The Body

Nor can it be a body, because every body has parts and multiplicity in it, whereas the first existent from God is one.

Then the human soul attaches to it, which we said is a subtle luminous body, and what appears is that it differs from the first two in reality.

Then the body needs a bringer into existence and a place, and in its acting it needs an instrument, for the body performs its act only by a bodily power or an instrument;

But what is most astonishing of all is that while they would grant that the mind is superior to the body, nevertheless, in spite of this opinion, they look with greater favor upon training in gymnastics than upon the study of philosophy.

Since this is so, certain of our ancestors, long before our time, seeing that many arts had been devised for other things, while none had been prescribed for the body and for the mind, invented and bequeathed to us two disciplines, physical training for the body, of which gymnastics is a part, and, for the mind, philosophy, which I am going to explain.

for it is the function of the mind to decide both on personal and on public questions, and of the body to be servant to the judgements of the mind.

It has already passed that there are in existence earthly souls, strong, not in the grossness of the predatory and bestial souls and their density and their scant perception, nor upon the configurations of human souls and their preparednesses, such that their attachment to dense bodies over which earthiness predominates would be entailed — nor in the purity of the immaterial souls and their subtle …

The jinn are earthly souls embodied in subtle bodies compounded of the subtle parts of the elements;

⟩subtle and that they be dense, contrary to the Muʻtazilah in their saying that they are subtle bodies and that because of their subtlety we do not see them ⟨.

But, I think, if when it departs from the body it is defiled and impure, because it was always with the body and cared for it and loved it and was fascinated by it and its desires and pleasures, so that it thought nothing was true except the corporeal, which one can touch and see and drink and eat and employ in the pleasures of love, and if it is accustomed to hate and fear and avoid that which is …

Then see, Cebes, if this is not the conclusion from all that we have said, that the soul is most like the divine and immortal and intellectual and uniform and indissoluble and ever unchanging, and the body, on the contrary, most like the human and mortal and multiform and unintellectual and dissoluble and ever changing.

Then the soul is more like the invisible than the body is, and the body more like the visible.

From this body the mind goes forth now with an even temper, now leaps out, and does not then inquire what the end of the abandoned body is to be.

When it has borne itself up to this height, the body too it tends not from love but from care, as a needful thing, and is unwilling to be subject to that which it rules.

But even then, while he is among men, he fears none of the threats against his body, nor those who would foully mangle the corpse for the sake of insult.