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Augustine of Hippo, A Treatise On the Soul And Its Origin
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A Treatise on the soul and its origin,
Chapter 3 [III]—The Eloquence of Vincentius, Its Dangers and Its Tolerableness.
Chapter 5 [V.]—Another of Victor’s Errors, that the Soul is Corporeal.
Chapter 8 [VIII.]—Victor’s Erroneous Opinion, that the Soul Deserved to Become Sinful.
Chapter 9.—Victor Utterly Unable to Explain How the Sinless Soul Deserved to Be Made Sinful.
Chapter 16 [XIII.]—Difficulty in the Opinion Which Maintains that Souls are Not by Propagation.
Chapter 18.—By “Breath” Is Signified Sometimes the Holy Spirit.
Chapter 19.—The Meaning of “Breath” In Scripture.
Chapter 20.—Other Ways of Taking the Passage.
Chapter 21.—The Second Passage Quoted by Victor.
Chapter 22.—Victor’s Third Quotation.
Chapter 23.—His Fourth Quotation.
Chapter 26 [XVI.]—The Fifth Passage of Scripture Quoted by Victor.
Chapter 27 [XVII.]—Augustin Did Not Venture to Define Anything About the Propagation of the Soul.
Chapter 28.—A Natural Figure of Speech Must Not Be Literally Pressed.
Chapter 29 [XVIII.]—The Sixth Passage of Scripture Quoted by Victor.
Chapter 30—The Danger of Arguing from Silence.
Chapter 32 [XIX.]—The Self-Contradiction of Victor as to the Origin of the Soul.
Chapter 1 [I.]—Depraved Eloquence an Injurious Accomplishment.
Chapter 2 [II.]—He Asks What the Great Knowledge is that Victor Imparts.
Chapter 3.—The Difference Between the Senses of the Body and Soul.
Chapter 4.—To Believe the Soul is a Part of God is Blasphemy.
Chapter 5 [III.]—In What Sense Created Beings are Out of God.
Chapter 6.—Shall God’s Nature Be Mutable, Sinful, Impious, Even Eternally Damned.
Chapter 7.—To Think the Soul Corporeal an Error.
Chapter 8.—The Thirst of the Rich Man in Hell Does Not Prove the Soul to Be Corporeal.
Chapter 9 [V.]—How Could the Incorporeal God Breathe Out of Himself a Corporeal Substance?
Chapter 10 [VI.]—Children May Be Found of Like or of Unlike Dispositions with Their Parents.
Chapter 11 [VII.]—Victor Implies that the Soul Had a “State” And “Merit” Before Incarnation.
Chapter 12 [VIII.]—How Did the Soul Deserve to Be Incarnated?
Chapter 13 [IX.]—Victor Teaches that God Thwarts His Own Predestination.
Chapter 15 [XI.]—Victor “Decides” That Oblations Should Be Offered Up for Those Who Die Unbaptized.
Chapter 18 [XIII.]—Victor’s Dilemma and Fall.
Chapter 19 [XIV.]—Victor Relies on Ambiguous Scriptures.
Chapter 20.—Victor Quotes Scriptures for Their Silence, and Neglects the Biblical Usage.
Chapter 21 [XV.]—Victor’s Perplexity and Failure.
Chapter 22 [XVI.]—Peter’s Responsibility in the Case of Victor.
Chapter 23 [XVII.]—Who They are that are Not Injured by Reading Injurious Books.
Chapter 1 [I.]—Augustin’s Purpose in Writing.
Chapter 5.—Examination of Victor’s Simile: Does Man Give Out Nothing by Breathing?
Chapter 6.—The Simile Reformed in Accordance with Truth.
Chapter 7 [V.]—Victor Apparently Gives the Creative Breath to Man Also.
Chapter 8 [VI.]—Victor’s Second Error. (See Above in Book I. 26 [XVI.].)
Chapter 9 [VII.]—His Third Error. (See Above in Book II. 11 [VII.].)
Chapter 10.—His Fourth Error. (See Above in Book I. 6 [VI.] and Book II. 11 [VII.].)
Chapter 11 [VIII.]—His Fifth Error. (See Above in Book I. 8 [VIII.] and Book II. 12 [VIII.].)
Chapter 13 [X]—His Seventh Error. (See Above in Book II. 13 [IX.].)
Chapter 14.—His Eighth Error. (See Above in Book II. 13 [IX.].)
Chapter 15 [XI.]—His Ninth Error. (See Above in Book II. 14 [X.].)
Chapter 16.—God Rules Everywhere: and Yet the “Kingdom of Heaven” May Not Be Everywhere.
Chapter 17.—Where the Kingdom of God May Be Understood to Be.
Chapter 18 [XII.]—His Tenth Error. (See Above in Book I. 13 [XI.] and Book II. 15 [XI.]).
Chapter 19 [XIII.]—His Eleventh Error. (See Above in Book I. 15 [XII.] and Book II. 16.)
Chapter 20 [XIV.]—Augustin Calls on Victor to Correct His Errors. (See Above in Book II. 22 [XVI.].)
Chapter 21.—Augustin Compliments Victor’s Talents and Diligence.
Chapter 22 [XV.]—A Summary Recapitulation of the Errors of Victor.
Chapter 23.—Obstinacy Makes the Heretic.
Chapter 1 [I.]—The Personal Character of This Book.
Chapter 2 [II.]—The Points Which Victor Thought Blameworthy in Augustin.
Chapter 3.—How Much Do We Know of the Nature of the Body?
Chapter 4 [III.]—Is the Question of Breath One that Concerns the Soul, or Body, or What?
Chapter 5 [IV.]—God Alone Can Teach Whence Souls Come.
Chapter 8.—We Have No Memory of Our Creation.
Chapter 9 [VII.]—Our Ignorance of Ourselves Illustrated by the Remarkable Memory of One Simplicius.
Chapter 13 [IX.]—In What Sense the Holy Ghost is Said to Make Intercession for Us.
Chapter 15 [XI.]—We Must Not Be Wise Above What is Written.
Chapter 19 [XIII.]—Whether the Soul is a Spirit.
Chapter 20 [XIV.]—The Body Does Not Receive God’s Image.
Chapter 21 [XV.]—Recognition and Form Belong to Souls as Well as Bodies.
Chapter 22.—Names Do Not Imply Corporeity.
Chapter 23 [XVI.]—Figurative Speech Must Not Be Taken Literally.
Chapter 24.—Abraham’s Bosom—What It Means.
Chapter 25 [XVII.]—The Disembodied Soul May Think of Itself Under a Bodily Form.
Chapter 27.—Is the Soul Wounded When the Body is Wounded?
Chapter 28.—Is the Soul Deformed by the Body’s Imperfections?
Chapter 29 [XIX.]—Does the Soul Take the Body’s Clothes Also Away with It?
Chapter 30.—Is Corporeity Necessary for Recognition?
Chapter 31 [XX.]—Modes of Knowledge in the Soul Distinguished.
Chapter 32.—Inconsistency of Giving the Soul All the Parts of Sex and Yet No Sex.
Chapter 33.—The Phenix After Death Coming to Life Again.
Chapter 34 [XXI.]—Prophetic Visions.
Chapter 35.—Do Angels Appear to Men in Real Bodies?
Chapter 36 [XXII.]—He Passes on to the Second Question About the Soul, Whether It is Called Spirit.
Chapter 37 [XXIII.]—Wide and Narrow Sense of the Word “Spirit.”
Chapter 33.—The Phenix After Death Coming to Life Again.
Now, what you say about the phenix has nothing whatever to do with the subject before us. For the phenix symbolizes the resurrection of the body; it does not do away with the sex of souls; if indeed, as is thought, he is born afresh after his death. I suppose, however, that you thought your discourse would not be sufficiently plausible unless you declaimed a good deal about the phenix, after the fashion of young people. Now do you find in the body of your bird male organs of generation and not a male bird; or female ones, and not a female? But, I beg of you, reflect on what it is you say,—what theory you are trying to construct, and to recommend for our acceptance. You say that the soul, spread through all the limbs of the body, grew stiff by congelation, and received the entire shape of the whole body from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet, and from the inmost marrow to the skin’s outward surface. At this rate it must have received, in the case of a female body, all the inner appurtenances of a woman’s body, and yet not be a woman! Why, pray, are all the members feminine in a true living body, and yet the whole no woman? And why all be male, and the result not a man? Who can be so presumptuous as to believe, and profess, and teach all this? Is it that souls never generate? Then, of course, mules and she-mules are not male and female. Is it that souls without bodies of flesh would be unable to cohabit? Well, but this deprivation is shared by castrated men; and yet, although both the process and the motion be taken from them, their sex is not removed—some slender remnant of their male members being still left to them. Nobody ever said that a eunuch is not a male. What now becomes of your opinion, that the souls even of eunuchs have the generative organs unimpaired, and that these organs will remain entire, on your principle, in their souls, even when they are clean removed from their bodily structure? For you say, the soul knows how to withdraw itself when that part of the flesh begins to be cut off, so that the form which has been removed when amputated is not lost; but although spread over it by condensation, it retires by an extremely rapid movement, and so buries itself within as to be kept quite safe; yet that cannot, forsooth, be a male in the other world which carries with it thither the whole appendage of male organs of generation, and which, if it had not even other signs in the body, was a male by reason of those organs alone. These opinions, my son, have no truth in them; if you will not allow that there is sex in the soul, there cannot be a body either.
33. Quod enim de phoenice loqueris, ad rem de qua agitur omnino non pertinet. Resurrectionem quippe illa significat corporum, non sexum destruit animarum: si tamen, ut creditur, de sua morte renascitur. Sed arbitror quod tuum sermonem parum putaveris fore plausibilem, si non multa de phoenice more adolescentium declamares. Numquid enim sunt in ejus corpore genitalia masculina et non est masculus, vel feminina et non est femina? Tu autem attende quid dicas, quid astruere, quid persuadere coneris. Animam dicis per cuncta membra diffusam gelando riguisse, et a vertice usque ad ima vestigia, a medullis intimis usque ad superficiem cutis, totam totius accepisse corporis formam: ac per hoc accepit in femineo corpore quidquid habent femineorum viscerum feminae, et verum est hoc corpus, et haec vera sunt membra, et tamen non est femina. Cur, obsecro te, in vero et vivo corpore omnia sunt membra feminea, et non est femina? in vero et vivo corpore membra sunt omnia masculina, et non est masculus? Quis ista credere, dicere, docere praesumat? An quia non generant animae? Ergo nec muli et mulae sunt masculi et feminae. An quia nec concumbere poterunt sine carneis corporibus animae? Sed hoc aufertur et his qui castrantur: et tamen cum eis adimatur et opus et motus, non adimitur sexus, figura quantulacumque masculinorum manente membrorum. Nemo unquam masculum negavit eunuchum. Quid quod apud te animae etiam eunuchorum testes integros habent, et si cuiquam genitalia prorsus tota tollantur, tota in ejus anima, secundum opinionem tuam, et omnino integra permanebunt? Novit enim se subtrahere, sicut dicis, cum ea pars carnis coeperit exsecari; ut ea forma quae inde sumpta est, quando illud unde sumpta est amputatur, non pereat; sed quamvis in fusa gelaverit, motu tamen celerrimo rapiatur, et interius recondatur, ut salva servetur: et tamen non sit masculus apud inferos, masculinorum genitalium secum afferens totum, qui cum illa in corpore non haberet, masculus fuit propter eorum solum locum. Falsa sunt haec, fili: si non vis ut sit in anima sexus; non sit et corpus.