Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
AGAINST PLATO'S "LEARNING IS RECOLLECTION." [1] To begin with, I will not concede that the soul is capable of forgetting, because Plato has granted it so great a divinity that it is made equal to God. He makes it unborn — which alone would have been enough to arm his case for a full divinity — and he adds that it is immortal, incorruptible, incorporeal (since this too he believed of God), invisible, without shape, uniform, sovereign, rational, intellectual. What more could he claim for the soul short of calling it God outright? [2] We, however, who ascribe nothing to God by way of increase, by this very fact rate the soul as far beneath God: we acknowledge that it was born, and therefore that its divinity is a thinner thing and its blessedness a slighter one — a breath, not the Spirit; and if it is immortal, that is a mark of its divine side, yet it is also capable of suffering, which is a mark of its being born; and therefore from its very origin it is capable of deviation, and from that, akin to forgetting as well. Enough on this point — I settled it with Hermogenes. [3] But whatever, by the sum of all its properties, could rightly be reckoned God, will be subject to no passion whatever — and so not to forgetting either, since forgetting is as great an injury as the glory of that which it injures is great — namely memory, which Plato himself proclaimed the health of the senses and the intellect, and Cicero the treasury of all our pursuits. Nor is the question now whether so divine a soul could lose its memory, but whether, having lost it, it can recover it again. For a thing which ought not to have forgotten — if it has forgotten — I do not see how it can be supposed able to remember. So both halves of the case fit my soul, not Plato's. [4] On a second front I raise this objection: do you make the soul possessed by nature of the knowledge of those Forms, or not? "Yes, by nature," you say. No one, then, will grant that natural knowledge of natural things can lapse; the knowledge of arts may lapse, of studies; of teachings, of disciplines; perhaps even of talents and dispositions, which look like nature but are not, because, as I said before, these are made up out of accidents — place, upbringing, bodily constitution and health, ruling powers, and the freedom of the will. [5] But knowledge of natural things fails not even in beasts. Granted, a lion will forget its wildness, tamed by training, and with its whole mane spread out will become the pet whose cheeks some Queen Berenice's tongue is licking clean. Habits the beast will abandon; the knowledge of natural things will remain. That same lion will not forget its natural food, its natural remedies, its natural terrors; offer it fish, offer it pastries from the queen's own table, and it will still crave flesh; compound it a theriac for its sickness, and the lion will still want a monkey; deny it every hunting spear, and it will still be frightened of a rooster. [6] In the same way, in man too — though he is perhaps the most forgetful of all living things — the one thing left unerased is precisely the knowledge of natural things, being, of course, the only truly natural knowledge: always remembering to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty, to see with the eyes, hear with the ears, smell with the nostrils, taste with the mouth, and handle with the hand. These, certainly, are the very senses that philosophy cheapens by preferring the intellectual faculties over them. [7] If, then, natural knowledge of the things of sense persists, how can the knowledge of intellectual things — which is held to be the superior — perish? And where, in fact, does the very force of this alleged prior forgetting, that precedes recollection, come from? "From the great span of time," he says. Not a very careful answer! For a quantity of time can have no bearing on a thing said to be unborn, and therefore believed above all to be eternal. For whatever is eternal — precisely because it is also unborn — admitting neither beginning nor end of time, suffers no measure of time at all; and what has no measure of time is subject to no change through time, and its power owes nothing to any great span of time. [8] If time is the cause of the forgetting, why does memory slip away only from the moment the soul is introduced into the body — as if from that point the soul first began to sustain time, when without doubt it existed before the body, and therefore without time? And once it has entered the body, does it forget at once, or only after some interval? If at once, what quantity of time could there even be yet to reckon — infancy, presumably? If after some interval, then in that interval, before the forgetting sets in, the soul is still, by hypothesis, remembering. And what sort of thing is it that forgets afterward and then, still later, remembers again? And at whatever moment the forgetting rushed in, what measure of time will even that be reckoned to have? The whole course of a lifetime, I think, will hardly suffice to overturn the memory of so vast an age spent before the body. [9] But then Plato shifts the cause again, onto the body — as though this too deserved credence — that a substance which is born should be able to snuff out the faculty of one that has no birth at all. But bodies differ greatly and in many ways — by race, by size, by constitution, by age, by health. Are we then to suppose differences of forgetting to match? But forgetting is uniform; therefore a multiform bodily condition cannot be the cause of a uniform outcome. [10] Many proofs likewise, on Plato's own testimony, establish the soul's power of divination — proofs I have already set out against Hermogenes. And indeed there is no human being who has not at some time or other felt his own soul foreknowing something, prophesying an omen, a danger, or a joy. If the body does not obstruct divination, then, I think, it will not hinder memory either. Certainly within one and the same body souls both forget and remember. If some property of the body induces forgetting, how does that same body admit the opposite — recollection (since recollection after forgetting is itself a second memory, a memory reborn)? What tells against the first memory, why does it not equally tell against the second? [11] Finally, who ought to remember more than little children — as being the freshest souls, not yet submerged in domestic and public cares, given over to their studies alone, whose very learning consists in this "recollecting"? Better still, why do we not all remember equally, since we all forget equally? But only philosophers do — and not even all of them. Plato alone, apparently, in so vast a forest of nations, in so wide a meadow of wise men, both forgot and recollected the Forms. [12] So then, even if this famous argument stands on no footing at all, the whole structure it was built to support collapses along with it — the notion that souls, being unborn and having dwelt among the heavenly bodies, privy there to things divine, and then brought down from there and here recollecting them, were to be believed — plainly furnishing occasions enough for heretics to exploit.