In Proteus Stephen thinks of his physical origin as a
small being "lugged...squealing into life" by a midwife and
then, more ambitiously, of his spiritual origins: "Creation
from nothing." Catholic theology, governed by the need to
understand the human soul as immortal, holds that God creates
it ex nihilo (from nothing), independently of the
material processes of conception and gestation. Two paragraphs
later Stephen continues to think of himself both as a poor
creature "Wombed in sin darkness" and as an eternally existing
soul willed into existence by divine fiat. He infers
that "From before the ages He willed me and now may not will
me away or ever." In Eumaeus, however, he acknowledges
the possibility that God might choose to annihilate even
an immortal soul, "adding that to the number of His
other practical jokes."
The first verse of Genesis says that "In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth." It does not say whether
God created these things from some pre-existing
material, but by the second century of the Christian era
theologians were arguing that their God brought the world into
being from nothing, as opposed to Gnostic accounts of a
demiurge who fashioned it from primordial matter. A verse of 2
Maccabees (a 2nd-century book deemed canonical by the Catholic
church) says, "I beseech thee, my son, look upon the heaven
and the earth, and all that is therein, and consider that God
made them of things that were not, and so was mankind made
likewise" (7:28). Similarly, the older book of Wisdom (another
work deemed canonical by the Catholic church but considered
apocryphal by most Protestants) says that "We are born of
nothing" (2:2).
This account of the creation of mankind seems to conflict
with the statement in Genesis that God "formed man of the dust
of the ground" (2:7). Later philosophers, however, authorized
by the following words of the same verse––"and breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
soul"—took pains to distinguish between the fleshly part of
human nature and an immortal part called the rational soul
which God makes in special, additional acts of creation ex
nihilo. Stephen's beloved Thomas Aquinas argues that
"The rational soul can be made only by creation," meaning that
it "cannot be produced, save immediately by God" (Summa
Theologica 1.90.2-3).
In canto 25 of Dante's Purgatorio, Statius gives a
materialistic account of the growth of the vegetative and the
animal souls in the human embryo, during the first few months
of gestation, followed by a description of how God
subsequently intervenes in the process to breathe a rational
soul into the embryo: "once the brain's articulation / in the
embryo arrives at its perfection, / the First Mover turns to
it, rejoicing / in such handiwork of nature, and breathes /
into it a spirit, new and full of power, / which then draws
into its substance / all it there finds active and becomes a
single soul / that lives, and feels, and reflects upon itself"
(68-75). The rational soul, which is immortal, subsumes into
itself the lesser forms of soul (plant and animal) that would
otherwise be perishable.
Armed with this traditional way of thinking, Stephen makes
sharp distinctions between the material part of his being and
a spiritual dimension that exists eternally. His father and
mother ("the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman
with ashes on her breath") produced him by an act of sexual
intercourse: they "clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will." In this
sexual sense, Stephen was "made not begotten"—unlike
the divine Christ, who according to the Nicene Creed was "begotten, but
not made, of one essence consubstantial with the Father."
(Begetting, as used in the Creed, is a theological term
describing the mysterious, and only metaphorically sexual,
relationship between two persons, Father and Son, who are consubstantial
but distinct.)
After thinking of himself as "made not begotten," however,
Stephen turns to the spiritual account: "From before
the ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever.
A lex eterna stays about Him."
Gifford traces the "eternal law" to Summa Theologica
1.91.1: "The ruling idea of things which exists in God as the
effective sovereign of them all has the nature of law. Then
since God's mind does not conceive in time, but has an eternal
concept...it follows that this law should be called eternal.
Hence: 1. While not as yet existing in themselves things
nevertheless exist in God in so far as they are foreseen and
preordained by Him; so St. Paul speaks of God summoning things
that are not yet in existence as if they already were.
Thus the eternal concept of divine law bears the character of
a law that is eternal as being God's ordination for the
governance of things he foreknows." (Thomas does not take up
the question of whether God could will a soul away.)
Stephen's soul, then (combining the logic of this passage
with what Aquinas says about the creation of the rational soul
one question earlier in the Summa), did not come
into actual existence until the moment it was infused into his
gestating pre-rational body, but its existence was willed
outside of time and thus exists in God for all eternity. And,
since God's thinking "has the nature of law," it might be
said––though here Stephen is flirting with heresy, as one of
his teachers accuses him of doing in A Portrait of the
Artist––that God is not able ever to will him out of
existence. He is not only immortal, but guaranteed to remain
so. He revises this opinion in Eumaeus, just as he
corrects his heretical statement in A Portrait.
