Ensoulment
In religion and ancient philosophy, ensoulment is the moment at which a human or other being gains a soul. Some belief systems maintain that a soul is newly created within a developing child; others, especially in religions that believe in reincarnation, believe that the soul is pre-existing and enters the body at a particular stage of development.
In the time of Aristotle, it was widely believed that the human soul entered the forming body at 40 days or 90 days, and quickening was an indication of the presence of a soul. Other religious views are that ensoulment happens at the moment of conception; or when the child takes the first breath after being born; at the formation of the nervous system and brain; at the first detectable sign of brain activity; or when the fetus is able to survive independently of the uterus.
The concept is closely related to debates on the morality of abortion as well as the morality of contraception. Religious beliefs that human life has an innate sacredness to it have motivated many statements by spiritual leaders of various traditions over the years; however, the three matters are not exactly parallel, given that various figures have argued that some kind of life without a soul, in various contexts, still has a moral worth that must be considered.
Ancient Greeks
Among Greek scholars, Hippocrates believed that the embryo was the product of male semen and a female factor. But Aristotle held that only male semen gave rise to an embryo, while the female only provided a place for the embryo to develop,. Aristotle believed a fetus in early gestation has the soul of a vegetable, then of an animal, and only later became "animated" with a human soul by "ensoulment". For him, ensoulment occurred 40 days after conception for male fetuses and 90 days after conception for female fetuses, the stage at which, it was held, movement is first felt within the womb and pregnancy was certain. This is called epigenesis, which is "the theory that the germ is brought into existence, and not merely developed, in the process of reproduction", in contrast to the theory of preformation, which asserts the "supposed existence of all the parts of an organism in rudimentary form in the egg or the seed;" modern embryology, which finds both that an organism begins with an inherited genetic code and that embryonic stem cells can develop epigenetically into a variety of cell types, may be seen as supporting a balance between the views.Stoicism maintained that the living animal soul was received only at birth, through contact with the outer air, and was transformed into a rational soul only at fourteen years of age. Epicureanism saw the origin of the soul as simultaneous with conception. Pythagoreanism also considered ensoulment to occur at conception.
Christianity
Historical development
From the 12th century, when the West first came to know more of Aristotle than his works on logic, medieval declarations by Popes and theologians on ensoulment were based on the Aristotelian hypothesis. Aristotle's epigenetic view of successive life principles in a developing human embryo—first a vegetative and then a sensitive or animal soul, and finally an intellective or human soul, with the higher levels able to carry out the functions also of the lower levels—was the prevailing view among early Christians, including Tertullian, Augustine, and Jerome. Lars Østnor says this view was only "presaged" by Augustine, who belongs to a period later than that of early Christianity. According to David Albert Jones, this distinction appeared among Christian writers only in the late fourth and early fifth century, while the earlier writers made no distinction between formed and unformed, a distinction that Saint Basil of Caesarea explicitly rejected. While the Hebrew text of the Bible only required a fine for the loss of a fœtus, whatever its stage of development, the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew text, a pre-Christian translation that the early Christians used, introduced a distinction between a formed and an unformed fœtus and treated destruction of the former as murder. It has been commented that "the LXX could easily have been used to distinguish human from non-human fœtuses and homicidal from non-homicidal abortions, yet the early Christians, until the time of Augustine in the fifth century, did not do so."The view of early Christians on the moment of ensoulment is also said to have been not the Aristotelian, but the Pythagorean:
St. Maximus the Confessor in his repudiation of the Origenist pre-existence theory outlines in his Ambigua a deductive position that both refutes the pre-existence and delayed ensoulment theories of his day. The general premise for his arguments is priority of 'coming-to-being' to 'being-in-motion'. "All motion, in other words, unfolds in simple and composite patterns. If, then, coming into being must necessarily' be posited before beings can begin to move, it follows that motion is subsequent to the manifestation of being." Further, in arguing that body and soul are a substantial unity, he thereby reasons against delayed-ensoulment, "Therefore, insofar as soul and body are parts of man, it is not possible for either the soul or the body to exist before the other, or indeed to exist after the other in time, otherwise what is known as the principal of reciprocal relation would be destroyed." St. Maximus, in Ambiguum 42 elaborates the arguments against the pre-existence and delay-ensoulment in further detail as three separate digressions. In the first he argues against the pre-existence of the soul. Whatever is already a complete individual substance cannot enter into composition with another to form a new substantial whole without undergoing corruption. The pre-existent soul is posited to be a complete individual substance before union with the body. Therefore, according to the saint, the pre-existent soul cannot be united with the body to form a new human substance without undergoing corruption, which is absurd. Further does he argue that a natural substantial whole must originate from the simultaneous generation of its essential parts as he raised prior in Ambiguum 7, upon this, that man in particular is a natural substantial whole composed of soul and body. Ultimately, leading St. Maximus to conclude that man must originate from the simultaneous generation of both soul and body. In the second digression St. Maximus argues for the position that the human soul cannot develop from a pre-existing kind of soul after ensoulment. First he argues for ensoulment. The argument runs in the beginning with the premise that a thing is completely devoid of soul is dead and incapable of vital activity. But, he contends, the embryo exhibits vital activity. Therefore, the embryo is not devoid of soul. And thus consequently he goes on to make the case that unless the embryo has a rational soul from the beginning, man would not beget man. The third and last digression specifically repudiates delayed ensoulment. His arguments here are primarily theological, having in the prior digression furnished the natural argumentation that serves as its basis. First he presents the point that the kind of soul which bears the image of God must be rational and intellectual from its beginning. But man is created in the image of God and is so from the moment of conception. Therefore, St. Maximus concludes that man must have a rational and intellectual soul from the moment of conception. Further, he argues from the nature of medicine of his time:
This is proven by the method used to heal those parts of the body that have been wounded. For should physicians, in treating such wounds, find any areas that have suffered necrosis, they remove them by means of drugs that consume dead tissue, after which they apply what is necessary for the regeneration and restoration of the wounded area, since the living body possesses a nature capable o f regenerating itself, along with the capacity to restore and stabilize its proper state, whereas a dead body is incapable of doing any such thing, for once it is dead it completely loses its vital power, and for this reason is devoid of activity. How then can the body, which by nature easily dissipates and dissolves, stand on its own if it lacks the foundation, as it were, of a logically prior underlying life-giving power, which will naturally unite and hold its dissipative nature together, and from which it acquires its being and form, thanks to that power that has wisely fashioned all things by its art? For by virtue of whatever thing truly remains with the body after birth, one could rightly say that in that same thing there unquestionably resides the beginning of the body’s existence. And with respect to any kind of body that by nature is dissolved upon its separation from this element, it is obvious that this very same thing coexisted with that body when it first came into being.In the Medieval period, although also keeping open the possibility of delayed-ensoulment, this opinion of St. Maximus the Confessor was followed by St. Bonaventure in the second book of the Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard upon arguments from both reason and from Scripture prooftexts:
It seems by far more reasonable to posit, that the soul was produced immediately with the body, both because the soul is united to the body as natural perfection, to which it naturally desires to be joined, to such an extent, that it is a punishment for it to be without it and to be sequestered from it; and also, because it is united as a mover to a movable, such that without the latter it cannot merit nor demerit; and for that reason it ought not have been produced before the body, lest it be punished before fault, and lest it merit and/or demerit apart from the body. — Moreover not only does reason concord with this position, nay also the authority of Scripture supports, which says, that after the production and formation of man God breathed into him the breath of life.Through the Latin translations of Averroes's work, beginning in the 12th century, the legacy of Aristotle was recovered in the West. Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas adapted largely to his views and because they believed that the early embryo did not have a human soul, they did not necessarily see early abortion as murder, although they condemned it nonetheless. Aquinas, in his main work, the Summa Theologica, states "...that the intellectual soul is created by God at the end of human generation". Although Jesus may have been exceptional, Aquinas did believe that the embryo first possessed a vegetative soul, later acquired sensitive soul, and after 40 days of development, God gave humans a rational soul.
In 1588, Pope Sixtus V issued the Bull Effraenatam, which subjected those that carried out abortions at any stage of gestation with automatic excommunication and the punishment by civil authorities applied to murderers. Three years later after finding that the results had not been as positive as was hoped, his successor Pope Gregory XIV limited the excommunication to abortion of a formed fœtus. In 1679, Pope Innocent XI publicly condemned sixty-five propositions taken chiefly from the writings of Escobar, Hereau and other casuists as propositiones laxorum moralistarum as "at least scandalous and in practice dangerous". He forbade anyone to teach them under penalty of excommunication. The condemned propositions included:
In the 1869 Bull Apostolicae Sedis, Pius IX rescinded Gregory XIV's not-yet-animated fetus exception and re-enacted the penalty of excommunication for abortions at any stage of pregnancy, which even before that were never seen as merely venial sin. Since then, canon law makes no distinction as regards excommunication between stages of pregnancy at which abortion is performed. In spite of the difference in ecclesiastical penalties imposed during the period when the theory of delayed ensoulment was accepted as scientific truth, abortion at any stage is currently claimed to have always been condemned by the Church and continues to be so. However, in its official declarations, the Catholic Church avoids taking a philosophical position on the question of the moment when a human person begins to be:
Citing the possibly first-century Didache and the Letter of Barnabas of about the same period, the Epistle to Diognetus and Tertullian, the Catholic Church declares that "since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law." Even when the prevailing scientific theory considered that early abortion was the killing of what was not yet a human being, the condemnation of abortion at any stage was sometimes expressed in the form of making it equivalent to homicide. Accordingly, the 1907 article on abortion in the Catholic Encyclopedia stated:
The early Christians are the first on record as having pronounced abortion to be the murder of human beings, for their public apologists, Athenagoras, Tertullian, and Minutius Felix, to refute the slander that a child was slain, and its flesh eaten, by the guests at the Agapæ, appealed to their laws as forbidding all manner of murder, even that of children in the womb. The Fathers of the Church unanimously maintained the same doctrine. In the fourth century the Council of Eliberis decreed that Holy Communion should be refused all the rest of her life, even on her deathbed, to an adulteress who had procured the abortion of her child. The Sixth Ecumenical Council determined for the whole Church that anyone who procured abortion should bear all the punishments inflicted on murderers. In all these teachings and enactments no distinction is made between the earlier and the later stages of gestation. For, though the opinion of Aristotle, or similar speculations, regarding the time when the rational soul is infused into the embryo, were practically accepted for many centuries still it was always held by the Church that he who destroyed what was to be a man was guilty of destroying a human life.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that Human life "must be treated from conception as a person." In 2008, this teaching was confirmed in the authoritative Instruction Dignitas Personae, stating "The dignity of a person must be recognized in every human being from conception to natural death." It stated that "Although the presence of the spiritual soul cannot be observed experimentally, the conclusions of science regarding the human embryo give "a valuable indication for discerning by the use of reason a personal presence at the moment of the first appearance of a human life: how could a human individual not be a human person?”