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There is no need, therefore, that in our sins and vices we accuse the
nature of the flesh to the injury of the Creator, for in its own kind
and degree the flesh is good; but to desert the Creator good, and
live according to the created good, is not good, whether a man choose
to live according to the flesh, or according to the soul, or according
to the whole human nature, which is composed of flesh and soul, and
which is therefore spoken of either by the name flesh alone, or by the
name soul alone. For he who extols the nature of the soul as the chief
good, and condemns the nature of the flesh as if it were evil,
assuredly is fleshly both in his love of the soul and hatred of the
flesh; for these his feelings arise from human fancy, not from divine
truth. The Platonists, indeed, are not so foolish as, with the
Manichaeans, to detest our present bodies as an evil nature; for they
attribute all the elements of which this visible and tangible world is
compacted, with all their qualities, to God their Creator.
Nevertheless, from the death-infected members and earthly
construction of the body they believe the soul is so affected, that
there are thus originated in it the diseases of desires, and fears,
and joy, and sorrow, under which four perturbations, as CiCero
calls them, or passions, as most prefer to name them with the
Greeks, is included the whole viciousness of human life. But if this
be so, how is it that Æneas in Virgil, when he had heard from his
father in Hades that the souls should return to bodies, expresses
surprise at this declaration, and exclaims: "O father! and can
thought conceive That happy souls this realm would leave, And seek
the upper sky, With sluggish clay to reunite? This direful longing
for the light, Whence comes it, say, and why?"
This direful longing, then, does it still exist even in that boasted
purity of the disembodied spirits, and does it still proceed from the
death-infected members and earthly limbs? Does he not assert that,
when they begin to long to return to the body, they have already been
delivered from all these so-called pestilences of the body? From
which we gather that, were this endlessly alternating purification and
defilement of departing and returning souls as true as it is most
certainly false, yet it could not be averred that all culpable and
vicious motions of the soul originate in the earthly body; for, on
their own showing, "this direful longing," to use the words of their
noble exponent, is so extraneous to the body, that it moves the soul
that is purged of all bodily taint, and is existing apart from any body
whatever, and moves it, moreover, to be embodied again. So that
even they themselves acknowledge that the soul is not only moved to
desire, fear, joy, sorrow, by the, flesh, but that it can also be
agitated with these emotions at its own instance.
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