potuit verbis, quae temporaliter cogitantur et voce proferuntur, "as could have been said
312 The Literal Meaning of Genesis
God blessed the seventh day and consecrated it; and again, unless they had been started then, the text would not continue because on that day God restedfrom all his works which God started to do (Gn 2: 1-3).
19. Here therefore, if anyone should ask how he finished and how he started—he did not, you see, finish some works and start others, but finished and started the very same ones, certainly, from which he rested on the seventh day—the answer is clear from what we have said above. That is to say, we under stand God to have finished these works when he created all things simulta neously so completely, that there was nothing for him still to create in the series of times which had not already been created by him here in the series of causes, while we take him to have started in that he here fixed the causes which he would put into effect later on.
Accordingly, Godformed the man dust of the earth, or mud of the earth—that is, from dust or from mud of the earth—andbreathed, or puffed, into hisface the breath of life, and man was made into a live soul (Gn 2:7). He was not then predestined, because that was done before all ages in the foreknowledge of the creator; nor then causally either started in his finished completeness or finished completely at the starting stage, because that was done at the start of the ages in the primordial ideas when all things were created simultaneously; but he was then created in his own time, visibly in the body, invisibly in the soul, consisting as he does of soul and body.
How God made the man 's body
12. 20. So now, then, it is time for us to see how God made him, first his body from the earth; later on we shall also see about his soul, if we find we are up to it. But that God molded the man from mud with actual material hands is an exces sively childish notion, so that if scripture had actually said this, we ought rather to believe that the author was employing the word metaphorically than that God is furnished with such limbs as we see in our own bodies. It says, after all: Yourhand scattered the nations (Ps 44:2), and: You led outyourpeople with mighty handand and upraisedarm (Ps 1 36: 1 2); and is there anybody so witless as not to understand that the name of this limb is being used to stand for God's authority and power?
2 1 . Nor is any attention to be paid to what some people think, that what makes the man God' s chief work is that with all the other things he spoke and they were made (Ps 148:5), while this one he actually made himself; no, it is rather that this one he made to his own image. The reason it says there that "he spoke and they were made" is that they were made by his Word, like a man telling other men to do things with words expressing out loud thoughts conceived in time.14 That, however, is not how God speaks, except when he speaks through a bodily crea
14. This is a paraphrase for a clause that 1 confess baffles me: sicut per hominem hominibus dici potuit verbis, quae temporaliter cogitantur et voce proferuntur, "as could have been said through a man to men with words that are thought in time and uttered out loud."