{"collection":"chr","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/chr/ecf/105/1050773.htm","path":"chr/ecf/105/1050773.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/105/1050773.htm","text":"Chapter 17 [XII.]\u2014A Twofold Question to Be Treated Concerning the Soul; Is It \u201cBody\u201d? and is It \u201cSpirit\u201d? What Body is.\nAnd now, as far as the Lord vouchsafes to enable me, I must reply also to that allegation of yours, in which, speaking of the soul, you again mention my name, and say, \u201cWe do not, as the very able and learned bishop Augustin professes, allow it to be incorporeal and also a spirit.\u201d We have therefore, first, to discuss the question, whether the soul is to be deemed incorporeal, as I have said; or corporeal, as you hold. Then, secondly, whether in our Scriptures it is called a spirit\u2014although not the whole but its own separate part is also properly called spirit. 2478 Well, I should, to begin with, like to know how you define body. For if that is not \u201cbody\u201d which does not consist of limbs of flesh, then the earth cannot be a body, nor the sky, nor a stone, nor water, nor the stars, nor anything of the kind. If, however, a \u201cbody\u201d is whatever consists of parts, whether greater or less, which occupy greater or smaller local spaces, then all the things which I have just mentioned are bodies; the air is a body; the visible light is a body; and so are all the things which the apostle has in view, when he says, \u201cThere are celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial.\u201d 2479\n[The author seems here to have such texts as 1 Thess. v. 23 in mind (see below, chs. 19 and 36), and to mean that sometimes the whole inner man is called \u201cspirit,\u201d and sometimes \u201cspirit\u201d is distinguished from \u201csoul.\u201d\u2014W.]\n361:2479","title":"Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. V: A Treatise on the...","type":"page"}