46. See above, chapters 8 and 9, sections 15-18.
368 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis
ln what way did God speak to Adam?
18. 37. Again one may ask, in what way God now spoke to the man he made, who was already for sure endowed with sensation and intelligence, so that he would be capable of hearing and understanding. In no other way, after all, could he be a transgressor of the command received, unless he understood it when he received it. So in what way, then, did God speak to him? Was it inwardly in the mind, directly to his intelligence, that is so that he would clearly be aware of the command and understand God's will without any bodily sounds or likenesses of bodily things? But I do not somehow think that that is how God spoke to the first man. Scripture, l mean, is telling the sort of story which should lead us to suppose, rather, that God spoke to the man in Paradise just as he also spoke later on to the fathers, as he did to Abraham, as he did to Moses, that is, in some kind of bodily appearance. That, you see, is how they heard his voice as he took a stroll in Paradise towards evening and they then hid themselves.45
More about the twofold operation ofdivine providence
19. 38. And thus a great topic is being proposed to us, one certainly not to be passed over, that we should look more deeply, as best we may, to the extent that he is graciously prepared to grant us his assistance, into that twofold operation of divine providence which we glanced at in passing earlier on when we were talking about agriculture.46 This will begin to get the mind of the reader into the habit of observing something that is of the greatest help against our forming any unworthy ideas about the very substance of God.
So then, we say that this supreme, true, one and only God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, God, that is, and his Word and the Spirit of both, the Trinity itself, neither confused nor separated, the God who alone has immortality and dwells in light inaccessible, whom no human being has ever seen or can see ( 1 Tm 6: 16), is not contained in any place whether of finite or infinite space, nor altered by the passage of times, whether finite or infinite. For there is nothing in the substance by which he is God that is smaller in the part than in the whole, as must be the case with things that are in place; nor was there in his substance anything that is not there now or that will be and is not yet, as is the case with natures which can experience the changes and chances of time.
20. 39. So this God, then, living in unchanging eternity, created all things simultaneously (Sir 18:1), from which point times would run their course and places would be filled, and the ages would unroll with movement in time and space. Some of these things he created were spiritual, some corporeal, and he set
45. See Gn 3:8. 46. See above, chapters 8 and 9, sections 15-18.