Where Souls Begin

There is no end to the uncertainty and the wandering of human opinion until we come to the limits God has laid down. So I will now fall back within our own lines and hold my ground there, in order to prove to the Christian how sound my answers to the philosophers and the physicians have been. Brother, build up your faith on your own foundation. [a]

Consider the wombs of the holiest women, alive with the life inside them — babies who not only breathed in there, but were given prophetic insight as well. See how Rebecca’s insides are thrown into turmoil, though her time to give birth is still far off and there is as yet no stir of vital air. Look: a twin offspring chafes inside its mother, though she has as yet no sign of the two nations in her. We might perhaps have counted the quarrel of this infant pair a freak of nature — children who struggled before they lived and had hostility before they had animation — if it had done nothing but make the mother restless. But when her womb opens, and the number of her children is seen, and the destiny foretold for them is known, we are given proof not merely that the infants had souls of their own, but that they were at war.

The one who was born first was threatened with being held back by the one who was beaten to the birth — the one not yet fully delivered, whose hand alone had been born. Now if the first drew life and received his soul, in Plato’s manner, at his first breath, or if, by the Stoic rule, he got his earliest taste of animation on touching the frosty air, then what was the other about — the one everyone was waiting for, who was still held inside the womb and was trying to hold his brother back outside it? He had not yet breathed, I take it, when he seized his brother’s heel; he was still warm with his mother’s warmth when he wanted so badly to be the first out of her. What an infant — so competitive, so strong, so quarrelsome already! And all of it, I take it, because even then he was full of life.

Then consider those still more extraordinary conceptions, the barren woman’s and the virgin’s. These women would only be able to produce unfinished offspring, against the course of nature, for the very reason that one of them was too old to bear seed and the other was untouched by any man. If there was to be bearing at all in their case, it was only fitting that children conceived so irregularly should be born without a soul — so the philosopher would say. And yet even these are alive, each of them in his mother’s womb. Elizabeth breaks out in joy, because John had leaped inside her; Mary magnifies the Lord, because Christ had stirred her from within. Each mother knows her own child, and is known in turn by her infant — infants therefore certainly alive, and not merely souls but spirits too.

And so you read the word of God spoken to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” Since God forms us in the womb, he also breathes on us there, as he did at the first creation, when “the Lord God formed man, and breathed into him the breath of life.” Nor could God have known the man in the womb except in his whole nature: “And before you came out of the womb, I set you apart.” Well then — was it a dead body at that early stage? Certainly not. For “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

How, then, is a living being conceived? Is the substance of body and of soul formed together at one and the same time? Or does one of them come first in the order of nature? Our position is that both are conceived, and formed, and completed at the same moment, and born together as well; and that not an instant’s interval falls between them in conception, such that either could be given the earlier place. [g]

Judge what happens at the very beginning of a person’s existence by what happens to him at the very end. Death is defined as nothing else than the separation of body and soul; so life, which is the opposite of death, can have no other definition than the joining of body and soul. If the severing happens to both substances at one and the same moment by means of death, then the law of their pairing ought to satisfy us that the two substances are joined at one and the same moment by means of life. Now we grant that life begins with conception, because we hold that the soul also begins at conception; life starts at the same moment and in the same place as the soul does. So the processes that act together to bring about separation in death also work together, at one stroke, to bring about life.

If we give priority to the forming of one of the two natures and a later time to the other, we shall have to go on and fix the exact times of the two seedings, according to the standing and rank of each. And if we do that, what time are we to assign to the seed of the body, and what to the seed of the soul? Besides, if the seedings are put at different periods, then that difference in time will give us different substances as well. For though we allow that there are two kinds of seed — the body’s and the soul’s — we still declare that they are inseparable, and therefore of one date and one moment in their origin.

Now let no one take offense or feel embarrassed at an account of the workings of nature which the defense of the truth has made necessary. Nature ought to be an object of reverence to us, not of blushes. It is lust, not natural use, that has brought shame on the intercourse of the sexes; it is the excess, not the ordinary condition, that is indecent and unchaste. The ordinary condition has God’s blessing on it, and is blessed by him: “Be fruitful and multiply.” The excess he has cursed, in adulteries and debaucheries and brothels.

Well then, in this usual function of the sexes, which brings the male and the female together in their common intercourse, we know that soul and flesh both do a duty together: the soul supplies the desire, the flesh contributes the satisfaction of it; the soul furnishes the impulse, the flesh the accomplishment. The whole man is roused by the single effort of both natures, and his seminal substance is discharged, drawing its fluid from the body and its warmth from the soul. Now if the Greek word for soul really is the same word as “cold,” how does it come about that the body goes cold once the soul has left it?

In fact — at the risk of offending decency in my wish to prove the truth — I cannot help asking whether, in that very heat of extreme gratification when the generative fluid is ejected, we do not feel that something of our soul has gone out of us. And do we not feel a faintness and a collapse, with a dimness of sight along with it? This, then, must be the soul-bearing seed, which comes at once from the trickling-out of the soul, just as the other fluid is the body-bearing seed that comes from the draining of the flesh.

The examples of the first creation are exactly true. Adam’s flesh was formed of clay. And what is clay but an excellent moisture, the sort of thing the generating fluid should spring from? The soul came first from the breath of God. And what is the breath of God but the vapor of spirit, the sort of thing that should give rise to what we breathe out through the generating fluid? So then, since these two different and separate substances, the clay and the breath, were combined at the first creation in forming the individual man, they mingled and blended their own seminal beginnings into one, and from then on handed down to the human race the regular manner of its propagation. Even now the two substances, different as they are, flow out together in one united channel; they find their way together into their appointed seed-plot; and out of their respective natures they fertilize the human fruit with their combined strength. And in this human product his own seed lies waiting, by the process laid down for every creature that has the power of generation.

And so from the one first man comes the whole outflow and abundance of human souls — nature proving true to God’s command, “Be fruitful and multiply.” For in the very preamble to this single act of making — “Let us make man” — the whole of man’s posterity was declared and described in a plural phrase: “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,” and the rest. And no wonder: in the seed lie the promise and the pledge of the crop.

What, then, are we to make by now of that ancient saying Plato mentions, about souls migrating back and forth — how they leave here and go there, and then return here and pass through a life, and then depart from this life again, and afterwards become alive out of the dead? Some will have it that this is a saying of Pythagoras; Albinus takes it for a divine pronouncement, perhaps of the Egyptian Mercury. But there is no divine saying except from the one true God, through whom the prophets and the apostles and Christ himself delivered their great message. [m]

Moses is a good deal older than Saturn — by some nine hundred years — and older than Saturn’s grandchildren as well; and he is certainly far more divine, since he recounts and traces out the course of the human race from the very beginning of the world, setting down the successive births by their names and their dates, and so giving plain proof of the divine character of his work, from its divine authority and its divine word.

If it really is the sophist of Samos who is Plato’s authority for this endlessly revolving migration of souls out of a constant alternation of the dead and the living, then the famous Pythagoras, however admirable in other respects, relied for the manufacture of such an opinion on a lie — a lie that was not only disgraceful but dangerous. Consider it, you who do not know it, and believe it along with us.

He fakes his own death. He hides himself underground. He sentences himself to that ordeal for some seven years, and while he is down there he learns from his mother — his sole accomplice and attendant — what he was to report to the world, so that it would believe him, about the people who had died since he shut himself away. Then, when he thought he had reduced his body to the horrible look of a dead old man, he comes out of his hiding-place and his fraud, and pretends to have come back from the dead. Who would hesitate to believe that a man he had supposed dead had come back to life? Especially after hearing from him facts about the recently dead which he could obviously only have found out in Hades itself.

So the claim that men are made alive after death is a rather old one. But what if it is really a recent one instead? Truth has no need of age, and falsehood does not shy away from novelty. This notable saying I hold to be plainly false, for all the nobility that age has given it. How could a thing not be false when the evidence it rests on is a lie? How can I help thinking Pythagoras a deceiver, when he practices deceit to win my belief? How is he going to convince me that before he was Pythagoras he had been Aethalides, and Euphorbus, and Pyrrhus the fisherman, and Hermotimus — all in order to make us believe that men live again after they have died — when as Pythagoras he went on to perjure himself? The easier it would have been for me to believe that he had come back to life once in his own person, rather than so often in this man’s and that man’s, the more thoroughly he has cheated me in things too hard to believe, since he played the impostor in matters that might readily have been believed.

Ah, but he recognized the shield of Euphorbus, which had long before been dedicated at Delphi; he claimed it as his own and made his claim good by marks that nobody generally knew. Now look again at that underground lurking-place of his, and believe the story if you can. A man who devised so tricky a scheme at the cost of his own health, cheating his life away and torturing it for seven years underground, in hunger and idleness and darkness, in deep disgust with the great open sky — what reckless effort would such a man not make, what elaborate contrivance would he not attempt, to arrive at the discovery of this famous shield?

Suppose, now, that he found it out in some of those hidden researches of his. Suppose he picked up some faint breath of a report that had outlived the tradition, dead as it now was. Suppose he came to know of it by an inspection he had bribed the temple keeper to allow him. We know perfectly well what the resources of the magical art are for hunting out hidden things: there are the catabolic spirits, which throw their victims down; the paredral spirits, which sit beside a man forever to haunt him; and the pythonic spirits, which put him into a trance by their fortune-telling and their belly-talking. Was it not likely, after all, that Pherecydes too, our Pythagoras’s own master, used to divine — or rather to rave and dream — by just such arts and contrivances as these? Might it not have been the very same demon in him who, while he was in Euphorbus, transacted those deeds of blood?

But last of all: why is it that the man who proved himself to have been Euphorbus by the evidence of the shield did not also recognize any of his old comrades from Troy? They too must by now have got their lives back, since men were rising again from the dead.

It is perfectly plain that dead men are made out of living ones. But it does not follow from that, that living men are made out of dead ones. From the beginning the living came first in the order of things, and therefore from the beginning the dead came afterwards; and the dead proceeded from no other source than the living. The living had their origin in any other source you please than in the dead, while the dead had no source at all to begin from except the living. [v]

If, then, from the very first the living did not come from the dead, why should they be said to come from the dead afterwards? Had that original source, whatever it was, come to an end? Was there something to regret in its form, or in the rule of it? Then why was that rule kept for the dead? Does it not follow that, because the dead came from the living at the beginning, they always came from the living? For either the law that held at the beginning had to continue on both sides of the relation, or else it had to change on both sides — so that if it had become necessary for the living to proceed from the dead afterwards, it would have become equally necessary for the dead not to proceed from the living. For if the arrangement was not to be kept faithfully in each respect, then opposites cannot go on being re-formed out of opposites, turn and turn about.

We too, for our part, will bring some opposites of our own against you: the born and the unborn, sight and blindness, youth and old age, wisdom and folly. Now it does not follow that the unborn proceeds from the born, on the ground that an opposite issues from its opposite; nor that sight proceeds from blindness, because blindness happens to sight; nor that youth comes back out of old age, because after youth comes the decrepitude of age; nor that folly is born, with all its dullness, out of wisdom, because wisdom may sometimes be sharpened out of folly.

Albinus has some fears for his master and friend Plato on these points, and labors very ingeniously to distinguish different kinds of opposites — as if these examples of ours did not partake of the nature of opposition just as absolutely as the ones he expounds to illustrate his great master’s principle: life and death, I mean. Nor is it true, for that matter, that life is restored out of death, merely because it happens that death follows life.