which the rational, that is the human, soul is made, again the question has to be
Book VII 329 itself of living with its own will, intelligence, and memory. You see, if there is something, and that something blessed, there for God to breathe this discharge from it into the flesh he has formed, thus making the soul as if by puffing, this something is in no way changed or altered, nor does it lose anything when this flux from which the soul is made is discharged from it.
9. lt is not, after all, a body, to be diminished by any sort of exhalation. 12. If, however, non-rational soul is somehow or other the material from which the rational, that is the human, soul is made, again the question has to be asked what was this non-rational sort made from, because it too has no other maker but the creator of all natures. Was it made from bodily material? So why not this rational sort too? Unless of course anyone chooses to deny that God could make all at once what can also be made, so to say, in stages. Accordingly, whatever stages may be introduced, if body is the material of non-rational soul and non-rational soul is the material of the rational, it is undoubtedly the case that body is the material of the rational soul—something that no one, as far as I know, has been brazen enough to assert, except for those who classify soul itself as some kind of body.
1 3 . And then care has to be taken lest it should be supposed that there can be a transference of soul from brute beast to human being (which is clean contrary to the truth and to Catholic faith), if we concede that non-rational soul is like the underlying material from which the rational soul may be made. In this case, you see, it will come about that if it becomes the soul ofa human being when changed for the better, when changed for the worse it will become a brute beast's—an absurdity of which even the successors of some of those philosophers5 were ashamed, and so they said that they had not actually thought that, but had been misunderstood.
And l think it is rather the same as if someone were also to come to this conclusion from our scriptures, where it says: Man established in honor did not understand; he was matched with senseless cattle and became like them (Ps
Which philosophers? He has not named any so far in this Book V11, unless he is referring to those whom he has just dismissed rather contemptuously as having thought that soul—and for that matter, God—is to be classified as some sort of body. 1n this event he may have had Aristotle in mind, who was indeed commonly misunderstood at that time to have taught that the soul is made from a "fifth element," ^quintessence, the stuff from which he in fact supposed the heavens and the heavenly bodies to be made. But then in the next paragraph Augustine mentions, as a kind of afterthought, the idea of the transmigration of souls entertained by some philosophers, possibly even by Plato. Now he certainly has not yet discussed that idea in this work. But he does discuss it in The Trinity X11, 1 5,24; and there he uses the same phrase, which 1 translate "successive states of soul," revolutiones animarum, as we find here. This discussion does indeed come at the end of Book X11, which was probably written several years after he finished this work on Genesis. But he began work on The Trinity at roughly the same time as The Literal Meaning ofGenesis. Sojust possibly he was dictating the two works concurrently, and got his wires mixed up, and here thought he had already mentioned the Platonic theory of reminiscence, and the very similar one of transmigration.