every nature and substance that is to say, it is not indeed a manner of speech that
338 The Literal Meaning of Genesis
29. 1 forbear to say that that thing of the soul's which even cattle are under stood to possess—or the birds of the sky, since they revisit their dwellings or nests—by which the images of all bodily things are retained, is in no way like any sort of body; and of course this, in which the bodily likenesses of things are contained, ought if anything to be like a body. But if this is not any kind ofbody, seeing that it is certain that bodily likenesses are not only retained there as remembered but are also imagined and made up in countless ways at will, how much less can the soul be like a body in any other of its powers at all!
30. But if they are using "body" in some other way to mean everything that is, every nature and substance that is to say, it is not indeed a manner of speech that is admissible, else we would not find in speaking any way of distinguishing bodies from things that are not bodies; still, we should not trouble ourselves too much over the word.22 What we are saying is that whatever the soul is, it is neither one of these four well-known elements, which are manifestly bodies, nor is it what God is. But you cannot state better what it is than by saying that it is the soul or spirit of life. The reason for adding "of life," you see, is that this air too is often called spirit. Though as a matter of fact they have also called the same air the soul, so that now one cannot find a name properly to distinguish this reality, which is neither body nor God, nor insensate life which can be assumed for trees, nor life without rational mind, such as is to be found in cattle, but life which is now less than that of the angels and is going to be what that of the angels is, if it has lived here by the instructions of its creator.
3 1 . Even if there are doubts and questions, however, about where it comes from, that is about what material, so to say, it has been made from, or what perfect and blessed nature it has issued from as a kind of flux or discharge, or whether it has quite simply been made from nothing, about this at least there must be no doubt at all; that if it was anything before, what it was was made by God, and it has now been made by God to be itself a live soul; after all, it was either nothing, or at least it was not what it now is. But that part of our inquiry in which we were seeking the quasi-material from which it may have been made has now engaged our attention long enough.
22. This use of the word "body" was to be found rather disconcertingly in Augustine's African predecessor, Tertullian, who quite happily calls God a body. He does in fact use the word to distinguish concrete realities from abstractions; concrete from abstract nouns. When we say that "God" is a concrete noun, we are not afraid of being taken to mean that God is a solid substance like concrete. Augustine returns to the subject in Book X, and there offers a detailed criticism of Tertullian's views at the end of that book, 25,41—26,45.