27. He is here harking back to his extended commentary on Gn 1 :2 in Book 1.
343 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis formable material, both bodily and spiritual, this too, however, set up by none other but God. which indeed came before its formation, not in time but in origin, as the voice does with the song, what can be a more fitting assumption than that the soul was made from spiritual material?27
To maintain that the soul was created only when it was breathed into the man alreadyformed will not square with these texts ofscripture
28, 40. lf, however, you wish to maintain that the soul was only created when it was breathed into the body already formed, you must consider what answer you will give when you are asked what it was made from. I mean, you are either going to say that God made, or still makes, something out of nothing after he finished all his works, and then you must look hard for an explanation of the man being made to the image of God, and this can only be rightly understood with reference to the soul, on the sixth day—that is, in what nature the causal formula was made of a thing which did not yet exist in itself; or else you will say that the soul was made from something already in existence. And then you will have the trouble of inquiring what the nature of that something might be, whether bodily or spiritual, going over the questions which we have been thrashing out above. Added to this, you will still be bothered with the problem of which substance it was, among the creatures originally set in place in the six days, in which he made that causal formula of the soul which he had as yet made neither from nothing nor from something.
41. If you wish to avoid this problem by saying that the man was also made from mud on the sixth day, but that this was mentioned later on by way of reca pitulation, then you must consider what you are to say about the woman, because male andfemale, it said, he made them and blessed them (Gn 1 :27-28). If you answer that she too was made on that day from the bone of her man, then ask yourself how you can assert that theflying things which were brought to Adam (Gn 2:19) were made on the sixth day, when scripture insists that every kind of flying thing was created on the fifth day out of the waters; and how about the trees too on the sixth day, which were planted in Paradise, when the same scrip ture has attributed this kind of creature to the third day?
You must also consider what these words mean: He still cast up from the earth every tree that had a beautiful look about it and was goodfor eating (Gn 2:9), as if the ones which the earth had cast up on the third day were not beautiful to look at and good for eating, although they were among the works which God made all very good (Gn 1:31). And what about this: God stillfashionedfrom the earth all the beasts ofthefield and all theflying things ofheaven (Gn 2:19), as
27. He is here harking back to his extended commentary on Gn 1 :2 in Book 1.