Metalogicon (1991) IV, 1
Denotation and Corporeity in Leviathan
Emanuele Riverso
What is said in Leviathan, the most known work by Hobbes,
about God and theological subjects with or without reference to
politics, cannot be correctly understood without a previous
consideration of some peculiar aspects of the doctrine of language
that is embodied in this and in others Hobbesian writings; such
aspects are the ones concerned with semantics or the meaning of
words and phrases. For sake of brevity I will restrict my enquiry
to Leviathan, where it is sketched with sufficient clarity. Speech,
according to Hobbes, is an invention, the “most noble and
profitable invention of all others”1 whose first author was God,
that instructed Adam how to name the creatures that were
presented to his sight. Notice that, according to Hobbes, God did
not instruct Adam how to connect one word with another to form
a meaningful utterance, but only how to give creatures names. It
was the act of naming that Adam was taught by God through a
sort of training that consisted in presenting creatures one by one to
his sight while inviting him to give each of them a name. God did
not instruct Adam how to give creatures the correct names;
Hobbes had no problem about the correct name of a thing as the
problem that had worried Plato2 about the possibility of
>?>µ< ;@AB@C and the way of determining the >DE>2FC of
names. Hobbes clearly suggests that Adam, after the short training
received by God, got able to repeat by himself the same act of
giving a name to each new creature and taught his descendants
how to achieve the same performance. This training by God “was
sufficient to direct him to adde more names, as the experience and
use of the creatures should give him occasion; and to join them in
such manner by degrees, as to make himself understood; and so
1 Th.HOBBES, Leviathan, Dent and Sons, London 1957, ch.lV, p.12.
2 PLATONE, Cratilo, trad. intr. e note di E. Riverso, Borla, Roma, 1988.
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Metalogicon (1991) IV, 1
by succession of time, so much language might be gotten, as he
had found use for”.3
Unfortunately the language got “and augmented by Adam
and his posterity, was again lost at the tower of Babel , when by
the hand of God, every man was stricken for his rebellion, with an
oblivion of his former language”.4 New languages were invented
by men dispersed into several parts of the world and this
production happened “as need ( the mother of all inventions )
taught them.”.5 Probably we should admit that oblivion of the
former language did not involve oblivion of the act of naming, so
men having lost the ancient names were ables to invent new ones.
If speech was conceived of as supported by a logical structure,
Hobbes had to suggest how men came to give a structure to the
new languages, they invented, after having lost the old one. There
is a place in Leviathan,6 where we can read that “truth consisteth
in the right ordering of names in our affirmations”. This could
mean that speech is not a mere succession of words but posses a
structure; unfortunately Hobbes adds immediately that “a man that
seeketh precise truth” had need to remember that every name he
uses stands for; and to place it accordingly”; this means that the
ordering of names in the speech should be conceived of not as
obeying to syntactical or logical rules but as obeying to the
correspondence rule of names with things; as a consequence the
truth of speech should be conceived of as a consequence of
correct applications of names. Definitions are of the utmost
importance because they determine since the beginning of an
argumentation the meaning of words, that is to say what each
word stands for.
Of course Hobbes did not ignore the existence of logical
researches that the books of Aristotle and of the authors of the
Schools were so rich in, but he had a very low opinion of such
books and did not believe that they could be of a real utility for
3 Th.HOBBES, Leviathan, ch.IV, p.12.
4 Op. cit., ch. IV, pp.12-13.
5 Op. cit., ch. lV, p.13.
6 Op. cit., ch. IV, p .15.
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Metalogicon (1991) IV, 1
the understanding of speech. He admitted a “Mental Discourse”
and a “Trayne of our Thoughts” 7 on which he relied for the
correctness of argumentations while reserving to language only
four function: l) to supply names as marks or notes of things for
remembrance; 2) to supply names or notes of things for
communication of thoughts and knowledges among men ; 3) to
supply names of things to make known to others our wills and
desires; 4 ) to permit playing with words for pleasure or ornament.
The only value that we can find in a connection between two
names is that it expresses a connection between the things named
by them. All this amounts to say that each language can be
adequately described as a collection of names (the collection of
names supplied by its vocabulary), each with his own denotation;
the rules of grammar and syntax have no bearing on its linguistic
functions.
Such a view ignores the distinction that was so important in
Plato's analysis of speech , between >?>µ< and DFµ<, as the two
constituents parts of G>H>C,8 and subsumes all sorts of words
under the label name, that has the same value of the label sign or
note or mark . No such things were admitted of like logical
constants or syncathegorematic terms.This was connected to the
view that the “Mentall Discourse” and the “Trayne of our
Thoughts” were only additions or “subtractions ” of parcels,
sometimes grouped and shaped as multiplications and divisions;
reasonings were nothing more than adding or subtracting
denotations made by names “in what matter soever there is place
for addition and subtraction, there is also place for Reason ; and
where these have no place, there Reason has nothing at all to do”.9
So “the Use and End of Reason” were “not the finding of summe,
and truth of one, or few consequences, remote from the first
definitions, and settled significations of names; but to begin at
7 Op.cit., ch. IV, p.13.
8 Cf. PLATONE, Sofista 261 e - 262 c, trad. intr. e note di E. Riverso, Istituto Editoriale
del Mezzogiorno, Napoli 1964, pp.113-115 e Intr. pp. 33-34.
9 Th.HOBBES, Leviathan, ch.V, p .18.
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Metalogicon (1991) IV, 1
these; and proceed from one consequence to another”.10 This
means that reasoning is not the mere accepting of the results of
addictions and subtractions but is the accurate rehearsal of
reckonings yet performed and of new ones togheter with the
control of names entering such reckonings. But the operations
performed by thought in all cases are always additive or
subtractive procedures that do not need more than elements or
parcels represented by names. The following of consequenses
from premises is nothing more than the following of sums or
differences from additive or subtractive performances. As in a
sum and in a difference the elements or parcels are only heaped or
gathered togeter without any pattern or framework, so that they
can be numbered in whatever order you prefer, no pattern or
framework was to be recognized by Hobbes in the result of a
reasoning or in its development, that could be represented by a
sort of words different from names.
* * *
The Hobbesian view that language is mere collection of
names or signs of things and that words are all names, means that
words are made into elements of language only through a relation
with things; this relation is now known as denotative or referential
and could be contrasted with connotative relation or with the role
of functors (existential f. , universalizer f., individualizer f ., time
f., etc .), but the Hobbesian view does not admit of any other
relation different from the denotative one.
This view was rooted in a long tradition of analysis of
language that depended on the fact that naming is what men can
grasp with the greatest easiness in the reality of language.The
most ancient speculations about language produced by all peoples
are concerned with names.11 Greek philosophers discovered that
G>H>C is not a mere addition of names but embodies a structure.
10 Op.cit., ch. V, p.19.
11 Cfr. E. RIVERSO, Il linguaggio nel pensiero filosofico e pedagogico del mondo
antico, Armando, Roma, 1973, pp.15-25.
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Metalogicon (1991) IV, 1
Plato was the first of them that tried to detect this structure and
discovered the propositional structure made of a nominal
part
( >?>µ<) and a verbal part ( DFµ< ); nevertheless he thought that
both parts have each a denotative relation to an object and in this
sense they are both names ( >?>µ<2< ); obviously he used the
word >?>µ< with two meanings: the semantic one by which the
nominal part and verbal part of a proposition are both names, and
the logical one by which only the nominal part of a proposition is
a name.12 Plato's view that both parts of a proposition ( G>H>C) are
in a sense names was the root of Aristotle's terminism that had an
enormous bearing on the speculations about logic and analysis of
language in Hellenistic times and Middle Ages till the times of
Hobbes. Plato's view can be described as a correspondence theory
of meaning, that is to say it can be described as a theory of
meaning that does not allows a word to be meaningful if there is
not an object denoted by it or to which it refers. In Plato this view
is rather loose, because he did not consider each word as a name
but knew that in some cases a name can be constituted by several
words ( what Bertrand Russell called descriptive phrases or
descriptions ) and besides he noticed the difference between
>?>µ<2< that are >?>µ<2< also in a grammatical and logical
sense and >?>µ<2< that are DFµ<2< in a grammatical and logical
sense.
It was St. Augustine that gave the correspondence theory of
meaning a very striking shape, when he supported the view that
each word, if meaningful, is the name of something and for each
meaningful word (the very Latin words si, qui, volo, bene,
scriptus, et, ab, heu)13 there is a thing denoted and named by it:
“Omnia verba nomina et omnia nomina verba esse comperimus”14
Hobbes followed in this tradition though he did not speak in
a way that revealed the acceptance of an extreme view like the
12 PLATONE, Cratilo, “Introduzione” by E. Riverso, Borla, Roma 1988.
13AURELII AUGUSTINI, De magistro, 15, recensuit G. Weigel in Corpus Scriptorum
Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol.LXXVII, Moelder, Pichler, Tempsky, Wien 1959.
14Op. cit. 17; cfr. E. RIVERSO, Il linguaggio..., pp.176-184.
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one of St. Augustine. What he was concerned with was the
shaping of a theory of language that should cancel the legitimacy
of metaphysical speculations cultivated by the official teaching of
schools . In this concern a bearing of Ockhamist tradition can be
discovered that is more manifest in his nominalist rejection of
universals.
It is worth noticing that two similar correspondence theories
of meaning pushed Plato towards the belief in the existence of
immaterial objects ( @IBF) as references for universal and abstract
names, and Hobbes towards the negation of all sorts of universal
or abstract objects. There was a third possibility envisaged by St
Augustine for dealing with universal names ; it consisted in taking
the hierarchy of categorical names, or universals of different
degrees of universality, as determinated by relations between
names and named in the sense that a more universal name is the
name of less universal names that are included in its extension,
till the lowest specifical names that refer to individual things:
“Cum verbum signum sit nominis et nomen signum sit fluminis et
fluminis signum sit rei”;15 that is : the word verbum is a name
whose reference includes the word nomen, nomen is a name
whose reference includes the word flumen and the word flumen
is a name whose reference are the various rivers flowing on Earth.
Augustinus did not develop this cue; had he developed it, the
whole of his doctrine of ideas had crumbled down; it seems that
no attention has been paid to this suggestion by Augustine to
conceive of universal names as metalinguistic terms. Hobbes did
not envisage anything like this and thought that the disposition of
names in the speech is sufficient to show the connections of
causes and effects among things, so the only pattern or framework
that we can find in the result of reasoning is the one that is made
apparent by the connexions of names .
* * *
15AURELII AUGUSTINI, De magistro, 9; cf. E. RIVERSO, Il linguaggio...,pp. 177-
178.
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The view that the conclusion of a reasoning is always a sum
or a difference, as it entails that no pattern or framework of this
conclusion is representable by words that are not names, is not
obviously consistent with the view that the connexion of names is
important in the speech “to the remembrance of the consequence
of causes and effects”.16 It is not easy to decide which connexion
of names Hobbes had in mind. If we agree that Hobbes mentioned
the disposition of names in the speech and conceived of this
disposition as a means to show the connexion among things, we
are perhaps near to attributing to Hobbes something like a picture
theory. But in his illustration of universal names as names of
“divers particular thing”,17 Hobbes describes another sort of
connexions among names that are the connexions existing
between universal names of different extension: “of Names
Universall, some are of more, and some of lesse extent; the larger
comprehending the less large: and some again of equall extent,
comprehending each other reciprocally” 18
Obviously the connexions among universal names cannot be
representatives of connexions among things, because nothing
universal exists in things themselves, besides the connexion
between causes and effects are not of the sort of connexions
between more extensive and less extensive universal names.
Be it as it may, the distinction that Hobbes made between
proper names and universal names ( or common names ) is that
each proper name refer to only one thing ( exemples of proper
names are Peter, John, This man, This Tree ; for Hobbes singular
descriptions counted as proper names) while each universal name
has a multiple reference as it is the name of more than one thing,
each being named individually and singularly. So a proper name
recalls to the mind only one thing; and an universal name recalls
one of a group of things. In all cases the object denoted is an
individual; there is nothing denotable except individuals and if
somebody claims that he is referring by his words to something
16 Th.HOBBES, Leviathan, ch. IV, p.13.
17 Ib.
18 Op. cit. , ch. IV, p.14.
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that is not an individual, he is referring to nothing and his words
are meaningless. Universals are only names.
The nominalistic view supported by Hobbes is part of his
mental attitude strongly critical against cultural mystifications of
his time.Such mystifications, he thought, are produced by misuses
of language. Frencis Bacon had moved a similar censure against
idola fori of his time. Hobbes aimed at being more rigorous by
shaping a theory of language that excluded fictitious words
divested of all reference to reality. He knew the dangers of
meaninglessness, that is a concept known since the time of
Plato.19 He frequently censured words and compositions of words
that had no correct reference to existing things. For exemple he
showed that if you try to explicate the motion downwards of
bodies by mentioning heaviness, you say something of no value
because the word heaviness does not add any new meaning to the
one of going downwards.20 Sometimes he denounced the usage of
names that do not signify anything but “are taken up and learned
by rote from the Schooles, as hypostatical, transubstantiate,
eternal Now ”.21 He strongly believed that the usage of words
divested of reference to real objects was a major source of
mistakes and troubles in cultural and social life of men and in all
his works he energetically crusaded against all sorts of people
that indulged the tendency to build up words that were names of
nothing. He fought also the tendency to misuse words by giving
accidents names of bodies, bodies names of accidents ( obviously
he thought of accidents as individual ones, not as general things),
by applying names of bodies to names or discourses, names of
accidents to names or discourses and by employing names
metaphorically.22
By giving an accident the name of a body we make
fictitiously the accident into a body and run into falsity. By giving
19 PLATONE, Cratilo 430 ~. The sound that a bronze object produces when hit, is a
meaningless sound.
20 Th.HOBBES, Leviathan, ch. XLVI, p.371.
21 Op. cit., ch. V, p.21.
22 Op. cit., ch.V, pp.20—21.
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a body the name of an accident we mistakenly suggest that it has
the property of accidents. By giving names or discourses the
name of a body or of an accident we deceive ourselves and others
into dealing with words as if they were bodies or accidents.
*
*
*
This view and this criticism by Hobbes about use and
misuse of language entail that the range of denotable things is
strictly circumscribed and, as a consequence, the range of possible
names is limited. There is no true word that is not a name
(descriptions are counted by Hobbes as unities, so they are
conceived of as names) and there is no name without reference to
an object; so if we claim to name fictitiously things that cannot
have any reality, we do not perform an act of naming and, as
speaking is naming according an order, we fail to speak, we don't
speack at all. But if we are not referring to anything of any object,
so we are not
thinking at all, we are only deluding ourselves and other people.
What is the range of denotable things according to Hobbes?
Hobbes circumscribed the range of denotable things to bodies,
accidents of bodies, names and compositions of names, thoughts,
sensations, imaginations, passions and virtues. Of such things
names are signs. They are all bodies or accidents of bodies;
thoughts, sensations, imaginations, passions and virtues are all
bodily happenings. “The cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or
Object, which presset the organ proper to each Sense, [...] which
pressure [ ...] causeth there a resistence, or counter pressure or
endeavour of the Heart, to deliver it self: which endeavour
because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without”.23 So
experience offers to our attention the results of a mingling of
external pressures and internal counter-pressures; such results are
in part knowledges of external bodies and their movements and in
part knowledges of what happens in our body that manifests itself
in the form of dreams and more or less strong fancies. If external
23 Op. cit., ch.I, p.3.
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bodies and their movements known through vision and sensations
are denoted by the application of names, there are correct
denotations, real names and reliable discourses. If dreams and
fancies are denoted as movements of our body or as something
that happens within ourselves by names of dreams and fancies, we
make a correct application of names and are able to perform
reliable discourses. If dreams and fancies are denoted as realities
existing in the world outside our body, we effect a misuse of
words and apply names to nothing, so we deal with utterances
that are not real names and are misled into building up unreliable
discourses. “From this ignorance of how to distinguish Dreams,
and other strong Fancies, from Vision and Sense, did arise the
greatest part of the Religion of the Gentiles in time past, that
worshipped Satyres, Fawnes, Nymphs, and the like; and now
adayes the opinion that rude people have of Fayries, Ghosts, and
Goblins; and of the power of Witches”.24 This entails that the
religion of Gentiles is filled with falsities and delusions and
Christian religion needs to be protected against all sorts of
introduction of pagan elements; this protection includes a crusade
against misuse of language consisting in the invention of fictitious
names that refer to nothing.
Hobbes, when engaged in such a crusade, could truly be a
believer and could bona fide conceive of himself as a Christian,
as a better Christian than the ones that fostered superstitions,
pagan rituals and interpolations of ghostly beings into
Christianity. The accustion of corrupting Christianity through the
introduction of pagan falsities was commonly charged against
Roman Church and Anglican Church by Calvinists, Puritans,
Presbyterians and other radical groups of Protestants; Hobbes
followed in this trend of Christian thougt and if we perceive that
his criticism of Christian superstitions made Christianity into a
rather poor religion approaching deism, we should keep in mind
that the way followed by Hobbes was same of Bayle and of a
number of sincere Christians, and that in England and in France
deism was the result of a deeper and deeper purification of
24 Op. cit., ch.II , p.7.
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Christian religion.
Hobbes judged in the same way the fictitious names of
ghostly things and the fictitious names invented and used by
philosphers of Schools that were divested of reference, for
exemple the names Separated Essences, Essences, Corporeity,
Walking, Life, Time, Act and Power, etc. “Therefore, to bee a
Body, to Walke, to bee Speaking, to Live, to See and the like
Infinitives; also Corporeity, Walking, Speaking, Life, Sight, and
the like, that signifie just the same, are the names of Nothing.”25
To conclude: Hobbes endorsed the view that speech is made
only of names (names of things, names of accidents, names of
names, etc.), names are meaningful and are true names only if
they are denoting words, a word is denoting only if there is a thing
it refers to, what exists is a body or an accident of a body (all
accidents of bodies are movements), therefore a meaningful
speech is only the one that is about one or more bodies or bodily
accidents. The name God cannot be a real name and ... a speech
about God cannot be a reliable speech, if God is not conceived of
as something bodily or plainly as a individual body.
*
*
*
Hobbes was very outspoken on this point: “the nature of
God is incomprehensible ; that it to say, we understand nothing of
what he is , but only that he is; and therefore the Attributes we
give him, are not to tell one another, what he is, nor to signifie our
opinion of his Nature, but our desire to honour him with such
names as we conceive most honorable amongst our selves”.26 But
to say that God exists is the same as to say that he is a body,
because were God not a body or something bodily, the word God
would be divested of reference and the speech about God would
be meaningless. In his criticism of De mundo by Thomas White
Hobbes painly stated “idem esse ens et corpus: [...] pro ente igitur
25 Op. cit., ch. XLVI, p. 369.
26 Op.cit., ch.XXXIV,.211-212.
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de quo loquimur dicemus semper corpus ”.27 He held the view
that the verb to be (and the corresponding verbs in Latin, Greek
and other languages) by himself is divested of all meaning,
therefore the words obtained from it or the corresponding Latin or
Greek words, like entity, essence, essential, essentiality have no
meaning of their own but are only signs that we are effecting
some inferences or deriving some conclusions. We can conceive
of languages without any verb like to be ; in these languages the
words entity, essence etc. could not exist and yet people that use
them could perform the same mental inferences that we effect
with the help of the verb to be.28 As words like ens, entity, etc. are
not able to convey by themselves an understandable meaning,
they can have a reference if they entail the meaning of the word
corpus in the sense that if we speak of an entity, we always
intend a body, that it to say we intend something that is extended
in space: “Est igitur ens in hoc sensu id omne quod occupat
spatium, sive id quod aestimari potest longitudine, latitudine et
profunditate”.29 If we say that there is something that is not
corporeal, we contradict ourselves. Incorporeal being is a
contradiction because corporeity is not an attribute that adds to
being but is being itself.
The identity between ens and corpus nullified the
possibility of any word that would denote something incorporeal;
would such a word exist, it would refer to nothing, so it would be
meaningless. This view obliged Hobbes to effect a detailed
confutation of the opinion largely accepted among Christians that
there are immaterial beings referred to as spirits, that angels,
devils, souls of men and God himself are spirits or immaterial
beings. His refutation has two faces, the one was linguistic, the
other was Scriptural. From the linguistic point of view he showed
as people that claim to refer to immaterial things, in fact do not
refer to anything at all. All things that are named spirits, or are
27 Th.HOBBES, Critique du de mundo de Thomas White,, éd critique d'un texte inedit
par Jean Jacquot et Harold Whitmore Jones, Vrin ,Paris 1973, p. 312.
28 Th.HOBBES, Leviathan, ch. XLVI, p. 368.
29 Th.HOBBES, Critique..., p. 312.
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bodies, perhaps subtile bodies as air, or are delusions produced by
dreams, fancies and improper usage of words. “The world, (I
mean not Earth only, that denominates the Lovers of it Wordly
men, but the Universe, that is, the whole masse of all things that
are) is Corporeall, that is to say, Body; and hath the dimensions of
Magnitude, namely, Lenght, Bredth, and Depth: also every part of
Body, is likewise Body, and hath the like dimensions; and
consequently every part of the Universe, is Body; and that which
is not Body, is no part of the Universe: and Because the Universe
is All, that which is no part of it, is Nothing; and consequently no
where. Nor does it follow from hence, that Spirits are nothing: for
they have dimensions, and are therefore really Bodies; though that
name in common Speech be given to such Bodies onely, as are
visible, or palpable; that is, that have some degree of Opacity”.30
From the Scriptural point of view Hobbes showed that all
mentions of angels, devils, souls and God himself that are made in
the Scripture can be easily and correctly interpreted or as referred
to material objects 31 as passions, good or as bad dispositions, etc.
The view that the range of denotable objects includes only
bodily or material individuals and that all claims to effect
references to universal, abstract or immaterial objects are
groundless, was supported by Hobbes with a strong belief that he
was crusading against degenerations of Christianity, spoiling of
Christian belief by pagan interpolations, mystifications effected
by Schools and falsities that could be reproductive of political
troubles. Yet this view was very disturbing for his readers and
students that tried to elucidate it were faced with difficult puzzles
most of which are still extant and touch essentially the materiality
of God. An easy escape from some of these puzzles has consisted
in labelling Hobbes an atheist, what is unfair.
In fact Hobbes was not a pious nor a holy man according to
the standards of Catholicism of modern times, nor even according
to the standards of protestant confessions; but he strongly
30 Th.HOBBES, Leviathan, ch. XLVI, pp. 367-368.
31 Op.cit., ch. XXXIV, pp. 2l0-2ll, 2l4, 2l6; ch.XLIV, p.341; ch.XLV, pp. 350-353; ch.
XLVI ,pp.369-371.
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believed in the existence of God as a fundamental tenet for the
understanding of the world and for the building up of the
framework of social and political order.
His view that God is material or corporeal can be less
disturbing if we consider that in his time the concept of matter
was much less determined than it is in our time; the only thing
that could be said with certainty was that it occupies space or is
extended or is present in different contiguous places; no theory of
the structure of matter was strongly grounded and it was licit to
think that some matter profoundly different from the one we see
and touch could exist or that something extended could exist that
was outside all our powers of perception and conception. In fact
Hobbes insisted that God is such that we cannot have an idea or
image of him in our minds 32 and what we say of him do not
signify something of his attributes but only expresses our pious
intention “to do him the greatest Honour we are able”. 33 The
concept that there is something that is not material or corporeal,
that is not in any place and does not moves from one place to
another, was a very puzzling concept that Hobbes contemned as
fictitious, misleading and apt to fall into meaninglessness. The
origin of the belief that we are able to think of and to speak about
things that are really immaterial and incorporeal, is to be found in
the thought of Plato, that introduced into the world of
philosophers the @IBF as references of universal names. Aristotle
follewed in his steps and spoke of forms that schoolmen used to
buid up sentences that claimed to be about separate forms and
abstract essences. Another ground for the claim that we can think
of immaterial things was laid by Descartes with his notions of
consciousness and selfconsciousness that had perhaps a debt to
the view of the flying man suggested by Ibn Sina.34 But Hobbes
strongly condemned all doctrines of abstract essences, substantial
forms and selfsubsistent ideas,35 nor he accepted the views of
32 Op. cit., ch. XI, p.53.
33 Op. cit., ch. XXXI, p.195.
34 Cf. E. RIVERSO, L'Islam, Armando, Roma 1985, pp. 220-221.
35 Th.HOBBES, Leviathan, ch. XLIV, p.331; ch. XLVI, pp.367-368.
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Descartes36 that made the soul into something wholly different
from the body. How could he accept as meaningful a speech that
would claim to be about immaterial objects.
Students that are disturbed by the Christian belief of
Hobbes in a material God, should remember that in the early
Christianity the same semantic need felt by Hobbes was obeyed
by Tertullian that openly declared: “Quis enim negabit Deum
corpus esse, etsi Deus spiritus est? Spiritus enim corpus sui
generis in sua effigie”.37 In fact, according to Tertullian, God
“Cum autem sit, habeat necesse est aliquid, per quod est, hoc erit
corpus eius. Omne, quod est, corpus est sui generis. Nihil est
incorporale nisi quod non est”.38 Obviously also the soul had to
be conceived of as corporal: “Igitur corpus anima, quae nisi
corporalis corpus non derelinquet”.39 “Si quid tormenti siue
solacii anima praecerpit in carcere seu deuersorio inferum, in igni
uel in sinu Abrahae, probata erit corporalitas animae [...] in
quantum enim omne corporale passibile est, in tantum quod
passibile est corporale est” 40
To conclude, it is useful, perhaps, to add that also St.
Augustine felt strongly inclined to conceive of God as
corporeal:“ut quamvis non forma humani corporis, corporeum
tamen aliquid cogitare cogerer per spatia locorum sive infusum
mundo sive etiam extra mundum per infinita diffusum”.41
.
36 Cf. the third objections to the Meditations of Descartes, specifically the objections
against the second meditation.
37 Q. S. FLORENS TERTULLIANUS, De anima, Adversus Valentinianos, De carne
Christi, Adversus Praxean cura et studio J. H. Waszink, A. Kroymann, E. Evans, in
Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina II, Tertulliani Opera; pars II, Brepols, Turnhold
1954, Adversus Praxean VII, 8.
38 Q. S. FLORENS TERTULLIANUS, De carne Christi, XI,3-4 .
39 Q. S. FLORENS TERTULLIANUS, De anima, V, 6.
40 Op. cit. ,VII, 4 .
41 AURELII AUGUSTINI, Confessionum libri tredecim, edidit M. Skutella,Teubner
Stuttgart 1969, VII, 1.
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