CREATIONISM. — This term may refer to the philosophical system that affirms the universe had its origin through creation (v.); or, in opposition to "evolutionism," the doctrine that holds the various biological species were immediately created by God (v. EVOLUZIONISMO CULTURALE); or, finally, in the question of the origin of the human soul, the doctrine—opposed to "generationism" and "traducianism"—that God creates each individual soul at the moment it is infused into the body. Here, the term is understood in this last sense.
Tertullian (De anima, 19 and 27) believed that the soul was generated by parents in the same way as the body, through material seed. St. Augustine rejected this explanation ("what more perverse could be said?"; Epist., 190, no. 14: PL 33, 861), but never dared to exclude a spiritual generationism, according to which the child’s soul mysteriously and immaterially derives from the souls of the parents, as one flame is lit from another without dividing II. He did not, however, conceal the difficulties of this hypothesis (loc. cit., no. 15: PL 33, 862); indeed, he would have preferred that the opinion of immediate creation, as defended by St. Jerome, were free from all objections: *"optarem ut haec sententia vera esset"* (Epist., 166, cap. 8, no. 26: PL 33, 731-732). Yet he did not see how this would remove the danger of making the transmission of original sin impossible, and thus preferred to leave the question open. St. Augustine’s uncertainty persists in St. Gregory the Great (Epist. ad Secundinum, VII, 53) and in St. Isidore (De officiis ecclesiasticis, 1, 2, cap. 23); it reappears in the 18th century with Cardinal E. Noris (Vindiciae Augustinianae, Brussels 1675, cap. 4, 3, col. 691), and in the 19th century with E. Klee (Kathol. Dogmatik, II, Mainz 1835, p. 234) and G. Ubaghs (Anthropologia, Louvain 1834). Meanwhile, G. Froschammer and G. Hermes held that parents produce the souls of their children through creation. The position of A. Rosmini is well known: according to him, parents generate, along with the body, the sensitive soul, which then becomes intellectual through the illumination communicated by God (Antropologia sopranaturale, III, cap. 8, § 3; cf. Denz-U, 1910-11).
Nevertheless, creationism must now be considered a certain part of Catholic doctrine and taught by the ordinary magisterium. St. Thomas already declared it to have been taught by the Church (In epist. ad Rom., cap. 14, lect. 3), though it is not easy to find a pre-scholastic document that clearly excludes spiritual generationism. Among the Fathers, many taught creationism: John Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzen, Cyril of Alexandria, Jerome, Lactantius, and others. And, apart from Revelation, creationism is also the only doctrine that satisfies the demands of reason (v. ANIMA). The difficulty that prevented St. Augustine’s adherence is sufficiently resolved by observing that original sin, as a sin of nature, is transmitted with nature itself—which is not constituted by the soul alone but also by the body, derived from Adam through human generations. The soul, created in the body, is subject to the condition of that nature which it completes.
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