5. SeeGn 1:20.24.
306 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis to these visible ones in which he is working every day at whatever is being as it were unwrapped in time from those primordial wrappings, we have been following the words of scripture, and been led by them to make the distinction in a way that is not absurdly wrongheaded. The point is admittedly somewhat diffi cult to grasp, and those who are rather slow on the uptake may find it hard to make head or tail of it. So what we now have to beware of is being thought to hold and express opinions which we know perfectly well that we do not hold or express.
For although, you see, I have been directing the reader's steps as carefully as I could, I imagine all the same that several people are groping in the dark in these places and are thinking that the man was first made in that work of God in which he created all things simultaneously, in such a way as to be actually living some sort of life and thus to hear, believe, and understand the words of God addressed to him, when God said, Behold, l have given you every seed-bearingfodder (Gn
1 :29). So please, would anyone who thinks this be assured that I have neither held nor expressed this opinion.
1 0. And again, if I say that in that first establishment of things, in which God created all things simultaneously together, man was not to be found as he is now, not only as an adult but not even as an infant, not only as an infant, but not even as a fetus in his mother's womb, not only this, but not even as the visible seed of a human being; such people will suppose that he was not to be found there at all. So then, let them go back to scripture, and they will find there that on the sixth day man was made to the image of God, made, indeed, male and female.3 Next let them inquire when the woman was made, and they will find it was outside those six days; the time she was made, after all, was when God was still molding from the earth beasts of the field and flying things of heaven,4 not when the waters produced flying things and the earth produced living soul, which also includes beasts.5
So both then and later on; not either then and not later on, or later on and not then; and not different ones later on, but the very same ones in a different way then, in a different way later on. They will ask me: "In what way later on?" l will answer: "Visibly, with the appearance of the human constitution as we know it—not however born of parents, but he from mud, she from his rib." They will ask: "In what way then, the first time?" I will answer: "Invisibly, potentially, in their causes, in the way things to come are made when they have not yet been made in actual fact."
1 1 . Here, very likely, they will be at a loss to understand. Everything they are familiar with, after all, down to the bodily materiality ofseeds, is being eliminated.
3. SeeGn 1:27. 4. SeeGn 2:19-22. 5. SeeGn 1:20.24.
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The man, you see, was not even anything like that when he was made in that first setting out of six days. Seeds do indeed provide some sort ofcomparison with this, on account of the growths to come that are bound in with them; before all seeds, nonetheless, are those causes. But this such people do not understand.
So what am I to do but advise them, as best I can, to trust God' s scriptures, and to believe that the man was made both then, when "God made heaven and earth when the day was made," about which scripture says elsewhere, The one who livesfor ever created all things simultaneously (Sir 18:1); and also then, when no longer creating things simultaneously but each in its own time, he molded him from the mud of the earth and the woman from one of his bones? Scripture, in fact, does not allow us either to understand them as being made like that on the sixth day, or for all that as not being made at all on the sixth day.
An untenable suggestion that it was only the human soul which was created on the sixth day
7, 1 2. So then, perhaps what was made on the sixth day was their souls, where the image of God is rightly to be understood, in the spiritual reality of their minds, so that their bodies might be formed later on? But this too is something we are not permitted by the same text ofscripture to believe; first, because of that completion of God's works, I do not see how these could be understood to be complete if anything was not there established in its causes which would later on be realized visibly; secondly, because the difference of sex between male and female can only be verified in bodies. But if anyone should suggest that each sex is, so to say, represented in every single soul with reference to its intellectual understanding and its rational activity,6 what will he make of the fruits which God gave them on that very day for food, which of course would only be suitable
A suggestion that Augustine takes up and works out at considerable length in The Trinity X11, 1,1 -4 and 14,22—15,25, equating intellectual understanding with the "word of wisdom" and rational activity with the "word of knowledge" (1 Cor 12:8). But the way he mentions the point here rather suggests that this was not an original idea of his own, but one derived from someone else, which he then, many years later, developed himself. He has already in fact noted the point in passing earlier on in this work, 11I,22,34; see note 33 on that passage. Now one of the works on which he was engaged about the same time as this Literal Meaning ofGenesis, at which time he was also beginning The Trinity, was Teaching Christianity, vol 1/1 1 in this series. And in this, at the end of the third book, he sets out some rules for interpreting scripture drawn up by a Donatist scholar, Tychonius, for whom Augustine clearly had some respect. His seventh rule is called "recapitulation," a term we have found Augustine using here in this volume of The Literal Meaning of Genesis. 1t is true that when referring to it in Teaching Christianity, Augustine does not illustrate it by mentioning this suggestion; but that may well have been because Tychonius did link it to the idea ofonly the human soul having been created on the sixth day. which Augustine, as we see, could not accept. So 1 am tempted to infer that it was from Tychonius that Augustine in fact derived the idea of the two mental functions of intellectual understanding and rational activity being analogues in the soul to the distinction of male and female in the body.