phers, or any others hooked on this futile theory of the transmigration or succes
Book VII 331 resemblance to their own than to humankind, and differ from human beings far more widely than from other animals, these souls will never belong to human beings, if like really does attract like.
But if this argument is false, how can that opinion be true, seeing that they offer no other reason to show that it is even likely, let alone true? So l myself am more inclined to believe what their later followers also say, that those men who originally proposed these ideas in their books intended it rather to be understood that people become like brute beasts in this life by any kind of perverse and shameful behavior, and thus are changed after a fashion into brute beasts; and that they hoped by thrusting the disgrace of it in this way under their very noses to recall them from the depravity of their lusts and ambitions.
The same continued, with an aside about the Manichees
11, 16. Things, after all, that are said to have happened, like some people remembering in which animal bodies they had been, are either just stories that have been made up, or else were produced in their minds by demons playing jokes on them. l mean, if it can happen in dreams that people recall by a false memory having been what in fact they never were, or having done what they never did, why should we be surprised if by a just and undeclared judgment of God demons are conceded the power of producing something similar in the minds of people who are awake?
17. Much worse, however, and more detestable than those heathen philoso phers, or any others hooked on this futile theory of the transmigration or succes sive states of souls, are the Manichees, who think of themselves or like to be thought of as Christians. The others at least distinguish between the nature of the soul and the nature of God, whereas these people, who say that the soul is the very substance of God and quite simply the same as what God is, have no hesita tion in saying that it is changeable to such a loathsome extent, that there is no kind of grass or grub, according to their quite astonishingly crazy ideas, with which it has not been mixed up and into which it cannot be recycled.
Let them only, however, clear their minds of questions about the obscurest of matters, which inevitably land them, as they mull over them in their crude, literal-minded way, head over heels in such false, noxious and monstrous opin ions; let them only get a firm grip on what has been naturally and truly grafted into every rational soul without the slightest possibility of doubt, that God is altogether unchangeable and imperishable; and their whole thousand-sided fable will immediately collapse—that mythical picture they have painted in their sacrilegious mumbo-jumbo of God being subject to change in the most loathsome ways.