Chapter 33: Of the Image of God in the Reasonable Soul — Simplicity and Spirituality
Concerning the dignity of the soul in its nature and essence, reason has adventured thus far, to confess that the soul of man is in some sort a spark and beam of divine brightness. And a greater and more infallible Oracle has warranted that it was breathed into him by God himself, and was made after his image and likeness, not substantially, as if there were a real emanation and traduction of the soul out of God — which were blasphemous and impious to conceive — but only by way of resemblance, and imitation of God's properties in man's original created nature, which is more notable in him than in the other parts of the world; there is indeed in all God's works some kind of image, and lineaments, and footsteps of his glory.
Deum namque ire per omnes Terrasque Tractusque maris Coelumque profundum, etc.
For all the tracts of earth, of sea, and sky, are filled with divine immensity.
The whole world is a great book, wherein we read the praise, glory, power, and infiniteness of him that made it, but man is after a more peculiar manner called [illegible] and [illegible] — the image and glory of God. The greater world is only God's workmanship, wherein is represented the wisdom and power of God, as in a building the art and cunning of the workman; but man (in the original purity of nature) is, besides that, as wax, wherein was more notably impressed by that divine spirit (whose work it is to seal) a spiritual resemblance of his own goodness and sanctity. Again, the greater world was never other than an orator to set forth the power and praises of God; but he made the soul of man, in the beginning, as it were his Oracle, wherein he fastened a perfect knowledge of his law and will, from the very glimpses and corrupted relics of which knowledge of his law, some have been bold to call men [illegible] — the kindred of God. And Seneca, Liber Animus and Diis cognatus, which is the same with that of Aratus cited by Saint Paul [illegible], for we are his offspring. Indeed, Euripides (as Tully in his Tusculans observes) was bold to call the soul of man by the name of God; and Seneca will venture so far too: Quid aliud vocas animum quam deum in humano corpore hospitantem. But to forbear such boldness, as (it may be) one of the originals of heathen idolatry: certain it is that there are (as Tully many times divinely observes) various similarities between God and the mind of man. There are indeed some attributes of God, not only incommunicable, but absolutely inimitable and unshadowable by any excellency in man's soul, as immensity, infiniteness, omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, impassibility, and the like; but whatever spiritual and rational perfections the power and bounty of God conferred upon the soul in its first creation are all of them so many shadows and representations of the like, but most infinite, perfections in him.
The properties then and attributes of God, wherein this image chiefly consists, are first these three: spirituality with the two immediate consequences thereof, simplicity and immortality, in which the soul has partaken without any after corruption or depravation. Concerning the former, it were vast and needless to confute those various opinions of ancient philosophers concerning the substance of the soul — many of which Tully in the first of his Tusculans has reported, and Aristotle confuted in his first De Anima. Some conceived it to be blood, others the brain, some fire, others air; some that it consists in harmony and number; and the philosopher Dicaearchus, that it was nothing at all but the body disposed and fitted for the works of life. But to let these pass as unworthy of refutation, and to proceed to the truth of the first property.
There are various natural reasons to prove the spirituality of the soul; as first, the manner of its working, which is immaterial, by conceiving objects as universal, or otherwise purified from all grossness of matter, by the abstraction of the active understanding, whereby they are made in some sort proportional to the nature of the Intellect Passive, into which the species are impressed.
Secondly, its independence on the body in that manner of working; for though the operations of the soul require the concurrence of the common sense and imagination, yet that is by way only of conveyance from the object, not by way of assistance to the elicited and immediate act. They only present the species; they do not qualify the perception. Phantasmata are only objecta operationis — the objects they are, not instrumenta operandi, the instruments of the soul's working. The act of understanding is immediately from the soul, without any the least concurrences of the body to it, although the things whereon that act is fixed and conversant require, in this estate, bodily organs to represent them to the soul; as light does not at all concur to the act of seeing, which solely and totally flows from the visive faculty, but only serves as an extrinsic assistance for qualification of the medium and object that must be seen. And this reason Aristotle has used to prove that the understanding, which is principally true of the whole soul, is not mixed with any body, but has a nature altogether diverse therefrom, because it has no bodily organ, as all bodily powers have, by which it is enabled to the proper acts that belong to it. And hereon is grounded another reason of his, to prove the soul immaterial, because it depends not on the body in its operations, but draws them immediately from within itself, as is more manifest in the reflection of the soul upon its own nature, being an operation (as he expressly speaks) separable therefrom — the soul being not only actus informans, a form informing, for the actuating of a body and constitution of a compound substance, but actus subsistens too, a form subsisting; and that per se, without any necessary dependence upon matter. It is an act which works as well in the body as whereby the body works.
Another reason of Aristotle in the same place is the difference between material and immaterial powers. For (says he) all bodily cognitive faculties do suffer offense and damage from the too great excellency of their objects, as the eye from the brightness of the sun, the ear from the violence of a sound, the touch from extremity of heat or cold, and the like. But the understanding on the contrary side is perfected by the worthiest contemplations, and the better enabled for lower inquiries. And therefore Aristotle in his Ethics places the most complete happiness of man in those heavenly intuitions of the mind, which are fastened on the divinest and most remote objects; which in religion is nothing else but a fruition of that beatific vision (which, as far as nature goes, is called the contemplation of the first cause) and an eternal satisfying of the soul with beholding the nature, essence, and glory of God.
Another reason may be drawn from the condition of the understanding's objects, which have so much the greater conformity to the soul, by how much the more they are divine and abstracted. Hoc habet animus argumentum suae divinitatis, (says Seneca) quòd illum divina delectam. This argument of its divineness has the mind of man, that it is delighted with divine things; for if the soul were corporeal, it could not possibly reach to the knowledge of any, but material substances, and those that were of its own nature; otherwise we might as well see Angels with our eyes, as understand any thing of them in our minds. And the ground of this reason is, that axiom in Philosophy, that all reception is ad modum recipientis, according to the proportion and capacity of the receiver. And that the objects which are spiritual and divine, have greatest proportion to the soul of man, is evident in his understanding and his will, both which are in regard of truth or good unsatisfiable, by any material or worldly objects, the one never resting in enquiry, till it attain the perfect knowledge, the other never replenished in desire till it be admitted to the perfect possession of the most divine and spiritual good: namely, of him who is the first of causes, and the last of ends.
From this attribute of spirituality flows immediately that next of simplicity, unity, or actuality; for matter is the root of all perfect composition, every compound consisting of two essential parts, matter and form. I exclude not from the soul all manner of composition; for it is proper to God only to be absolutely and perfectly simple: But I exclude all essential composition, in respect of which the soul is merely actual; And so I understand that of Tully, Nihil est Animus admixtum, nihil concretum, nihil copulatum, nihil coagmentatum, nihil duplex.
