planted Paradise, and placed in it the man he had made and brought the animals
Book VI 303 and the man placed there and put to sleep for Eve to be formed; and when she had been, he woke up and gave her a name. But none of this could have been done except over intervals of time. And so it follows that none of it was done in the way that all things were created simultaneously.
The rest of the story evidently tells ofevents occurring in time
3, 4. However easy, after all, a human being may think it is for God to have done all this simultaneously with the rest, we know with absolute certainty that the words of a human being can only be uttered aloud over intervals of time. When we hear the man's words, therefore, when he was giving names either to the animals or to the woman, or when he also went on to say, For this reason a man shall leave hisfatherandmotherand bejoined to his wife; and they shall be two in oneflesh (Gn 2:24), whatever the syllables this was uttered with, not even any two of them could have been spoken simultaneously; how much less, then, could all of this have happened all together with all the things that were created simultaneously! And this would mean that those "all things" were not after all created simultaneously at the absolute starting point of the ages, but that they were made over successive intervals of time, and that that day originally estab lished was of a material, not a spiritual nature, and was making morning and evening by heaven knows what kind ofcircling round of light, or by its emission and contraction.
But taking into consideration everything that has been discussed above in the preceding books, we have concluded more probably and reasonably that it was a spiritual day which was sublimely instituted at the beginning, and that the day was called a kind of wise light, whose presence was vouchsafed to the simulta neous creation through six stages of knowledge arranged in due order; and that this opinion chimes in with the words of scripture, because it says later on, When the day was made God made heaven and earth, and all the greenery ofthefield before it was upon the earth, and all the hay ofthefield before it sprang up (Gn 2:4-5); and is also supported by what is written elsewhere: The one who livesfor ever created all things simultaneously (Sir 18:1). So there can be no doubt that this account of the man being molded from the mud of the earth, and a wife being formed for him from his side, does not belong to the creating of all things simul taneously and God resting when they were complete, but to that divine work which is continuing now through the ages as they unroll, at which he is working until now (Jn 5:17).
5. What it comes to is that the very words in which the story is told how God planted Paradise, and placed in it the man he had made and brought the animals to him for him to give them names, and how, since no helper like him was found among them, he then formed the woman for him from the rib he had removed