CSEL text omits causae; but 1 think this must be only a printer's error, as there is no reference to
340 The Literal Meaning of Genesis human being too, after all, it is none but God who creates the offspring, whether in the seed or in the already formed fetus, through Wisdom reaching everywhere because of her purity, such that nothing defiled may gain entry into her (Wis 7:24-25), while she stretches mightilyfrom end to end, and disposes all things sweetly (Wis 8:1).
But I really do not know how one can understand heaven knows what sort of spiritual creature to have been created, which is not mentioned among those works of God made during those six days, in which God is said to have made the man on the sixth day, the man he had not yet made in his proper nature, but still only by a causal formula in that creature which has not been mentioned. lt ought particularly to have been mentioned, after all, as something that had been finished in such a way that it was not itself still due to be made according to its own preceding causal formula.24
23. 34. Or when God made the man on the sixth day to his image, did he perhaps insert this causal formula for making the soul in the nature of that day which he established at the beginning, if that day is rightly taken as being intelli gent spirit, thus fixing in advance the cause and formula on which he would make him after those seven days? On this showing he may be supposed to have created the causal formula of the man's body in the nature of earth, that of his soul in the nature of that first day. But when you say this, what else are you saying but that angelic spirit is the quasi-parent of the human soul, if the pre-established formula for creating the human soul is in it, just as that of future offspring is in a human being? The result of this will be that while human beings are indeed the parents of human bodies, angels are the parents of human souls. God of course will be the creator of both bodies and souls, but of bodies out of human beings, of souls out of angels ; or of the first body out of earth and the first soul out of the angelic nature, where he had fixed their causal formulae in advance when he originally made the man among the things which he created all together simultaneously; but from then on he is creating human beings now from human beings, body from body, soul from soul.
lf you find it hard to swallow this idea of calling the soul the daughter of an angel, or of angels, that of its springing from the bodily heaven will be much harder; so how much more so from sea and earth!25 Much less therefore was the causal formula of the soul pre-established in any bodily creature when God made the man to his image, before he animated him with a puff, after forming
24. Reading secundum suae causae praecedentem rationem facienda with the Maurists. The CSEL text omits causae; but 1 think this must be only a printer's error, as there is no reference to the point in the apparatus criticus. 25. An oblique allusion here, 1 suppose, to the second, third, fourth, and fifth days of creation; and perhaps a side swipe at various pagan myths about the origin of the soul.