Augustine's time.
BookX 417 he came to his mother's body, which was undefiled by menstrual blood. lt is commonly said, you see, that natural talents are "weighed down" by this, that is to say, orby contamination from adulterous intercourse. And thus these words of this book tend rather to favor those who talk of the transmission of souls, or else, ifthe other party too can interpret them in its own behalf, they swing between the two sides.
Seeing ifthe text can be applied to Christ
18, 32. Should we wish to take all this as said about the Lord, with reference to the human creature assumed by the Word, there are indeed in the whole context of the passage some things which are not appropriate to that unique excellence. Above all there is what the very person who is talking in this book said a little earlier on, when he started the speech containing the words we are now dealing with; he stated that he was curdled in bloodfrom the seed ofa man (Wis 7:2), a manner of coming to birth, of course, wholly alien to the child-bearing of the Virgin, who did not conceive the flesh of Christ from the seed of a man, as no Christian will doubt for a moment. But then in the Psalms, where it certainly says, They dug my hands andfeet, they counted all my bones; they, however, gazed at me and inspected me, they divided my garments among them and over my vesture they cast lots, words that properly fit him alone; it also says there, God, my God, attend to me; why have youforsaken me? Farfrom my salvation are the words of my misdeeds (Ps 21:17-19.1), words which on the contrary do not fit him, except insofar as he is transposing to himself the body of our lowli ness (Phil 3:21), since we are members of his body.
Then again, in the gospel itself the boy was advancing in age and wisdom (Lk 2:40); ifeven those things we read on this question in the book ofWisdom can be applied to the Lord himself because of the lowlyform ofa slave (Phil 2:7) and the unity of the body of the Church with its head, what could be more talented than that boy whose wisdom at the age of twelve had the elders marveling? And again, could anything be better than this soul? But even if those who insist that souls are transmitted through parents win their case by proof, not just by debating power, will the result not be that this soul too must be supposed to have been transmitted from that one of the first transgressor; and so through the disobedience of that man will not this one also be constituted a sinner, the single one by whose obedience alone many are delivered from that guilt and consti tuted as being just?
And what could be more undefiled than that womb of the Virgin, whose flesh, even if it derived from the propagation of sin,27 still did not conceive from the
27. The doctrine of the 1mmaculate Conception of Mary had not even begun to be formulated in Augustine's time.