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.