The Literal Meaning of Genesis
BOOK TEN 129 the utmost perfection, having His own proper nature surpassing all other bodies—but a body none the less.
CHAPTER 25
Tertullian's view of the soul. Visual images representing immaterial reality.
41. Tertullian thought the soul was corporeal simply because he was unable to think of it as incorporeal, and hence he feared that it would be nothing if it were not a body.!°! He also was unable to think of God in any but material terms.!°? But since he was intelligent, he sometimes saw the truth and rose above his ordinary way of thinking. For what could have been truer than what he says in one of his works, "Every corporeal being is capable of suffering"'?!°3 Consequently, he had to change the opinion that he had previously adopted when he said that even God was a body. Indeed, I do not think that he was so out of his mind as to believe that God was capable of suffering, so that Christ not in body only, or in body and soul, but in the Word through whom all things were made would be thought of as capable of suffering and subject to change. May such thoughts be far from the mind of a Christian!
Furthermore, when Tertullian gave the soul a color like air and light,!°* he turned to the senses and tried to furnish the soul with the various sense organs as if it were a body. He said: "This [the soul molded into the shape of the body] is the interior man, the other is exterior. They are two, but they form one being. The interior man also has his eyes and ears by which the people must have heard and seen the Lord. He also has the other members which he uses in his thoughts and employs in his dreams."'10>
42. Notice the kind of ears and eyes with which the people had to hear and see God and which the soul employs in dreams. And yet, if anyone were to see Tertullian himself in a dream, he would never say that Tertullian had seen him and that they