The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
BOOK SEVEN 251 not supported by any authority in the canonical books of Scripture.
4. God placed the causal reason of the soul in some corporeal creature. This is immediately dismissed as impossible (7.23.34).
5. God created the soul in its own proper being among the works of the six days. Aug. thinks it reasonable to suppose that God created man on the sixth day in the sense that He made the causal reason of his body and laid it away in the elements of the world, whereas He made the soul in its own proper being on the first day and stored it away in the works of creation (et creata lateret in operibus Det) until He would breathe it into the body formed from the slime of the earth (7.24.35). This, then, is Augustine's opinion about the soul of Adam. The discussion about the souls of the rest of mankind is left to Book 10.
See Agaésse-Solignac 48.714-17, and Portalié, DTC 1.2359-61 (tr. Bastian 148-51).
Rom. 9.11. SCL? Cors:10. 6°All the MSS of z, and in addition also Bod and Pal, read qui. No MSS authority is cited for quae, the reading of m.
67Plotinus has a similar theory about the soul in Enn. 4.3.13. ©8Conf. 12.6.6: "The mutability of mutable things is itself able to receive all the forms into which mutable things are changed." This is precisely what matter is.
69See nn. 7 and 48 to Book 1 supra. 70in 1.15.29 supra, Aug. explains that the voice is the matter of words, and words form the voice, but both proceed simultaneously from the vocal organs.
71Augustine's speculations have inclined him to the theory that the soul of Adam was made among the original works which God created simultaneously (see 7.24.35 supra). In this paragraph he considers the two possible positions that might be taken by an adversary of his theory: (1) God created the soul out of nothing at the moment He breathed it into Adam's body (in which case He must have created the causal reason of the soul on the sixth day); or (2) at the moment when God breathed the soul into Adam's body, He made it from some creature He had previously created in the six days. Both of these positions pre-