A Soul Made of Flesh

But we run into another argument of theirs when we ask this question: why, if Christ took on flesh made of soul, should he be thought to have had a soul made of flesh? [a]

Their answer is that God wanted to make the soul visible to us by clothing it in a body, invisible though it had been until then; by its own nature it could see nothing, not even itself, because this flesh stood in the way — so that it was even in doubt whether the soul was ever born at all. So, they say, the soul was made bodily in Christ, in order that we might watch it being born, and dying, and, more than that, rising again.

But how could that work? How was the soul to show itself, to itself or to us, by means of flesh, when there was no way of establishing that it would put itself on display in that way until the very thing it did not know had come into existence — namely the flesh? It was handed darkness, apparently, so that it could shine.

Let us take the first point first: was it even necessary for the soul to put itself on display in this manner? Then the second: whether their earlier position holds — that the soul is wholly invisible — and whether that invisibility follows from its having no body at all, or whether it actually has some body of its own kind.

And yet, although they call the soul invisible, they decide it is bodily, only with something invisible about it. If it has nothing invisible, how can it be called invisible? But it could not exist at all unless it had the thing by which it exists. And since it does exist, it must have something through which it exists. If it has that, that something is its body. Everything that exists is a bodily thing of its own kind. Nothing lacks a body except what does not exist.

Now if the soul has an invisible body, then the one who set out to make it visible would have done the job better — in a way more worthy of himself — if he had made visible the part of it that counted as invisible. Then there would have been no falsehood and no weakness in the business, and neither of those flaws suits God. As their theory stands, there is falsehood, since he has set the soul out as something other than what it is; and there is weakness, since he could not make it look like what it is. Nobody who wants to display a man covers him with a veil or a helmet. But that is exactly what has been done to the soul, if it has been dressed in a covering that belongs to something else by being turned into flesh.

Or suppose that on their theory the soul is taken to be bodiless, so that whatever it is, it is quite unknowable by some hidden force of its own nature, and simply is not a body. Even then it would not have been beyond God’s power — indeed it would have suited his plan better — to display the soul in some new kind of body, unlike the one we all have in common, of which we would have formed quite a different idea. We would then have been spared the thought that he had set his heart on making a visible soul out of an invisible one without adequate cause — a fine invitation, no doubt, to the very questions these people raise, by insisting on human flesh for it.

But Christ could not have appeared among men except as a man. So give Christ back his own good faith. Believe that the one who chose to walk the earth as a man displayed a soul of a thoroughly human condition as well — not making it out of flesh, but clothing it in flesh.

Very well; let it be granted that the soul is made apparent by the flesh, on the assumption that it plainly had to be made apparent somehow, on the ground that it cannot be known either by itself or by us. There is still an absurd distinction buried in the theory, which treats us as separate from our own soul, when the whole of what we are is soul. Without the soul we are nothing. There is not even the name of a human being left, only the name of a corpse. So if we do not know the soul, then in fact it is the soul that does not know itself. [f]

The only question left for us to look into, then, is whether the soul was so ignorant of itself in this matter that it had to become known by any means available.

The soul, in my opinion, is a thing endowed with sense. Nothing that belongs to the soul is without sense, and nothing that belongs to sense is without soul. And, if I may put it strongly for the sake of emphasis, I would say: animae anima sensus est — sense is the soul’s own soul.

Now it is the soul that gives the power of perception to everything that has sense, and it is the soul itself that perceives the senses of them all, not to say their properties. How is it likely, then, that it did not itself receive sense as part of its own natural make-up? Where is it to learn what it needs in a given situation, out of the sheer necessity of natural causes, if it does not know its own property and what it needs? Recognizing that much is within the competence of every soul. It has, I mean, a working knowledge of itself, and without that knowledge no soul could ever have carried out its own functions.

I take it, too, that it is especially fitting that man, the one rational animal, should have been furnished with the sort of soul that makes him the rational animal, that soul being itself rational above all. And how can a soul that makes a man a rational animal be rational itself, if it is ignorant of its own rationality, being ignorant of its own very self?

So far is it from being ignorant that it knows its own Author, its own Master, and its own condition. Before it learns anything about God, it speaks the name of God. Before it acquires any knowledge of his judgment, it declares that it commends itself to God. There is nothing one hears more often than that there is no hope after death — and yet listen to the curses or the pleas a soul lets out, according as the man dies after a life well spent or badly spent. I have followed these thoughts out further in a short book of ours, On the Testimony of the Soul.

Besides, if the soul was ignorant of itself from the beginning, there is nothing it could have learned from Christ except what sort of thing it is. But it was not its own shape that it learned from Christ; it was its salvation. This is why the Son of God came down and took on a soul: not so that the soul might find itself in Christ, but so that it might find Christ in itself. Its salvation is in danger not because it is ignorant of itself, but because it is ignorant of the word of God. “The life,” he says, “was made visible” — not the soul. And again, “I have come to save the soul.” He did not say “to explain” it.

Of course we could not have known that the soul, invisible thing though it is, is born and dies, unless it had been put on show bodily. And we certainly did not know that it was to rise again along with the flesh. That is the truth which will be found to have been made plain by Christ. But even this he did not make plain in his own case in any different way than he did in the case of someone like Lazarus, whose flesh was no more made of soul than his soul was made of flesh.

What further knowledge, then, have we been given about the structure of the soul that we did not have before? What invisible part of it was there that needed making visible by flesh?

The soul became flesh so that the soul might be seen. Well then — did the flesh likewise become soul, so that the flesh might be shown? If the soul is flesh, it is no longer soul but flesh. If the flesh is soul, it is no longer flesh but soul. So wherever there is flesh and wherever there is soul, the thing has become the one and the other indifferently. [j]

Now if they are neither one in particular, although they become both, it is at the very least absurd that we should have to understand the soul when we say the flesh, and, when we point to the soul, explain ourselves as meaning the flesh. Everything will be in danger of being taken in a sense not its own, and, while it is taken in that other sense, of losing the sense that is its own, if things are called by a name that differs from what they naturally are. Honesty in names is what keeps properties safely recognizable. When those properties change, things are reckoned to have whatever qualities their names indicate. Fired clay, for instance, gets the name of a pot. It does not keep the name that belonged to its former state, because it no longer has any share in that state.

So too, then, Christ’s soul, having become flesh, cannot be anything but what it has become, and can no longer be what it once was, having become something else. And since we have just resorted to an illustration, we will make further use of it. Our pot, then, which was formed out of the clay, is one body, and it has one name, indicating of course that one body; and the pot cannot also be called clay, because what it once was, it is no longer. Now what a thing has stopped being no longer clings to it. So the soul no longer clings. Since therefore it has become flesh, the soul is one solid body of a single kind; it is a single thing all through, and an undivided substance.

But in Christ we find the soul and the flesh set down in bare terms, with no figure of speech: that is, the soul is called soul and the flesh flesh. Nowhere is the soul called flesh, or the flesh soul — and they ought to have been named that way, confusedly, if that had really been their condition. The fact is that even Christ himself mentioned each substance separately and on its own, in keeping of course with the difference between the properties of the two, the soul by itself and the flesh by itself. “My soul,” he says, “is deeply grieved, even to death”; and “the bread that I will give is my flesh, for the salvation of the world.”

Now if the soul had been flesh, there would have been in Christ only the soul made of flesh, or else the flesh made of soul. But since he keeps the two kinds distinct, the flesh and the soul, he shows them to be two. If two, then they are no longer one; if not one, then the soul is not made of flesh, nor the flesh of soul — for the soul-flesh, or the flesh-soul, is a single thing. Unless, that is, he had some other soul besides the one that was flesh, and carried about some other flesh besides the one that was soul. But since he had one flesh and one soul — that soul which was grieved even to death, and that flesh which was the bread given for the salvation of the world — the count of two substances, each of its own kind, stands intact, and that one-of-a-kind thing, a soul made of flesh, is shut out.

But Christ, they say, carried an angel. What for? For the same reason that led him to become man? Then Christ was moved by the motive that made him take human nature. That motive was man’s salvation, the restoring of what had been lost. Man had been lost; his recovery had become necessary. [n]

No such cause existed for Christ’s taking on the nature of angels. Angels too are assigned destruction, in “the fire prepared for the devil and his angels” — but a restoration is never promised to them. Christ never received any charge from the Father about the salvation of angels, and what the Father neither promised nor commanded, Christ could not have undertaken.

For what purpose, then, did he bear the angelic nature, unless it was to have it as a strong-arm helper for carrying out the salvation of man? As though the Son of God were not equal on his own to delivering man — man, whom one solitary single serpent overthrew! In that case there is no longer one God and one Savior, if there are two contriving salvation and one of them in need of the other.

Or was his object really to deliver man by means of an angel? Then why come down himself to do what he was going to get done with an angel’s help? If by an angel’s help, why come as well? If he meant to do it all himself, why have an angel too?

It is true that he has been called “the Angel of great counsel” — that is, a messenger — by a word that describes an office and not a nature. He had to announce to the world the mighty purpose of the Father, the purpose that ordained the restoration of man. But that is no reason to reckon him an angel, a Gabriel or a Michael. The owner of the vineyard sends his Son as well as his servants to the workers to demand the fruit; and the Son will not on that account be counted one of the servants, because he undertook a servant’s errand. So I would more readily say, if such a thing may be risked, that the Son actually is an angel, that is, a messenger from the Father, than that there is an angel inside the Son.

Besides, since it has been said of the Son himself, “You made him a little lower than the angels,” how will it turn out that he put on the nature of angels, if he was made lower than the angels by becoming man, with flesh and soul, as the Son of man? But as “the Spirit of God” and “the Power of the Most High,” can he be reckoned lower than the angels — he who is truly God and the Son of God? Well, but as bearing human nature he is made lower than the angels, and as bearing angelic nature he loses exactly that much of his inferiority.

That opinion will suit Ebion very nicely, who holds that Jesus is a mere man and nothing more than a descendant of David, and not also the Son of God — though in one respect, to be sure, more glorious than the prophets, since Ebion says there was an angel in him, just as there was one in Zechariah. Only Christ never said, “And the angel who spoke within me said to me.” Neither did Christ ever use that stock phrase of all the prophets, “This is what the Lord says.” For he was himself the Lord, and he spoke openly on his own authority, prefacing his words with the formula “Truly, truly, I tell you.”

What need is there of further argument? Hear what Isaiah says in so many words: “It was no envoy, and no angel, but the Lord himself who saved them.”

Valentinus, on the strength of his own system of teaching, might invent a spiritual flesh for Christ consistently enough. Anyone who refused to believe that that flesh was human could pretend it to be whatever he liked. And this remark applies to all the heretics: if it was not human, and was not born of a human being, I do not see what substance Christ himself was speaking of when he called himself man and the Son of man, saying, “But now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth,” and “The Son of man is Lord of the sabbath.” [v]

For it is of him that Isaiah writes, “A man in suffering, who knows how to bear weakness”; and Jeremiah, “He is a man, and who has known him?”; and Daniel, “On the clouds, as the Son of man.” The apostle Paul says the same: “The one mediator between God and man is the man Christ Jesus.” Peter too, in the Acts of the Apostles, speaks of him as genuinely human: “Jesus Christ was a man approved by God among you.”

These passages by themselves ought to be enough to stop the case at the outset, as proof that Christ had human flesh derived from a human being — not spiritual flesh, not flesh made of soul, not flesh made of the substance of the stars, and not imaginary flesh. They would be enough, at any rate, if the heretics could only strip off all their heat and their trickery.

For, as I have read in some writer of Valentinus’s shabby little faction, they refuse from the start to believe that a human and earthly substance was formed for Christ, in case the Lord should be reckoned lower than the angels, who are not made of earthly flesh. And on that footing, if his flesh were like ours, it would have had to be born as ours is: not of the Spirit, nor of God, but of the will of a man. Why, moreover, should it be born of incorruptible seed rather than corruptible? And again: since his flesh has both risen and gone back to heaven, why is ours, which is like his, not taken up at once as well? Or else, since his flesh is like ours, why does it not go back to the ground in the same way and fall apart?

The heathen used to toss the same objections about constantly. Was the Son of God brought as low as all that? And again: if he rose again as a precedent for our hope, how is it that nothing of the kind has been thought worth doing in our own case?

Such views are not out of place in heathens, and they suit the heretics just as naturally. For what difference is there between the two, except that the heathen, by not believing, believe, while the heretics, by believing, do not believe?

Then again they read, “You made him a little lower than the angels,” and they deny the lower nature of the very Christ who declares himself to be “not a man, but a worm” — who also had “no form or beauty; his form was without honor, despised beyond all men, a man in suffering, and knowing how to bear weakness.” Here they find a human being mixed with a divine one, and so they deny that he was a man at all. They believe that he died, and they maintain that a being which has died was born of an incorruptible substance — as if corruptibility were anything other than death.

But our flesh, too, ought to have risen again immediately. Wait a while. Christ has not yet put his enemies under his feet, so that he may triumph over them in the company of his friends.