A — Ame

It would be a fine thing to see one’s soul. Know yourself is an excellent precept, but God alone can put it into practice: who but he can know his own essence?

We call soul whatever animates. We know scarcely more, thanks to the limits of our intelligence. Three quarters of humankind go no further and do not trouble themselves about the thinking being; the other quarter searches, but no one has found it or ever will.

Poor philosopher, you see a plant growing and say growth, or even vegetative soul. You observe that bodies possess and impart motion, and say force. You see your hunting dog learning his trade under your instruction and cry instinct, sensitive soul. You combine ideas and say mind.

But please, what do you mean by these words? This flower grows, but is there a real being called growth? This body pushes another, but does it contain a distinct being called force? This dog brings you a partridge, but is there a being called instinct? Would you not laugh at a reasoner—even one who had tutored Alexander—who told you: “All animals live; therefore within them is a being, a substantial form, which is life”?

If a tulip could speak and told you, “My growth and I are two beings plainly joined together,” would you not mock the tulip?

Let us first see what you know, and what you are certain of: that you walk with your feet, digest with your stomach, feel through your whole body, and think with your head. Let us see whether reason alone could have given you light enough to conclude, without supernatural aid, that you have a soul.

The earliest philosophers, Chaldean or Egyptian, said: “There must be something within us that produces our thoughts. This something must be very subtle: it is a breath, it is fire, it is ether, it is a quintessence, it is a light image, it is an entelechy, it is a number, it is a harmony.” Finally, according to the divine Plato, it is a compound of the same and the other. “It is atoms that think within us,” said Epicurus after Democritus. But, my friend, how does an atom think? Admit that you know nothing about it.

The opinion we must undoubtedly hold is that the soul is an immaterial being. But surely you do not conceive what this immaterial being is? “No,” the learned answer, “but we know its nature is to think.” And how do you know that? “We know because it thinks.” Learned gentlemen! I greatly fear you are as ignorant as Epicurus. A stone’s nature is to fall, because it falls; but I ask you, what makes it fall?

“We know,” they continue, “that a stone has no soul.” Agreed; I believe that as you do. “We know that a denial and an affirmation are not divisible, are not parts of matter.” I share your opinion. But matter, otherwise unknown to us, possesses qualities that are not material and are not divisible. It has the gravitation toward a center that God has given it. This gravitation has no parts and cannot be divided. Bodies’ motive force is not a being composed of parts. The growth of organized bodies, their life, their instinct, are no more separate beings, divisible beings. You can no more cut a rose’s growth, a horse’s life, or a dog’s instinct in two than you can cut a sensation, a denial, or an affirmation in two. Your fine argument drawn from thought’s indivisibility therefore proves nothing at all.

What, then, do you call your soul? What idea do you have of it? By yourself, without revelation, you can admit nothing within you but a power, unknown to you, to feel and think.

Now tell me honestly: is this power to feel and think the same as the one that makes you digest and walk? You admit it is not, for your understanding may tell your stomach “digest” as much as it likes: the stomach will do nothing of the kind if it is ill. In vain would your immaterial being order your feet to walk; if they have gout, they will stay where they are.

The Greeks clearly perceived that thought often had nothing to do with the working of our organs. They allowed an animal soul for these organs, and for thoughts a finer, subtler soul, an intellect.

Yet this soul of thought supervises the animal soul on a thousand occasions. The thinking soul orders its hands to grasp, and they grasp. It does not tell its heart to beat, its blood to flow, or its chyle to form: all that happens without it. Here are two souls very much at a loss, with very little mastery of their household.

Now this first animal soul certainly does not exist; it is nothing but the movement of your organs. Take care, human being: your feeble reason gives you no more proof that the other soul exists. You can know it only through faith. You were born, you live, act, think, wake, and sleep without knowing how. God gave you the faculty of thought as he gave you everything else; and had he not come, at the times appointed by providence, to teach you that you have an immaterial and immortal soul, you would have no proof of it.

Let us see the fine systems your philosophy has constructed about these souls.

One man says the human soul is part of God’s own substance; another that it is part of the great whole; a third that it has been created from all eternity; a fourth that it is made, not created. Others assure us that God forms souls as they are needed and that they arrive at the instant of copulation. “They lodge in the seminal animalcules,” one cries. “No,” says another, “they go to live in the fallopian tubes.” “You are all wrong,” says a newcomer: “the soul waits six weeks for the fetus to form, then takes possession of the pineal gland; but if it encounters a false conception, it withdraws to await a better opportunity.” The latest opinion is that it dwells in the corpus callosum. This is the post La Peyronie assigns it. One had to be chief surgeon to the king of France to dispose of the soul’s lodgings in this way. Yet his corpus callosum has not enjoyed the same success as the surgeon himself.

St. Thomas, in question 75 and those following, says that the soul is a form subsisting in itself; that it is whole in the whole; that its essence differs from its power; that there are three vegetative souls, namely the nutritive, augmentative, and generative; that the memory of spiritual things is spiritual and the memory of bodily things bodily; that the rational soul is a form immaterial in its operations and material in its being. St. Thomas wrote two thousand pages of this force and clarity; thus he is the angel of the schools.

No fewer systems have been devised about how this soul will feel after leaving the body through which it felt: how it will hear without ears, smell without a nose, and touch without hands; what body it will afterward resume, whether the one it had at two or at eighty; how the self, the identity of the same person, will persist; how the soul of a man who became an imbecile at fifteen and died an imbecile at seventy will pick up the thread of ideas it had at puberty; by what clever maneuver a soul whose leg was cut off in Europe and whose arm was lost in America will recover that leg and arm, which, transformed into vegetables, will have passed into some other animal’s blood. There would be no end to an account of all the extravagances this poor human soul has imagined about itself.

What is most remarkable is that the laws of God’s people say not a word about the soul’s spirituality and immortality: nothing in the Decalogue, nothing in Leviticus or Deuteronomy.

It is quite certain, it is beyond doubt, that nowhere does Moses offer the Jews rewards or punishments in another life; that he never speaks to them of their souls’ immortality; that he holds out no hope of heaven and threatens them with no hell. Everything concerns this world.

Before dying he tells them in his Deuteronomy:

“If, after having children and grandchildren, you transgress, you will be rooted out of the land and reduced to a small number among the nations.”

“I am a jealous God, who punish the fathers’ iniquity to the third and fourth generation.”

“Honor father and mother so that you may live long.”

“You will have food and never lack it.”

“If you follow foreign gods, you will be destroyed…”

“If you obey, you will have rain in spring and autumn, wheat, oil, wine, and hay for your animals, so that you may eat and be full.”

“Put these words in your hearts, in your hands, between your eyes; write them on your doors, so that your days may be multiplied.”

“Do what I command you, without adding or taking anything away.”

“If a prophet arises who foretells extraordinary things, if his prediction is true and what he said comes to pass, and if he tells you, ‘Come, let us follow foreign gods’…kill him at once, and let all the people strike after you.”

“When the Lord has delivered the nations into your hands, slaughter everyone without sparing a single man, and have pity on no one.”

“Do not eat unclean birds, such as the eagle, the griffon, the ixion, and so forth.”

“Do not eat animals that chew the cud but do not have a divided hoof, such as the camel, hare, porcupine, and so forth.”

“By observing all these ordinances, you will be blessed in the city and in the fields; the fruit of your womb, your land, and your livestock will be blessed…”

“If you do not keep all the ordinances and all the ceremonies, you will be cursed in the city and in the fields…you will suffer famine and poverty; you will die of misery, cold, poverty, and fever; you will have mange, scabies, and fistulas…you will have ulcers on your knees and calves.”

“The foreigner will lend to you at interest, and you will not lend to him at interest…because you have not served the Lord.”

“And you will eat the fruit of your womb, and the flesh of your sons and daughters, and so forth.”

It is clear that all these promises and threats concern this world alone, and that not a word is to be found about the soul’s immortality and the life to come.

Several illustrious commentators have believed Moses was perfectly instructed in these two great doctrines. They prove it by the words of Jacob, who, believing his son had been devoured by beasts, said in his grief: I shall go down with my son into the pit; into the lower world, into hell—that is, I shall die, since my son is dead.

They prove it again through passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel. But the Hebrews to whom Moses spoke could have read neither Ezekiel nor Isaiah, who came only several centuries later.

It is quite useless to dispute Moses’s secret beliefs. The fact is that in his public laws he never spoke of a life to come, and that he confines all punishments and rewards to the present time. If he knew of the future life, why did he not expressly set out this great doctrine? And if he did not know of it, what was the object of his mission? Several great personages ask this question. They answer that the master of Moses and of all men reserved the right to explain, in his own time, a doctrine the Jews could not understand while they were in the desert.

If Moses had proclaimed the doctrine of the soul’s immortality, a great school of Jews would not always have opposed it. This great school of Sadducees would not have been authorized within the state. Sadducees would not have held its highest offices, nor would high priests have been chosen from their number.

It seems that only after Alexandria’s foundation did the Jews divide into three sects: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. The historian Josephus, who was a Pharisee, tells us in book thirteen of his Antiquities that the Pharisees believed in the transmigration of souls. The Sadducees believed the soul perished with the body. The Essenes, Josephus also says, held souls to be immortal. According to them, souls descended in airy form into bodies from the highest region of the air. A violent attraction bears them back there; and after death those that belonged to good people dwell beyond the Ocean, in a country with neither heat nor cold, wind nor rain. The souls of the wicked go to a climate entirely opposite. Such was the theology of the Jews.

He who alone was to instruct all men came to condemn these three sects. But without him we could never have known anything about our soul, since the philosophers never had any definite idea of it, and Moses—the world’s only true lawgiver before our own, Moses who spoke with God face to face and saw him only from behind—left men in profound ignorance on this great matter. Only for seventeen hundred years, then, have we been certain of the soul’s existence and immortality.

Cicero had only doubts. His grandson and granddaughter could learn the truth from the first Galileans who came to Rome.

But before that time, and ever since throughout the rest of the earth where the apostles did not penetrate, everyone had to say to his soul: “Who are you? Where do you come from? What do you do? Where are you going? You are something I cannot name, thinking and feeling; and even if you felt and thought for a hundred billion years, your own understanding would never teach you anything more without a God’s assistance.”

Human being! This God gave you understanding to guide your conduct well, not to penetrate the essence of the things he created.

It would be good to be able to see your soul. Know yourself is an excellent rule, but only God can follow it. Who else can know what he is in himself?

By soul we mean whatever gives life. Thanks to the limits of our understanding, we know very little more. Three quarters of the human race stop there and do not worry about the being that thinks. The remaining quarter looks for it. Nobody has found it, and nobody will.

You poor philosopher: you watch a plant grow and call it growth, or even a vegetative soul. You notice that bodies move and make other bodies move, and you call it force. You train your hunting dog and watch it learn its work; you exclaim, instinct, a soul that senses. You put ideas together and call it mind.

But what, please, do these words mean? The flower grows. Is there a separate, real being called growth? One body pushes another. Does it have a separate being inside it called force? Your dog brings back a partridge. Is there a being called instinct? Suppose someone argued, “Every animal is alive, so inside every animal there must be a being, a substantial form, which is its life.” Would you not laugh at him, even if he had been Alexander’s teacher?

If a tulip could talk and said, “My growth and I are clearly two beings joined together,” would you not make fun of it?

First let us establish what you know for certain. Your feet let you walk. Your stomach digests your food. Your whole body feels things. Your head thinks. Could your own reason have told you enough to conclude that you have a soul, without any supernatural help?

The first philosophers, whether in Chaldea or Egypt, said, “Something inside us must produce our thoughts. It must be extremely fine. It is breath, fire, ether, a fifth essence, a weightless image, an entelechy, a number, a harmony.” According to the divine Plato, it is a mixture of the same and the other. Epicurus, following Democritus, said that atoms do our thinking. But how does an atom think, my friend? Admit you have no idea.

We must, of course, accept that the soul is an immaterial being. But surely you cannot understand what this immaterial being is? The scholars answer, “No, but we know that its nature is to think.” How do you know? “Because it thinks.” Scholars, I fear you know as little as Epicurus. A stone falls, so falling is in its nature. But my question is: what makes it fall?

They go on, “We know a stone has no soul.” Yes, I believe that too. “We know you cannot divide a denial or an affirmation into parts. They are not bits of matter.” I agree. Yet matter, which we otherwise know nothing about, has qualities that are not material and cannot be divided. God has given it gravity pulling it toward a center. Gravity has no parts that can be divided up. The force that moves bodies is not a being made of parts. Nor are the growth, life, and instinct of living bodies separate beings that can be divided. You cannot cut a rose’s growth, a horse’s life, or a dog’s instinct in half, any more than you can cut a feeling, a denial, or an affirmation in half. So your impressive argument that thought cannot be divided proves absolutely nothing.

What do you mean by your soul, then? What idea do you have of it? Without revelation, all you can establish for yourself is that you have some unknown ability to feel and think.

Tell me honestly: is that ability to feel and think the same ability that lets you digest food and walk? You admit it is not. Your understanding can keep telling your stomach, digest, but if the stomach is sick, it will do nothing. Your immaterial being can order your feet to walk as much as it likes. If they have gout, they will not move.

The Greeks understood that thinking often has nothing to do with the way our organs work. They accepted an animal soul to run the organs and a finer, more delicate soul for thought: a mind.

Yet this thinking soul directs the animal soul in a thousand cases. It tells the hands to take something, and they do. It never tells the heart to beat, the blood to flow, or the chyle to form. Those things happen without it. These two souls seem very confused and have little control over their own house.

In fact, the first, animal soul certainly does not exist. It is simply the movement of your organs. Be careful, human being: your weak reason gives you no more evidence that the other soul exists either. You can know that only through faith. You were born; you live, act, think, stay awake, and sleep, without knowing how. God gave you the ability to think just as he gave you everything else. If he had not come at the times set by providence and taught you that you have an immaterial, immortal soul, you would have no evidence for it.

Look at the impressive theories your philosophy has invented about these souls.

One philosopher says the human soul is part of God’s own substance. Another makes it part of the great whole. A third says it has existed as a created thing throughout eternity. A fourth says it was made but not created. Others insist that God makes souls when they are needed and that they arrive at the moment of sexual intercourse. One shouts, “They live in the tiny creatures in semen!” Another says, “No, they settle in the fallopian tubes.” Someone else arrives and says, “You are all wrong. The soul waits six weeks until the fetus has formed. Then it moves into the pineal gland. If it finds an unsuccessful conception, it leaves again and waits for a better chance.” The latest theory puts its home in the corpus callosum. La Peyronie assigned it that position. Only the chief surgeon to the king of France could arrange the soul’s accommodation like that. But the surgeon’s corpus callosum has not been as successful as the surgeon was.

In question 75 and those that follow, Saint Thomas says the soul is a form that exists in itself; that it is entirely present in everything; that what it is differs from what it can do; that there are three souls for growth: one for nourishment, one for increase, and one for reproduction. He says memory of spiritual things is spiritual, and memory of bodily things is bodily. The rational soul is a form that is immaterial in what it does and material in its existence. Saint Thomas wrote two thousand pages with this much force and clarity. That is why he is the angel of the schools.

There are just as many theories about how the soul will feel after it has left the body it used to feel through. How will it hear without ears, smell without a nose, or touch without hands? Which body will it get back afterward: the one it had at two or the one it had at eighty? How will the self, the identity of that same person, continue to exist? Suppose a man lost his understanding at fifteen and died in that state at seventy. How will his soul pick up the ideas it had when he reached puberty? Suppose someone’s leg was cut off in Europe and he lost an arm in America. By what clever trick will his soul recover them, after they have turned into vegetables and passed into another animal’s blood? We could go on forever listing all the absurd things the poor human soul has imagined about itself.

One very strange fact is that the laws of God’s people do not say a single word about the soul being spiritual or immortal. There is nothing in the Ten Commandments, Leviticus, or Deuteronomy.

It is absolutely certain, beyond any doubt, that nowhere does Moses promise the Jews rewards or punishments in another life. He never discusses their souls’ immortality, offers heaven as a hope, or threatens them with hell. Everything is about life on earth.

Before he dies, he tells them in Deuteronomy:

“If you have children and grandchildren and then do wrong, you will be wiped out in that country, with only a few of you left among the nations.”

“I am a jealous God. I punish the fathers’ wrongdoing down to the third and fourth generation.”

“Respect your father and mother so that you will live a long time.”

“You will always have enough to eat.”

“If you follow other gods, you will be destroyed…”

“If you obey, you will have rain in spring and autumn, wheat, oil, wine, and hay for your animals. You will be able to eat until you are full.”

“Keep these words in your hearts, in your hands, and between your eyes. Write them on your doors so that you will live for many days.”

“Do what I tell you, without adding anything or leaving anything out.”

“If a prophet appears who predicts extraordinary things, and his prediction is true and comes about, and he tells you, ‘Come, let us follow other gods’…kill him immediately. Let all the people strike him after you.”

“When the Lord hands the nations over to you, slaughter them all. Do not spare a single man or have pity on anyone.”

“Do not eat unclean birds such as the eagle, the griffon, the ixion, and so on.”

“Do not eat animals that chew the cud but do not have a split hoof, such as camels, hares, porcupines, and so on.”

“If you keep every rule, you will be blessed in the city and in the fields. Your children, your crops, and your livestock will be blessed…”

“If you fail to keep every rule and ceremony, you will be cursed in the city and in the fields…you will face famine and poverty. You will die from misery, cold, poverty, and fever. You will have mange, scabies, and fistulas…you will get ulcers on your knees and calves.”

“Foreigners will lend you money at interest, but you will not lend to them at interest…because you have not served the Lord.”

“And you will eat the children you have given birth to, the flesh of your sons and daughters, and so on.”

All these promises and threats are clearly about this life. There is not one word about the soul’s immortality or a future life.

Several famous commentators thought Moses fully understood both these great doctrines. For proof they quote Jacob. He thought wild animals had eaten his son, and in his grief he said, I will go down with my son into the pit; into the world below, into hell. In other words: I will die, because my son is dead.

They also offer passages from Isaiah and Ezekiel as proof. But the Hebrews Moses addressed could not have read either Ezekiel or Isaiah. Those prophets lived several centuries later.

Arguing about Moses’s private beliefs is pointless. In the laws he made public, he never spoke about a life after death. All the punishments and rewards he described were for the present life. If he knew about a future life, why did he not clearly set out that great doctrine? If he did not know, what was his mission for? Several important people ask this question. Their answer is that the master of Moses and of all human beings kept the right to explain the doctrine to the Jews at the proper time. They could not have understood it while they were in the desert.

Had Moses taught that souls are immortal, one major Jewish school would not have kept opposing the doctrine. That school, the Sadducees, would not have been legally recognized in the state. Sadducees would not have held the highest posts, and high priests would not have been selected from among them.

Apparently it was only after Alexandria was founded that the Jews divided into three groups: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. Josephus, the historian, was a Pharisee. He tells us in book thirteen of his Antiquities that the Pharisees believed souls passed from one body to another. The Sadducees thought the soul died with the body. Josephus also says the Essenes believed souls were immortal. In their view, souls descended in an airy form from the highest part of the air into bodies. A powerful attraction takes them back there. After death, the souls of good people stay beyond the Ocean, in a land with no heat, cold, wind, or rain. The souls of bad people go to a place with exactly the opposite climate. That was Jewish theology.

The one who alone was to teach all human beings came and condemned all three groups. Without him we could never have known anything about our soul. Philosophers never reached a definite idea of it. Moses, the world’s only true lawgiver before ours, spoke to God face to face but saw him only from behind. Yet he left people completely ignorant about this great subject. So it is only in the last seventeen hundred years that we have been certain the soul exists and is immortal.

Cicero had nothing but doubts. His grandson and granddaughter could have learned the truth from the first Galileans to arrive in Rome.

Before then, and ever since in all the places the apostles did not reach, people had to ask their souls: “Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you do? Where are you going? You are something I cannot identify that thinks and feels. Even if you went on feeling and thinking for a hundred billion years, your own understanding could never tell you anything more without help from a God.”

Human being, this God gave you understanding so that you could behave well, not so that you could discover the inner nature of the things he created.