GRM 204.6 · Volume 3
The Gospel as revealed to me
Quotation
«So we have a soul and it is alive and present in us?»
«Yes, it is so.»
«And it suffers? Do You really think that it remembers God? We do not remember the womb that bore us. We could not tell what its inside was like. If I have understood You correctly, the soul is spiritually born of God. Can it possibly remember Him if our body does not remember the long time it was in a womb?»
«The soul is not material, Plautina. An embryo is. In fact the soul is infused when the foetus is already formed. The soul is, like God, eternal and spiritual. It is eternal from the moment it is created, whereas God is the Most Perfect Eternal Being and thus has no beginning in time and will have no end. The soul[1], the lucid, intelligent, spiritual work of God, does remember. And it suffers, because it longs for God, the True God, from Whom it comes, and it hungers for God. That is why it spurs the torpid body to endeavour to approach God.»
Annotation
- The soul is not raw material, Plautina. The embryo is. It's so true that the soul is only given when the fetus is already formed.
INFUSION OF THE SOUL: The embryo, yes, instead of:the fœtus, si, is a correction by Maria Valtorta to the original manuscript, where she inserts: "So true is it that the soul is given when the fœtus is already formed". This phrase is present in the 1985 French translation by Felix Sauvage, but has been removed on the grounds that it would contradict other statements in the chapter, but this statement, which is in line with that of St Thomas Aquinas (see below), is confirmed by other statements such as in EMV 118: Man is first of all only an animal embryo, no different from that of a sheep.
The soul is, in the likeness of God, eternal and spiritual. This position was upheld by Saint Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church, in the tradition of Aristotle. He estimated the insufflation time at 40 days (about 6 weeks). Today, as science advances, John Paul II, without deciding on the exact moment of insufflation, reminds us that from the very origin of the embryo, there is a personal definition to be respected (we all come from it). Anthropological study leads us to recognize that, by virtue of the substantial unity of the body with the spirit, the human genome has not only a biological significance; it is the bearer of an anthropological dignity which has its source in the spiritual soul which penetrates and vivifies it"(Address to the members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, February 24 1998 {it}). For his part, St Thomas Aquinas affirmed "The soul pre-exists in the embryo; it is there first nutritive, then sensitive, and finally intellective"(Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 118, from whence comes the soul of Man, Article 2, Answer).
The soul, lucid, intelligent, spiritual, the work of God, remembers this. This has already been discussed above, in EMV 204.5, as well as in EMV 94.7, EMV 121.7, EMV 154.7 (with a note), EMV 157.5, EMV 169.5, EMV 344.7 (in the mouth of a child), EMV 428.4 (with a note), EMV 534.6 (in the mouth of an old man), EMV 554.10, EMV 556.8.
The memory that souls have of God is dealt with more specifically in : EMV 10.9 | EMV 286.7 | EMV 290.9. Furthermore, Mary "was never deprived of the remembrance of God", as we read in EMV 4.6; this is illustrated in EMV 10.8/10 and in the last lines ofEMV 11.4. Mary's soul is also mentioned in EMV 136.6 and EMV 348.9/10.