52. See Col 1:18.
96 On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees is charity (Rom 13:10), and let us see this same love contained in that twin commandment: You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with your whole mind; and You shall love your neighbor as yourself; on these two commandments hangs the whole law, and the prophets (Mt 22:37.39-40). Then we can take it without the slightest hesitation that one does not only come to the tree of life through the flaming, whirling sword, that is, through the endurance of temporal troubles, but also through the fullness of knowledge, that is, through charity; because ifl do not have charity, he says, / am nothing (1 Cor 13:2).
The story is also prophetic of Christ and the Church
24, 37. But l promised51 that in this book I would consider first the account of things that have happened, which I think has now been unfolded, and go on to consider next what they prophesy; and this still remains to be considered briefly.
l don't reckon, you see, that this will take us very long once we have set up a kind of clear signpost which will direct us through everything else. The apostle, you see, says that there is a great sacrament in the text which says: For this reason a man shall leavefather and mother and stick to his wife; and they shall be two in oneflesh (Gn 2:24). He explains what he means by adding: But l mean in Christ and in the Church (Eph 5:31-32). So then, what as a matter of history was fulfilled in Adam, as a matter of prophecy signifies Christ, who left his Father when he said: / came outfrom the Father and have come into this world (Jn
16:28). He didn't leave the Father spatially, because God is not contained in a space, nor by turning away from him in sin, in the way apostates leave God; but by appearing among human beings as a man, when the Word was madeflesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1:14). This again doesn't signify any change in the nature of God, but the taking on of the nature ofa lower, that is, ofa human, person. That is also the force of the statement, he emptied himself (Phil 2:7), because he did not show himself to us in the honor and rank he enjoys with the Father, but cosseted our weakness while we did not yet have hearts and minds clean enough to see the Word as God with God. So what else do we mean by saying he left the Father, but that he forbore to appear to us as he is with the Father?
Again, he also left his mother, that is, the Synagogue and her old literal obser vance of the law, his motherfrom the seed ofDavid according to theflesh (Rom
1 :3), and stuck to his wife, that is, to the Church, so that they might be two in one flesh. The apostle after all calls him the head of the Church, and the Church his body.52 And so he too was put to sleep, falling asleep in death, in order that his
51. See 11,2.3 above. 52. See Col 1:18.