Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
ON THE NATURAL ENDOWMENTS. [1] And so here too we conclude that all the natural endowments of the soul, being substantive to it, are present in it and advance and progress along with it, from the very source by which the soul itself is reckoned. As our own Seneca so often says: the seeds of all arts and of all ages are implanted in us, and God, the hidden schoolmaster, brings forth our talents — from seeds, that is, implanted and hidden through infancy, which are also understanding. For it is from these that talents are produced. [2] Further, in the seeds of crops there is one form for each kind, yet the outcomes vary: some turn out true to type, some answer even better, some degenerate, depending on the condition of sky and soil, on the manner of cultivation and care, on the outcome of the seasons, on the license of chance events. So too the soul may be permitted to be uniform in its seed, multiform in its yield. For here too place makes a difference. [3] It is recorded that at Thebes people are born dull and brutish, at Athens the sharpest at wisdom and speech, where, in the district of Colyttus, the children speak with precocious tongue a full month sooner — since Plato too, in the Timaeus, affirms that Minerva, when she was founding that city, was looking to nothing else than the nature of the region, which promised talents of just this kind; hence in the Laws also he himself instructs Megillus and Clinias, when founding a city, to see to the choice of the site. But Empedocles locates the cause of a keen or a dull disposition in the quality of the blood, and derives its perfecting and advancing from teaching and discipline. All the same, the properties of nations are by now common knowledge. The comic poets mock the Phrygians as cowards; Sallust strikes at the Moors as fickle and the Dalmatians as ferocious; the apostle himself, for his part, marks the Cretans down as habitual liars. [4] Perhaps something is also owed to the body and to health. Corpulence hinders wisdom, leanness assists it; paralysis wastes the mind, consumption preserves it. How much more, then, will things be attributed to accidents that, quite apart from bodily bulk and vigor, either sharpen or dull! Teaching, discipline, the arts, experience, effort, study sharpen; ignorance, sloth, idleness, lust, inexperience, leisure, and vices dull — and beyond these, if certain powers are also in charge. [5] Indeed they are in charge — according to us, God the Lord and the devil his rival; according to common opinion, providence and fate and necessity and fortune and freedom of will. For these the philosophers distinguish too, and we for our part have already promised to discuss them, according to the faith, under their own proper heading. [6] It is plain how great is the set of things that have distributed the single nature of the soul so variously that they are commonly credited to nature, when in fact they are not distinct species but lots cast upon a nature and substance that is one — that very nature, of course, which God conferred upon Adam and made the matrix of all. And so they will be lots, not species, of a substance that is one; that is to say, this moral variety, however great it now is, would not have been so great in Adam himself, the prince of the race. For all these things ought to have been present in him as in the fountainhead of our nature, and so flowed out from there with the whole of their variety — if the variety had belonged to nature.