First Question. Whether Adam’s soul was created in the body

Bonaventure, Sent. 2 d.17 q.3 a.1
Scotus, Sent. 2 d.17 q.1
Thomas, ST Ia q.91 a.4
Richard of St. Victor, Sent. 2 d.17 q.2

1. About the seventeenth distinction the question asked is whether the soul of Adam was created.

2. That it was not: the form is produced by the same production by which the composite is produced, for the form is only produced because the composite is produced, Metaphysics 7 text 22, 27; but man was not created but formed from the mud of the earth.

3. Against this is the Master in the text.

To the Question

4. I reply that here there was an error that the soul would be of the substance of God, the error taking its origin from a badly understood remark of Augustine, Literal Commentary on Genesis 7 on the verse ‘He breathed the breath of life into his face’, which says that it seems that this breath was of the substance of the breather. This error is empty, as is plain, because what is of the substance of God is indivisible and unchangeable, but the soul changes from vice to virtue, from ignorance to knowledge.     Therefore etc     .

5. But I say that the soul is created, and created in the body, though it is capable of being created per se. For here one may consider two instants of nature, and in the first instant of nature the soul is created, so that creation terminates at the soul precisely in the first instant, and thus there is then a creation of the particular man, that is, creation in part. But in the second instant of nature the soul, having been created in the first instant, is infused into the body, and so this second action is not properly creation; and in the second instant the whole man is said to be produced.

6. I say then that the soul is created and not educed from matter, and that it is immortal and not subject to any natural agent either as to production or as to corruption, and that this is not a conclusion from demonstration but purely something believed.

7. I say also that souls were not produced before bodies, as some have said, according to what is clear expressly from Augustine On Ecclesiastical Dogmas, and it is contained in the Master’s text in the following distinction.

8. To the principal argument [n.2] I say that it is true of a natural composite which is naturally produced wholly.