Paul's Position and Argument. Marcion's Doctrine Confuted Out of St. God's Attribute of Goodness Considered as Rational. Marcion's Contempt of the Body Absurd. Wherein Tertullian shows that the creator, or demiurge, whom Marcion calumniated, is the true and good God. The Proper Course of the Argument. The True Doctrine of God the Creator. God Known by His Works. Spiritual as Well as Physical Gifts to Man. The Blessings of Man's Free-Will. His Objection Refuted, I.
Man's Fall Foreseen by God. Another Cavil Answered, I. Another Cavil Met, I. The Devilish Nature Superadded by Wilfulness. They are Compatible in the True God. Evil of Two Kinds, Penal and Criminal. Defence of the Divine Dispensation in that Matter. The Law of the Sabbath-Day Explained. The Gathering of Sticks a Violation. The Oath of God: God's Condescension in the Incarnation. Perverseness of the Marcionite Cavils.
Wherein Christ is shown to be the Son of God, Who created the world; to have been predicted by the prophets; to have taken human flesh like our own, by a real incarnation. Marcion's Christ Not the Subject of Prophecy. Sundry Features of the Prophetic Style: Principles of Its Interpretation. Prophecies of Christ's Rejection Examined. Isaiah's Prophecy of Emmanuel. Christ Entitled to that Name. The Virginity of Christ's Mother a Sign. Other Prophecies Also Signs. Military Metaphors Applied to Christ.
Joshua a Type of Him. Types of the Death of Christ. Prophecies of the Death of Christ. The Sure Mercies of David. Jesus is the Christ of the Creator. He Derives His Proofs from St. The Other Gospels Equally Authoritative. The Apostolic Gospels Perfectly Authentic. Antiquity the Criterion of Truth in Such a Matter. Marcion's Pretensions as an Amender of the Gospel. Marcion's Only a Mutilated Edition. Marcion's Object in Adulterating the Gospel. No Rival Christ Admissible. Marcion Rejected the Preceding Portion of St. Christ Compared with the Prophet Elisha. The Call of Levi the Publican.
Christ in Relation to the Baptist. Christ as the Bridegroom. The Parable of the Old Wine and the New. Arguments Connecting Christ with the Creator. Christ's Authority Over the Sabbath. The Withered Hand Healed on the Sabbath. Christ's Connection with the Creator Shown. Christ's Sermon on the Mount. Sermon on the Mount Continued. The Precept of Loving One's Enemies. Sundry Precepts of Charity Explained.
Prohibition of Usury and the Usurious Spirit. Concerning the Centurion's Faith. The Raising of the Widow's Son. Explanation of Christ's Apparent Rejection Them. Christ's Power Over Unclean Spirits. The Case of the Legion. The Cure of the Issue of Blood. Luke's Narrative of the Mission of the Disciples. The Feeding of the Multitude.
The Confession of St. Being Ashamed of Christ. The Same Conclusion Supported by the Transfiguration. Peter's Ignorance Accounted for on Montanist Principle. Precedents Drawn from the Old Testament. This Concealment Judiciously Effected by the Creator. Other Points in St. The Exclamation of the Woman in the Crowd. Christ's Reprehension of the Pharisees Seeking a Sign. Scripture Abounds with Admonitions of a Similar Purport. Proofs of His Mission from the Creator. Parables of the Mustard-Seed, and of the Leaven. The Absurdity of the Marcionite Interpretation.
John Baptist and Herod. The Cure of the Ten Lepers. Christ, the Stone Rejected by the Builders. Indications of Severity in the Coming of Christ. His Salutation--Son of David. The Salvation of the Body as Denied by Marcion. Christ's Refutations of the Pharisees. Next of the Sadducees, Respecting Marriage in the Resurrection. The Terrible Signs of His Coming. Parallel Passages of Prophecy. The Treachery of Judas.
The Institution of the Lord's Supper. Christ's Conduct Before the Council Explained. Barabbas Preferred to Jesus. Details of the Crucifixion. The Earthquake and the Mid-Day Darkness. All Wonderfully Foretold in the Scriptures of the Creator. The Pious Women at the Sepulchre. The Angels at the Resurrection. Marcion's Manipulation of the Gospel on This Point. Wherein Tertullian proves, with respect to St. Paul's epistles, what he had proved in the preceding book with respect to St.
Far from being at variance, they were in perfect unison with the writings of the Old Testament, and therefore testified that the Creator was the only God, and that the Lord Jesus was his Christ. As in the preceding books, Tertullian supports his argument with profound reasoning, and many happy illustrations of Holy Scripture.
Paul's Writings as Marcion Allowed. On the Epistle to the Galatians. This Book Agrees with the Pauline Epistles. Paul Quite in Accordance with St. Peter and Other Apostles of the Circumcision. His Censure of St. Peter Explained, and Rescued from Marcion's Misapplication.
Marcion's Tampering with St. Another Instance of Marcion's Tampering with St. Mosaic Rites Abrogated by the Creator Himself. Marcion's Tricks About Abraham's Name. The First Epistle to the Corinthians. The Cross of Christ Purposed by the Creator. God's Hiding of Himself, and Subsequent Revelation. Married and Unmarried States. Meaning of the Time is Short. Prohibition of Meats and Drinks Withdrawn by the Creator. The Sevenfold Spirit Described by Isaiah.
A treatise on the soul - Table of Contents - IntraText CT
The Apostle and the Prophet Compared. The Doctrine of the Resurrection. The Body Will Rise Again. Jewish Perversions of Prophecy Exposed and Confuted. Doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body, Continued. How are the Dead Raised? Let Us Bear the Image of the Heavenly. The Second Epistle to the Corinthians.
The Creator the Father of Mercies. The Newness of the New Testament. Satan, the God of This World. The Eternal Home in Heaven. The Epistle to the Romans. Likeness of Sinful Flesh. No Docetism in It. Resurrection of Our Real Bodies. Paul's God Was the Creator. The First Epistle to the Thessalonians. The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians. The Man of Sin--What? Inconsistency of Marcion's View. Similarity of the Pauline Precepts with Those of the Creator. The Epistle to the Laodiceans. The Proper Designation is to the Ephesians. No Room for Marcion's Christ Here. Creation and Regeneration the Work of One God.
A Vain Erasure of Marcion's. The Apostles as Well as the Prophets from the Creator. Another Foolish Erasure of Marcion's Exposed. The Epistle to the Colossians. But where at last will the soul have to lodge, when it is bare and divested of the body? We must certainly not hesitate to follow it thither, in the order of our inquiry.
We must, however, first of all fully state what belongs to the topic before us, in order that no one, because we have mentioned the various issues of death, may expect from us a special description of these, which ought rather to be left to medical men, who are the proper judges of the incidents which appertain to death, or its causes, and the actual conditions of the human body. But the entire reason of this phenomenon is in the body, and arises from the body. For whatever be the kind of death which operates on man , it undoubtedly produces the destruction either of the matter, or of the region, or of the passages of vitality: Inasmuch, then, as these parts of the body are severally devastated by an injury proper to each of them, even to the very last ruin and annulling of the vital powers—in other words, of the ends, the sites, and the functions of nature—it must needs come to pass, amidst the gradual decay of its instruments, domiciles, and spaces, that the soul also itself, being driven to abandon each successive part, assumes the appearance of being lessened to nothing; in some such manner as a charioteer is assumed to have himself failed, when his horses, through fatigue, withdraw from him their energies.
And then, again, by what are incorporeal things understood? If it is by the mind , where will be the soul? If it is by the soul , where will be the mind?
Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume III/Apologetic/A Treatise on the Soul/Chapter LIII
For things which differ ought to be mutually absent from each other, when they are occupied in their respective functions and duties. It must be your opinion, indeed, that the mind is absent from the soul on certain occasions; for you suppose that we are so made and constituted as not to know that we have seen or heard something, on the hypothesis that the mind was absent at the time.
I must therefore maintain that the very soul itself neither saw nor heard, since it was at the given moment absent with its active power — that is to say, the mind. The truth is, that whenever a man is out of his mind , it is his soul that is demented — not because the mind is absent, but because it is a fellow-sufferer with the soul at the time.
Indeed, it is the soul which is principally affected by casualties of such a kind. Whence is this fact confirmed? It is confirmed from the following consideration: Now, since it follows the soul , it is also indissolubly attached to it; just as the understanding is attached to the soul , which is followed by the mind , with which the understanding is indissolubly connected.
Granted now that the understanding is superior to the senses, and a better discoverer of mysteries , what matters it, so long as it is only a peculiar faculty of the soul , just as the senses themselves are? It does not at all affect my argument, unless the understanding were held to be superior to the senses, for the purpose of deducing from the allegation of such superiority its separate condition likewise. After thus combating their alleged difference, I have also to refute this question of superiority, previous to my approaching the belief which heresy propounds in a superior god. On this point, however, of a superior god, we shall have to measure swords with the heretics on their own ground.
Our present subject concerns the soul , and the point is to prevent the insidious ascription of a superiority to the intellect or understanding. Now, although the objects which are touched by the intellect are of a higher nature, since they are spiritual, than those which are embraced by the senses, since these are corporeal, it will still be only a superiority in the objects — as of lofty ones contrasted with humble — not in the faculties of the intellect against the senses.
For how can the intellect be superior to the senses, when it is these which educate it for the discovery of various truths? It is a fact, that these truths are learned by means of palpable forms; in other words, invisible things are discovered by the help of visible ones, even as the apostle tells us in his epistle: The things which appear are the image of the things which are concealed from view, whence it must needs follow that this world is by all means an image of some other: How, then, can a thing be superior to that which is instrumental to its existence , which is also indispensable to it, and to whose help it owes everything which it acquires?
Two conclusions therefore follow from what we have said: Nor must we fail to notice those writers who deprive the soul of the intellect even for a short period of time.
They do this in order to prepare the way of introducing the intellect — and the mind also — at a subsequent time of life, even at the time when intelligence appears in a man. They maintain that the stage of infancy is supported by the soul alone, simply to promote vitality, without any intention of acquiring knowledge also, because not all things have knowledge which possess life.
Trees, for instance, to quote Aristotle's example, have vitality, but have not knowledge ; and with him agrees every one who gives a share to all animated beings of the animal substance, which, according to our view, exists in man alone as his special property, — not because it is the work of God , which all other creatures are likewise, but because it is the breath of God , which this human soul alone is, which we say is born with the full equipment of its proper faculties. Well, let them meet us with the example of the trees: But then, as time goes on, the vigour of the tree slowly advances, as it grows and hardens into its woody trunk, until its mature age completes the condition which nature destines for it.
Else what resources would trees possess in due course for the inoculation of grafts, and the formation of leaves, and the swelling of their buds, and the graceful shedding of their blossom, and the softening of their sap, were there not in them the quiet growth of the full provision of their nature, and the distribution of this life over all their branches for the accomplishment of their maturity?
Trees, therefore, have ability or knowledge ; and they derive it from whence they also derive vitality — that is, from the one source of vitality and knowledge which is peculiar to their nature, and that from the infancy which they, too, begin with. For I observe that even the vine, although yet tender and immature, still understands its own natural business, and strives to cling to some support, that, leaning on it, and lacing through it, it may so attain its growth. Indeed, without waiting for the husbandman's training, without an espalier, without a prop, whatever its tendrils catch, it will fondly cling to, and embrace with really greater tenacity and force by its own inclination than by your volition.
It longs and hastens to be secure. Take also ivy-plants, never mind how young: I observe their attempts from the very first to grasp objects above them, and outrunning everything else, to hang on to the highest thing, preferring as they do to spread over walls with their leafy web and woof rather than creep on the ground and be trodden under by every foot that likes to crush them.
On the other hand, in the case of such trees as receive injury from contact with a building, how do they hang off as they grow and avoid what injures them! You can see that their branches were naturally meant to take the opposite direction, and can very well understand the vital instincts of such a tree from its avoidance of the wall. It is contented if it be only a little shrub with its own insignificant destiny, which it has in its foreseeing instinct thoroughly been aware of from its infancy, only it still fears even a ruined building.
On my side, then, why should I not contend for these wise and sagacious natures of trees? Let them have vitality, as the philosophers permit it; but let them have knowledge too, although the philosophers disavow it. Even the infancy of a log, then, may have an intellect suitable to it: I am much mistaken if the human person, even from his infancy, when he saluted life with his infant cries, does not testify to his actual possession of the faculties of sensation and intellect by the fact of his birth, vindicating at one and the same time the use of all his senses — that of seeing by the light, that of hearing by sounds, that of taste by liquids, that of smell by the air, that of touch by the ground.
This earliest voice of infancy, then, is the first effort of the senses, and the initial impulse of mental perceptions. There is also the further fact, that some persons understand this plaintive cry of the infant to be an augury of affliction in the prospect of our tearful life, whereby from the very moment of birth the soul has to be regarded as endued with prescience, much more with intelligence. Accordingly by this intuition the babe knows his mother, discerns the nurse, and even recognises the waiting-maid; refusing the breast of another woman , and the cradle that is not his own, and longing only for the arms to which he is accustomed.
Now from what source does he acquire this discernment of novelty and custom, if not from instinctive knowledge?
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How does it happen that he is irritated and quieted, if not by help of his initial intellect? It would be very strange indeed that infancy were naturally so lively, if it had not mental power; and naturally so capable of impression and affection, if it had no intellect. But we hold the contrary: And here, therefore, we draw our conclusion, that all the natural properties of the soul are inherent in it as parts of its substance; and that they grow and develope along with it, from the very moment of its own origin at birth.
Just as Seneca says, whom we so often find on our side: There are implanted within us the seeds of all the arts and periods of life. And God , our Master, secretly produces our mental dispositions; that is, from the germs which are implanted and hidden in us by means of infancy, and these are the intellect: Now, even the seeds of plants have, one form in each kind, but their development varies: In like manner, the soul may well be uniform in its seminal origin, although multiform by the process of nativity.
And here local influences, too, must be taken into account. It has been said that dull and brutish persons are born at Thebes; and the most accomplished in wisdom and speech at Athens, where in the district of Colythus children speak — such is the precocity of their tongue — before they are a month old. Empedocles, however, places the cause of a subtle or an obtuse intellect in the quality of the blood, from which he derives progress and perfection in learning and science.
The subject of national peculiarities has grown by this time into proverbial notoriety. Comic poets deride the Phrygians for their cowardice; Sallust reproaches the Moors for their levity, and the Dalmatians for their cruelty; even the apostle brands the Cretans as liars.
Stoutness hinders knowledge , but a spare form stimulates it; paralysis prostrates the mind , a decline preserves it. How much more will those accidental circumstances have to be noticed, which, in addition to the state of one's body or one's health, tend to sharpen or to dull the intellect! It is sharpened by learned pursuits, by the sciences, the arts, by experimental knowledge , business habits, and studies; it is blunted by ignorance , idle habits, inactivity, lust , inexperience, listlessness, and vicious pursuits.
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Then, besides these influences, there must perhaps be added the supreme powers. Now these are the supreme powers: Even the philosophers allow these distinctions; while on our part we have already undertaken to treat of them, on the principles of the Christian faith , in a separate work. It is evident how great must be the influences which so variously affect the one nature of the soul , since they are commonly regarded as separate natures.
Still they are not different species, but casual incidents of one nature and substance — even of that which God conferred on Adam, and made the mould of all subsequent ones. Casual incidents will they always remain, but never will they become specific differences. However great, too, at present is the variety of men's maunders, it was not so in Adam, the founder of their race. But all these discordances ought to have existed in him as the fountainhead, and thence to have descended to us in an unimpaired variety, if the variety had been due to nature.
Now, if the soul possessed this uniform and simple nature from the beginning in Adam, previous to so many mental dispositions being developed out of it , it is not rendered multiform by such various development, nor by the triple form predicated of it in the Valentinian trinity that we may still keep the condemnation of that heresy in view , for not even this nature is discoverable in Adam. What had he that was spiritual? Is it because he prophetically declared the great mystery of Christ and the church? Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and he shall cleave unto his wife; and they two shall be one flesh.
If, again, the evil of sin was developed in him, this must not be accounted as a natural disposition: Now, if neither the spiritual element, nor what the heretics call the material element, was properly inherent in him since, if he had been created out of matter, the germ of evil must have been an integral part of his constitution , it remains that the one only original element of his nature was what is called the animal the principle of vitality, the soul , which we maintain to be simple and uniform in its condition.
Concerning this, it remains for us to inquire whether, as being called natural, it ought to be deemed subject to change. The heretics whom we have referred to deny that nature is susceptible of any change, in order that they may be able to establish and settle their threefold theory, or trinity, in all its characteristics as to the several natures, because a good tree cannot produce evil fruit, nor a corrupt tree good fruit; and nobody gathers figs of thorns, nor grapes of brambles.
A corrupt tree will never yield good fruit, unless the better nature be grafted into it; nor will a good tree produce evil fruit, except by the same process of cultivation. Stones also will become children of Abraham , if educated in Abraham's faith ; and a generation of vipers will bring forth the fruits of penitence, if they reject the poison of their malignant nature. If, then, the natural condition has to be submitted to a definition, it must be determined to be twofold — there being the category of the born and the unborn, the made and not-made.
Now that which has received its constitution by being made or by being born, is by nature capable of being changed, for it can be both born again and re-made; whereas that which is not-made and unborn will remain for ever immoveable. Since, however, this state is suited to God alone, as the only Being who is unborn and not-made and therefore immortal and unchangeable , it is absolutely certain that the nature of all other existences which are born and created is subject to modification and change; so that if the threefold state is to be ascribed to the soul , it must be supposed to arise from the mutability of its accidental circumstances, and not from the appointment of nature.
Hermogenes has already heard from us what are the other natural faculties of the soul , as well as their vindication and proof ; whence it may be seen that the soul is rather the offspring of God than of matter. The names of these faculties shall here be simply repeated, that they may not seem to be forgotten and passed out of sight.
We have assigned, then, to the soul both that freedom of the will which we just now mentioned, and its dominion over the works of nature, and its occasional gift of divination , independently of that endowment of prophecy which accrues to it expressly from the grace of God. We shall therefore now quit this subject of the soul's disposition, in order to set out fully in order its various qualities. The soul , then, we define to be sprung from the breath of God , immortal , possessing body, having form, simple in its substance, intelligent in its own nature, developing its power in various ways, free in its determinations, subject to be changes of accident, in its faculties mutable, rational, supreme, endued with an instinct of presentiment, evolved out of one archetypal soul.
It remains for us now to consider how it is developed out of this one original source; in other words, whence, and when, and how it is produced. Some suppose that they came down from heaven, with as firm a belief as they are apt to entertain, when they indulge in the prospect of an undoubted return there. Saturninus, the disciple of Menander, who belonged to Simon's sect , introduced this opinion: A futile, imperfect creation at first, weak and unable to stand, he crawled upon the ground like a worm, because he wanted the strength to maintain an erect posture; but afterwards having, by the compassion of the Supreme Power in whose image, which had not been fully understood, he was clumsily formed , obtained a slender spark of life, this roused and righted his imperfect form, and animated it with a higher vitality, and provided for its return, on its relinquishment of life, to its original principle.
Carpocrates, indeed, claims for himself so extreme an amount of the supernal qualities, that his disciples set their own souls at once on an equality with Christ not to mention the apostles ; and sometimes, when it suits their fancy, even give them the superiority — deeming them, forsooth, to have partaken of that sublime virtue which looks down upon the principalities that govern this world. Apelles tells us that our souls were enticed by earthly baits down from their super-celestial abodes by a fiery angel , Israel's God and ours, who then enclosed them firmly within our sinful flesh.
I am sorry from my heart that Plato has been the caterer to all these heretics. Forasmuch, therefore, as the doctrines which the heretics borrow from Plato are cunningly defended by this kind of argument, I shall sufficiently refute the heretics if I overthrow the argument of Plato. In the first place, I cannot allow that the soul is capable of a failure of memory; because he has conceded to it so large an amount of divine quality as to put it on a par with God. He makes it unborn , which single attribute I might apply as a sufficient attestation of its perfect divinity; he then adds that the soul is immortal , incorruptible, incorporeal — since he believed God to be the same — invisible, incapable of delineation, uniform, supreme, rational, and intellectual.
What more could he attribute to the soul , if he wanted to call it God? We, however, who allow no appendage to God in the sense of equality , by this very fact reckon the soul as very far below God: This point I have discussed sufficiently with Hermogenes. But it may be further observed, that if the soul is to merit being accounted a god, by reason of all its qualities being equal to the attributes of God , it must then be subject to no passion, and therefore to no loss of memory; for this defect of oblivion is as great an injury to that of which you predicate it, as memory is the glory thereof, which Plato himself deems the very safeguard of the senses and intellectual faculties, and which Cicero has designated the treasury of all the sciences.
Now we need not raise the doubt whether so divine a faculty as the soul was capable of losing memory: I could not decide whether that, which ought to have lost memory, if it once incurred the loss, would be powerful enough to recollect itself. Both alternatives, indeed, will agree very well with my soul , but not with Plato's. In the second place, my objection to him will stand thus: Plato , do you endow the soul with a natural competency for understanding those well-known ideas of yours? Certainly I do, will be your answer.
Well, now, no one will concede to you that the knowledge , which you say is the gift of nature, of the natural sciences can fail. But the knowledge of the sciences fails; the knowledge of the various fields of learning and of the arts of life fails; and so perhaps the knowledge of the faculties and affections of our minds fails, although they seem to be inherent in our nature, but really are not so: Now the instinctive knowledge of natural objects never fails, not even in the brute creation.
The lion, no doubt , will forget his ferocity, if surrounded by the softening influence of training; he may become, with his beautiful mane, the plaything of some Queen Berenice, and lick her cheeks with his tongue. A wild beast may lay aside his habits, but his natural instincts will not be forgotten. He will not forget his proper food, nor his natural resources, nor his natural alarms; and should the queen offer him fishes or cakes, he will wish for flesh; and if, when he is ill, any antidote be prepared for him, he will still require the ape; and should no hunting-spear be presented against him, he will yet dread the crow of the cock.
In like manner with man, who is perhaps the most forgetful of all creatures, the knowledge of everything natural to him will remain ineradicably fixed in him — but this alone, as being alone a natural instinct. He will never forget to eat when he is hungry; or to drink when he is thirsty; or to use his eyes when he wants to see; or his ears, to hear; or his nose, to smell; or his mouth, to taste; or his hand, to touch.
These are, to be sure, the senses, which philosophy depreciates by her preference for the intellectual faculties. But if the natural knowledge of the sensuous faculties is permanent, how happens it that the knowledge of the intellectual faculties fails, to which the superiority is ascribed?
Whence, now, arises that power of forgetfulness itself which precedes recollection? From long lapse of time, he says. But this is a shortsighted answer. Length of time cannot be incidental to that which, according to him, is unborn, and which therefore must be deemed most certainly eternal. For that which is eternal , on the ground of its being unborn, since it admits neither of beginning nor end of time, is subject to no temporal criterion.
And that which time does not measure, undergoes no change in consequence of time; nor is long lapse of time at all influential over it. If time is a cause of oblivion, why, from the time of the soul's entrance into the body, does memory fail, as if thenceforth the soul were to be affected by time?
For the soul , being undoubtedly prior to the body, was of course not irrespective of time. Is it, indeed, immediately on the soul's entrance into the body that oblivion takes place, or some time afterwards? If immediately, where will be the long lapse of the time which is as yet inadmissible in the hypothesis? Take, for instance, the case of the infant. If some time afterwards, will not the soul , during the interval previous to the moment of oblivion, still exercise its powers of memory? And how comes it to pass that the soul subsequently forgets, and then afterwards again remembers?
How long, too, must the lapse of the time be regarded as having been, during which the oblivion oppressed the soul? The whole course of one's life, I apprehend, will be insufficient to efface the memory of an age which endured so long before the soul's assumption of the body. But then, again, Plato throws the blame upon the body, as if it were at all credible that a born substance could extinguish the power of one that is unborn. There exist, however, among bodies a great many differences, by reason of their rationality, their bulk, their condition, their age, and their health.
Will there then be supposed to exist similar differences in obliviousness? Oblivion, however, is uniform and identical. Therefore bodily peculiarity, with its manifold varieties, will not become the cause of an effect which is an invariable one. There are likewise, according to Plato's own testimony, many proofs to show that the soul has a divining faculty, as we have already advanced against Hermogenes.
But there is not a man living, who does not himself feel his soul possessed with a presage and augury of some omen, danger, or joy. Now, if the body is not prejudicial to divination , it will not, I suppose, be injurious to memory. One thing is certain, that souls in the same body both forget and remember. If any corporeal condition engenders forgetfulness, how will it admit the opposite state of recollection? Because recollection, after forgetfulness, is actually the resurrection of the memory. Now, how should not that which is hostile to the memory at first, be also prejudicial to it in the second instance?
Lastly, who have better memories than little children, with their fresh, unworn souls , not yet immersed in domestic and public cares, but devoted only to those studies the acquirement of which is itself a reminiscence? Why, indeed, do we not all of us recollect in an equal degree, since we are equal in our forgetfulness?
But this is true only of philosophers! But not even of the whole of them. Amongst so many nations, in so great a crowd of sages, Plato , to be sure, is the only man who has combined the oblivion and the recollection of ideas. Now, since this main argument of his by no means keeps its ground, it follows that its entire superstructure must fall with it, namely, that souls are supposed to be unborn, and to live in the heavenly regions, and to be instructed in the divine mysteries thereof; moreover, that they descend to this earth, and here recall to memory their previous existence , for the purpose, of course, of supplying to our heretics the fitting materials for their systems.
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I shall now return to the cause of this digression, in order that I may explain how all souls are derived from one, when and where and in what manner they are produced. Now, touching this subject, it matters not whether the question be started by the philosopher , by the heretic , or by the crowd.
Those who profess the truth care nothing about their opponents, especially such of them as begin by maintaining that the soul is not conceived in the womb, nor is formed and produced at the time that the flesh is moulded, but is impressed from without upon the infant before his complete vitality, but after the process of parturition. They say, moreover, that the human seed having been duly deposited ex concubiter in the womb, and having been by natural impulse quickened, it becomes condensed into the mere substance of the flesh, which is in due time born, warm from the furnace of the womb, and then released from its heat.
This flesh resembles the case of hot iron, which is in that state plunged into cold water; for, being smitten by the cold air into which it is born , it at once receives the power of animation, and utters vocal sound. We shall see whether this view of his is merely fictitious. Even the medical profession has not lacked its Hicesius, to prove a traitor both to nature and his own calling. These gentlemen, I suppose, were too modest to come to terms with women on the mysteries of childbirth, so well known to the latter.
But how much more is there for them to blush at, when in the end they have the women to refute them, instead of commending them. Now, in such a question as this, no one can be so useful a teacher, judge, or witness , as the sex itself which is so intimately concerned. Give us your testimony, then, you mothers, whether yet pregnant, or after delivery let barren women and men keep silence — the truth of your own nature is in question, the reality of your own suffering is the point to be decided.
Tell us, then, whether you feel in the embryo within you any vital force other than your own, with which your bowels tremble, your sides shake, your entire womb throbs, and the burden which oppresses you constantly changes its position? Are these movements a joy to you, and a positive removal of anxiety, as making you confident that your infant both possesses vitality and enjoys it? Or, should his restlessness cease, your first fear would be for him; and he would be aware of it within you, since he is disturbed at the novel sound; and you would crave for injurious diet, or would even loathe your food — all on his account; and then you and he, in the closeness of your sympathy, would share together your common ailments — so far that with your contusions and bruises would he actually become marked — while within you, and even on the selfsame parts of the body, taking to himself thus peremptorily the injuries of his mother!
Now, whenever a livid hue and redness are incidents of the blood, the blood will not be without the vital principle, or soul ; or when disease attacks the soul or vitality, it becomes a proof of its real existence , since there is no disease where there is no soul or principle of life. Again, inasmuch as sustenance by food, and the want thereof, growth and decay, fear and motion, are conditions of the soul or life, he who experiences them must be alive. And, so, he at last ceases to live, who ceases to experience them.
And thus by and by infants are still-born; but how so, unless they had life? For how could any die, who had not previously lived? But sometimes by a cruel necessity, while yet in the womb, an infant is put to death , when lying awry in the orifice of the womb he impedes parturition, and kills his mother, if he is not to die himself. There is also another instrument in the shape of a copper needle or spike, by which the actual death is managed in this furtive robbery of life: Such apparatus was possessed both by Hippocrates, and Asclepiades, and Erasistratus, and Herophilus, that dissector of even adults, and the milder Soranus himself, who all knew well enough that a living being had been conceived, and pitied this most luckless infant state, which had first to be put to death , to escape being tortured alive.
Of the necessity of such harsh treatment I have no doubt even Hicesius was convinced, although he imported their soul into infants after birth from the stroke of the frigid air, because the very term for soul , forsooth, in Greek answered to such a refrigeration! How many nations are there who commence life under the broiling sun of the torrid zone, scorching their skin into its swarthy hue? Whence do they get their souls , with no frosty air to help them?
I say not a word of those well-warmed bed-rooms, and all that apparatus of heat which ladies in childbirth so greatly need, when a breath of cold air might endanger their life. But in the very bath almost a babe will slip into life, and at once his cry is heard! But the fact really is, that population is greater within the temperate regions of the East and the West, and men's minds are sharper; while there is not a Sarmatian whose wits are not dull and humdrum. The minds of men , too, would grow keener by reason of the cold, if their souls came into being amidst nipping frosts; for as the substance is, so must be its active power.
Now, after these preliminary statements, we may also refer to the case of those who, having been cut out of their mother's womb, have breathed and retained life — your Bacchuses and Scipios. But when the same philosopher , in the sixth book of The Laws , warns us to beware lest a vitiation of seed should infuse a soil into both body and soul from an illicit or debased concubinage, I hardly know whether he is more inconsistent with himself in respect of one of his previous statements, or of that which he had just made.
For he here shows us that the soul proceeds from human seed and warns us to be on our guard about it , not, as he had said before, from the first breath of the new-born child. Pray, whence comes it that from similarity of soul we resemble our parents in disposition, according to the testimony of Cleanthes, if we are not produced from this seed of the soul? Why, too, used the old astrologers to cast a man's nativity from his first conception, if his soul also draws not its origin from that moment?
To this nativity likewise belongs the inbreathing of the soul , whatever that is. Now there is no end to the uncertainty and irregularity of human opinion, until we come to the limits which God has prescribed. I shall at last retire within our own lines and firmly hold my ground there, for the purpose of proving to the Christian the soundness of my answers to the Philosophers and the Physicians. Brother in Christ , on your own foundation build up your faith. Consider the wombs of the most sainted women instinct with the life within them, and their babes which not only breathed therein, but were even endowed with prophetic intuition.
Behold, a twin offspring chafes within the mother's womb, although she has no sign as yet of the twofold nation. Possibly we might have regarded as a prodigy the contention of this infant progeny, which struggled before it lived, which had animosity previous to animation, if it had simply disturbed the mother by its restlessness within her. But when her womb opens, and the number of her offspring is seen, and their presaged condition known , we have presented to us a proof not merely of the separate souls of the infants, but of their hostile struggles too.
He who was the first to be born was threatened with detention by him who was anticipated in birth, who was not yet fully brought forth, but whose hand only had been born. Now if he actually imbibed life, and received his soul , in Platonic style, at his first breath; or else, after the Stoic rule, had the earliest taste of animation on touching the frosty air; what was the other about, who was so eagerly looked for, who was still detained within the womb, and was trying to detain the other outside? Consider, again, those extraordinary conceptions, which were more wonderful still, of the barren woman and the virgin: If there was to be bearing at all in the case, it was only fitting that they should be born without a soul , as the philosopher would say, who had been irregularly conceived.
However, even these have life, each of them in his mother's womb. Accordingly you read the word of God which was spoken to Jeremiah, Before I formed you in the belly, I knew you. And before you came forth out of the womb, I sanctified you.