TRADUCIA NISMO

TRADUCIANISM. — Theory according to which the souls of men (with the exception of those of Adam and Eve) are transmitted to children by their parents. This theory (hereafter t.) is opposed to the doctrine according to which individual souls are immediately created by God (creationism).

I. HISTORY

The t. has had notable development in Western Christendom, of which the most significant representatives were Tertullian (De anima, 27) and St. Augustine (De libero arbitrio, III, 20-21; De Genesi ad litteram, X, 11-26; Ep., 166 and 190; De Anima; Retractationes, I, 1, 3; II, 45, 56), the former advocating a materialist t., and the latter being uncertain in the face of a spiritualist t. According to the materialist t., the human soul would derive from a material seed; according to the spiritualist t. (which today is preferably called “generationism”), on the other hand, the soul of the child would derive from the soul of the parent. The manner of explaining this derivation is undoubtedly difficult: St. Augustine expressed himself with an image that later became classic: “As one torch lights another without the communicating flame losing any of its light, so the soul is transmitted from father to son” (Ep., 190, 15). This is a mere image, and he felt that it did not resolve the enigmas of this generation; indeed, he asks: “Does the immaterial germ of the soul perhaps pass from the father to the mother through some secret and invisible channel in the act of conception? Or, what is more difficult to admit, is this principle latent in the material germ of the body? And what happens to the spiritual seed when, after a conjugal union, generation does not follow?” (Ep., 190, 15). These are the fundamental difficulties of the spiritualist t., and they have emerged in all periods of history: J. FROHSCHAMMER, JACOB (v.) in order to overcome them eliminated in his Defence of Generationism (1845) the idea of any material or spiritual seed, and attributed a creative efficacy to the action of the parents with regard to the soul of the child. This is the most up-to-date expression of the t.; such, however, cannot be said of the opinion of Rosmini, for whom the child derives from the parent only its sensitive soul, which becomes intellectual upon arriving at knowledge of the ideal being and unites with it as its intelligible form.

II. TEACHING OF THE CHURCH

The documents of the Church’s magisterium on the t. are not numerous, and none is definitive. The first interventions date to the struggle against the Manichaeans and the Priscillianists; emanatism and the idea of a pre-existence of souls in a state from which they have fallen into this world because of their sin were condemned; instead, the principle is affirmed that the soul is created by God (cf. Symbol of Toledo of 447; Denz.-U., 20, 31; Second Council of Braga of 561; Denz.-U., 235-236). In the same sense and more clearly is the fifteenth letter of St. Leo to Turibius in 447: “Nec ab alio incorporantur nisi ab opifice Deo qui et ipsarum est creator et corporum” (PL 54, 685). The most explicit document on the t. is a letter of Anastasius II (of 498) to the bishops of Gaul, in which he condemns those who hold that just as parents generate the body by a material seed, so they also give their children a soul; this opinion is declared a new heresy (Denz.-U., 170). Among later documents, mention should be made of the condemnation of 1341 against the opinion according to which the human soul of the child proceeds from that of the father (ibid., 533) and the decree of the Fifth Lateran Council (ibid., 738). In the 19th century the magisterium intervened with the condemnation (1857) of the book of Frohschammer and of the twentieth Rosminian proposition; and recently with the encyclical Humani generis, in which, treating of evolutionism, the Pope incidentally makes this declaration: “The Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God” (AAS, 44 [1950], p. 575).

None of these documents is definitive, but they are sufficient to conclude that a Catholic cannot hold any kind of t.: the materialist t. because it is heretical (it in fact denies the spirituality of the soul), the spiritualist t. (whether it makes the soul of the child derive from a spiritual seed or attributes a creative activity to the action of the parents) because it is erroneous. The so-called t. of Rosmini, on the other hand, is only a condemned opinion (Denz.-U., 1910).

III. REFUTATION OF THE T

The spiritualist t. (we limit ourselves to this, since the materialist t. is eliminated by the demonstration of the spirituality of the soul) is not sustainable either by philosophical arguments or by arguments drawn from Revelation; indeed, in both fields there are proofs that demonstrate its inconsistency. The principal philosophical argument of the t. is this: if parents do not transmit the soul to their children, they cannot say that they have generated them, since they produce not a being similar to themselves but only a body; consequently, the activity of man in generation should be considered inferior to that of the soul, which generates its offspring both as to body and as to sensitive soul. This reasoning, however, is based on an erroneous philosophical conception of man, who is not an accidental composite of body and soul but a substantial composite. Only in the first hypothesis can parents, not producing the soul of the child, say that they have generated him; but not in the second hypothesis; indeed, for parents to be able to say that they are the cause of the birth of a human being it is sufficient that they generate one of its substantial elements (the body), which “demands” that God intervene to create the other. Another argument to which the traducianists of the past century readily resorted is that of heredity: if it is not admitted that the souls of children derive from those of their parents, it would not be possible to explain the many similarities that are not only physical and somatic but also psychic and spiritual. The answer is easy: the intimate bond, which experience attests and which Thomist philosophy illustrates, between body and spirit already helps to understand how one who derives his body from another also resembles him spiritually; it must not then be forgotten that parents and children belong to the same family and historical environment, which has great importance in the formation of a person’s mentality and character, i.e., in the formation of his spiritual physiognomy. The refutation of the t. is completed by arguments that are directly opposed to II. A materialist t. must be excluded because in this hypothesis either the spirituality of the soul is denied or it must be said that a cause (material seed) can produce an effect superior to itself (spiritual soul). The generationist t. must also be excluded because it is difficult to imagine what the action of a soul generating another soul could be (the difficulty raised by St. Augustine): in any case, if it is a matter of generation, it should be said that a part of the souls of the parents passes to the child; now this cannot occur because the soul of the parents is indivisible, being simple (cf. D. Mercier, Psychologie, II, Louvain 1908, p. 332). The hypothesis of Frohschammer must be excluded because a creature cannot create; as for the opinion of Rosmini, it is tied to his entire system and thus shares its weaknesses.

From the theological point of view the refutation is even easier. The traducianist theory cannot in fact claim in its own favour any argument from Sacred Scripture: the few passages cited (e.g., Gen. 1:28; 5:3, 46, 26) prove nothing. Nor can it invoke any real contradiction or even any difficulty arising from other doctrines of the faith: the transmission of original sin can be well explained even within creationism (q.v.); to hold that God is the creator of souls does not mean making Him responsible for any possible illegitimacy of a conjugal act. Nor can the traducianist theory appeal to the tradition of the Fathers, since the opinion of Tertullian and other Western writers who have followed him more or less on this point (St. Jerome, with evident exaggeration, said that the majority of Latins were followers of the traducianist theory: Ep., 125, 2), and the uncertainties of St. Augustine are not sufficient to draw a definitive argument. The line of development of tradition is not, as can be shown even by the few documents cited, in a traducianist direction, but in a creationist one.