As for the creation of the rational soul, there must be no doubt at all that it could not have proceeded from the Angels. For since the mind of man is immaterial and immortal, it can be created in no other way than from nothing, and by no other than God. For to create any thing whatever, as Augustine teaches in chapter 15 of book 9 of On Genesis according to the Letter, no Angel is able, any more than it can create its own self. But concerning the body of the first man — whether the Angels lent their labour to its formation — this seems able to be called into question on this account, that all matter and corporeal creature is (on Augustine's authority, chapter 24 of book 8 of On Genesis according to the Letter) subject to the will and command of the Angels; and just as they themselves often formed human bodies and assumed them to themselves, in order to appear in them to men, so they could fashion and figure the body of the first man.²

NEVERTHELESS, it must beyond doubt be said that the body of the first man was neither formed by the Angels nor could be formed by them: since the Angels, being incorporeal, have no force or power of themselves to generate any corporeal thing, except only by ministering, by applying, and by fitting together one with another the natural causes through which natural bodies can be generated — in that manner, namely, in which a farmer is said to “create” crops and “generate” wine, and a physician likewise to “drive off” diseases and “effect” health. For Augustine uses these very examples to confirm the same point, in chapter 15 of book 9 of On Genesis according to the Letter; in which passage he says affirmatively that neither was the body of Eve from Adam's rib, nor the body of Adam himself from the dust of the earth, formed by the power of the Angels — although there Augustine does not deny that the Angels could have exhibited some ministry in the formation of the body of Adam or of Eve; but what that ministry may have been, “who,” he says, “would dare to affirm?” If, therefore, an Angel cannot generate any body except through the natural generating and effecting causes — and the natural efficient and forming cause of the human body is that wonderful force residing in the male seed, which in the schools they call the formative power — and this did not exist at all before the generation of the first man, so that it might be applied by the Angels: it is concluded, then, that the body of the first man could not have been formed by the Angels.³

Yet I would not deny that the Angels could have ministered something to the formation of that body; but what that was, or what kind of ministry it was, Augustine dares to establish nothing: whereas others, bolder, do not hesitate to say that the Angels gathered the dust, compacted the material, and conformed it into the form and likeness of the human body... [the word breaks here and is completed on the next page]⁴

...conformed and figured it; and that this material, figured into human shape, God animated and quickened by breathing into it a rational mind. But granting that it was done so, it is not to be supposed that that simulacrum of the human body, fashioned and formed by the Angels, was truly a human body: for there was not in it such a mixture of the elements, nor such a temperament, as a human body must have; nor did it have flesh, bones, sinews, inner organs, nor natural heat, nor the animal and vital spirits, without which things a human body cannot subsist. And if, when the soul departs from the body through death, the body that remains is not truly the body of a man but only equivocally so — even though it still retains the substance of flesh, of bone, and of the other parts — how much less could that thing fashioned and figured by the Angels be called the body of a man, seeing that it would have neither the forms nor the natures of flesh, of bone, or of the other parts?⁵