TRADUCIANISM. - Theory according to which the souls of men (except that of Adam and Eve) are transmitted to children by their parents. This theory (t.) is opposed to the doctrine according to which individual souls are immediately created by God (creationism).
I. HISTORY
Traducianism had a notable development in the Western Church, whose 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 a supporter of a materialist traducianism, and the latter uncertain in the face of a spiritualist traducianism. According to materialist traducianism the human soul would derive from a material seed; according to spiritualist traducianism, on the other hand (a traducianism that today is preferably called "generationism"), 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 anything of its light, so the soul is transmitted from father to son" (Ep., 190, 15). It is a simple 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 harder to admit, is such a principle latent in the material germ of the body? And what becomes of the spiritual seed when, after a conjugal union, generation does not follow?" (Ep., 190, 15). These are the fundamental difficulties of spiritualist traducianism, and they emerged in all periods of history; J. Frohschammer (v.), in order to overcome them, eliminated in his Difesa del generazionismo (1845) the idea of any material and 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 traducianism; such, indeed, cannot be said of the opinion of Rosmini, for whom the child derives from the parent only its sensitive soul, which becomes intellective on arriving at the knowledge of ideal being and uniting itself to it as to its intelligible form.
II. MAGISTERIUM OF THE CHURCH
The documents of the magisterium on traducianism are not many and none is definitive. The first interventions go back to the struggle against the Manichaeans and the Priscillianists; what was condemned was emanatism and the idea of a pre-existence of souls in a state from which they have fallen into this world because of a sin of their own; on the other hand, the principle is affirmed that the soul is created by God (cf. the Creed of Toledo of 447; Denz-U, 20, 31; the 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 Turribius 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 traducianism is a letter of Anastasius II (of 498) to the bishops of Gaul, in which he condemns those who hold that parents, just as they generate the body by material seed, so also give their children the soul; this opinion is declared nova haeresis (Denz-U, 170). Among the 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 Frohschammer's book and of the twentieth Rosminian proposition; and recently with the encyclical Humani generis, where, treating of evolutionism, the Pope makes incidentally this declaration: «The Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are created immediately by God» (AAS, 44 [1950], p. 575).
None of these documents is definitive, yet they are sufficient to conclude that a Catholic cannot uphold any kind of traducianism: the materialist kind because it is heretical (it denies, in fact, the spirituality of the soul), the spiritualist kind (whether it makes the soul of the child derive from a spiritual seed, or attributes to the action of the parents a creative activity) because it is erroneous. The so-called traducianism of Rosmini, on the other hand, is only a condemned opinion (Denz-U, 1910).
III. CONFUTATION OF TRADUCIANISM
The spiritualist t. (we limit ourselves to this one, since the materialist one is eliminated by the demonstration of the spirituality of the soul) is not tenable either with philosophical arguments or with arguments drawn from Revelation; indeed, in both fields there are proofs that demonstrate its inconsistency. The major philosophical argument of the t. is this: if parents do not transmit the soul to their children, they cannot say they have generated them, since they produce not a being similar to themselves, but only a body: consequently the activity of man in generation would have to be considered inferior to that of the animal, which generates its offspring as regards the body and the sensitive soul. Such reasoning, however, is founded on an erroneous philosophical conception of man, who is not an accidental compound of body and soul, but a substantial compound. Only under the first hypothesis can parents, not producing the soul of the child, not say they have generated it; but not under the second hypothesis; in fact, for parents to be able to call themselves the cause of the birth of a human being, it is sufficient that they generate one of its substantial elements (the body), which "requires" that God intervene to create the other. Another argument to which the traducianists of the past century easily resorted is that of heredity: if one does not admit that the soul of children derives from that of the parents, one could not explain the mutual resemblances that are not only physical and somatic, but also psychic and spiritual. The answer is easy: the intimate bond, which experience ascertains and which Thomist philosophy illustrates, between body and spirit already helps one to understand how one who derives his body from another also resembles him spiritually; nor should one forget that parents and children belong to the same family and historical environment, which has great importance in the formation of an individual's mentality and character, that is, in the formation of his spiritual physiognomy. The confutation of the t. is completed by arguments that are directly contrary to it. A materialist t. must be excluded because under this hypothesis either the spirituality of the soul is denied, or one must say that a cause (material seed) can produce an effect superior to itself (spiritual soul). It is also necessary to exclude a generationalist t. because it is difficult to imagine what the action of a soul that would generate another soul could be (the difficulty of St. Augustine): in any case, since it is a matter of generation, one would have to say that a part of the parents' soul passes to the child; now this cannot occur because the parents' soul is indivisible, being simple (cf. D. Mercier, Psychologie, II, Louvain 1908, p. 332). Frohschammer's hypothesis is to be excluded, because a creature cannot create; as for Rosmini's opinion, it is bound to his entire system and therefore shares its weaknesses.
From the theological point of view the confutation is even easier. The t. cannot in fact claim in its own favor 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 true contradiction or even any difficulty deriving from other doctrines of faith: the transmission of original sin can be well explained even in creationism (v.); to hold God the creator of souls does not mean making him responsible for the possible illicit nature of a conjugal act. Nor can the t. appeal to the tradition of the Fathers, since the opinion of Tertullian and of other Western writers who more or less followed him on this point (St. Jerome, with evident exaggeration, said that the majority of the Latins were followers of the t.: Ep., 125, 2), and the uncertainties of St. Augustine are not sufficient to draw a definitive argument. The line of development of tradition is in fact not, as even the few documents cited can demonstrate, in a traducianist sense, but in a creationist sense.