Summary: Soul
creation: is it at the time of conception or at the embryonic stage?;
St. Thomas; Aristotle; quote from Joseph F. Donceel’s Philosophical
Psychology (1961); Vatican sees aborted foetal matter in some
therapeutic drugs as ‘morally acceptable’.
When is the soul created?
For anybody who believes that we have a soul, the question of when it is
created is likely to be of some interest to them. The following excerpt
deals with this issue. Extracted from pages
340 and 341 of Philosophical Psychology (published in
1955 for the first edition and in 1961 for the second by Fordham University
– which is the Jesuit university of New York), this very short text I shall
be reproducing below is by the pen of Rev.
Joseph F. Donceel, whose work was heavily influenced by Thomism (in
short, the doctrines of St Thomas and his followers) and European
phenomenology. I came across this excerpt as I was looking for an extract on
the same subject by an enigmatic Rauh, as quoted in a very unusual
book written by a former French colonel turned investigator of the
paranormal and published in 1911 (whose title in English I would translate
as The lives coming in a succession). For the little I knew about
the Catholic doctrine on the question of when a soul comes into being (or
rather, when it is infused into a human body), I would have expected the
names of St. Augustine and St. Thomas to have figured prominently in any
exploration of this subject. The following extract confirmed that I was
wrong, as St. Augustine is not mentioned despite the important role he
played in the development of Catholic thought. To come back to this excerpt
penned by Donceel on the creation/infusion of a soul into a human, it is
important to note that his book was published in 1961 and that the position
of the Catholic Church has evolved on some points, maybe not drastically but
sufficiently so for the Vatican to have declared in December of last year
that the presence of aborted foetal matter in the substances that are being
injected into the bodies of the faithful (starting with Vatican employees)
was ‘morally acceptable’*.
p.340
Part four: human rational life
to beget the human being, since they produce a body which demands the
infusion of a spiritual soul. Therefore the parents are not only the cause
of the body, but also indirectly of the union of body and soul—that is, of
the whole human being.
When is the soul created?
We cannot answer that question with certitude. From the very
nature of the soul it follows that it cannot be created before the body. For
it is essential to the soul to have a transcendental relation to matter. We
can understand that this relation may subsist after the soul’s separation
from the body, but we do not see how it could exist before the soul’s union
with the body. Therefore the soul is created when it is infused into the
body.
When is the soul infused into the body? St Thomas, after
Aristotle, defined the soul as the first (or substantial) act of a physical,
organized body which has the potency of life. Therefore
he held that the human embryo must possess a certain degree of organization
before it can become the seat of a rational soul. It should have at least
the beginning of a human shape, and the essential organs must be present. St
Thomas admitted, however, that the embryo is alive from the very moment of
conception. But this first life is vegetative life, and the first soul is a
plant soul. When a certain degree of organization is reached, the vegetative
soul is replaced by a sensitive or animal soul. These two souls are not
created but generated, called forth from the potency of matter. Finally,
when the organization has progressed sufficiently, God creates and infuses a
rational soul. St Thomas’s theory is known as the mediate animation theory.
Most present-day Scholastics reject this theory and hold that the rational
soul is infused at the moment of conception. This “immediate animation
theory” sprang up in the seventeenth century. The authors who first
introduced it did not deny St. Thomas’s contention that the embryo must have
a certain degree of organization before it can become the seat of a rational
soul, but on the basis of defective scientific observations they held that
this organization was present from the very beginning of embryonic life.
This “preformation” theory, according to which the later organism is already
present on a microscopic scale in the earliest embryonic stages, was held
for a long time by many scientists. Nowadays it is universally rejected.
Although the scientific reasons which prompted many Scholastics
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to reject the mediate animation
theory of St. Thomas have lost their value, the great majority of
present-day Scholastics continue to hold the immediate animation theory.
They see no difficulty in admitting that a rational soul may inform an
unorganized embryo, even when it consists of only a few cells.
A few recent Scholastic authors would like to return to the
conceptions of St. Thomas. Prominent among them are Cardinal Mercier, one of
the founders of Neo-Scholasticism, and Canon de Dorlodot.8 At the present
stage of our knowledge, it seems impossible to decide which theory is true.
8. See his spirited defense of mediate animation in E.C. Messenger, Theology
and Evolution, pp.259 ff.
