making of the human soul (using figurative language, ofcourse). The Alexandrian theologian,
352 The Literal Meaning of Genesis not, after all, the case that that sheep was not a sheep; clearly it was a sheep, and it was killed and eaten; and yet by that very fact something else was also being signified. It was not like that fatted calf, which was killed to make a feast on the younger son's return;16 here the whole story is figurative, not a story of things actually done with a figurative significance.
l mean, it was not the evangelist but the Lord himself who told it, while the evangelist told the story of the Lord telling it. Thus it is then that the story told by the evangelist was of what also actually happened, namely that the Lord really said all that, while the story told by the Lord himself was a parable, about which it is never required that what it tells of should be shown to have happened liter ally. Christ is also the stone anointed by Jacob, and the stone rejected by the builders which became the cornerstone;" but the first was something actually done in the course of events, while the second was only foretold in figurative terms. ln the first instance the narrator was writing of events in the past, in the second the foreteller was pointing only to things yet to come in the future.
The same continued, with a discussion ofcertain complicatingfactors
5, 9. Thus Wisdom—which is the same as Christ himself—is also the tree of life in the spiritual paradise, where he sent the thief on from the cross;18 but the tree of life was also created in the bodily paradise (to signify Wisdom, indeed) because the passage of scripture said so which was telling of things that happened in their own time, and which told of the man both made in bodily form and set up there living in the body.
Or if anyone thinks that when souls depart from the body they are contained in places that are visible to bodily eyes though bodiless themselves,19 let him defend his opinion; people will not be lacking to support it, and so to argue for that rich man in his thirst having certainly been in a bodily place. They thus have no hesitation in declaring that the soul itself is quite simply bodily, on account of his burning tongue and his longing for a drop of water from the finger of Lazarus.20 1 for my part will not be in a hurry to take them on over such an impor tant question. It is better, surely, to remain in doubt over obscure matters, than to quarrel over uncertain ones. l have no doubts, to be sure, about having to take
16. SeeLk 15:23. 17. See Gn 28:18; Ps 118:22. 18. SeeLk 23:43. 19. He appears to have in mind people who assumed that the text of Gn 2:7 refers only to the making of the human soul (using figurative language, of course). The Alexandrian theologian, Origen (d. 253) held such a view, and considered that human souls were fitted out with bodies as a punishment for sin, interpreting in this figurative sense Gn 3:2 1 , God clothing Adam and Eve with garments of skin. 20. See Lk 16:19-26.