53. Ep. 18.2 (CCL 31:44); my trans., based on Parsons, FOTC 12:44. (continued)
Body-Soul Relationship
In Augustine's day, most intellectuals—and this includes most Christian ones—thought of the soul in corporeal terms: that the soul was a sort of highly refined "stuff." Neoplatonism revolutionized Augustine's view. He came to think of both God and the soul as utterly incorporeal. Roland Teske has argued that this idea is one of Augustine's two seminal contributions to Western metaphysical thought.54 In the following passage, Augustine explores the relationship between the immaterial soul and the material body. Augustine saw the soul as a sort of lightning-fast intelligent life-force enlivening the body. From On the Immortality of the Soul:
(16.25) In the natural order, more powerful beings hand down to lower ones the form they have received from the Supreme Beauty. And surely, what they give, they do not take away. Lower things, insofar as they exist, exist for the very reason that more powerful beings hand down to them the form by which they exist. These greater ones are, by reason of their power, more excellent. To these natures it is given that they have greater power. . . . The soul is more powerful and excellent than the body. Therefore, since the body subsists by the soul, . . . the soul itself can in no way be transformed into a body. . . . But the soul is present at the same time wholly, entirely, not only in the entire mass of the body, but also in each of its individual parts. For it is the entire soul that feels pain in any part of the body, yet it does not feel it in the entire body. For when there is an ache in the foot, the eyes take a look at it, the mouth talks about it, and the hand reaches for it. This, of course, would be impossible if whatever of the soul that was in these parts did not also experience a sensation in the foot; if the soul were not present, it would be unable to feel what has happened there. For it would be incredible for a messenger to announce a fact he had not experienced. The sensation of pain that occurs does not run through the mass of the body by continuing in such a way as not to remain unnoticed by other parts of the soul which are elsewhere. Rather, the entire soul feels what is going on in a particular part of the foot and feels it only there where it occurs. Therefore, the entire soul is present at one and the same time in individual parts of the body, and it experiences sensation as a whole, at one and the same time, in the individual parts.55
54. Roland Teske, "Augustine as Philosopher: The Birth of Christian Metaphysics," Augustinian Studies 23 (1992): 7–32; reprinted in To Know God and the Soul: Essays on the Thought of Saint Augustine (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 3–25.
55. De immortalitate animae 16.25 (BA 5:216–18); my trans., based on Schopp, FOTC 4:45–47. See Rist, Augustine, 92–104; Teske, "Soul," AugEncy, 807–12.