souls from bodies.
Book VII 325 been shaped or formed out ofmud; so what is to be said now on the words written here, "God puffed," if not thatjust as he did not form or shape with bodily hands, so neither did he puff with gullet or lips? However, it is precisely by this word that scripture in my opinion has come most effectively to our aid over a most difficult question.
2. 3. Some people, you see, have supposed on the strength of this word that the soul is something from the very substance of God, meaning that it is of the same nature as he is; and the reason they think so is that when human beings puff they expel something from themselves in the puff.3 But we should really be advised by this very word to repudiate such an idea as dead against Catholic faith. We, after all, believe that the nature and substance of God, which is believed by many, understood by few, to consist in the Trinity of persons, is altogether unchangeable, while as for the nature of the soul, who can doubt that it can change, whether for better or for worse? And accordingly the opinion that the soul and God are of one substance is simply sacrilegious; for what else does it mean but that he too is assumed to be changeable? So then it is to be believed and understood, and to be doubted in no way whatsoever, that the soul, as the right faith holds, comes from God as a thing which he has made, not as being of the same nature as he is, whether as something he has begotten or in any way at all produced from himself.
3. 4. "And how," they ask, "is it written: He puffed into hisface, and the man was made into a live soul, if the soul is not a part of God or quite simply the substance of God?"
But in fact it is the use of this very word that makes it quite clear that this is not so. When human beings puff, after all, the soul itself certainly moves the nature of the body which is subject to it, and it is from that, not from itself, that it makes the puff—unless of course these people are so crass, they do not know that it is from our alternately inhaling and exhaling, as we breathe in from the air around us and breathe out again, that the puff is made which we produce when we puff deliberately. lf on the other hand it is not from the surrounding atmosphere, breathed in and out, but from the very nature which our bodies consist of that we expel something by puffing, the nature of the body is not the same as that of the soul—a point on which these people too, of course, agree with us.4 Accordingly even in this case the substance of the soul, which governs and moves the body, is one thing, and quite another is the puff which it makes, not from itself, but from the body subject to it as to its governor and mover.
3. He is almost certainly referring to the Manichees, to whom he will return explicitly in 11,17 below. 4. The whole drift of the Manichee religion was to release spirit from the grip of matter, hence souls from bodies.