Soul, Breath, and Mind

It belongs to a steady faith to declare, with Plato, that the soul is simple — of one kind, that is, and not put together out of parts; simple, I mean, in respect of its substance. Never mind the artificial views men construct, and away with the inventions of the heretics. Some hold that inside the soul there is a natural substance of its own, the spirit, distinct from the soul itself: as though having life, which is the soul’s work, were one thing, and sending out breath, which is supposed to be the spirit’s work, were another. [a]

Now these two functions are not found in every animal. There are many that only live and do not breathe, in that they have no organs for breathing — no lungs and no windpipes. But what is the use, when we are examining the soul of a man, of borrowing our proofs from a gnat or an ant? The great Creator has assigned to every animal, by his own divine arrangement, the organs of life that suit its disposition and nature, and we ought not to snatch at guesses from comparisons of that kind. A man is fitted out with lungs and windpipes, but that will not prove that he breathes by one process and lives by another; and the ant, though it lacks those organs, cannot on that account be said to have no breathing at all, as though it merely lived and nothing more.

For who has ever gained so clear a view of the works of God that he is entitled to assume some living thing has no such equipment? There is Herophilus, the famous surgeon — or butcher, as I might almost call him — who cut up no end of people to investigate the secrets of nature, and who dealt savagely with human beings to find out how they are made. I have my doubts whether he ever explored all the inward parts of their structure clearly, since death itself alters and disturbs the natural workings of life, and especially a death that is not natural, but is bound to bring irregularity and error into the very process of the dissection.

Philosophers have laid it down as a settled fact that gnats and ants and moths have no lungs and no windpipes. Very well. Tell me, then, you inquisitive and painstaking investigator of these mysteries: have they eyes to see with? And yet they go wherever they mean to go, and by sight they shun one thing and make for another. Point out their eyes to me; show me their pupils. Moths gnaw and eat: demonstrate their mandibles to me, reveal their molars. Gnats hum and buzz, and not even in the dark do they fail to find their way to our ears: point out to me, then, not only the noisy pipe of that mouth of theirs, but the stinging lance in it as well. Take any living thing you like, the tiniest you can find: it has to be fed and kept going by food of some kind. Show me its organs for taking food in, digesting it, and passing it out.

What are we to conclude, then? If life is kept up by instruments of this sort, then such instruments must exist in everything that is to live, even where they escape the eye or the mind because they are so small. You will believe it the more readily if you remember that God displays the greatness of his workmanship in the smallest objects quite as much as in the largest. And if you suppose that God’s wisdom is not equal to shaping bodies so infinitely little, you can still recognize his greatness in this: that he has given even the smallest animals the functions of life without the organs that go with them, securing them sight without eyes, eating without teeth, digestion without stomachs. Some animals can move forward without feet — snakes by gliding, worms by looping themselves along, snails and slugs by their slimy crawl. Why then should you not believe that breathing too can be carried on without the bellows of the lungs and without air passages?

That is how you would build yourself a stronger case that breath is something attached to the human soul, on the very ground that some creatures have no breath — and have none because they are not furnished with organs for breathing. You think a thing can live without breath; then why not suppose a thing might breathe without lungs?

Tell me, please: what is it to blow out breath? To send breath out of yourself, I suppose. And what is it not to live? Not to send breath out of yourself, I suppose. That is the answer I would have to give, if blowing out breath were not the same thing as living. But surely it must be the mark of a dead man not to breathe; so breathing is the mark of a living man. And breathing is likewise the mark of a man who blows breath out; so blowing out breath is the mark of a living man too. Now if the one and the other could be carried on without the soul, then blowing out breath might not belong to the soul, and only living would. But in fact to live is to breathe, and to breathe is to live. So the whole business, breathing and living together, belongs to the same thing that living belongs to — that is, to the soul.

Well then: since you divide the spirit, or breath, from the soul, divide their operations too. Let each of them do something apart from the other, the soul on its own and the breath on its own. Let the soul live without the breath; let the breath breathe without the soul. Let one of them leave a man’s body and the other stay. Let death and life meet and keep company. If the soul and the breath really are two, they can be divided; and then, by the parting of the one that goes from the one that stays, life and death would be joined and would meet. But that meeting will never take place. Therefore they are not two, and they cannot be divided — though they might have been divided, if they had been two.

Still, two things can certainly grow together into one. But these two never will grow together, since living is one thing and breathing is another, and substances are told apart by what they do. How much firmer is your ground, then, for believing that the soul and the breath are one, seeing that you assign them no difference — so that the soul is itself the breath, since breathing is the work of the very thing whose work living is.

But what if you insist on holding that the day is one thing and the light that comes with the day is another, when the day is nothing but the light itself? There are of course different kinds of light, as one sees from the service of fires; and in the same way there will be different sorts of spirits, according as they come from God or from the devil. But whenever the question is about soul and spirit, the soul will be the spirit itself, just as the day is the light itself. For a thing is one and the same with that by which it exists.

The nature of the inquiry I am now making obliges me to call the soul spirit, or breath, because breathing is being credited to another substance. We claim that operation for the soul, which we acknowledge to be an indivisible and simple substance; and so we have to call it spirit in a defined sense — not from its condition but from its action, not in respect of its nature but of its operation, because it breathes, and not because it is spirit in the proper sense of the word. For to blow is to breathe. So we are driven to describe by the word that indicates breathing, that is, spirit, the soul which we hold to be breath by the propriety of its action. [i]

There is a further reason why we make a point of calling it breath, and that is Hermogenes, who derives the soul from matter instead of from the breathing of God. He goes flat against the witness of Scripture, and with that end in view he turns the breath into spirit, because he cannot believe that the creature breathed into by the Spirit of God fell into sin and then under condemnation; and so he would rather conclude that the soul came from matter than from the Spirit, or breath, of God. That is exactly why we, on our side, argue from the same passage that the soul is breath and not spirit in the scriptural and distinctive sense of that word. It is with reluctance that I use the word spirit at all in the lower sense, and I do it only because breathing and blowing are one and the same act. In that passage the only question is about the natural substance, and breathing is an act of nature.

I would not linger a moment longer on the point, were it not for those heretics who bring into the soul some spiritual seed that passes my understanding — bestowed on it, they say, by the secret generosity of its mother Sophia, Wisdom, without the Creator’s knowledge. But Scripture, which knows the soul’s Maker better — knows God, rather — has told us no more than this: that God breathed on the man’s face the breath of life, and the man became a living soul, by which he was both to live and to breathe. At the same time it makes a clear enough distinction between the spirit and the soul, in passages like the one where God himself declares:

“My Spirit went out from me, and I made the breath of each one; and the breath of my Spirit became soul.”

And again: “He gives breath to the people who are on the earth, and Spirit to those who walk on it.” First comes the soul — the breath, that is — to the people who are on the earth: to those, in other words, who act in the flesh in a fleshly way. Afterwards comes the Spirit to those who walk on it: to those, that is, who tread down the works of the flesh. The apostle says the same, that what is spiritual is not first; what belongs to the natural soul is first, and after that what is spiritual.

For when Adam straightway foretold that great mystery of Christ and the church, saying,

“This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; therefore a man will leave his father and his mother and will cling to his wife, and the two will become one flesh,”

he was under the influence of the Spirit. For there fell upon him that ecstasy which is the Holy Spirit’s own working power of prophecy. And the evil spirit too is an influence that comes over a man. The Spirit of God turned Saul into another man — into a prophet, that is — when people said to one another,

“What is this that has come to the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?”

and the evil spirit afterwards turned him into another man just as truly: into an apostate. Judas likewise was long counted among the chosen apostles, and was even given the post of their treasurer. He was not yet the traitor, though he had already turned dishonest; it was afterwards that the devil entered into him. So, since neither the Spirit of God nor the spirit of the devil is planted in a man’s soul by nature at his birth, it is clear that the soul exists by itself and alone before either spirit comes to it. And if it is by itself and alone, it must also be simple and uncompounded in its substance; and therefore it can have no other reason for breathing than the actual condition of that substance.

In the same way the mind — animus, what the Greeks call nous — we take in no other sense than as the equipment set up in the soul, native to it and its own by nature, by which the soul acts and by which it comes to know, and by having which it is able to move of itself from within, and so to look as though it were being driven by the mind as by another substance. That is what is maintained by those who make the soul the thing that moves the universe — the god of Socrates, and the Monogenes of Valentinus, the only Son of his father Bythus and his mother Sige. [p]

How confused Anaxagoras’ opinion is! He imagined the mind to be the starting principle of all things, and hung the balance of the universe on its pivot; he declared, moreover, that the mind is a simple principle, unmixed and incapable of being mixed, and it is chiefly on that ground that he keeps it from being blended with the soul at all — and then in another passage he actually makes it over to the soul. Aristotle noticed this too; though whether he meant his criticism to build something up and fill out a system of his own, rather than to pull down other men’s principles, I am hardly able to decide. As for Aristotle himself, he puts off his definition of the mind, but he begins by mentioning, as the second of the mind’s two natural kinds, that divine element which he guesses to be incapable of being acted on, or of feeling anything, and which he thereby removes from all partnership with the soul.

Now it is plain that the soul is open to the feelings that it naturally falls to it to undergo, and so it must undergo them either by the mind or with the mind. If the soul is naturally in partnership with the mind, there is no drawing the conclusion that the mind cannot be acted on. Or again, if the soul undergoes nothing either by the mind or with the mind, it cannot possibly have a natural partnership with a mind that shares none of its sufferings and undergoes nothing itself. Moreover, if the soul undergoes nothing by the mind and with the mind, it will have no sensation, it will acquire no knowledge, and it will undergo no feeling through the mind’s agency — which is what they say it will do.

For Aristotle makes even the senses passions, states of being acted on. And rightly. To use the senses is to be acted on, because to be acted on is to feel. In the same way, to acquire knowledge is to use the senses, and to undergo a feeling is to use the senses; and the whole of it is a being acted on. But we see that the soul undergoes none of these things except in such a way that the mind is affected by the feeling as well — the mind by which, and with which, the whole thing is done. It follows, then, that the mind can be mixed, against Anaxagoras, and that it can be acted on and can feel, against the opinion of Aristotle.

Besides, if a separate condition between the soul and the mind is to be admitted, so that they are two things in substance, then feeling and sensation and every kind of taste and all action and motion will be the marks of the one, while the natural condition of the other will be calm and rest and stupor. There is no way around it: either the mind must be useless and empty, or the soul must. But if all these affections may certainly be ascribed to both, then the two will be one and the same, and Democritus will carry his point in doing away with all difference between them. The question will then arise how two can be one — by the running together of two substances, or by the arrangement of one? For our part, we say that the mind is grown together with the soul: not as a thing distinct from it in substance, but as the office and the agency belonging to that substance.

It remains to examine where the supremacy lies — which of the two, that is, is above the other, so that the one that plainly holds the supremacy will be the substance in its own bulk, while the one over which that substance holds authority will count as the substance’s natural functionary. And who will hesitate to give the soul this whole authority — the soul, from whose name common speech takes its word for the whole person? A rich man asks how many souls he keeps, not how many minds. A ship’s captain wants to save so many souls from a wreck, not so many minds. The laborer at his work and the soldier on the battlefield each says that he lays down his soul, not his mind. [v]

Which of the two do you hear more often on men’s lips, in their dangers and in their prayers — the mind or the soul? When people are dying, which are they said to be parting with, the mind or the soul? In short, philosophers themselves, and medical men, even when they mean to discuss the mind, write on the face of the work and at the head of the subject, every single time: De Anima — On the Soul.

And so that you may have God’s own voucher on the matter as well: it is the soul that he addresses; it is the soul that he urges and advises to turn its mind and understanding toward him. It is the soul that Christ came to save. It is the soul that he threatens to destroy in hell. It is the soul that he forbids us to make too much of. And it is his own soul that the good Shepherd lays down for his sheep. So it is to the soul that you ascribe the supremacy; and in the soul you have that union of substance in which you can see that the mind is the instrument, not the ruling power.