Letter 7

From: Faustus, Bishop of Riez To: Avitus (of Vinarum) Date: ~477 AD Context: A theological letter on the nature of the soul — Faustus notoriously argued that the soul is corporeal (material), a position later condemned but influential in his lifetime. Faustus to the beloved Avitus, in Christ. You have asked about my views on the soul, and I will give them to you directly, since I have never seen the point of writing about theology in a way that requires the reader to deduce your actual position. I believe the soul is created, not eternal. I believe it is not strictly incorporeal in the way the philosophical tradition has claimed. When I say "not incorporeal," I am trying to express something that I think the tradition has obscured with Greek philosophy: that the soul is real, that it occupies space in some meaningful sense, that it is genuinely part of the created order rather than a divine emanation that happens to be temporarily lodged in matter. The reason this matters: if the soul is truly incorporeal — if it is essentially spirit in the philosophical sense — then the resurrection of the body becomes philosophically problematic. What would a pure spirit need a body for? The Christian doctrine of resurrection requires that the soul have a real relationship with the body, a relationship that death disrupts and resurrection restores. A soul that has no bodily character has no such relationship. I recognize that this view is not the consensus, and I expect to be argued with. I am not setting it forward as definitive. I am setting it forward as a serious attempt to think through what Christian doctrine actually requires us to say about the soul, rather than simply inheriting a framework from Plato. Your brother, Faustus