soul and body is not penal, though Plato represents the supreme
Deity as promising to the inferior gods that they shall never
be dismissed from their bodies._
But the philosophers against whom we are defending the city of God,
that is, His Church, seem to themselves to have good cause to deride
us, because we say that the separation of the soul from the body
is to be held as part of man's punishment. For they suppose that
the blessedness of the soul then only is complete, when it is quite
denuded of the body, and returns to God a pure and simple, and, as it
were, naked soul. On this point, if I should find nothing in their
own literature to refute this opinion, I should be forced laboriously
to demonstrate that it is not the body, but the corruptibility of
the body, which is a burden to the soul. Hence that sentence of
Scripture we quoted in a foregoing book, "For the corruptible body
presseth down the soul."[593] The word corruptible is added to show
that the soul is burdened, not by any body whatsoever, but by the
body such as it has become in consequence of sin. And even though
the word had not been added, we could understand nothing else.
But when Plato most expressly declares that the gods who are made
by the Supreme have immortal bodies, and when he introduces their
Maker himself promising them as a great boon that they should abide
in their bodies eternally, and never by any death be loosed from
them, why do these adversaries of ours, for the sake of troubling
the Christian faith, feign to be ignorant of what they quite well
know, and even prefer to contradict themselves rather than lose
an opportunity of contradicting us? Here are Plato's words, as
Cicero has translated them,[594] in which he introduces the Supreme
addressing the gods He had made, and saying, "Ye who are sprung from
a divine stock, consider of what works I am the parent and author.
These (your bodies) are indestructible so long as I will it; although
all that is composed can be destroyed. But it is wicked to dissolve
what reason has compacted. But, seeing that ye have been born, ye
cannot indeed be immortal and indestructible; yet ye shall by no
means be destroyed, nor shall any fates consign you to death, and
prove superior to my will, which is a stronger assurance of your
perpetuity than those bodies to which ye were joined when ye were
born." Plato, you see, says that the gods are both mortal by the
connection of the body and soul, and yet are rendered immortal by the
will and decree of their Maker. If, therefore, it is a punishment to
the soul to be connected with any body whatever, why does God address
them as if they were afraid of death, that is, of the separation
of soul and body? Why does He seek to reassure them by promising
them immortality, not in virtue of their nature, which is composite
and not simple, but by virtue of His invincible will, whereby He
can effect that neither things born die, nor things compounded be
dissolved, but preserved eternally?
Whether this opinion of Plato's about the stars is true or not, is
another question. For we cannot at once grant to him that these
luminous bodies or globes, which by day and night shine on the earth
with the light of their bodily substance, have also intellectual and
blessed souls which animate each its own body, as he confidently
affirms of the universe itself, as if it were one huge animal, in
which all other animals were contained.[595] But this, as I said,
is another question, which we have not undertaken to discuss at
present. This much only I deemed right to bring forward, in opposition
to those who so pride themselves on being, or on being called
Platonists, that they blush to be Christians, and who cannot brook
to be called by a name which the common people also bear, lest they
vulgarize the philosophers' coterie, which is proud in proportion to
its exclusiveness. These men, seeking a weak point in the Christian
doctrine, select for attack the eternity of the body, as if it were
a contradiction to contend for the blessedness of the soul, and to
wish it to be always resident in the body, bound, as it were, in a
lamentable chain; and this although Plato, their own founder and
master, affirms that it was granted by the Supreme as a boon to the
gods He had made, that they should not die, that is, should not be
separated from the bodies with which He had connected them.