would be made, or if there is any from which souls are still being made, what
328 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis have had some appropriate spiritual material which was not yet soul, just as earth, from which flesh was made, was already something, though it was not flesh.
Difficulties about the notion ofspiritual material
10. But then earth was filling the lowest part of the universe before ever the man's body was made from it, and thus contributing to the totality of the universe, so that even were no flesh to be made from it of any animated being, it would still with its own specific nature complete the mass and fabric of the universe, which thereby gets its name of heaven and earth.
7. As for that spiritual material, however, if there was any from which the soul would be made, or if there is any from which souls are still being made, what precisely was it? What name, what specific nature, what function does it hold among created things? Is it alive, or not? If it is, how does it act? What does it contribute to the effectiveness of the whole? Does it live a happy, blessed life, or a miserable one, or neither? Does it quicken anything? Or is it unoccupied with any of this, and resting idly in some hidden place of the universe without conscious sensation or vital movement?
lf, you see, it was not yet any sort of life at all, how could it be the material, neither bodily nor alive, for life yet to be in the future? So this is plainly untrue, or excessively obscure. lf on the other hand it was already living a life neither blessed nor miserable, how could it be rational? But if that material became rational at the moment when the nature of the human soul was made from it, then non-rational life was the material of the rational, that is of the human, soul. So what was the difference, then, between that and merely animal soul? Or was it already potentially rational, not yet actively so? After all, we see how the infant soul, already of course the soul of a human being, has not yet begun to use reason, and yet we already call it a rational soul; so why should we not suppose that in that material from which it was made even sentient activity was stilled, just as in this infant soul, which is certainly that of a human being already, rational activity is stilled for the time being?
8, 1 1. But now suppose it was a blessed life from which the man's soul has been made; this means that it has become something worse, and consequently that it is not now the soul's material, but that the soul is just a kind of flux or discharge from it, because when any material is formed or shaped, especially by God, it is without a doubt shaped into something better. Though even if the human soul could be thought of as being a discharge from some kind of life made by God in a certain state of blessedness, not even in that case can it be supposed to have deserved to begin to be so from some act of its own, except from the moment it began to live its own proper life after being made into a soul animating flesh, and using the senses of the flesh as its messengers, and being aware in