The Emergence of Soul: Retrieving Augustine’s Potentialism for Contemporary Theological Anthropology

That there is a certain resonance between Augustine’s theology of creation and evolutionary theory has been pointed out by many scholars over the last century, and is reiterated in recent works on the relation between theology and biology. Only very recently, however, has it been suggested that Augustine’s theology of creation articulates something like a general theory of emergence avant la lettre. Such is the argument in Alister McGrath’s 2009 Gifford lectures, published as A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology. McGrath notes the dynamic holism of Augustine’s notion of seminal reasons (rationes seminales or rationes causales), which are ‘infolded’ by God in the world at its original creation, only to unfold over time when the right circumstances pertain. As McGrath reads it, not implausibly in my view, these seminal reasons can be used as a theological heuristic for understanding several intriguing features of the world recently disclosed by science, namely the so-called anthropic principles that make this a ‘bio-friendly universe’. Says McGrath: