What is the right word, Jesus assumed a human soul or have a created rational soul?

Upvote:2

All human souls are created, since God is not a human soul. And since Christ assumed a human nature, which consists of a human body and a human soul (Matthew 10:28), Jesus has a created soul, inasmuch as He has the human soul (the opposite of which is a heresy known as Apollinarianism, which says the Word used a human body as a kind of puppet, which would deny Christ's ability to suffer and so forth, taught in Matthew 26:38; Hebrews 4:15, and other places). So while Christ is personally God, His soul was created along with His human nature. The Word, or Son of God, is not created, since He is God (John 1), but when He took a human nature upon Himself, "taking the form of a servant," (Philippians 2) this entailed a human body and human soul being created by God for Him. Except the soul's person or identity was that of the Word. Instead of a created person being created anew by God, "God sent forth His Son, born of a woman" (Galatians 4). That is to say, a human soul (its factulties and so forth) can be separated in a sense from the person with whom it is associated or whose it is, e.g., "he let his spirit go" (Matthew 27) or "put to death indeed in the flesh, but made alive in spirit, in which going he preached to the spirits that were in Prison" (1 Peter 3); or, "my soul magnifies the Lord: and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour" (Luke 1).

So it's not strictly true to say Jesus was a creature, since Jesus refers to an identity or person, who was there from all eternity (we should say, 'The Word,' not 'Jesus,' since this name was only later given to Him in His humanity), but one may, and must, say that His human nature was created in its entirety, since "God is not a man" (Numbers 23)—otherwise the Incarnation would be superfluous. Nothing which makes Jesus God is human, and nothing human about Jesus makes Him not personally God.

At the Anunciation, Gabriel said to Mary, "You shall conceive and bear a son;" it seems like the moment of conception involved the person of the Son, and so using the words, "assumed a human soul" (as protecting the teaching of the eternal existence of the Son) is correct as well as "had a created soul," since all souls are created, and Jesus has one. They aren't mututally exclusive, but "had a created soul" necessarily follows from "assumed" one.

Upvote:4

Is Jesus human soul created or assumed?

Jesus, at the Incarnation, assumed a human soul:[1]

Because "human nature was assumed, not absorbed",97 in the mysterious union of the Incarnation, the Church was led over the course of centuries to confess the full reality of Christ's human soul, with its operations of intellect and will, and of his human body. In parallel fashion, she had to recall on each occasion that Christ's human nature belongs, as his own, to the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it. Everything that Christ is and does in this nature derives from "one of the Trinity". The Son of God therefore communicates to his humanity his own personal mode of existence in the Trinity. In his soul as in his body, Christ thus expresses humanly the divine ways of the Trinity.

[1]: The Catechism of the Catholic Church:

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