The Literal Meaning of Genesis
God who is absolutely immutable and incorruptible. Then there will suddenly be an end to their long fable in its thousand forms, which in their foolish and impious minds they have shamefully fashioned?> about the mutability of God.
18. The material from which the human soul is made, therefore, is not an irrational soul.?°
CHAPTER 12
The human soul was not made of anything corporeal, not even of air or heavenly fire.
What, then, is the material out of which the soul was made by the breath of God? Was it a body of an earthly and humid nature??? By no means! From these elements the flesh was made. For what else is slime than humid earth? And we must not suppose that the soul was made from moisture alone, as if the flesh was from earth and the soul from water. For it is utterly absurd to think that the soul of man was made of material from which the flesh of fish and birds was made.?8
19. Was the human soul, then, made out of air? For the breath belongs to this element—but our breath, not God's. Hence, I said above'? that this identification could be considered appropriate if we believed that God was the soul of the world (the world being considered as one large living being), so that He would have breathed the soul forth from the air of His body, just as our soul breathes its breath forth from the air of its body. But since it is clear that God is infinitely above every bodily creature in the world and above every spirit which He created, how can this explanation be seriously proposed?
Should we say that the more God is present to the whole of His creation by His unparalleled almighty power, the more He would have been able to make from air the breath which would be the soul of man? But the soul is not corporeal, and whatever comes from the corporeal elements of the world must necessarily be corporeal. Now, among the elements of the world, we must include air; but even if the soul were said to have been