In religion and ancient philosophy, ensoulment (from the verb ensoul meaning to endow or imbue with a soul—earliest ascertainable word use: 1605) is the moment at which a human or other being gains a soul. Some belief systems maintain that a soul is newly created within a developing child; others, especially in religions that believe in reincarnation, believe that the soul is pre-existing and enters the body at a particular stage of development.
In the time of Aristotle, it was widely believed that the human soul entered the forming body at 40 days (male embryos) or 90 days (female embryos), and quickening was an indication of the presence of a soul. Other religious views are that ensoulment happens at the moment of conception; or when the child takes the first breath after being born;Daniel Schiff, Abortion in Judaism (Cambridge University Press 2002 ), p. 42, footnote 38 at the formation of the nervous system and brain; at the first detectable sign of brain activity; or when the fetus is able to survive independently of the uterus (viability).
The concept is closely related to debates on the morality of abortion as well as the morality of contraception. Religious beliefs that human life has an innate sacredness to it have motivated many statements by spiritual leaders of various traditions over the years; however, the three matters are not exactly parallel, given that various figures have argued that some kind of life without a soul, in various contexts, still has a moral worth that must be considered.
Ancient Greeks
Among Greek scholars, Hippocrates (c.460 – c.370 BC) believed that the embryo was the product of male semen and a female factor. But Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) held that only male semen gave rise to an embryo, while the female only provided a place for the embryo to develop, (a concept he acquired from the preformationist Pythagoras). Aristotle believed a fetus in early gestation has the soul of a vegetable, then of an animal, and only later became "animated" with a human soul by "ensoulment". For him, ensoulment occurred 40 days after conception for male fetuses and 90 days after conception for female fetuses,A companion to bioethics By Helga Kuhse, Peter Singer the stage at which, it was held, movement is first felt within the womb and pregnancy was certain.Aristotle, History of Animals, book VII, part IIINorman M. Ford, When Did I Begin? Conception of the Human Individual in History, Philosophy and Science (Cambridge & New York, Cambridge University Press ), p. 28 This is called epigenesis, which is "the theory that the germ is brought into existence (by successive accretions), and not merely developed, in the process of reproduction", in contrast to the theory of preformation, which asserts the "supposed existence of all the parts of an organism in rudimentary form in the egg or the seed;" modern embryology, which finds both that an organism begins with an inherited genetic code and that embryonic stem cells can develop epigenetically into a variety of cell types, may be seen as supporting a balance between the views.For a discussion of the differences between epigenesis and the theory of preformation, see this:
Stoicism maintained that the living animal soul was received only at birth, through contact with the outer air,A.A. Long, Stoic Studies (University of California Press 2001 ), p. 237 and was transformed into a rational soul only at fourteen years of age.Tad Brennan, The Stoic Life (Oxford University Press 2005 ), p. 155 Epicureanism saw the origin of the soul (considered to consist of only a small number of atoms even in adults) as simultaneous with conception.Norman Wentworth DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy (University of Minnesota 1954), p. 201 Pythagoreanism also considered ensoulment to occur at conception.David Albert Jones, The Soul of the Embryo (Continuum International 2004 )
Christianity Historical development From the 12th century, when the West first came to know more of Aristotle than his works on logic,Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, "Aristotelianism, Christian"James Edward McClellan, Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History (Johns Hopkins University Press 2006 ), p. 184 medieval declarations by Popes and theologians on ensoulment were based on the Aristotelian hypothesis. Aristotle's epigenetic view of successive life principles ("souls") in a developing human embryo—first a vegetative and then a sensitive or animal soul, and finally an intellective or human soul, with the higher levels able to carry out the functions also of the lower levelsAquinas notes in Summa Contra Gentiles, lib. 2 cap. 88 n. 3 that "Aristotle teaches in the De generatione animalium II, 3 that the fetus is an animal before becoming a man."—was the prevailing view among early Christians, including Tertullian, Augustine, and Jerome. Quotation from the article on Abortion. Book preview Lars Østnor says this view was only "presaged" by Augustine,Stem cells, human embryos and ethics: interdisciplinary perspectives: Lars Østnor, Springer 2008 who belongs to a period later than that of early Christianity. According to David Albert Jones, this distinction appeared among Christian writers only in the late fourth and early fifth century, while the earlier writers made no distinction between formed and unformed, a distinction that Saint Basil of Caesarea explicitly rejected. While the Hebrew text of the Bible only required a fine for the loss of a fœtus, whatever its stage of development, the Greek Septuagint (LXX) translation of the Hebrew text, a pre-Christian translation that the early Christians used, introduced a distinction between a formed and an unformed fœtus and treated destruction of the former as murder. It has been commented that "the LXX could easily have been used to distinguish human from non-human fœtuses and homicidal from non-homicidal abortions, yet the early Christians, until the time of Augustine in the fifth century, did not do so."Paul T. Stallsworth, Ruth S. Brown (editors), The Church & Abortion (Abingdon Press 1993 ), p. 42
The view of early Christians on the moment of ensoulment is also said to have been not the Aristotelian, but the Pythagorean: