ST. AUGUSTINE: SOUL AND IMMORTALITY

I.

1. The word “immortality” means that someone is not subject to death, as the cessation of human existence or as the dissolution of its unity into parts. In the ancient Mediterranean world, it was the exclusive privilege of the gods. Every human being was mortal in the sense that his vital principle (“soul”) and his material body were separated.
2. The ‘person’ dissolved and ceased to exist, even if his unfortunate ‘shadow’ wandered through Hades, which the Hebrews called Sheol.
3. In the relatively ‘sophisticated’ circles of the philosophical schools, some – most especially the followers of the Platonic tradition – maintained that the human soul, being a derivation of the “Soul of the World”, was a member, although of very low rank, of the divine realm.
   However, this meant that the soul not only could not cease to exist, but had always existed.
4. The Platonic tradition – and not only that – also defined the soul, with its capacity for deliberation and rational choice, as the essential identity of man.
   He was himself, in his soul. And it was commonly accepted that to be “anthropos” (man) meant to be a compound of soul and body and, furthermore, that it was the function of the soul to form, animate and govern the body.
5. But this tradition also taught that the ‘well-being’ of the soul required that it remain unbound from the body. The body (soma) was the prison (sema) of the soul.
   II.
6. This ancient set of assumptions, which I have described very summarily, passed, somewhat uncritically, into the Christian tradition.
7. Ambrose and “the books of the Platonists” (Conf. 7.9.13; cf. 7.20.26) conditioned Augustine’s understanding of immortality in his early days as a Christian. His first writings, after his conversion and before his baptism in 387, composed in Cassiciacum, also deal, generally speaking, with “the soul’s capacity to seek and grasp that truth that fills us with satisfaction”: the truth that is divine Wisdom or the divine Word.
8. In the last of these works, the two books of the “Soliloquia,” which continue in a somewhat later work, “De inmortalitate animae,” deal with the immortality of the soul as a consequence of its character as the “place” where immutable and eternal truths reside in the human being.
9. This, in such a way, that the capacity of the soul to ‘grasp’ the eternal truth (the “eternal reality”, that is, the divine reality) is the essential key to its immortality and that which makes the soul a participant in the divine realm.
10. This essentially Platonic argument and, even more so, later, Plotinian, which has roots in Philo of Alexandria and which occupies the attention of Origen of Alexandria, is completed with another Augustinian argument clearly Platonic, which resorts to the fact that the soul, rather than possessing life, is life itself and, consequently, cannot die because it cannot ‘be’ without life (Imm. an. 9.16; cf. Plato, Phaedo 105C-107A).
11. This immortality presupposes that the soul is incorporeal, that is, that it exists without spatial dimensions (Ep. 166.2.4) and, consequently, it does not “move” or “change” with respect to time. In this way Augustine conceives that the soul resides between the body (which extends in time and space) and that which is truly divine (which is immutable and therefore neither temporal nor spatial). This conclusion was not inconsistent with the Neoplatonic perspective, nor did it call into question the belief that the soul itself was divine, even if it was so in a derived or ‘secondary’ sense.
    III.
12. Augustine saw, however, that the mere ‘persistence’ of the soul in the human being did not imply its exemption from evil (for the soul could not not change). And he also saw that, in a Christian scheme of things, there could not be several degrees of divinity.
13. He concluded, therefore, that immortality, in the proper sense, belongs to God, as the Corpus Paulinum had already said with some emphasis (1Tim 6:16: ς ἀνθρώπων οὐδὲ ἰδεῖν δύναται· ᾧ τιμὴ καὶ κράτος αἰώνιον· ἀμήν.), and also because it belongs to men only by grace, that is, insofar as they can reach and enjoy communion with God.
14. Augustine never doubted that the soul is immortal by nature, but he began to think and believe that this circumstance was less interesting than it had seemed to him in his first days as a Christian, than what the pagan tradition and also part of the Catholic tradition thought and that, today, it is the key to the prevailing deism in circles that have not yet fully fallen into agnosticism, but that are going to end up in it.
15. For Augustine, “immortality” increasingly means an elevation or transformation of human nature, of the body and the soul alike: it was a restored or redeemed creation, it was precisely the “recreation” of man.
16. It does not take a great exegete to guess here the coordinates of the Corpus Paulinum, the Corpus Iohanneum and, especially, of the wonderful book of the New Testament canonical Apicalypse.
17. In all this it is clear, for the moment, that.
    1). The Christian interest is for the ‘immortality’ of the whole person, of the body and the soul, and not only for the immortality of the soul.
    2). Secondly, that Christian eschatological immortality for human persons was not a mere incapacity – neither of the soul nor of the body – to end and cease in ordinary existence, but rather it was the enjoyment of a true participation in the eternity of God, in which the body itself became “immortal, spiritual and incorruptible” (Civ. Dei 20.21).
    
    • Mgr. Jaume González-Agàpito