Aëriae Animae: Souls and Elements from the Roman Cosmos to the Christian Afterworld

It has been widely recognized that until the fourth century AD Christians discussed freely about the source and the nature of the soul – the cases of Origen and Tertullian being emblematic of this situation in the East and in the West, respectively. It was only in the fourth century AD – after the so-called conversion of Constantine, with the Church’s increasing entanglement with political and social power and the emergence of a new generation of Platonizing intellectuals from the ranks of the upper class – that Christian bishops and theologians inaugurated a new discourse on the soul, its transcendent origin, immaterial constitution, and immortal destiny, which entailed the banishment and repression of earlier alternative visions. In the present paper, I shall be exploring an episode in this crucial historical transition, which, though limited in scope, can shed light upon the long-standing interactions between Greco-Roman theories of matter, elements, and principles, on the one hand, and Christian ideas of the soul and the afterworld, on the other. I am going to focus on the treatise On the City of God (De Civitate Dei) by Augustine of Hippo, who is usually regarded as one of the most decisive and influential figures in what can be called the Neoplatonic turn of fourth-century AD Christian eschatology. It is too often forgotten that throughout his long engagement with the issue of the nature and origin of the soul Augustine maintained an agnostic position, which is faithfully mirrored in all his writings. Indeed, I shall attempt to show that Augustine’s troubled reflection on the soul – on what he repeatedly terms as the ‘extremely obscure question of the soul’ (obscurissimam de anima quaestionem) – includes a meaningful dialogue with Book 16 of Varro’s Divine Antiquities (Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum) and its theory that the four elements of the cosmos host four different kinds of souls. I will investigate the philosophical pedigree of Varro’s cosmological-cum-psychological doctrine, with its recognizable mixture of Platonic and Stoic notions, arguing that Varro’s teacher, the Middle Platonist philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon, is its most likely source. However, far from restricting myself to an exercise in Quellenforschung, I shall claim that the Varronian theory reported in Book 7 of Augustine’s City of God should be read in light of Augustine’s sustained reception of the Platonic tradition in Book 8 of the same work, where the view that the body of demons is made up of air is endorsed by Augustine and attests to his serious pondering of the role of the natural elements in the emergence of a creature’s essence.