also the non-rational as in cattle and flying things and fish, is moved by the sight
390 The Literal Meaning of Genesis should find some help in what we discussed in the previous book about the twofold working ofdivine providence.23 lt is not to be supposed, l mean, that this was done in the way hunters and fowlers track down and drive into the nets what ever animals they catch. Nor did some commanding voice issue from a cloud in words which rational souls are used to understanding and obeying when they hear them; neither beasts nor birds, after all, received this capacity.
But all the same they do in their own fashion submit to God, though not by any rational decision of the will, but in the way that he moves all things around at the appropriate times, without being moved through periods of time himself, by the ministry of angels. These grasp in his Word what has to be done and at what time, and without his being moved through time, they are themselves so moved, in order to carry out his instructions in things that have been made subject to them.
25. Every live soul, you see, not only the rational kind as in human beings, but also the non-rational as in cattle and flying things and fish, is moved by the sight of things. But the rational soul, by a free voluntary decision, either consents or does not consent to such sights, whereas the non-rational does not have this power ofjudgment, but is all the same stimulated, according to the nature of its kind, when in contact with something seen. Nor does any soul have control over what sights may strike either its bodily senses or its innermost spirit;24 and it is by these sights that the appetite of any sort of animate being at all is moved.
And thus it is that when these sights are presented from above through the obedience of the angels, God's instructions reach not only human beings, not only birds and cattle, but also things that lurk under the waters, like the whale which swallowed Jonah; and not only these bigger ones, but also a little worm—because we read that this too was instructed by God to gnaw the root of the gourd under whose shade the prophet had gone to have a rest.25
Think of how God, in setting man in his place, has bestowed on him the ability, even when he is carrying "the flesh of sin,"26 not only to subdue cattle and beasts of burden and domestic fowls to his uses, but also to catch and tame birds that fly around free, all sorts of savage beasts too, and in a wonderful way to rule them with the power of reason, not by brute force; and then how trainers do this by working on the appetites and pains of the animals, softening them up gradu ally by enticements, by applying pressure and relaxing it, until they have, as it were, stripped them of their wild habits and clothed them with human manners.
23. See Book V111.9.17-18; 21-26,40-48. 24. That is, the sense memory and imagination, both elements, in varying degrees, ofevery kind of animal's sensory equipment. 25. SeeJn 1:17; 4:6-7. 26. 1 think he must have had in mind here a text like Rom 6:6. which in fact, however, talks of "the body of sin"; but it mentions its being destroyed by our baptism into Christ's death.