God created not only the causal reason of the future human
CHAPTER 6
Was there some previously created spiritual material for the soul as there was earth for the body?
9. Is it believable, then, that in the works of the first six days God created not only the causal reason of the future human body but also the material from which it would be made, namely, earth from whose slime or dust the body would be formed, whereas in the case of the soul He created only the causal reason according to which it would be made and not any kind of material sui generis from which it would be made?
For if the soul were something immutable, we should have no need to look for its own special kind of matter; however, its mutability shows it sometimes deformed by vice and deception and formed by virtue and true doctrine, its nature as soul meanwhile remaining, just as the flesh remains by nature flesh though it is glowing with health or disfigured by disease or wounds.!3 But the flesh, before becoming flesh and having its natural beauty or deformity, also had the material, namely, earth, from which it was made into flesh. Perhaps, then, the soul, before it was made into the nature of soul, whose beauty is virtue and whose deformity is vice, could have had its own kind of spiritual material which was not yet soul, just as the earth from which the flesh was made was already something, although it was not flesh.
10. But there is a difference. For the earth filled the lowest part of the world before the body of man was made from it, and it gave to the world its whole substance so that even if no flesh of any living being were made from it, by its own form it would fill out the structure and mass of the world; and this is why the world is referred to as heaven and earth.