God created out of nothing the nature which is called soul and which did not
Book VII 327 of nothing after that creation of all things simultaneously, and do believe that his resting from all the finished works which he had started to make means that whatever he made from then on would be made out of these, then l do not see how we can understand him to go on making souls out of nothing. Or should we say that in those works of the first six days he did indeed make that hidden day as
(if this is what we should rather believe) the common spiritual and intelligent nature of the angels, and the visible universe of heaven and earth, and that in these now already existing natures he created the ideas or formulae of other natures yet to come in the future, not these actual natures themselves? Other wise, if they had already been created as they were to be in the future, they would not any longer be things to come in the future. ln that case there was not yet any nature of the human soul among the things actually established, and it then began to be when God made it by puffing and introduced it into the man.
8. But that is not the end of the question, which still has to be asked, whether God created out of nothing the nature which is called soul and which did not previously exist; this would mean that his actual puff was not made from any substance at his disposal, as we were saying about the puff the soul makes out of its body, but was quite simply made out of nothing at the moment God chose to puff, and was made as the soul of the man. Or was there, on the other hand, some thing spiritual already there, although whatever this was it was not yet the nature of soul, and was it from this that God' s puff was made in order to be the nature of soul? ln the same way there was not yet any nature of the human body before God had formed it from the mud, or dust, of the earth; dust or mud, after all, was not human flesh, but still it was something from which that, not yet in existence, would be made.
6, 9. So then, can one really believe that in those works of the six days God established not only the causal formula of the future human body but also the material it would be made from, earth that is to say, from the mud or dust of which it would be molded, while for the soul he only established there the formula to which it would be made, without any appropriate material of its own kind which it would be made from? lf the soul, you see, were something unchangeable, we ought not to be inquiring in any way at all about its quasi-material; but as it is, its changeableness is obvious enough through its sometimes being rendered misshapen by vices and errors, sometimes being put into proper shape by virtues and the teaching of truth, but all within the nature it has of being soul. ln the same way flesh, in its own nature which it has of being flesh, is both embellished with health and disfigured by diseases and wounds.
Butjust as this, apart from being already flesh and in that nature ranking high as being beautiful or low as being misshapen, also had some material, that is to say earth, from which to be made in order to be entirely flesh; in the same way soul too, possibly, before being made in the actual nature which is called soul, whose beauty and misshapenness consist respectively in virtue and vice, could