The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
CHAPTER
Was the life from which the soul of man is said to have been made a happy life? Difficulties with this.
11. If the life from which the soul of man was made was already a happy life, then the soul has been given a life less excellent, and accordingly that other life is not the material of the soul, but the soul is rather an inferior emanation!* from it. Now, when a material is formed, especially by God, it is certainly improved by the formation. But even if the human soul could be understood as an emanation of some form of life created in a blessed state by God, it could not be thought of as having begun to exist in a state according to its merits except from the moment it has begun to live its own life when it has been made a soul animating a body, using its senses as messengers,!5 and conscious of its own individual life with will, intellect, and memory. For if there is some creature from which God breathed this emanation into the flesh He formed, creating the soul by what might be called a breathing, and if the source of the emanation is in a blessed state, it is not in any way moved or changed nor does it lose anything when the effluence which becomes the soul flows from it.
Difficulties in assuming an irrational soul as the material.
Transmigration rejected.
For it is not a body and therefore cannot be diminished by exhalation,
12. But if an irrational soul is somehow the material from which the rational (namely, human) soul is made, again a question arises about the source from which this irrational soul comes. For it too can be made only by the Creator of all beings.
Was it made from corporeal matter? If so, why can we not say the same about the rational soul? Surely, if it is granted that a