Tertullian's 58-chapter treatise arguing, against Plato and the Stoics alike, that the soul is corporeal, born together with the body at conception, and destined for bodily resurrection rather than transmigration.
De Anima ("On the Soul") is Tertullian's longest surviving philosophical treatise, a sequel to his earlier work Against Hermogenes. Having already argued there that the soul comes from the breath of God rather than from pre-existing matter, Tertullian turns here to settle nearly every remaining question ancient philosophy asked about the soul: what it is made of, what shape it has, where its ruling faculty sits, how the five senses relate to intellect, when the soul enters the embryo, and what happens to it at and after death. He stages the whole inquiry as a running fight with named philosophers -- Plato above all, but also the Stoics Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, the physicians Soranus and Herophilus, and Pythagoras -- whom he treats less as authorities to be synthesized than as witnesses to be cross-examined and, chapter after chapter, refuted.
The treatise unfolds as a sustained argument that the soul is a body of its own particular kind: it has shape, color, and extension, even though it is finer than flesh. Tertullian defends this claim from Scripture (the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham's bosom), from a contemporary charismatic vision reported by a Montanist prophetess in his own congregation, and from sheer physiology -- if the soul could not be touched, wounded, or weighed, it could not suffer, and Scripture plainly says it suffers. He then works through the soul's single, simple nature against those who divide it into many parts; its ruling faculty (the hegemonikon) and its seat in the heart rather than the brain; the reliability of the five senses against Academic skepticism; and the vexed question of infant cognition and natural talent. The treatise's most sustained polemical set-piece targets Plato's doctrine that learning is recollection and the related Pythagorean claim that living souls are recycled out of the dead -- a doctrine Tertullian dismantles partly by exposing Pythagoras's own alleged return from a faked death as fraud, and partly by a demographic argument: if souls cycled between the living and the dead in fixed numbers, the world's population could never have grown the way historical record shows it has.
Written around 210-213 CE, De Anima matters historically as the fullest surviving statement of a distinctively Latin Christian anthropology forged in direct combat with Middle Platonism, Stoicism, and the physicians' schools (Soranus of Ephesus in particular) of Tertullian's own Carthage. It is also a major early witness to traducianism -- the doctrine that the soul is transmitted along with the body at conception, inherited from Adam rather than freshly created or pre-existent -- a position that would echo through later Western debates about original sin. Along the way it preserves invaluable fragments of lost philosophers and physicians, an eyewitness account of early Christian prophetic ecstasy, and Tertullian's own embryological reasoning drawn directly from what he calls the testimony of pregnant women themselves.
“So all of Socrates' wisdom at that moment came from a deliberate policy of composed calm, not from confidence in truth already found. For who has found truth without God? Who has known God without Christ?”
— De Anima — Chapter 1
“There is among us today a sister who has been allotted gifts of revelations, which she experiences in the church during the Sunday services through ecstasy in the Spirit; she holds conversation with angels, and on occasion with the Lord Himself”
— De Anima — Chapter 9
“We define the soul as born of God's breath, immortal, corporeal, possessing form, simple in substance, wise of its own accord, proceeding in various ways, free in will, subject to accident, changeable through the talents, rational, dominant, prophetic, overflowing from one source.”
— De Anima — Chapter 22
“No — we say both are conceived together, and wrought together, brought to completion together, just as they are also brought forth together, and that no interval intervenes in the conceiving where some order could be arranged.”
— De Anima — Chapter 27
“How am I to believe that Pythagoras was not lying when he lied in order to be believed?”
— De Anima — Chapter 28
It is a 58-chapter treatise systematically working through every major ancient question about the soul: its origin, substance, shape, ruling faculty, relation to the senses and mind, its entry into the embryo, and its fate after death. Tertullian argues throughout that the soul is a body of its own fine substance, born together with the flesh at conception, against the rival views of Plato, the Stoics, and the physicians of his day.
Yes. He argues the soul is corporeal -- it has shape, color (he suggests 'airy and luminous'), and can be located, touched, and made to suffer, which for him proves it has a body, even though its substance is finer than ordinary flesh. He supports this with the parable of the rich man and Lazarus and with a reported vision from a prophetess in his own congregation who saw a soul in bodily, human form.
In chapters 25-27 he argues soul and flesh are conceived together in a single act, not that the soul is added later at birth (the Stoic and sometime-Platonic view) or descends from a prior heavenly existence (the Gnostic and Platonist view). He appeals directly to pregnant women's testimony of felt fetal movement as evidence the unborn child is already alive and ensouled.
In chapter 24 he denies the soul could have pre-existed among the Forms and forgotten them, since forgetting requires a cause proportionate to a body, and time itself cannot erase what is properly unborn and eternal, as Plato claims the soul to be. He also notes that natural knowledge (hunger, thirst, the senses) never actually fades, which undercuts the premise that intellectual knowledge could vanish and later be 'recollected.'
He devotes chapters 28-30 to demolishing the idea that living souls are recycled from the dead. He first attacks its supposed origin, exposing Pythagoras's claimed return from death as a staged fraud involving years hidden underground. He then offers a demographic argument: if a fixed stock of souls cycled between the living and the dead, humanity's population could never have grown across recorded history the way it demonstrably has.
Chapter 15 surveys many rival locations proposed by philosophers and physicians -- the head, the brain, the membranes, the chest -- and sides with those (including Egyptian tradition and several Stoics) who place the hegemonikon, the ruling faculty, in the heart, which he also ties to biblical language about God searching and testing the heart.
Yes. Chapter 17 answers Academic skeptics who cite illusions like a bent oar in water or a round-seeming distant tower as proof the senses lie. Tertullian argues these are caused by external conditions (water, distance, angle of light) rather than by any falsehood in sight or hearing themselves, and warns that doubting the senses would undermine the gospel accounts of witnesses seeing, hearing, and touching Christ.
Plato is the central target, especially his doctrines of the soul's pre-existence, its incorporeality, and recollection. Tertullian also engages the Stoics (Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus) on the soul's substance, the physician Soranus of Ephesus on embryology and the soul's seat, Pythagoras on metempsychosis, and various Gnostic and Valentinian teachers whom he treats as having borrowed corrupted Platonist ideas.
Ad Martyras · Ad Nationes 1 · Ad Nationes 2 · Adversus Marcionem 1 · Adversus Marcionem 2 · Adversus Marcionem 3 · Adversus Marcionem 4 · Adversus Marcionem 5 · Adversus Praxean · Apologeticum · De Baptismo · De Carne Christi