Creation from nothing

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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.