254), which was condemned as heretical long after his death.
3 1 0 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis act, either good or bad, before birth. Let us be equally certain that the opinion some people hold, according to which souls sinned, some more some less, and were thrust down into different kinds of body, depending on the different degrees of their guilt,10 is not compatible with the apostle's assertion in the plainest terms that those who have not yet been bom have done nothing either good or bad.
16. And this raises another question, to be dealt with in its proper place: what the whole batch or lump1 1 of the human race contracted from the sin of our first parents, who were just the two of them, all by themselves; that the man, though, could have earned nothing of the kind for us before he was molded from the dust of the earth, before he lived in his own time, there is no question whatever. We could not say, after all, that Esau and Jacob, who did nothing either good or bad, so the apostle has told us, before they were born, derived any liability from their parents if their parents themselves had done nothing good or bad either. Nor could we say that the human race sinned in Adam if Adam himself had not sinned; and Adam would not have sinned unless he had been alive at his own time, able to live either well or badly. So it is pointless looking for any sin or good deed of his, while he was only set up in his causes among all the things created simultaneously, and not yet living his own proper life, or even existing there in his parents living theirs. ln that original establishment of the world, you see, when God createdall things simultaneously (Sir 1 8: 1 ), the man was made in order to come into being in the future—there was the idea or formula of one to be created, not any action of one already created.
Different levels ofcausality at which things pre-exist in their causes
10, 17. But all this is different in the very Word of God, where these things were not made but are eternal; different in the constituent elements of the universe, where all things to come in the future were made simultaneously; different again in things that are being created, not now simultaneously but each in its own time, in accordance with its simultaneously created causes, like Adam already formed out ofmud and "ensouled" by the breath of God, like the hay that sprang up; different in seeds, in which it is as if the primordial causes are being repeated again, derived from things which came into being in accordance with the cause which he first established, like grass from the earth, seed from grass.
In all these cases things already made received the characteristic activities of their own proper time, which came forth in manifest forms and natures from the secret formulae that are causally latent in creation; things like the grass which sprang up over the earth, and the man made into a living soul, and other things of
10. An opinion favored by the great biblical scholar and theologian of Alexandria, Origen (died 254), which was condemned as heretical long after his death.
1 1 . The metaphor is taken from the bakery, the human race being regarded as an enormous batch of dough, infected by Adam's sin with "the leaven of malice and wickedness" ( 1 Cor 5:8).