The Mirror of Unusual Questions
Adorned with various precepts of theology, canon law, the philosophers, and the astrologers; comprising three decades.
By Brother Bartholomaeus Sibylla of Monopoli, master of sacred theology, of the Order of Preachers.
First Decade
Chapter One
Containing seven questions concerning rational souls.
Question One
Whether the rational soul is made from the essence of God
It is asked whether rational souls were made from the essence of God, as Parmenides and Marcus Terentius Varro said.
In answering this question, it must be known that, because of the essential perfection of rational souls and their invisibility - since they do not fall under the senses, from which all our proper cognition arises - various errors, opinions, and difficulties have therefore arisen concerning them, as is evident in Book I of On the Soul. Hence the Philosopher also says there: “It is altogether and exceedingly difficult to grasp what the soul is.”
According to Augustine, however, in his book On the Origin of the Soul, the first teaching about rational souls that is openly perverse and contrary to the Catholic faith is that which certain persons asserted when they said that God made them not from nothing but from himself. They were moved to assert this because, when certain persons began to consider the natures of things, they were unable to transcend imagination and sense so that they might believe that any spiritual substances existed. They therefore asserted that nothing exists apart from the bodies that are seen, imagined, and represented in the phantasy. For this reason they said that God is a certain infinite body - namely, either this whole ethereal and elemental body, as Parmenides said, or all this corporeal light which we see, as the Manichaeans used to say. They said that this whole body, or all this light, was the principle of all things and of all bodies, and thus they asserted that God was the soul of the world and was of the essence of all things. They asserted that the rational soul was of the nature of that infinite body, or was a certain power of that light, and consequently was of the essence of God himself.
This error belonged first to Parmenides himself, who said that all things are simply one and differ only according to sense and estimation, in Book I of the Physics. Marcus Terentius Varro later followed him and asserted, as Augustine reports in Book VII of The City of God, that God was the soul of the world, governing it by motion and reason. He asserted that the human soul was a part of that great soul of the world, that is, of God. Virgil also related this opinion, following Aratus, the Greek poet, when he said:
Jupiter is whatever you see and whatever is moved.
They could furthermore have strengthened this opinion with the following argument. That which is breathed forth by someone is made from that which is emitted by the one breathing, as is evident in the case of the spider, which, in forming webs to catch flies, breathes them forth from its own substance and thus wastes away and is weakened, as the Psalmist says. But when God had formed man from the clay of the earth with respect to his body, he breathed into him the breath of life, and man became a living soul, Genesis 2. Therefore the rational soul, by which man lives, was breathed forth and is something actually taken from the substance of God.
But Augustine, in the book On the Origin of the Soul, says to the contrary that this teaching is openly perverse. For if souls were of the essence of God, they would be of the same nature as he, and consequently there would be as many gods as there are souls.
Moreover, this opinion contradicts sense, is opposed to the faith, is rejected by the philosophers, and is condemned by the sacred doctors, especially by Saint Thomas in Part I, question 90, article 1, through an argument possessing the following force. The divine nature is pure act, invariable, immovable, always understanding, and its power does not really differ from its essence. The rational soul, however, is mingled with potency and is variable from one affection to another, from one cognition to another, from truth to error, and from virtue to vice. Before it learns, it is like a scraped tablet upon which nothing has been depicted, as stated in Book III of On the Soul; it understands at one time actually and at another potentially. Its powers, according to Thomas, really differ from its essence. Therefore the soul is not of the essence of God.
To the argument given above on the contrary side, it is said that “to breathe into” in the book of Genesis is not to be understood corporeally; rather, for God to breathe is the same as to make a spirit. Even a man who breathes corporeally does not emit anything from his own substance, but from an extraneous nature, namely air. A spider, moreover, is not said to breathe forth its webs, but to weave them from its own substance.
Addition
On the fact that the rational soul is not of the substance and essence of God, see Augustine, the book On the Knowledge of the True Life; likewise, the epistle of Blessed Augustine to Saint Jerome, On the Origin of the Soul where he asks Jerome whether that opinion is to be followed according to which, as each individual is born, a newly created soul is infused into him. See likewise Jerome, To Marcellinus and Anapsychia; Saint Thomas, Opusculum 3, chapter 94; Part I of the Summa, question 90, article 1; Against the Gentiles, chapter 85; and Augustine, On Psalm 41.