Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] The Platonists stir all this up with cleverness rather than truth. Every body, they say, must be either animate or inanimate. If inanimate, it will be moved from outside; if animate, from inside. But the soul is moved neither from outside, since it isn't inanimate, nor from inside, since it is itself rather the thing that moves the body. And so the soul doesn't appear to be a body, since it isn't moved, from any quarter, in the manner bodies are. [2] To this we shall first marvel at the sheer incoherence of a definition that drags in terms that don't even apply to the soul. For the soul cannot be called an animate or an inanimate body, since it is precisely the soul that makes a body animate by being present, or inanimate by being absent from it. So what does the making cannot itself be the thing made, such that it could be called animate or inanimate — the soul, after all, is named for its own substance. But if what is soul cannot even admit of being called an animate or inanimate body, how can it be summoned to answer to the mold of animate and inanimate bodies at all? [3] Next: if it belongs to a body to be moved from outside by something else, and we've shown above that the soul too is moved by another — when it prophesies, when it rages — and certainly from outside, since by another, then by the very terms of their own proposed example I am entitled to recognize as a body whatever will be moved from outside by another. But if being moved by another belongs to a body, how much more does moving another belong to one! And the soul moves the body, and its efforts are plainly visible from outside. It is the soul that drives the feet into walking, the hands into touching, the eyes into seeing, the tongue into speaking — as if some puppeteer's motion stirred the surface from within. Where does this incorporeal power of the soul get its force? Where does an empty thing get the strength to push solid things around? [4] But then how, they ask, do bodily and intellectual senses appear divided in a human being? The qualities of bodily things, they say — earth, fire — are reported by bodily senses, touch and sight; but the qualities of incorporeal things — kindness, malice — are grasped by intellectual senses. Therefore, they conclude, the soul, whose qualities are grasped not by bodily but by intellectual senses, must plainly be incorporeal. [5] Certainly — if I fail to knock out the very first rung of this definition. But look: I can show incorporeal things subject to bodily senses — sound to hearing, color to sight, smell to smell — and it's by their example that the soul, too, has access to the body; don't tell me these are reported through bodily senses just because they happen to touch bodily things. Well then, if it's agreed that incorporeal things too are grasped by bodily senses, why shouldn't the soul, though a body, likewise be reported by incorporeal senses? The definition, clearly, has been ruled out of court. [6] Among their more impressive arguments will also be this one: that every body, they judge, is nourished by bodily things, while the soul, being incorporeal, is nourished by incorporeal things — namely, the pursuits of wisdom. But this rung won't hold up either, since Soranus, that most accomplished authority of the Methodic school of medicine, answers that the soul too is nourished by bodily things — indeed that a soul failing from lack of food is generally propped back up by it. Of course! Take that away entirely and it slips clean out of the body. So even Soranus himself, having written on the soul most exhaustively in four volumes and tested every philosopher's opinion, claims a bodily substance for the soul — though he cheats it of immortality. Not everyone, after all, is prepared to believe what belongs to Christians. [7] So then, just as Soranus shows by the facts that the soul is nourished by bodily things, let the philosopher likewise produce evidence that it feeds on incorporeal ones. But no one, ever, hesitating on the brink of death, has had honeyed water poured down him out of some quotation from Plato, or crumbs stuffed in from some morsel of Aristotle's fine print. And what will become of all those countless souls of hillbillies and barbarians, who have none of wisdom's rations and yet, untrained, are strong in good sense — living without academies, without the porticoes of Athens, without Socrates' prison cell, fasting, in short, from philosophy their whole lives long, and living just fine? For it isn't the substance itself that these studies feed, but the discipline; they don't fatten the soul, they merely dress it up. And it's convenient, too, that the Stoics themselves declare the arts to be bodies — so on that reckoning too the soul is a body, if it's believed to be nourished even by the arts. [8] But philosophy's overreaching concentration is often apt not even to watch its own feet (so Thales fell down his well), and is apt, failing to grasp its own conclusions, to suspect them of being some derangement of health (so Chrysippus reached for hellebore). Something like that, I think, happened to him when he denied that two bodies could occupy one — a man out of touch with the sight and the reflection of pregnant women, who carry, not one body a day, but two, three, in the compass of a single womb. There is even a case on record in civil law of a Greek woman who gave birth to five at once — one mother of all her sons at a single stroke, a single litter's parent of many, a single womb's mother of a crowd — who, packed with that many bodies, I might almost say a whole population, was herself a sixth body. [9] The whole of nature will bear witness that bodies destined to come from bodies are already there, where they come from. Whatever comes from something else must, of necessity, be a second thing. And nothing comes from something else unless, at the moment of being begotten, there are two.