The Soul’s Ruling Power

Being single, simple and whole in itself, as we have said, the soul can no more be put together out of parts brought in from outside than it can be divided within itself, since it cannot be broken up at all. For if it had been possible to build it and to take it apart, it would no longer be immortal. But since it does not die, it also cannot be dissolved or divided. To be divided means to be dissolved, and to be dissolved means to die. Yet the philosophers have cut the soul into parts. Plato, for instance, into two; Zeno into three; Panaetius into five or six; Soranus into seven; Chrysippus into as many as eight; Apollophanes into as many as nine; while certain of the Stoics have found as many as twelve parts in the soul. Posidonius makes even two more than these. He begins with two governing faculties of the soul — the directing one, which they call the hēgemonikon, and the reasoning one, which they call the logikon — and in the end breaks these down into seventeen parts. That is how variously the different schools dissect the soul. [a]

Divisions like these, however, ought not to be regarded as parts of the soul so much as its powers, or capacities, or operations — which is how Aristotle himself regarded some of them. They are not portions of the soul’s substance, or organs of it, but things the soul does: moving, acting, thinking, and whatever else they list in this way; and so too the five senses everyone knows — seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling. Now, they have assigned to each of these its own particular quarters in the body to live in. It does not follow from that, though, that the soul can be parceled out the same way. The body itself would not stand the sort of partition they want the soul to undergo. Out of the whole set of limbs one body is made up, so that the arrangement is a growing-together rather than a division.

Look at that remarkable piece of engineering by Archimedes — I mean his water organ, with its many limbs and parts and straps, its channels for the notes and its outlets for their sounds, its couplings for the harmony and its ranks of pipes. All those details together make up one instrument and nothing more. In the same way, the air that breathes through this organ at the push of the water engine is not broken into separate portions simply because it is spread through the instrument to make it play. It is whole and entire in its substance, though divided in what it does. This illustration is not far from the one used by Strato, and Aenesidemus, and Heraclitus, for these philosophers hold that the soul is one thing spread through the whole body and the same in every part of it. Exactly like the air blown through the pipes throughout the organ, the soul shows its energies in various ways by means of the senses — not divided, but rather distributed in an order that belongs to its nature. As for what names these energies should be known by, what divisions of themselves they should be sorted into, and which particular offices and functions in the body each of them is confined to — the physicians and the philosophers must consider that and settle it. For our part, a few remarks will be enough.

In the first place, we must determine whether there is in the soul some supreme power of life and wisdom, the thing they call “the ruling part of the soul,” the hēgemonikon. If that is not granted, the whole standing of the soul is put at risk. Indeed, the men who say there is no such directing faculty began by supposing that the soul itself is simply nothing at all. A certain Dicaearchus of Messene, and among the medical profession Andreas and Asclepiades, have destroyed the soul’s directing power in just this way: they put the senses in the mind itself, and claim the ruling faculty for them. Asclepiades rides roughshod over us with this argument in particular — that a great many animals go on living for a good while, and feeling too, after losing the very parts of the body in which the soul’s power of life and sensation is thought chiefly to reside: flies, wasps and locusts, when you have cut off their heads; she-goats, tortoises and eels, when you have pulled out their hearts. From this he concludes that there is no special principle or power of the soul at all; for if there were, the soul’s vigor and strength could not carry on once it had been taken away along with the organs it lived in. Dicaearchus, however, has a number of authorities against him, and philosophers too — Plato, Strato, Epicurus, Democritus, Empedocles, Socrates, Aristotle. And against Andreas and Asclepiades may be set their fellow physicians Herophilus, Erasistratus, Diocles, Hippocrates and Soranus himself. Better than all of them, we have our own Christian authorities. [g]

We are taught by God on both these questions: that there is a ruling power in the soul, and that it is set apart as sacred in one particular chamber of the body. For when one reads of God as “the searcher and witness of the heart”; when his prophet is put in the wrong by God’s uncovering to him the secrets of the heart; when God himself gets ahead of the thoughts of his people’s hearts — “Why do you think evil in your hearts?”; when David prays, “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” and Paul declares, “With the heart a person believes so as to be counted righteous,” and John says, “By his own heart each person is condemned”; and when, last of all, “the man who looks at a woman so as to want her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” — then both points are fully cleared up. There is a directing faculty of the soul, which the purpose of God can meet: a supreme power of understanding and life, that is, for where there is understanding there must be life. And it lives in that treasured part of our body to which God especially looks. So you must not suppose, with Heraclitus, that this sovereign faculty we are discussing is set moving by some force outside it; nor, with Moschion, that it floats about through the whole body; nor, with Plato, that it is shut up in the head; nor, with Zenophanes, that it comes to its peak at the crown of the head; nor that it rests in the brain, as Hippocrates thought; nor around the base of the brain, as Herophilus held; nor in the brain’s membranes, as Strato and Erasistratus said; nor in the space between the eyebrows, as Strato the physician maintained; nor behind the breastplate of the chest, as Epicurus would have it. Rather it is where the Egyptians have always taught it to be — especially those of them who were reckoned the interpreters of sacred things — and where that line of Orpheus or Empedocles puts it too:

Protagoras likewise, and Apollodorus, and Chrysippus hold this same view. So our friend Asclepiades may go looking for his goats bleating without a heart, and chase his flies about without their heads; and all those worthies too, who have settled in advance what the human soul is like from the condition of brute animals, may be quite sure that it is they themselves who are living in a heartless and brainless state.

That position of Plato’s is also quite in keeping with the faith, the one in which he divides the soul into two parts, the rational and the irrational. We take no exception to that description, except that we would not put the twofold distinction down to the soul’s nature. It is the rational element that we must believe to be its natural condition, stamped on it from the very moment it was created, by its Maker, who is himself rational through and through. For how should a thing be anything but rational, when God produced it on his own prompting — more than that, when he expressly sent it out by his own breath? The irrational element, however, we must understand to have come in later, since it proceeded from the serpent’s prompting — the very act by which the first transgression was carried through — and from then on was lodged in the soul and grew as the soul grew, taking on by this time the look of a natural development, since it happened right at the beginning of nature. But since the same Plato speaks of the rational element only as existing in the soul of God himself, then if we were to trace the irrational element as well to the nature our soul has received from God, the irrational would be equally derived from God, as being a natural product — because God is the author of nature. Now the push toward sin comes from the devil. All sin, however, is irrational. Therefore the irrational proceeds from the devil, from whom sin proceeds; and it is foreign to God, to whom the irrational is an alien thing. The difference between these two elements, then, comes from the difference between their authors. [o]

When, therefore, Plato reserves the rational element of the soul to God alone, and subdivides it into two departments — the angry part, which they call the thymikon, and the craving part, which they name the epithymētikon, in such a way as to make the first shared by us with lions and the second shared by us with flies, while the rational is confined to us and God — I see that this point will have to be taken up by us, owing to the things we find at work in Christ as well. For you may see this set of three in the Lord. There was the rational element, by which he taught, by which he argued, by which he prepared the way of salvation. There was indignation in him too, by which he denounced the scribes and the Pharisees. And there was the element of desire, by which he so earnestly wanted to eat the Passover with his disciples. In our own case, accordingly, the angry and the craving elements of our soul are not always to be charged to the irrational side, since we are sure that in our Lord these elements worked in full agreement with reason. God will be angry, with perfect reason, at everyone who deserves his anger; and with reason, too, God will want whatever objects and claims are worthy of himself. For he will show indignation against the evil man, and for the good man he will want salvation.

The apostle even allows us the craving quality. “If anyone wants the work of an overseer,” he says, “he wants a good work.” By saying “a good work” he shows us that the desire is a reasonable one. He permits us to feel indignation as well. How should he not, when he feels the same thing himself? “I wish,” he says, “that the people who are unsettling you would cut themselves right off.” That indignation was in perfect agreement with reason, since it came out of his wish to keep discipline and good order. When, however, he says, “We were once children of wrath,” he is censuring an irrational temper — one that comes not from the nature that is God’s production, but from the nature the devil brought in. The devil is himself styled the lord, or “master,” of his own kind — “You cannot serve two masters” — and actually bears the title “father”: “You are from your father the devil.” So you need not be afraid to ascribe to him the mastery and rule over that second, later, spoiled nature we have been speaking of, when you read of him as “the sower of the weeds,” the night thief who ruins the grain crop.