Ensoulment at conception

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smichhertz said:
Please excuse my ignorance, but is there a difference between when ensoulment occurs and when life occurs? Would it be technically possible to have a human life at any point that does not have a soul?

I have heard a priest say that the Church has not technically defined when ensoulment occurs, only when life occurs. IF that is correct (and again, I have no idea) then the above posts would only be demonstrating how the Church shows that LIFE begins at conception, but not ENSOULMENT.

Can someone point to something that specifically deals with ensoulment? Thank you!
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From the standpoint of Catholic philosophy, every living being has a soul. Non-human living beings have a material soul; human beings have a spiritual soul. There is no such thing as a soul-less human entity.

I prefer not to use the term “when life begins” because it is vague and ambiguous. Let’s ask rather when a new and distinct individual of the human species has its beginning. That is obviously at conception: At that point the newly formed individual is genetically distinct from its mother and father; and it is human. That’s the biological fact. It doesn’t exist as a non-human living entity for some indefinite period of time. It is human from conception. If it is living, it must have a soul. If it is human, the soul must be spiritual.
 
Texas_Roofer said:
It seems there is no clear teaching of this issue in detail. Let’s look at the steps:

Step 1: Male life (sperm) is contacted to female life (egg)
Step 2: Sperm enters egg
*Step 3: Sperm and egg lose original identity forming a mixed entity ( most Catholics recognize as person) *
*Step 4: entity replicates, the first growth of the new being *
Step 5: entity moves
*Step 6: entity implants ( Legally recognized as pregnancy) *
*Step x: ( 40, 60, or 80 days) St. Thomas Aquinas’s recognizes ensoulment *
Step x (26 weeks): Legally recognized as person

So life transfers however souls have to be infused during that process. My understanding is Catholics are to protect all stages as equal in life while lacking knowledge of when infusion occurs.
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Step 3 should read:
“Sperm and egg lose original identity forming a new human being, a new life.”

The soul is the animating principle of life.
Step three is the beginning of the life of a separate human being.
Therefore the human soul is present.
 
Hi all,

Thank you for the replies to my post, I think I have a better grasp on it now.

What I still don’t get it is this: How can the Church teach that life begins at conception but ensoulment doesn’t necessarily happen at conception? Wouldn’t that just naturally follow since man is both body and soul and you can’t have a human being without a soul?

Can there be a position that states ensoulment occurs at some point after conception that still is in line with the Church?
 
smichhertz said:
Hi all,

Thank you for the replies to my post, I think I have a better grasp on it now.

What I still don’t get it is this: How can the Church teach that life begins at conception but ensoulment doesn’t necessarily happen at conception? Wouldn’t that just naturally follow since man is both body and soul and you can’t have a human being without a soul?

Can there be a position that states ensoulment occurs at some point after conception that still is in line with the Church?
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The quote from Donum Vitae in post #4 shows that the Church does indeed accept that a new human life begins at conception. But “ensoulment” as a philosophical idea has never been the subject of defined Church doctrine.

The only people nowadays that I hear arguing about when ensoulment occurs seem to be those favoring the legitimacy of early abortion, which the Church obviously rejects.

Ensoulment is not something that can be seen. But biologically, we know when a new individual of the human species begins, and that individual must have a soul.
 
JimG said:
From the standpoint of Catholic philosophy, every living being has a soul. Non-human living beings have a material soul; human beings have a spiritual soul. There is no such thing as a soul-less human entity.

I prefer not to use the term “when life begins” because it is vague and ambiguous. Let’s ask rather when a new and distinct individual of the human species has its beginning. That is obviously at conception: At that point the newly formed individual is genetically distinct from its mother and father; and it is human. That’s the biological fact. It doesn’t exist as a non-human living entity for some indefinite period of time. It is human from conception. If it is living, it must have a soul. If it is human, the soul must be spiritual.
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Althought I agree with other posters that the Church has never said when ensoulment occurrs, I find this logic very convincing and pretty much irrefutable. It would, IMO, be the case of development of doctrine for the church to adopt this logic more formally. I think in the past, the church did not have the scientific knowledge of what conception was to have a definitive answer. Now that we know, from science, that it is a new life, it does seem like it must have a soul at that time.
 
JimG said:
The quote from Donum Vitae in post #4 shows that the Church does indeed accept that a new human life begins at conception. But “ensoulment” as a philosophical idea has never been the subject of defined Church doctrine.

The only people nowadays that I hear arguing about when ensoulment occurs seem to be those favoring the legitimacy of early abortion, which the Church obviously rejects.

Ensoulment is not something that can be seen. But biologically, we know when a new individual of the human species begins, and that individual must have a soul.
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Thanks! This makes a lot of sense.
 
Nita said:
Could you please give me the reference for the Roman Catechism where it teaches ensoulment occurs some time after fertilization? I am unable to find anything about it in my Roman Catechism.
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The reference he mentioned is from Article III on the Creed of the Catechism of the Council of Trent from the section entitled “By the Holy Ghost”. In particular it reads thus:

*But what **surpasses the order of nature and human comprehension is…the most sacred body of Christ was immediately formed, and to it was united a rational soul enjoying the use of reason. That this was the astonishing and admirable work of the Holy Ghost cannot be doubted; for *according to the order of nature the rational soul is united to the body only after a certain lapse of time. [emphases added]
FightingFat said:
I don’t think the Catechism teaches that Nita.
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Please consider the above quote from the Catechism of the Council of Trent.

Not discounting the authority of the current Catechism of the Catholic Church, as any universally promulgated Catechism is protected by the Ordinary Magisterium of the Church, it would seem to follow that any previously promulgated Catechism is doctrinally protected.

By the way, the reference for the text can be found online at:

catholicapologetics.info/thechurch/catechism/ApostlesCreed03.shtml
 
Geremia said:
Fr. Benedict Ashley, author of the excellent Health Care Ethics: A Catholic Theological Analysis, wrote an excellent article refuting, based on St. Thomas Aquinas himself et al., the “delayed hominization” hypothesis argument and supporting that ensoulment occurs at conception: View attachment 9702
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Without disparaging the great qualities of Fr. Benedict Ashley, how would one reconcile his assertions with the magisterial assertion of the Catechism of the Council of Trent quoted immediately before your post?

Between the two, it would seem proper to give deference to the Ordinary Magisterium of the Catholic Church as expressed in her universal teachings through one of her official catechisms.
 
Paleo_Thomist said:
The reference he mentioned is from Article III on the Creed of the Catechism of the Council of Trent from the section entitled “By the Holy Ghost”. In particular it reads thus:

*But what surpasses the order of nature and human comprehension is…the most sacred body of Christ was immediately formed, and to it was united a rational soul enjoying the use of reason. That this was the astonishing and admirable work of the Holy Ghost cannot be doubted; for *according to the order of nature the rational soul is united to the body only after a certain lapse of time. [emphases added]

Please consider the above quote from the Catechism of the Council of Trent.

Not discounting the authority of the current Catechism of the Catholic Church, as any universally promulgated Catechism is protected by the Ordinary Magisterium of the Church, it would seem to follow that any previously promulgated Catechism is doctrinally protected.

By the way, the reference for the text can be found online at:

catholicapologetics.info/thechurch/catechism/ApostlesCreed03.shtml
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How long is a “certain lapse of time”? Is it months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, miliseconds? Was it defined? It seems any statement about duration of this lapse is speculation and for all practical purposes is identical to what we now know today as conception. Did those during the Council of Trent have the understanding that we now have thought science of embrology.
 
davidv said:
How long is a “certain lapse of time”? Is it months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, miliseconds? Was it defined? It seems any statement about duration of this lapse is speculation and for all practical purposes is identical to what we now know today as conception. Did those during the Council of Trent have the understanding that we now have thought science of embrology.
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Speculation or not…it’s magisterial. The Church didn’t (and to this day effectively says that it*** won’t***) speculate as to the “how much” that lapse of time constitutes, just that there is one. It should also be noted that Trent used this assertion as a premise for the miraculous nature of Christ’s rational, human soul being infused immediately upon conception.

Furthermore, if magisterial decrees were wholly dependent on the knowledge of men, then either: 1) there would be no magisterial decrees, or 2) there would be erroneous magisterial decrees due to the tendency of man to make mistakes. The first point is erroneous just from the vantage point of history, the second is impious based on the guidance and protection of the teaching authority of the Church by the Holy Spirit promised by our Lord. Therefore, regardless of man’s knowledge or lack thereof, magisterial pronouncements must be considered not human but divine (not as in new revelation, but just as the protection of the Deposit of Faith) as they are supposed to be guided and protected by the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity for the conveyance of Truth and the salvation of men.

However, in a more direct answer to your final question, medieval and renaissance man had a decent understanding of the gestation process from experiments on animals of varying species.
 
Paleo_Thomist said:
Without disparaging the great qualities of Fr. Benedict Ashley, how would one reconcile his assertions with the magisterial assertion of the Catechism of the Council of Trent quoted immediately before your post?
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What was quoted above made it seem that “what surpasses the order of nature and human comprehension is” only that “the most sacred body of Christ was immediately formed,” not “that as soon as the Blessed Virgin assented to the announcement of the Angel” “the most sacred body of Christ was immediately formed.”

Here is the partial, possibly misleading quote from above with my addition from the Catechism of some of what was in the ellipsis:
*But what surpasses the order of nature and human comprehension is *“that as soon as the Blessed Virgin assented to the announcement of the Angel” (what was missing in the quote above)] *the most sacred body of Christ was immediately formed, and to it was united a rational soul enjoying the use of reason. That this was the astonishing and admirable work of the Holy Ghost cannot be doubted; for *according to the order of nature the rational soul is united to the body only after a certain lapse of time.
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The soul certainly does not exist before the body. (One often hears that the souls of babies are in heaven waiting to come to earth when they are conceived, but this is completely false. God creates us out of nothing; we don’t proceed out of Him.) This “lapse of time” must then refer to a time beginning before fertilization, perhaps from the time of sexual intercourse in cases besides the Incarnation. The Incarnation didn’t happen by fertilization since there was no sperm; it “surpasses the order of nature,” as the Catechism says.

16th century embryology was not what it has been recently since the invention of the microscope. They didn’t know exactly when after sexual intercourse fertilization may occur. They definitely knew it was before 40 days, though, since this is when the woman can feel the vital signs of her unborn baby; her baby moves, kicks, etc. In fact, people didn’t even know about the sperm and definitely not the egg. They just knew about the semen and the menstrual blood. Fr. Ashley discusses all this is more detail in his article.
 
There is also a nice summary on the following page:

religioustolerance.org/abo_hist_c.htm

The time at which the soul enters the fetus is often called the “quickening”; a search for this term should turn up much information.

Generally, the quickening was long thought to occur at the time the woman first felt movement in her womb. If talking about specific time periods, it ranged from 40 - 80 days after conception.
 
Theology of the Body teaches that the soul and the body are made at the same time because they are made to be together. The body without a soul is lifeless, a soul without the body is meaningless.
 
To this perpetual evidence - perfectly independent of the discussions on the moment of animation[19] - modern genetic science brings valuable confirmation. It has demonstrated that, from the first instant, there is established the program of what this living being will be: a man, this individual man with his characteristic aspects already well determined. Right from fertilization is begun the adventure of a human life, and each of its capacities requires time- a rather lengthy time- to find its place and to be in a position to act. The least that can be said is that present science, in its most evolved state, does not give any substantial support to those who defend abortion. Moreover, it is not up to biological sciences to make a definitive judgment on questions which are properly philosophical and moral such as the moment when a human person is constituted or the legitimacy of abortion. From a moral point of view this is certain: even if a doubt existed concerning whether the fruit of conception is already a human person, it is objectively a grave sin to dare to risk murder. "The one who will be a man is already one. De abortu procurato, n. 13
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I think this highlights the Churches stance perfectly. We cannot be sure that the embryo is animated at the point of conception but we equally cannot know at what point in the pre-natal development of human life animation takes place. Therefore, given the gravity of murder and the Churches want to be sure it does not condone it, we must defend life from conception or else we ‘dare to risk murder’. Life is gift and God loathes the destruction of any life. In Genesis chapter four God puts a mark on Cain precisely to preserve him from death even after he has murdered his brother. All life is sacred to God and even a homicide cannot justify another homicide. If God will not destroy human life even in its disobedience but desires for all men to be saved then the Church must heed the call to preach the Gospel of life - both the life of world to come and life in this present world.
 
ConstantineTG said:
Theology of the Body teaches that the soul and the body are made at the same time because they are made to be together. The body without a soul is lifeless, a soul without the body is meaningless.
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Yes, this is why the phrase “infusion of the soul into the body” can be misleading. It also makes it sound like the soul is just something trapped inside the body, which it is not. The soul is the form of the body.
 
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