The Church Fathers · c. 470
On the State of the Soul
De Statu Animae
Claudianus Mamertus · d. c. 474
What it is
An argument that the soul is wholly incorporeal, against Faustus of Riez, who had held that only God is truly bodiless and that everything created must have some kind of body. Written by a priest of Vienne with more Neoplatonism than anyone else in Gaul.
Why it lasted
The last piece of serious philosophical writing in the Latin West before Boethius, and evidence that the argument about whether the soul is a thing was still live when the western empire had months left.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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