Africa from Milan, when he was settled on his own property in Thagaste with a few
348 The Literal Meaning of Genesis extensive too and rendered fertile by a huge spring—when they can see so many large tracts of grassland turn into woods without any human labor, just by the hidden work of God, I only wonder how they can believe that the man himself was made in a way they have never seen. Or if he too is to be understood figura tively, who was it who begot Cain and Abel and Seth? Or did they also only exist in figure, not also as real human beings born of human beings?
So then they should pay very close attention to where this assumption of theirs is leading them, and try hard with us to take all these primordial events of the narrative as actually having happened in the way described. ls there anyone, after all, who would not support them as they turned their minds next to working out what lessons these things have for us in their figurative meaning, whether about spiritual natures and experiences or even about events to come in the future?
Certainly, if the bodily things mentioned here could not in any way at all be taken in a bodily sense that accorded with truth, what other course would we have but to understand them as spoken figuratively, rather than impiously to find fault with holy scripture? On the other hand, if these things understood in a bodily sense, far from being an embarrassment to the divine narrative, actually lend it more solid support, nobody I imagine will be so disloyally obstinate as to insist on remaining wedded to his old opinion that they can only be taken figura tively, when he sees them, on being expounded in their proper sense, to be in accordance with the rule of faith.7
What he said on this point in his two volumes on Genesis against the Manichees
2, 5. 1 too, you see, shortly after my conversion wrote two volumes against the Manichees,8 who do not just go wrong by taking these books of the Old Testa ment in a way that is not correct, but who blaspheme by rejecting them outright with detestation. So my aim was to confute their ravings as quickly as possible, and also to prod them into looking for the Christian and evangelical faith in the writings which they hate. Now at that time it had not yet dawned on me how everything in them could be taken in its proper literal sense; it seemed to me rather that this was scarcely possible, if at all, and anyhow extremely difficult. So in order not to be held back, l explained with what brevity and clarity I could muster what those things, for which I was not able to find a suitable literal
7. 1 here omit a phrase, siforte illi visafuerant, "if perchance they had seemed/appeared to him," as totally impossible to fit meaningfully into this sentence. 1 suspect some scribble in a margin which crept into the text. 8. On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, 1 and II; written about 389, after his return to Africa from Milan, when he was settled on his own property in Thagaste with a few like-minded friends.