nothing that God made the soul which he gave to the first man, not out of some
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16. This evidence, for sure, is a sufficient reminder to us that it was out of nothing that God made the soul which he gave to the first man, not out of some creature already made, like the body out of earth; and that is why when it goes back it has nowhere to go back to except the author who gave it, not to any crea ture it was made out of, like the body to earth. There is, after all, no creature it was made out of, because it was made out of nothing. And thus the one that goes back goes back to its maker, by whom it was made out ofnothing. They do not all go back, you see, since there are those of whom it is written: a spirit walking about and not returning (Ps 78:39).
Testing these various opinions by the evidence ofscriptural texts proves inconclusive
10, 17. So we are finding how difficult it is to tie up together10 all the testimo nies of the holy scriptures on this matter. Even if this can be done, and they are not only listed but also studied and discussed, they will stretch our discourse out to quite inordinate lengths. But still 1 do not know how this question can be solved by the testimony of the divine literature unless it can offer something as certain as the definitive proofs by which it shows that God made the soul or that he gave it to the first man. Had it been written, you see, that God puffed in the same way into the woman's face when she was formed and that she was made into a living soul, that would indeed have given us the green light for believing that the soul is not given from the parents to any human flesh when it is formed—though we would still be left in two minds over what we should hold in the case of offspring born of woman, 1 1 which is the manner of one human being coming from another that we are used to. The first woman, though, was made in a different way, and that is why it could still be said that the reason God did not give Eve her soul out ofAdam was that she did not derive from him as offspring. But ifscripture had related that the first one to be born of them had been given his
10. 1 here make bold to emend the lext'scolligere, meaning "to collect," and read instead colligare. There is not the slightest manuscript support for this emendation; but it seems clear to me that from 6,9 onwards he has been collecting all the relevant texts, and trying to tie them together or harmonize them, to establish on the authority ofscripture what the right theory about the origin of the soul might be. The change for a copyist from one word to the other is of course minimal; the reading in the text does make immediate sense; and copies containing the word 1 think Augustine wrote or dictated may simply have disappeared.
1 1 . Here again 1 find it necessary to add a phrase to the text, from which it does seem that something has dropped out, because as it stands it is impossible Latin. 1t reads: quidproprie teneretur in prole, qui nobis modus usitatus est hominis ex homine. Now proles is feminine, and Augustine cannot have thought of it as the antecedent of the masculine relative qui, which is anyway clearly agreeing with modus; and offspringjust by itself can hardly be "the manner familiar to us ofhuman being from human being." So what 1 am suggesting has dropped out afterprole is a phrase like nam exfemina; then the antecedent of the relative clause would just be the whole verbal phrase, "offspring born of woman."