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| Spirit--A Term Expressive of an Operation of the Soul, Not of Its Nature. To Be Carefully Distinguished from the Spirit of God.
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Chapter XI.—Spirit—A
Term Expressive of an Operation of the Soul, Not of Its Nature.
To Be Carefully Distinguished from the Spirit of God.
But the nature of my present inquiry obliges me to
call the soul spirit or breath, because to breathe is ascribed to
another substance. We, however, claim this (operation) for the soul,
which we acknowledge to be an indivisible simple substance, and
therefore we must call it spirit in a definitive sense—not
because of its condition, but of its action; not in respect of its
nature, but of its operation; because it respires, and not
because it is spirit in any especial sense.1561
| 1561 Proprie “by
reason of its nature.” | For to blow or breathe is to respire. So
that we are driven to describe, by (the term which indicates this
respiration—that is to say) spirit—the soul which we
hold to be, by the propriety of its action, breath. Moreover, we
properly and especially insist on calling it breath (or spirit), in
opposition to Hermogenes, who derives the soul from matter instead of
from the afflatus or breath of God. He, to be sure, goes flatly
against the testimony of Scripture, and with this view converts breath
into spirit, because he cannot believe that the (creature on which was
breathed the) Spirit of God fell into sin, and then into condemnation;
and therefore he would conclude that the soul came from matter rather
than from the Spirit or breath of God. For this reason, we on our side
even from that passage, maintain the soul to be breath and not the
spirit, in the scriptural and distinctive sense of the spirit; and here
it is with regret that we apply the term spirit at all in the lower
sense, in consequence of the identical action of respiring and
breathing. In that passage, the only question is about the
natural substance; to respire being an act of nature. I would not tarry
a moment longer on this point, were it not for those heretics who
introduce into the soul some spiritual germ which passes my
comprehension: (they make it to have been) conferred upon the soul by
the secret liberality of her mother Sophia (Wisdom), without the
knowledge of the Creator.1562
| 1562 See the tract Adv.
Valentin., c. xxv. infra. | But (Holy)
Scripture, which has a better knowledge of the soul’s Maker, or
rather God, has told us nothing more than that God breathed on
man’s face the breath of life, and that man became a living soul,
by means of which he was both to live and breathe; at the same time
making a sufficiently clear distinction between the spirit and the
soul,1563
| 1563 Compare Adv.
Hermog. xxxii. xxxiii.; also Irenæus, v. 12, 17. [See Vol. I.
p. 527, this Series.] | in such passages as the following, wherein
God Himself declares: “My Spirit went forth from me, and I made
the breath of each. And the breath of my Spirit became
soul.”1564
And again:
“He giveth breath unto the people that are on the earth, and
Spirit to them that walk thereon.”1565
First of all there comes the (natural) soul, that is to say, the
breath, to the people that are on the earth,—in other words, to
those who act carnally in the flesh; then afterwards comes the Spirit
to those who walk thereon,—that is, who subdue the works of the
flesh; because the apostle also says, that “that is not first
which is spiritual, but that which is natural, (or in possession of the
natural soul,) and afterward that which is spiritual.”1566
For, inasmuch as Adam straightway predicted
that “great mystery of Christ and the church,”1567
when he said, “This now is bone of my
bones, and flesh of my flesh; therefore shall a man leave his father
and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they two shall
become one flesh,”1568
he experienced the
influence of the Spirit. For there fell upon him that ecstasy,
which is the Holy Ghost’s operative virtue of prophecy. And even
the evil spirit too is an influence which comes upon a man. Indeed, the
Spirit of God not more really “turned Saul into another
man,”1569
that is to say,
into a prophet, when “people said one to another, What is this
which is come to the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the
prophets?”1570
than did the evil
spirit afterwards turn him into another man—in other words, into
an apostate. Judas likewise was for a long time reckoned among the
elect (apostles), and was even appointed to the office of their
treasurer; he was not yet the traitor, although he was become
fraudulent; but afterwards the devil entered into him. Consequently, as
the spirit neither of God nor of the devil is naturally planted with a
man’s soul at his birth, this soul must evidently exist apart and
alone, previous to the accession to it of either spirit: if thus apart
and alone, it must also be simple and uncompounded as regards its
substance; and therefore it cannot respire from any other cause than
from the actual condition of its own substance.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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