In a review-article in IPQ, (1989) of O'Connell's book on The Origin of the Soul in St Augustine's Later Works I was puzzled as to why, if Augustine's final position on the origin of the human soul is neither traducianist (the soul as well as the body is handed down from one's parents) nor creationist (individual souls are constantly being created by God), these two rejected hypotheses are still apparently on the table until the end of Augustine's life (e.g. Incomplete Work 2.177–181). O'Connell thinks not only that Augustine was unprepared to be too dogmatic, but that as a wary ecclesiastical campaigner he was concerned not to give a handle to dangerous opponents.

Augustine at least ‘knows’ that our souls all shared Adam's sin, so that what he expresses ignorance about is not ‘our’ existence ‘in Adam’, but only how, after existing in Adam, our souls arrived in our present bodies. Yet it is still strange that creationism is not rejected outright, for it implies the making of new (and therefore guiltless) souls. Now it is true, as O'Connell regularly notes, that creationism was a very popular Christian belief outside North Africa. (Both Jerome and Pelagius subscribed to it.) So it may be that, since Augustine can find no knock-down scriptural text or reasoned argument against it, his profession of ignorance merely reflects an unwillingness to condemn a position so widely and traditionally held. Compare his unwillingness to condemn women who had committed suicide to avoid rape, because he knew they had been honoured in the Church as martyrs.

Augustine knows (and tells Jerome in Letter 166, for example) that squaring creationism with original sin is peculiarly difficult.