Ask God, Not the Philosophers

A Treatise on the Soul

I have already argued one point with Hermogenes — where the soul comes from — as far as his own assumption forced me to: that the soul was put together out of matter rather than breathed into man by God. Now I turn to the other questions that belong with the subject, and here it is plainly the philosophers I will have to contend with, most of the way. It was in the very prison of Socrates that they first skirmished over the state of the soul. And I have my doubts at once whether the time was a good one for their great master — to say nothing of the place, though perhaps the place does not matter much. What could the soul of Socrates take in clearly and calmly just then? The sacred ship was back from Delos. The poison he had been sentenced to drink had been drunk. Death was standing in front of him. His soul, we may suppose, was thrown into confusion by every feeling nature can raise; or, if nature had lost her hold on him, it must have been out of its senses altogether. [b]

Or make him as calm and settled as you like — unmoved, against everything family feeling could claim of him, by the tears of the woman who was about to be his widow and the sight of the children who were about to be orphans. Even so, his soul was moved by the very effort of holding itself still, and his steadiness itself must have been shaken as he fought down the commotion around him. Besides, what else would any man think about, condemned to die unjustly, except whatever might console him for the wrong done to him? That would be especially true of that magnificent creature the philosopher, in whom an injury does not raise a craving for comfort so much as resentment and indignation. So, after the sentence, when his wife came to him wailing like a woman, Socrates, you are being put to death unjustly! he already seemed to be enjoying his answer: Would you rather I were put to death justly?

It is no surprise, then, if even in prison, wanting to break the filthy hands of Anytus and Meletus, he asserts the immortality of the soul in the face of death itself — by a bold assumption, exactly the sort that was needed to defeat the wrong they had done him. So all the wisdom of Socrates at that moment came out of a composure he was putting on, and not out of settled certainty about the truth. For who has ever found the truth without God? Who has ever found God without Christ? Who has ever traced out Christ without the Holy Spirit? And who has ever received the Holy Spirit without the sacred pledge of faith?

Socrates, nobody can doubt, was driven by a different spirit. They say a demon stuck close to him from boyhood — the worst possible teacher, whatever high place the poets and philosophers give the thing, next to the gods themselves, or rather right alongside them. The teaching that carries the power of Christ had not yet been given, and that power alone can silence this most destructive influence of evil, which has nothing good in it but is the author of every error and the seducer away from all truth. And if Socrates was pronounced the wisest of men by the oracle of the Pythian demon — which, you may be sure, tidily arranged the business for its own friend — how much more weight and steadiness there is in what Christian wisdom asserts, at the mere breath of which the whole crowd of demons scatters!

This wisdom, out of heaven’s own school, denies the gods of this world openly and without hedging. It is caught in no such inconsistency as ordering “a cock to be sacrificed to Asclepius.” It brings in no new gods and no new demons; it throws the old ones out. It does not corrupt the young; it trains them in everything good and self-controlled. And so it bears an unjust condemnation not from one city but from the whole world, for the sake of a truth that is hated the more completely the more fully it is told. It does not taste death out of a cup, almost in a holiday mood; it drains death dry in every kind of bitter cruelty, on crosses and in fires that burn people alive.

Meanwhile, in the far gloomier prison of the world, among your Cebeses and Phaedos, it carries on every inquiry about the soul by God’s rules. And in any case you can point us to no more competent expounder of the soul than the one who made it. From God you may learn about what you hold from God; from anyone else you will not get this knowledge, if you do not get it from God. For who is going to reveal what God has hidden? We must take our questions to the one place where even our ignorance is safe. It really is better not to know a thing, because he has not revealed it to us, than to know it by human wisdom, because some man was bold enough to assume it.

Of course we will not deny that philosophers have sometimes thought the same things we do. What the thinking comes to is the test of whether it is true. Even in a storm, when the boundaries of sky and sea are lost in one confusion, a laboring ship sometimes stumbles on a harbor by a happy chance; and in the dead of night a man sometimes finds his way into a place, or out of it, by blind luck alone. In the ordinary way, though, most of our conclusions are suggested by that common sense with which God was pleased to furnish the human soul. [l]

Philosophy has caught that up, and — it is no wonder I use the word — has puffed it out to glorify her own art, straining after the fluency that comes of building everything up and pulling everything down again, a fluency better fitted to persuade people by talking than to teach them. She assigns things their forms and conditions; now she makes them common and public property, now she keeps them for private use; on things that are certain she stamps uncertainty as the mood takes her; she appeals to precedents, as if everything could be compared with everything; she describes everything by rule and definition, handing out different properties even to objects that are alike; she credits nothing to what God permits, and takes the laws of nature for her first principles. I could put up with her pretensions if she were true to nature herself, and could prove to me that she had mastery over nature because she had a share in its making.

No doubt she thought she was drawing her mysteries from sacred sources, as men reckon such things, because in ancient times most authors were taken to be — I will not say godlike — actually gods: the Egyptian Mercury, for instance, whom Plato treated with the greatest deference; and Silenus the Phrygian, to whom Midas lent his long ears when the shepherds brought him in; and Hermotimus, for whom the good people of Clazomenae built a temple after his death; and Orpheus, and Musaeus, and Pherecydes, the master of Pythagoras.

But why should we care, when these same philosophers have also made their attacks on the writings we ourselves condemn under the title of forgeries? We are certain that nothing ought to be accepted that does not agree with the true prophecy which has arisen in the present age, and we do not forget that there have been false prophets, and long before them rebel spirits, which have schooled the whole tone and look of the world in cunning knowledge of just this philosophical cast. It is not unbelievable, of course, that a man in search of wisdom went so far, out of curiosity, as to consult the prophets themselves. But take the philosophers as they stand, and you will find more disagreement in them than agreement, since even in their agreement the disagreement shows through. Whatever is true in their systems and fits prophetic wisdom, they either recommend as coming from some other source, or twist perversely into some other sense. That does very great damage to the truth, when they pretend either that it is helped along by falsehood, or that falsehood draws its support from it.

Here is what was bound to set us and the philosophers at each other, especially on the present subject. Sometimes they dress up opinions that both sides hold in arguments that are their own, and at points contrary to our rule and standard of faith. At other times they defend opinions peculiarly their own with arguments both sides admit, and now and then with arguments that even suit what we believe. At this rate the truth has been all but shut out by the philosophers, through the poisons they have infected it with. So, looking at both these ways of mixing, which are equally hostile to the truth, we feel the urgent need to free the opinions we hold in common with them from the philosophers’ arguments, and to separate the arguments both sides use from those same philosophers’ opinions. And we do it by bringing every question back to the standard God has inspired — with the obvious exception of simple cases, free of any preconceived notions, that a man may fairly admit on human testimony alone; for evidence of that plain kind we must sometimes borrow from opponents, when our opponents have nothing to gain by it.

Now I am not unaware what a vast mass of literature the philosophers have piled up on the subject before us, in their own commentaries on it — how many schools of first principles there are, what conflicts of opinion, what fertile sources of questions, what tangled methods of solution. I have looked into medical science as well, philosophy’s sister, as they call her, who claims the curing of the body as her business and so claims a special acquaintance with the soul. On that account she has great quarrels with her sister, since she pretends to know more about the soul by handling her more directly, at home, as it were, in the body. But never mind all this contention over which of them comes first. In extending their researches on the soul, philosophy has enjoyed the full run of her genius, and medicine has had the strict demands of her art and practice. Men’s inquiries into uncertainties are wide; their disputes about guesses are wider still. However great the difficulty of producing proofs, the labor of producing conviction is not one bit less. So gloomy Heraclitus was quite right, when he saw the thick darkness over the researches of the men inquiring into the soul and grew weary of their endless questions, to declare that he had certainly not explored the soul’s limits, though he had traveled every road in her country.

For the Christian, though, few words are needed to make the whole subject clear. And in those few words certainty always comes to him; nor is he permitted to let his inquiries range wider than they can be settled, for “endless questions” are what the apostle forbids. This must be added, however: no solution may be found by any man except the one learned from God, and what is learned from God is the sum and substance of the whole thing.

I only wish there had never been any need for heresies, “so that those who are approved may be shown for what they are.” Then we would never have to test our strength against philosophers in these contests about the soul — the philosophers being, as one may fairly call them, the patriarchs of the heretics. The apostle, back in his own time, already foresaw that philosophy would do the truth violence. That warning about false philosophy came to him after he had been in Athens, had got to know that talkative city, and had had a taste of its market-stall know-it-alls and chatterers. It is the same when the soul is handled according to the clever doctrines of men who “mix their wine with water.” [s]

Some of them deny that the soul is immortal; others say it is immortal, and something more besides. Some raise disputes about its substance, others about its shape, others again about each of its several faculties. One school traces where it came from to this source or that; another assigns its departure to this destination or that. The schools take after their masters, according to whether they took their stamp from the dignity of Plato, the vigor of Zeno, the evenness of Aristotle, the dullness of Epicurus, the gloom of Heraclitus, or the frenzy of Empedocles. The trouble with the divine teaching, I suppose, is that it sprang out of Judea and not out of Greece. And Christ made a mistake too, sending out fishermen to preach instead of a professional sophist.

So whatever poisonous fumes have breathed out of philosophy and clouded the clear, healthy air of truth, it will be for Christians to clear away — both by smashing to pieces the arguments drawn from the first principles of things, the philosophers’ principles I mean, and by setting against them the maxims of heavenly wisdom, the ones the Lord has revealed. Then the pits with which philosophy traps the pagans will be filled in, and the means heresy uses to shake the faith of Christians will be shut down.

One point in our controversy with Hermogenes we have already decided, as I said at the beginning of this book, when we claimed that the soul was formed by the breathing of God and not out of matter. Even there we relied on the plain direction of the inspired statement that tells us how “the Lord God breathed on the man’s face the breath of life, and the man became a living soul” — by that breathing of God, of course. On this point, then, nothing further needs to be looked into or brought forward by us. It has its own book, and its own heretic. I will treat it as my introduction to the other branches of the subject.

With the soul’s origin settled, its condition, or state, comes up next. For once we acknowledge that the soul originates in the breath of God, it follows that we assign it a beginning. Plato refuses to do that: he will have the soul be unborn and unmade. We, however, precisely because it had a beginning, and because of what it is, teach that it had both birth and making. And in ascribing both birth and making to it we have made no mistake. Being born is one thing and being made is another — “born” being the word best suited to living things. But when distinctions have places and times of their own, they can sometimes be applied back and forth between themselves. So “being made” can be put in the sense of having come forth, since anything that receives being or existence in any way at all has in fact been generated. The maker can quite properly be called the parent of the thing that is made; Plato himself uses the words that way. So far as our believing that the soul was made, or born, is concerned, then, the philosopher’s opinion is overthrown by the authority of prophecy itself. [y]

Suppose a man calls in a Eubulus to help him, and a Critolaus, and a Xenocrates, and for this occasion Plato’s friend Aristotle. They may very possibly hold themselves ready to strip the soul of its bodiliness — unless they happen to see other philosophers ranged against them in that purpose, and in greater numbers, claiming a bodily nature for the soul. And I am not referring only to the men who mold the soul out of plain bodily substances: Hipparchus and Heraclitus out of fire, Hippon and Thales out of water, Empedocles and Critias out of blood, Epicurus out of atoms — since even atoms, by holding together, make bodily masses — Critolaus and his Peripatetics out of some fifth substance, I do not know what, if a thing that rather contains and embraces bodily substances can itself be called a body. I call on the Stoics as well to help me. They declare, almost in our own terms, that the soul is a spiritual essence, since breath and spirit are very near akin by nature; and they will have no difficulty persuading us that the soul is a bodily substance. [aa]

Zeno, for instance, defines the soul as a spirit sown into us along with the body, and builds his argument this way. Any substance whose departure causes a living being to die is a bodily one. Now a living being dies by the departure of the spirit that was sown into it along with the body. Therefore that spirit is a bodily substance. But that spirit is the soul. So the soul is a bodily substance.

Cleanthes, too, will have it that family likeness passes from parents to their children not only in bodily features but in traits of the soul — as though it were out of a mirror of a man’s manners, abilities and feelings that likeness and unlikeness of body were caught and reflected by the soul as well. It is therefore as something bodily that the soul is capable of likeness and unlikeness. Again, what has a body and what has none have nothing in common in the way they can be acted on. But the soul certainly feels with the body, and shares its pain whenever the body is hurt by blows and wounds and sores; and the body suffers along with the soul, and is bound up with it — when it is troubled by anxiety, distress or love — losing the strength its companion has lost, and testifying to the soul’s shame and fear by its own blushing and pallor. The soul, then, is shown to be bodily by this sharing of what can be felt.

Chrysippus also joins hands in fellowship with Cleanthes when he lays it down that it is not at all possible for things that have body to be separated from things that have none, because between them there is no such relation as touch or cohesion. Which is why Lucretius says:

But that separation does take place between the soul and the body: when the body is deserted by the soul, death overcomes it. The soul, therefore, has a body — for if it were not bodily, it could not desert the body.