“Medieval theologians described a tripartite process of ensoulment over the course of fetal development. The poet Dante Alighieri gives one of the most cogent explanations of this concept, which goes back to Aristotle, via Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and others. Dante’s description of when God breathes life into the fetus takes place in the Divine Comedy on the sixth terrace of Purgatory. Dante’s Purgatory is imagined as an island-mountain organized according to the Seven Deadly Sins. On the terrace of gluttony, sinners circle past an offshoot of the Tree of Knowledge, which produces a delicious odor that makes them excruciatingly hungry and emaciated in appearance. Dante asks his two guides, the poets Virgil and Statius, how the disembodied spirits can become so thin if they do not need nourishment. Statius responds with a digression on sexual reproduction and embryology (Purgatorio 25.37-108) in order to account for the continuity between humans’ mortal bodies and their aerial bodies in Purgatory. He explains how the fetus takes shape and passes through three stages, first being endowed with a soul like that of a plant, and then with that of an animal, at which point the bodily organs are fashioned. Only after the articulation of the brain does God breathe into it a specifically human spirit, capable of self-reflection and speech. This new soul then combines with the two already inhabiting in the body, and after the person’s death, when the soul’s connection to the body is severed, it radiates around itself an ombra, a sort of shadow or mirror body that continuously reflects its inner condition.” —Olivia Holmes, “When was an embryo considered a person in the Middle Ages?,” Cambridge University Press, January 31, 2023 (retrieved December 30, 2023)
