Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/41

Genesis that God breathed into man the breath of life and so man became a living soul. In fact St. Paul had already distinguished between the two elements, the animal soul and the immortal spirit, in accordance with the psychology which had been developed in his time. But Christian theology supposed that in Christ was also present the eternal Logos which had been the creative Spirit and of which the spirit or rational soul was itself an emanation. What, therefore, would be the relation between the Logos and its own emanation when they came together in the same person? If the Alexandrian philosophy and the Christian religion were both true the problem was capable of reasonable solution: if its only answer was a manifest absurdity then either the psychology or Christianity was in error, and then, as always, it was assumed that contemporary science was sure and religion had to be tested by its standard. To this particular problem two solutions were proposed. The one, especially maintained at Alexandria, was that the Logos and the rational soul or spirit, being in the relation of source and emanation, necessarily fused together when simultaneously present in the same body, the point being of course that the Logos was the agent of creation, the True God not acting therein as it was an activity in time, but through the intermediary of the Logos, whilst the animal soul dispersed through creation was ultimately derived from the Logos, but the spirit was directly proceeding from it, all of which represents the