CREATIONISM. - It may indicate the philosophical system that affirms that the universe had its origin through creation (v.); or, in opposition to "evolutionism," the doctrine that holds the various biological species to have been created immediately by God (v. EVOLUZIONISMO CULTURALE); or, finally, in the question of the origin of the human soul, the doctrine, opposed to "generationism" and to "traducianism," of the creation by God of individual souls at the moment of their informing the body. Here c. is understood in this last sense.
Tertullian (De anima, 19 and 27) thought that the soul was generated by the parents in the same way as the body, by means of the material seed. St. Augustine rejected this explanation ("quo perversius quid dici potest?": Epist., 190, n. 14: PL 33, 861), but he never dared to exclude a spiritual generationism, according to which in a mysterious and immaterial way the soul of the child would derive from the soul of the parents, just as one flame is kindled from another flame without dividing it. He did not conceal from himself the difficulties of this hypothesis (loc. cit., n. 15: PL 33, 862); indeed he would have preferred that the opinion of immediate creation, as it was defended by St. Jerome, had been freed from every objection: "optarem ut haec sententia vera esset" (Epist., 166, cap. 8, n. 26: PL 33, 731-32); but he did not see removed in c. the danger of making impossible the transmission of original sin, and he preferred to leave the question open. The uncertainty of St. Augustine persists in St. Gregory the Great (Epist. ad Secundinum, VII, 53) and in St. Isidore (De officiis ecclesiasticis, I, 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, in E. Klee (Kathol. Dogmatik, II, Mainz 1835, p. 234) and G. Ubaghs (Anthropologia, Louvain 1834); while G. Froschammer and G. Hermes held that the parents produce the soul of their children by creation. The position of A. Rosmini is well known, according to which the parents generate, along with the body, the sensitive soul, which then becomes intellective through the illumination communicated to it by God (Antropologia soprannaturale, III, cap. 8, § 3; cf. Denz-U, 1910-11).
Nevertheless c. must be considered by now a certain part of Catholic doctrine and taught by the ordinary magisterium. St. Thomas said it was already declared by the Church (In epist. ad Rom., cap. 14, lect. 3); although it is not easy to find before him a document that clearly excludes spiritual generationism. Among the Fathers many taught c.: John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Alexandria, Jerome, Athanasius, etc. And, setting aside Revelation, c. is also the only doctrine that satisfies the demands of reason (v. ANIMA). The difficulty that prevented the adherence of St. Augustine is sufficiently resolved by observing that original sin, a sin of nature, is transmitted with nature, which is not constituted by the soul alone, but also by the body, deriving from Adam through human generations. The soul created in the body undergoes the condition of that nature which it comes to complete.