Saint Augustine (354-430)

Of the Soul and Its Origin

Translated by Peter Holmes

Book IV

Chapter 24

Wherefore if you take these books, which I have with a sincere and affectionate interest written in answer to your opinions, and read them with a reciprocal love for me; if you attend to what you have yourself declared in the beginning of your first book, and “are anxious not to insist on any opinion of your own, if it be found an improbable one,” then I beseech you to beware especially of those eleven errors which I warned you of in the preceding book of this treatise. Do not say, that “the soul is of God in such a sense that He created it not out of no, nor out of another, but out of His own nature”; or that, “as God who gives is Himself ever existent, so is He ever giving souls through infinite time”; or that “the soul lost some merit through the flesh, which it had previous to the flesh”; or that “the soul by means of the flesh repairs its ancient condition, and is born again through the very same flesh, by which it had deserved to be polluted”; or that “the soul deserved to be sinful even prior to sin”; or that “infants who die without the regeneration of baptism, may yet attain to forgiveness of their original sins”; or that “they whom the Lord has predestinated to be baptized can be taken away from His predestination, or die before that has been accomplished in them which the Almighty had predetermined”; or that “it is of those who expire before they are baptized that the Scripture says, ‘Speedily was he taken away, lest wickedness should alter his understanding,’ ”—with the remainder of the passage to the same effect; or that “there are some mansions outside the kingdom of God, belonging to the ‘many,’ which the Lord said were in His Father’s house”; or that “the sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ ought to be offered in behalf of those who have departed out of the body without being baptized”; or that “any of those persons who die without Christ’s baptism, are received for a while into paradise, and afterwards attain even to the blessedness of the kingdom of heaven.” Above all things, beware of these opinions, my son, and, as you wish to be the vanquisher of error, do not rejoice in the surname of “Vincentius.” And when you are ignorant on any subject, do not think that you know it; but in order to get real knowledge, learn how to be ignorant. For we commit a sin by affecting to be ignorant of nothing among “the secret things of God”; by constructing random theories about unknown things, and taking them for known; and by producing and defending errors as if they were truth. As for my own ignorance on the question whether the souls of men are created afresh at every birth, or are transmitted by the parents (an ignorance which is, however, modified by my belief, which it would be impious to falter in, that they are certainly made by the Divine Creator, though not of His own substance), I think that your loving self will by this time be persuaded that it either ought not to be censured at all, or, if it ought, that it should be done by a man who is capable by his learning of removing it altogether; and so also with respect to my other opinions, that while souls have in them the incorporeal semblances of bodies, they are not themselves bodies; and that, without impairing the natural distinction between soul and spirit, the soul is in a general sense actually designated spirit. If, indeed, I have unfortunately failed to persuade you, I must leave it rather to my readers to determine whether what I have advanced ought not to have convinced you.

If, as may possibly be the case, you desire to know whether there are many other points which appear to me to require emendation in your books, it cannot be troublesome for you to come to me,—not, indeed, as a scholar to his master, but as a person in his prime to one full of years, and as a strong man to a weak one. And although you ought not to have published your books, still there is a greater and a truer glory in a man’s being censured, when he confesses with his own lips the justice of his correction, than in being lauded out of the mouth of any defender of error. Now, while I should be unwilling to believe that all those who listened to your reading of the aforementioned books, and lavished their praises on you, had either previously held for themselves the opinions which sound doctrine disapproves of, or were induced by you to entertain them, I still cannot help thinking that they had the keenness of their mind blunted by the impetuous and constant flow of your elocution, and so were unable to bestow adequate attention on the contents of your discourse; or else, that when they were in any case capable of understanding what you said, it was less for any very clear statement of the truth that they praised you than for the affluence of your language, and the facility and resources of your mental powers. For praise, and fame, and kindly regard are very commonly bestowed on a young man’s eloquence in anticipation of the future, though as yet it lacks the mellowed perfection and fidelity of a fully-informed instructor. In order, then, that you may attain to true wisdom yourself, and that what you say may be able not only to delight, but even edify other people, it behoves you, after removing from your mind the dangerous applause of others, to keep conscientious watch over your own words.

Book IV Chapter 23

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