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| Concerning the Philosophers Who Think that the Separation of Soul and Body is Not Penal, Though Plato Represents the Supreme Deity as Promising to the Inferior Gods that They Shall Never Be Dismissed from Their Bodies.
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Chapter 16.—Concerning the
Philosophers Who Think that the Separation of Soul and Body is Not
Penal, Though Plato Represents the Supreme Deity as Promising to
the Inferior Gods that They Shall Never Be Dismissed from Their
Bodies.
But the philosophers against whom
we are defending the city of God, that is, His Church seem to
themselves to have good cause to deride us, because we say that the
separation of the soul from the body is to be held as part of
man’s punishment. For they suppose that the blessedness of the
soul then only is complete, when it is quite denuded of the body,
and returns to God a pure and simple, and, as it were, naked
soul. On this point, if I should find nothing in their own
literature to refute this opinion, I should be forced laboriously
to demonstrate that it is not the body, but the corruptibility of
the body, which is a burden to the soul. Hence that sentence of
Scripture we quoted in a foregoing book, “For the corruptible
body presseth down the soul.”598
The word corruptible is added to
show that the soul is burdened, not by any body whatsoever, but by
the body such as it has become in consequence of sin. And even
though the word had not been added, we could understand nothing
else. But when Plato most expressly declares that the gods who
are made by the Supreme have immortal bodies, and when he
introduces their Maker himself, promising them as a great boon that
they should abide in their bodies eternally, and never by any death
be loosed from them, why do these adversaries of ours, for the sake
of troubling the Christian faith, feign to be ignorant of what they
quite well know, and even prefer to contradict themselves rather
than lose an opportunity of contradicting us? Here are Plato’s
words, as Cicero has translated them,599
| 599 A translation of part of the
Timæus, given in a little book of Cicero’s, De
Universo. | in which he introduces the Supreme
addressing the gods He had made, and saying, “Ye who are sprung
from a divine stock, consider of what works I am the parent and
author. These (your bodies) are indestructible so long as I will
it; although all that is composed can be destroyed. But it is
wicked to dissolve what reason has compacted. But, seeing that ye
have been born, ye cannot indeed be immortal and indestructible;
yet ye shall by no means be destroyed, nor shall any fates consign
you to death, and prove superior to my will, which is a stronger
assurance of your perpetuity than those bodies to which ye were
joined when ye were born.” Plato, you see, says that the gods
are both mortal by the connection of the body and soul, and yet are
rendered immortal by the will and decree of their Maker. If,
therefore, it is a punishment to the soul to be connected with any
body whatever, why does God address them as if they were afraid of
death, that is, of the separation, of soul and body? Why does He
seek to reassure them by promising them immortality, not in virtue
of their nature, which is composite and not simple, but by virtue
of His invincible will, whereby He can effect that neither things
born die, nor things compounded be dissolved, but preserved
eternally?
Whether this opinion of Plato’s
about the stars is true or not, is another question. For we
cannot at once grant to him that these luminous bodies or globes,
which by day and night shine on the earth with the light of their
bodily substance, have also intellectual and blessed souls which
animate each its own body, as he confidently affirms of the
universe itself, as if it were one huge animal, in which all other
animals were contained.600
| 600 Plato, in the Timæus,
represents the Demiurgus as constructing the kosmos or
universe to be a complete representation of the idea of animal.
He planted in its centre a soul, spreading outwards so as to
pervade the whole body of the kosmos; and then he introduced
into it those various species of animals which were contained in
the idea of animal. Among these animals stand first the
celestial, the gods embodied in the stars, and of these the oldest
is the earth, set in the centre of all, close packed round the
great axis which traverses the centre of the kosmos.—See
the Timæus and Grote’s Plato, iii. 250 et
seq. | But this, as I said, is another
question, which we have not undertaken to discuss at present.
This much only I deemed right to bring forward, in opposition to
those who so pride themselves on being, or on being called
Platonists, that they blush to be Christians, and who cannot brook
to be called by a name which the common people also bear, lest they
vulgarize the philosophers’ coterie, which is proud in proportion
to its exclusiveness. These men, seeking a weak point in the
Christian doctrine, select for attack the eternity of the body, as
if it were a contradiction to contend for the blessedness of the
soul, and to wish it to be always resident in the body, bound, as
it were, in a lamentable chain; and this although Plato, their own
founder and master, affirms that it
was granted by the Supreme as a
boon to the gods He had made, that they should not die, that is,
should not be separated from the bodies with which He had connected
them.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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