The Soul Has a Body

The Platonists unsettle these conclusions of ours more by cleverness than by truth. Every body, they say, must have either a nature that carries soul in it or a nature that does not. If it has the soulless kind, it receives its motion from outside itself; if it has the other, from within. Now the soul receives motion neither from outside nor from within: not from outside, since its nature is not the soulless kind; not from within, since it is rather the soul that gives the body its motion. So it is plainly not a bodily substance, since it receives motion in neither of the ways that belong to the nature and law of bodies. [a]

What surprises me first here is how badly that definition fits, since it appeals to things that have no kinship with the soul at all. The soul cannot be called either a body with soul in it or a body without, because it is the soul itself that makes a body one or the other — the first if it is present, the second if it is gone. And what produces a result cannot itself be that result, so as to earn the name of a thing with soul or a thing without. The soul takes its name from its own substance. If, then, what is the soul cannot be called a body with soul or a body without soul, how can it be measured against the nature and law of bodies with soul and bodies without?

Furthermore, since it belongs to a body to be moved from outside by something else, and since I have already shown that the soul does receive motion from something else when it is swayed — from outside, of course, and by something other than itself — by prophetic power or by madness, I must be right to count as a bodily substance a thing which, in the cases I have cited, is moved from outside by something else. And if receiving motion from something else belongs to a body, how much more does giving motion to something else! But the soul moves the body, and all the body’s efforts show on the outside. It is the soul that gives motion to the feet for walking, to the hands for touching, to the eyes for seeing, to the tongue for speech — a kind of inner image that moves the surface and gives it life. Where would such power come to the soul from, if it had no body? How could a thing with no substance drive solid objects?

But in what way do a man’s senses seem to them to divide into the bodily and the mental? They tell us that the qualities of bodily things — earth, for instance, and fire — are registered by the bodily senses of touch and sight, while the qualities of things that are not bodies — kindness, say, and spite — are found out by the mind. And from this they draw what looks to them the obvious conclusion: that the soul is not a body, since its properties are taken in not by bodily organs but by the mind. Well, I shall be much surprised if I do not cut away at once the very ground their argument stands on. For I can show them how things without body are commonly submitted to the bodily senses — sound, for instance, to the ear; color to the eye; smell to the nose. And just as in these cases, so the soul too makes its contact with the body. Not to mention that things without body are reported to us through the bodily organs for the very reason that they come into contact with those organs. Since, then, it is plain that even bodiless things are taken hold of and grasped by bodily ones, why should not the soul, which is a body, be equally grasped and understood by faculties that are not bodies? So their argument certainly fails.

Among their more striking arguments you will find this: that in their judgment every bodily substance is fed by bodily substances, whereas the soul, having no body, is fed on food that has no body — by the study of wisdom, for instance. But this ground gives way too, since Soranus, a thoroughly accomplished authority in medicine, answers that the soul is in fact fed by bodily food; that when it is failing and weak it is often revived by a meal. Indeed, when it is deprived of all food, does the soul not leave the body altogether? Soranus, then, after discussing the soul at the fullest length, filling four volumes with his treatment of it, and after weighing all the philosophers’ opinions, defends the soul’s bodily nature — although in the course of it he robs the soul of its immortality. For it is not given to everyone to believe the truth that Christians are allowed to hold. So, since Soranus has shown us from the facts that the soul is fed by bodily food, let the philosopher show us in the same way that it is sustained by food without a body.

But the fact is that nobody has ever been able to quench this man’s doubts and difficulties about the soul’s condition with the honeyed water of Plato’s clever talk, or to stuff them full with the crumbs of Aristotle’s finely chopped remedies. And what is to become of the souls of all those tough barbarians, who have had no feeding on a philosopher’s learning at all, and yet are strong in a practical wisdom nobody taught them — half-starved as far as philosophy goes, without your Athenian academies and porches, and without even the prison of Socrates, and who nevertheless contrive to live? For it is not the soul’s actual substance that the food of learned study benefits, but only its conduct and its discipline; such food adds nothing to its bulk, only to its grace. It is a happy circumstance, too, that the Stoics say even the arts have bodies, since at that rate the soul must be a body as well, being commonly supposed to feed on the arts.

But so enormous is the philosophic mind’s preoccupation that it is generally unable to see what is straight in front of it. Hence the story of Thales falling into the well. And very commonly, through not understanding even its own opinions, it suspects that its own health has failed. Hence the story of Chrysippus and the hellebore. Some such hallucination, I take it, must have come over him when he asserted that two bodies could not possibly be contained in one. He must have kept out of mind and out of sight the case of pregnant women, who day after day carry not one body but two and three at a time inside the embrace of a single womb.

One also finds, in the records of the civil law, the case of a Greek woman who gave birth to a set of five children — the mother of all of them at one delivery, the manifold parent of a single brood, the teeming produce of one womb, who, guarded by so many bodies (I nearly said, by a whole people), was herself no less than the sixth person! The whole creation bears witness that bodies naturally meant to come out of bodies are already there in the body they come from. And what comes out of some other thing must needs be second to it. Nothing, however, comes out of another thing except by being generated; and then there are two of them.

So far as the philosophers go, we have said enough. As for our own teachers, our appeal to them is more than we need — an overflow of authority: in the Gospel itself the clearest evidence for the soul’s bodily nature will be found. In the world below, a certain man’s soul is in torment, punished in flames, suffering agonies of thirst, and begging from the finger of a happier soul the relief of a drop of water for his tongue. Do you suppose that this ending of the blessed poor man and the wretched rich man is only a picture? Then why the name Lazarus in the story, if the thing does not belong among real events? But even if it is to be taken as a picture, it will still be evidence for truth and reality. For unless the soul had a body, the image of a soul could not possibly hold a finger of bodily substance; nor would the Scripture make up a statement about the limbs of a body if such limbs did not exist. [g]

But what is it that is carried off to the world below once the body has been separated from it? What is detained there? What is held in reserve until the day of judgment? What did Christ also go down to when he died? The souls of the patriarchs, I take it. But what is the point of all this, if the soul is nothing in its dwelling underground? And nothing it certainly is, if it is not a bodily substance. For whatever has no body cannot be kept or guarded in any way; it is exempt from punishment and from refreshment alike. That must be a body by which punishment and refreshment can be felt. I shall deal with this more fully in a fitter place. Therefore, whatever punishment or refreshment the soul tastes in the world below — in its prison or its lodging, in the fire or at Abraham’s side — it gives proof by that very fact of its own bodily nature. For a thing without body suffers nothing, since it has nothing in it that can suffer; and if it does have that capacity, it must be a bodily substance. For just so far as everything bodily is capable of suffering, so far is whatever is capable of suffering also bodily.

Besides, it would be a harsh and absurd proceeding to take something out of the class of bodily beings on the ground that it is not exactly like the rest of that class. And where individual creatures have various properties, does not this variety among works of the same class show the greatness of the Creator, who made them different and alike at once, friendly and yet rivals? Indeed, the philosophers themselves agree in saying that the universe is made of harmonious opposites, according to Empedocles’ friendship and enmity. In the same way, then, although bodily beings stand opposed to bodiless ones, they still differ among themselves in a way that enlarges their kind by their variety without changing their class: they remain all alike bodily, adding to God’s glory by existing in so many forms; so various, because of their differences; so unlike, in that some of them have one kind of perception and others another, some feed on one kind of food and others on another, some can be seen and others cannot, some are heavy and others light. [k]

They are in the habit of saying that the soul must be pronounced bodiless on this account: that the bodies of the dead grow heavier once it has left them, whereas they ought to grow lighter, being now deprived of a body’s weight — if the soul is a bodily substance. But what, says Soranus in answer to this, if men were to deny that the sea is a bodily substance because a ship out of the water becomes a heavy and motionless mass? How much truer and stronger, then, is the soul’s bodily nature, which carries the body about with the nimblest motion — the same body that afterward takes on so great a weight!

Again, even if the soul cannot be seen, that too is strictly in keeping with the condition of its own bodily nature, and suits the property of its own substance, and suits as well the nature of the very beings to whom its lot made it invisible. The owl’s eyes cannot bear the sun, while the eagle can face his glory so well that the noble quality of its young is settled by the unblinking strength of their gaze — and the eaglet that turns its eye away from the sun’s ray is thrown out of the nest as a degenerate creature. So it really is true that a thing invisible to one eye may be perfectly plain to another, without that implying any bodilessness in what is not seen by the weaker sight. The sun is certainly a bodily substance, since it is made of fire; and yet the object whose existence the eaglet admits at once, the owl denies — with no damage, all the same, to the eagle’s testimony. There is exactly the same difference in the matter of the soul’s bodily nature, which is invisible, perhaps, to the flesh, but perfectly visible to the spirit. So John, being “in the Spirit” of God, saw plainly the souls of the martyrs.

When we assert that the soul has a body of a quality and kind peculiar to itself, this special condition of it already settles for us all the other attributes that come with having a body: they belong to the soul, because we have shown it to be a body, but they too have a quality of their own, matched to the special nature of the body they belong to. Or else, if any attributes of a body are conspicuous here by their absence, that too follows from the peculiar condition of the soul’s bodily nature, which lacks a number of qualities that all other bodily beings have. And yet, for all that, we shall not be inconsistent at all if we declare that the more usual marks of a body — the ones that always come with being bodily — belong to the soul as well: shape, for instance, and boundary, and that threefold set of dimensions, I mean length and breadth and height, by which philosophers measure every body. [n]

What is left, then, but to give the soul a form? Plato refuses to do it, as though it put the soul’s immortality at risk. For according to him everything that has form is compound and made of parts, whereas the soul is immortal; and being immortal, it cannot be dissolved; and being indissoluble, it has no form — since if it did have form it would be of a composite and built-up make. He does, however, in some other way frame for the soul a likeness out of the shapes of the mind: beautiful for its just proportion and for the lessons of philosophy, but disfigured by certain opposite qualities.

For ourselves, we mark the soul with the outlines of a body, and not simply on the assurance that reasoning has given us of its bodily nature, but also from the firm conviction that God’s kindness impresses on us by revelation. For since we acknowledge spiritual charismata, that is, gifts, we too have been counted worthy to obtain the gift of prophecy, though we come after John.

We have among us now a sister whose lot it has been to be favored with gifts of revelation of various kinds, which she experiences in the Spirit by ecstatic vision during the sacred rites of the Lord’s day in church. She converses with angels, and sometimes even with the Lord; she both sees and hears things kept secret; she reads some men’s hearts, and to those in need she hands out remedies. Whether it is in the reading of the Scriptures, or in the chanting of psalms, or in the preaching of sermons, or in the offering of prayers, every one of these services gives her occasion and material for seeing visions.

It may well be that, while this sister of ours was rapt in the Spirit, we had been discussing the soul in some way past putting into words. After the people are dismissed at the end of the sacred services, it is her regular practice to report to us whatever she has seen in vision — for everything she reports is sifted with the most scrupulous care, so that its truth may be tested. “Among other things,” she says, “a soul was shown to me in bodily shape, and a spirit has been in the habit of appearing to me — not a void and empty illusion, but something that would offer itself to be taken hold of by the hand: soft, transparent, of the color of the upper air, and in form like a human being in every respect.” This was her vision, and God was her witness; and the apostle most certainly foretold that there were to be “spiritual gifts” in the church. Now, can you refuse to believe this, when unquestionable evidence on every point is put before you to convince you?

Since, then, the soul is a bodily substance, no doubt it has qualities such as the ones we have just mentioned, among them the property of color, which belongs to every bodily substance. And what color would you give the soul but the clear color of the upper air? Not that its substance actually is that upper air, or the air we breathe — though Aenesidemus and Anaximenes thought so, and I suppose Heraclitus too, as some report of him — nor transparent light, though Heraclides of Pontus held that it was. Thunderstones are not made of fire because they shine with a ruddy red, nor are beryls made of water because they have a pure watery whiteness. And how many other things there are besides these whose color would put them in one class, while nature keeps them far apart! Since, however, everything very fine-drawn and transparent bears a strong resemblance to the air, this would be the case with the soul, since in what it is handed down as it is wind and breath — which is why belief in its bodily quality is put at risk, its substance being so extremely thin and fine.

Likewise, as regards the shape of the human soul, from your own idea of it you can well imagine that it is nothing but the human form — indeed nothing but the shape of the very body that each soul gives life to and moves about. We may be brought to admit this at once from considering man’s original making. For only consider carefully: after God had breathed on the face of man the breath of life, and man had accordingly become a living soul, surely that breath must have passed through the face at once into the inner structure, and have spread itself through all the spaces of the body. And as soon as it had been condensed by the divine inbreathing, it must have taken the stamp of every internal feature that the condensing had filled in, and so have been set, as it were, in that shape. So by this thickening process the soul’s bodily nature was fixed, and by the impression its form was shaped and molded. This is the inner man, different from the outer, and yet the two of them one.

It has eyes and ears of its own, by means of which Paul must have heard and seen the Lord; and it has all the other parts of the body as well, by whose help it carries out all its thinking and all its activity in dreams. That is how it comes about that the rich man in the world below has a tongue, and poor Lazarus a finger, and Abraham a side to lean against. By these features, too, the souls of the martyrs under the altar are told apart and recognized. And the soul which in the beginning was joined to Adam’s body, and grew as it grew, and was molded after its form, proved to be the seed both of the whole substance of the human soul and of that whole order of created things.