The Human Dimension

PIGEONHOLING HUMANITY IS SOMETHING THE CHURCH will not do as she knows that she is dealing with a mystery, and she is used to handling mysteries, including the mystery of mysteries which she handles with a humeral veil or confects on the altar. With respect to the mystery of man, she disdains the "various reductionist conceptions of the human person," those that are predicated upon ideology and not sound notions of the human person, those that would limit man's personhood to function. Man's ability to limit man is quite prevalent: homo faber, homo ludens, homo economicus, homo loquax, homo politicus, or a homo technologicus, as if man were all work, all play, all about money, all about chatter, politics, or technology.

Instead, the Church's social doctrine "strives to indicate the different dimensions of the mystery of man, who must be approached 'in the full truth of his existence, of his personal being and also of his community and social being.'" (Compendium, No. 126) (quoting JP II, Redemptor hominis, 14)

What the Church does know is that there is no such thing as homo solus, man alone. "The human person," the Church insists, "may never be thought of only as an absolute individual being built up by himself and on himself, as if his characteristic traits depended on no one else but himself." (Compendium, No. 125) There is no such thing as atomistic man.

"It is not good for man to be alone," says the Lord in the beginning of creation. (Gen. 2:18) Likewise, it is not good to think that man is man alone.

There are certain qualities, certain large features in the landscape of the personhood of man that the Church identifies: a unity of body and soul, an openness to transcendence, the subject of free will, a source of intrinsic uniqueness, dignity, always open to, and formed by, others.

Man is a unit of body and soul, with the soul being spiritual, immaterial, and the "principle of unity of the human being." In Aristotelian terms which the Church has borrowed and made her own, the "unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the 'form' of the body." (Compendium, No. 129) The Church rejects a Platonic notion of that man is spirit, imprisoned, as it were, in a body. She rejects a Cartesian dualistic vision of man as a "ghost in a machine." The body is part of the person every bit as much as the soul. Corpore et anima unus.

The body is not a tool, something separate from man, that he may use for pleasure. Nor is the body to be regarded as something to be despised or unholy. The body is not a pariah, an untouchable. Though wounded by sin, the body remains a holy thing, a temple of the Holy Spirit to use St. Paul's words. (1 Cor. 6:19) The body is intrinsic to man, and for that reason participates in the moral act, and participates in the redemption through the promised resurrection of the body.


The Church travels in between the extremes of spiritualism and materialism: "Neither the spiritualism that despises the reality of the body nor the materialism that considers the spirit a mere manifestation of the material do justice to the complex nature, to the totality or to the unity of the human being." (Compendium, No. 129)

Along with his freedom and with his disposition toward desiring truth, the human person is intrinsically open to others of his kind, but also to the transcendent, the infinite "Other," the holy "Beyond," ultimately He whom we know as God. This openness to the entirety of existence even God was described by the Scholastics as the capax universi and the capax Dei, the capacity towards the universe and the capacity towards God in man.

The Compendium hearkens back to these notions of man as capax universi and the capax Dei, when it says: "The human person is open to the fullness of being, to the unlimited horizon of being . . . . In a certain sense the human soul is--because of its cognitive dimension--all things." Anima quodammodo est omnia, said St. Thomas. The soul is in a manner of speaking all things.

Indeed, the soul is in a manner of speaking greater that all material things, for "in fact, man in his interiority transcends the universe and is the only creature will be God for itself." (Compendium, No. 133) This brings to mind St. Thomas's striking statement: "The good of the grace of one soul is greater than the good of the nature of the whole universe."*

Each human being is also "a unique and unrepeatable being," who "exists as an 'I' capable of self-understanding, self possession, and self-determination." (Compendium, No. 131) Here again the Church rejects a functional understanding of person and insists an an ontological notion of person. It is not function that makes a person, it is the person that allows the function.

"[I]t is not intellect, consciousness, and freedom that define the person; rather, it is the person who is the basis of the acts of intellect, consciousness, and freedom. These acts can even be absent, for even without them man does not cease to be a person." (Compendium, No. 131)

The Church clearly spurns functional definitions of personhood which have their source in John Locke and receive their full flower in the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, whose functional definitions of personhood as "self-awareness" have led him to justify such evils as abortion and infanticide as well as those in persistent vegetative states.

The openness to the transcendent and his uniqueness give the human person a unique dignity which society and its structures must respect, and which is the foundation of his moral and civil rights and freedoms. "[T]he social order and its development must invariably work to the benefit of the human person, since the order of things is to be subordinate to the order of persons, and not the other way around. . . . Every political, economic, social, scientific, and cultural program must be inspired by the awareness of the primacy of each human being over society." (Compendium, No. 132)

Freedom, a gift of God to man, is another essential quality of personhood, and freedom is ordered to the good, to truth, ultimately to God himself from whence it came. "Man can turn to good only in freedom, which God has given to him as one of the highest signs of his image." (Compendium, No. 135)

Yet this freedom so intrinsic to man is not a false autonomy. Man is not an autos nomos, a law unto himself, "self-law." Man's freedom is not independent from God and his law, for it is not in man to define good and evil. Contrary to the teaching of the Greek philosopher Protagoras, the Church maintains that man is not the measure of all things. Rather she sides with Plato who in his Laws maintained against Protagoras that God is the measure of all things.

Man's freedom "is not unlimited: it must halt before the 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil,' for it is called to accept the moral law given by God. In fact, human freedom finds its authentic and complete fulfillment precisely in the acceptance of that law." (Compendium, No. 136) (quoting JP II, Veritatis splendor, No. 35)

The moral law is therefore fundamental to the proper exercise of man's freedom, and any suggestion that freedom requires man to travel beyond the boundaries of the moral law is nothing other than an argument that a proper use of freedom is to fall into the abyss of immorality. No. The moral law is a reality, which is only ignored to the peril of freedom.

"The proper exercise of personal freedom," the Compendium insists, "requires specific conditions of economic, social, political, and cultural order that 'are too often disregarded or violated. . . . By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom, becomes imprisoned within himself, disrupts neighborly fellowship, and rebels against divine truth.'" (Compendium, No. 137) (quoting CCC, § 1740)

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*St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIa, q.24, a. 3, ad 2.

Veritatis Splendor: Part 15--Corpus Humanum et Lex Naturalis

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NATURE AND FREEDOM, and the relationship between the nature of man and law, is an area which today is the center of heated argumentation: one might even say it is a sort of war on two fronts. The sides of an intense debate may roughly be categorized as: (i) advocates of an extreme form of scientific empiricism who unduly "narrow" human nature to scientific facts, and then, based upon these narrow scientific bases, advance an extreme scientific determinism, and (ii) advocates carrying a banner of an excessive human liberalism. At the center is the much beleaguered traditional, classical morality, which finds itself under siege, if not outright hostilities, with its implacable foes.

At the heart of the debate is the very notion of "nature," in particular human nature. The empiricist sees "nature" in solely empirical terms, limiting himself to "the world of the senses within space and time." The empiricist narrows his field of vision of human nature to dimensions that can be measured by instruments, by observation, by statistics. For the scientific empiricist, human nature, then, is nothing other than an amalgam of biological, psychological, cultural processes. By limiting man's nature to such empirically-verifiable measures an ethicist succumbs to the temptation to take these measures and the principle criterion of what is moral. At the extreme edge, some of these empiricists may even suggest that man cannot free himself from these unbreakable biological, psychological, and social laws, and thus is not free at all, but circumscribed by his own materialism. These view nature in a sort of mono-dimensional view: a one-dimensional man whose entire existence can be relegated to physical and biological processes.

In reaction, perhaps, to this excessive empiricism comes liberalism, which views human nature as something separate and distinct from human freedom and morality. Nature is viewed as something that is amoral, and not the source of any normative moral value. The liberal overlooks the "created dimension of nature," and therefore fails to grasp its "integrity," the message that is contained within it. Nature for these moralists is something over which man exercises power, including his moral power. It is not something which may be the source of moral norms or value. Nature is seen as a restriction to be overcome by man, and the source of man's morality is not nature, but is something constructed by man from his freedom which progressively must be exercised over and against nature which limits him. Others define man's nature as freedom, thus confusing the two categories resulting in making freedom "selfdefining and a phenomenon creative of itself and its values." In this latter instance, man ultimately does not even have a nature: it is essentially "his own personal life-project," man and his nature being "nothing more than his own freedom." VS, 46.

Either camp--scientific empiricism or moral liberalism--has misunderstood the notion of human nature. This misunderstanding is, in fact, displayed in the very objections the liberals commonly hurl against the traditional conception of natural law. Confused by their own principles, by their own limited understanding of nature as something empirical and divorced from creation, they accuse the traditional doctrine of natural law as being nothing other than forms of physicalism or naturalism, where physical or biological laws are simplistically extended to become moral laws.

Man is body and soul.

Such a view has even entered into the minds of "certain theologians," who accuse the Church's magisterial teachings as suffering from antiquated physicalism or naturalism, one which limits man's freedom, and fails to account for "both man's character as a rational and free being," and fails also to take into account "the cultural conditioning of all moral norms." These theologians would give to man the power to "freely determine the meaning of his behavior," so that, at best, "natural inclinations" would give rise only to a "general orientation towards correct behavior," but they in no way could "determine the moral assessment of individual human acts." For the liberal theologian, man, it would seem, is in the final analysis unmoored from his nature: that is a necessary implication of his freedom.

It is in the context of these notions that the Pope feels the need to "consider carefully the correct relationship existing between freedom and human nature," with a particular focus on "the place of the human body in questions of natural law." VS, 48.

The essential point of John Paul's view is that the human body is a significant aspect of man, and is an essential component of man's entire reality--who he is and what he is--and therefore is something that has within it moral meaning, a moral message. It is false, even in the name of freedom, to treat the human body as something without moral meaning.

A freedom which claims to be absolute ends up treating the human body as a raw datum, devoid of any meaning and moral values until freedom has shaped it in accordance with its design. Consequently, human nature and the body appear as presuppositions or preambles, materially necessary for freedom to make its choice, yet extrinsic to the person, the subject and the human act. Their functions would not be able to constitute reference points for moral decisions, because the finalities of these inclinations would be merely "physical" goods, called by some "pre-moral". To refer to them, in order to find in them rational indications with regard to the order of morality, would be to expose oneself to the accusation of physicalism or biologism. In this way of thinking, the tension between freedom and a nature conceived of in a reductive way is resolved by a division within man himself.

VS, 48. The Pope's assessment of such a theory is abrupt: "This moral theory does not correspond to the truth about man and his freedom." VS, 48. It is false to suggest that the human body does not inform man's freedom, and therefore has no intrinsic meaning in informing us who man is, and how his freedom ought to be exercised. The essential error stems from a misunderstanding of the human person.

It contradicts the Church's teachings on the unity of the human person, whose rational soul is per se et essentialiter the form of his body.* The spiritual and immortal soul is the principle of unity of the human being, whereby it exists as a whole — corpore et anima unus — as a person.**

VS, 48. In a sense, these modern theologians suffer from a sort of Gnostic deprecation of the body, a Manichean or Catharist tendency of viewing matter as evil, an evil that must be overcome in the name of freedom. They suffer further from the philosophical error that one may ascribe to Plato and Descartes, where the body is merely a sort of repository for the soul, and the only noble thing in man is his reasonable soul which is incarcerated or which pilots through the means of the human body, as if reason were a pilot separate from the ship.

This deprecatory view of the human body is philosophically false and unchristian, and fails to consider the dignity to be accorded the human body in God's natural and supernatural plan. It ignores, for example, the reality that "reason and free will are linked with all the bodily an sense faculties," and so misunderstands man in his nature. Moreover, it forgets that the "body . . . has been promised the resurrection," and therefore shares in man's "glory," in his redemption and salvation. Man is not saved from or apart from his body, but in his body.

There is therefore not one morality for the body and another for man's soul: morality for man involves the entire person of man, which necessarily involves man, body and soul:

The person, including the body, is completely entrusted to himself, and it is in the unity of body and soul that the person is the subject of his own moral acts. The person, by the light of reason and the support of virtue, discovers in the body the anticipatory signs, the expression and the promise of the gift of self, in conformity with the wise plan of the Creator. It is in the light of the dignity of the human person — a dignity which must be affirmed for its own sake — that reason grasps the specific moral value of certain goods towards which the person is naturally inclined. And since the human person cannot be reduced to a freedom which is self-designing, but entails a particular spiritual and bodily structure, the primordial moral requirement of loving and respecting the person as an end and never as a mere means also implies, by its very nature, respect for certain fundamental goods, without which one would fall into relativism and arbitrariness.

VS, 48. That is the philosophical error behind a false opposition of body and soul. There is also a theological error behind this notion, a theological error relating to human anthropology and moral theology:

A doctrine which dissociates the moral act from the bodily dimensions of its exercise is contrary to the teaching of Scripture and Tradition. Such a doctrine revives, in new forms, certain ancient errors which have always been opposed by the Church, inasmuch as they reduce the human person to a "spiritual" and purely formal freedom. . . . In fact, body and soul are inseparable: in the person, in the willing agent and in the deliberate act, they stand or fall together.

VS, 49.

The philosophical and theological errors, therefore, separate the personhood of man, which necessarily is composed of a union of body and soul. The traditional doctrine of the natural law does not suffer from these philosophical or theological errors. Quite the contrary, it is insistent that man must be treated as a person in his entirety, as a person in the unity of soul and body:

At this point the true meaning of the natural law can be understood: it refers to man's proper and primordial nature, the "nature of the human person", which is the person himself in the unity of soul and body, in the unity of his spiritual and biological inclinations and of all the other specific characteristics necessary for the pursuit of his end. "The natural moral law expresses and lays down the purposes, rights and duties which are based upon the bodily and spiritual nature of the human person. Therefore this law cannot be thought of as simply a set of norms on the biological level; rather it must be defined as the rational order whereby man is called by the Creator to direct and regulate his life and actions and in particular to make use of his own body."

VS, 50.***

The inclinations of the entire person--both spiritual inclinations and biological inclinations--must be considered in any doctrine of natural law. It is an error to predicate morality solely on biological inclinations, just as it is an error to predicate morality solely on rational or spiritual inclinations.

Only in reference to the human person in his "unified totality", that is, as "a soul which expresses itself in a body and a body informed by an immortal spirit," can the specifically human meaning of the body be grasped. Indeed, natural inclinations take on moral relevance only insofar as they refer to the human person and his authentic fulfillment, a fulfillment which for that matter can take place always and only in human nature. By rejecting all manipulations of corporeity which alter its human meaning, the Church serves man and shows him the path of true love, the only path on which he can find the true God.

VS, 50.†

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*For the principle that the soul is itself (per se) and essentially (essentialiter) the form of man's body, the Pope cites to the Ecumenical Council of Vienne, Constitution Fidei Catholicae: DS, 902 and the Fifth Lateran Ecumenical Council, Bull Apostolici Regiminis: DS, 1440. The first source reads as follows:

(De anima ut forma corporis.)
Porro doctrinam omnem seu positionem temere asserentem, aut vertentem in dubium, quod substantia animae rationalis seu intellectivae vere ac per se humani corporis non sit forma, velut erroneam ac veritati catholicae inimicam fidei, praedicto sacro approbante Concilio reprobamus: definientes, ut cunctis nota sit fidei sincerae veritas ac praecludatur universis erroribus aditus, ne subintrent, quod quisquis deinceps asserere, defendere seu tenere pertinaciter praesumpserit, quod anima rationalis seu intellectiva non sit forma corporis humani per se et essentialiter, tamquam haereticus sit censendus.

[The soul as a form of the body]. Furthermore, with the approval of the above mentioned sacred council we reprove as erroneous and inimical to the Catholic faith every doctrine or position rashly asserting or turning to doubt that the substance of the rational or intellective soul truly and in itself is not a form of the human body, defining, so that the truth of sincere faith may be known to all, and the approach to all errors may be cut off, lest they steal in upon us, that whoever shall obstinately presume in turn to assert, define, or hold that the rational or intellective soul is not the form of the human body in itself and essentially must be regarded as a heretic.

The second source reads as follows:

Cum ... zizaniae seminator ... nonnullos perniciosissimos errores, a fidelibus semper explosos, in agro Domini superseminare et augere sit ausus, de natura praesertim animae rationalis, quod videlicet mortalis sit, aut unica in cunctis hominibus, et nonnulli temere philosophantes, secundum saltem philosophiam verum id esse asseverent : contra huiusmodi pestem opportuna remedia adhibere cupientes, hoc sacro approbante Concilio damnamus et reprobamus omnes asserentes animam intellectivam mortalem esse, aut unicam in cunctis hominibus, et haec in dubium vertentes, cum illa non solum vere per se et essentialiter humani corporis forma exsistat, sicut in canone felicis recordationis Clementis papae V praedecessoris Nostri in (generali) Viennensi Concilio edito continetur, verum et immortalis, et pro corporum quibus infunditur multitudine singulariter multiplicabilis, et multiplicata, et multiplicanda sit . . .

Since in our days (and we painfully bring this up) the sower of cockle, ancient enemy of the human race, has dared to disseminate and advance in the field of the Lord a number of pernicious errors, always rejected by the faithful, especially concerning the nature of the rational soul, namely, that it is mortal, or one in all men, and some rashly philosophizing affirmed that this is true at least according to philosophy, in our desire to offer suitable remedies against a plague of this kind, with the approval of this holy Council, we condemn and reject all who assert that the intellectual soul is mortal, or is one in all men, and those who cast doubt on these truths, since it [the soul] is not only truly in itself and essentially the form of the human body, as was defined in the canon of Pope Clement V our predecessor of happy memory published in the (general) Council of Vienne, but it is also multiple according to the multitude of bodies into which it is infused, multiplied, and to be multiplied. . . . And since truth never contradicts truth, we declare every assertion contrary to the truth of illumined faith to be altogether false; and, that it may not be permitted to dogmatize otherwise, we strictly forbid it, and we decree that all who adhere to errors of this kind are to be shunned and to be punished as detestable and abominable infidels who disseminate most damnable heresies and who weaken the Catholic faith.

**For the principle that the body and soul are united as one in man's personhood (corpore et anima unus), the encyclical cites to Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes, 14.
***For the first quote, the encylical quotes Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes, 51. For the second, the encyclical cites to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation Donum Vitae (February 22, 1987), Introduction, 3: AAS 80 (1988), 74, and refers, further to Paul VI, Encyclical Letter Humanae Vitae (July 25, 1968),10: AAS 60 (1968), 487-488.
†The quotation is from Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio (November 22,1981),11: AAS 74 (1982), 92.

Tertullian on the Natural Law: The Soul as My Witness, "Neither God nor Nature Lie!"

QUINTUS SEPTIMIUM FLORENS TERTULLIANUS, mercifully shortened as Tertullian (ca. 160-ca. 220 A.D.), is perhaps the first of the Latin Christian sources on the natural moral law. Though Catholic for part of his life, in 201 or 202 A.D. Tertullian unfortunately lapsed into a form of Montanism, or Cataphrygianism, a charismatic, enthusiastic, chiliastic, and rigoristic sect founded by Montanus, who claimed to be the incarnation of the Holy Spirit., or, perhaps more properly, the "paraclete" or helper that Christ had told his apostles to anticipate and which would lead them unto all truth It was ecstatic and charismatics movements such as the Montanists that forced the Church to look at the issue of public revelations seriously, eventually deciding that public revelation ceased at the death of the last apostle, foreclosing the ideal of a continuing revelation. In his History of Christianity, Phillip Schaff calls the Montanist heresy "an earnest and well-meaning, but gloomy and fanatical hyper-Christianity, which, like all hyper-spiritualism, is apt to end in the flesh."

Tertullian was the son of a Roman centurion, a "centurio proconsularis" or a Roman aide-de-camp, perhaps stationed in Africa. Tertullian was likely born in Carthage, studied law, but later was ordained a priest after his conversion to Christianity in 197-98 A.D. Tertullian's output was vast, and, though much of it has been lost, there are thirty-one works that are extant. Though the works cover many areas and genres--there are apologetic, polemical, dogmatic, and moral works--some of them expressly refer to the natural moral law. In this posting we will review the mention of the natural moral law in a variety of Tertullian's works. We will begin this series by looking at Tertullian's notion of natural law in his De testimonio animae (On the Testimony of the Soul). In this short work written after his Apology, and intended to be a defense of Christianity against the Pagans, Tertullian addresses the nature of the human soul, and the witness it gives to the existence of a God which created the world and the soul, and which in nature affords the soul the content of his plan. He seeks to find common ground betwen the Christians and the Pagan in the area of a natural theology and a natural moral law. It is the burden of Tertullian's argument to show, as he put in in the remarkable words of his Apology, that the soul is naturally Christian, anima naturaliter Christiana. The truths that natural theology and the natural moral law convey to the soul without revelation find their perfect fulfillment, their satisfaction, their home in the Christian revelation, in Christ's law and in his Church.

Mosaic of Tertullian

In the opening chapter of his De testimonio animae, Tertullian reflects that the Pagan writings give witness to the Christian God. Thus we may see in poets, philosophers, and in the writings of sages, mention of one God, the creator of heaven and earth. And yet error has crept into these sources, as they endow the gods with human passion, and place them in the most compromising situations. The pagan writings are therefore ambivalent, and may be construed in both a Christian sense as well as a non-Christian sense. Tertullian accordingly posits that his audience go beyond the Pagan writings, and look at the soul unencumbered by these. In the manner of a lawyer, he calls as his first witness, the human soul:

Now I invoke a new witness better known than any literature, more compelling than any theory, more widely circulated than any publication, greater than the fullness of man – which is to say the very sum of man [id est totum quod est hominis]. O soul, step forth into our midst [Consiste in medio, anima] whether you are divine and eternal as many philosophers attest. All the more would you not lie! Or whether you are not divine, since you are material as only Epicurus suggests. All the more you ought not to lie. Whether you are received from heaven or conceived from the earth; whether you are assembled from numbers or atoms; whether you originate with the body; whether you are introduced into the body after birth. However you originate, you make of mankind a rational animal, supremely receptive to awareness and knowledge.

De test. anim., I. (Q. Howe, trans.) Tertullian thus calls the soul as his first witness--it matters not presently whether the soul is considered material, or whether the soul is considered spiritual. The philosophy or theology of the soul matters not, as its true testimony is unaffected the philosophical theories or theological truths in which it is draped. The soul Tertullian invokes is not to come dressed with Pagan or even Christian inheritances, with the biases and prejudices it has gained through inculturation or belief. It is to appear bereft of such clothing, a naked witness of its fundamental nature. It is to come without prejudice against the Christian.

I do not summon you as one formed by schooling, instructed by libraries, nurtured by Platonic and Stoic academies that you may trumpet your wisdom. I invoked you in your simple [simplicem], unfinished [rudem], untutored [impolitam], unformed [idioticam] nature -- such as you are for those who have only you alone. Such as you are at the crossroads, on the street, in the workshop. I need you in your innocence since no one trusts even the smallest measure of your experience. I demand of you those primal sparks you confer on man, those insights that you have learned from your own depths or from your creator, whoever he may be [ex quocumque acutore tuo sentire didicisti]. As far as I know, you are not inherently Christian [No es, quod sciam, Christiana]. The soul can become Christian, but it is not born Christian. [Fieri enim, non nasci solet Christiana.] But Christians are now demanding evidence from you to be presented to your adversaries from without so that those may blush before you who have hated and mocked us for the very beliefs which they now discover you have always known.

De test. anim., I. (Q. Howe, trans.) After calling the soul as his witness, Tertullian engages it, as if he were accusing it or addressing it in open court. The soul is engaged in second person. The first area of question involves natural theology, and Tertullian seeks to prove that the soul is naturally aware of God's existence, that it is created, and that it seeks to worship him. The soul seeks to worship the Christian God, the one True God, even while unfortunately worshiping in Pagan forms:

Hence, O soul, it is accorded to you to proclaim from your own awareness, at home and abroad, no one mocking, no one objecting, "God sees all." "I trust in God." "God will make it good." "God will judge between us." How does this come to you, O soul, if you are not Christian?

When bound in the ribbon of Ceres, when clad in the scarlet pallium of Saturn, when robed in the linen gown of Isis, when in the very temples of the gods, O soul, you often call upon God as your judge. You stand at the feet of Asclepius, you adorn the brazen image of Juno, you decorate the helmet of Minerva with dark omens. And yet while doing this, you do not invoke the god you are addressing. In your own forum you summon a judge from beyond. In your temples you experience an alien divinity. O testimony of truth which conjures up a Christian witness in the midst of these pagan demons!

De test. anim., II. (Q. Howe, trans.) The soul is also aware of evil, even of a personal expression of that evil, that is, Satan. De test. anim., III.

In his fourth chapter, Tertullian seeks to show that the soul is immortal, that it anticipates judgment, and that this implies the preservation of personality, and even preservation of the body:

We are affirming that you survive beyond the final reckoning and that you can expect a day of judgment when you are eternally consigned to torment or delight according to your merits [adfirmamus te manere post uitae dispunctionem et expectare diem iudicii proque meritis aut cruciatui destinari aut refrigerio, utroque sempiterno]. In order to undergo this, you must recover your original essence by reviving the substance and memory of the person you once were. Without the awareness of sentient flesh, you can perceive neither good nor evil; there is no basis for judgment without the living presence of the one who actually earned the inflicted punishment. This Christian concept of the soul is more high-minded than Pythagorean, for it does not relocate you into animal bodies. It is more bountiful than Platonism, for it restores to you the gift of the body. It is more majestic than Epicureanism, for it delivers us from death. And yet solely because of the Christian name, this belief is rejected as a delusion or a misconception – or as some say, an act of arrogant presumption.

De test. anim., IV. (Q. Howe, trans.) In Chapter 5 of his short work, what may be called the kernel or climax of Tertullian's argument, we find Tertullian going beyond all convention, beyond all revelation, pagan, Jewish, or Christian.

These testimonies of the soul are as true as they are straightforward, [simplicia] as straightforward as they are widespread [vulgaria] as widespread as they are universal [communia] as universal as they are natural [naturalia], and as natural as they are divine [divina]. I do not believe anyone would find it frivolous or laughable, if he reflects on the majesty of nature [naturae maiestatem], which is regarded as the wellspring of the soul [ex qua censetur acutoritas animae]. As much as you attribute to the teacher, so much you will concede to the pupil. The teacher is nature and the pupil is the soul [Magistra natura, anima discipula] Whatever the teacher has conveyed or the pupil has learned has been communicated by God, who is the teacher of nature [a deo traditum est, magistro scilicet ipsius magistrae]. Whatever the soul can surmise about its original teacher, this power resides in you that you may reflect upon that which is in you. Be aware of that which has given you awareness. Recognize her who is the seer of your forebodings, who is the prophet of your inklings, who is the oracle of your outcomes. Is it any wonder if, having been bestowed by God, she holds powers vision. Is it any wonder if she knows God, by whom she was bestowed?

Even when the soul is deceived by the adversary, she recalls her creator, his goodness, his decree, her own fall, and the fall of the adversary. Is it any wonder if, having been bestowed by God, she pronounces those things which God gave his creatures to know? But whoever does not think that these explanations of the soul are the promptings of nature and the silent expressions of our inborn and native awareness, he will attribute them to the vice of citing opinions from the published literature in circulation among the masses.

Certainly the soul predates writing, and speech predates the book, and thought predates the pen, and man himself predates the philosopher and the poet. Is it to believed that before literature and its spread, man lived in silence on such subjects? Did no one ever speak of God and his goodness? Did no one speak of death and the afterlife? Speech, I believe, was impoverished, in fact nonexistent, if it once lacked those elements without which it cannot exist today. And now, of course, speech is richer, fuller, and wiser than ever before. If those things which today are so accessible, so immediate, so near at hand, so springing from the lips – if they did not exist before writing emerged, before, as I believe, Mercury [the reputed author of writing] was born – then indeed speech was a beggar. How was it possible, I ask, that literature could know and launch into spoken usage what no mind had previously conceived, no tongue had uttered, no ear had heard?

But since the divine scriptures belonging to us or to the Jews – onto whose olive branch we had been grafted – are much older or at least somewhat older than pagan literature, then credence must be given to our literature rather than to yours. Our literature is more forceful for instructing the soul than yours, having come into being earlier rather than later. Even if we grant that the soul was educated by your literature, tradition derives from its primal origin. Whatever you have taken or assimilated from our letters is still ours. This being the case, it does not make a great deal of difference whether the awareness of the soul was shaped by God [a deo formata] or by writings about God [an litteras dei]. Why, O humankind [homo], why do you insist that these notions about the soul emerged from opinions about your writings [de humanis sententiis litterarum tuarum], only to ripen then into common usage?

De test. anim., V. (Q. Howe, trans.) Tertullian then closes his argument to the Pagan jury to whom he writes his treatise on the soul. The witness of the soul is to be believed as a testimony of the divine. Revelation is but "the faithful sister of the truth," that has its source in God, the creature of the soul and its nature. Indeed, "neither God nor Nature lie," neque deus neque natura mentitur.

Go ahead and believe in your literary sources; even more believe in our divine sources. But as for the insight of the soul, believe in Nature [sed de animae ipsius arbitrio perinde crede naturae]. Select whichever of these you believe to be the faithful sister of the truth [fidelius sororeme veritatis]. If you have doubts as to your own sources, be assured that neither God nor Nature lie [neque deus neque natura mentitur]. In order that you may believe in both Nature and in God, believe in the soul [Ut et naturae et deo credas, crede animae]. So it shall come to pass that you will believe in yourself [Ita fiet ut et tibe credas]. It is the soul you value as having made you as great as you are.

You belong to her entirely; she is everything to you. Without her you can neither live nor die. For her sake you neglect even God. When you fear to become a Christian, come onto her. Why does the soul invoke the name of God when she is worshiping another? When she enlists spirits for cursing, why does she addressed them as demons? Why does she invoke the heavens and curse the earth? Why does she serve the Lord in one place and summon his vengeance in another place? How does she judge the dead? What words does she take from the Christians, whom she wishes neither to see nor to hear? Why does she either communicate these expressions to us or keep them from us? Why has she either taught us or learned from us?

Be suspicious of such a convergence of words amidst such a divergence of the message. You are deluded if you attribute this to the Latin language alone or to the Greek language, which is closely related, for you are thus denying the universality of nature. The soul has descended from heaven, not just on the Latins and the Greeks. One humanity comprises all races, although the name varies. There is a single soul, but language is various. There is a single spirit, but speech is various. Every race has its own discourse, but the content of this discourse is universal. God is everywhere and the goodness of God is everywhere. [Omnium gentium unus homo, varium nomen est, una anima, varia vox, unus spiritus, varius sonus, propria cuique genti loquella, sed loquellae material communis. Deus ubique et bonitas dei ubique.] The demons are everywhere and the curse of the demons is everywhere. The summons of God’s judgment is everywhere [iudicii divini invocatio ubique]. The awareness of death is everywhere [mors ubique et conscientia mortis ubique] and the testimony of the soul is everywhere [testimonium ubique]. By its own right every soul proclaims those things we Christians are not even allowed to murmur [in public forum?] [Omnis anima suo iure proclamat quae nobis nec mutire conceditur]. Rightly then, every soul is both defendant and witness – as much a defendant against the charge of error as a witness to the truth. And she will stand before the court of God on the day of judgment with nothing to say. You were preaching God, but you were not seeking him. You shuddered before the demons and still you worshipped them. You would invoke the judgment of God and yet you denied it. You believed in eternal punishment and yet you took no steps to avoid it. You were aware of the Christian name and yet you have persecuted it [Christianum nomen sapiebas, et Christianum nomen persquebaris].

De test. anim., VI. (Q. Howe, trans.)

16th Century Woodcut Depiction of Tertullian