Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
ON THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. [1] I turn now to the intellectual part, to the way Plato has commended to the heretics a knowledge separate from bodily things, attained before death. For he says in the Phaedo: 'And what then of the possession of wisdom itself? Will the body be a hindrance or not, if one takes it on as a partner in the inquiry? I mean something like this: do sight and hearing hold any truth for men? Or do not even the poets keep murmuring this to us endlessly, that we neither hear anything certainly nor see anything certainly?' He was remembering, of course, Epicharmus the comic poet too: 'mind sees, mind hears; the rest is deaf and blind.' [2] So again he says that the man who is truly wise is the one who is wise chiefly in mind, proposing no seeing, drawing on no sense of that kind for the soul, but using the mind itself in its purity when it reconsiders things, in order to grasp each thing in its own purity — above all if he has gone forth from the eyes and the ears and, one might as well say, from the whole body, as something that disturbs and does not allow the soul to possess truth and wisdom, whenever it has dealings with it. [3] We see, then, that against the bodily senses another equipment is being put forward as far more suitable — namely, the powers of the soul, working out that understanding of truth whose objects are not present, nor lie subject to the bodily senses, but are far removed from common awareness, hidden away, in the higher realms, and with God himself. For Plato wants there to be certain substances, invisible, incorporeal, above the world, divine and eternal, which he calls ideas — that is, forms, patterns, and causes of these visible things of nature that lie subject to the bodily senses; and he holds that those are the true realities, and these are their images. [4] Do the heretical seeds of the Gnostics and the Valentinians not already gleam through here? For this is where they seize their distinction between bodily senses and intellectual powers, a distinction they even bend to suit the story of the ten maidens, casting the five foolish maidens as emblems of the bodily senses — foolish, of course, because easily deceived — while the wise virgins express the mark of the intellectual powers, wise, naturally, because they attain to that hidden and heavenly truth established within the Pleroma, the sacraments of the heretics' 'ideas'; for this is exactly what their aeons and their genealogies are. [5] So they divide up sense itself as well, assigning the intellectual faculties to their own 'spiritual seed,' and the sensory ones to the 'animal' seed, on the ground that it can in no way grasp spiritual things; and they hold that the objects of the one are invisible, while those of the other are visible, lowly, and temporal, things that are engaged by sense as constituted in mere images. It was for these reasons, then, that we established earlier that the animus is nothing other than a furnishing and structure built into the soul, and that the spirit is nothing foreign to it beyond what the soul itself produces by breathing — everything else being credited to an addition, whether God or the devil later breathed something further in. [6] And now, as to the distinction between the sensory and the intellectual, we admit nothing more than a difference of objects — bodily and spiritual, visible and invisible, public and hidden — such that the former are assigned to sense, the latter to intellect, while it is the soul, nonetheless, that both are credited to as their servant, the soul which perceives bodily things through the body just as it understands incorporeal things through the mind, provided that it is also understood that it perceives even while it understands. [7] For is not to perceive also to understand, and to understand also to perceive? Or what will sense be, but the understanding of the thing that is sensed? What will understanding be, but the perception of the thing that is understood? Where do these torments come from, torturing plain simplicity and holding truth in suspense? Who will show me a sense that does not understand what it senses, or an understanding that does not perceive what it understands, so as to prove that one can exist without the other? [8] If bodily things are perceived and incorporeal things are understood, then the kinds of things are distinct, but not the dwelling-places of sense and understanding — that is, not the soul and the mind. Well then, by whom are bodily things perceived? If by the mind, then the mind is already sensory too, not merely intellectual, for in understanding it perceives — since if it does not perceive, it does not understand either; and if bodily things are perceived by the soul, then the soul's power is already intellectual too, not merely sensory, for in perceiving it understands — since if it does not understand, it does not perceive either. By the same token, by whom are incorporeal things understood? If by the mind, where will the soul be? If by the soul, where will the mind be? For things that are distinct ought to be absent from each other when each operates in its own office. [9] You will perhaps suppose that at some moment the mind is not present within the soul, since it does happen that we do not know we have seen or heard something, because the mind was elsewhere. I would go further and contend that the soul itself neither saw nor heard, because it was elsewhere along with its own power, that is, its mind. For even when a man is out of his senses, it is the soul that is out of its senses, not because the mind has wandered off but because it is then sharing the soul's condition — though the collapse belongs, in the first instance, to the soul. [10] On what is this established? On the fact that when the soul departs, the mind is not found in the man either; so closely does the mind follow the soul that it does not even linger behind at the end. But when it follows and is bound to the soul, then understanding likewise is bound to the soul, which the mind follows, and to which the mind is bound, understanding being bound to it too. Let understanding, for now, even be granted superior to sense, and the better knower of the sacraments — provided that it, too, is itself simply a power of the soul, exactly as sense is. It makes no difference to me, except that understanding is preferred to sense precisely so that, on this basis, it may be held all the more separate, the more superior it is claimed to be. Then, after the distinction, I will have to beat back the claim of superiority as well, since it will end by reaching all the way to a persuasion about a superior god. [11] But we shall test that question about their god on its own ground, along with the heretics. For now the subject is the soul, and this is not the place to be slyly preferring intellect over it. For even granting that the things attained by intellect, being spiritual, are superior to the things attained by sense, being bodily, the superiority will belong to the objects — the loftier over the lowlier — not to intellect over sense. For how could intellect be preferred to sense, when it is by sense that intellect is furnished with the material for knowing truths? [12] For if truths are apprehended by means of images — that is, if invisible things are known by means of visible ones, since the apostle too tells us that 'his unseen realities, ever since the world was founded, are perceived plainly, grasped through the things he has fashioned,' and Plato tells the heretics that 'the visible things are the face of the hidden things,' and that 'this world must of necessity be some image of another,' — does it not seem to you that intellect uses sense as its guide, its author, its foundational principle, and that truths cannot be attained without it? How then will intellect be superior to that through which it exists, that which it needs, that to which it owes everything it attains? [13] So both conclusions follow together: intellect must not be preferred to sense — for that through which a thing subsists is beneath that thing itself — nor must it be separated from sense — for that through which a thing exists remains together with it.