God created not only the causal reason of the future human (continued)
CHAPTER 6
Was there some previously created spiritual material for the soul as there was earth for the body?
9. Is it believable, then, that in the works of the first six days God created not only the causal reason of the future human body but also the material from which it would be made, namely, earth from whose slime or dust the body would be formed, whereas in the case of the soul He created only the causal reason according to which it would be made and not any kind of material sui generis from which it would be made?
For if the soul were something immutable, we should have no need to look for its own special kind of matter; however, its mutability shows it sometimes deformed by vice and deception and formed by virtue and true doctrine, its nature as soul meanwhile remaining, just as the flesh remains by nature flesh though it is glowing with health or disfigured by disease or wounds.!3 But the flesh, before becoming flesh and having its natural beauty or deformity, also had the material, namely, earth, from which it was made into flesh. Perhaps, then, the soul, before it was made into the nature of soul, whose beauty is virtue and whose deformity is vice, could have had its own kind of spiritual material which was not yet soul, just as the earth from which the flesh was made was already something, although it was not flesh.
10. But there is a difference. For the earth filled the lowest part of the world before the body of man was made from it, and it gave to the world its whole substance so that even if no flesh of any living being were made from it, by its own form it would fill out the structure and mass of the world; and this is why the world is referred to as heaven and earth.
BOOK SEVEN 9
CHAPTER 7
Difficulties connected with supposing that there was a spiritual material out of which the soul was made.
If there was any such thing as a spiritual material from which the soul was made, or if there is any such thing from which souls are now made, what precisely is it? What is its name, what is its form, what use does it have in the works of creation? Is it living or nonliving? If it lives, what does it do? What does it produce in the world? Does it live a happy life or a wretched life or neither? Does it give life to anything? Or is it without this function also, and does it rest quietly in some inmost recess of the universe without active perception and vital motion? For if there was no life whatsoever in it, how could it be some sort of incorporeal, nonliving material for life yet to come? The supposition, then, is false, or this is a mystery beyond our comprehension.
But if it was already living neither happily nor wretchedly, how was it rational? But if it was made rational at the time when the human soul was made from this material, was irrational life the material of the rational (that is, human) soul? What, then, was the difference between this life and the life of cattle? Had it only the possibility of rational life and not yet the exercise of it? For we see that the soul of an infant, which is certainly the soul of a human being, has not yet begun to use reason, and nevertheless we call it a rational soul. Why, then, should we not believe that similarly in this material from which the soul has been made, the life of thought was dormant, just as in the infant's soul, which is certainly human, rational life is dormant?