with the opinion according to which the man is taken both to have been made to
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And so it is that we have to see which of three possibilities can at least be said to be the more acceptable, even if it continues to elude us which is actually the true one: whether the one I havejust stated; or that the single soul of the first man was made in those first works of God, for all other human souls to be created from its "slips"; or that new souls are being made from then on, of which no formula would have been made to precede them in those works of God in the first six days. Now of these three the first two do not clash with those primordial works where all things were created simultaneously together. For whether the formula of the soul was made in some creature, as in a kind of parent, so that all souls might derive from that but be created by God when they are given to indi vidual human beings, like their bodies from human parents, or whether it was not the formula of soul, like the formula of offspring in parents, but quite simply the soul itself that was made when the day was made, as the day itself was made, as heaven and earth and the lights in the sky,3 it fits in well with the words, God made man to his own image (Gn 1 :27).
5. But as for this third one, it is not so easy to see how it can avoid clashing with the opinion according to which the man is taken both to have been made to the image of God on the sixth day and to have been visibly created after the seventh day.4 The point is that if we say new souls are being made, which were not made either in themselves or in their formula, like that of offspring in parents, on that sixth day among the works from which God rested on the seventh after finishing and starting them, then there is the risk that scripture's painstaking insistence that God finished in six days all his works, which he made very good, was all quite futile, if he was still going to create some natures which he had not made then either in themselves or in their causal formulae.
But on the other hand God could be understood to have kept in himself the formula of souls to be made one by one and given to people when they were born, and not to have inserted it into some part of his creation; or else, because these souls are not creatures of a different kind from the one with which the man was made on the sixth day to the image of God, it is not correct to say that God is making now things that he did not finish then. He had, after all, already made a soul then of the same kind as he is making now. And thus it is that he is not making some new kind of creature now which he did not create then in his finished works. Nor is this activity of his going against those causal formulae of things to come in the future which he inserted then in the total creation, but rather going along with them, seeing that it accords with them that human bodies, of which the propagation in continuous succession stretches on from those primary works, should have souls inserted into them of the same kind as he is now making and inserting.
3. See in particular Book 1,19,38 and 11I,20,30-31. 4. The opinion espoused by Augustine himself, and defended in detail in Book V1.