The Mind Is Never Absent

I come now to the field of our intellectual powers — the field Plato handed over to the heretics as something marked off from the functions of the body. He came by his knowledge of it, of course, before he died. [a]

He asks in the Phaedo: “And what about actually getting knowledge? Is the body a hindrance or not, if a man takes it along as a partner in the search? I mean something like this. Do sight and hearing hold any truth for people, or is it as the poets are forever droning at us, that we never hear or see anything exactly?” No doubt he had in mind what Epicharmus the comic poet had said: “It is the mind that sees and the mind that hears; everything else is deaf and blind.” He makes the same point again elsewhere. The wisest man, he says, is the one whose thinking is clearest: the man who never calls in his sight and adds no such help to his mind, but uses the intellect by itself in unmixed calm when he settles down to contemplate, so as to get a pure look at the nature of things. Such a man divorces himself with all his might from his eyes and his ears and — as one has to put it — from his whole body, on the ground that the body disturbs the soul and will not let it hold either truth or wisdom whenever it is brought into contact with it.

So we see that over against the bodily senses another faculty is supplied, one of far greater use: the powers of the soul, which produce an understanding of that truth whose realities cannot be handled and are not open to the bodily senses, but lie a long way off from what people know day by day — hidden, in the heights above, in the presence of God himself. For Plato holds that there are certain invisible substances, bodiless, set above this world, divine and everlasting, which they call ideas — archetypal forms, that is, the patterns and causes of the natural objects that show themselves to us and fall under our bodily senses. The first, on his account, are the actual truths; the second are the images and likenesses of them.

Now, are there not gleams here of the teachings of the Gnostics and the Valentinians? It is from this philosophy that they eagerly take over the difference between the bodily senses and the intellectual powers — a distinction they actually apply to the parable of the ten virgins. The five foolish virgins stand for the five bodily senses, since these are so silly and so easily taken in; and the wise virgin stands for the intellectual powers, which are wise enough to reach that hidden truth from above that is placed in the pleroma. Here, then, is where these heretics got their ideas. In this philosophy lie both their Aeons and their genealogies. In the same way they divide sensation, tracing the intellectual powers back to their spiritual seed and the sense faculties back to the animal seed, which cannot possibly take in spiritual things. From the first germ come invisible things; from the second, visible things — grovelling, temporary, obvious to the senses, since they are set in shapes that can be handled.

It is because of these views that I stated as a preliminary, earlier on, that the mind is nothing but an apparatus or instrument of the soul, and that the spirit is not some separate faculty alongside the soul, but is the soul itself at work in breathing — though whatever God on the one hand, or the devil on the other, has breathed upon it must be reckoned as something added. Now as to the difference between intellectual powers and sense faculties, we allow it only so far as the natural difference between them requires. There is of course a difference between bodily things and spiritual things, between visible beings and invisible ones, between what is out in the open and what is hidden from view, because the one class is put down to sensation and the other to the intellect. But both alike must be reckoned as belonging to the soul and under its orders, since the soul takes hold of bodily objects by means of the body in exactly the way it conceives bodiless objects by help of the mind — except that even when it is employing the intellect it is still exercising sensation. For is it not true that to use the senses is to use the intellect, and that to use the intellect comes to the same thing as using the senses? What can sensation be but the understanding of the thing sensed? And what can the intellect or understanding be but the seeing of the thing understood? Why put simple knowledge to the torture like this, and crucify the truth? Show me the sense that does not understand what it senses, or the intellect that does not perceive what it understands — show it to me clearly enough to prove that either can get on without the other.

If bodily things are the objects of sense and bodiless things the objects of the intellect, then it is the classes of objects that differ, not the house that sense and intellect live in — not, that is, the soul and the mind. By what, in the end, are bodily things perceived? If by the mind, then the mind is a sense faculty and not merely an intellectual power, for while it understands it also perceives, since without perception there is no understanding. If, on the other hand, bodily things are perceived by the soul, then the soul’s power is an intellectual one and not merely a sense faculty, for while it perceives it also understands, since without understanding there is no perceiving. And again, by what are bodiless things understood? If by the mind, where will the soul be? If by the soul, where will the mind be? For things that differ ought to be away from one another when each is busy at its own work and duty.

You must in fact hold that the mind is absent from the soul on certain occasions. You suppose that we are so made and put together as not to know that we have seen or heard something, on the theory that the mind was away at the time. Then I must insist that it was the soul itself that neither saw nor heard, since at that moment it was away along with its active power — that is, with the mind. The truth is that whenever a man is out of his mind, it is his soul that is deranged: not because the mind is absent, but because at that moment it is suffering along with the soul. Indeed it is the soul that is chiefly affected by accidents of that kind. How is that confirmed? By this. After the soul has gone, the mind is no longer found in a man. It always follows the soul; it does not stay behind by itself at the last, after death. And since it follows the soul, it is also bound to it inseparably — just as understanding is bound to the soul, which the mind follows, and to which understanding is inseparably tied.

Grant now that understanding is above the senses and is a better discoverer of hidden things. What does it matter, so long as it is only one particular faculty of the soul, just as the senses themselves are? It makes no difference to my argument — unless understanding is being held superior to the senses in order to argue from that superiority that it also exists in a separate state. Having fought their alleged difference, then, I have to refute this question of superiority as well, before I come to the belief heresy puts forward in a superior god. On that point of a superior god we shall have to cross swords with the heretics on their own ground. Our subject here is the soul, and the point is to stop them slipping in a claim that the intellect or understanding ranks higher.

The objects touched by the intellect are indeed of a higher nature, since they are spiritual, than those the senses take hold of, since these are bodily. But even so it will only be a superiority in the objects — lofty ones set against humble ones — and not a superiority of the intellect’s faculties over the senses. For how can the intellect be above the senses, when it is the senses that school it for the discovery of one truth after another? These truths are learned by means of shapes that can be handled: invisible things are found out by help of visible ones, as the apostle tells us in his letter, “For the invisible things of him are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made” — and as Plato too could tell our heretics, “The things that appear are the face of the things hidden from view.” From which it must follow that this world is in every way an image of some other. So the intellect plainly uses the senses for its own guidance, its authority, its mainstay, and without the senses the truth could not be reached. How, then, can a thing be superior to what makes its existence possible — what it cannot do without, and to whose help it owes everything it gets? Two conclusions follow from what we have said. First, the intellect is not to be preferred above the senses, since that would make the agent through which a thing exists inferior to the thing itself. Second, the intellect must not be separated from the senses, since the instrument by which a thing’s existence is sustained goes together with the thing itself.

Nor must we pass over those writers who take the intellect away from the soul even for a short stretch of time. They do it so as to bring in the intellect — and the mind with it — at a later stage of life, at the point when intelligence shows itself in a person. They hold that infancy is supported by the soul alone, simply to keep it alive, with no aim of acquiring knowledge as well, since not everything that has life has knowledge. Trees, to take Aristotle’s example, have life but not knowledge. And everyone agrees with him who gives every living thing a share in the animal substance — the substance that on our view belongs to man alone as his own property, not because it is God’s work, which all other creatures are as well, but because it is God’s breath, which this human soul alone is. And we say that it is born with the full equipment of the faculties that belong to it. [o]

Well then, let them meet us with the example of the trees. We take up the challenge, and find nothing in it that damages our own case. It is beyond doubt that while trees are still only twigs and shoots, before they even reach the sapling stage, they have their own proper faculty of life in them from the moment they spring out of the ground where they were sown. Then, as time goes on, the tree’s vigor slowly advances; it grows and hardens into its woody trunk, until its full age completes the condition nature intends for it. Otherwise, what resources would trees have when the time came for the grafting in of shoots, the forming of leaves, the swelling of buds, the graceful shedding of blossom, the softening of the sap — if there were not in them the quiet growth of nature’s full provision, and the spreading of that life through all their branches to bring them to maturity? Trees, therefore, do have ability, or knowledge; and they get it from the same source they get life from, the one source of life and knowledge that belongs to their own nature, and they get it from the infancy that they too begin with.

I notice that even a vine, tender and unripe as it still is, understands its own natural business and struggles to catch hold of some support, so that by leaning on it and lacing through it, it may grow. Indeed, without waiting for the vine-dresser’s training, without a trellis, without a prop, it will fall in love with whatever its tendrils catch, and grip it with far more real tenacity and force by its own inclination than by your intention. It longs to be safe, and hurries to be safe. Take ivy plants too, however young. I notice that from the very first they try to get hold of things above them, and, outrunning everything else, to hang on to the highest thing there is — preferring to spread over walls with the leafy weave of their web and woof rather than creep along the ground and be trodden by every foot that cares to crush them. On the other hand, take the trees that are damaged by touching a building. See how they hang off as they grow and keep clear of what hurts them. You can see that their branches were meant by nature to go the other way, and you can understand well enough what the life in such a tree amounts to from the way it avoids the wall. A little shrub is content with its own insignificant lot, which its foresight has known thoroughly since its infancy — only it is still afraid even of a ruined building.

Why, then, should I not stand up for these wise and shrewd natures of the trees? Let them have life, as the philosophers permit; but let them have knowledge too, though the philosophers deny it. If even the infancy of a log may have an intellect suited to it, how much more the infancy of a human being, whose soul — which may be compared to the young shoot of a tree — has been drawn from Adam as its root, and propagated among his descendants by means of the woman, to whom it was entrusted for handing on, and so has sprouted into life with its whole natural equipment, both of intellect and of sense.

I am much mistaken if a human being, even from his infancy, when he greeted life with his infant cries, does not testify that he actually possesses both sensation and intellect by the very fact of his birth, laying claim all at once to the use of every one of his senses: sight by the light, hearing by sounds, taste by liquids, smell by the air, touch by the ground. This earliest voice of infancy, then, is the first effort of the senses and the opening impulse of the mind’s perceptions. There is the further fact that some people take that plaintive cry of the infant for an omen of trouble ahead, in view of the tearful life before him; and on that reading the soul is to be credited from the very moment of birth with foresight, and much more with intelligence. It is by this instinct that the baby knows his mother, makes out the nurse, and even recognizes the maid, refusing another woman’s breast and a cradle that is not his own, and wanting only the arms he is used to. Where does he get this telling apart of the new and the familiar, if not from a knowledge born in him? How does it happen that he is put out and then quieted, if not by help of his first intellect? It would be very strange indeed if infancy were naturally so lively without having mental power, and naturally so open to impression and affection without having intellect.

But we hold the opposite. For Christ, by “accepting praise out of the mouth of babies and nursing infants,” has declared that neither childhood nor infancy is without feeling. The one, when it met him with shouts of approval, proved that it could bear witness to him; the other, by being slaughtered — for his sake, of course — knew what violence was.