 In Neoplatonism it was disputed how soul, being immortal, immaterial and ontologically superior to body, came to be incorporated nevertheless. The basic options, present already in Plato’s dialogues, were either that the disembodied soul had “fallen” into the corporeal world because of some error (as in the Phaedrus myth) or that it had been sent into the cosmos by God to impart life and order to it (as in the Timaeus; for harmonizing Neoplatonic exegeses, see Plotinus, Enneads IV.8, and Macrobius, Commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis 1.10–14). Augustine addresses the issue in the horizon of his doctrine of creation and, in the period of the Pelagian Controversy, of the debate about the transmission of original sin (see  9. Gender, Women and Sexuality).  In De libero arbitrio (3.56–59), he distinguishes the three options of creationism (God creates a new soul for every newborn body), traducianism (the soul is transmitted from the parents to the child like corporeal properties), and preexistence, which is subdivided into the Platonic options of voluntary or god-sent descent. After 412 all these options come to the fore again (Letters 143.5–11; 166; 190; and the treatise De anima et eius origine). Augustine discards none of them officially except for the notion, wrongly associated with Origenism, which was considered a heresy at the time, that incorporation was a punishment for a sin committed by the pre-existent soul (De civitate dei 11.23). In practice, he narrows the debate down to the alternative between creationism and traducianism, which appear to have been the only options taken seriously by his Christian contemporaries. Augustine refused to take a stand till the end of his life, probably because neither option really suited his purposes (Rist 1994: 317–320; O’Connell 1987; Mendelson 1998): Creationism made original sin very difficult to explain; traducianism was functional in this respect, but it was a materialist and even biologist theory that ran counter to Augustine’s Platonism and was further compromised because it had been brought up by his African predecessor Tertullian (d. c. 220 CE), a Stoicizing corporealist who had ended his life as a heretic (Rist 1994: 123).