Questions About Heaven and Earth

You pass on to the origin of souls, and at great length you cry out against the smoke you say I raise. You want to be allowed to profess ignorance on a point where you deliberately hide what you know. So you begin questioning me about angels and archangels: how they exist, where they live and what their dwellings are like, and what differences there are between them, if there are any. Then you ask about the course of the sun, the waxing and waning of the moon, and the nature and movements of the stars. I wonder that you did not write out the whole passage: [a]

Then, leaving the things of heaven and stooping to those on earth, you philosophize on lesser points. You say, “Tell us the causes of springs and of the wind; what makes hail and rain; why the sea is salt and the rivers fresh; what explains clouds and storms, thunderbolts, thunder and lightning.” You mean that if I do not know all this, you are entitled to say you know nothing about the origin of souls. You want to balance your ignorance on a single point against mine on many. But you, who page after page stir up what you call my smoke, do you not understand that I can see your mists and whirlwinds? You want to be thought a man of wide learning, and to enjoy a great name for wisdom among the disciples of Calpurnius. So you set up the whole physical world in front of me, as if Socrates had spoken in vain when he turned to the study of ethics and said, “What is above us is nothing to us.” So, then, if I cannot tell you why the ant, so small a creature, whose body is a mere dot, has six feet, while the elephant with its vast bulk has only four to walk on; why serpents and snakes glide along on their chests and bellies; why the worm commonly called the millipede has such a swarming array of feet, then I am forbidden to know anything about the origin of souls! You ask me what I know about souls so that the moment I say anything about them, you may attack it. If I say that the church’s teaching is that God forms souls every day and sends them into the bodies of those who are born, you will at once bring out the snares your master invented and ask: Where is God’s justice, if he grants souls to those born of adultery or incest? Is he not an accomplice in men’s sins, if he creates souls for the adulterers who make the bodies? As if, on hearing that seed grain had been stolen, you were to suppose that the fault lay in the nature of the grain and not in the man who stole the wheat; and that the earth therefore had no business nourishing the seed in its bosom, because the hands of the sower who cast it in were unclean. From the same source comes your mysterious question, Why do infants die? For, as you hold, it was because of their sins that they received bodies. There is a treatise of Didymus addressed to you in which he meets this question of yours with the answer that they had not sinned much, and so it was punishment enough for them just to have touched their bodily prisons. He, who was your teacher and mine too, wrote at my request, when you asked this question, three books of commentary on the prophet Hosea, and dedicated them to me. This shows which parts of his teaching each of us accepted. [b]