Chapter XVII.
Let these things that have been said about the image of God, to which man was made, be sufficient. Now, let us return to the order at hand. Therefore, He was born from a virgin mother among men, without a human father, because He had God the Father in heaven, whom He had not come to deny, so that He could be born from another. Therefore, because of the sentence of Eve the virgin (Gen. III, 16), which she received after the sin, she, who was once immortal, became mortal after the transgression. He Himself came through a Virgin: and just as death was conquered through a virgin, so He came through the Virgin Mary, who would conquer death. Death entered through the wood, but by the wood the death of the Lord was excluded: a woman was formed from the side of a sleeping man (Gen. II, 22); similarly, the Church was formed from the side of Christ on the cross through the suffering and death-like sleep. The woman was formed from the side of the man; and therefore the Lord was pierced in the side, so that he may suffer for the woman, from whose side she was formed, who persuaded him. But let us see, because the place requires it, what should be responded to heretics who want the soul of Adam to be a part of God, or that it was made before his body was formed from the earth: which is completely foreign to the Catholic faith and is alien. For it is written that God formed man from the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life, and man became a living soul (Gen. II, 7; Wis. XV, 11). This does not teach us, however, that the example of Eve, the woman, who was formed from Adam's rib and later received her soul from God, is the same; for she was preserved in the creation and formation until the end of the world, as the prophet Isaiah testifies, saying: He who forms the spirit of man within him (Isa. 42:5); and David: who fashions the hearts of them all (Ps. 33:15). Therefore, according to such clear evidence, neither is the soul prior to the body, nor was it created earlier, nor is it formed from the substance of God, nor is it found in material and irrational creatures, as the heretics claim, much before this time I do not know where it had been, which they cannot prove.