HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
Where does an individual human soul come from? Scripture says that God formed the first man of dust and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” — but it never says plainly what happens at the conception of the second man, or the millionth. Three answers were given, and they are the axes of this timeline. Traducianism (from tradux, the layered vine-shoot by which a vine is propagated): the soul comes from the parents' souls as the body comes from their bodies, so that the whole race is one stock descending from Adam. Creationism: God makes each soul afresh out of nothing and joins it to the body He has formed in the womb. Pre-existence: souls were all made long ago, and enter bodies later — on Origen's version, because they cooled from their first contemplation of God and fell.1
The question looks abstract and is not. It is load-bearing for three others. It decides how original sin reaches a newborn — through a soul inherited from Adam, or through a fresh soul joined to inherited flesh. It decides what to say about infants who die unbaptised, which is where Augustine's whole interest in the question lay. And it decides whether the diversity of human lots is the residue of choices made before birth, which is where Origen's lay. That is why a debate with almost no explicit scriptural warrant on either side generated a papal letter, a conciliar anathema, and a scholastic charge of heresy.2
The shape of the story is a narrowing. The third century holds all three views at once. The fifth century kills one of them — pre-existence — and leaves the other two in a stalemate that Augustine, who cared most about it, could never break: he confessed his ignorance in 388 and again in his last years, and died undecided. The West then settled quietly on creationism, not by defining it but by condemning its rival's implications, until Aquinas could call traducianism simply heretical. What follows are the datable witnesses, earliest first.3
Tertullian is the author of traducianism, and his Treatise on the Soul is the first sustained argument for it. Body and soul are conceived together and neither precedes the other: “both are conceived, and formed, and perfectly simultaneously, as well as born together; and… not a moment's interval occurs in their conception.” The soul is therefore a sprout from a root — it “has been derived from Adam as its root, and has been propagated among his posterity by means of woman” — so that “from the one (primeval) man comes the entire outflow and redundance of men's souls.”4 His evidence is not exegetical but observational: we resemble our parents in disposition, not only in feature, and that likeness must be propagated like any other. Its cost is the one his critics never let go of — to be transmitted with the seed, the soul has to be something bodily enough to be transmitted, and Tertullian accepted that consequence where later traducians would not.5
Origen supplies the third option and is candid that it is an option: the church's rule of faith, he writes in the preface to De Principiis, has not settled “whether it is derived from the seed by a process of traducianism… or whether it has any other beginning.” Into that acknowledged gap he puts pre-existence. Rational minds were made equal; freedom made them unequal; and a mind that cooled from the divine warmth became a soul — he derives psychē from psychesthai, to grow cold — and was placed in a body proportioned to what it had become.6 The motive is theodicy: the inequality of human lots is not the Creator's arbitrariness but the residue of prior choice, so that even Jacob supplanting Esau in the womb was loved “according to the deserts of his previous life.” Origen himself twice marks the whole discussion as exploratory rather than dogmatic — a caveat his condemnation three centuries later did not preserve.7
Lactantius is the first Latin to hold creationism explicitly and the first to say the surrounding question may be permanently insoluble: what the soul is, he writes, “is not yet agreed upon by philosophers, and perhaps will never be agreed upon.” On its origin he is not agnostic at all. Souls come from neither parent nor from both, “because nothing can depart from a slight and incomprehensible subject”; therefore “the manner of the production of souls belongs entirely to God alone.” The parents' whole contribution is the matter of the body; conception, moulding, and the breathing-in of life are God's.8 He agrees with Tertullian on timing against the philosophers — the soul is present from conception, not breathed in at birth — while denying his mechanism.9
Didymus, blind from childhood and for half a century the head of the catechetical school of Alexandria, is the one witness of standing to keep Origen's third option alive in the fourth century. Reading the Lord's “Adam, where are you?” he takes the fallen soul to have been “free from every place through incorporeality” and to have “come into a place” only once it “became attached to the body” — Origen's pre-cosmic descent, read out of Genesis 3.10 That it was his own teaching and not merely a view he canvassed is confirmed by his pupil Jerome, who — sorting him as sound on the Trinity but astray “in trusting to Origen” — reports a treatise of Didymus holding that the pre-existent souls “had not sinned much, and therefore it was enough punishment for them just to have touched their bodily prisons.” What he held was Origen's careful version — rational creatures who once wore subtler bodies, not a pre-existence of bare souls — and he died in the Church's honour, his teaching on the soul condemned only long after his death.11
Gregory of Nyssa steers between the two options that frame the question in the Greek East — souls before bodies, or bodies before souls — and rejects both: “the doctrine of both, then, is equally to be rejected; but I think that we ought to direct our own doctrine in the way of truth between these theories.” Against pre-existence he presses that it slides into the pagan transmigration tales, fit for “the chatter of frogs or jackdaws”; against the literalist reading of Genesis 2:7 that makes the clay figure first, he answers that man is one, and so “the beginning of his existence is one, common to both parts,” lest a man be “antecedent and posterior to himself.”12 His positive image is the seed that already contains the whole plant potentially: what is sent forth from a living body to be the occasion of life cannot itself be lifeless. That is Tertullian's simultaneity without Tertullian's materialism — and it left the Greek tradition with a formula about when the soul begins that did not commit it on whence.13
Rufinus, defending himself before Pope Anastasius I against the charge of Origenism, gives the cleanest ancient statement of the three-way division — soul infused with the seed (he names Tertullian and Lactantius), or made new daily, or made long ago and planted in bodies (“the opinion of Origen”) — and then refuses to choose: “I declare in the presence of God that, after reading each of these opinions, I am up to the present moment unable to hold any of them as certain and absolute.”14 The refusal is the point. Rufinus is treating the origin of the soul as an open question on which orthodoxy does not yet ride — and Jerome, mid-quarrel, treated that very refusal as evasion.15 (His attribution of traducianism to Lactantius is, on Lactantius's own text, simply wrong.)16
Jerome is the West's decided creationist. Writing to Marcellinus and Anapsychia shortly after the sack of Rome he lays out the same taxonomy in five branches and marks his own view by the proof-text he attaches to it: are souls “daily created by God and sent into bodies, according to what is written in the gospel, My Father works hitherto, and I work”? The rival he names is Tertullian's, which “Tertullian, Apollinaris, and the majority of the Western divines conjecture… so that as the body is the offspring of body, the soul is the offspring of soul, and exists on conditions similar to those regulating the existence of the inferior animals” — the sting being that traducianism levels man with the beasts.17 Elsewhere he is blunter. On Ecclesiastes 12:7, since the spirit returns to God who gave it, “there is enough to smile at in those who think that spirits are produced with bodies, not from God, but are made from the parent's body”; on Zechariah 12:1 God is “the same Creator of all souls.” Yet in the letter itself he declined to expound the matter and sent his correspondents to Augustine instead — “that holy man and learned bishop Augustine, who will be able to teach you on this subject viva voce” — who would spend the rest of his life wishing Jerome had answered.18
Augustine is the great non-decider, and the reason the question mattered so much in the West. In On Free Will he had already enumerated four possibilities — souls propagated from Adam's; each newly made; pre-existing souls sent into bodies; pre-existing souls entering of their own accord — and deliberately argued in a way that would hold on any of them. He never advanced past that. In 415 he sent Jerome a whole treatise as a letter (Letter 166), carried east by the priest Orosius, confessing “many are perplexed by questions concerning the soul, and I confess that I myself am of this number,” and pressing one difficulty above all: if God makes each soul new and sinless, whence the guilt for which an unbaptised infant is condemned?19 Jerome never answered it. Fifteen years later, against Vincentius Victor, Augustine was still saying the same thing — “I have no certain knowledge how it came into my body; for it was not I who gave it to myself” — while explicitly offering to accept creationism from anyone who could reconcile it with original sin and infant condemnation. His last word on the subject, in the Retractations, was that as to the soul's origin “I did not know then, and I still do not know.”20
Cassian puts the creationist case on a proof-text that outlived the debate: Hebrews 12:9, which distinguishes “fathers of our flesh” from “the Father of spirits.” What could show more clearly, he asks, “that he laid down that men were the fathers of our flesh, but always taught that God alone was the Father of souls”? The mechanism is denied outright — “spirit does not beget spirit just as soul cannot procreate soul” — and God “makes them out of nothing whenever He pleases.”21 The argument is a monk's, made in passing inside a conference on demons, which is itself a sign of where the question had got to by the 430s: in the Latin West, creationism was becoming the assumed answer.22
Gennadius is the hinge from opinion to rule. His handbook of church dogmas states creationism as the church's teaching and names both rejected alternatives in one breath: souls were not all made at the beginning among the other intellectual natures, “as Origen imagines,” nor sown with the bodies through intercourse, “as the Luciferians, Cyril, and certain presumptuous Latins affirm”; rather the body alone is sown, and “the body being now formed, the soul is created and infused.”23 Its influence came partly by accident: the book circulated for centuries under Augustine's name, so the West read Augustine's own permanent hesitation and a flat creationist canon as if both were his.24
Anastasius II supplies the first papal intervention: a letter to the bishops of Gaul against people there who reasoned that “just as the parents transmit bodies to the human race from material dregs, so also they bestow the vital principle of the living souls.” Against them he argues from the same verse Jerome used — the Father's work has “not ceased even today” — and concludes that God “imparts souls.”25 Its weight should not be overstated: it is a letter to a regional episcopate, not a conciliar definition, and it is preserved in the standard collections only in heavily abridged excerpt. What it shows is that by 498 traducianism in Gaul was something a bishop of Rome would write to suppress.26
Justinian ends the third option by law. His edict against Origen opens with the pre-existence of souls and anathematizes precisely Origen's mechanism: whoever says that human souls pre-existed, “that they had previously been spirits and holy powers, but that, satiated with the vision of God, they had turned to evil, and in this way the divine love in them had died out… and they had therefore been condemned to punishment in bodies, shall be anathema.”27 A fuller set of fifteen anathemas, opening with “the fabulous pre-existence of souls,” is transmitted with the Fifth Ecumenical Council of 553, though its relation to the council's own acts is disputed. Either way the effect was the same: after the sixth century the three-way question is a two-way one.28
John of Damascus fixes the settled Greek position in the handbook that became the East's standard summary. The reasoning soul God “bestowed upon him by His own inbreathing”; and against the remaining rival: “body and soul were formed at one and the same time, not first the one and then the other, as Origen so senselessly supposes.”29 Gregory of Nyssa's simultaneity has become a formula, and the only named error is pre-existence.30
Aquinas closes the Latin question with a metaphysical argument rather than a proof-text. Since the intellectual soul has an operation independent of the body it is subsistent; a subsistent immaterial thing cannot be produced by a power working in matter, so it “cannot be caused through generation, but only through creation by God.” Therefore “to hold that the intellectual soul is caused by the begetter, is nothing else than to hold the soul to be non-subsistent and consequently to perish with the body. It is therefore heretical to say that the intellectual soul is transmitted with the semen.”31 Tertullian's inference is thus turned around: he had accepted a quasi-corporeal soul in order to keep the transmission, and Aquinas rejects the transmission in order to keep an incorporeal soul. The charge of heresy is his own theological censure, not a conciliar sentence — no council ever defined the point — but it is where the Latin tradition came to rest.32
The John 5:17 proof-text for creationism — the one verse the creationist side leaned on for a millennium, from Jerome through Anastasius II. Its own context is a sabbath controversy about healing, and the “work” Jesus claims to share is the Father's providential upholding of everything, not the manufacture of souls in particular; the verse is compatible with creationism but selects it over no rival, since a traducianist also affirms God's ceaseless working. The conclusion may still be true; this verse does not establish it.33
Augustine's difficulty — if God creates each soul new and innocent, and an infant dying unbaptised is nevertheless condemned, then God has joined a guiltless soul to a doom it did nothing to earn. This is the argument that made Augustine unable to accept creationism for forty years, and he could never get an answer from Jerome. The standard reply — that the soul contracts the guilt of Adam by its union with flesh descended from Adam — is coherent and became the settled scholastic answer, but it relocates the difficulty rather than dissolving it, and it works only on a doctrine of inherited guilt that is itself disputed.34
See also, on the reception of Origen's third option: Was the pre-existence of souls an open question when Origen taught it? — the historical question of whether the church had settled the soul's origin before it anathematized his answer to it, weighed on the condemnation-of-Origen timeline.
The three-way division as an ancient writer states it: Rufinus of Aquileia, Apology in Defence of Himself (to Anastasius), §6 (a.d. 400) — soul “infused together with the material body through the channel of the human seed”; “God is every day making new souls”; “the souls were all made long ago… This is the opinion of Origen.” The Latin tradux is a vine-layer, whence “traducianism”; the first man's formation is Genesis 2:7. ↩
Augustine states the infant-baptism stake explicitly in Augustine, Letter 166 (to Jerome), ch. iii §6 (a.d. 415): “where can the soul, even of an infant snatched away by death, have contracted the guilt which, unless the grace of Christ has come to the rescue by that sacrament of baptism which is administered even to infants, involves it in condemnation?” Origen's theodicy stake: Origen, De Principiis II.ix.6–7. The papal letter, anathema, and scholastic censure are the Anastasius II, Justinian, and Aquinas entries below. ↩
For the standard modern account of the narrowing — Tertullian as author of traducianism, Jerome as creationist, Augustine wavering “because the Scriptures do not expressly decide,” and pre-existence as “one of the Origenistic heresies, which were condemned under Justinian” — see Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church III §154, “Original Sin, and the Origin of the Human Soul”. For the scholastic settlement: C. Dubray, “Traducianism,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) — “Creationism is held as certain by the Scholastics”; and, on the absence of a formal definition, “there are no strict definitions condemning Generationism as heretical.” ↩
Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul (De Anima), chs. xix, xxvii (c. 210–213) — the sprout “derived from Adam as its root,” the simultaneity of conception (“not a moment's interval occurs in their conception”), and “from the one (primeval) man comes the entire outflow and redundance of men's souls.” Fuller quotation on Tertullian's page. ↩
The family-likeness argument, from Cleanthes, at Tertullian, De Anima xxv: “whence comes it that from similarity of soul we resemble our parents in disposition… if we are not produced from this seed of the soul?” On the corporeality that goes with it, Schaff, History III §154: “With Tertullian this theory was connected with a materializing view of the soul.” ↩
Origen, De Principiis, Preface §5: “But with respect to the soul, whether it is derived from the seed by a process of traducianism… or whether it has any other beginning… is not distinguished with sufficient clearness in the teaching of the Church.” The cooling etymology and the fall of the mind into soul: Origen, De Principiis II.viii.3. ↩
Origen, De Principiis II.ix.6–7 — diversity derives “not from the will or judgment of the Creator, but from the freedom of the individual will,” and Jacob was preferred “according to the deserts of his previous life.” The self-qualification, II.viii.4 and the close of II.viii: “these views are not to be regarded as advanced by us in a dogmatic manner, but simply as opinions, treated in the style of investigation and discussion”; “as topics of discussion for our readers, rather than as dogmatic and well-defined propositions.” ↩
Lactantius, On the Workmanship of God (De Opificio Dei) xvii, xix (c. 303–311) — “not yet agreed upon by philosophers, and perhaps will never be agreed upon”; “a soul cannot be produced from souls, because nothing can depart from a slight and incomprehensible subject. Therefore the manner of the production of souls belongs entirely to God alone”; “souls are not given by parents, but by one and the same God and Father of all.” ↩
Lactantius, De Opificio Dei xvii: “it is not introduced into the body after birth, as it appears to some philosophers, but immediately after conception.” Compare Tertullian, De Anima xxv, arguing the same timing on traducianist grounds. ↩
Didymus the Blind, Commentary on Genesis 91 (on Genesis 3:9; Tura papyrus, ed. Sources Chrétiennes 233/244), translated in Daria Szymańska-Kuta, “The Soul-Body Compound in Didymus the Blind's Commentary on Genesis,” Studia Religiologica 48.4 (2015), at p. 274. Fuller quotation, and the caveat that Didymus frames the sharpest form as the view of unnamed “some authors,” on his page. ↩
Jerome, Apology against Rufinus III.27–28 — “we extol… the purity of his faith in the Trinity, while on the other point in which he erred in trusting to Origen we withdraw from him,” and the treatise addressed to Rufinus in which Didymus held “that they had not sinned much.” On the Origenian precision of the doctrine (rational creatures, not bare souls), Ilaria Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (2013), p. 289. His posthumous condemnation with Origen and Evagrius (680–681, 787) and his restoration teaching are traced on his page and the apokatastasis timeline. ↩
Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man xxviii.2–8, xxix.1 (a.d. 379) — “the doctrine of both, then, is equally to be rejected”; the transmigration tales “fitting for the chatter of frogs or jackdaws”; “as man is one, the being consisting of soul and body, we are to suppose that the beginning of his existence is one, common to both parts, so that he should not be found to be antecedent and posterior to himself.” ↩
Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man xxix.3, xxix.5 — the wheat-grain containing the whole plant potentially, and “since it is not from a dead body that the potentiality for conception is secreted, but from one which is animate and alive…” ↩
Rufinus of Aquileia, Apology in Defence of Himself (to Pope Anastasius I), §6 (a.d. 400). ↩
Jerome, Apology Against Rufinus II.4–5 — “If it arose by traduction, then human souls, which we believe to be eternal, are subject to the same condition as those of the brutes… But if it is created and sent into the body after the body has been formed, tell us so simply, and free us from anxiety”; “None of these answers will you give us.” The wider quarrel is followed on the Origenist controversy timeline. ↩
Rufinus assigns the traducianist view to “Tertullian or Lactantius among the Latins” (Apology §6); but Lactantius, De Opificio Dei xix denies precisely that souls come from the parents. The misattribution is noted on Lactantius's page. ↩
Jerome, Letter 126 (to Marcellinus and Anapsychia), §1 — printed in the NPNF collection among Augustine's correspondence as Letter 165, and dated there a.d. 410; the letter's own reference to “the sack of Rome itself by the barbarians” puts it in 410–412. ↩
Jerome on Ecclesiastes 12:7 (Jerome, Commentary on Ecclesiastes): “there is enough to smile at in those who think that spirits are produced with bodies, not from God, but are made from the parent's body.” On Zechariah 12:1 (Jerome, Commentary on Zechariah): “the same Creator of all souls.” The referral to Augustine: Letter 126 §1 — “you have in Africa that holy man and learned bishop Augustine, who will be able to teach you on this subject viva voce, as the saying is, and expound to you his opinion, or, I should rather say, my own opinion stated in his words.” ↩
Augustine, Letter 166 (to Jerome), chs. ii–iii (a.d. 415) — the confession of perplexity (§3), the four opinions recalled from On Free Will and the fifth (“the soul is a part of God”) set aside as heretical (§7), and the infant question (§6). Its delivery east by Orosius alongside Letter 167 is narrated on the Jerome–Augustine timeline. ↩
Augustine, On the Soul and Its Origin I.25, I.33–34 (a.d. 419–420) — “I have no certain knowledge how it came into my body… nor am I ashamed, like him, to confess my ignorance of what I know not”; and the terms on which he would accept creationism (“we certainly do not in the least object to its maintenance,—only let it be by persons who have succeeded in discovering some new evidence”). His final statement, Retractations I.1.3, “as to its origin… I did not know then, and I still do not know”, is quoted in Schaff, History III §154. ↩
John Cassian, Conferences VIII.25 (the Second Conference of Abbot Serenus) (c. 426–429), citing Hebrews 12:9. ↩
Cassian also reads Ecclesiastes 12:7 as Jerome does — the dust returns to the earth, “while he points out that the spirit which is not begotten by intercourse between the sexes… returns to its creator” (Conferences VIII.25). On creationism as the West's assumed answer by the fifth century, Dubray, “Traducianism”. ↩
Gennadius of Massilia, De ecclesiasticis dogmatibus xiv (c. 470) — Latin text: “Animas hominum non esse ab initio inter caeteras intellectuales naturas, nec simul creatas, sicut Origenes fingit; neque cum corporibus per coitum seminatas… ac formato jam corpore animam creari et infundi.” English rendering here is our own from that text; the one published English clause is the form Aquinas quotes, “the rational soul is not engendered by coition” (Summa Theologiae I q.118 a.2, sed contra). Critical edition: C. H. Turner, “The Liber Ecclesiasticorum Dogmatum,” Journal of Theological Studies 7 (1905–6), 78–99, whose chapter numbering differs from Migne's. ↩
On the pseudonymous circulation, and on Gennadius's authorship of the treatise, see A. Fortescue, “Gennadius of Marseilles,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1909); the text is printed under his name at Patrologia Latina 58, 979–1054, but circulated widely as Augustine's. Peter Lombard settles the question in the same terms at Sentences II d.18 c.7, whose rubric reads “De anima mulieris, quae non ex anima viri, quia animae non sunt ex traduce.” Further detail on his page. ↩
Pope Anastasius II, Bonum atque iucundum (23 August 498), to the bishops of Gaul, as excerpted in Denzinger, Sources of Catholic Dogma 170 (Deferrari trans.), under the heading “The Origin of Souls and Original Sin”; critical Latin in Thiel, Epistolae Romanorum Pontificum I, 634 ff. ↩
Denzinger prints the letter in elided excerpt (the ellipses are the collection's own). On its authority, Dubray, “Traducianism”: “although there are no strict definitions condemning Generationism as heretical, it is certainly opposed to the doctrine of the Church, and could not be held without temerity.” The formula “God fashions souls daily” often quoted in this connection is Jerome's, not the pope's — quotidie Deus fabricatur animas, Against John of Jerusalem 22, quoted in Schaff, History III §154 n. ↩
The Anathematisms of the Emperor Justinian Against Origen, i (a.d. 543), NPNF² vol. 14. ↩
The Anathemas Against Origen, i — “If anyone asserts the fabulous pre-existence of souls, and shall assert the monstrous restoration which follows from it: let him be anathema.” That these fifteen belong to the acts of Constantinople II (whose own canons number fourteen) is widely doubted; see the discussion on Justinian's page. ↩
John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith II.12, “Concerning Man” (c. 743). ↩
Compare Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man xxix.1, of which John's clause is effectively a summary; and see his page for the point that neither the formula nor the condemnation of Origen decides between traducianism and creationism. ↩
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q.118 a.2, “Whether the intellectual soul is produced from the semen?” (c. 1268). ↩
Aquinas holds by contrast that the sensitive soul is transmitted by the power in the semen (I q.118 a.1), so the split is deliberate. That no council ever defined the question: Dubray, “Traducianism”. On the scholastic consensus with its two exceptions (Hugh of St Victor, Alexander of Hales), same article. ↩
Argument: the John 5:17 proof-text for creationism — assessment weak. ↩
Argument: does the condemnation of unbaptised infants tell against creationism? — assessment contested. ↩