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| Plato Suggested Certain Errors to the Gnostics. Functions of the Soul. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter XVIII.—Plato
Suggested Certain Errors to the Gnostics. Functions of the
Soul.
I turn now to the department of our intellectual
faculties, such as Plato has handed it over to the heretics, distinct
from our bodily functions, having obtained the knowledge of them before
death.1620
1620 Said ironically, as if
rallying Plato for inconsistency between his theory here and the
fact. | He asks in the
Phædo, What, then, (do you think) concerning the actual
possession of knowledge? Will the body be a hindrance to it or
not, if one shall admit it as an associate in the search after
knowledge? I have a similar question to ask: Have the faculties of
their sight and hearing any truth and reality for human beings or
not? Is it not the case, that even the poets are always muttering
against us, that we can never hear or see anything for certain? He
remembered, no doubt, what Epicharmus the comic poet had said:
“It is the mind which sees, the mind that hears—all else is
blind and deaf.” To the same purport he says again, that man is
the wisest whose mental power is the clearest; who never applies the
sense of sight, nor adds to his mind the help of any such faculty, but
employs the intellect itself in unmixed serenity when he indulges in
contemplation for the purpose of acquiring an unalloyed insight into
the nature of things; divorcing himself with all his might from his
eyes and ears and (as one must express himself) from the whole of his
body, on the ground of its disturbing the soul, and not allowing it to
possess either truth or wisdom, whenever it is brought into
communication with it. We see, then, that in opposition to the bodily
senses another faculty is provided of a much more serviceable
character, even the powers of the soul, which produce an understanding
of that truth whose realities are not palpable nor open to the bodily
senses, but are very remote from men’s everyday knowledge, lying
in secret—in the heights above, and in the presence of God
Himself. For Plato maintains that there are certain invisible
substances, incorporeal, celestial,1621
1621 Supermundiales
“placed above this world.” | divine, and
eternal, which they call ideas, that is to say, (archetypal)
forms, which are the patterns and causes of those objects of nature
which are manifest to us, and lie under our corporeal senses: the
former, (according to Plato,) are the actual verities, and
the latter the images and
likenesses of them. Well, now, are there not here gleams of the
heretical principles of the Gnostics and the Valentinians? It is from
this philosophy that they eagerly adopt the difference between the
bodily senses and the intellectual faculties,—a distinction which
they actually apply to the parable of the ten virgins: making the five
foolish virgins to symbolize the five bodily senses, seeing that these
are so silly and so easy to be deceived; and the wise virgin to express
the meaning of the intellectual faculties, which are so wise as to
attain to that mysterious and supernal truth, which is placed in the
pleroma. (Here, then, we have) the mystic original of the ideas of
these heretics. For in this philosophy lie both their Æons and
their genealogies. Thus, too, do they divide sensation, both into the
intellectual powers from their spiritual seed, and the sensuous
faculties from the animal, which cannot by any means comprehend
spiritual things. From the former germ spring invisible things; from
the latter, visible things which are grovelling and temporary, and
which are obvious to the senses, placed as they are in palpable
forms.1622 It is because of
these views that we have in a former passage stated as a preliminary
fact, that the mind is nothing else than an apparatus or instrument of
the soul,1623
1623 See above, c. xii. p.
192. | and that the spirit
is no other faculty, separate from the soul, but is the soul itself
exercised in respiration; although that influence which either God on
the one hand, or the devil on the other, has breathed upon it, must be
regarded in the light of an additional element.1624
1624 Above, c. xi. p.
191. |
And now, with respect to the difference between the intellectual powers
and the sensuous faculties, we only admit it so far as the natural
diversity between them requires of us. (There is, of course, a
difference) between things corporeal and things spiritual, between
visible and invisible beings, between objects which are manifest to the
view and those which are hidden from it; because the one class are
attributed to sensation, and the other to the intellect. But yet both
the one and the other must be regarded as inherent in the soul, and as
obedient to it, seeing that it embraces bodily objects by means of the
body, in exactly the same way that it conceives incorporeal objects by
help of the mind, except that it is even exercising sensation when it
is employing the intellect. For is it not true, that to employ the
senses is to use the intellect? And to employ the intellect amounts to
a use of the senses?1625
1625 Intelligere sentire
est. | What indeed can
sensation be, but the understanding of that which is the object of the
sensation? And what can the intellect or understanding be, but the
seeing of that which is the object understood? Why adopt such
excruciating means of torturing simple knowledge and crucifying the
truth? Who can show me the sense which does not understand the object
of its sensation, or the intellect which perceives not the object which
it understands, in so clear a way as to prove to me that the one can do
without the other? If corporeal things are the objects of sense, and
incorporeal ones objects of the intellect, it is the classes of
the objects which are different, not the domicile or abode of sense and
intellect; in other words, not the soul (anima) and the
mind (animus). By what, in short, are corporeal things
perceived? If it is by the soul,1626
1626 Oehler has
“anima;” we should rather have expected
“animo,” which is another reading. |
then the mind is a sensuous faculty, and not merely an intellectual
power; for whilst it understands, it also perceives, because without
the perception there is no understanding. If, however, corporeal things
are perceived by the soul, then it follows that the soul’s power
is an intellectual one, and not merely a sensuous faculty; for while it
perceives it also understands, because without understanding there is
no perceiving. And then, again, by what are incorporeal things
understood? If it is by the mind,1627 where will be
the soul? If it is by the soul, where will be the mind? For things
which differ ought to be mutually absent from each other, when they are
occupied in their respective functions and duties. It must be your
opinion, indeed, that the mind is absent from the soul on certain
occasions; for (you suppose) that we are so made and constituted as not
to know that we have seen or heard something, on the
hypothesis1628
1628 Subjunctive verb,
“fuerit.” | that the mind was
absent at the time. I must therefore maintain that the very soul itself
neither saw nor heard, since it was at the given moment absent with its
active power—that is to say, the mind. The truth is, that
whenever a man is out of his mind,1629 it is his soul
that is demented—not because the mind is absent, but because it
is a fellow-sufferer (with the soul) at the time.1630
1630 The opposite opinion
was held by Tertullian’s opponents, who distinguished between the
mind and the soul. They said, that when a man was out of his mind, his
mind left him, but that his soul remained. (Lactantius, De Opif.
xviii.; Instit. Div. vii. 12; La Cerda). | Indeed, it is the soul which is principally
affected by casualties of such a kind. Whence is this fact
confirmed? It is confirmed from the following consideration: that after the
soul’s departure, the mind is no longer found in a man: it always
follows the soul; nor does it at last remain behind it alone, after
death. Now, since it follows the soul, it is also indissolubly attached
to it; just as the understanding is attached to the soul, which is
followed by the mind, with which the understanding is indissolubly
connected. Granted now that the understanding is superior to the
senses, and a better discoverer of mysteries, what matters it, so long
as it is only a peculiar faculty of the soul, just as the senses
themselves are? It does not at all affect my argument, unless the
understanding were held to be superior to the senses, for the purpose
of deducing from the allegation of such superiority its separate
condition likewise. After thus combating their alleged difference, I
have also to refute this question of superiority, previous to my
approaching the belief (which heresy propounds) in a superior god. On
this point, however, of a (superior) god, we shall have to measure
swords with the heretics on their own ground.1631
Our present subject concerns the soul, and the point is to prevent the
insidious ascription of a superiority to the intellect or
understanding. Now, although the objects which are touched by the
intellect are of a higher nature, since they are spiritual, than those
which are embraced by the senses, since these are corporeal, it will
still be only a superiority in the objects—as of lofty
ones contrasted with humble—not in the faculties of the
intellect against the senses. For how can the intellect be superior to
the senses, when it is these which educate it for the discovery of
various truths? It is a fact, that these truths are learned by means of
palpable forms; in other words, invisible things are discovered by the
help of visible ones, even as the apostle tells us in his epistle:
“For the invisible things of Him are clearly seen from the
creation of the world, being understood by the things that are
made;”1632 and as Plato too
might inform our heretics: “The things which appear are the
image1633 of the things which are concealed from
view,”1634
1634 Timæus,
pp. 29, 30, 37, 38. | whence it must
needs follow that this world is by all means an image of some other: so
that the intellect evidently uses the senses for its own guidance, and
authority, and mainstay; and without the senses truth could not be
attained. How, then, can a thing be superior to that which is
instrumental to its existence, which is also indispensable to it, and
to whose help it owes everything which it acquires? Two conclusions
therefore follow from what we have said: (1) That the intellect is not
to be preferred above the senses, on the (supposed) ground that the
agent through which a thing exists is inferior to the thing itself; and
(2) that the intellect must not be separated from the senses, since the
instrument by which a thing’s existence is sustained is
associated with the thing itself.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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