Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

460
Jonathan Barnes
St. Paul distinguished between the inner and the outer man – “But
though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day
by day.” (2 Cor 4.16) – and the inner man is evidently both a human
soul and also a man. The story of Lazarus shows that souls have tongues
and fingers and chests – and hence are surely human in form. And St.
John records how “I saw under the altar the souls of them that were
slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held”
(Apc 6.9). The souls must have had human forms; for how else could
John have recognized them?
What can the inward man get up to? The story of Lazarus indicates
that he can eat and drink – and suffer torment. And in fact it seems as
though he can do pretty well everything which the outward man can
do. In one passage Tertullian says that
the soul never rests and is never inactive, nor does it make its immortal nature
a slave of sleep. It proves that it is always in motion: it journeys on land
and sea, it does business, it is agitated, it works, it plays, it grieves, it laughs,
it pursues the lawful and the unlawful … (43.12)
It is true that that is a description of dreaming; and a little later Tertullian
makes it clear that dreams are mere semblances of things – that it’s
one thing for the inward man to dream that he’s working and quite another
for him actually to be working. (See 45.2.) But the text goes on
like this: “… it pursues the lawful and the unlawful, it indicates that it
can do many things even without the body.” In other words, what a
soul dreams it’s doing is an indication of what it actually can do. So
the inward man may sing and dance, walk and talk, eat and drink; he
may guffaw at a joke and grimace with the tooth-ache.
Is there anything he can’t do? Tertullian says that souls don’t, and
perhaps can’t, fall asleep; and perhaps their invisibility and airy constitution
sets other limits to their repertoire. But it is plain that the limits are
not cramping.
What about the outward man? Tertullian suggests that there are
some things – notably thinking and reasoning – which the outward
man cannot do; and it is natural to suppose that he is incapable of
any psychological activity. After all, consider the state of the outward
man once the inward man leaves him – consider, that is, the state of
a corpse. Corpses can’t think, and they can’t perceive. But there’s
more than that: corpses can’t sing and dance, they can’t walk and
talk, they can’t eat and drink. Such a line of thought must suggest
that the outward man is a husk, that he gives a shape and a visibility