The Destiny of the Soul | Page 9

conditions meet,
"Then God smites his hands together, And strikes out a soul as a spark,
Into the organized glory of things, From the deeps of the dark."
This is the view asserted by Vincentius Victor in opposition to the
dogmatism of Tertullian on the one hand and to the doubts of
Augustine on the other.2 It is called the theory of Insufflation, because
it affirms that God immediately breathes a soul into each new being:
even as in the case of Adam, of whom we read that "God breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul." The
doctrine drawn from this Mosaic text, that the soul is a divine substance,
a breath of God, miraculously breathed by Him into every creature at
the commencement of its existence, often reappears, and plays a
prominent part in the history of psychological opinions. It corresponds
with the beautiful Greek myth of Prometheus, who is fabled to have
made a human image from the dust of the ground, and then, by fire
stolen from heaven, to have animated it with a living soul. So man, as
to his body, is made of earthly clay; but the Promethean spark that
forms his soul is the fresh breath of God. There is no objection to the
real ground and essence of this theory, only to its form and
accompaniments. It is purely anthropomorphitic; it conceives God as
working, after the manner of a man, intermittently, arbitrarily. It
insulates the origination of souls from the fixed course of nature, severs
it from all connection with that common process of organic life which
weaves its inscrutable web through the universe, that system of laws

which expresses the unchanging will of God, and which constitutes the
order by whose solemn logic alone He acts. The objection to this view
is, in a word, that it limits the creative action of God to human souls.
We suppose that He creates our bodies as well; that He is the
immediate Author of all life in the same sense in which He is the
immediate Author of our souls. The opponents of the creation theory,
who strenuously fought it in the seventeenth century, were accustomed
to urge against it the fanciful objection that "it puts God to an invenust
2 Augustine, De Anima et ejus Origine, lib. iv.
employment scarce consistent with his verecundious holiness; for, if it
be true, whenever the lascivious consent to uncleanness and are pleased
to join in unlawful mixture, God is forced to stand a spectator of their
vile impurities, stooping from his throne to attend their bestial practices,
and raining down showers of souls to animate the emissions of their
concupiscence"3
A fourth reply to the inquiry before us is furnished in Tertullian's
famous doctrine of Traduction, the essential import of which is that all
human souls have been transmitted, or brought over, from the soul of
Adam. This is the theological theory: for it arose from an exigency in
the dogmatic system generally held by the patristic Church. The
universal depravity of human nature, the inherited corruption of the
whole race, was a fundamental point of belief. But how reconcile this
proposition with the conception, entertained by many, that each new
born soul is a fresh creation from the "substance," "spirit," or "breath"
of God? Augustine writes to Jerome, asking him to solve this
question.4 Tertullian, whose fervid mind was thoroughly imbued with
materialistic notions, unhesitatingly cut this Gordian knot by asserting
that our first parent bore within him the undeveloped germ of all
mankind, so that sinfulness and souls were propagated together. 5 Thus
the perplexing query, "how souls are held in the chain of original sin,"
was answered. As Neander says, illustrating Tertullian's view, "The
soul of the first man was the fountain head of all human souls: all the
varieties of individual human nature are but modifications of that one
spiritual substance." In the light of such a thought, we can see how

Nature might, when solitary Adam lived, fulfil Lear's wild conjuration,
and
"All the germens spill At once that make ingrateful man."
In the seventh chapter of the Koran it is written, "The Lord drew forth
their posterity from the loins of the sons of Adam." The commentators
say that God passed his hand down Adam's back, and extracted all the
generations which should come into the world until the resurrection.
Assembled in the presence of the angels, and endued with
understanding, they confessed their dependence on God, and were then
caused to return into the loins of their great ancestor. This is one of the
most curious doctrines within the whole range of philosophical history.
It implies the strict corporeality of the soul; and yet how infinitely fine
must be its attenuation when it