Question Five
Whether souls, once the body has been organized, are successively created out of nothing by God, at once by being created and infused
It is asked whether souls, once the body has been organized, are successively created out of nothing by God, at once by being created and infused.
In answering this, one notable point and two conclusions are set down. The notable point is that in the womb, or embryo, through the action of the agents - that is, of the parents - the matter and the body are disposed for the reception of the rational soul, since all corporeal matter acts as an instrument of a spiritual power, and especially of God himself; and by disposing it in this manner, it is said to generate something like itself.
Then let this be the first conclusion: the intellective soul is created out of nothing by God. It is proved as follows. Since an agent is threefold - namely, artificial, natural, and supernatural - a being in act is necessarily placed beneath the action of an artificial agent; a being in potency, that is, matter, is subjected to the action of a natural agent; but nothing is necessarily subjected to the action of a supernatural agent. Since, therefore, the soul is created by such an agent, God creates it with no preexistent matter, but out of nothing.
The second conclusion is that, once the body has been organized by the action of the parents, God infuses the soul into the body and, by infusing it, creates it: in the body of a male, commonly after forty days from the first conception; but in the body of a female, after eighty.
Pliny and Master Dominicus Tholosanus, following the philosophers in connection with Leviticus, chapter 12, assign the following reason for the difference between male and female in the infusion of the rational soul. A male fetus is conceived from hot seed in the right part of the womb, which is hot; a female fetus, however, from cold seed in the left part of the womb. What is cold is slow and sluggish in its operation, while what is hot is swift. The formative power therefore organizes and forms the members more swiftly and quickly in the one seed than in the other.
Augustine proves this conclusion in his book On Ecclesiastical Dogmas, speaking as follows: “We say that the souls of human beings were not created at the beginning among the other intelligences, nor that they were all created together, as Origen fabricated; nor that they are sown together with bodies through intercourse, as the Luciferians and Cyril and certain presumptuous persons among the Latins affirm. But we say that the body alone is sown through the union of marriage. The Creator alone knows the creation of the soul; and each person’s body is coagulated in the womb, compacted and formed; and when the body has been formed, the soul is created and infused so that it may live. Finally, a human being consisting of soul and body is born and comes forth alive from the womb, full of human substance.” Thus he speaks.
Addition
Saint Augustine touches upon this question in Book VII of On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, affirming that the soul is out of nothing and that it truly is not produced from any matter. For the rational soul is a subsistent form to which being made and being belong per se. It cannot, however, be made from preexistent matter: neither corporeal matter, because it would then be of a corporeal nature; nor spiritual matter, because spiritual substances would then be transmuted into one another. Hence it is necessary to say that it comes to be only through creation, and therefore out of nothing, as all theologians conclude.