Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
THAT SOUL AND FLESH ARE CONCEIVED TOGETHER. [1] I will now go back to the origin of this digression, so as to explain how souls overflow from the one, and when and where and by what process they are taken up — a question on which it makes no difference whether it comes up from a philosopher, a heretic, or the common crowd. [2] It matters nothing to the professors of truth from which adversaries the question arises, especially ones as bold as these first ones, who assume that no soul takes shape together with the womb's conception, nor is fashioned and brought forth alongside the forming of the flesh, but that only when the birth is already delivered is it, while the infant is not yet alive, stamped in from outside; that the rest, the seed, once separated off from intercourse into the woman's parts and set moving by a natural impulse, thickens into the substance of flesh alone; that this, once brought forth, still steaming from the furnace of the womb and loosened by heat — like heated iron plunged straightaway into cold water — is struck in just that way by the harshness of the air, and so seizes the vital force and lets out its first vocal sound. This is the Stoic view, shared by Aenesidemus, and Plato too at times, when he says that the soul, foreign and exiled from the womb until then, is drawn in with the newborn infant's first breath, just as it is led out again with its last exhalation. We shall see whether he really meant it that way. Not even among the physicians was Hicesius wanting — a betrayer both of nature and of his own art. [3] They were ashamed, I think, to lay down what women themselves could tell them was so. And how much more shameful the outcome, to be refuted by women than to be proved right by them! For in this matter no one is so fit a teacher, judge, and witness as the female sex itself. Answer, mothers — you who are pregnant, you who have given birth (let the barren and the men be silent) — the truth of your own nature is being asked, the honest report of your own experience is being called for: do you feel in the womb some living vitality not your own, from which the flanks throb, the sides quiver, the whole swelling of the belly is agitated, the seat of the weight shifting from place to place? Are these movements your joy and your sure reassurance that the child is alive and at play within you? And if its restlessness should stop, are you not the first to be afraid for it? Does it not already hear within you, when it startles at a strange sound? Do you not crave, on its behalf, certain foods, and loathe others, also on its behalf? Do you not share your illnesses with it in turn — indeed even your bruises, by which it too, inside, is marked through the same members, taking on the injuries of its mother as its own? [4] If the discoloration and flush of blood are a form of feeling, then blood does not exist without a soul; if all health is an added condition, then health does not exist without a soul; if nourishment, hunger, growth, wasting, fear, movement, and sensitivity to touch are functions of the soul, then whoever performs them is alive. In short, whoever stops performing them stops living. In short, the dead too are delivered — how, unless they were also alive? And who is "dead" except one who was first alive? And indeed even while still in the womb an infant is sometimes slaughtered, by a necessary cruelty, when, lying crosswise at the moment of exit, it denies its own birth, matricide that it would be did it not die itself. [5] And so among the instruments of physicians there is one, along with an implement, by which the hidden parts are first forced open by a twisting adjustment — the ring-knife, with which the limbs are cut apart inside by an anxious deliberation, and the blunt hook, by which the whole grim business is dragged out in a violent delivery. There is also a bronze spike, by which the very act of killing is carried out, a blind assassination; they call it the embryo-slayer, from its office of infanticide — plainly a device for destroying a living infant. Hippocrates had this instrument, and Asclepiades, and Erasistratus, and Herophilus too, the dissector of the ancients, and even the gentler Soranus, all certain that what was conceived was a living creature, and so taking pity on an infancy so wretched that it must be killed first, lest it be torn apart alive. [6] And Hicesius, I believe, had no doubts about the necessity of this crime either, since he supposes the soul is superinduced only after birth, from the strike of cold air — because, he says, the very word "soul," among the Greeks, corresponds to a term for cooling. Are barbarian and Roman peoples, then, animated differently, because they have called the soul by some other name than psyche? And how many nations are reckoned to live under the blazing equator, baked to their very color? Where do they get their soul, who have no harshness of air at all? I say nothing of the heat of the birthing chamber and all the apparatus of warmth necessarily kept blazing there, which it is actually dangerous to expose the newborn to directly. In the very baths, almost, the child slips out, and at once its cry is heard. [7] But if the harshness of the air is the treasury of the soul, then no one ought to have been born outside Germany, Scythia, the Alps, and the Caucasus. And yet the more populous nations, and the readier wits, are found under an eastern and southern climate, while all the Sarmatians are dull of mind despite their cold. Indeed minds ought to grow sharper the colder the climate, if souls came from chilliness — since substance and power go together. [8] With this established, we may also reconsider those who drew breath alive after being cut from their mother's womb — a Liber or two, and the Scipios. And if anyone, following Plato, supposes that two souls cannot come together into one, any more than two bodies can, I would show him not only two souls heaped together into one, just as two bodies are, in the case of twins in the womb, but many other things besides interwoven with a soul — the substance, namely, of a demon, and not just a single one, as in Socrates himself, but a spirit sevenfold, as in Mary Magdalene, and one of legion's number, as in the Gerasene — so that a soul is more readily interwoven with a soul, from a shared community of substance, than an evil spirit with it, given their difference of nature. [9] Yet this same Plato, within the Laws' sixth book, cautions that care be taken lest a defect of the seed, arising from some baseness in the intercourse, should impose a blemish on body and soul alike — and I do not know whether he has here forgotten his earlier position, or that one this. For he shows that the soul is brought in with the seed, which he advises be kept sound, and not with the newborn's first breath. Whence, I ask, do we too, by likeness, correspond to our parents in disposition — on Cleanthes' own testimony — if we are not drawn as well from the seed of the soul? And why, too, did the old astrologers cast a man's horoscope from the moment of his conception, if it is not from that moment that the soul as well exists — to which, if it is anything at all, breath equally belongs?