The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
BOOK SEVEN 25
CHAPTER 23
Tf a causal reason of man's soul was created, where was it stored away? In the angels?
34. If the day which God first made is rightly understood as spiritual and intellectual being,®? could it be that, when God made man to His image on the sixth day, He placed in this spiritual and intellectual creation the causal reason of the soul which was to be made later? Thus He would have created in advance the cause and formative principle by which He would make man after the seven days, and this would mean that He created the causal reason of man's body in the earth and the causal reason of his soul in the creation of the first day.
But when this is said, what does it mean except that the angelic spiritual creation in a sense begets the human soul if there is pre-existing in that spiritual creation the causal reason of the human soul yet to be created, just as in man there is the causal reason of his future offspring? Human beings, according to this explanation, are parents of human bodies, and angels are parents of human souls, but God is the Creator of both souls and bodies, creating bodies through men, and souls through angels. Or can we say that He created the first body from the earth and the first soul from the angelic nature, after placing the causal reasons there when He originally made man in those beings which. He created simultaneously, and that subsequently He created men from men, the body from the body and the soul from the soul? This is a knotty problem, for it is hard to understand how the soul can be the child of an angel or of angels; but it is far more difficult to understand how it could be the child of the corporeal heaven, or, worse yet, of the sea and earth.
If it is absurd, therefore, to think that God laid away the causal reason of the soul in the realm of angelic beings, it would be even more absurd to suppose that the causal reason was previously made in a corporeal creature when God was making man to His image before He formed him in due time from the slime of the earth and breathed life into him.