One Nature, Many Differences

So here is the conclusion we come to. All the soul’s natural properties belong to it as parts of its own substance, and they grow and develop along with it from the very moment it comes into being at birth. Seneca, whom we so often find on our side, puts it this way: [a]

“The seeds of all the arts and of every stage of life are planted in us, and God our teacher secretly brings out our characters.”

He means the germs that are planted and hidden in us through infancy — and these are the mind. Out of them our natural dispositions unfold. Even the seeds of plants have one form for each kind, yet they do not all develop alike. Some open out healthy and complete; others improve or degenerate according to the weather and the soil, the labor and care spent on them, the turn of the seasons, and whatever happens to come along. In the same way, the soul may well be uniform in its seed and still come out many-shaped through the process of birth.

Local influences have to be counted in as well. It is said that dull, brutish people are born at Thebes, and the finest minds and speakers at Athens — where, in the district of Colythus, children talk before they are a month old, so quick are their tongues. Plato himself says in the Timaeus that when Minerva set about founding her great city she looked for nothing but a countryside that gave promise of that kind of mind; and in the Laws he has Megillus and Clinias take care over choosing a site for the city they mean to build. Empedocles, for his part, puts the cause of a sharp or a slow intellect in the quality of the blood, and traces progress and mastery in learning and science back to that.

The subject of national peculiarities has long since become a byword. The comic poets deride the Phrygians for cowardice; Sallust charges the Moors with fickleness and the Dalmatians with cruelty; even the apostle labels the Cretans “liars.” No doubt something must also be put down to bodily condition and the state of a person’s health. A heavy body gets in the way of understanding, while a lean one stirs it up; a stroke lays the mind flat, while a wasting illness keeps it clear. And how much more must we take account of the accidents that, over and above one’s body and one’s health, either sharpen the intellect or blunt it. It is sharpened by learning, by the sciences and the arts, by experience, business, and study; it is blunted by ignorance, laziness, inactivity, lust, inexperience, apathy, and corrupting pursuits.

Then, besides all these, we should perhaps add the powers above. As we Christians reckon them, those powers are the Lord God and his adversary the devil. In people’s ordinary way of speaking they are fate and necessity where providence is in question, and, where fortune is in question, a person’s freedom of will. Even the philosophers allow these distinctions; and for our own part we have already undertaken to treat them, on the principles of the faith, in a separate book.

You can see how great the influences must be that work so variously on the soul’s one nature, since people commonly speak of them as separate “natures.” Still, they are not different kinds. They are accidents that happen to one nature and one substance — the substance God gave Adam and made the mold of every soul after him. Accidents they will always remain, and they will never turn into differences of kind. However great the variety in people’s characters now, it was not so in Adam, the founder of the race. All these discords ought to have been in him at the head of the stream, and to have come down to us with the variety unbroken, if the variety were really a matter of nature.

Now if the soul had this one simple nature from the beginning in Adam, before all those various dispositions were developed out of it, then it is not made many-natured either by that development or by the threefold form assigned to it in “the Valentinian trinity” — to keep our condemnation of that heresy in view — for not even that nature can be found in Adam. What did he have that was spiritual? Was it that he prophetically declared “the great mystery of Christ and the church”? [g]

“This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman. That is why a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will be one flesh.”

But that gift of prophecy came on him only afterwards, when God poured into him the ecstasy — the spiritual condition in which prophecy happens. And if the evil of sin was developed in him, that must not be reckoned a natural disposition either. It was produced by the prompting of the old serpent, and it was no more inherent in his nature than Matter was material in him — for we have already ruled belief in Matter out. So if neither the spiritual element nor what the heretics call the material element was properly in him (since, had he been made out of matter, the germ of evil would have been built into his very constitution), what is left is that the one original element of his nature was the one called animal — the principle of life, the soul — which we maintain to be simple and uniform in its condition.

About that soul it remains for us to ask whether, being called natural, it ought to be thought subject to change. The heretics we have been speaking of deny that a nature can undergo any change at all, so that they can set up and settle their threefold theory, their “trinity,” with all its several natures intact — since “a good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor a rotten tree good fruit; and nobody gathers figs from thorns or grapes from brambles.”

But if that is so, then God will no longer be able to raise up children for Abraham out of the stones, or make a brood of vipers bring forth the fruits of repentance. And if that is so, the apostle was in error too when he wrote in his letter, “You were once darkness”; and, “We too were by nature children of wrath”; and, “Such were some of you, but you have been washed.” The statements of holy Scripture, however, will never be out of tune with the truth. A rotten tree will never yield good fruit unless a better nature is grafted into it; and a good tree will not produce bad fruit except by the same process of cultivation. Stones too will become children of Abraham if they are trained in Abraham’s faith, and a brood of vipers will bring forth the fruits of repentance if they throw off the poison of their malignant nature.

This is what the grace of God can do — stronger than nature, exercising its sway over the faculty that lies underneath it within us, the freedom of our will, which is described as autexousios, having authority of its own. And since that faculty is itself natural and changeable, whichever way it turns, it inclines that way by its own nature. That this independent authority does exist in us naturally, we have already shown against Marcion and against Hermogenes.

If, then, the natural condition has to be submitted to a definition, it must come out twofold: there is the born and the unborn, the made and the unmade. Whatever has received its constitution by being made or by being born is by nature capable of change, for it can be born again and remade; whereas whatever is unmade and unborn will stay unmoved forever. But since that state suits God alone, the only being who is unborn and unmade — and therefore deathless and unchangeable — it is absolutely certain that the nature of every other thing that is born and created is open to alteration and change. So if the threefold state is to be ascribed to the soul, it has to be supposed to arise from the changeableness of the soul’s accidents, and not from any appointment of nature.

Hermogenes has already heard from us what the soul’s other natural faculties are, along with the defense and the proof of them; and from that it can be seen that the soul is the offspring of God rather than of matter. Here I will simply repeat their names, so that they do not seem forgotten and out of sight. We have assigned to the soul, then, both the freedom of will we just mentioned, and its mastery over the works of nature, and its occasional gift of foresight — quite apart from that endowment of prophecy which comes to it expressly from the grace of God. [n]

So we will leave the subject of the soul’s disposition here, in order to set out its several qualities in full. The soul, then, we define as born from the breath of God; deathless; having a body; having a shape; simple in its substance; knowing of itself; unfolding its power in various ways; free in its choices; open to accidents; changeable in its faculties; rational; ruling; able to foresee; and flowing out of one. It remains for us now to consider how it is unfolded out of that one source — in other words, where it comes from, and when, and how.

Some suppose that souls came down from heaven, and they believe it about as firmly as they believe anything, since they enjoy dwelling on the prospect of a guaranteed return there. Saturninus, the pupil of Menander, who belonged to Simon’s sect, introduced this opinion. He claimed that man was made by angels: a futile, half-finished creature at first, weak and unable to stand, who crawled along the ground like a worm because he had not the strength to hold himself upright. Afterwards, out of the pity of the Supreme Power — in whose image, imperfectly understood, he had been clumsily shaped — he got a slender spark of life. That roused his unfinished form and set it upright, gave it a higher vitality, and arranged for its return, once it let go of life, to the source it came from. [q]

Carpocrates claims for himself so extreme an amount of the qualities from above that his disciples put their own souls on a level with Christ at once — never mind the apostles — and sometimes, when the fancy takes them, even above him, on the grounds, if you please, that they have shared in that lofty power which looks down on the principalities that govern this world. Apelles tells us that our souls were enticed down by earthly bait from their dwellings above the heavens by a fiery angel, the God of Israel and ours, who then shut them up tight inside our sinful flesh. The swarm of Valentinus fortifies the soul with the seed of Sophia, or Wisdom; and by means of that seed they recognize, in the images of visible things, the tales and Milesian stories of their own Aeons.

I am sorry from my heart that Plato has been the caterer to all these heretics. For in the Phaedo he imagines that souls wander from this world to that one and back here again; while in the Timaeus he supposes that the children of God, who had been assigned the production of mortal creatures, took the seed of immortality for the soul and froze a mortal body around it — which is to say that this world is the figure of some other. Then, to get all this believed — that the soul had once lived with God in the heavens above, sharing his ideas with him, and afterwards came down to live with us on earth, and while here recollects the eternal patterns of things it had learned before — he worked up his new formula, mathēseis anamnēseis, which means that learning is recollection. Souls that come to us from there forget the things they used to live among, he says, but afterwards recall them, taught by the objects they see around them. Since, then, the doctrines the heretics borrow from Plato are cunningly defended by this kind of argument, I shall refute the heretics well enough if I overthrow Plato’s argument.