certain souls cling to bodies. For this purpose Plato, even though he dispatches certain souls he wishes straight to heaven, yet in the Republic sets before us the corpse of a certain unburied man, preserved for a long time without any decay, by reason, of course, of the soul's inseparability. For this purpose also Democritus notes the growth of nails and hair in tombs for some considerable time. Moreover, the quality of the air could have served as a protection for that body. For what if the air were rather dry, and the soil rather salty? What if the very substance of the body itself were more lacking in moisture? What if the manner of death had already previously discharged the materials of corruption?

Now nails, since they are the beginnings of the sinews, are rightly seen to advance further, and daily to be pushed out as the flesh fails, when the sinews are stretched out by dissolution. Hair too draws its nourishment from the brain, which the hidden protection of its enclosure allows to last for some time. Finally, even in the living the growth of hair either abounds or fails according to the richness of the brain. You have the physicians. But neither is it any small thing that some portion of the soul subsides in the body, destined itself also to depart at some point, when time shall have abolished the whole scene of the body. And this too is in the opinion of certain persons. For this reason they say the body should not be committed to the flames at burial, sparing what remains of the soul.

But the reason for this piety is different: not flattering the relics of the soul, but also averting cruelty in the name of the body itself, which a man does not in any case deserve to have consumed by a penal end. Moreover, the soul, being indivisible as it is immortal, requires that death also be believed indivisible—befalling the soul not as something immortal, but as something indivisible, in an indivisible manner. But death will be divided, if the soul also is divided, with the superfluous portion of the soul dying at some point. Thus a portion of death will remain along with a portion of the soul. Nor am I unaware that there is some trace of this opinion. I have learned it from my own experience.

I know of a certain woman, a home-born member of the Church, of unblemished beauty and age, who had fulfilled a single and brief marriage, and when she had fallen asleep in peace, while the burial was still delayed and she was being composed meanwhile by the prayer of a presbyter, at the first posture of prayer moved her hands away from her sides into the posture of supplication, and when peace was restored again, returned them to their place. There is also another account among our people, of a body in a cemetery making room for another body placed beside it by withdrawing. If among the pagans too something of this kind is reported, God everywhere sets forth signs of His power—to His own for consolation, to strangers for testimony. For I would rather believe it was done by God than by any remnants of the soul: for if these were present, they would have moved other members too; and if only the hands, yet not for the purpose of prayer.

That other body would not only have yielded to its brother, but would also at other times have refreshed itself by a change of position. Certainly, wherever these things come from, they are to be reckoned as signs and portents; they cannot constitute a law of nature. If death is not wholly complete at once, it is not death; if any part of the soul remains, it is life. Death will no more be mingled with life than night with day.

This work of death, therefore—the separation of flesh and soul—setting aside the question of fates and accidents, human feeling has distinguished in two ways, into an ordinary and an extraordinary form: assigning the ordinary form to nature in the case of any peaceful death, but judging the extraordinary form to be contrary to nature in the case of any violent end. But we who know the origins of man boldly determine that death did not follow man from nature, but from fault—not even a natural fault: yet the name of nature is easily usurped for those things which appear to have attached themselves from birth by accident. For if man had been constituted directly for death, then at last death would be ascribed to nature. Moreover, that he was not constituted for death is proved by the law itself, which suspends the threat conditionally and assigns the event of death to the choice of man. Finally, if he had not sinned, he would by no means have died.

Thus it will not be nature, that which comes about through the power of an offer by will, not through the authority of an institution by necessity. Accordingly, even though the exits of death are various, as the condition of causes is manifold, we say none of them is so gentle as not to be accomplished by force. That very principle which works death, simple though it be, is a force. For what else is it? It tears apart and sunders so great a fellowship of soul and flesh, so great a concretion from conception of kindred substances.

For even if someone breathes out his spirit through joy, as Chilon the Spartan did while embracing his son victorious at Olympia; even if through glory, as Clidemus the Athenian, while being crowned with gold by actors for his excellence; even if through sleep, as Plato; even if through laughter, as P. Crassus: far more violent is the death which advances through alien means, which expels the soul through pleasant circumstances, which brings death at the very moment when life is more agreeable—in exultation, in honour, in repose, in pleasure. It is also a force in the case of a ship, when far from the rocks of Caphereus, with no storms to fight against, with no great waves to batter it, with a favouring breeze, a gliding course, a rejoicing company, suddenly struck by an internal blow, it sinks with all its security. No less are they shipwrecks of life, even the events of a tranquil death. It matters nothing whether the ship of the body departs whole or shattered, when the soul's voyage is overturned.

But whither the soul, stripped bare and expelled, then turns, we shall without doubt set forth in order. First, however, we shall complete what belongs to this place, lest, because we have declared the various exits of death, anyone should expect from us an account of each one individually—accounts to be left rather to physicians, the proper arbiters of all lethal things, whether causes or bodily conditions themselves. Plainly, for the protection of the soul's immortality here also, in the mention of death, I shall interpose something concerning that kind of exit in which the soul slips away gradually and little by little: for sustaining the appearance of failing, it is led away while it seems to be consumed, and furnishes a conjecture of destruction from the departure of its temperature. But the whole account is in the body and from the body.

For whatever that exit of death may be, it is without doubt either the destruction of materials, or of regions, or of vital passages: of materials, such as bile, such as blood; of regions, such as the heart, such as the liver; of passages, such as veins, such as arteries. While therefore these are ravaged in the body by their respective injurious causes, up to the final destruction and severing of the vital—that is, the natural—limits, positions, and functions, necessarily the soul also, as its instruments and dwelling-places and spaces gradually give way, is compelled to migrate gradually itself, and is brought into the semblance of diminution; in no other way than that in which the charioteer himself is also presumed to have failed, when exhaustion has denied the horses their strength—so far as concerns the appearance of the man left without support, not the reality of his suffering.

In like manner the animal spirit, the charioteer of the body, fails in the name of the failing vehicle, not in its own name; departing in its work, not in its vigour; languishing in its activity, not in its state; consuming its constancy, not its substance—because it ceases to appear, not because it ceases to be. So also every swift death, like the reaping of necks, opening at once so great a door, like the force of a ruin at once crushing out all the vital powers, like apoplexy, an inward ruin, affords the soul no delay, nor torments its departure into moments. But where death is prolonged, as the soul is abandoned, so also it abandons; yet it is not cut to pieces in this fashion, but is drawn out; and while it is drawn out, it causes its last part to appear to be seen. But not every part is immediately also cut off because it is the last; nor because it is small is it itself immediately also about to perish.

Its own end follows in sequence, and the middle portion is drawn on to the final, and the remnants, cohering to the whole, are awaited by it, not abandoned by it. And so I would venture to say: the last of the whole is the whole—because, though it be less and posterior, it belongs to the whole. Hence it comes about that often the soul is stirred more powerfully at the very moment of departure, with more intent gaze, with extraordinary loquacity, while, from a higher vantage point, now established in freedom, through the surplus that still lingers in the body, it declares what it sees, what it hears, what it is beginning to know.

For if this body is in Platonic opinion a prison, but in apostolic terms a temple of God, when it is in Christ; yet for the present it obstructs the soul within its enclosure, and darkens it, and defiles it by the concretion of flesh; whence it has, as it were through a horn-like window, a dimmer light of things—then without doubt when by the force of death it is pressed out from the concretion of flesh, and is itself refined by that very pressing out, and bursts forth from the covering of the body into the open, it recognises itself at once in the pure and clear and its own light, in the freedom of its substance; and in that very liberty comes to its senses regarding its divine nature, as one emerging from sleep passes from images to realities: then it also declares what it sees, then it exults or trembles, according as it perceives the preparation of its lodging, from the very face of the angel himself, the caller of souls, the Mercury of the poets.

Whither, then, the soul is led—this we now set forth. Almost all the philosophers who vindicate the immortality of the soul, after their own fashion, yet—such as Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato—and those who allow it some period of time from its departure until the conflagration of the universe, such as the Stoics—place only their own souls, that is, the souls of the wise, in the mansions on high. Plato indeed does not grant this to the souls of philosophers indiscriminately, but to those who have adorned philosophy with the love of boys. So great a privilege does impurity hold even among philosophers. And so in his system the wise souls are raised to the ether; in Arius's, to the air; in the Stoics', below the moon. These latter I marvel at, in that they cast the unwise souls down around the earth, while affirming that they are to be educated by the wise souls who are far superior. Where will the region of the school be, with so great a distance between their lodgings?

By what means will the pupils assemble to their teachers, being absent from one another by so great an interval? And what use and profit will posthumous education be to them, when they are about to perish so soon in the conflagration? The remaining souls they cast down to the underworld. This Plato describes as a kind of bosom of the earth, in the Phaedo, into which all the filth of worldly impurities flows together, and settling there exhales, and as it were packs a denser and private air in that place with the mire of their uncleannesses.

Let the underworld be believed by us to be not a bare hollow space, nor some open-air sewer of the world, but a vast space in the depths of the earth, and a profundity hidden in its very bowels. For we read that Christ spent the three days of death in the heart of the earth—that is, in the innermost and inward recess, covered over by the earth itself, and enclosed within it, and built over by the still lower abysses.

Now if Christ is God—because He is also man—who died according to the Scriptures, and was buried according to the same, and here too fulfilled the law, having undergone the form of human death among the underworld; and if He did not ascend to the heights of heaven before He descended to the lower parts of the earth, in order that there He might make the Patriarchs and Prophets partakers of Himself—then you have both reason to believe the region of the underworld to be subterranean, and reason to thrust aside with your elbow those who, with sufficient arrogance, do not think the souls of the faithful worthy of the underworld—servants above their lord, and disciples above their master—disdaining, perhaps, to take comfort in Abraham's bosom while awaiting the resurrection.

"But for this purpose," they say, "Christ went down to the underworld, that we might not go down: otherwise, what distinction is there between pagans and Christians, if the prison after death is the same?" In what manner, then, will the soul exhale into heaven, when Christ is still sitting there at the right hand of the Father, when the command of God has not yet been heard through the trumpet of the archangel, when those whom the coming of the Lord shall find alive in the world have not yet been caught up into the air to meet Him, together with those who died in Christ and shall rise first? Heaven is open to none while the earth still stands—not to say while it is closed. For with the passing away of the world the kingdoms of heaven shall be unsealed.

"But our sleep is in the ether, with the boys of Plato; or in the air, with Arius; or around the moon, with the Endymions of the Stoics." "Nay," you say, "in Paradise, whither even then the Patriarchs and Prophets, as appendages of the Lord's resurrection, migrated from the underworld." And how is it that John, when the region of Paradise was revealed to him in the Spirit—which region is beneath the altar—showed other souls there besides those of the martyrs? How is it that Perpetua, that most valiant martyr, in the revelation of Paradise under her passion, saw there only her fellow-martyrs—unless it be that the sword, the doorkeeper of Paradise, yields to none save those who have died in Christ, in Adam? A new death for God, and an extraordinary one for Christ, is received in a different and special lodging. Recognise, therefore, the difference between a pagan and a believer in death.

If you fall for God, as the Paraclete counsels—not in fevers and on beds, but in martyrdoms—if you take up your cross and follow the Lord, as He Himself commanded: the whole key of Paradise is your blood. You have also from us a little work on Paradise, in which we have established that every soul is kept in the underworld until the Day of the Lord.

A dispute arises whether some reason also detains certain souls here in the meantime immediately after departure, or whether souls already received below may afterward be permitted to intervene from the underworld either of their own accord or by command: for persuasive arguments in favor of these opinions are not lacking. It has been believed that the unburied are not conducted to the underworld before they have received their due rites, following the Homeric Patroclus demanding his funeral from Achilles in a dream, because he could not otherwise approach the gates of the underworld, being kept far off by the souls of the buried. We know, moreover, beyond the poetic art, also the diligence of Homeric piety. For he placed so much care upon burial precisely because he charged the delay of it as an injury to souls; lest, that is, anyone detaining a dead man at home should himself be worn away by love for him, consumed by the enormity of a grief-nourished consolation.

Thus he makes the complaints of the unburied soul serve both purposes: that the urgency of the funeral and the honor of bodies be preserved, and that the grief of affections be tempered. But how vain it is that a soul should await the due rites of the body, as though it carries something of them down to the underworld! Far more vain, if the cessation of burial is to be reckoned an injury to the soul, which ought rather to embrace it as a favor. Surely she who did not wish to die will prefer to be dragged to the underworld more slowly. She will love the impious heir through whom she is still nourished by the light: or if there is indeed some injury in being thrust under the earth more slowly, and the title of the injury is the cessation of burial, through which it is unjust that she be afflicted with injury, to whom the cessation of burial cannot be imputed—since it pertains to her relatives.

They also say that those overtaken by untimely death wander here until the remainder of the years is completed, which they would have lived through had they not died unseasonably. But either fixed terms have been appointed to each person, and I will not believe that what is fixed can be forestalled; or if they are indeed fixed, yet are cut short by God's will or some power, they are cut short in vain, if those already fulfilled must still wait; or if they are not fixed, there will be no remainder of terms that were not fixed. I will add yet this: behold, an infant has died (for example) at the very fountains of the breast; suppose now a boy not yet of age, suppose one just coming to age, who nevertheless would have lived eighty years: that his soul should pass these stolen years here after death—what manner of thing is that? For it cannot take on age without a body, because ages operate through bodies.

But let our people also reflect that souls will receive back in the resurrection the same bodies in which they departed. The same bodily forms, therefore, and the same ages which make those bodily forms, are to be hoped for. In what way, then, can the soul of an infant pass here the stolen years, so as to rise at eighty years of age in a body of one month? Or if it will be necessary for those destined years to be fulfilled here, will the soul also run through here the order of the life which those years had been allotted, together with them, as likewise destined here—so that it also applies itself from infancy, assigned to boyhood; and serves in the army from adolescence, stirred by youth; and grows old from youth, weighed down by old age; and presses out interest, and drives the field, sails, litigates, marries, labors, undergoes illnesses; and whatever sad and glad things awaited it along with those times? But how shall these things be transacted without a body? Life without life?

But the times will be empty, to be filled up by mere passage alone. What then prevents them from being fulfilled in the underworld, where there is equally no use of them? Thus we say that every soul, at whatever age it has departed, stands fixed in that state until that perfect day which is promised, tempered to the measure of angelic fullness. Accordingly, neither will those be held as exiles from the underworld whom they suppose to have been snatched away by force, especially through the atrocities of punishments—I mean the cross, and the axe, and the sword, and the beast; nor are those violent exits violent which justice decrees, justice being the avenger of violence. And therefore, you will say, wicked souls too are exiled from the underworld. I compel you then to establish one of two alternatives: either a good underworld, or a bad one. If you prefer a bad one, then the most wicked souls ought already to be hurled down there.

If a good one, why do you likewise judge souls that are immature and unwedded, pure and innocent by reason of their age, as not yet worthy of the underworld?

Either it is best to be detained here, according to the aoroi; or worst, according to the biaiothanatoi—to use now the very terms with which magic, the originator of these opinions, resounds: Hostanes and Typhon, and Dardanus, and Damigeron, and Nectabis, and Berenice. It is now common literature which promises to summon souls even lulled to sleep at the proper age, even separated by an honorable death, even dispatched with ready burial, back from their dwelling in the underworld. What then shall we say of magic? What nearly all say: that it is deception.

But the reason for the deception escapes none but Christians alone, who know the spiritual forces of wickedness—not indeed by a fellowship of conscience, but by a hostile knowledge—and deal with them not by an inviting cooperation but by an overpowering dominion; the manifold plague of the human mind, the contriver of all error, the knowledge of magic equally destructive of salvation and of the soul—magic, that is, the second idolatry, in which demons likewise feign themselves to be dead, just as in that other they feign themselves to be gods. Why not? Since gods too are dead. And so the aoroi and biaiothanatoi are indeed invoked, under that argument of credibility, that it seems plausible that those souls above all should do violence and harm which a violent and savage and untimely end has wrested away, as though in retaliation for the wrong. But demons operate under the pretext of those souls; and those especially who were in those very persons when they were alive, and who drove them to such ends.

For we have also suggested that scarcely any man is without a demon, and it is known to many that untimely and atrocious deaths too are brought about by the workings of demons, which they attribute to their assaults. This deception also of the wicked spirit lurking under the persons of the dead we prove—unless I am mistaken—even by facts, when in exorcisms a spirit sometimes affirms itself to be one of the person's own parents, sometimes a gladiator, or a beast-fighter, just as elsewhere a god; caring for nothing more than this very thing—to exclude what we proclaim, lest we readily believe that all souls are conducted to the underworld, so as to disturb faith in both judgment and resurrection. And yet that demon, after it has attempted to deceive the bystanders, overcome by the insistence of divine grace, confesses unwillingly what is true.

So also in that other form of magic which is believed to tear souls already at rest from the underworld and exhibit them to sight, no other force of deception is more active. Plainly because a phantom is also produced, because a body is also fashioned for it; nor is it a great thing for it to deceive the outward eyes, for whom it is perfectly easy to blind the inner sight of the mind. Bodily forms, at any rate, appeared to Pharaoh and the Egyptians as dragons from the magicians' rods, but Moses' truth devoured the lie. Many things indeed Simon also performed against the Apostles, and Elymas the magician; but the stroke of blindness was not from illusions. What novelty is it that the imitation of truth comes from an unclean spirit? Behold, today the heretics of that same Simon are so puffed up with the presumption of their art that they even pledge themselves to move the souls of prophets from the underworld.

And I believe they can do so by lying; for it was no less permitted to the pythonic spirit at that time to counterfeit the soul of Samuel, when Saul consulted the dead after God. Far be it otherwise that we should believe the soul of any saint, let alone a prophet, to have been drawn out by a demon, taught as we are that Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light, let alone into a man of light, and that he will even assert himself to be God at the end and will produce yet more portentous signs, to overturn, if it were possible, the elect. Did he hesitate, perchance, at that time to assert himself to be a prophet of God—and certainly to Saul, in whom he himself was already dwelling?

Do not suppose that one spirit was administering the phantom and another was commending it; but that the same spirit both in the false prophetess and in the apostate easily lied what it had caused to be believed, through whom Saul's treasure was there where his heart also was, where, that is, God was not. And therefore through him by whom he believed he would see, he saw; because through him by whom he saw, he also believed. If the objection is also raised concerning nightly visions—that the dead are often seen not without purpose (for the Nasammonians seek their own oracles by spending the night at their parents' tombs, as Heraclides writes, or Nymphodorus, or Herodotus; and the Celts spend the night at the graves of brave men for the same reason, as Nicander affirms)—we no more truly experience the dead in dreams than the living, but by the same reasoning the dead as also the living, and all things that are seen.

For things are not true because they are seen, but because they are fulfilled. The credibility of dreams is reported from their effect, not from their appearance. But that the underworld is open to no soul at all, the Lord has sufficiently established in that argument of the poor man at rest and the rich man groaning, through the person of Abraham, that no messenger of the arrangement of the underworld can be sent back from there; which could have been permitted at that time, so that Moses and the Prophets might be believed. But even if the power of God recalled certain souls into bodies, as demonstrations of its own authority, the faith and audacity of magicians and the deception of dreams and the license of poets will not thereby be admitted to share in this.

Moreover, in the examples of resurrection, when the power of God—whether through the Prophets, or through Christ, or through the Apostles—presents souls back into bodies, solid and tangible and satisfied with truth, it has been prejudged that this is the form of truth: that you should judge every incorporeal exhibition of the dead to be illusion.

"Are all souls then in the underworld?" you ask. Whether you will or not, both punishments are already there, and refreshments. You have the poor man and the rich man. And because I deferred something to this point, I will now render it opportunely in conclusion. For why should you not think that the soul is both punished and cherished in the underworld in the meantime, under expectation of both judgments, in a kind of anticipation and foretaste of it? "Because," you say, "its case ought to be kept safe for the divine judgment, without any foretaste of the sentence. Then also because the restoration of the flesh must be awaited, as the partner of its works and rewards." What then will happen in that interval of time? Shall we sleep? But souls do not even sleep in the living: for sleep belongs to bodies, of which death itself is also a counterpart, with its mirror-image sleep. Or do you wish nothing to be transacted there, to which all humanity is drawn, to which all hope is consigned?

Do you think judgment is being anticipated, or begun? Precipitated, or prepared? Now indeed, how most unjust even in the underworld, if even there it is still well with the guilty, and not yet well with the innocent! What? Do you wish there to be a postponement after death, playing with confused hope and uncertain expectation, or a review of life already begun and an ordering of judgment already causing dread? Does the soul always await the body in order to grieve or rejoice? Is it not sufficient unto itself from its own resources for either title of suffering? How often, with the body unharmed, does the soul alone writhe with bile, anger, weariness—often not even known to itself! How often likewise, with the body afflicted, does the soul seek out a secret joy for itself and withdraw from the body's unwelcome partnership at that moment! I lie, if it has not been accustomed even to glory and rejoice alone in the very torments of the body.

Look upon the soul of Mucius, when he dissolved his right hand in the flames. Look upon that of Zeno, when the torments of Dionysius pass him by. The bites of wild beasts are ornaments of youth, as the scars of the bear in Cyrus. So well does the soul know even in the underworld both to grieve and to rejoice without the flesh; because even in unharmed flesh it grieves if it will, and in harmed flesh it rejoices if it will. If this is so by its own choice in life, how much more by God's judgment after death! But neither does the soul share all its works with the ministry of the flesh; for divine censure pursues even thoughts alone and bare intentions: He who has looked to lust has already committed adultery in his heart. Therefore on this account it is most fitting that the soul be punished, even without the flesh being awaited, for what it committed without the flesh as partner.

So also for pious and benevolent thoughts, in which it had no need of the flesh, it will be refreshed without the flesh. What now, if in fleshly matters it is prior—it that conceives, that plans, that commands, that impels? And even when unwilling, it nevertheless first handles what it is about to do through the body. Never, in short, will conscience be posterior to the deed. Thus it is fitting also to this order that she who is first owed the rewards should first receive them. In sum, since we understand by that prison which the Gospel points out the underworld, and interpret the last farthing as every least offense to be expiated there by the delay of the resurrection; no one will doubt that the soul pays something in the underworld, with the fullness of the resurrection kept safe through the flesh as well. This also the Paraclete has most frequently commended, if anyone has admitted his words from the acknowledgment of the promised gifts of grace.

Against every human opinion concerning the soul, as I judge, having engaged it from the teaching of faith, we have satisfied a just and necessary curiosity. But for one who is extravagant and merely idle, as much will be lacking to learn as it has pleased him to inquire.