is human reason more able after a fashion to converse with "The Nature of
Book VIII 357 praised more copiously for having given a soul set in an animal body the rational facility of working as much as would satisfy its willing spirit, not as much as it would be reluctantly forced to do by the wants of the body.
16. What greater or more wonderful spectacle can there be, after all, or when is human reason more able after a fashion to converse with "The Nature of Things,"28 than when after seeds have been sown, cuttings potted, shrubs planted out, graftings made, each root and seed is questioned, so to say, on what its inner vital force can or cannot do, what helps and what hinders it, what is the range of the inner, invisible power of its own numerical formula,29 what that of the care bestowed on it from outside? And then to perceive by these very considerations that neither the one who plants is anything nor the one who waters, but the one who gives the growth, God ( 1 Cor 3:7), because the work and skill applied from the outside is applied by one who also was nonetheless created and is being governed and directed invisibly by God?
The same continued, on a cosmic scale
9, 17. From this the eye of the mind can now be raised up to the universe itself as if it were all some huge tree, and in this too will be discovered the same twin functioning of providence, partly through natural, partly through voluntary activity; through natural activity indeed is working the hidden management of God, by which he also gives growth to trees and herbs, while voluntary activity comes through the works of angels and human beings. As regards the first mode celestial things are arrayed up above, terrestrial ones down below, the great lights and constellations shine, day and night are moved around in turn, the earth with its foundations in the waters has them washing round it and in amongst it, the air is poured over it at a higher level, shrubs and animals are conceived and born, grow up, grow old and perish, and whatever else happens in things through the inner impulses of nature; while in this other mode signs are given, taught and learned,30 fields cultivated, communities administered, arts and skills practiced, and whatever else is done, whether in the higher company of the angels or in this earthly and mortal society, in such a way as to be in the interests of the good even through the unwitting actions of the bad. And in the human individual we see the same twin power of providence at work; first with respect to the body, nature
28. Cum rerum natura, an allusion, surely, to the strange epic poem, De Rerum Natura of the great Latin poet Lucretius, older contemporary ofCicero, and enthusiastic advocate of the Epicurean philosophy. Were it not for this allusion, 1 would more happily render the phrase, "converse with Nature herself." 29. Of its "numbers"; see Wis 1 1:20. 30. See Teaching Christianity 1,2 for his distinction between "things" and "signs," which then governs the rest of that work. Chief among signs is language and words; but then some things signified by words can also be used as signs, and these he will often call sacraments.