The Soul from the Womb

In taking up these questions we left behind us ground that we must now go back to — if I remember rightly. We had settled that the soul is planted in a person by seed, and by human agency, and that its seed has been one and the same for the whole human race from the very beginning. We settled it because of the rival opinions of the philosophers and the heretics, and because of that ancient saying Plato mentions, which we dealt with earlier. Now let us follow, in their order, the points that come next. [a]

The soul is sown in the womb at the same moment as the body, and along with the body it receives its sex — and so exactly at the same moment that neither of the two substances can be counted the cause of the sex. If any interval were allowed in the sowing of them, so that either the flesh or the soul were the first to be conceived, then you could assign a sex of its own to one of the two substances, because of the difference in the timing of the two impregnations; either the flesh would stamp its sex on the soul, or the soul on the flesh. That is what Apelles does — the heretic, not the painter. Taught by Philumena, he gives the souls of men and women priority over their bodies, and so makes the flesh, as the later of the two, take its sex from the soul. And those who have the soul come upon the flesh after birth are of course settling the sex of the already formed soul, male or female, by the sex of the flesh. But the truth is that the sowing of the two substances cannot be pulled apart in time. They are poured out in one and the same act, and by that a shared sex is secured for them, so that the course of nature — whatever that is — draws the line between the sexes.

In fact this view is borne out by the way the first two of us were made. The male was shaped and worked out in a completer way, for Adam was formed first, and the woman came a long way behind him, for Eve was formed later. So her flesh went a long time without a shape of its own — the shape she took on afterwards, when she was taken out of Adam’s side. Yet even then she was herself a living being, since I would count her at that time, in soul, as a part of Adam. Besides, God’s breath would have given her life as well, if there had not been in the woman a transmission from Adam of his soul as well as of his flesh.

Now the whole business of sowing, forming and finishing the human embryo in the womb is no doubt managed by some power that serves the will of God in it, whatever method that power is appointed to use. Even Roman superstition, attending carefully to these things, imagined a goddess Alemona to feed the child in the womb; and Nona and Decima, named after the months when everything hangs in the balance; and Partula, to manage and direct the delivery; and Lucina, to bring the child out to birth and to the light of day. We, for our part, believe that angels do this work for God. So the embryo becomes a human being in the womb from the moment its form is complete. The law of Moses, in fact, punishes with the penalty it deserves the man who causes an abortion, since there is already the beginning of a human being there. That beginning is credited even now with the condition of life and death, since it is already liable to both — although, still living inside its mother, it mostly shares her state. [f]

I must also say something about the timing of the soul’s birth, so that I leave nothing out of the whole process. A full-term, ordinary birth happens, as a general rule, at the beginning of the tenth month. The men who theorize about numbers honor ten as the parent of all the rest, and as what makes a human birth complete. For myself, I would rather look at this measure of time with God in view, as though the ten months were bringing a person into the ten commandments; so that the count of the time it takes to finish our natural birth should answer to the count of the rules of the life we are given in our second birth. But since a birth is also completed in the seventh month, I recognize in that number, rather than in the eighth, the honor of matching the sabbath count: the month in which God’s image is sometimes brought to birth in a human being would then match, in its number, the day on which God’s creation was finished and made holy. Human birth has sometimes been allowed to come early and still to fall out fit and perfect on a sevenfold count, as a sign of our resurrection and rest and kingdom. The eightfold number, then, has nothing to do with our making — for in the time it stands for there will be no more marriage.

We have already shown that body and soul are joined, from the running together of their very seeds to the complete forming of the child. We now maintain that they are joined from birth onward as well. In the first place, they grow together, each in the way that suits the difference of its nature — the flesh in size, the soul in intelligence; the flesh in bodily condition, the soul in feeling. We are forbidden, however, to suppose that the soul grows in substance, in case it should also be said to be capable of shrinking in substance, and so people should come to believe that it can even be snuffed out. What grows is its inborn power, which holds all its natural properties as they were planted in its being from the start. That power is unfolded little by little along with the flesh, without damaging the seed-basis of the substance it received when it was first breathed into a person.

Take a quantity of gold or of silver, still a rough lump. It has a compact condition of its own, more compressed at the moment than it will be later, and yet it holds inside its outline what is gold or silver all the way through. When the lump is afterwards drawn out by being beaten into leaf, it becomes larger than it was — by the stretching of the original mass, not by anything added to it, because it is spread out in space, not increased in bulk; though in a way it is even increased when it is spread out, since it can be increased in form without being increased in state. Then too the sheen of the gold or the silver, which was really there while the metal was a block, but only dimly, shines out in full luster. Afterwards various shapes are added, according to what the material will take as it yields to the craftsman’s handling — and he adds nothing to the condition of the mass except its figure. In the same way, the growth and development of the soul should be reckoned not as enlarging its substance but as calling out its powers.

We have already laid down that all the natural properties of the soul that have to do with sensation and intelligence belong to its very substance and spring from the way it was made, but that they advance by a gradual growth through the stages of life and unfold in different ways through accidental circumstances — a person’s means and skills, his manners and customs, the place he lives in, and the powers above. But following the side of the body-and-soul partnership we now have to consider, we maintain that the soul comes of age at the same time as the body, and that the two reach full growth together at about the fourteenth year of life, speaking generally — the soul through the prompting of the senses, the body through the growth of its members. And we fix on this age not because reflection begins then, as Asclepiades supposes, and not because the civil laws date the beginning of a person’s real business from this point, but because this was the appointed order from the very first. For just as Adam and Eve felt that they had to cover their nakedness once they knew good and evil, so we claim to have the same discernment of good and evil from the time we feel the same shame. [k]

Now from that age of fourteen, sex is flooded and clothed with a feeling all its own. Craving puts the eye into its service, passes its pleasure on to another, understands what male and female are naturally to each other, wears the fig-leaf apron to cover the shame it still stirs up, drives a person out of the paradise of innocence and chastity, and in its wild itch falls into sins and into unnatural provocations to wrongdoing; for by now its drive has gone past nature’s appointment and springs from nature’s abuse. Strictly natural craving, though, goes no further than wanting the food God granted to man at the beginning. He says: “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat.” And then, to the generation that came next after the flood, he widened the grant: “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; look, I have given you all these things as I gave the green plants.” In that he has the body in view rather than the soul, though it is in the soul’s interest too.

For we must take away every opening from the objector who, because the soul apparently wants food, would insist that this shows the soul to be mortal — since it is kept going by food and drink, loses its vigor after a while when they are withheld, and at last, when they are taken away altogether, droops and dies. Now the point to keep in view is not merely which faculty it is that wants these things, but for what end; and even if it is for its own sake, the question still remains: why this want, and when it is felt, and for how long. Then there is this to consider as well: it is one thing to want something by natural instinct and another to want it out of necessity; one thing to want it as a property of one’s being, another to want it for a particular purpose.

So the soul will want food and drink — for itself, because of a particular necessity; but for the flesh, because of the nature of the flesh’s own properties. For the flesh is the house of the soul, and the soul is the temporary tenant of the flesh. The tenant’s wanting, then, will arise from the temporary cause and the particular necessity that the very word suggests: he wants to benefit and improve the place he is lodging in while he stays there. He certainly does not want to be the foundation of the house himself, or its walls, or its supports and roof; he wants simply and solely to be housed and made comfortable, since he could not be so housed except in a sound and well-built house. And if the soul is not given this accommodation, it will not be in its power to leave its dwelling place, and for want of fit and proper resources to depart safe and sound, still holding its own supports and the nourishment that belongs to its own proper condition — that is, deathlessness, reason, feeling, intelligence, and freedom of the will.

All these gifts of the soul, given to it at birth, are still darkened and spoiled by the malicious one who from the beginning looked at them with an envious eye, so that they are never seen acting freely and are never managed as they ought to be. For is there any member of the human race that the evil spirit will not fasten on, ready to trap souls at the very doorway of their birth — the doorway where he is invited to be present in all the superstitious rites that go with childbearing? So it comes about that everyone is brought to birth with idolatry for a midwife, while the very wombs that carried them, still bound with the woolen bands that were wound in front of the idols, declare their offspring dedicated to demons. At the delivery they call on Lucina and Diana for help; for a whole week a table is spread in Juno’s honor; on the last day the Fates who write a child’s destiny are called on; and then the baby’s first step on the ground is sacred to the goddess Statina. After all this, is there anyone who fails to hand over his son’s whole head to idol service — pulling out a hair, or shaving the head bare with a razor, or binding the hair up as an offering, or sealing it for sacred use — on behalf of the clan, or of the ancestry, or for public devotion? It was on this principle of early possession that Socrates, while still a boy, was found by the spirit of his demon. And this is how everyone gets his own genius assigned to him, which is only another name for a demon. So there is no birth — among the pagans, of course, is what I mean — that is clean of idolatrous superstition. [p]

It was because of this that the apostle said that when either of the parents was made holy the children were holy, and this as much by the privilege of the seed as by the training they are brought up in. “Otherwise,” he says, “the children would be unclean.” Unclean by birth, that is — as though he meant us to understand that the children of believers were marked out for holiness and so for salvation, and that by the pledge of such a hope he was propping up marriage, which he had made up his mind to keep whole. Besides, he had certainly not forgotten how definitely the Lord had put it: “Unless a man is born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Which is to say, he cannot be holy.

Every soul, then, because of its birth, has its nature in Adam until it is born again in Christ; and it is unclean the whole time it stays without that second birth; and because it is unclean it is actively sinful, and — since the two are joined — it floods even the flesh with its own shame. Now although the flesh is sinful, and we are forbidden to walk according to it, and its works are condemned as craving against the spirit, and people are blamed on its account as fleshly, still the flesh does not carry this disgrace on its own account. It is not of itself that it thinks anything or feels anything for the purpose of advising or ordering a sin. How could it? It is only a thing that serves; and its service is not the service of a slave or a close friend — animated beings, human beings — but the service of a vessel, or something of that kind. It is body, not soul. A cup may serve a thirsty man; and yet, if the thirsty man will not put the cup to his mouth, the cup will render no service at all. So what makes a human being human by no means lies in his earthy part, and the flesh is not the person, as though it were some faculty of his soul, some quality that belongs to him. It is a thing of quite another substance and another condition, attached to the soul as a piece of property, or as a tool for the business of living. [t]

Accordingly the flesh is blamed in the Scriptures, because nothing is done by the soul without the flesh in the way of craving, appetite, drunkenness, cruelty, idolatry, and the other works of the flesh — the ones, I mean, that are not confined to feelings but come out in effects. The stirrings of sin, when they do not come out in effects, are usually charged to the soul: “Anyone who looks at a woman to want her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

But what has the flesh alone, without the soul, ever done in the way of virtue, righteousness, endurance or chastity? And what an absurdity it is to charge sin and crime to a substance you assign no good actions and no character of its own! Now the party who helps in the committing of a crime is brought to trial, but in such a way that the principal, the man who actually did it, bears the weight of the penalty, while the man who helped him does not escape indictment either. The odium falls harder on the principal when his agents are punished through his fault. The man who instigates and orders the crime is beaten with more stripes — and at the same time the man who obeys such an evil order is not acquitted.

Besides the evil that comes on the soul from the intervention of the evil spirit, then, there is an earlier evil, and in a certain sense a natural one, which comes from the fault of the soul’s origin. For as we have said before, the corruption of our nature is a second nature, with a god and father of its own — namely the one who authored that corruption. Still there is a portion of good in the soul: that original, divine, genuine good which is its proper nature. What comes from God is dimmed rather than put out. It can be dimmed, because it is not God; put out it cannot be, because it comes from God. So, as light blocked by a solid body still goes on existing, though it cannot be seen because of the density of the thing standing in the way, in the same way the good in the soul is weighed down by the evil, and because of the darkening it is either not seen at all, its light entirely hidden, or else only a stray beam shows where it forces its way through some chance opening. [w]

So some people are very bad and some very good; and yet the souls of all of them are of one kind. Even in the worst there is something good, and in the best there is something bad. For God alone is without sin, and the only man without sin is Christ, since Christ is also God. So the divine element in the soul breaks out in prophetic foresight, because of its first good; and knowing where it came from, it bears witness to God in exclamations like Good God! and God knows! and I commend you to God!

Just as no soul is without sin, so no soul is without seeds of good. So when the soul takes hold of the faith, made new in its second birth by water and the power from above, then the veil of its former corruption is taken away and it looks on the light in all its brightness. It is also taken up, in that second birth, by the Holy Spirit, just as in its first birth it was clasped by the unholy spirit. The flesh follows the soul, now married to the Spirit, as part of the bride’s portion — no longer the servant of the soul, but of the Spirit. What a happy marriage, if no breaking of the wedding vow is committed in it!