Faults in His Latin

Before I come to the substance of this passage, I must stop to admire words worthy of Theophrastus: “I am told,” he says, “that some stir has been made over the question of the nature of the soul. Whether complaints on a matter of this kind ought to be entertained rather than set aside, you must decide for yourself.” If these questions about the origin of the soul have been stirred up at Rome, what is the meaning of this complaint and murmuring over whether they ought to be entertained or not, a matter that belongs entirely to the judgment of bishops? But perhaps he thinks that “question” and “complaint” mean the same thing, because he finds this way of speaking in the Commentaries of Caper. [a]

Then he writes: “Some of those whom I have read hold that the soul is infused together with the material body through the channel of the human seed; and of these they give such proofs as they can.” What liberties he takes with his forms of speech! What a jumble of moods and tenses! “I have read some sayings; they confirmed them with what assertions they could.” And in what follows: “Others assert that God is making new souls every day and infusing them into the bodies that have been formed in the womb; while others again believe that the souls were all made long ago, when God made all things out of nothing, and that all he does now is send out each soul to be born in its body as seems good to him.” Here too we have a most beautiful arrangement. Some, he says, assert this and that; some declare that the souls were made long ago, that is, when God made all things out of nothing, and that he now sends them out to be born in their own body as it pleases him. He speaks so tastelessly and so confusedly that I have more trouble correcting his mistakes than he had in writing them. At the end he says, “I, however, though I have read these things”; and while the sentence still hangs unfinished, he adds, as if he were bringing forward something new, “I, however, do not deny that I have both read each of these things, and as yet confess that I am ignorant.”