The Cup of Forgetfulness

We can overturn their teaching about souls passing from body to body by one fact alone: souls remember nothing whatever of what happened to them in an earlier life. If they were sent out for the very purpose of gaining experience of every kind of action, then they would necessarily have to keep a memory of what they had already done, so that they could fill in what they still lacked, instead of circling the same pursuits over and over without a break and wasting their labor for nothing. (The mere joining of a soul to a body could not altogether wipe out the memory and the contemplation of what it had already experienced.) And this holds all the more if they came into the world for exactly that purpose. [a]

Think of what happens when the body is asleep and at rest. Whatever the soul sees on its own and does in a vision, it remembers much of and reports to the body; a man wakes, perhaps long afterward, and tells what he saw in a dream. In the same way he would certainly remember what he did before he came into this particular body. If something seen for the briefest moment, or merely imagined by the soul alone in a dream, is remembered after the soul has mingled with the body again and spread out through all its parts, how much more would it remember the things it lived among for so long a stretch — for the whole span of a past lifetime.

Plato, that ancient Athenian, was the first to bring this opinion forward, and when he could not answer these objections he invented a cup of forgetfulness, imagining that this was a way out of the difficulty. He attempted no proof of any kind. He simply laid it down that when souls enter this life, the spirit who watches over their entrance makes them drink forgetfulness before they get into the bodies assigned to them.

It escaped him that in saying this he had fallen into a worse difficulty. If the cup of forgetfulness, once drunk, can blot out the memory of everything that has been done — then how, Plato, do you know this at all, since your soul is in a body now? How do you know that before it entered the body a spirit made it drink a drug that caused forgetting? If you remember the spirit, and the cup, and the entrance into life, then you ought to know the other things too. And if you do not know them, then there is no truth in the story of the spirit, nor in the cup of forgetfulness so artfully prepared.

Then there are those who say that the body itself is the drug of forgetfulness. To them this can be said. How is it, then, that whatever the soul sees by its own working — in dreams, or by reflection, or by hard mental effort while the body lies passive — it remembers and reports to the people around it? And again: if the body itself were what causes forgetting, then the soul, living in the body, could not remember even the things it took in long ago by eye or ear. The moment the eye turned away from what it was looking at, the memory of it would be destroyed as well. A soul living inside the very cause of forgetting could know nothing except what it was seeing at that instant. And how, on their account, could it come to know divine things at all, and keep the memory of them while it is in the body, if the body itself is what causes forgetting? Yet the prophets, while they were still on earth, remembered — once they had come back to their ordinary state of mind — whatever they had seen or heard in visions of heavenly things, and they told others about it. So the body does not make the soul forget what it has seen in the Spirit. The soul teaches the body, and shares with it the vision it has had.

The body does not have more power than the soul. It is the soul that breathes into the body, gives it life, makes it grow and holds it together; the soul takes possession of the body and rules it. The soul is certainly slowed down in its speed, in exactly the proportion in which the body shares in its motion — but it never loses the knowledge that properly belongs to it. Think of the body as a tool, and of the soul as having the mind of a craftsman. The craftsman finds the idea of a piece of work springing up quickly in his mind, but he can only carry it out slowly by means of a tool, because the material he works on will not yield perfectly. His quick thought is blended with the slow action of the tool, and what comes of it is a middling sort of speed. In the same way the soul, mixed in with the body that belongs to it, is held back to a degree, its quickness blended with the body’s slowness. But it does not lose its own powers altogether. It shares life with the body, so to speak, without ceasing to live itself; and while it passes other things on to the body, it loses neither the knowledge of them nor the memory of what it has seen.

So if the soul remembers nothing of an earlier existence, but does perceive what is here, it follows that it never lived in other bodies, never did things it has no knowledge of, and never knew things it cannot now think about. Just as each of us receives his body through the skilled work of God, so he receives his own soul. God is not so poor, so short of resources, that he cannot give each individual body its own proper soul, just as he gives it its own particular character.

And so, when the number is complete — the number he settled on beforehand in his own counsel — all who have been enrolled for life will rise again, with their own bodies, and their own souls, and their own spirits, the ones in which they pleased God. Those who deserve punishment, for their part, will go away into it, they too with their own souls and their own bodies, the ones in which they stood apart from the grace of God. Both groups will then stop begetting and being begotten, marrying and being given in marriage, so that the number of mankind, matching what God ordained beforehand, may be complete, and the whole plan the Father formed may be fully realized.

The Lord has taught in the fullest way that souls go on existing — not by passing from one body to another — that they keep the same form as the body they were fitted to, and that they remember the deeds they did in this life and have now left behind. He teaches all of it in the account of the rich man and the Lazarus who found rest at Abraham’s side. In that account the rich man knows Lazarus after death, and knows Abraham as well; each of them stays in his own place; and the rich man asks that Lazarus be sent to relieve him — the very Lazarus to whom he would not give even the crumbs from his table. Abraham answers him, and Abraham knows not only his own situation but the rich man’s too, and tells anyone who does not want to come into that place of torment to believe Moses and the prophets, and to accept the preaching of the one who was going to rise from the dead. [i]

All of this states plainly that souls go on existing; that they do not pass from body to body; that they have the form of a man, so that they can be recognized; that they keep the memory of things in this world; that Abraham had the gift of prophecy; and that each class of souls receives the dwelling it has deserved, even before the judgment.

Someone may object at this point that souls which only began to exist a little while ago cannot last for any length of time — that they must either be unborn, in order to be immortal, or else, if they had a beginning in the way of generation, must die along with the body itself. Let such people learn that God alone, who is Lord of all, is without beginning and without end, truly and forever the same, always remaining the same unchanging Being. But everything that proceeds from him, whatever has been made and is being made, does receive its own beginning of generation, and for that reason is lesser than the one who formed it, since it is not unbegotten. All the same, such things last, and stretch their existence out over a long series of ages, in accordance with the will of God their Creator. He grants them both that they should be formed in the beginning, and that they should go on existing afterward.

Take the heaven above us, the firmament, the sun, the moon, the rest of the stars, and all their grandeur. They had no previous existence; they were called into being, and they continue through a long course of time because God wills it. Anyone who thinks the same way about souls and spirits — and in fact about everything that has been created — will not go far astray. Everything made had a beginning when it was formed, but lasts as long as God wills that it should exist and continue.

The prophetic Spirit bears witness to this when he declares: “For he spoke, and they were made; he commanded, and they were created. He has established them forever, yes, forever and ever.” And he speaks this way about the salvation of a man: “He asked life of you, and you gave him length of days forever and ever.” This shows that it is the Father of all who grants continuance forever and ever to those who are saved. Life does not arise from us, or from our own nature; it is given according to the grace of God. So the man who keeps the life given to him and gives thanks to the one who gave it will also receive length of days forever and ever. But the man who rejects it, and shows himself ungrateful to his Maker — created, and not recognizing the one who bestowed the gift on him — deprives himself of continuance forever and ever.

That is why the Lord said to people who showed themselves ungrateful toward him: “If you have not been faithful in what is little, who will give you what is great?” He meant that those who in this brief and temporary life have shown themselves ungrateful to the one who gave it will justly not receive length of days forever and ever from him.

The animal body is certainly not itself the soul, though it keeps company with the soul as long as God pleases. In the same way the soul is not itself life; it shares in the life bestowed on it by God. That is why the prophetic word says of the first-formed man that “he became a living soul” — teaching us that the soul came alive by sharing in life, so that the soul, and the life it has, must be understood as two separate things. When God gives life and lasting duration, then even souls that did not exist before go on existing from that point onward, since God has both willed that they should exist and willed that they should continue. God’s will has to govern and rule in everything, while everything else gives way to him, is in subjection to him, and is devoted to his service. That is as much as I will say about the creation of the soul and its continuance.

Besides what has already been said, Basilides will find himself forced by his own principles to maintain not only that there are 365 heavens, each made in turn by the one before it, but that an immense and countless multitude of heavens have always been in the process of being made, are being made now, and will go on being made, so that the forming of heavens of this kind can never stop. For if the second heaven was made from the outflow of the first, in its likeness, and the third from the likeness of the second, and so on through all the rest that follow, then it follows of necessity that from the outflow of our heaven — the one he calls the last — another must be formed like it, and from that one a third. So neither the outflow from the heavens already made nor the manufacture of new heavens can ever come to an end; the operation must run on without limit and give rise to a number of heavens that is simply indefinite. [p]

The rest of those who are wrongly called Gnostics — the ones who hold that the prophets spoke their prophecies under the inspiration of different gods — are easily overthrown by this one fact: that all the prophets proclaimed one God and Lord, and that this one is the very Maker of heaven and earth and of everything in them. And they announced the coming of his Son besides, as I will prove from the Scriptures themselves in the books that follow.

Someone may object that in the Hebrew language different expressions for God occur in the Scriptures — Sabaoth, Eloe, Adonai, and all the other such words — and may try to prove from them that there are different powers and different gods. Let such people learn that all expressions of this kind are announcements and titles of one and the same Being. The word Eloe in the Jewish language means God, while Eloim and Eleuth in Hebrew mean “that which contains all.” As for the title Adonai: sometimes it means what is nameable and admirable, but at other times, when the letter Daleth in it is doubled and the word takes a rough sound at the front — Addonai — it means “one who sets a bound and separates the land from the water,” so that the water should not afterward flood the land. In the same way Sabaoth: when the last syllable is written with a Greek omega — Sabaōth — it means “one who acts of his own will”; but when it is written with a Greek omicron — Sabaoth — it expresses “the first heaven.” So too with the word Jaoth: when the last syllable is made long and aspirated — Jaōth — it means “a measure fixed beforehand”; but when it is written short, with a Greek omicron — Jaoth — it means “one who puts evils to flight.” All the other expressions likewise bring out the title of one and the same Being: in our own language, the Lord of Powers, the Father of all, God Almighty, the Most High, the Creator, the Maker, and the like. These are not the names and titles of a succession of different beings, but of one and the same; and by them the one God and Father is made known, the one who contains all things and grants to all the gift of existing.

That the preaching of the apostles, the authoritative teaching of the Lord, the announcements of the prophets, the dictated letters of the apostles, and the ministry of the law all praise one and the same Being — the God and Father of all — and not many different beings; that they do not describe one who draws his substance from different gods or powers, but declare that all things were formed by one and the same Father, who nevertheless fits his works to the natures and tendencies of the materials he deals with; and that things visible and invisible, and in short everything that has been made, were created neither by angels nor by any other power, but by God the Father alone — that all of this agrees with what I have been saying has, I think, been sufficiently proved. These weighty arguments have shown that there is one God, the Maker of all things.

But I do not want to seem to be avoiding the line of proof that can be drawn from the Scriptures of the Lord, since those Scriptures set this very point out far more plainly and clearly. So, for the sake of those at least who do not bring a warped mind to bear on them, I will devote a whole book to the Scriptures I have referred to, follow them out fairly, and set out from these divine Scriptures plain proofs for everyone who loves the truth.