have not found Ambrose saying anything quite like this in his little work on Paradise; so it
354 The Literal Meaning of Genesis with the means ofensuring that his body would not change for the worse through ill-health or old age, or even succumb to some accident, when he provided ordi nary human food with such a wonderful staying power, that flour and oil in earthen vessels would restore human strength that was running out and not run out themselves?23 Here too let one of that disputatious crew stand up and say that it was proper for God to perform such miracles in our present world, but not proper for him to do so in Paradise—as though he had not there made the man from dust or the woman from her husband's side, greater miracles than his here having raised the dead.
On the tree ofknowledge of good and evil
6, 12. lt remains for us to see about the tree ofknowledge ofdiscerning good and evil (Gn 2:9). Naturally this too was a visible and bodily tree like all the others. So then, that it was a tree is not to be doubted; but why it was given this name is something that has to be looked into. Now as l consider the question again and again, words cannot express how delighted I am with the opinion that it was not a matter of that tree having poisonous fruit—the one who had made all things very good (Gn 1:31) would not have planted something bad in Para dise—but of the man's transgression of the commandment having been bad for him.24 Now it was necessary that the man, placed under God as his Lord and master, should be prohibited from doing something, so that obedience might itselfbe his virtue by which to deserve well of his master. This, l can indeed say with absolute truth, is the one and only virtue for every creature that is a rational agent under the authority of God, while the first and greatest vice, puffing it up to its own downfall, is the wish to assert its own authority, the name of this vice being disobedience.
So the man then would have had no reason to reflect that he had a Lord and master, and to feel it in his bones, unless he had been given some order. And so that tree was not evil, but it was given the name of the knowledge of discerning good and evil, because if the man should eat of it after being forbidden to do so, there was in it the future transgression of the commandment, as a result ofwhich the man would learn through his experience of the penalty what a difference there was between the good of obedience and the evil of disobedience. Accord ingly this too is to be taken notjust as a metaphor but as a real tree, which was not given its name from the fruit or apple which would grow on it, but from the
23. See 1 Kgs 17:8-16, Ihe story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. 24. He speaks as though this was not an original idea of his own, but one he had heard from others. 1 have not found Ambrose saying anything quite like this in his little work on Paradise; so it seems to me that it was probably an opinion put forward by one of Augustine's circle of friends in discussion on the point.