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| The Main Points of Our Author's Subject. On the Sexes of the Human Race.
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Chapter XXXVI.—The Main
Points of Our Author’s Subject. On the Sexes of the Human
Race.
For the discussion of these questions we
abandoned, if I remember rightly, ground to which we must now return.
We had established the position that the soul is seminally placed in
man, and by human agency, and that its seed from the very beginning is
uniform, as is that of the soul also, to the race of man; (and this we
settled) owing to the rival opinions of the philosophers and the
heretics, and that ancient saying mentioned by Plato (to which we
referred above).1742
| 1742 In ch. xxviii. at the
beginning. | We now pursue in
their order the points which follow from them. The soul, being sown in
the womb at the same time as the body, receives likewise along with it
its sex; and this indeed so simultaneously, that neither of the two
substances can be alone regarded as the cause of the sex. Now, if
in the semination of these substances any interval were admissible in
their conception, in such wise that either the flesh or the soul should
be the first to be conceived, one might then ascribe an especial sex to
one of the substances, owing to the difference in the time of the
impregnations, so that either the flesh would impress its sex upon the
soul, or the soul upon the sex; even as Apelles (the heretic, not the
painter1743
| 1743 See above, ch.
xxiii. [Also p. 246, infra.] | ) gives the priority
over their bodies to the souls of men and women, as he had been taught
by Philumena, and in consequence makes the flesh, as the later, receive
its sex from the soul. They also who make the soul supervene after
birth on the flesh predetermine, of course, the sex of the previously
formed soul to be male or female, according to (the sex of) the flesh.
But the truth is, the seminations of the two substances are inseparable
in point of time, and their effusion is also one and the same, in
consequence of which a community of gender is secured to them; so that
the course of nature, whatever that be, shall draw the line (for the
distinct sexes). Certainly in this view we have an attestation of
the method of the first two formations, when the male was moulded and
tempered in a completer way, for Adam was first formed; and the woman
came far behind him, for Eve was the later formed. So that her flesh
was for a long time without specific form (such as she afterwards
assumed when taken out of Adam’s side); but she was even then
herself a living being, because I should regard her at that time in
soul as even a portion of Adam. Besides, God’s afflatus
would have animated her too, if there had not been in the woman a
transmission from Adam of his soul also as well as of his
flesh.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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