Annotatio CCVIII

”Let thy ears be attentive.” — Psalm 129:2

Hilary, illustrating this passage by [his] exposition, indicates that the Soul of the first man was formed before the body;¹ for thus we read in him: “When God, the world being now finished, began the most beautiful work — namely, making man to his own image — he composed him of a lowly and a heavenly nature, that is, of Soul and body; and first indeed he constituted that Soul by that divine and (to us) incomprehensible work of his power. For that God did not, when he made man to the image of God, then also make the body, Genesis teaches: [namely, that] long after man had been made to the image of God, the dust [was] taken, and the body formed, and thereupon again made into a living Soul by inspiration — this nature, namely the earthly and the heavenly, being coupled by a certain covenant of the in-breathing.”

From this opinion Augustine does not altogether shrink, in the book On Genesis, to the Letter, book 7, chapter 24, where he committed these things to writing: “Let us therefore see whether perchance that can be true which certainly seems to me more tolerable to human opinion: that God, in those first works in which he created all things at once, created also the human Soul — which in its own time he might breathe into the members of the body formed from clay; of which body, among those things established all at once, he had created causally the rational principle, according to which it should come to be when the human body was to be made. For neither that which is said, ‘to his image,’ do we rightly understand except in the soul; nor that which is said, ‘Male and female,’² except in the body. Let it be believed, therefore, if no” authority of the Scriptures, or reason of truth, contradicts, that man was so made on the sixth day, that the causal ratio of the human body indeed [was] in the elements of the world, but the Soul itself was now created — as the day was first made — and, [once] created, lay hidden in the works of God, until, at its own time, by breathing upon it, he might insert it into the body formed from clay.”

Rufinus, in the first book of the Invectives, asserts that Jerome once held this same [opinion], in the commentaries on the Epistle to the Ephesians, when he elucidated that [saying] of the Apostle, “For we are his workmanship,”³ etc.; and he brings forward his words, having this form: “Diligently observe that he did not say, ‘We are his figuration and molding [plasmatio],’ but, ‘We are his making [factura]’; for the molding draws its origin from the clay of the earth, but the ‘making’ took its beginning according to the likeness and image of God — which, in the one-hundred-and-eighteenth psalm, being placed together, signifies diverse things: ‘Thy hands have made me, and formed me’⁴ — the ‘making’ holds the first place, then the ‘formation.’”

Philastrius, bishop of Brescia, adheres to this opinion so constantly that, in the catalogue of heresies published by him, chapter 99, he judges those who think otherwise [to be] heretics; against whom he also brings forward the testimony of Moses, who, describing the formation of man, first narrated the creation of the Soul, when in the first chapter of Genesis he said: “God created man to his own image”⁵ — for man is not the image of God according to the body, but according to the soul only. Then, in the second chapter of the same book, relating the formation of the body, he says: “God therefore formed man of the clay of the earth, and breathed into him the breath of life” — by which distinction of narrations Moses willed (as Philastrius says) to signify that the Soul was first created, and then the body was molded.

Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, consenting to these, affirms that not only the Soul of the first man, but the Souls of all men also, were created at once, before the body of Adam; and this he strives to demonstrate by the authority of the sacred Letters and by reason, in the second book of [his] Philosophy, chapter 6, writing: “If anyone shall think that the Soul was sent in after the fashioning of the body, or that it was begotten after the body, he strays from the truth: for neither does Moses say that it was then created, when it was being sent into the body, nor does it so stand according to reason.” And further, bringing forward the demonstration of his opinion, he says: “It is the most principal work of creation, to make some things out of non-existents. If, therefore, Souls came to be from mutual procreation, they would surely come to be by [the] reason of providence, and would be corruptible — no otherwise than the animals begotten from the succession of [their] kind. But if they come to be out of non-existents, [then] creation still goes on, and that [saying] of Moses is not true, ‘God rested from all his works.’⁶ But both of these are unfitting; not therefore are souls now coming to be.” And again, meeting Eunomius — who, from that sentence of Christ saying, “My Father worketh until now,”⁷ showed that new souls are created daily — he subjoins: “But that [Christ] says, ‘My Father worketh until now,’ is to be taken not of creation, as it seems to him, but of provision, and that [things] may be well [maintained in being].”

There are [some] who think that this assertion can be both believed and defended without any danger of heresy, provided we do not think that the Souls sinned before they glided into bodies, and were thrust down into bodies on account of [their] sins, as into prisons — which [error], in Origen and in the Origenists and Priscillianists, the decrees of the Councils condemned. Nor does Peter, bishop of Paris, seem to differ from these, leaving this matter in doubt, in book 2 of the Sentences, distinction 17.

But against these [opinions] the authority of Pope Leo the First openly protests, who in the epistle to the bishop of Astorga thus decrees: “The Catholic faith constantly and truly preaches that the Souls of men were not, before they were breathed into their own bodies.” St. Thomas, in the first volume of the Theological Summa, question 90, opines that this position can in some manner be sustained, if we say that the Souls of men preceded [their] bodies not according to act, but according to a certain likeness of kind, by which souls agree with the Angels in intellectual nature. Albert [the Great], bishop of Regensburg, in the Summa on Man, question 15, rejecting the aforesaid opinion of Gregory of Nyssa as a Platonic figment, says that the authority of Moses, adduced by him, is to be so taken that we understand God indeed to have rested from the specific creation of all the species,⁸ but not from the individual creation of Souls, which are daily infused into human bodies.