Annotatio XCV
(The printed text misprints this annotation XCI; corrected here to XCV, its proper place in the sequence.)
”Thou shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael.” — Genesis 16:11
Philo the Jew, in the book On Fugitives [De profugis], which he published on the sixteenth chapter of Genesis, incidentally explaining that saying, “Let us make man to our image,” etc., wrongly asserts that only the rational soul of the first parent was created by God, but that its sensible and vegetable soul was made by the angels.1 His words run thus: “Moses, when he philosophizes about the fashioning of the world, after he had said that God created all other things, taught that man alone was formed with others also cooperating. ‘God said,’ he says, ‘Let us make man to our image’2 — by this word ‘Let us make’ signifying a multitude. Therefore that Father of things addresses his own powers, to which he gave this mortal part of our soul to be fashioned, imitating his art, when he was forming the rational [part] in us; deeming it just that the principal part should be fabricated by the Prince of things, but the subordinate part by the subordinate powers. And he used these powers not only for the reason just mentioned, but because man’s soul alone was going to possess an understanding of goods and evils, and to choose one or the other, when it cannot [have] both. He judged it necessary, therefore, that the making of evils be attributed to other makers, but of goods to himself alone. Wherefore, when he had first said ‘Let us make man,’ as of many, soon he speaks as of one: ‘God made man.’ For of the true man — who is a most pure mind — God alone is the maker; but of him who is vulgarly so called, mixed and tempered out of the senses, [the makers are] many. For which reason that excellent man is indicated by the article: for it is read, ‘God made THAT man’ — that [man] lacking, in kind, the mixture of the [sensible] intellect. But the vulgar man is set down without such an addition. For when he says ‘Let us make man,’ he signifies [one] woven together out of the brute and the rational soul.” This same, already-reprobated opinion Philo repeats in the book On the Fashioning of the Six Days, as you have above, Annotation 17.