beginning of this work.
Book II 73 ably understand the whole of time to be signified. God, after all, made the whole of time simultaneously with the whole time-bound creation, the visible creation which is signified under the name of "heaven and earth." What should prompt our questioning, though, is that after naming the day which was made, and heaven and earth, he also added all the greenery ofthefieldandall thefodder.
You see, when it said, ln the beginning God made heaven and earth (Gn 1:1), it didn't also say that all the greenery of the field and all the fodder was made then; it's plainly there for us to read, after all, that all the greenery and fodder of the field was made on the third day, while the statement that ln the beginning God made heaven and earth does not belong to any of those seven days. As yet, you see, he was calling the basic material out of which everything was made by the name of"heaven and earth," or else, more likely, he had first set before us the whole ofcreation under the name ofheaven and earth when he said, ln the begin ning God made heaven and earth ; and after that he expounded God' s works one by one consecutively through the sequence of days, in a way required by their prophetic significance, as we explained in the first book.6
So what else can it mean, then, that after naming heaven and earth he now added the greenery of the field and the fodder, and kept quiet about all the rest, so much of it, which is to be found in heaven and on earth, or even in the sea, but that by the greenery of the field he wished the invisible creation to be understood, such as the soul? lt is usual in the scriptures, you see, for the world to be called a field; l mean, the Lord himself said, Thefield is this world (Mt 13:38), when he was explaining that parable in which darnel was mixed in with the good seed. So then he calls the spiritual and invisible creation the greenery of the field because of its vigor and vitality, and we naturally give the same interpretation to the word "fodder" as sustaining life.7
4, 5. His adding next, before it was upon the earth, is to be understood as meaning before the soul sinned. When it has befouled itself with earthy lusts, after all, it is rightly said to have been born upon the earth, or to be upon the earth. And that is why he added: For God had not yet rained upon the earth (Gn 2:5)—because nowadays too God makes the greenery of the field, but by raining upon the earth. That is, he makes souls grow green again and flourish through his word; but he waters them from the clouds, that is, from the scriptures of the prophets and apostles. These are rightly called clouds because their words, which are over and done with as soon as uttered aloud over the air, become clouds of a sort when the obscurity of allegories is added to them like a kind of fog or mist; and then, when their meaning is squeezed out in commentaries and
6. The seven days of creation as representing the six ages of the world and the final, eternal day of the new heaven and the new earth, 1,22,33—23.42. 7. See his comment on this interpretation of fodder in the extract from Revisions 3, placed at the beginning of this work.