Question Three
Whether the soul is propagated anew from seed at the same time as the human body is sown, as Cyril says
It is asked whether souls are propagated anew from seed at the same time as the human body is sown, as Cyril says.
Certain persons, together with Cyril, answered this question by saying that souls are not created anew and successively by God, but rather are propagated through seminal power and come from propagation when the body is sown by the parents, so that, just as the body of the son is from the body of the father, so the soul of the son comes from the soul of the father.
They attempted to prove this from Deuteronomy 12: “Take care that you do not eat the blood, for their blood is in place of the soul.” Hence certain philosophers and physicians also say that the soul is in the blood and that the blood is its seat. But blood exists by propagation; therefore the soul does also.
Again, that which comes forth from the loins of a man is caused from seed. But Genesis 46 says that sixty-six souls came forth from the loins of Jacob. Therefore the souls also came from seed.
Their third argument proceeds as follows. We are commanded to show reverence to our parents by reason of the being which we have from them. But being comes from the soul. Therefore the soul flows with the seed by propagation and comes from the parents.
But to the contrary stands the text of Augustine’s book Questions of the New and Old Testament, which is also incorporated by way of extract into the Decretum, 32, question 2, chapter Moyses.
This truth is first also proved by arguments. Every form that is brought into being through the transformation of matter and the separation of seed is a form educed from the potency of matter. For this is what it means for matter to be transformed, namely to be brought from potency into act. But the soul cannot be educed from the potency of matter. Therefore neither can it be produced through transformation.
The minor premise is made clear as follows. No active power acts beyond its own genus. But it is certain that the soul transcends every genus of body, since it possesses an operation elevated above all bodies, namely understanding. Therefore no corporeal power can produce the intellective soul.
The same point is secondly evident as follows. In the case of any principles whose operations cannot exist without a body, neither can their beginning exist without a body. For as a thing has being, so it operates, and conversely. In the case of any principles whose operations exist without a body, their generation does not occur through the generation of a body. The operation of the nutritive and sensitive soul cannot exist without a body; therefore these begin to exist through the propagation of seed. The operation, however, of the intellective soul, since it does not occur through a corporeal organ, as has been said, does not begin to exist through the propagation of seed. Therefore it is produced in another way.
Furthermore, the acts of active agents exist in a well-disposed recipient, according to Book III of On the Soul. But the soul is the act of a physical, organic body possessing life in potency, as is evident in Book II of that work. Therefore, before the body receives life from the soul, it must be disposed, organized, and brought to a suitable temperament. For the soul must have a house in which to dwell before it is created. Otherwise it would dwell upon dry ground, as is said in the gloss on the decree cited above.
Secondly, this is proved from the order which God observed in the formation of Adam. In Adam’s creation he first formed the body and afterwards breathed the soul into it, Genesis 2.
It is proved thirdly from an unfitting consequence. It would follow that, just as many bodies perish when the emission of seed sometimes does not result in birth and hence no human being is born, so also many souls would perish together with those bodies. This is unfitting, since souls are immortal. It therefore remains to say that, once the body has been organized, the soul is created by God.
For this reason chapter Sicuti, 37, question 2, maintains that if a fetus perishes before the infusion of the soul, homicide is not committed, because it cannot then be said that a human being has been born; but the guilty person must be fined money. If, however, the fetus has been animated by a rational soul, the guilty person must suffer capital punishment, as chapter Moyses says in the cause cited above.
The Master of the Sentences also speaks as follows concerning this matter in Book II, distinction 28: “The Catholic Church teaches that souls were made neither all together nor by propagation, but that they are infused into bodies sown through intercourse and already formed, and that in being infused they are created.”
To the arguments on the opposite side: to the first it is said that blood is not the soul, but, among the other humors, it contributes most of all to disposing the soul’s union with and preservation in the body. For, as Albert says, spirit is generated from the humor of the blood, and through these spirits the powers of the soul are conveyed to the organs of its faculties. Hence the statement made by certain natural philosophers and physicians, that the soul is in the blood, and so forth is not to be understood as meaning that blood is an animate thing, or that the soul principally coexists with the blood, or that the soul is nowhere in the body where there is no blood. For bones and nerves do not contain blood, although the soul is their substantial form.
Moreover, if a sudden removal of all the blood from the body were supernaturally effected without injury to the temperament of the members, it would still seem possible for the soul to exist there, and for the vital and animal spirits to suffice for their operations for some time after all the blood had been removed from the body.
Furthermore, before the first instant of the production of the soul in the embryo there was no blood there; nor could blood have been generated in that instant, but some additional time was required. Therefore the soul is naturally fitted to exist in a body without blood.
Accordingly, the statement of the philosophers in Book III of On the Parts of Animals, chapter 3, and of Averroes there in the chapter On the Heart, that blood is the seat of the soul, appears to be understood from the fact that the condition of the vital operations follows upon the condition of the blood. Thus, if blood is lacking, the operations fail; if the blood is most excellently disposed, the operations will be most vigorous; but if it is corrupted, infected, or otherwise badly qualified, the vital operations are impeded and fail.
The cause of this is that the instruments of the soul - namely the vital and animal spirits, for the exercise of whose vital operations the soul needs the body and without which it is not naturally fitted to perform those operations - are originally generated from sublimated blood, with the substance of air concurring in a certain manner. Consequently, blood that is corrupted, infected with poison, crude, or undigested is not fit for generating the vital and animal spirits in the liver or in the heart; and consequently it is not fit for their operations. Hence it is sometimes necessary that the composite should fail entirely on this account.
To the second argument it must be said, as Thomas says in Part I, question 118, article 2, that in the cited authority a part is put for the whole - that is, “soul” is put for “body” through the figure of synecdoche.
To the third argument it is said that parents do not give rational being, as though through an outflow, but dispose the body in the womb with the final disposition upon which the rational soul follows of necessity.
Addition
It can be proved by many testimonies of Scripture that the rational soul is created immediately by God and, in being created, is infused into prepared matter; that it is neither educed from the potency of matter, nor produced from the substance of God, nor effected by an intelligence, but has its being from God alone.
Isaiah 27: “I made every breath.” Genesis 1: “He breathed into him the breath of life.” Psalm 32: “He fashioned their hearts one by one.” And when Genesis 2 says, “This is bone of my bones,” it appears that rational souls are not from the soul of the first man, but that flesh is from flesh.
Saint Augustine holds this view in On the Soul and Its Origin, addressed to Renatus, chapter 4. He also agrees with it in the book On the Two Souls. Saint Thomas does so in the Compendium of Theology, Opusculum 3, chapter 93, and in Against the Gentiles, chapter 86; Paulus Cortesius in Book II, distinction 5; Biel in distinction 17, question 1; and Scotus affirms the same in Book II, distinction 17, question 1, where he attacks the error of the Manichaeans and Origenists. Tertullian also fell into this error.