The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
BOOK SEVEN 7
For if we do not believe that God still creates anything from nothing after He has created all things simultaneously, and if we therefore believe that He rested from all the works which He had begun to make and had finished, so that whatever He would subsequently make He would make from these works, I do not see how we can understand that He still creates souls from nothing.
Perhaps we should say that in the works of the first six days God made the hidden day!? and (if this is what we are to believe) the spiritual and intellectual realm, that is, the united company of angelic spirits; and besides them, the world, namely, heaven and earth; and then we should perhaps add that in these existing beings God created the reason-principles of other beings to come in the future, but not the beings themselves. Otherwise, if these beings had already been created as they were destined to be, they would no longer be destined to be. And if that is so, there was not yet existing in the created world any human soul. A human soul first began to exist when God breathed forth and made it and put it into man.
8. But this does not solve the problem. We want to know whether God created from nothing the being which is called the soul and which before that moment was not existing, on the supposition that His breath would not come from some subordinate substance as is the case with the breath which the soul exhales from the body, as we have already pointed out. Was God's breath, then, quite simply made from nothing when it pleased Him to breathe forth and His breath became the soul of man? Or was there already existing some spiritual entity which, whatever its nature, was not yet soul, and from this entity was there made the breath of God, identified with the soul itself? There is a parallel with man's body, which was nonexistent before God formed it from the slime or dust of the earth. For dust or slime was not human flesh; nevertheless, it was something from which would be made a being which was not yet in existence.