De Anima

In my engagement with Hermogenes I dealt only with the question of the soul's origin, in so far as he presumed that it was constituted out of the underlying stuff of matter rather than out of the breath of God; now, turning to the remaining questions, I shall plainly be found contending at great length with the philosophers. The state of the soul was already skirmished over in the prison of Socrates. I do not now know whether his masters chose a fitting moment for it, though the place makes no difference. For what clear knowledge could the soul of Socrates have at that time, when the sacred ship had already returned, the hemlock of his condemnation had already been drained, and death was already present — a soul certainly thrown into some agitation, if according to nature, or driven beside itself, if not according to nature? For however calm and tranquil it was, which neither the weeping of his soon-to-be widow nor the sight of his soon-to-be orphaned children had been able to bend by the law of natural affection, yet in this very thing it was moved — that it should not be moved; and its very steadfastness was shaken in resisting the shock of unsteadiness. And what else would any man unjustly condemned be aware of, except the solace of his wrong? — still less a philosopher, that creature of glory, for whom a wrong is not to be consoled but rather to be defied. So it was that, after the sentence, when his wife met him and cried out in womanly fashion, ‘You are unjustly condemned, Socrates!’, he had already answered, even as a kind of congratulation, ‘But would you have had it just?’ It is no wonder, then, if even in prison, eager to break the snared hands of Anytus and Meletus, he asserts the immortality of the soul in the very face of death by a presumption made necessary to frustrate the wrong done to him. So entirely had all that wisdom of Socrates come at that moment out of a deliberately contrived equanimity, not out of any confidence in a truth discovered. For to whom is truth discovered without God? To whom is God known without Christ? To whom is Christ explored without the Holy Spirit? To whom is the Holy Spirit imparted without the sacrament of faith? Indeed, Socrates was the more easily driven by a different spirit, since they say a familiar spirit clung to him from boyhood — a thoroughly evil tutor in truth, even though among the poets and philosophers demons are ranked after the gods and along with the gods. For the proofs of Christian power had not yet come forth, which alone exposes that most pernicious force, never at any time good, but rather the artificer of all error and the seducer from all truth. But if the wisest Socrates was so accounted even by the vote of the Pythian demon — who was of course doing a service for his own confederate — how much worthier and more steadfast is the assertion of Christian wisdom, before whose breath the whole power of demons gives way! This wisdom from the school of heaven is freer to deny the gods of the age — it would not play the hypocrite by ordering a cock to be paid to Aesculapius; it brings in no new demons, but drives out the old; it corrupts no youth, but forms it in every good of modesty; and therefore it endures the unjust sentence not of one city but of the whole world, for the name of truth — a sentence the more hateful as it is the more full, so that it drinks down death not from a cup with an air of pleasantness, but drains it from the gibbet and the stake through every device of cruelty — meanwhile, in this darker prison of the age, among its own Cebeses and its own Phaedos, if anything is to be examined concerning the soul, it will refer it to the rules of God. Surely you can point to no better demonstrator of the soul than its Author. Learn from God what you hold from God, or learn it from no one else, if not from God. For who shall reveal what God has concealed? It must be inquired into from that source from which it is also safest not to know. It is better, through God, not to know, because He has not revealed it, than, through man, to know, because he has presumed it on his own.

We shall, plainly, not deny that the philosophers have sometimes felt as we do. The very outcome is a testimony to the truth. Sometimes, even in a storm, when the tracks of sky and sea are confounded, some harbour is struck upon by a lucky error; sometimes, even in the dark, some entrance and exit are found by a blind good fortune. But many things are also suggested by nature, as if from the common stock of perception, with which God has deigned to endow the soul. Philosophy, having got hold of this, has puffed it up to the glory of its own art, out of that zeal for eloquence — no wonder if I put it so — which is trained to build up and pull down anything whatever, and which persuades more by speaking than by teaching. It imposes shapes upon things; now it levels them off, now it strips them away; it pre-judges what is uncertain from what is certain, appeals to examples as though all things were comparable, prescribes everything, even where things alike differ in their properties, reserves nothing to the divine liberty, and makes its own opinions into the laws of nature. I would bear with this, if philosophy itself were natural, so that it might be proved to be a partner of nature by sharing in her constitution. It has, indeed, seemed to itself to have drawn even from the sacred writings, as they call them, because antiquity reckoned most of its authors to be even gods, let alone divine men — such as the Egyptian Mercury, to whom Plato especially attached himself; such as the Phrygian Silenus, whose huge ears Midas received from him when shepherds brought him in; such as Hermotimus, to whom the people of Clazomenae dedicated a temple when he was dead; such as Orpheus, such as Musaeus, such as Pherecydes the teacher of Pythagoras. But what if the philosophers have also stumbled into those writings which among us are condemned by their confession of being apocryphal, since we are certain that nothing is to be received which does not agree with the genuine prophetic equipment that was already brought forth in that same age — seeing that we may remember both the false prophets and, much earlier, the apostate spirits, who by the cunning of such talents have furnished the whole face of the age? Finally, even if it is credible that every searcher after wisdom went to the prophets themselves out of the business of curiosity, yet you will find more disagreement among the philosophers than agreement, since even in their agreement their disagreement is detected. For whatever true things harmonize with the prophets they either commend from some other source or pervert to some other end, with the greatest injury to the truth, which they cause to be either aided by falsehoods or made the patron of them. This, then, is what has brought us and the philosophers into conflict, in this matter especially: that sometimes they clothe common conclusions in their own argumentations, contrary in places to our rule, and sometimes they fortify their own conclusions with common argumentations, agreeable in places to their rule — so that truth is almost shut out of philosophy by its own sorceries against her. And therefore, since the adversary of truth presses us under both titles of that fellowship, we are bound both to free the common conclusions from the argumentations of the philosophers and to separate the common argumentations from their conclusions, recalling the questions to the writings of God — except, plainly, those which it will be lawful to take up for simple testimony without the snare of any prejudice, since even from rivals testimony is sometimes necessary, provided it does not profit the rivals. Nor am I ignorant how great a forest this subject is among the philosophers, in proportion to the very number of its commentators — how many varieties of opinion, how many wrestling-schools of theories, how many offshoots of questions, how many entanglements of solutions. But I have looked also into medicine, the sister of philosophy, as they call it, which lays claim to this business for itself as well, on the ground that the account of the soul belongs the more to that art which deals with the care of the body. Hence too it most opposes its sister, in that it claims to know the soul better by treating it, as it were, face to face, in its own dwelling-place. But let the ambition of each for pre-eminence look to it. Philosophy has had the liberty of genius, and medicine the necessity of craft, for extending the discussions about the soul; uncertain things are inquired into at length, and presumed things are disputed at greater length still. As great as is the difficulty of proving, so great is the labour of persuading; so that with good reason that obscure Heraclitus, observing the vaster fogs among the examiners of the soul, declared out of weariness with the questions that he had nowise found the boundaries of the soul, though he had entered upon every road. But for the Christian, few things are needful to the knowledge of this matter. For certainty always lies in few things, and he is not permitted to inquire further than what it is permitted to find — for the apostle forbids endless questions. Moreover, it is not permitted to find more than what is learned from God; and what is learned from God is the whole.

And would that it had been needful for no heresies to exist, so that the approved might be revealed; then we should have no dealings at all with the philosophers concerning the soul either — those, so to speak, who are the patriarchs of the heretics. For even by the apostle, already then, philosophy was foreseen to be the shaker of truth; since at Athens, having experienced that talkative city when he had tasted all those hucksters of wisdom and eloquence, he conceived that forewarning edict. For so it is that the account of the soul too has been adulterated by the philosophized doctrines of men, who mix water with the wine. Some deny the soul to be immortal; others affirm it to be more than immortal; some dispute about its substance, some about its form, some about each of its arrangements; these draw its origin from one quarter, those draw its departure off to another — according as either the prestige of Plato, or the vigour of Zeno, or the steadiness of Aristotle, or the stupor of Epicurus, or the gloom of Heraclitus, or the frenzy of Empedocles has persuaded them. The divine doctrine has erred, I suppose, in rising out of Judaea rather than out of Greece. Christ too went astray in sending out fishermen rather than a sophist to preach. If, then, anything in this fashion darkens the bright and pure air of truth with the fumes of philosophy, these things must be cleared away by Christians, who both strike at the original argumentations — that is, the philosophical ones — and oppose to them the heavenly definitions — that is, the Lord's — so that both the things by which the heathen are captured through philosophy may be destroyed, and the things by which the faithful are shaken through heresy may be beaten back. One contest having already been decided against Hermogenes, as we said before — since we claim that the soul is from the breath of God, not from matter, being fortified there too by the inerasable rule of the divine determination, ‘And God breathed the breath of life into the face of man, and man became a living soul,’ assuredly from the breath of God — about this nothing more need be turned over. It has its own title and its own heretic. From this point I shall bring in the beginning of the rest.

After the definition of its origin, the question of its condition presents itself. For it follows that, having professed the soul to be from the breath of God, we should assign it a beginning. This Plato excludes, wishing the soul to be unborn and uncreated. But we teach that it is both born and made, by the constitution of its beginning. Nor have we at once erred in saying both, since being born is one thing and being made is another — the former being proper to living creatures. But distinctions, while keeping their own places and times, have at times also their mutual exchanges. So it admits of being laid down that a thing made has come to be; since everything that in any way receives existence is generated. For the maker himself may also be called the parent of the thing made; and so Plato uses the word. Therefore, as concerns our faith in the soul as made and born, the philosopher's opinion has been driven off by the authority of prophecy as well.

Let him summon up some Eubulus and Critolaus and Xenocrates, and in this place Aristotle the friend of Plato. Perhaps they will rather be built up to take away the corporeality of the soul — unless they have looked at others on the contrary side, and indeed more of them, who claim a body for the soul. And I do not mean only those who fashion it out of manifest bodily things — as Hipparchus and Heraclitus out of fire, as Hippo and Thales out of water, as Empedocles and Critias out of blood, as Epicurus out of atoms (if atoms too compose corporealities by their conjunction), as Critolaus and his Peripatetics out of some fifth substance I know not what (if that too is a body, since it includes bodies) — but I cite even the Stoics, who, by proclaiming the soul to be breath, hold almost with us, since breath and spirit are near akin to each other; and yet they will easily persuade that the soul is a body. In short, Zeno, defining the soul as a breath sown together with the body, instructs us in this manner: ‘That,’ he says, ‘on whose withdrawal the living creature dies, is a body; but on the withdrawal of the sown breath the living creature dies; therefore the sown breath is a body; but the sown breath is the soul; therefore the soul is a body.’ Cleanthes too holds that the resemblance of parents in their children answers not only in the lineaments of the body but also in the marks of the soul — that is, in the mirror, namely, of character and of disposition and of the passions — and that the soul takes on likeness and unlikeness along with the body. So the body is liable to likeness or unlikeness. Likewise, that the affections of corporeal and incorporeal things have nothing in common with each other. Moreover, that the soul suffers together with the body, grieving when it is hurt by blows, wounds, and ulcers; and the body together with the soul, cleaving to it when it is afflicted with anxiety, with anguish, with love, through the loss of its partner's vigour — whose shame and fear it attests by blushing and pallor. Therefore the soul is a body, by its sharing in corporeal passions. But Chrysippus too lends him a hand, laying it down that corporeal things can in no way be deserted by incorporeal ones, since they are not even touched by them — whence Lucretius too says, ‘For nothing but body can touch or be touched’ — and that the body, being deserted by the soul, is affected by death. Therefore the soul is a body, since, were it not corporeal, it would not desert the body.

The Platonists confound these things by subtlety rather than by truth. ‘Every body,’ they say, ‘must be either animate or inanimate. And if it is inanimate, it will be moved from without; but if animate, from within. Now the soul will not be moved from without, as being not inanimate, nor from within, as being itself rather that which moves the body. Therefore it does not appear to be a body, since it is not moved like the form of corporeal things from some quarter.’ To this we shall first wonder at the incongruity of the definition, which appeals to things that do not apply to the soul. For the soul cannot be called an animate or an inanimate body, since it is itself that which makes the body either animate, if it is present, or inanimate, if it is absent from it. And so that which makes cannot be the very thing that is made, so as to be called animate or inanimate. For the soul is named by the name of its own substance. But if it cannot be called an animate or inanimate body, since it is the soul, how shall it be appealed to under the form of animate and inanimate bodies? Next, if it is the property of a body to be moved from without by another, and we have shown above that the soul too is moved by another — when it prophesies, when it raves, certainly from without, since by another — then with good reason I shall recognize as a body, according to the terms of their own example, that which will be moved from without by another. Indeed, if to be moved by another belongs to a body, how much more to move another! Now the soul moves the body, and its efforts appear outwardly. For it is from the soul that the feet are driven to walking, the hands to touch, the eyes to seeing, and the tongue to speech — a single inner agency stirring the surface as with the motion of a seal. Whence comes this power to an incorporeal soul? Whence the power of an empty thing to drive solid masses? But how is it that bodily and intellectual senses appear divided in man? The qualities of corporeal things, they say — as of earth, as of fire — are reported by the corporeal senses, as by touch and by sight; but those of incorporeal things are apprehended by the intellectual senses, as kindness, as malice. And so it is established that the soul is incorporeal, whose qualities are grasped not by corporeal but by intellectual senses. Plainly so — unless I exclude this step of the definition. For behold, I show incorporeal things subjected to corporeal senses: sound to hearing, colour to sight, odour to smell; by whose example the soul too belongs to the body. Do not say that incorporeal things are reported through the corporeal senses because they belong to corporeal things; for if it is established that incorporeal things too are apprehended by corporeal things, why should not the soul too, which is corporeal, be reported by incorporeal things? So let the definition be excluded. Among their more notable argumentations will be this also, that every body, they judge, is nourished by corporeal things, but the soul, as incorporeal, by incorporeal things — namely, the pursuits of wisdom. But this step too will not stand; for even Soranus, a most accomplished authority on the methodical school of medicine, answers that the soul is nourished by corporeal things as well; in fact, that when it grows faint it is for the most part propped up with food. Why not? For when food is withdrawn, the soul slips away wholly from the body. So Soranus himself too, who treated of the soul most fully in four volumes, and tested it against all the opinions of the philosophers, claims a corporeal substance for the soul, even though he cheated it of immortality — for it is not for all to believe what belongs to Christians. As, then, Soranus himself shows by facts that the soul is nourished by corporeal things, so let the philosopher in turn exhibit it as fed on incorporeal ones. But no one ever poured honeyed water out of an eloquence of Plato into a soul in doubt at its departure, nor stuffed it with the crumbs of Aristotle's hair-splitting talk. And what will so many and so great souls of mountain-folk and barbarians do, who lack the nourishments of wisdom, and yet are strong in untaught prudence, and — without academies and Attic porticoes, and indeed the prison of Socrates — nonetheless live while fasting from philosophy? For the nourishments of studies do not profit the substance itself, but its training; since they make the soul not richer, but more adorned. But it is well that the Stoics affirm even the arts to be corporeal. So in this way too the soul is corporeal, if it is believed to be nourished even by the arts. But the immense intentness of philosophy is often wont not even to look out before its own feet. So Thales fell into a well. It is wont also to suspect that the corruption of its health is the cause of its not understanding its own conclusions. So Chrysippus turned to hellebore. Something of this sort, I suppose, befell him when he denied that two bodies could be in one, alienated from any view or consideration of pregnant women, who carry not single bodies daily, but two and three within the compass of one womb. There is found even in the civil law a certain Greek woman who brought forth five sons, mother of all at one birth, parent manifold of a single delivery, a numerous childbearer of a single womb, who, packed about with so many bodies — I had almost said a people — was herself the sixth body. The whole order of things will testify that bodies destined to proceed from bodies are already there whence they proceed. That which is from another must be second. But nothing is from another except while it is being begotten; and then they are two.

As far as the philosophers are concerned, this is enough — since, as far as our own people are concerned, it is more than enough; for them the corporeality of the soul will shine out in the Gospel itself. The soul of a certain man is in pain among the dead, and is punished in flame, and is tormented in its tongue, and from the finger of a happier soul implores the solace of a drop of dew. Do you think that departure of the rejoicing poor man and the grieving rich man a mere image? And what is the name of Lazarus doing there, if the matter is not real? But even if it is to be believed an image, it will be a testimony to the truth. For if the soul had not a body, the image of the soul would not admit the image of a body, nor would Scripture lie about corporeal members if they were not there. And what is it that is carried off to the lower regions after the divorce from the body, that is detained there, that is reserved unto the day of judgment, to which Christ too descended by dying? To the souls of the patriarchs, I think. But to what end, if the soul is nothing beneath the earth? For it is nothing, if it is not a body. Incorporeality is free from every kind of confinement, exempt both from penalty and from comfort. For that by which one is punished or cherished — this will be a body. Of this I shall render account more fully and more opportunely. Therefore, if the soul plucks beforehand any torment or any solace in the prison or lodging of the lower regions, 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, this will be a body. For in so far as everything corporeal is capable of suffering, in so far is that which is capable of suffering corporeal.

It is, moreover, abrupt and absurd to take anything out of the reckoning of corporeal things merely because it is not equal to the other examples of corporeal things. And where then are the private distinctions of properties, by which the magnificence of the Author is signalized out of the very diversity of His works, so that they are as distinct as they are alike, as friendly as they are even rivals? Since the philosophers themselves agree that the universe is composed of contraries, according to the friendship and enmity of Empedocles. So then, even if corporeal things stand over against incorporeal ones, they too differ thus among themselves, in such a way that the difference enlarges their species without changing their genus — so that they remain corporeal: so many things to the glory of God, while they are various; so various, while diverse; so diverse, while to these belongs one set of qualities of perception, to those another; while to these belong some nourishments, to those others; while these are invisible, those visible; while these are heavy, those light. For they say that the soul too is to be reported incorporeal on this further ground, that when it has departed, the bodies of the dead become heavier, whereas they ought to be lighter, the weight of one body being taken away, if the soul were a body. ‘For what,’ says Soranus, ‘if they should deny the sea to be a body, because outside the sea a ship is made motionless and heavy?’ How much more powerful, then, is the body of the soul, which afterwards carries about with the lightest mobility a body of so great a weight! Moreover, even if the soul is invisible, it is so according to the condition of its own body, and according to the property of its substance, and according also to the nature of those to whom it has been allotted to be invisible. Owls do not know the sun with their eyes; eagles so endure it that they judge the nobility of their offspring by the boldness of their pupils — otherwise they will not rear, as degenerate, the one which the ray of the sun has turned aside. There is, then, that which is invisible to one and not to another, which is not therefore incorporeal because the power does not avail equally. For the sun is a body, being fire; but that the eagle should confess it and the owl deny it does not prejudice the eagle. Just so the body of the soul is invisible to the flesh, but visible, it may be, to the spirit. So John, become in the Spirit of God, beheld the souls of the martyrs.

When we assert that the soul is a body of its own quality and its own kind, this condition of property will already pre-judge concerning the other accidents of corporeality — that these too belong to it, which we have shown to be a body, but themselves of their own kind according to the property of the body; or even if they are not present, this is a matter of property — that there are not present to the body of the soul those things which are present to the rest of the bodies. And yet we shall not inconsistently profess that all those things which are in every way due to corporeality are present to the soul also: as habit, as limit, and that threefold dimension — I mean length, and breadth, and height — by which the philosophers measure bodies. What now, that we even give the soul a shape? Plato is unwilling, as if the immortality of the soul were thereby endangered. For he affirms that everything shaped is composite and built up, and that everything composite and built up is dissoluble; but that the soul is immortal, therefore indissoluble, in so far as it is immortal, and unshaped, in so far as indissoluble — otherwise composite and built up, if shaped. Yet he shapes it after another manner, with intellectual forms, beautiful through justice and the disciplines of philosophy, but misshapen through the contrary practices. But we inscribe corporeal lines upon it too, not only from confidence in its corporeality by reasoning, but also from the constancy of grace by revelation. For since we acknowledge spiritual gifts, after John too we have deserved to attain to prophecy. There is among us at this present day a sister who has been allotted the gifts of revelations, which she experiences in the church amid the Lord's solemnities through ecstasy in the Spirit; she converses with angels, sometimes even with the Lord, and sees and hears mysteries, and reads the hearts of certain persons, and supplies medicines to those who desire them. And so, as the Scriptures are read, or the psalms sung, or addresses delivered, or petitions offered, the materials for her visions are thus supplied. We had happened to be discussing something or other about the soul, when that sister was in the Spirit. After the solemnities were over and the people dismissed — it being her custom to report to us what she has seen (for these things are most diligently sorted, that they may even be proved) — ‘Among other things,’ she said, ‘there was shown to me a soul corporeally, and a spirit appeared, but not of an empty and void quality, rather one that even promised to be held in the hand, tender and lucid and of an airy colour, and in form altogether human.’ This was the vision, and God is witness, and the apostle a sufficient sponsor of the gifts that were to be in the church. Will you, then, not believe, even if the very thing has persuaded you in its particulars? For if the soul is a body, it is without doubt among those things which we have above professed. Accordingly the property of colour too cleaves to every body. What other colour, then, will you reckon for the soul than the airy and lucid? — not that air is its very substance (although this seemed so to Aenesidemus and Anaximenes, and, I think, according to some, to Heraclitus too), nor that it is light (although this pleased Heraclides of Pontus). For neither is the substance of thunderstones fiery merely because they flash with a reddish glow, nor of beryls watery merely because they shimmer with a filtered brightness. For how many things does colour associate which nature disjoins? But since everything thin and translucent is the rival of air, this the soul will be, in so far as it is a breath and a transmitted spirit — since, by the very subtlety of its fineness, it is endangered in respect of the faith of its corporeality. So conceive of its shape now from your own sense, that no other is to be assigned to the human soul than the human, and indeed that of the very body which each one carried about. Let the contemplation of its first origin meanwhile bring us to understand this. For consider: when God had breathed into the face of man the breath of life, and man had become a living soul, that breath was certainly at once transmitted through the face into the interior parts and diffused through all the spaces of the body, and at the same time, condensed by the divine inbreathing, was impressed upon every inner line which, condensed, it had filled, and, as it were, froze into the mould. Hence, then, both the corporeity of the soul was solidified out of this condensation, and its shape was formed by the impression. This will be the inner man, another the outer, the one being twofold; he too has eyes and ears of his own, by which Paul ought to have heard and seen the Lord; he has also the other limbs, which he uses both in thoughts and exercises in dreams. So the rich man among the dead has a tongue, and the poor man a finger, and there is the bosom of Abraham. By these lines too the souls of the martyrs under the altar are understood. For from the first origin the soul, conjoined and configured to the body in Adam, made itself the seed both of the whole substance and of this condition.

It pertains to the standing of the faith to determine the soul to be simple, according to Plato, that is, uniform — at least in respect of the name of its substance. Let the arts and disciplines look to themselves, and the shapes too. For some wish there to be in it another natural substance, namely spirit, as though to live were one thing, which comes from the soul, and to breathe another, which is done by the spirit. For not all living creatures, they say, have both; for many only live, and do not also breathe, in that they have not the organs of breath, lungs and arteries. But what kind of thing is it, in the examination of the human soul, to regard the arguments of the gnat and the ant, when God the artificer has tempered the vital functions, according to the disposition of each kind, peculiar to all living creatures, so that no conjecture is to be caught from thence? For neither will man, if he is built with lungs and arteries, therefore breathe from one source and live from another; nor will the ant, if it lacks members of this sort, therefore be denied to breathe, as if merely living. But to whom has it lain so open in the works of God that he should presume these things to be lacking to anything? That Herophilus, physician or butcher, who cut up six hundred persons in order to scrutinize nature, who hated man in order to know him — I do not know whether he clearly explored all his inward parts, since death itself altered what had lived, and a death not simple, but one that strayed in the very arts of dissection. The philosophers have for certain reported that gnats and ants and moths lack lungs and arteries. Tell me, most curious inspector, do they have eyes for seeing? And yet they go where they will, and shun and seek the things they know by seeing; point out their eyes, mark out their pupils. But the moths also eat through things: show their jaws, bring forth their grinders. The gnats also sound their note, not even deaf as to the ears in the dark: show me alike the trumpet and the lance of that mouth. Whatever animal there be, even of a single point, must of necessity be nourished by something: exhibit the members for transmitting, cooking, and voiding the food. What then shall we say? If it is by these that life is sustained, these will assuredly be in all things that live, even if they are not seen, even if they are not apprehended because of their smallness. This you will believe the more, if you bethink yourself that God is as great an artificer in the minute as in the greatest. But if you think the genius of God incapable of fashioning such tiny little bodies, in this way too acknowledge His magnificence, that He has equipped little animals to live nonetheless without the necessary members — sight preserved even without eyes, and eating without teeth, and digestion without bowels; just as some things even move without feet by a flowing impulse, as snakes do, and by a rising effort, as worms do, and by a foaming crawl, as slugs do. So why do you not think that breathing too is done without the bellows of lungs and without the pipes of arteries — so that you should embrace it as a great argument that the spirit is added to the human soul because there are things which lack spirit, and that they lack spirit because they are not built with the organs of breathing? Do you reckon that anything lives without spirit, and do you not think that anything breathes without lungs? What is it, I ask you, to breathe? To drive breath out of oneself, I suppose. What is it not to live? Not to drive breath out of oneself, I suppose. For this I shall be bound to answer, if to breathe is not the same as to live. But it will belong to the dead not to drive breath; therefore it belongs to the living to drive breath. But it belongs also to the breathing to drive breath; therefore to breathe too belongs to the living. If both could have run their course without the soul, then breathing would not have belonged to the soul, but only living. But in fact to live is to breathe, and to breathe is to live. Therefore the whole of this — both to breathe and to live — belongs to that to which living also belongs, that is, to the soul. Finally, if you separate spirit and soul, separate their works too. Let both do something in distinct fashion, the soul apart, the spirit apart; let the soul live without the spirit, the spirit breathe without the soul; let the one leave the body, the other remain; let death and life come together. For if soul and spirit are two, they can be divided, so that by their division — the one departing, the other remaining — a concurrence of death and life may come about. But it will in no way come about; therefore they will not be two things, which cannot be divided, but could be divided if they had been two. Yet, you say, two things may be conjoined. But they will not be conjoined, if to live is one thing and to breathe another. Their works distinguish substances. And how much the firmer is it now that you should believe them one, since you do not give a distance such as would make the soul one thing and the spirit another, seeing that breathing belongs to the same thing as living does? For what if you wished day to be reckoned one thing, and light, which befalls the day, another, when day itself is light? Plainly there will be other kinds of light too, as from the service of fires. For there will be other species of spirit also, as from God, as from the devil. So when soul and spirit are in question, the soul itself will be spirit, just as the day itself is light. For the very thing through which something exists is that something.

But that I should call the soul a spirit, the reasoning of the present question compels me, because breathing is ascribed to another substance. While we claim this for the soul, which we acknowledge to be uniform and simple, we must call it spirit under a certain condition — not by the name of its state, but of its act; not under the title of substance, but of operation, because it breathes, not because it is properly spirit. For to blow too is to breathe. So the soul also, which we defend as breath by reason of its property, we now pronounce spirit by reason of necessity. But against Hermogenes, who contends that it is from matter, not from the breath of God, we uphold properly the term ‘breath.’ For he, against the faith of Scripture itself, turns breath into spirit, so that — since it is incredible that the Spirit of God should come into transgression and then into judgment — the soul should rather be believed to be from matter than from the Spirit of God. Therefore both there we defend it as breath, not spirit, according to Scripture and according to the distinction of the spirit, and here we pronounce it spirit, however reluctantly, according to the community of breathing and blowing. There the question is of substance; for breathing is an act of substance. Nor need we dwell longer on this, except on account of the heretics who stuff into the soul some spiritual seed I know not what, conferred out of the hidden bounty of their mother Sophia, without the Maker's knowledge — whereas Scripture, more conscious of its Maker, who is its own God, has promulgated nothing further than that God breathed into the face of man the breath of life, and that man became a living soul, through which thereafter he both lives and breathes; the difference between spirit and soul being sufficiently declared in the following instruments, God Himself pronouncing, ‘The spirit went forth from me, and I made every breath.’ For the soul too is breath made out of spirit. And again, ‘Who gave breath to the people upon the earth, and spirit to those who tread it.’ For first the soul — that is, breath — to the people walking on the earth, that is, acting carnally in the flesh; afterwards the spirit to those who tread the earth, that is, who subdue the works of the flesh; since the apostle too says, not first that which is spiritual, but that which is animal, and afterwards the spiritual. For even though Adam at once prophesied that great mystery concerning Christ and the Church, ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; for this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh,’ he experienced an access of the spirit. For an ecstasy fell upon him, the operative power of the Holy Spirit, which is prophecy. For the evil spirit too is an accidental thing. So afterwards the Spirit of God turned Saul into another man, that is, into a prophet, when it was said, ‘What is this to the son of Kish? Is Saul too among the prophets?’ — just as afterwards the evil spirit turned him into another man, namely an apostate. Judas too, for some while reckoned among the elect, even to the office of the purse, though already a thief, was nonetheless not yet a traitor, until afterwards the devil entered into him. Therefore, if neither the spirit of God nor the spirit of the devil is sown into the soul from its birth, it stands that the soul is alone before the access of either spirit; and if alone, then simple and uniform in the name of its substance, and thus breathing from no other source than from the lot of its own substance.

Accordingly the mind also — or the intellect, which the Greeks call ‘nous’ — we understand to be nothing other than a faculty of the soul, inborn and implanted and proper to it from its birth, by which it acts, by which it knows, which, having it with itself, out of itself it moves itself within itself, and so seems to be moved by it as if by another substance; as those would have it who decree that the mind is even the mover of the universe — that god of Socrates, that Only-begotten of Valentinus from the Father ‘Nous’ and the mother ‘Truth.’ How confused was the opinion of Anaxagoras! For, having reasoned that the mind is the beginning of all things, and having hung the swinging-pole of the universe upon its axis, and affirmed it to be pure and simple and unmixable, he by this very title above all segregates it from any commingling with the soul, and yet elsewhere assigns it to the soul. This Aristotle too noted, more ready, I know not, to fill out his own views than to empty others'. In short, he too, while he deferred the definition of the mind, meanwhile pronounced one kind of mind, the divine; and showing this in turn to be impassible, he too removed it from any partnership with the soul. For since it is agreed that the soul is capable of suffering the things it has been allotted to suffer, it will suffer either through the mind and with the mind: if it is conjoined with the mind, the mind cannot be brought in as impassible; or if not through the mind, the soul will not suffer with the mind either, and it will not be conjoined with that with which, and which, suffers nothing. Moreover, if the soul will suffer nothing through it and with it, then it will neither perceive nor know nor be moved through it, as they would have it. For Aristotle too makes the senses passions. Why not? For to perceive too is to suffer, since to suffer is to perceive. Accordingly to know too is to perceive, and to be moved is to perceive; so the whole is to suffer. But we see that the soul experiences none of these things without its being attributed also to the mind, since it is transacted through it and with it. Now therefore the mind is both mixable, against Anaxagoras, and passible, against Aristotle. But if a distinction is admitted, so that mind and soul are two things in substance, then to the one will belong every passion and perception and knowledge and act and motion, but to the other leisure and rest and torpor and now no employment at all; and either the mind or the soul will be idle. But if it is agreed that all these things are to be reckoned to both, then both will be one, and Democritus will prevail, removing the difference; and it will be asked how both are one — whether from a fusion of two substances, or from the arrangement of one. But we say that the mind is so conjoined with the soul, not as another in substance, but as the function of a substance.

To this it remains to consider where the principality lies, that is, which presides over which; so that whatever is found to have the principality may be the mass of the substance, while that over which the mass of the substance presides may be reckoned among the natural functions of the substance. But who will not grant the whole sum to the soul, in 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 the souls safe, not the minds; and the countryman at his work, and the soldier in battle, affirms that he stakes his soul, not his mind. Whose perils or whose vows are the more named, the mind's or the soul's? And what are the dying said to be losing — the mind or the soul? Lastly, the philosophers themselves and the physicians themselves, although they too are about to dispute concerning the mind, yet each has inscribed the face of his work and the front of his subject as ‘Of the Soul.’ And that you may learn it from God too: God always addresses the soul, calls upon and summons the soul, that it may turn the mind to Him. It is the soul that Christ came to save; the soul that He threatens to destroy in hell; the soul that He forbids to be set at a higher price; the soul that He Himself, the good shepherd, lays down for His own sheep. You have the principality of the soul; you have in it the union of substance; whose instrument, you may understand, the mind is, not its patron.

Otherwise the soul is single and simple and wholly of its own, no more buildable up from elsewhere than divisible out of itself, since it is also not dissoluble. For if it were buildable and dissoluble, it would no longer be immortal. And so, since it is no longer mortal, it is neither dissoluble nor divisible. For to be divided is to be dissolved, and to be dissolved is to die. But it is divided into parts — now into two by Plato, now into three by Zeno, now into five and into six by Panaetius, into seven by Soranus, even into eight in the school of Chrysippus, even into nine in that of Apollophanes; but also into twelve among certain of the Stoics, and into two more than that in the school of Posidonius, who, having begun from two titles, the principal — which they call the ‘hegemonic’ — and the rational — which they call the ‘logical’ — went on from there to seventeen. So various species, derived one from another, divide the soul. But things of this sort will be reckoned not so much parts of the soul as powers and efficacies and operations; as Aristotle too judged concerning some of them. For they are not members of the animate substance, but faculties — as the locomotive, the active, the cogitative, and whatever they distinguish in this manner, even those five most famous senses, sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. To all of which, even though they have assigned certain dwelling-places severally in the body, this distribution will not therefore pertain to any sections of the soul; since not even the body itself is so divided into members as these would have the soul divided. On the contrary, out of the multitude of members one body is made, so that the very division is rather a conjoining. Behold the most marvellous munificence of Archimedes — I mean the water-organ: so many members, so many parts, so many fastenings, so many passages for voices, so many resources of sounds, so many combinations of measures, so many rows of pipes, and they will all be one mass. So also the breath, which there pants from the engine of water, will not therefore be separated into parts because it is administered through parts — solid indeed in substance, but in operation divided. 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, like breath in a pipe through its holes, so flashes forth through the organs of sense in various ways — not so much cut up as dispensed. By what titles all these things are named, and by what divisions out of themselves they are held, and by what allotted stations in the body they are sequestered, the physicians will rather consider together with the philosophers; for us a few things will suffice.

First of all, whether there is any supreme grade of vital and sapiential power in the soul, which they call the ‘hegemonic,’ that is, the principal; for if it is denied, the whole standing of the soul is endangered. In short, those who deny the principal have first reckoned the soul itself to be nothing. A certain Dicaearchus of Messene, and, among the physicians, Andreas and Asclepiades, thus did away with the principal, since they would have the senses themselves be in the mind, on whose behalf the principal is claimed. Asclepiades is moreover carried along by this argumentation: that very many animals, when those parts of the body are taken away in which the principal is thought chiefly to consist, both live somewhat further and nonetheless retain their wits — as flies and wasps and locusts, if you cut off their heads, as goats and tortoises and eels, if you take out their hearts; and so the principal does not exist, for if it had, the vigour of the soul would not persist when lost along with its seats. But more, both philosophers — against Dicaearchus, Plato, Strato, Epicurus, Democritus, Empedocles, Socrates, Aristotle — and physicians against Andreas and Asclepiades, Herophilus, Erasistratus, Diocles, Hippocrates, and Soranus himself; and now, more than all, we Christians, who are instructed by God on both points: that there is a principal in the soul, and that it is consecrated in a certain recess of the body. For if we read that God is the searcher and beholder of the heart; if His prophet too is proved to be such by betraying the secrets of the heart; if God Himself anticipated the considering of the heart in the people, ‘Why do you think evil in your hearts?’; if David too says, ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God,’ and Paul says that one believes with the heart unto righteousness, and John says that each one is reproved by his own heart; if, lastly, he who has looked on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery in his heart — then both things shine forth at once: that there is a principal in the soul, which the divine intention addresses, that is, a sapiential and vital power (for what is wise is living), and that it is held in that treasure-house of the body to which God looks. So you are not to think that this principal is agitated from without, according to Heraclitus, nor fanned through the whole body, according to Moschion, nor shut up in the head, according to Plato, nor that it presides rather in the crown of the head, according to Xenocrates, nor that it lies in the brain, according to Hippocrates; nor yet about the base of the brain, as Herophilus holds, nor in the little membranes, as Strato and Erasistratus, nor in the middle space of the eyebrows, as Strato the Natural Philosopher, nor in the whole breastplate of the chest, as Epicurus — but where both the Egyptians reported it, and those who were held to be commentators on divine things, as in that verse of Orpheus or Empedocles: ‘For in man the blood about the heart is perception.’ Protagoras too, and Apollodorus and Chrysippus, hold these views; so that, beaten back even by these, Asclepiades may go seek his goats bleating without a heart and drive off his flies flitting without a head, and let all men now know that they themselves rather live without heart and brain, who have pre-judged the disposition of the human soul from the condition of beasts.

There is this also, pertaining to the faith, that Plato divides the soul in two ways, by the rational and the irrational. To this definition we too give our applause, but not so that both should be reckoned to nature. For the rational is to be believed natural, as being inborn in the soul from the first origin, by a rational Author, namely. For what is not rational which God has put forth even by His command, let alone that which He has properly emitted by His own breath? But the irrational is to be understood as something later, as having befallen by the instigation of the serpent — that very admission of transgression — and as having thence grown in and grown up together in the soul to the likeness now of a natural thing, since it befell at once in the first origin of nature. But since the same Plato says that the rational alone is, as it were, of the soul of God Himself, if we too should ascribe the irrational to nature, which our soul has been allotted from God, the irrational would equally be of God, as being natural, since God is the Author of nature. But in fact the entrance of fault is from the devil, and every fault is irrational; therefore the irrational is from the devil, from whom the fault too is, being foreign to God, from whom the irrational is alien. Accordingly the diversity of these things is from the distance between their authors. Accordingly, when Plato, segregating the rational to God alone, subdivides two kinds out of the rational — the indignant, which they call ‘thymikon,’ and the concupiscent, which they call ‘epithymetikon,’ so that the former is common to us and to lions, the latter to flies, but the rational belongs with God — I see that I too must retract upon this, on account of the things which are discovered in Christ. For behold, this whole trinity is in the Lord too: the rational, by which He teaches, by which He discourses, by which He paves the ways of salvation; the indignant, 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 indignant and the concupiscent are not always to be reckoned from the irrational, since we are certain that in the Lord they ran their course rationally. God will be indignant rationally, namely with those with whom He ought; and God will desire rationally things worthy of Himself. For He will both be indignant with evil and desire salvation for the good. The apostle too gives us concupiscence: ‘If anyone desires the office of bishop, he desires a good work.’ But in saying ‘a good work,’ he shows a rational concupiscence. He concedes indignation also. Why not, since he himself took it up? ‘I would,’ he says, ‘that they were even cut off who subvert you.’ Rational is the indignation that is from a feeling of discipline. But when he says, ‘We were once by nature children of wrath,’ he brands the irrational indignation, as not being of that nature which is from God, but of that which the devil introduced, he himself being called the lord of his own order: ‘You cannot serve two masters’; and himself surnamed father: ‘You are of the devil your father.’ Do not fear to ascribe to him too the property of another nature, a later and an adulterous one — him whom you read of as the over-sower of wild oats and the nocturnal corrupter of the wheaten crop.

There touches us also that question of the five senses, which we learn in our first lessons, since from this too something is procured for the heretics. There is sight, and hearing, and smell, and taste, and touch. The faith of these the Academics too harshly condemn — according to some, Heraclitus too and Diocles and Empedocles; and Plato certainly in the Timaeus, pronouncing sense-perception irrational and entangled with mere opinion. So a lie is charged against sight, in that it asserts oars in water to be bent or broken, against the consciousness of their soundness; in that it persuades us that a four-cornered tower seen from afar is round; in that it defames a most level portico as narrower at its far end; in that it joins to the sea a sky suspended at so great a height. Likewise hearing is held guilty of fallacy, as when we think a heavenly rumble, and it is a wagon; or, while a thunderclap is preparing, we believe for certain that the sound is from a wagon. So too smell and taste are arraigned, since the same unguents and the same wines are cheapened by later use. So touch too is reproached, since the same pavements are believed rougher to the hands, smoother to the feet, and in the baths the same pool of hot water is reported at first most boiling, then most temperate. ‘So in this way too,’ they say, ‘we are deceived by the senses, when we change our verdicts.’ More moderately the Stoics do not charge every sense nor always with falsehood. The Epicureans more consistently defend a truth equal to all and perpetual, but by another road. For it is not the sense that lies, but the opinion. For the sense suffers, it does not opine; the soul opines. And they cut off both opinion from sense and sense from the soul. But whence opinion, if not from sense? In short, unless sight had perceived the tower round, there would be no opinion of roundness. And whence sense, if not from the soul? In short, a body lacking soul will lack sense too. So sense is from the soul, and opinion from sense, and the soul is the whole. For the rest, it will best be laid down that there is certainly something which causes a thing to be reported by the senses otherwise than it is in fact. Moreover, if that can be reported which is not in the thing, why should it not equally be possible for that to be reported through which is not in the senses, but in those causes that intervene under their own name? And so it will be permitted to recognize these causes. For that an oar should appear bent or broken in water, the water is the cause; in short, out of the water the oar is whole to the sight. But the tenderness of that substance, by which a mirror is produced from light, just as it is struck or moved, so, quivering the image, overturns the line of the straight. Likewise, that the look of the tower should deceive, the condition of distance compels in the open; for the equality of the surrounding air, clothing the corners with equal light, obliterates the lines. So too the uniformity of the portico is sharpened at the end, while the line of sight, packed close in the enclosed space, is there thinned out at the very point where it is also extended. So too the sky is united with the sea, where vision is consumed, which, as long as it is vigorous, so long divides them. And what else will deceive hearing than the likeness of sounds? And if afterwards the unguent breathes less, and the wine tastes less, and the pool boils less, in all of them the first force is almost entire. For the rest, as to rough and smooth, the hands and feet — the one tender, the other callous — rightly disagree. So in this way no frustration of the senses will be without a cause. But if the causes deceive the senses, and through the senses the opinions, then the fallacy is to be placed neither in the senses, which follow the causes, nor in the opinions, which are directed by the senses that follow the causes. Those who are mad see some men in others, as Orestes sees his mother in his sister, and Ajax sees Ulysses in the herd, as Athamas and Agave see beasts in their children. Will you charge this lie to the eyes, or to the furies? Those who are jaundiced by an overflow of bile find all things bitter. Will you then charge taste with prevarication, or their state of health? And so all the senses are overturned or circumvented for a time, so that they are free from the property of fallacy. Nay, the verdict of fallacy is now not even to be ascribed to the causes themselves. For if these things happen by reason, reason does not deserve to be called fallacy. What ought to happen so is no lie. And so, if even the causes themselves are freed from infamy, how much more the senses, before which the causes now freely go — since precisely from this very thing truth and faith and integrity must be claimed for the senses, in that they report nothing otherwise than that reason ordained which causes a thing to be reported by the senses otherwise than it is in fact. What are you doing, most insolent Academy? You overturn the whole standing of life, you disturb the whole order of nature, you blind the very providence of God, who has set over all His works — to be understood, inhabited, dispensed, and enjoyed — fallacious and lying masters, the senses! Is not the whole creation administered to us by these? Is it not through these that a second equipping of the world came to it: so many arts, so many talents, so many studies, businesses, duties, dealings, remedies, counsels, consolations, ways of life, of culture, of adornment? They have seasoned the whole savour of life, while through these senses man alone of all creatures is recognized as a rational animal, capable of intelligence and knowledge, and of the Academy itself. But indeed Plato, that he might set no mark of testimony upon the senses, therefore in the Phaedrus too, in the person of Socrates, denies that he can know himself, as the Delphic inscription admonishes, and in the Theaetetus takes from himself knowing and perceiving, and in the Phaedo defers his verdict until after death, a posthumous verdict on truth, namely — and yet, not yet dead, he was philosophizing. It is not lawful, it is not lawful for us to call these senses into doubt, lest in Christ too their faith be deliberated, lest perhaps it be said that He falsely saw Satan cast down from heaven, or falsely heard the Father's voice testifying concerning Him, or was deceived when He touched Peter's mother-in-law, or afterwards perceived another smell of the unguent which He accepted for His burial, another taste of the wine which He consecrated in memory of His blood. For so Marcion too chose to believe Him a phantom, scorning the truth of His whole body in Him. But not even in His apostles was nature mocked. Faithful was both the sight and the hearing on the mount; faithful too the taste of that wine, though it was water before, at the marriage of Galilee; faithful too the touch thereafter of the believing Thomas. Recite the attestation of John: ‘What we have seen,’ he says, ‘what we have heard, we have seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled, of the word of life.’ A false attestation, assuredly, if the sense of eyes and ears and hands lies by nature.

I turn to the part of the intellectual faculties, and how Plato commended them to the heretics as separate from corporeal things, having attained their cognition before death. For he says in the Phaedo: ‘What then concerning the very possession of wisdom? Will the body be a hindrance or not, if anyone takes it as a partner in the inquiry? Some such thing I mean — has sight and hearing any truth for men, or not? Do not even the poets always mutter this to us, that we hear nothing certain nor see anything certain?’ He remembered, of course, Epicharmus the comic poet too: ‘The mind sees, the mind hears; the rest is deaf and blind.’ And so again he says that he therefore over-knows who most knows with the mind, neither setting before himself vision nor drawing in any sense of that kind to the mind, but using the pure mind itself in reflection, to grasp each pure thing of reality — having withdrawn especially from eyes and ears and, if it must be said, from the whole body, as a thing that disturbs and does not permit the soul to possess truth and wisdom whenever it has dealings with it. We see, then, that against the corporeal senses another equipment is set forth, as far more suitable — namely the powers of the soul, working out the intellect of that truth whose objects are not present nor lie subject to the corporeal senses, but are far absent from common consciousness, in the secret and in the higher places and with God Himself. For Plato will have there be certain substances, invisible, incorporeal, supramundane, divine and eternal, which he calls Ideas, that is, forms, exemplars and causes of these natural things that are manifest and subject to corporeal senses; and these to be the truths, but the others to be their images. Do not the heretical seeds of the Gnostics and the Valentinians already shine out? For from this they snatch the difference between the corporeal senses and the intellectual powers, which they accommodate even to the parable of the ten virgins — so that the five foolish ones figure the corporeal senses, foolish, namely, because easy to be deceived, while the wise express the mark of the intellectual powers, wise, namely, because they touch that truth which is hidden and supernal and constituted in the Pleroma — the mysteries of the heretical Ideas. For this is what their Aeons and their genealogies are. And so they divide sense too, attributing the intellectual to their spiritual seed, but the sensual to the animal, since the animal in no way grasps the spiritual; and they say that to the one belong invisible things, but to the other things visible and lowly and temporal, which are met with by sense, constituted in images. For these reasons, then, we have established beforehand that the mind is nothing else than a faculty of the soul, fashioned with it; and that the spirit is nothing foreign except what the soul itself is through breath; and that what is to be reckoned an accession is whatever God afterwards, or the devil, has breathed in. And now, as to the difference of the sensual and the intellectual, we admit nothing other than the diversities of things — corporeal and spiritual, visible and invisible, published and hidden — in that the former are attributed to sense, the latter to intellect; the soul, however, being assigned to the service both of these and of those, so that it equally perceives corporeal things through the body as it understands incorporeal things through the mind, with this proviso, that it even perceives while it understands. For is not to perceive too to understand, and to understand to perceive? Or what will sense be, except the understanding of the thing that is perceived? What will intellect be, except the perception of the thing that is understood? Whence these torments of torturing simplicity and hanging up the truth? Who will exhibit to me a sense not understanding what it perceives, or an intellect not perceiving what it understands, so as to prove that the one can exist without the other? If corporeal things indeed are perceived, but incorporeal things understood, the kinds of things are diverse, not the dwelling-places of sense and intellect, that is, not soul and mind. In short, by what are corporeal things perceived? If by the soul, then the mind too is already sensual, not only intellectual, for while it understands, it perceives, because if it does not perceive, neither does it understand. But if corporeal things are perceived by the soul, then the intellectual power too is already of the soul, not only the sensual; for while it perceives, it understands, because if it does not understand, neither does it perceive. Accordingly, by what are incorporeal things understood? If by the mind, where will the soul be? If by the soul, where will the mind be? For things that are distant must be mutually absent when they work with their own functions. You will think indeed that the mind is sometimes absent from the soul. For thus it comes about that we do not know that we have seen or heard something, because the mind was elsewhere. Nay, I shall rather contend that the soul itself neither saw nor heard, because it was elsewhere with its own power, that is, the mind. For when a man is out of his mind, the soul is out of its mind, the mind not being abroad, but then suffering with it. For the rest, the lapse is principally the soul's. Whence is this confirmed? From the fact that when the soul has departed, the mind too is not found in the man; rather, it follows the soul everywhere, from which it does not lag behind even at the end. But since the mind follows and is assigned to the soul, just so the intellect is assigned to the soul as far as the mind follows it, to which the intellect is assigned. Let the intellect now be even superior to sense, and a better knower of mysteries — provided that it too is a proper power of the soul, as sense also is. It makes no difference to me, except when the intellect is preferred to sense for this purpose, that from this too it should be held the more separate in proportion as it is affirmed the superior. Then, after the difference, the preference too must be beaten back by me, who am to go forward even to the persuasion of a superior god. But concerning God we shall make trial with the heretics on its own field too. Now the title is of the soul, and there is no place for treacherously preferring the intellect. For even though the things attained by the intellect, as spiritual, are superior to those attained by sense, as corporeal, it will be a preference of the things — the more sublime, namely, over the lowlier — not of intellect over sense. For how can the intellect be preferred to sense, by which it is informed for the cognition of truths? For if truths are apprehended through images — that is, invisible things are known through visible — since the apostle too writes to us, ‘For the invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made,’ and Plato says to the heretics, ‘The face of hidden things is the things which appear,’ and it is altogether necessary that this world be a certain image of some other — there, indeed, the intellect is seen to use sense as guide and author and principal foundation, nor can it touch truths without it. How then will it be superior to that through which it exists, of which it has need, to which it owes all that it attains? Thus both are concluded: neither is the intellect to be preferred to sense — for that through which a thing subsists is inferior to itself — nor is it to be separated from sense; for that through which a thing exists is with it.

But not even those are to be passed over who widow the soul of intellect, if only for a little while. For thus they pave the way for afterwards bringing it in, as also the mind, from which, namely, intellect would proceed. They will have infancy contained by the soul alone, by which alone it lives, so as not equally to know — since not all things that live also know. In short, trees live, and yet do not know, according to Aristotle, and to anyone else who imparts the animal substance to the universe, which among us in man is a private thing, not merely as the work of God, which the rest are too, but as the breath of God, which this alone, of which we speak, is born with all its equipment. And if we are challenged to the trees, we will embrace the example; since in them too, while still not even little trees, but as yet stocks and shoots, the moment they arise out of the trenches, there is in them the proper power of the soul. But, according to the reckoning of time, it tarries, coalescing and growing up together with its own strength, until age fills out the habit by which nature performs its work. Or whence presently are little branches grafted into them, and leaves formed, and buds swelled, and tiny flowers adorned, and juices seasoned, if not because in them rests all the equipment of the kind, and, brought forth by parts, grows great? Thence, then, they have knowledge whence they have life, by a property as much of living as of knowing, and indeed from infancy, themselves their own. For I see the vine, still tender and unripe, yet already understanding its own work and wishing to cleave to something, on which, leaning and entwined, it may thrive. In short, without waiting for the rustic's discipline, without reed, without stake, if it has touched anything, it will of its own accord love it, and indeed will embrace it more lustily out of its own genius than out of your decision. It hastens to be secure. I see ivies too, as much as you will, straightway attempting the heights from the very first, and hanging up with none going before, since they would rather climb up the walls in their woven thicket than be worn on the ground by a voluntary injury. On the other hand, those that fare ill on a building — how, as they grow, they recede, how they flee! You may perceive the branches aimed elsewhere, and understand the animation of the tree from its divorce from the wall; it is content with its own littleness, which it learned from the first origin of the most provident plant, fearing even ruin. These wisdoms and sciences of trees — why should I not maintain them? Let them live, as the philosophers will; let them know, as the philosophers will not; and let the infancy of wood understand — how much more that of man? Whose soul, like a kind of shoot drawn off into a slip from the stock of Adam and entrusted to the genital furrows of the female, has sprouted with all its equipment, as much in intellect as in sense. I lie, if not at once the infant, as soon as it has greeted life with a wail, testifies by this very thing that it has perceived and understood that it is born, dedicating all its senses there at once: sight by light, hearing by sound, taste by moisture, smell by air, touch by the earth. So that first cry is forced out of the first voices of the senses and out of the first pulses of the intellects. There is more: that some interpret that mournful voice as the augur, in the prospect of a tearful life, of its discomforts — so that it is to be reckoned even foreseeing from the entrance of birth, let alone understanding. Thereafter it proves its mother by spirit, and examines its nurse by spirit, and recognizes its carrier by spirit, fleeing strange breasts and refusing unknown cradles, seeking no one but from habit. Whence has it judgment of novelty and of custom, if it does not know? Whence has it to be offended and to be soothed, if it does not understand? It is wonderful enough that infancy should be naturally spirited without having a mind, and naturally affectionate without having intellect. But indeed Christ, by appealing to the praise out of the mouth of sucklings and little ones, pronounced neither childhood nor infancy dull; of which the one, meeting Him with its suffrage, was able to offer Him testimony, the other, slaughtered for His sake, assuredly felt the force.

And here too, accordingly, we conclude that all the natural things of the soul, as belonging to its substance, are in it and proceed and thrive along with it, from the very point at which it is reckoned. As our own Seneca too often says: ‘There are implanted in us the seeds of all arts and ages, and God the Master brings out our talents from the hidden,’ namely from seeds implanted and hidden through infancy, which are also the seeds of the intellect. For from these the talents are produced. Moreover, of the seeds of crops too there is one form for each kind, yet various developments: some come out in entire condition, some answer even better, some degenerate, according to the condition of sky and soil, according to the manner of work and care, according to the chance of seasons, according to the licence of accidents. So too it will be possible for the soul to be uniform in its seed, manifold in its produce. For here too the places make a difference. At Thebes it is reported that dull and brutish men are born, at Athens men most acute in knowing and speaking; where, in the district of Colyttus, boys speak a month sooner with a precocious tongue. Indeed Plato too in the Timaeus affirms that Minerva, when she was constructing that city, looked to nothing else than the nature of the region, which promised such talents; whence too in the Laws he himself prescribes to Megillus and Clinias to provide a place for the city to be founded. But Empedocles places the cause of a keen disposition, or of a dull one, in the quality of the blood; the perfected and advanced he deduces from teaching and discipline. Yet the matter of national properties is now common knowledge. The comic poets mock the Phrygians as timid; Sallust strikes the Moors as vain and the Dalmatians as fierce; the apostle too brands the Cretans as liars. Perhaps something accrues also from the body and from health. Fatness hinders wisdom, leanness expedites it; paralysis squanders the mind, consumption preserves it. How much more will those things be reckoned among the accidents which, apart from corporeality and bodily strength, either sharpen or blunt. Doctrines, disciplines, arts and experiences, businesses, studies sharpen; ignorances, idlenesses, slothfulnesses, lusts, inexperiences, leisures, vices blunt; and besides these, if there are also other powers that preside. And indeed they do preside: according to us, God the Lord and the devil the rival; but according to the common opinion, the fate of providence too, and necessity, and the free arbitration of fortune. For the philosophers too distinguish these, and we have vowed them to be discussed according to the faith under their own title now. It appears how many are the things which have variously disposed the one nature of the soul, so that they are commonly reckoned to nature, when they are not species, but lots of nature and of one substance — that, namely, which God conferred upon Adam and made the womb of all. And so they will be lots, not species, of one substance; likewise this variety of character, which is now as great as it is, was not so great in the very head of the race, Adam. For all these things ought to have been in him, as in the fount of nature, and from there to have flowed forth with all their variety, if the variety had been of nature.

But if the nature of the soul was uniform from the beginning in Adam, before so many talents, then it is not manifold through so many talents, nor in any way triform — that the Valentinian trinity may be cut down even now, which is not itself recognized in Adam. For what is spiritual in him? If it is that 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; for this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall be glued to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh’ — this befell him afterwards, when God sent upon him the trance, the spiritual power in which prophecy consists. If the evil too appeared in him, the admitted transgression, this too is not to be reckoned natural, since he wrought it by the instigation of the serpent — as little natural as material, for we have already excluded the faith of matter too. But if neither the spiritual nor what is called the material was proper in him — and if it were from matter, there would have been a seed of evil — it remains that there was in him alone and only the natural, which is reckoned animal, which we have defended as simple and uniform in condition. Of this it plainly remains to ask whether it ought to be believed changeable, which is called natural. For the same persons deny nature to be convertible, that they may fix their trinity in its several properties; since a good tree bears not evil fruits, nor an evil tree good ones, and no one gathers figs from thorns or grapes from briars. Therefore, if it is so, neither will God be able to raise up sons of Abraham from the stones, nor make the offspring of vipers bring forth fruits of repentance. And the apostle erred in writing, ‘You too were once darkness,’ and, ‘We too were once by nature children of wrath,’ and, ‘In these you too once were, but you have been washed.’ But the holy sentences will never disagree. For the evil tree will not give good fruits, if it is not grafted; and the good will give evil ones, if it is not cultivated. And the stones will become sons of Abraham, if they are formed into the faith of Abraham. And the offspring of vipers will produce the fruit of repentance, if they spit out the venoms of malice. This will be the power of divine grace, more powerful assuredly than nature, having in us the free power of the will subject to itself, which is called ‘autexousion’; which, since it too is natural and changeable, is converted with nature whichever way it turns. But that the ‘autexousion’ is naturally in us we have already shown both to Marcion and to Hermogenes. What now, if the condition of nature must be so defined as to be determined twofold — of the born and the unborn, of the made and the uncreated? And so whatever is found to be born and made, its nature will admit of change; for it can both be born again and remade. But the unborn and uncreated will stand immovable. And since this belongs to God alone, as to the only unborn and uncreated, and therefore immortal and unconvertible, it is settled that the nature of all the rest, born and made, is convertible and changeable — so that, even if a trinity were to be ascribed to the soul, it would be reckoned from a change of accident, not from the establishment of nature.

The other natural endowments of the soul Hermogenes has already heard from us, with the defence and proof of them, by which it is recognized as akin to God rather than to matter. Here they shall only be named, lest they seem to have been passed over. For we gave it both freedom of will, as we wrote above, and dominion over things, and divination at times — setting aside that which comes by the grace of God from prophecy. And so I shall now withdraw from this retracing of its disposition, in order to complete the account of it. We define the soul as born of the breath of God, immortal, corporeal, shaped, simple in substance, knowing of itself, proceeding variously, free in will, subject to accidents, changeable through its faculties, rational, sovereign, divining, redundant out of one. It follows now that we consider how it is redundant out of one, that is, whence and when and by what reason it is taken up.

Some believe that they have come down from the heavens, with as much persuasion as they undoubtedly promise that they will return thither — as Saturninus, the disciple of Menander the Simonian, brought in, affirming that man was made by angels, and at first a feeble and weak and unstable work, throbbing on the earth like a worm, since the powers to stand were wanting; then, out of the mercy of the supreme power, to whose likeness, though not yet fully perceived, he had been rashly constructed, he obtained a little spark of life, which roused and erected him and animated him more steadily, and which after the departure of life is to be carried back to the mother-source. But Carpocrates too claims as much for himself out of the higher places, so that his disciples both equal their own souls now to Christ, let alone to the apostles, and, when they will, prefer them — souls which they have accordingly conceived out of a sublime virtue, despising the world's powerful principalities. Apelles relates that the souls were solicited by earthly baits, out of their supercelestial seats, by a fiery angel, the God of Israel and ours, who thereafter molded round them a sinful flesh. The school of Valentinus stuffs into the soul the seed of Sophia, through which they recognize the histories and Milesian tales of their Aeons out of the images of visible things. I grieve, in good faith, that Plato has been made the caterer of all the heretics. For it is his, in the Phaedo, that souls go thither from here and come hither from there. Likewise in the Timaeus, that the offspring of God, having had the generation of mortals delegated to them, when they had received the beginning of an immortal soul, froze about it a mortal body; and again that this world is the image of some other. All which, that he might commend it to belief — both that the soul, in former time in the higher places, lived with God in the fellowship of the Ideas, and that it crosses over hither from there, and that it here reviews the things it formerly knew of the exemplars — he elaborated a new argument, that ‘mathēseis’ are ‘anamnēseis,’ that is, that learnings are recollections. For souls, coming hither from there, forget the things in which they were before, and thereafter, taught by these visible things, remember. Since, then, by an argument of this kind those things are insinuated by Plato which the heretics borrow, I shall sufficiently strike the heretics back if I shatter the argument of Plato.

First, indeed, I shall not concede that the soul is capable of forgetting, because he has granted it so great a divinity that it is made equal to God. He makes it unborn, which alone I might have armed myself with for the testimony of full divinity; he adds immortal, incorruptible, incorporeal — for who has believed even God to be this? — invisible, unshapeable, uniform, principal, rational, intellectual. What more could he proscribe for the soul, if he called it God? But we, who attach nothing to God, by this very thing weigh the soul far below God, in that we acknowledge it to be born, and through this of a more diluted divinity and a slenderer felicity, as breath, not as spirit; and even if immortal, so that this is a matter of divinity, yet passible, so that this is a matter of birth, and therefore, from the very first origin, capable of straying, and thence too akin to forgetfulness. Enough of this with Hermogenes. But that which, so as to be deservedly held God out of the equalizing of all its properties, would lie subject to no passion, would also lie subject to no forgetfulness — since forgetfulness is as great an injury as is the glory of that of which it is the injury, namely memory, which Plato himself proclaimed the safety of the senses and the intellects, and Cicero the treasure-house of all studies. Nor is this now to be brought into doubt, whether so divine a soul could have lost its memory, but whether it can again recover what it has lost. For a thing which ought not to have forgotten, if it has forgotten, I know not whether it can remember. So both suit my soul, not Plato's. In the second place I shall object: Do you make the soul possessed of those Ideas by nature, or not? ‘By nature, surely,’ you say. No one, then, will grant that natural knowledge of natural arts can fall away. The knowledge of studies will fall away, of doctrines, of disciplines; perhaps too of talents and affections, which seem natural and yet are not — because, as we premised, they are constituted out of accidents, according to places and institutions and corporealities and states of health and presiding powers and freedoms of will. But the knowledge of natural things does not fail even in beasts. The lion will plainly forget his ferocity, when forestalled by the training of tameness, and with all his array of mane will become the darling of some queen Berenice, cleaning her cheeks with his tongue. Manners will leave the beast; the knowledge of natural things will remain. The same will not forget the natural foods, the natural remedies, the natural terrors; and even if the queen offer him fish, even if cakes, he will desire flesh; and if she compose theriac for him when ailing, the lion will require an ape; and if she set no hunting-spear against him, yet he will dread a cock. Just so for man too — perhaps the most forgetful of all — the knowledge of natural things alone, as alone natural, will persevere unobliterated: ever mindful of eating in hunger and drinking in thirst, and of what is to be seen with the eyes and heard with the ears and smelled with the nostrils and tasted with the mouth and handled with the hand. These are surely the senses, which philosophy depreciates by the preference of the intellectual. Therefore, if the natural knowledge of sensible things remains, how is it that the knowledge of intellectual things, which is held the superior, has perished? Whence now is the very force of forgetfulness that precedes recollection? ‘From the multitude of time,’ he says. Improvidently enough. For the quantity of time will not pertain to a thing said to be unborn, and through this above all believed eternal. For that which is eternal, in that it is unborn, admitting neither beginning nor end of time, suffers no measure of time. For that which has no measure of time is neither subject to time by any change, nor is there any force in it out of a multitude of time. If time is the cause of forgetfulness, why is it that, from the moment the soul is brought into the body, memory slips away, as though the soul thenceforth endures time — which without doubt was not prior to the body without time? But entering the body, does it at once forget, or some while after? If at once, what multitude of time, not yet to be reckoned, will there be? Infancy, namely. If some while after, then in that space, before the times of forgetfulness, will the soul still act mindful? And what kind of thing is it that afterwards it should forget, and again afterwards remember? But at whatever time forgetfulness rushes in upon it, how great a measure of time too will be reckoned here? The whole course of life, I suppose, will not be enough to overturn the memory of so great an age before the body. But again Plato changes the cause to the body, as though this too were worthy of belief, that a born substance should extinguish the power of an unborn one. But there are great and many differences of bodies, according to nationality, magnitude, habit, age, health. Will then differences of forgetfulnesses too be reckoned? But forgetfulness is uniform; therefore the multiform corporeality will not be the cause of a uniform result. Many proofs likewise, Plato himself being witness, have proved the divination of the soul, which we have already set forth to Hermogenes. But there is no one of men who does not himself at some time feel his soul to be foreseeing, the augur of an omen or a peril or a joy. If the body does not obstruct divination, neither, I suppose, will it stand in the way of memory. In the same body, certainly, souls both forget and remember. If some condition of the body strikes in forgetfulness, how will it admit recollection, which is its contrary? — since recollection itself too, after forgetfulness, is a memory revived. What is adverse to the first memory, why should it not also be repugnant to the second? Lastly, who would remember more than little children, as the more recent souls, as not yet plunged into domestic and public cares, as given over to their studies alone — whose learnings become recollections? Nay, why do we not all alike remember, since we all alike forget? But only the philosophers, you say. Not even all of these. Plato alone, namely, in so great a forest of nations, in so great a meadow of the wise, both forgot and remembered the Ideas. Therefore, if this chief argumentation in no way stands, the whole of that to which it was accommodated is equally overturned — that souls were to be believed unborn, and conversant in the heavens, and conscious there of divine things, and carried down from there, and here remembering — plainly to furnish occasions to the heretics.

Now then I shall return to the cause of this digression, to render how souls are redundant out of one — when, and where, and by what reason they are taken up. About which kind it matters nothing whether the question comes from a philosopher, or from a heretic, or from the common crowd. It makes no difference to the professors of truth about her adversaries, especially such bold ones as are, in the first place, those who presume that the soul is not conceived in the womb, nor compacted and produced together with the modeling of the flesh, but, when the birth has already been brought forth and the infant is not yet alive, is impressed upon it from without. Moreover, that the seed, sequestered from intercourse in the female parts and quickened by natural motion, thickens into the substance of flesh only; and that this, brought forth, and smoking from the furnace of the womb and loosened by heat, like iron made fiery and there plunged into cold water, so, struck by the rigour of the air, both seizes the animal power and gives back the sound of a voice. This the Stoics hold with Aenesidemus, and Plato himself at times, when he says that the soul, otherwise strange and an exile from the womb, is led in by the first inbreathing of the infant as it is born, just as it is led out by the last out-breathing. We shall see whether he has invented this opinion. Nor among the physicians too was Hicesius lacking, a prevaricator both of nature and of his own art. They were ashamed, I suppose, to lay down this which women would recognize. But how much more blushworthy an outcome, to be refuted by women than approved by them! For in this matter there is no master, arbiter, witness so suitable as the sex itself. Answer, you mothers — you who are pregnant, and you who have given birth — let the barren and the males be silent; the truth of your nature is inquired into, the faith of your experience is convened. Do you perceive in the fetus any vital movement other than your own, by which the loins throb, the sides quiver, the whole compass of the belly is pulsed, the whole region of the burden shifts? Are these motions your joys and your sure security, that you so confide the infant both to live and to play? Or, if its restlessness ceases, do you fear for it first? Does it even now hear within you, when it is startled at a new sound? Do you even crave food-fancies for it, and even feel loathings for it? Do you even share your states of health with each other — it indeed even out of your bruises, by which it too within is marked through the same members, snatching to itself its mother's injuries? If livid bruise and redness is a passion of the blood, there will be no blood without a soul; if illness is an access of the soul, there will be no illness without a soul; if nourishment, fasting, increases, decreases, fear, motion are a handling of the soul, then he who exercises these will live. In short, he ceases to live who ceases to exercise them. In short, the dead too are brought forth — how, unless they too were once alive? And who are even the dead, unless those who were first alive? But indeed even in the very womb the infant is slaughtered by a necessary cruelty, when in the delivery, turned aslant, it denies the birth — a matricide, unless it is to die. And so among the instruments of physicians there is even an organ by which the secret parts are first compelled to open, with a screw-fitted apparatus; with a ring-knife, by which the members within are cut up by an anxious decision; with a blunt hook, by which the whole deed is drawn out by a violent delivery. There is also a brazen spike, by which the very throat-cutting is directed in a blind brigandage: they call it the ‘embryo-slayer,’ from the office of infanticide, the destroyer, assuredly, of a living infant. This both Hippocrates had, and Asclepiades, and Erasistratus, and Herophilus too, dissector even of grown men, and the gentler Soranus himself — all certain that a living creature is conceived, and so, taking pity on so most unhappy an infancy of this kind, that it should be killed first, lest it be torn alive. Of which necessity of crime Hicesius too, I believe, did not doubt, while he superadds the soul to those already born from the stroke of cold air — since even the very word for soul among the Greeks answers to a cooling. Are then the barbarian and Roman nations animated otherwise, because they have named the soul by something other than ‘psychē’? And how many nations are reckoned under the most blazing pole, scorched even in their colour? Whence have they a soul, who have no rigour of air? I say nothing of the heat of bed-chambers and all the apparatus of warmth necessary there for women in labour, to be exposed to whose breath of air is rather a danger. In the very baths almost the fetus slips out, and at once the wail is heard. For the rest, if the rigour of air is the treasure of the soul, then outside the Germanies and Scythias and the Alps and the Argaean ranges no one ought to be born. And yet the peoples are more frequent in the eastern and southern temperature, and the talents more nimble, while all the Sarmatians too are torpid in mind. For minds, too, would come forth wiser out of rigours, if souls came out of little chills, since the power is together with the substance. These things being thus established beforehand, we can also call to mind those too who, drawn alive from their mother's womb cut open, drank the air — certain men named Liber and Scipio. But if anyone, like Plato, thinks accordingly that two souls cannot come together into one, just as neither can two bodies — to him I would show not only two souls heaped together into one, as also two bodies, in fetuses, but many other things too joined with the soul, namely a demon, and not one only, as in Socrates himself, but even of a sevenfold spirit, as in Magdalene, and of a legionary number, as in the Gerasene — so that the more easily soul will be joined with soul out of community of substance than an evil spirit out of diversity of nature. But the same man, in the sixth book of the Laws, admonishing us to beware lest the corruption of the seed, from some baseness of intercourse, should breed a blemish for body and soul, has, I know not, slipped more from his earlier or from this opinion. For he shows that the soul is brought in from the seed, which he warns must be cared for — not from the first inbreathing of the one born. Whence, I ask you, do we answer the likeness of the soul too to our parents in our talents, according to the testimony of Cleanthes, if we are not also brought out from the soul's seed? And why did even the ancient astrologers reckon a man's nativity from the beginning of conception, if from that point the soul too is not there? To which equally pertains, if anything does, the breath.

But all the unevenness of human opinion reaches only as far as the boundaries of God. To our own lines now I shall gather my step, that what I have answered to the philosophers and physicians I may prove to the Christian. Build your faith, brother, on your own foundation. Look upon the living wombs of the most holy women, with the infants there not merely already breathing, but even prophesying. Behold, the bowels of Rebecca are disquieted, and the birth is still far off, and there is no impulse of air; behold, the twofold fetus tumultuates in the mother's parts, and there are nowhere as yet two peoples. A portentous petulance, perhaps, of an infancy contending before it lives, spirited before it is animated — if only it had troubled its mother by leaping. But when the birth is opened, and the number is inspected, and what was augured is recognized, then, I think, not only the souls of the infants are proved, but their battles too. He who had come first to be born was held back by the one forestalled, not yet more fully brought forth, but only born as to the hand. And if the first was drinking in his soul from the first inbreathing in the Platonic manner, or plucking it from the rigour of the air in the Stoic fashion, what of that one who was awaited, who was still detained within and already detaining the other without? Not yet breathing, I suppose, he had assailed his brother's heel; still hot with his mother, he desired to come forth before him. O infant both rival and strong and already contentious — alive, I believe! Look too upon singular conceptions, and indeed more monstrous ones, of the barren and of the virgin, who by this very thing might have brought forth imperfect ones, for the overthrowing of nature — since the one was numb to the seed, the other untouched. It were fitting, if anything, that those should be born without a soul who had not been duly conceived; but they too live, each in its own womb. Elizabeth exults — John had struck within; Mary glorifies the Lord — Christ had moved within. The mothers recognize each their own fetuses, themselves recognized in turn by them — assuredly living ones, which were not only souls, but spirits too. So too you read the voice of God to Jeremiah: ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.’ If God forms in the womb, He also breathes in, after the manner of the first origin: ‘And God formed man, and breathed into him the breath of life.’ Nor would God know man in the womb unless whole: ‘And before you came out of the womb, I sanctified you.’ And a body still dead? By no means whatever. For God is the God of the living, not of the dead.

How then is the living creature conceived? Is the substance of both body and soul fused together at once, or does one of them precede? Nay, we say that both are at once conceived, and formed, and perfected, just as they are also brought forth; nor does any interval come in within the conception, by which an order might be arranged. For reconsider the first things from the last. If death is determined to be nothing other than the disjunction of body and soul, life, the contrary of death, will be defined as nothing other than the conjunction of body and soul. If the disjunction befalls both substances at once through death, this ought to be the form which conjunction too, equally befalling both substances through life, has dictated. Now we acknowledge life from conception, since we claim the soul from conception; for from that point life exists at which the soul does. Equally, therefore, those things are compacted into life which are equally separated in death. Then, if we give the primacy to one and the second place to the other, the times of the seed too must be distinguished according to the order of their rank. And when will the seed of the body be deposited, when that of the soul? Nay, if the times of the seeds are divided, then diverse materials too will be held, out of the distance of the times. For even though we shall confess two species of seed, the corporeal and the animal, yet we claim them to be undistinguished, and in this way contemporaneous and of the same moment. Let us therefore not be ashamed of a necessary interpretation. Nature is to be revered, not to be blushed at. It is lust, not the act, that has befouled intercourse; it is the excess, not the institution, that is unchaste, since the institution is blessed by God: ‘Increase and abound into a multitude.’ But the excess is cursed — adulteries and stuprations and brothels. In this solemn office of the sexes, then, which mingles male and female — in common intercourse, I mean — we know that both soul and flesh perform their function together, the soul by concupiscence, the flesh by act, the soul by instinct, the flesh by the deed. By a single impulse of both, then, the whole man being shaken, the seed of the whole man is foamed out, having from the corporeal substance its moisture, from the animal its warmth. And if the soul is a cold thing in the name the Greeks give it, why does the body grow cold when it is removed? In short — that I may now risk myself more by modesty than by proof — in that very heat of the last pleasure, by which the genital fluid is expelled, do we not perceive that something of the soul too goes out? And do we not accordingly grow faint and feeble, with a loss of light? This will be the animal seed, straightway from the distillation of the soul, just as that corporeal fluid too is the seed from the purging of the flesh. Most faithful are the examples of the first origin. From clay was the flesh in Adam. What else is clay than a rich liquid? Thence will be the genital fluid. From the inbreathing of God was the soul. What else is the inbreathing of God than a vapour of the spirit? Thence will be that which we exhale through that fluid. Since therefore in the first origin two diverse and divided things, clay and breath, had been compacted into one man, the two substances, now confused into one, mixed their own seeds too, and thence handed down a form for propagating the race; so that even now the two, though diverse, even united, flow forth equally, and equally insinuated into their furrow and field, equally make man bud forth out of both substances; in whom again its own seed is inborn after its kind, just as it has been prefixed for every generative condition. Therefore from one man comes all this redundancy of souls — nature, namely, observing the edict of God: ‘Increase and abound into a multitude.’ For even in the very preface of His one work, ‘Let us make man,’ the whole posterity was foretold in the plural: ‘And let them have dominion over the fishes of the sea.’ No wonder: the promise of the harvest is in the seed.

What now is that old saying in the memory of Plato about the reciprocal coursing of souls — that those departing hence go thither, and again come hither and live, and thence depart from life, and again out of the dead are made alive? Pythagorean, as some will have it; divine, Albinus thinks it, of the Egyptian Mercury perhaps. But there is no divine saying except of the one God, with which the prophets, with which the apostles, with which Christ Himself thundered. Moses, much more ancient even than Saturn by about nine hundred years — let alone than his great-grandsons — and certainly much more divine, who set forth the descents of the human race from the beginning of the world too, through the several births, by name and by time, sufficiently proving the divinity of the work out of the divination of his utterance. But if the Samian sophist is Plato's authority concerning the relapse of souls, ever rolled back out of the alternate substitution of dead and living, certainly that Pythagoras, though good in other respects, yet, in order to build up this opinion, leaned upon a lie not only base but even rash. Learn, you who do not know, and believe with us. He feigns death, hides in an underground place, there condemns himself to seven years' endurance; meanwhile he learns from his only confidant and minister, his mother, those things concerning the recently dead which he was to relate for the credit of the matter; and when he has seemed to himself to have falsified his corporeality sufficiently for all the horror of an old corpse, he emerges from the recesses of his deceit, as one given back from the dead. Who would not believe that he whom he had believed dead had come to life again, hearing especially from him those things about the dead posterity which he could not seem to have learned except among the dead? So that the living are made out of the dead is an older saying. What of it, if it were even younger? Neither does truth desire antiquity, nor does falsehood shun novelty. I hold it plainly false, though noble in age; why not false, whose testimony too is from falsehood? How shall I believe that Pythagoras does not lie, who lies that I may believe? How will he persuade me that he was Aethalides and Euphorbus and Pyrrhus the fisherman and Hermotimus, before Pythagoras, in order to persuade me that the living are made out of the dead — he who again perjured himself to be Pythagoras? For by as much as it would have been more credible that he himself had once returned into life out of himself, than so often one and then another — by so much, in the harder matter, did he deceive, who lied in the softer. But he recognized the shield of Euphorbus once consecrated at Delphi, and said it was his own, and proved it by marks commonly unknown. Look to his underground vault, and, if it suffices, believe. For one who contrived such a trick, with injury to his good health, with the fraud of a life racked for seven years beneath the earth by fasting, sloth, and shadow — to whom the loathing of the sky was of such worth — what rashness would he not have approached, what curiosity would he not have attempted, to arrive at the mark of that shield? But what, if he found it in some more hidden histories? What, if he drank in some surviving little breaths of fame of a now decayed tradition? What, if, bribing the temple-keeper, he learned it by a secret inspection? We know too that it is permitted to magic to explore hidden things through the spirits of the underworld and the familiars and the Pythonic ones. For did not even Pherecydes, the teacher of Pythagoras, perhaps divine — not to say dream — by these arts? What, if the same demon was in him who in Euphorbus too had done the deeds of blood? In short, he who had proved himself Euphorbus from the argument of the shield, why did he recognize none of the Trojans, his fellow-soldiers, in like manner? For they too would by now have come to life again, if the living were made out of the dead.

That the dead are made out of the living is established; yet not on that account also the living out of the dead. For from the beginning the living were prior; whence from the beginning equally the dead were posterior — from nowhere else than from the living. The former had something whence they might rather arise, provided it was not from the dead; the latter had nothing whence they could rather be derived, except from the living. Therefore, if from the beginning the living were not from the dead, why afterwards from the dead? Had that fount of origin, whatever it is, failed? Or did the form repent? And how is it preserved in the dead? Is it not the case that, because from the beginning the dead were from the living, therefore always from the living? For either in both directions the form of the beginning would have persevered, or in both it would have changed; so that, if afterwards the living ought to be made out of the dead, equally it ought also that the dead should be made not out of the living. If the faith of the institution were not to be equalized, contraries are not everywhere reformed by alternation out of contraries. For we too shall set against them the contrarieties of the born and the unborn, of sight and blindness, of youth and age, of wisdom and folly; and yet the unborn does not therefore come from the born because a contrary is made out of a contrary, nor sight again out of blindness because blindness befalls out of sight, nor youth revive again out of age because age withers out of youth, nor folly become blunted again out of wisdom because wisdom is sharpened out of folly. These things Albinus too, fearing for his Plato, subtly inquires into, distinguishing the kinds of contrarieties — as though these too were not as absolutely placed among contrarieties as those which are interpreted toward the opinion of his master, life, I mean, and death. And yet life is not given back out of death because death is brought down out of life.

But what shall we answer to the rest? First, if the living are from the dead, as the dead are from the living, then one and altogether the same number of all men would have stuck fast forever — that number, namely, which had first entered upon life. For the living are prior to the dead, then the dead out of the living, and again the living out of the dead. And while this is always out of the same, so always there would be just as many as are out of the same. For neither would more or fewer have gone out than had returned. But we find, even in the Commentaries on Human Antiquities, that the human race has gradually grown beyond measure, while the Aborigines, or wanderers, or exiles, or any glory-seekers occupy lands — as the Scythians occupied the Parthian lands, as the Temenidae the Peloponnese, as the Athenians Asia, as the Phrygians Italy and the Phoenicians Africa — while there are also solemn migrations, which they call colonies, by counsel of unburdening the population, vomiting forth swarms of a nation into other territories. For the Aborigines now both remain in their own seats and have lent out their stock elsewhere in greater measure. Certainly the very world is plain to see, more cultivated by the day and better furnished than of old. All places are now traversed, all are known, all are busy with commerce; most charming farms have blotted out the once notorious wildernesses, fields have tamed the woods, flocks have put to flight the wild beasts, the sands are sown, the rocks are planted, the marshes are drained, there are as many cities as there were once cottages. No longer do the islands fright, nor the crags terrify; everywhere a house, everywhere a people, everywhere a commonwealth, everywhere life. The greatest testimony of human frequency: we are burdensome to the world, the elements scarcely suffice us, our necessities are sharper, and complaints are on the lips of all, while now nature does not sustain us. In truth, pestilence and famine and wars and the engulfings of cities are to be reckoned as a remedy, like a pruning of the human race grown overgrown. And yet, when axes of this kind cut down the greatest force of mortals at one stroke, the world has never once, after a thousand years, been frightened at its restitution, bringing the living back out of the dead. For an equal force of loss and of restitution would have made this too perceptible, if the living were made out of the dead. But why a thousand years after, and not at once the living out of the dead — since, if what was paid out were not at once made up, it would be endangered to be wholly consumed, the defect forestalling the restitution, because this furlough of life would not pay back the equivalent of the millennial period, being far shorter and therefore more easily extinguished before being rekindled? Therefore that which in this way would have perished, if the living were made out of the dead — when it has not perished — it will not be credible that the living are made out of the dead.

Now indeed, if the living are from the dead, then assuredly single ones from single ones. The souls of single bodies, therefore, ought to have returned, as single, into single bodies. Moreover, if even two and three and five at a time are resumed in one womb, the living will not be from the dead, since they are not single from single. And in this way too the form of the first origin is marked, since even now several souls are brought forth from one. Likewise, since souls depart at various ages, why do they return at one age? For all are imbued from infancy. But what kind of thing is it that an old man, deceased, should return an infant? If the soul decreases without, retrograding in age, how much more was it fit that it should return more advanced after a thousand years? Or at least coeval with its own death, so as to recover again the age it had left. But even if the same souls were always rolled round, although not the same forms of bodies too, yet they ought at least to carry back with them the former properties of talents and studies and affections, since otherwise they would rashly be held the same, lacking those things by which the same would be proved. ‘How do you know,’ you say, ‘whether it does not indeed happen so, secretly, but the condition of the millennial age destroys the faculty of recognizing, because they return unknown to you?’ But I know it does not happen so, since you set Pythagoras-Euphorbus against me. For behold, it is sufficiently established that Euphorbus was a military and warlike soul, even from the very glory of the consecrated shields; but Pythagoras so inactive and unwarlike that, shunning the battles of Greece then, he preferred the quiet of Italy, devoted to geometry and astrology and music, a stranger to the study and affection of Euphorbus. But Pyrrhus too occupied himself in catching fishes; Pythagoras, on the contrary, not even in eating them, abstaining as from living creatures. Aethalides, moreover, and Hermotimus had even thrust the bean into the common foods; but Pythagoras handed it down to his disciples that one was not even to pass through a bean-field. How then are the same souls recovered, which will be proved the same neither by talents nor by institutions nor now by foods? Now then, out of so great a census of Greece, four souls only are reckoned. But why at all of the census of Greece alone, and not out of every nation, and out of every age and dignity, and lastly out of every sex — since transmigrations and transincorporations come about daily — why does Pythagoras alone recognize himself as one and then another, and not I too? Or if it is the privilege of philosophers, and assuredly of Greeks — as though Scythians and Indians too did not philosophize — why does Epicurus remember himself as no one before, Chrysippus as no one, Zeno as no one, not even Plato himself, whom perhaps we would have believed Nestor on account of the honey of his eloquence?

But indeed Empedocles, who had raved himself a god, therefore, I suppose, disdaining to remember himself any hero, says, ‘I was a bush and a fish.’ Why not rather a pumpkin too, so insipid, and a chameleon, so puffed up? Plainly, as a fish, that he might not rot in some more decent burial, he chose rather to be roasted by hurling himself into Aetna. And thereupon let metempsychosis have ended in him, like a summer supper after the roast. Accordingly here too we must needs contend against a yet more portentous presumption, which revolves beasts out of men and men out of beasts. Let the bushes look to it. I shall be allowed to be brief too, lest I 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 were reckoned from elemental substances. For whether the soul be fire, or water, or blood, or breath, or air, or light, we ought to reconsider the animals contrary to each of the several species: to fire, those that are cold, the snakes, lizards, salamanders, and whatever is produced from the rival element, namely from water; likewise contrary to water, those that are dry and juiceless — in short, locusts, little butterflies, chameleons rejoice in dryness; likewise contrary to blood, those that lack its purple — snails, little worms, and the greater census of fishes; but contrary to breath, those that do not seem to breathe, lacking lungs and arteries — gnats, ants, moths, and this kind of little creatures; likewise contrary to air, those living things which, ever living underground and underwater, lack the drawing-in of it (you would know the things rather than the names); likewise contrary to light, those that are wholly blind, or have eyes only for the darkness — moles, bats, owls. These things, that I may teach from substances apparent and manifest. But if I were to hold the atoms of Epicurus, and to see the numbers of Pythagoras, and to come upon the Ideas of Plato, and to seize the entelechies of Aristotle, I should perhaps find, even for these species, animals which I might oppose by the name of contrariety. For I contend that, out of whatever substance above-named the human soul might have consisted, it could not have been reformed into animals so contrary to each several substance, and confer upon them a census from its own transference — by which it would rather have to be excluded and rejected than admitted and received under the name of this first contrariety, which makes a diversity of substantial state, and then the rest too, by the consequent order of each nature. For the human soul has been allotted other seats, and ways of feeding, and equipment, and senses, and affections, and modes of intercourse, and offspring; likewise talents, then works, joys, weariness, vices, desires, pleasures, states of health, medicines; and lastly its own ways of life too and exits of death. How then will that soul which clung to the earth, fearless of no height, of no depth, weary even at climbing stairs, suffocated even by plunging into pools, afterwards insult the air in an eagle, or afterwards leap into the sea in an eel? How likewise, brought up on liberal and dainty and well-tended foods, will it chew — I do not say chaff, but thorns and the wild bitternesses of leaves, and the beasts of dunghills, and even the venoms of worms — if it pass into a goat, or into a quail, or even into carrion, even into human flesh, mindful surely of itself in a bear or a lion? So you will reduce the rest too to incongruity, that we may not delay over pleading each. Whatever measure the human soul itself has, whatever its size, what will it do in animals far larger or far smaller? For of necessity both every body is filled by a soul, and every soul covered by a body. How then will the soul of a man fill an elephant? How likewise will it be covered in a gnat? If it is so far extended or contracted, it will surely be endangered. And therefore I add: if it is in no way capable of such a transference into animals not corresponding to it either in the measures of their bodies or in the other laws of its own nature — will it then be changed according to the qualities of the kinds and their life contrary to human life, itself too made contrary to the human by change? But in fact, if it admits of change, losing what it was, it will not be what it was; and if it will not be what it was, metempsychosis is dissolved — not to be ascribed, namely, to that soul which, if it will be changed, will not be. For it would be called metempsychosis of whatever soul would suffer it while remaining in its own state. Therefore, if it can neither be changed, lest it be not itself, nor remain in its state, since it does not admit contraries — I still seek some cause worthy of belief for a transference of this kind. For even though certain men are equated to beasts according to the qualities of their characters and talents and affections — since God too says, ‘Man, when he was in honour, was likened to the irrational beasts’ — yet kites are not therefore made out of the rapacious, and dogs out of the filthy, and panthers out of the cruel, or sheep out of the honest, and swallows out of the chattering, and doves out of the chaste, as though the same substance of soul everywhere repeated its nature in the properties of animals. But substance is one thing, and the nature of substance another; since substance is proper to each thing, but nature can be common. Take an example. Stone is a substance, iron is a substance; the hardness of stone and iron is the nature of the substance. The hardness they share; in substance they disagree. The softness of wool, the softness of feather — let their natural properties pair them off, their substantial ones do not pair them. So too, if a savage or an honest man be called a beast, yet it is not the same soul. For then too the likeness of nature is noted when the unlikeness of substance is observed. For the very fact that you judge a man like a beast, you confess the soul not the same, by saying ‘like,’ not ‘the very same.’ So the divine pronouncement too is wise, equating man to the cattle in nature, not in substance. For neither would God have marked man in this way, if He knew him a beast in substance.

Even when this dogma is claimed under the name of judgment — that human souls are allotted kinds of animals according to their life and merits, some to be slaughtered in the slaughterhouses, some to be broken in for servile uses, some to be wearied in labours, some to be fouled among the unclean; and accordingly to be honoured and loved and tended and sought after in the fairest and most upright and most useful and daintiest — here too I will say: if they are changed, the very souls that will have earned will not be requited, and the principle of judgment will be voided, if the sense of merits be lacking. But the sense of merits will be lacking, if the state of the souls be turned; and the state of the souls is turned, if they have not persevered the same. Equally, if they will persevere unto judgment — which even the Egyptian Mercury knew, saying that the soul, departed from the body, is not refunded into the soul of the universe, but remains determinate, ‘that it may render an account,’ he says, ‘to the Father of the things it did in the body’ — I wish, assuredly, to review the justice, the gravity, the majesty, the dignity of the divine judgment, whether human censure does not preside at a more sublime height, fuller of the honour of both sentences, of punishments and of rewards, severer in avenging and more liberal in bestowing. What do you think the soul of a murderer will become? Some beast, I suppose, destined for the butchery and the meat-market, that it may likewise be slaughtered, because it too slaughtered; likewise be flayed, because it too despoiled; likewise be set out for food, because it too cast to the beasts those whom it butchered in woods and pathless places. If it shall be so judged, will not that soul bring back more solace than punishment, in that it finds its funeral among the most precious cooks, in that it is buried with the spices of an Apicius and a Lurco, in that it is brought in on Ciceronian tables, in that it is borne out on the most splendid platters of the Sullae, in that it suffers a banquet for its obsequies, in that it is devoured by its equals rather than by kites and wolves — so that, entombed in a man's body and returned to its own kind, it might seem to have risen again, exulting against human judgments, if it had experienced them? For human judgments rend the assassin with various and exquisite and now unnaturally trained beasts, and indeed while living — nay, while not easily dying, the end being delayed of set purpose, to the fullness of the penalty. But even if the soul has fled before the final sword, lest the body too should escape the iron, nonetheless, the throat and belly being run through and the ribs transfixed, requital is exacted for its own crime. Thence it is given to the fire, that even its burial may be a punishment. Otherwise, in short, it is not permitted. Nor yet is so much care taken of the pyre that other beasts may find the remains; certainly neither are the bones spared, nor are the ashes indulged with being left to lie bare. So great among men is the vengeance for murder as is the very nature that is avenged. Who would not prefer the justice of the age, which the apostle too testifies is not armed with the sword in vain, which is religiously stern in the cause of man? If we consider too the wages of the other crimes — the gibbets and the burnings alive and the sacks and the hooks and the crags — for whom would it not be expedient to suffer the sentence of Pythagoras and Empedocles? For even those who are to be punished with labours and servitudes, and are to be re-embodied surely into asses and mules, how they will congratulate themselves on the mills and the water-wheels, if they remember the mines and the workhouses and the public works and the very prisons, idle though these may be! Likewise, of those who, having behaved uprightly, have commended their life to the Judge, I seek rewards, but rather find punishments. Doubtless it is a great reward to the good, to be restored into animals of whatever kind. Homer remembered that he had been a peacock, when Ennius dreamed it; but I will not believe the poets even when they are awake. Even if the peacock is most beautiful, and most adorned with whatever colour it will — yet its feathers are silent, its voice displeases, and the poets would rather do nothing else than sing. Homer therefore was condemned into a peacock, not honoured. He will rejoice more in the world's remuneration, accounted the father of the liberal disciplines, so that he prefers the ornaments of his fame to those of a tail. Come now: granting that the poets pass into peacocks or into swans — if there is a comely voice even to swans — what animal will you put upon a just man, an Aeacus? What beast upon a chaste woman, a Dido? What bird will patience, what beast will sanctity, what fish will innocence be allotted? All things are the servants of man, all subjected, all his chattels. If he is to be any of these, he is diminished there, he to whom, for the merits of his life, images, statues and inscriptions, public honours, privileges are repaid; for whom the senate, for whom the people offer sacrifice with their votes. O divine judgments after death, more lying than human ones! contemptible as to penalties, despicable as to favours, which neither the worst will fear nor the best desire, to which the wicked rather than the holy will hasten — those, that they may the sooner escape the justice of the age, these, that they may the later attain it! Well do you philosophers teach, profitably do you persuade, that the punishments or rewards after death are lighter; whereas, if any judgment awaits souls, it ought to be believed heavier in the requital of life than in its administration, since nothing is fuller than what is final, and nothing fuller than what is more divine. God therefore will judge more fully, because more finally, by an eternal sentence both of punishment and of refreshment, the souls returning not into beasts, but into their own bodies. And this once, and on that day which the Father alone knows, that by a suspended expectation the solicitude of faith may be proved, ever watching for the day while ever ignorant of it, fearing daily what it daily hopes.

No opinion of this kind of madness, indeed, has to this day broken forth under a heretical name, refashioning human souls into beasts. But we have necessarily brought in and excluded this species too, as cohering with the foregoing, so that just as Euphorbus was beaten back in Pythagoras, so Homer might be beaten back in the peacock; and thus, this metempsychosis or metensomatosis also being repelled, that other might again be cut down which furnished something to the heretics. For Simon of Samaria too, in the Acts of the Apostles, the would-be purchaser of the Holy Spirit — after, being condemned by him, he had wept in vain over his destruction together with his money — turned to the assault of the truth, as if by way of solace for his revenge; and, supported also by the powers of his art, for the deceptions of some virtue, he redeemed with that same money a certain Helen of Tyre out of a place of public lust, a worthy wage for himself in place of the Holy Spirit. And he feigns himself indeed the supreme Father, but her his first conception, by which he had conceived to found angels and archangels; that she, possessed of this design, leapt forth from the Father and bounded down into the lower regions, and there, forestalling the Father's design, brought forth the angelic powers, ignorant of the Father, the artificer of this world; that by these, out of an equal mind, she was thence detained, lest, if she departed, they should seem the offspring of another, and was therefore consigned to every contumely, so that, cheapened, she might nowhere be free to depart; that she fell down even to human form, to be coerced as it were by the chains of the flesh. So, rolled through many ages in one and another womanly habit, she was even that Helen so destructive to Priam, and afterwards to the eyes of Stesichorus, whom she had both blinded for the abuse of his song and afterwards given back their light for the satisfaction of his praise; and so, migrating from bodies into bodies, in a last disgrace, under the title of prostitution she stood for hire, a viler Helen. This, then, is the lost sheep, to whom the supreme Father descended — Simon, namely; and, having first recovered and carried her back, on his shoulders or his thighs I know not, thereafter looked to the salvation of men, as by way of vengeance for those to be freed from those angelic powers — for whose deceiving he too, equally configured, and falsely pretending to be a man among men, played in Judaea the Son, but in Samaria the Father. O Helen, toiling between the poets and the heretics, infamous now for adultery, now for stuprum! — except that it is more gloriously that she is rescued out of Troy than out of a brothel: from Troy by a thousand ships, from the brothel perhaps not by a thousand denarii. Blush, Simon, slower in seeking, more inconstant in drawing back. But Menelaus at once pursues the lost one, at once demands back the snatched one, wrings her out by a ten years' war, not lurking, not deceiving, not given to caviling. I fear that he was rather the Father, who laboured about the recovery of Helen both more vigilantly and more boldly and longer.

But not for you alone did metempsychosis frame this fable. From it Carpocrates too uses it, alike a magus, alike a fornicator, save that he has less of a Helen. Why not, when he asserted that souls are re-embodied for the establishing of an utter overthrow of divine and human discipline? For he holds that this life is made firm to no one unless all the things that arraign it have been wiped out, since a thing is held evil not by nature but by opinion; and so metempsychosis necessarily impends, if in this very first journey of life satisfaction is not made for all things forbidden. To wit, crimes are assigned to life. For the rest, the soul has to be recalled as often as it has discharged anything too little, a debtor for its faults, until it pays the last farthing, thrust again and again into the prison of the body. For to this he adapts that whole allegory of the Lord, which shines forth with certain interpretations, and is first to be understood simply. For the heathen man too is our adversary, walking in the same way of common life. For the rest, we should have to go out of the world, if we might not converse with such. He bids you, then, show goodness of mind toward him. ‘For love your enemies,’ He says, ‘and pray for those who curse you,’ lest, provoked by injury through some dealing of business, he drag you off to his judge, and you, handed over into custody, be tortured to the payment of the whole debt. Then, if the mention of the adversary is transferred to the devil, you are warned, by the attendant observance, to enter into concord with him too, which is reckoned from the covenant of the faith; for you have agreed to renounce both him and his pomp and his angels. It is agreed between you on this point. This will be the friendship of the observance of the pledge, that you take nothing of his afterwards from those things which you have abjured, which you have rendered back to him — lest he charge you before God the Judge as a defrauder, as a transgressor of the pact, even as we read of him elsewhere as the accuser of the saints and the informer concerning his very name; and the judge deliver you to the angel of execution, and he consign you to the infernal prison, whence you shall not be dismissed until even the smallest fault be expended by the delay of the resurrection. What is fitter than these senses? What is truer than these interpretations? For the rest, with Carpocrates, if the soul is the debtor of all crimes, who is to be understood as its enemy and adversary? The better mind, I believe, which has driven it into some act of innocence, to be forced again and again into the body, until it be found guilty in nothing of a good life. This is to recognize the good tree from its evil fruits — that is, to acknowledge the doctrine of truth from the worst precepts. I suspect that heretics of this kind seize upon the example of Elias too, as represented thus in John, so that the Lord's pronouncement should patronize metempsychosis: ‘Elias has already come, and they knew him not’; and elsewhere, ‘And if you will receive it, this is Elias who is to come.’ Did the Jews, then, ask John out of the Pythagorean opinion, ‘Are you Elias?’ — and not out of the divine preaching, ‘And behold, I will send you Elias the Tishbite’? But indeed their metempsychosis is the recall of a soul long since dead and repeated into another body. Elias, however, is to come not from any departure of life, but from a translation; nor to be restored to a body from which he was not removed, but to be given back to the world from which he was translated; not out of any return from exile of life, but out of a supplement of prophecy — the same both himself, and of his own name and of his own person. But how is Elias John? You have the angel's word: ‘And he himself,’ he says, ‘shall go before the people in the power and in the spirit of Elias’ — not in his soul nor in his flesh. For these substances are each man's own. But spirit and power are conferred from without, out of the grace of God; and so they can be transferred into another, by the will of God, as was done formerly with the spirit of Moses.

Into these questions we digressed thence, I think, whither we must now return. We had laid down that the soul is sown in man himself and out of him, and that there is one seed from the first origin — as of the flesh too unto the whole census of the race — namely on account of the rival opinions of philosophers and heretics, and that drowsy saying of Plato. Now we weave the order of the treatises that follow thereupon. The soul, sown in the womb together with the flesh, is allotted its sex together with it, equally so, in such a way that in the cause of sex neither substance is held responsible. For if, in the seeds of the two substances, their conception admitted any interval, so that either the flesh or the soul were sown first, there would be ground for ascribing the property of sex to one substance by reason of the temporal interval of the seeds, so that either the flesh should engrave its sex upon the soul, or the soul upon the flesh; since Apelles too — not the painter, but the heretic — by setting up souls, male and female, before bodies, as he learned from Philumene, assuredly makes the flesh, as the later, receive its sex from the soul. And those who superinduce the soul upon the flesh after birth, assuredly pre-judge for the soul the male or female sex of the flesh already formed. But the undistinguished seeds of both substances and the united effusion of them undergo the common outcome of the kind, in whatever direction that account of nature, whatever it be, has drawn its lines. Certainly here too the form of the first origin attests itself, since the male is shaped earlier — for Adam was first; the female somewhat later — for Eve was after. So for a long while the flesh is unformed, such as it was plucked from Adam's side; yet it too was already a living creature even then, for I would acknowledge even that portion of Adam to have been a soul. For the rest, the inbreathing of God would have animated it too, had it not been that, as of flesh, so of soul too, there had been a tradux from Adam into the woman.

But every equipment of sowing, building, fashioning man in the womb is regulated by some power, the minister of the divine will, allotted to set in motion whatever account it does. By estimating this, even Roman superstition feigned a goddess Alemona for nourishing the fetus in the womb, and Nona and Decima from the more anxious months, and Partula, who governs the birth, and Lucina, who brings into the light. But we believe the divine offices to be angels. Therefore the fetus in the womb is a man from the point at which the form is completed. For the law of Moses too then judges the abortion guilty of retribution, when it is already the case of a man, when there is already reckoned to it a status of life and death, when it is already enrolled even under fate, even though, while still living in the mother, it shares most of its lot with the mother. I will say something too of the times of the soul's being born, that I may run through the order. The lawful birth is generally the entrance of the tenth month. Those who reason about numbers both venerate the number ten as thence the parent of the rest, and, in short, as the perfecter of human nativity. But I will rather argue this measure of time toward God, that the ten months should rather inaugurate man by the Decalogue — that we should be born in as great a number of time as we are reborn by the number of the discipline. But also, since at the seventh month the birth is complete, more easily than at the eighth, I shall recognize the honour of the sabbath, so that on the day on which the creation of God was dedicated, in that month the image of God should sometimes be brought forth. It is granted to the birth to hasten, and yet to fall fitly upon the hebdomad, into the auspices of resurrection and of rest and of the kingdom. Therefore the eighth does not create us; for then there will be no marriages. The fellowship of flesh and soul we long since commended, from the joining of their very seeds even to the perfection of the modeling. Likewise now we defend it from birth too, first of all in that they grow together, but by a different account according to the condition of their kinds, the flesh by measure, the soul by talent, the flesh by habit, the soul by sense. But it is to be denied that the soul grows in substance, lest it be also said to decrease in substance, and so be believed even destined to fail; but its power, in which the natural endowments are kept implanted, is gradually brought forth with the flesh, the measure of its substance being preserved, with which it was breathed in from the first origin. Take a certain weight of gold or silver, still a rough mass: its collected habit is small, less for the time being than it will be, yet containing within the line of its measure all that is the nature of gold or silver. Then, when the mass is spread out into a sheet, it is made greater than its beginning, by the expansion of a fixed weight, not by addition, while it is extended, not while it is increased. Even so it is increased, while it is extended; for it may be increased in habit, though it may not in state. Then too the very splendour of the gold or silver is brought out, which had indeed been in the mass too, but more obscure — yet not none. Then too other and other habits accrue, according to the pliancy of the material, in whatever way he who works it shall draw it, conferring nothing on the measure but a shape. So too the increases of the soul are to be reckoned, not substantial, but evocative.

But although we have established beforehand that all the natural things of the soul are inherent in its very substance, pertaining to sense and intellect, and out of the inborn census of the soul, yet they come forth gradually through the spaces of age, and variously emerge through accidents, according to arts, to institutions, to places, to presiding powers — yet, to make for the now-proposed fellowship of flesh and soul, we say that the animal puberty too concurs with the carnal, and that the one rises up by the access of the senses, and the other by the advancement of the members, equally from about the fourteenth year — not because Asclepiades reckons wisdom from then, nor because the civil laws from this point apportion the management of affairs, but because this too is from the first origin a reasonable thing. For if Adam and Eve, from the knowledge of good and evil, felt the need to cover their shameful parts, then from the moment we feel this very thing, we profess the knowledge of good and evil. From these years, moreover, the sex is both more suffused and more clothed, and concupiscence uses the eyes as its arbiters and communicates its pleasure, and understands what things are, and girds its boundaries, after the likeness of the fig-leaf contagion, with itching, and leads man out of the paradise of integrity — thereafter scabbed even into the other faults, and into transgressions not natural, since now they are not from the institution of nature, but from vice. For the rest, properly natural concupiscence is one only, of foods alone, which God both conferred at the first origin: ‘Of every tree,’ He says, ‘you shall eat’; and measured out anew to the second generation after the flood: ‘Behold, I have given you all things for food, as the green herb of the grass’ — looking not so much to the soul as to the flesh, even though for the soul's sake. For the occasion of the arguer is to be taken away, who, because the soul seems to desire foods, from this too wishes it understood mortal, in that it is sustained by foods, and, in short, grows faint when they are taken away, and lastly perishes when they are withdrawn. But it is not only to be set forth who it is that desires them, but also for whom; and if for itself, then also why, and when, and how far; and that nature desires one thing, necessity another, the property of a thing one thing, the cause another. The soul therefore will desire foods — for itself indeed by reason of necessity, but for the flesh by the nature of property. For surely the flesh is the house of the soul, and the soul the inhabitant of the flesh. The inhabitant, then, will desire, by reason and by necessity of this name, things to profit the house through the whole time of its tenancy — not that it itself is to be underpinned, nor itself to be plastered, nor itself to be shored up, but only to be held together, since it cannot otherwise be held together than by a house upheld. Otherwise it will be permitted to the soul, when the house has fallen down through the failure of its proper supports, to depart unharmed, having its own firm foundations and the nourishments of its own condition — immortality, rationality, sensibility, intellectuality, freedom of will.

All which things conferred upon the soul at its birth, the same one who envied at the first origin now too overshadows and depraves, so that they may not either be voluntarily provided for or administered as they ought. For to which of men will the evil spirit not cleave, lying in wait for souls from the very gate of birth, since he is invited even by all that superstition of childbirth? So all are born under the midwifery of idolatry, while the very wombs, still bound about with fillets prepared before the idols, profess their offspring to be candidates of the demons; while in childbirth the wail is raised to Lucina and Diana; while throughout the whole hebdomad a table is set out for Juno; while on the last day the Fates of Writing are summoned; while even the first setting of the infant upon the ground is sacred to the goddess Statina. Who, thereafter, does not either vow the whole head of his son to guilt, or take off some lock, or shave it wholly with the razor, or bind it with a sacrifice, or seal it with a sacred rite — for a national, an ancestral, a public or a private devotion? So, then, the demonic spirit found Socrates too while still a boy. So to all men genii are assigned, which is a name of demons. So scarcely any birth is clean — at least among the heathen. Hence the apostle too says that holy children are procreated from a sanctified parent of either sex, as much from the prerogative of the seed as from the discipline of the institution. ‘Otherwise,’ he says, ‘they would be born unclean’ — wishing the children of the faithful to be understood as designated nevertheless for sanctity, and through this for salvation too, that by the pledge of this hope he might patronize the marriages which he had judged worthy of being retained. Otherwise he remembered the Lord's definition: ‘Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he shall not enter into the kingdom of God’ — that is, he shall not be holy.

Thus every soul, up to that point, is reckoned in Adam until it is recounted in Christ; so long unclean as it is not recounted; but a sinner, because unclean, taking back its own ignominy onto the flesh too out of fellowship. For although the flesh is a sinner, according to which we are forbidden to walk, whose works of concupiscence against the spirit are condemned, and on whose account men are noted as carnal — yet the flesh is not infamous in its own name. For it neither of itself savours anything nor perceives, so as to persuade or command a fault. Why should it? being a ministry — and a ministry not such as a slave or a lesser friend, who are animate and men, but such as a cup, or some other thing of the kind: a body, not a soul. For the cup too is the ministry of the thirsty; yet unless he who thirsts has applied the cup to himself, the cup will minister nothing. So entirely is there no property of man in the earthy thing; nor is the flesh man, as though another power of the soul and another person, but it is a thing plainly of another substance and another condition, yet assigned to the soul as its furniture, as an instrument in the offices of life. The flesh, therefore, is upbraided in the Scriptures, because without the flesh the soul does nothing in the working of lust, gluttony, drunkenness, cruelty, idolatry, and the other carnal things — not the senses, but the effects. In short, the senses of faults are wont to be imputed to the soul even without the effects: ‘He who has looked to lust has already committed adultery in his heart.’ For the rest, what does the flesh do without the soul in the working of probity, justice, endurance, chastity? Moreover, what kind of thing is it that you should subscribe crimes to that to which you ascribe no proper good documents? But that through which the offence is committed is convened, that the soul, from which the offence proceeds, may be burdened — even in the accusation of the ministry. The graver odium is against the governor when his offices are assailed. He is the more punished who commands, when not even he who obeys is excused.

The evil of the soul, then, besides that which is built upon it from the access of the evil spirit, comes first from the fault of origin, being in a manner natural. For, as we 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 in the soul that good which is principal, that divine and genuine and properly natural good. 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 light hindered by some obstacle remains, but does not appear, if the density of the obstacle has been so great — so too the good in the soul, oppressed by the evil, according to its quality either is wholly idle, its light being hidden, or, where it is given, shines out, its liberty being found. So there are some men most evil and some best, and yet all souls are nonetheless of one kind. So even in the worst there is something of good, and in the best somewhat of the worst. For God alone is without sin, and the only man without sin is Christ, since Christ is also God. So too the divinity of the soul breaks forth into presages out of its prior good, and the consciousness of God comes forth into testimony: ‘God is good,’ and ‘God sees,’ and ‘I commend it to God.’ For this reason no soul is without crime, because none is without the seed of good. Accordingly, when it comes to the faith, reformed by the second nativity out of water and supernal power, the curtain of its former corruption drawn aside, it beholds its whole light. It is taken up too by the Holy Spirit, as in its former nativity by the profane spirit. The flesh follows the soul now wedded to the spirit, as a dowered chattel, and now no longer the handmaid of the soul, but of the spirit. O blessed wedlock, if it admit no adultery!

It remains now to treat of death, that the matter may there be set down where the soul itself comes to its consummation — although Epicurus, by a sufficiently vulgar opinion, has denied that death pertains to us. ‘For that which is dissolved,’ he says, ‘lacks sense, and what lacks sense is nothing to us.’ But it is not death itself that is dissolved and lacks sense, but the man who suffers it. Yet he assigned the suffering to that whose is the action. But if it belongs to man to suffer the death that dissolves the body and destroys sense, how absurd it is that so great a force should be said not to pertain to man! Much more forced is Seneca, who says, ‘After death all things are finished, even death itself.’ If this is so, then death too will pertain to itself, if it too is finished — and the more to man, in whom, among all things, by being finished, it too is finished. ‘Death is nothing to us’ — then life too is nothing to us. For if that by which we are dissolved is beyond us, then that too by which we are compacted is outside us. If the removal of sense is nothing to us, neither is the acquisition of sense anything to us. But let him who would do away with the soul do away with death too. By us, as concerning the posthumous life and the further province of the soul, so too death shall be treated of, to which we ourselves pertain, even if it does not pertain to us. In short, not even its mirror, sleep, is foreign matter.

Of sleep let us dispute first, and afterwards how the soul runs its course after death. Sleep is by no means beyond nature, as it pleases certain philosophers, since they reckon it from those two causes which are held to be outside nature. The Stoics affirm sleep to be a relaxation of the sensual vigour; the Epicureans, a diminution of the animal spirit; Anaxagoras, with Xenophanes, a weariness; Empedocles and Parmenides, a cooling; Strato, a segregation of the implanted spirit; Democritus, a want of spirit; Aristotle, a withering of the heat about the heart. I presume I have never so slept as to recognize any of these. For neither is it to be believed that sleep is weariness, but rather the contrary of weariness, which it takes away, since a man is by sleep more restored than wearied. Moreover, sleep is not always conceived out of weariness, and yet, when it is from weariness, the weariness is then no longer there. But neither will I admit a cooling or any withering of heat, since bodies grow so warm in sleep that the distribution of foods would not easily proceed through sleep — the heat being a quickener, the chill a delayer — if we were cooled by sleep. There is more: that the sweat too is the index of a boiling digestion. In short, we are said to ‘cook’ our food, which is the operation of heat, not of cold. Likewise the immortality of the soul does not allow us to believe in a diminution of the animal spirit, or a want of spirit, or a segregation of the implanted spirit. The soul perishes if it is lessened. It remains, perhaps, that with the Stoics we should determine sleep to be a relaxation of the sensual vigour, since it procures the rest of the body alone, not also of the soul. For the soul, as ever mobile and ever exercised, never sinks into rest, which is foreign to the state of immortality; for nothing immortal admits an end of its work, but sleep is an end of work. In short, to the body, to which mortality belongs, to it alone does rest flatter with an end of its work. Whoever, then, will doubt of the naturalness of sleep has indeed the dialecticians bringing the whole distinction of natural and beyond-natural into doubt, so that he may know that even what he has thought to be apart from nature can be claimed for the nature from which it has been so allotted that it seems to be held apart from her — and that surely either all things are by nature, or there is no nature at all. But among us that may be heard which the contemplation of God suggests, the author of all the things in question. For we believe that, if there is anything by nature, it is some rational work of God. Moreover, reason precedes sleep — sleep so apt, so useful, so necessary, that without it no soul would suffice — the restorer of bodies, the renewer of strength, the prover of health, the pacifier of toils, the physician of labours; to whose lawful enjoyment day gives way, night makes a law, taking away even the colour of things. But if sleep is vital, salutary, helpful, nothing of this kind is not rational, nothing not natural. So too the physicians relegate everything contrary to the vital, salutary, helpful, beyond the natural hinges. For even the maladies that rival sleep — the phrenetic and the cardiac — by judging them beyond nature, they have pre-judged natural sleep to be natural; even in lethargy, by noting it as not natural, they answer with a natural testimony, since sleep, in its own temperament, is natural. For all nature is cut off either by defrauding or by excess; it is preserved by the propriety of measure. Thus that will be natural in state which can be made not natural by deficiency or excess. What, if I should also except eating and drinking from the lots of nature? For in these too there is very much preparation of sleep. Certainly with these man was imbued from the first origin of his nature. If you learn it from God: that fount of the race, Adam, drank in slumber before he thirsted for rest, slept before he laboured, nay, before he even ate, nay, before he even spoke — that men may see that natural sleep, the index, is more principal than all natural things. Thence we are led to recognize that even then he was reviewing an image of death. For if Adam gave a figure of Christ, the sleep of Adam was the death of Christ, who was to sleep into death, so that out of the wound likewise of His side might be figured the true mother of the living, the Church. Therefore sleep too is so salutary, so rational, that it is fashioned even into a pattern of the now public and common death. For God willed — and elsewhere too has wrought nothing in His dispensation without exemplars, by the Platonic paradigm — to deal with us daily, more fully, the lines especially of man's beginning and end, stretching out His hand to faith, to be the more easily aided by images and parables, as of words, so of things too. He sets before you, then, a body struck down by the friendly force of slumber, prostrate by the soft necessity of rest, motionless in its posture, such as it lay before life, and such as it will lie after life, as an attestation of the modeling and of burial, awaiting the soul as not yet conferred, and as already snatched away. But it too so suffers as to seem to act elsewhere, learning, by the dissimulation of its presence, its future absence: about Hermotimus we shall know. And yet meanwhile it dreams. Whence then come dreams? It neither rests nor grows wholly idle, nor consigns the nature of its immortality to the holidays of slumber. It proves itself ever mobile; it journeys by land, by sea; it does business, is set in motion, labours, plays, grieves, rejoices, pursues things lawful and unlawful; it shows that it can do very much even without the body; that it is furnished too with its own members; but that nonetheless it has need again of the body to be set in motion. So, when the body has awakened, restored to its offices, it affirms to you the resurrection of the dead. This will be both the natural reason of sleep and the rational nature of it. Even by the image of death you are initiated into faith, you meditate hope, you learn to die and to live, you learn to be watchful while you sleep.

As for Hermotimus, his soul, as they say, was wanting in sleep, as though, by the occasion of the man being at leisure, it set out from the body. His wife disclosed this. His enemies, finding him asleep, burned him for dead. His soul, returning too late, imputed to itself, I believe, the homicide. The citizens of Clazomenae console Hermotimus with a temple. The woman does not approach it, on account of the disgrace of a wife. To what purpose this tale? That, since it is easy for the common crowd to suppose sleep to be a secession of the soul, credulity might not be suborned by this argument of Hermotimus too. It had been a case of somewhat heavier slumber, as is the presumption about the nightmare-spirit, or about that lapse of health which Soranus opposes, excluding the nightmare, or some such defect as drove even Epimenides into a fable, drowsy for nearly fifty years. But Suetonius too says that Nero, and Theopompus that Thrasymedes, never dreamed, save that Nero scarcely did, at his last end, after his terrors. What, if Hermotimus too was such that the leisure of a soul doing nothing in sleep was believed a divorce? You would conjecture anything rather than this licence of a soul running away without death, and indeed continually by its very form. For if such a thing were said to happen once, like an eclipse of the sun or moon, so too of the soul, I might fairly be persuaded that it was done divinely; for it is fitting that a man be either admonished or terrified by God, as by a swift lightning-flash, by the stroke of a momentary death — if it were not rather more in keeping to believe it a dream, which ought rather to befall one waking; if it ought not rather be believed a dream.

Here we are bound to bring forth a Christian opinion concerning dreams too, as concerning the accidents of sleep, but not light tossings of the soul, which we have declared busy and ever exercised out of the perpetuity of its motion, which is the very reason of its divinity and immortality. Therefore, when rest comes to bodies, whose proper solace it is, the soul, idle for any solace foreign to it, does not rest; and if it lacks the work of the corporeal members, it uses its own. Conceive a gladiator without arms, or a charioteer without his car, miming all the bearing and effort of his art: there is fighting, there is striving, but the tossing is empty. Nonetheless those things seem to be done which yet are not seen to be done; for they are done in act, but not done in effect. This force we call ecstasy, an excess of sense, and the likeness of madness. So too in the first origin sleep was dedicated together with ecstasy: ‘And God sent an ecstasy upon Adam, and he slept.’ For sleep came to the body for rest; ecstasy came upon the soul against rest; and thence already a form, mixing sleep with ecstasy, and a nature out of the form. In short, we are both delighted and saddened and terrified in dreams — how feelingly and anxiously and with what suffering — when in no waking matter we should be so moved, namely by empty images; whereas, if we dreamed in possession of ourselves, we should not. In short, good deeds too are gratuitous in dreams, and faults secure; for no more shall we be condemned for a vision of stuprum than crowned for one of martyrdom. ‘And how,’ you say, ‘is the soul mindful of its dreams, which is not permitted to be in possession of itself?’ This will be the property of this madness, that it does not come from the corruption of good health, but from the reason of nature; for it does not put the mind to flight, but draws it aside. It is one thing to shake, another to move; one thing to overturn, another to set in motion. Therefore, that the memory holds out, is the soundness of the mind; that the soundness of the mind, with the memory preserved, is stupefied, is a kind of madness. Therefore we are not said to rave, but to dream; therefore we are also prudent, if ever we are. For our wisdom, though it be overshadowed, is yet not extinguished — save that this too may seem to be idle then, while ecstasy works even this of its own property, that thus it brings before us the images of wisdom, just as also of error.

Behold, again we are pressed even by the retreatment of these very dreams by which the soul is tossed, to express ourselves. And when shall we come to death? Here too I would say, When God shall have granted; there are no long delays of that which is to come. Epicurus judged dreams wholly vain, freeing the divinity from business, and dissolving the order of things, and scattering all in passivity, as exposed to chance and fortuitous. But if it is so, then there will be also some outcome of truth, since it does not admit that this alone should be exempted from the chance owed to all. Homer divided two gates for dreams, the horn one of truth, the ivory one of falsehood. For one looks through horn, but ivory is opaque. Aristotle, ascribing to dreams a greater part of falsehood, yet acknowledges the true too. The Telmessians void no dreams, but accuse the weakness of the conjecture. But who is so foreign to humanity as not to have felt at some time some faithful vision? Touching upon a few of the more notable ones, I shall impose shame upon Epicurus. Herodotus relates that Astyages, king of the Medes, saw in a dream that the bladder of his daughter Mandane, still a virgin, flowed forth into a deluge of Asia; likewise, a year after her marriage, that out of the same parts a vine arose and overshadowed all Asia. This too Charon of Lampsacus, earlier than Herodotus, hands down. Those who interpreted her son for so great a work did not deceive themselves; since Cyrus both submerged and pressed down Asia. Philip of Macedon, not yet a father, had seen that he had sealed his wife Olympias' nature with a ring; the device was a lion. He had believed her generation closed (because, I suppose, the lion is a father only once); Aristodemus or Aristophon, conjecturing rather that nothing empty is sealed, that a son was portended, and indeed one of the greatest impetus. Those who know Alexander recognize the lion of the ring. Ephorus writes it. But Dionysius' tyranny over Sicily a certain woman of Himera dreamed too. Heraclides has reported it. And to Seleucus the kingdom of Asia, his mother Laodice foresaw, before she had borne him. Euphorion published it. Mithridates too, from a dream, I learn from Strabo, took possession of Pontus; and that Baralis the Illyrian ruled from the Molossians as far as Macedonia, from a dream, I learn from Callisthenes. The Romans too have known dreams of this kind of truth. The reformer of the empire, still a little boy and private in station, and only Julius Octavius, and unknown to himself, Marcus Tullius knew from a dream as both Augustus and the burier of the civil whirlwinds. It is recorded in the commentaries of Vitellius. Nor will this be the only species, the herald of the highest powers, but also of perils and of destructions: as when Caesar, otherwise ill, in the battle of his enemies Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, yet thinking he would bring back a greater danger from the foe, escaped, by a vision shown to Artorius, leaving the tent; as when his daughter foresaw a cross for Polycrates of Samos, from the anointing of the sun and the washing of Jupiter. Honours too and talents are revealed through sleep, remedies too are furnished, thefts too are betrayed, treasures too are conferred. Cicero's dignity, while he was still a little one, his nurse had already beheld. The swan from the bosom of Socrates, soothing men, is the disciple Plato. Leonymus the boxer is healed by Achilles in dreams. When the people of Athens had lost a golden crown from the citadel, the tragedian Sophocles by dreaming found it again. The tragic actor Neoptolemus, near Rhoeteum the burial-place of Troy, warned in dreams by Ajax himself, frees his tomb from ruin, and, when he puts down the rubbish of the stones, returns thence rich with gold. How many commentators and affirmers there are on this matter! Artemon, Antiphon, Strato, Philochorus, Epicharmus, Serapion, Cratippus and Dionysius the Rhodian, Hermippus, the whole literature of the age. The only one I shall perhaps laugh at is he who thought to persuade us that Saturn dreamed before all others; unless Aristotle too lived before all others, forgive me for laughing. For the rest, Epicharmus, with Philochorus the Athenian, even raised dreams to the highest summit among the kinds of divination. For the world too is crowded with oracles of this kind — as of Amphiaraus at Oropus, of Amphilochus at Mallus, of Sarpedon in the Troad, of Trophonius in Boeotia, of Mopsus in Cilicia, of Hermione in Macedonia, of Pasiphae in Laconia. The rest, with their origins and rites and reporters, together with the whole history of dreams thereafter, Hermippus of Berytus will most abundantly exhibit in five volumes. But the Stoics too prefer to hold that God, most provident of human instruction, among other helps of the divining arts and disciplines, implanted dreams too in us, the peculiar solace of a natural oracle. So much as to the faith of dreams, which is to be sealed by us too, but interpreted otherwise. For as to the other oracles too, where no one sleeps, what else shall we pronounce than that their account is demonic — of those spirits which dwelt even then in the very men, or affected their memories, for every scene of their malice — feigning divinity in this kind too, and by the same industry deceiving even through benefits of medicines and admonitions and predictions, that they may the more hurt by helping, while through the things by which they help they lead men away from the inquiry into the true divinity by the insinuation of the false? And surely this power is not shut up, nor circumscribed by the bounds of shrines; it is wandering and flying about and meanwhile free. So that no one will doubt that houses too lie open to demons, and that they beset men with images, not only in shrines but in bedchambers.

For we define that dreams are for the most part struck in upon us by demons — even though sometimes true and gracious, but, by that industry of which we have spoken, affecting and ensnaring — how much more often vain and frustrating and turbid and mocking and unclean! Nor is it any wonder if the images are theirs whose the realities too are. But from God — who has promised, namely, the grace of the Holy Spirit upon all flesh, and that as His servants and handmaids should prophesy, so should they dream — those will be reckoned which are compared to that very grace: if any be honourable, holy, prophetic, revelatory, edifying, vocatory; whose liberality is wont to distil even upon the profane, since God too levels His rains and His suns equally upon the just and the unjust — seeing that Nebuchadnezzar too dreamed by divine appointment, and nearly the greater number of men learn God out of visions. As, therefore, there is the deigning of God even toward the heathen, so is there the temptation of the evil one toward the saints, from whom he does not desist even by day, so as to creep upon them sleeping as he can, if upon them waking he cannot. The third species will be dreams which the soul seems to bring upon itself out of the intentness of its surrounding circumstances. But since it is not in our choice to dream (for Epicharmus too thinks thus), how will the soul itself be to itself the cause of any vision? Is then this species to be left to the natural form, which preserves to the soul, even in ecstasy, the experiencing of its own things? But those which seem to befall neither from God nor from a demon nor from the soul — beyond opinion and beyond interpretation and beyond the power of narration — these will be set apart for ecstasy properly and its own reason.

They affirm that more certain and more refined things are dreamed in the last watches of the night, as if then the vigour of souls were emerging, the slumber being now drawn forth. As to the seasons of the year, that the spring is the more quiet, because summer dissolves the souls, and winter in some manner hardens them, and autumn, otherwise a tempter of healths, dilutes them with the most vinous juices of fruits. Likewise, as to the very posture of rest, that if one lie neither supine nor on the right side, nor with the inward parts thrown back, as if the cells were overflowed, the station of the senses may float, or the seat of the mind be choked by a compressed quinsy of the liver. But I should think these things ingeniously estimated rather than firmly proved (although it is Plato who estimated them); and perhaps they proceed by chance. Otherwise dreams will be in our choice, if they can be directed. For as to the fact that now presumption, now superstition, prescribes a discipline for dreams by the distinguishing or denying of foods, it is to be examined. Superstition, as when at the oracles a fast is enjoined upon those about to sleep there, that it may induce a chastity; presumption, as when the Pythagoreans, on this account too, reject the bean, a burdensome and flatulent food. But on the other hand, that fraternity of three with Daniel, content with pulse alone, lest they should be defiled by the royal dishes, redeemed from God, besides the rest of their wisdom, especially the grace of dreams, both of obtaining and of expounding them. As for fasts, I know not whether I alone, for the most part, so dream that I do not perceive that I have dreamed. ‘Then is sobriety nothing,’ you say, ‘to this part?’ Nay, the more to this in proportion as it is to all; if to superstition, much more to religion. For so even the demons demand it of their dreamers, namely for the pandering of divinity, since they know the friend of God — since Daniel too, again, by a station of three weeks grew dry in his diet, but in order to allure God by the offices of humiliation, not in order to build up sense and wisdom for the soul about to dream, as though it would not act in ecstasy. So sobriety will profit not for removing ecstasy, but for commending the very ecstasy, that it may come about in God.

Those who think infants do not dream, since all the powers of the soul are discharged according to the measure of age in life, let them observe their startings and noddings and smilings in sleep, that from the fact they may grasp that the motions of the dreaming soul easily break out to the surface through the tenderness of the flesh. But also, that the Libyan nation of the Atlantes is said to pass the night in a blind sleep, is assuredly charged to the nature of the soul. For either fame lied to Herodotus, sometimes slanderous against barbarians, or a great force of demons of this kind dominates in that climate. For if Aristotle too notes a certain hero of Sardinia who deprives the sleepers in his fane of their visions, this too will be among the wantonness of demons, as much to take away dreams as to bring them in, so that the mark of Nero too, a late dreamer, and of Thrasymedes proceeded thence. But we deduce dreams from God too. Why then would not the Atlantes dream even from God — or because no nation is now a stranger to God, the Gospel coruscating into all the earth and unto the bounds of the world? Did then either fame lie to Aristotle, or is there still the reckoning of demons — provided that no nature of soul be believed exempt from dreams?

Enough concerning the mirror of death, that is, sleep; and then concerning the businesses of sleep, that is, dreams. Now to the origin of this digression, that is, to the order of death — since not even this is without questions, although it is the end of all questions. By the public verdict of the whole human race, we pronounce death the debt of nature. This the voice of God stipulated, this everything that is born has promised; that even from this point Epicurus' stupor may not be poured over us, 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. To wit, he is sent as a legate from a supernal and hidden power, that those who shall have put on his baptism may become immortal and incorruptible and at once partakers of the resurrection. We read indeed of very many wonderful kinds of waters: as the wine-bearing vein of the Lyncestae renders men drunken; as the demonic spring of Colophon makes them frantic; as the poisoned water of Nonacris in Arcadia befell Alexander. There was too in Judaea a healing lake before Christ. The poet plainly handed down the Stygian marsh as washing away death. But Thetis too bewailed her son. And although Menander too plunges men into the Styx, one will have to die nonetheless, that one may come to the Styx; for it is said to be among the dead. What and where is that happiness of waters which neither John the Baptist administered nor Christ Himself showed to His disciples? What is this bath of Menander? A comic one, I believe. But why so infrequent, so hidden, where the fewest wash? For I shall make so great a rarity suspect of a most secure and safe sacrament — at which there is not even a law to die for God Himself, when, on the contrary, all nations now go up into the mountain of the Lord and into the house of the God of Jacob, who demands death even through martyrdom, which He exacted even of His own Christ. Nor will anyone grant so much to magic that it should exempt from death, or re-dig life like a vine renewed in age. For this was not permitted even to Medea upon a man, though it was permitted upon a ram. Enoch was translated, and Elias, nor was their delay found — postponed, namely. For the rest, being to die, they are reserved, that they may extinguish the antichrist with their blood. John too died, of whom the hope had been in vain that he would remain until the coming of the Lord. For heresies generally spring up after our examples, taking thence the supports from which they fight. Lastly, this is the short way: Where are those whom Menander himself drenched, whom he plunged into his Styx? Let the apostles come, abiding for ever, and stand by. Let my Thomas see them, hear, handle — and he believed.

But the work of death is in the midst — the separation of body and soul. But some, to defend the immortality of the soul, which indeed, not taught by God, they uphold feebly, so beg their argumentations that they would have it believed that even after death certain souls cleave to bodies. For to this end Plato too, although he dispatches what souls he will to heaven straightway, yet in the Republic opposes the corpse of a certain unburied man preserved a long time without any decay — on account, namely, of the indivisibility of the soul. To this end too Democritus notes the growths of nails and hair in the graves for some space of time. Yet the quality of the air too could have been a protection to that body. For what, if the air were drier and the soil saltier? what, if the very substance of the body were more juiceless? what, if the very kind of death had already discharged the corrupting materials beforehand? But the nails, since they are the beginnings of the sinews, are with reason seen to be pushed out further, the sinews being stretched out by relaxation, and the flesh failing daily; the hairs too have their nourishment from the brain, which a hidden protection grants to last for a while. In short, even in the living, according to the richness of the brain, the head of hair either flows or deserts. You have the physicians. But neither is it the case that a little of the soul subsides in the body, destined to depart at some time itself too, when time shall have abolished the whole scene of the body. For this too is in the opinion of certain men. Therefore they say that the dead are not to be buried by fire, sparing the superfluous part of the soul. But there is another reason for this piety, not flattering the relics of the soul, but abhorring cruelty even in the name of the body, which too man assuredly does not deserve to have spent in a penal end. For the rest, the soul, being indivisible, as immortal, demands that even death be believed indivisible — befalling indivisibly, not as to an immortal, but as to an indivisible soul. But death too will be divided, if the soul too is, by the superfluous part, namely, of the soul that is some time to die. So a portion of death will remain with a portion of the soul. Nor am I ignorant that there is some trace of this opinion. From my own experience I have learned it. I know a certain woman, a native daughter of the Church, of unimpaired form and age, deceased after a single and brief marriage; who, when she had slept in peace, and while the burial was still delayed, was meanwhile being composed by the prayer of a presbyter — at the first breath of the prayer she removed her hands from her sides into the posture of a suppliant, and, the peace being again said, restored them to their station. There is too that report among our own people, that a body, set side by side with another in the cemetery, made room by withdrawal for the new-comer. And if among the heathen too any such thing is handed down, everywhere God sets forth signs of His power, for solace to His own, for testimony to strangers. For I would rather believe a thing done in testimony from God than from any relics of the soul; which, if they were there, would have moved the other members too; and if the hands only, yet not for the cause of prayer. That body too would not only have yielded to a brother, but otherwise too, by a change of posture, would have eased itself. Certainly, whencesoever these things are, they are rather to be reckoned signs and portents; they cannot establish a natural law. Death, if it is not at once wholly death, is not death. If anything of the soul remain, it is life. Death will no more be mingled with life than night with day.

This work of death, then — the separation of flesh and soul — human feeling has distinguished in two ways, setting aside the question of fates and fortuitous things: into an ordinary and an extraordinary form; the ordinary indeed reckoning to nature, of any quiet death, but judging the extraordinary contrary to nature, of any violent end. But we, who know the first origins of man, boldly determine that death did not follow man from nature, but from fault, which is not itself even natural — though the name of nature is easily usurped for those things which seem to have cleaved from birth out of accident. For if man had been directly instituted unto death, then at last death would be ascribed to nature. But the law itself proves that he was not instituted unto death, suspending it by a conditional threat, and assigning the event of death to the choice of man. In short, if he had not sinned, he would by no means have died. So that will not be nature which befalls from the power of an option through the will, not from the authority of the institution through necessity. Accordingly, even though the exits of death are various, as the condition of causes is manifold, we call none so gentle that it is not wrought by force. That very operative reason of death, though simple, is a force. For what? since it tears asunder and divides so great a fellowship of soul and flesh, so great a coalescence of the sister substances from conception. For even though a man should breathe out his spirit for joy, as Chilon the Spartan, while embracing his son the victor at Olympia; even though for glory, as Clidemus the Athenian, while crowned with gold for the excellence of his historical style; even though through a dream, as Plato; even though through laughter, as Publius Crassus — much more violent is the death which makes its way through good things, which expels the soul through favourable circumstances, which brings death then when it is more pleasant to live, in exultation, in honour, in repose, in pleasure. There is force in the case of ships, when, far from the rocks of Caphareus, beaten by no whirlwinds, shaken by no great waves, with a flattering breeze, with a gliding course, with a rejoicing crew, they sink down suddenly by an inward shock with all their security. Not otherwise are the shipwrecks of life, even the outcome of a tranquil death. It makes no difference whether the ship of the body departs entire or shattered, so long as the soul's voyage is overthrown.

But whither then will the soul, naked and ejected, turn aside? Without doubt we shall follow it out in order. Yet first I shall fill up what belongs to this place, lest, because we have spoken of the various exits of death, anyone should expect from us the reasons of each — to be left rather to the physicians, the proper arbiters of all lethal things or causes, and of the very corporeal conditions. Plainly, to protect here too the immortality of the soul, in mentioning death I shall interpose somewhat concerning that kind of exit in which the soul slips away little by little and bit by bit; for, sustaining the habit of failing, it is led off while it seems to be consumed, and offers a conjecture of perishing out of the temper of its excess. But the whole account is in the body and out of the body. For whatever that exit of death be, without doubt it is the overthrow either of the materials or of the regions or of the vital ways: of the materials, as of the bile, as of the blood; of the regions, as of the heart, as of the liver; of the ways, as of the veins, as of the arteries. While, then, these are laid waste in the body, each from its own cause of injury, even to the last overthrow and rescission of the vital things — that is, of the natural boundaries, seats, offices — necessarily the soul too, its instruments and dwellings and spaces gradually slipping away, is itself too gradually compelled to migrate, and is led off into the appearance of diminution, in no other manner than as the charioteer too is presumed to have failed when the exhaustion of his horses has denied their strength — as to the disposition of the man left destitute, not as to the truth of suffering. Just so the charioteer of the body, the animal spirit, fails in the name of the failing vehicle, not in his own — withdrawing from work, not from vigour; languishing in act, not in state; boiling away his constancy, not his substance, because he ceases to appear, not because he ceases to be. So too every swift death, as the harvest of necks, opening at once and so great a gate, as the force of a ruin dashing out all the vital things at once, as apoplexy, an inner ruin — affords no delay to the soul, nor racks its departure into moments. But where the death is long, as the soul is deserted, so it deserts; yet it is not cut down in this fashion, but drawn out; and while it is drawn out, it makes its last part seem its whole. Not every part, however, is at once severed too, because it is the last, nor, because it is small, is it at once itself too about to perish. Its own end follows in the series, and the middle part is drawn to the summit, and the remnants, cohering with the whole, are awaited by it, not deserted. And so I would dare to say that the last of the whole is the whole, since, though it be less and posterior, it is the soul's own. Hence, in short, it often happens that the soul, in the very divorce, is more powerfully set in motion, with more anxious gaze, with extraordinary loquacity — since, established now from a greater eminence in liberty, through the superfluous part that still lingers in the body, it announces what it sees, what it hears, what it begins to know. For if this body is, by the Platonic verdict, a prison, but by the apostolic the temple of God, when one is in Christ, yet meanwhile it blocks up the soul within its enclosure, and overshadows it, and befouls it by the coalescence of the flesh — whence to it, as through a horn window, the light of things is the more obscured. Without doubt, when by the force of death it is squeezed out of the coalescence of the flesh, and by the very squeezing is strained clear, certainly it bursts out of the curtain of the body into the open, to its own pure and clear and proper light; at once it recognizes itself in the freeing of its substance, and recovers its divinity by its very liberty, as one emerging from sleep, from images to truths. Then too it announces what it sees, then it exults or trembles, according as it perceives the equipment of its lodging — from the very face at once of the angel, the summoner of souls, the Mercury of the poets.

Whither, then, the soul is conducted, we now render. Nearly all the philosophers who, in whatever fashion they will, yet vindicate the immortality of the soul — as Pythagoras, as Empedocles, as Plato — and those who grant it some time from its departure until the conflagration of the universe, as the Stoics, place their own souls alone — that is, those of the wise — in the supernal mansions. Plato indeed does not rashly grant this to the souls of philosophers, but to those of such as have, namely, adorned philosophy with the love of boys. So great a privilege, even among philosophers, has impurity. And so, with him, the wise souls are exalted into the ether; with Arius, into the air; with the Stoics, beneath the moon. At whom indeed I wonder that they prostrate the unwise souls about the earth, since they affirm that these are taught by the wise far above them. Where will be the region of the school, in so great a distance of lodgings? By what reason will the disciple-souls assemble to the mistress-souls, absent from each other by so great an interval? And what use and fruit of this posthumous instruction to them, who are at the very point of perishing in the conflagration? The rest of the souls they cast down to the lower regions. These Plato describes, in the Phaedo, as a kind of lap of the earth, whither all the dregs of worldly defilements, flowing together and there settling, breathe out, and, as out of the mire of their own uncleannesses, pack together there a grosser draught and a separate air.

But to us the lower regions are believed to be not a bare hollow, nor some sewer of the world open to the sky, but a vast space in the pit of the earth, and a depth hidden away in its very bowels — since we read that Christ accomplished a three days' death in the heart of the earth, that is, in the innermost and inner recess, covered within the earth itself and shut up within it, and built over by yet lower abysses. But if Christ, God though He be, because man too, died according to the Scriptures and was buried according to the same, satisfied this law also, having undergone in the lower regions the form of human death, nor ascended into the heights of the heavens before He descended into the lower parts of the earth, that there He might make the patriarchs and prophets partakers of Himself — then you have ground both to believe that the region of the lower world is subterranean, and to thrust away with your elbow those who too proudly think the souls of the faithful unworthy of the lower regions: servants above their Lord, and disciples above their Master, scorning, it may be, to receive in the bosom of Abraham the solace of awaiting the resurrection. ‘But for this,’ they say, ‘Christ went to the lower regions, that we should not go.’ For the rest, what difference is there between heathen and Christians, if the prison be the same for the dead? How then will the soul breathe up to heaven, while Christ still sits there at the right hand of the Father, the trumpet of the archangel not yet heard at God's command, those whom the Lord's coming shall find in the world not yet caught up to meet Him in the air, with those who, dead in Christ, shall rise first? To no one is heaven open, while earth is still safe, not to say closed. For with the passing of the world the kingdoms of the heavens will be unbarred. But our slumber, you say, is in the ether with the boy-lovers of Plato, or in the air with Arius, or about the moon with the Endymions of the Stoics. Nay, you say, in paradise, whither even then both patriarchs and prophets, the appendages of the Lord's resurrection, migrated from the lower regions. And how is it that the region of paradise, revealed to John in the Spirit, which lies beneath the altar, showed no other souls with it save those of the martyrs? How is it that Perpetua, that most valiant martyr, on the day of her passion, in a revelation of paradise, saw there only her fellow-martyrs — unless because to none does the sword, the doorkeeper of paradise, give way, save those who have died in Christ, not in Adam? A new death for God, and an extraordinary one for Christ, is received into another and a private lodging. Recognize, then, the difference between the heathen and the faithful in death, if you die for God, as the Paraclete admonishes, not in soft fevers and in little 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 too, from us, a little book concerning paradise, in which we have established that every soul is sequestered in the lower regions until the day of the Lord.

A debate presents itself: whether this is done at once from the departure, or whether some reason detains certain souls here in the meantime, or whether even those already received may afterwards intervene from the lower regions, by choice or by command. For persuasions for these opinions are not lacking. It has been believed that the unburied are not brought down to the lower regions before they have received their due rites — according to the Homeric Patroclus, demanding his funeral in dreams of Achilles, because he could not otherwise approach the gates of the lower world, the souls of the buried keeping him afar. But we know, besides the poetic rights, the industry too of Homer's piety. For he the more carefully placed the care of burial, in that he charged its delay as an injury to the souls; and at the same time, that no one, by detaining the dead at home, should himself be the more consumed with him by an excess of solace fed by grief. So he framed the complaints of the unburied soul to both ends, that both the urgency of the funeral and the honour of the bodies might be preserved, and the memory of the affections tempered. For the rest, how vain is it that the soul should await the rites of the body, as though it carried off thence anything to the lower regions! Much vainer, if the cessation of burial is to be reckoned an injury to the soul, which it ought rather to embrace as a favour. For surely it would prefer to be drawn off to the lower regions more slowly, which was unwilling to die at all. It will love an impious heir, through whom it is still fed by the light. Or if there is for certain some injury in being thrust beneath the earth more slowly, but the title of the injury is the cessation of burial, it is most unjust that it should be afflicted with an injury which will not be imputed to it — pertaining, namely, to its kindred. They say too that souls forestalled by an untimely death wander here until the remainder of their ages is completed — as long as they would have lived, had they not died out of season. Now either fixed times are appointed to each, and I shall not believe that the appointed times can be snatched away; or, if they are indeed appointed, but are mutilated by the will of God or some power, in vain are they mutilated, if they are still to be fulfilled. Or if they are not appointed, there will be no remainder of times not appointed. Further I shall add. Behold, an infant, say, has died beneath the founts of the breast; suppose now a beardless boy, suppose a youth coming of age, who yet would have lived eighty years — what kind of thing is it that the soul should pass these snatched-away years here after death? For age it cannot take on without a body, since ages are wrought through bodies. But let our own people too reconsider this, that souls are to receive again at the resurrection the same bodies in which they died. The same measures of bodies, then, are to be hoped for, and the same ages, which make the measures of the bodies. By what compact, then, can an infant's soul pass here the snatched-away times, so as to rise again at eighty in a body of one month? Or if it shall here be necessary for those times to be fulfilled which had been destined, will the soul also run through here, equally, the order of life which the times, equally destined here with them, had allotted — so that it should both study, being consigned from infancy to childhood, and serve as a soldier, being roused from adolescence to youth, and hold property, being weighted from youth to old age, and exact usury, and press the field, and sail, and go to law, and marry, and labour, and undergo sicknesses, and whatever sad and glad things awaited it along with the times? But these things, without a body, how shall they be transacted? life without life? But the times will be empty, to be filled up by their mere passage. What then hinders them from being fulfilled in the lower regions, where likewise there is no use of them? So we say that every soul, at whatever age it has deceased, abides in that age until that day on which the perfect thing is promised, tempered to the measure of angelic fullness. Accordingly, those will be held exiles from the lower regions whom they think to have been snatched away by violence, especially through the atrocities of punishments — I mean of the cross and the axe and the sword and the beast; nor, further, are those exits violent which justice decrees, the avenger of violence. ‘And therefore,’ you will say, ‘the wicked souls are exiled to the lower regions.’ Then I compel you to set up one of two things: either good lower regions, or evil. If you choose evil, then even now the worst souls ought to be hurled down thither; if good, why do you judge the souls of the immature and the unwedded, pure and innocent according to the condition of their age, meanwhile unworthy of the lower regions?

Either it is best to be detained here, according to the ‘aori,’ or worst, according to the ‘biaeothanatoi’ — that I may use the very words by which magic, the authoress of these opinions, sounds: Ostanes and Typhon and Dardanus and Damigeron and Nectabis and Berenice. There is now a public literature which promises that it will summon up, from the dwelling of the lower world, even souls laid to rest at a lawful age, even disjoined by an upright death, even discharged with prompt burial. What then shall we call magic? What nearly all do: a deception. But the reason of the deception escapes the Christians alone, who know the spirits of wickedness — not by an allied consciousness, but by a hostile knowledge — and handle, not by inviting operation but by an expugnatory dominion, that multiform plague of the human mind, the artificer of all error, the waster alike of salvation and of the soul. So too in magic — that is, in the second idolatry, in which the demons feign themselves dead in the same way as in the former they feign themselves gods (why not, since the gods too are dead?) — the ‘aori’ and the ‘biaeothanatoi’ are likewise invoked, under that argument of faith, that it should seem credible that those souls especially do violence and injury whom a savage and untimely end has wrung out by violence and injury, as though by way of requital for the offence. But the demons operate under cover of them, and these above all who were in those very persons when they were alive, and who had thrust them into ends of this kind. For we have suggested too that scarcely any man is free of a demon; and it is known to many that even immature and atrocious deaths are wrought by the operations of the demons, which they ascribe to onsets. This deception too, of the evil spirit lurking under the persons of the dead, we prove, unless I am mistaken, even by facts, since in exorcisms it sometimes affirms itself to be one of the parents of its man, sometimes a gladiator or a beast-fighter, just as elsewhere it affirms itself to be a god — caring for nothing more than this very thing, to exclude what we proclaim, lest we should easily believe that all souls are brought down to the lower regions, that it may disturb our faith both in judgment and in resurrection. And yet that demon, after he has tried to circumvent the bystanders, overcome by the urgency of divine grace, unwillingly confesses what is in the truth. So too in that other species of magic, which is believed to pluck up souls now at rest from the lower regions and exhibit them to view, there is no other more operative force of deception. Plainly, because a phantom is furnished, because a body too is feigned; nor is it any great matter for it to circumvent the outward eyes of one whose inner sharpness of mind it is most easy to blind. Bodies, in short, the dragons of the magical wands seemed to Pharaoh and the Egyptians. But the truth of Moses devoured the lie. Many things assuredly even against the apostles did Simon and Elymas the magi; but the stroke of blindness was not from their juggleries. What new thing is the rivalry of truth by an unclean spirit? Behold, today the heretics of this same Simon are exalted by so great a presumption of their art that they undertake even to move up the souls of the prophets from the lower regions. And I believe they can — by a lie. For not even to the Pythonic spirit then was it less permitted to feign 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 of a prophet, to be drawn forth by a demon — taught as we are that Satan himself transfigures himself into an angel of light, let alone into a man of light, being even about to assert himself God at the end, and to put forth more portentous signs to overthrow, if it could be, the elect. He hesitated not, it may be, then to assert himself a prophet of God — and indeed to Saul, in whom he himself now lodged. Do not suppose that it was one who administered the phantom, and another who commended it, but that it was the same spirit both in the false prophetess and in the apostate, easily lying that he had made it be believed, through whom Saul's treasure was there where his heart too was — where, namely, God was not. And therefore, through whom he believed he would see, he saw, because through whom he saw, he also believed. And if it be objected, concerning the nocturnal images, that the dead are often seen not in vain (for the Nasamones, by lingering at the tombs of their parents, catch their own oracles, as Heraclides or Nymphodorus or Herodotus writes; and the Celts, for the same cause, pass the night at the barrows of brave men, as Nicander affirms) — we no more truly suffer the dead in dreams than the living; but by the same reason the dead as the living, and all things that are seen. For things are not true because they are seen, but because they are fulfilled. The faith of dreams is reported from the effect, not from the sight. That to no soul whatever do the lower regions lie open, the Lord sufficiently sanctioned in that argument of the poor man reposing and the rich man groaning, in the person of Abraham, that no reporter of the infernal disposition could be sent back thence — which even then might have been permitted, that Moses and the prophets might be believed. But even though God's power has recalled certain souls into bodies, in proof of His own right, it will not on that account be shared with the faith and audacity of magicians, and the deception of dreams, and the licence of the poets. Nay, in the examples of resurrection, when the power of God, whether through the prophets, or through Christ, or through the apostles, represents souls into bodies, it has been pre-judged, by a solid and handleable and satisfying truth, that this is the form of truth — so that you should judge every incorporeal exhibition of the dead a jugglery.

‘All souls, then, are in the keeping of the lower regions?’ you say. Will you or no, there are both punishments already there and refreshments; you have the poor man and the rich. And because I have deferred something or other to this part, I shall now opportunely render it in the conclusion. For why should you not think that the soul is both punished and cherished in the lower regions, meanwhile, under the expectation of either judgment, in a certain anticipation, and indeed a foretaste, of it? ‘Because,’ you say, ‘its business ought to be kept safe in the divine judgment, without any prelibation of the sentence; and then, because the restitution of the flesh too must be awaited, as the partner of its works and of its wages.’ What then shall come to pass in that time? Shall we sleep? But souls do not sleep even in the living; for sleep belongs to bodies, whose is death too, with its own mirror, sleep. Or will you have nothing done there, whither the whole of humanity is drawn, whither all hope is sequestered? Do you think judgment is foretasted, or begun? hurried on, or pre-administered? But indeed how most unjust it would be, even in the lower regions, if it goes well even there as yet with the guilty, and not yet with the innocent! What more would you have — that after death hope should be confused, and mocking us with an uncertain expectation, or that the review of life and the ordering of judgment should already be shuddered at? But does the soul always await the body, in order to grieve or to rejoice? Is it not of itself sufficient to itself for either title of feeling? How often, the body being unhurt, is the soul alone tormented by bile, by anger, by weariness, and most often unknown even to itself? How often, likewise, the body being afflicted, does the soul seek for itself a stolen joy, and withdraw then from the importunate fellowship of the body? I lie, if she is not wont, even out of the very torments of the body, to glory and rejoice alone. Look to the soul of Mucius, when he loosened his right hand in the fire; look to that of Zeno, when the torments of Dionysius passed him by. The bites of beasts are the ornaments of youth, as the scars of the bear in Cyrus. So fully does the soul know, even in the lower regions, both to rejoice and to grieve without the flesh; since both in the flesh, even unhurt, it grieves if it will, and, hurt, it rejoices if it will. If this be by its own choice in life, how much more by the judgment of God after death! But neither does the soul share all its works with the ministry of the flesh; for the divine censure pursues even mere thoughts and bare wills. ‘He who has looked to lust has already committed adultery in his heart.’ Therefore, even on this account, it is most fitting that the soul, even though the flesh be not awaited, should be punished for what, without the flesh's partnership, it committed. So too, for pious and benevolent thoughts, in which it had no need of the flesh, it shall be refreshed without the flesh. Nay, what if in carnal matters too it is the first which conceives, which arranges, which commands, which impels? And if ever unwilling, yet it first handles what it is to do through the body. Never, in short, will the conscience be later than the deed. So to this order too it answers that she should first weigh out the wages to whom they are first owed. In sum, when we understand that prison which the Gospel sets forth to be the lower regions, and interpret the last farthing to be even the smallest fault to be expiated there by the delay of the resurrection, no one will doubt that the soul pays back something in the keeping of the lower regions, the fullness of the resurrection being preserved through the flesh too. This too the Paraclete has most frequently commended, if anyone shall have admitted his discourses out of the acknowledgment of the promised gifts. To every human opinion concerning the soul, as I think, having engaged from the doctrine of faith, we have satisfied a curiosity at least just and necessary. But to one immense and idle there will be lacking as much to learn as it shall have pleased to inquire.