The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
CHAPTER 24
Those who hold the traducianist theory must be careful not to think of the soul as corporeal.
40. I earnestly beg those who have accepted the traducianist theory and hold that souls are generated by parents, to make every effort to reflect on themselves and to understand that their souls are not bodies. If we but consider the soul seriously, there is no other being that can so help us to think of God, who remains immutable above all His creation, and to recognize Him as immaterial, as the soul, which has been made to His image. On the contrary, there is nothing more likely, or perhaps nothing more logical, than that God should be thought of as a body once the soul is thought of as a body. Thus, constantly immersed in the corporeal and living the life of the senses, people are unwilling to think that the soul is anything other than a body, for they fear that if it is not a body it may be nothing. Consequently, they are all the more afraid to think that God is not a body in proportion as they fear to think that God is nothing.?"
Thus they are taken up with images or phantasms of images®® which the cogitative power?? forms from familiarity with bodies, and as a result without these images and phantasms they fear they must perish in a void. Hence, it is necessary for them to paint, as it were, a picture of justice and wisdom in their minds with shapes and colors, for they cannot think of them as incorporeal. But when they are moved by justice or wisdom to praise these virtues or to do some deed in accordance with them, they cannot say what color or size, what features or shapes they have seen.
I have spoken of this matter at length elsewhere; and, God willing, I shall speak of it again when necessary.'!°° But as I said above, if some persons have no doubt that souls are generated by parents, or if some are doubtful as to whether or not this is so, let them not dare to think or to say that the soul is a body.
It is important to avoid this, as I have said, so that they may not think that God Himself is nothing else than a body, a body of