nels when he irrigates;28 but it is not his work to ensure that water flows down
Book IX 391
How much more are angels able to do this, who register his orders in that unchangeable Truth of his which they gaze upon everlastingly! Then moving themselves through time and the bodies subject to them through both time and place with a wonderful agility, they can effectively produce for every living soul the sights by which it will be moved and the appetite to satisfy some fleshly need, so that it may be brought all unconsciously to wherever its presence is needed.
How theformation of the woman was actually done
15, 26. So now let us see how the formation of the wife, which was mystically also called a work of building, was actually done. The nature of the woman was of course created, although out of the man's which was already there; it was not made by any moving around or changing ofexisting natures. Now angels are not able to create any nature whatsoever; the one and only creator ofany nature you like, great or small, is God, that is to say the Trinity itself, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. So it is a different kind of question, how Adam was put to sleep, and his rib extracted from the structure of the body27 without his feeling any pain. We may perhaps say that these things could have been done through angels; but to form or build the rib into being a woman was something that only God, who maintains nature as a whole in being, was able to do—so much so that l cannot even believe the supplying of the man's body with flesh to take the place of his rib was done by angels, any more than the making of the man himself from the dust of the earth. Not that the angels contribute no work at all to the creation of something, but that does not make them creators, just as we do not call farmers the creators of crops and trees, since neither the one who plants is anything, nor the one who irrigates, but the one who gives the growth, God (1 Cor 3:7). An instance of such growth is also to be found in a human body, when the place left by the removal of a bone has been filled up with flesh—by God doing the same sort of work, that is, as he did when he set up all natures in being, as he also did when he created the angels themselves.
27. And so it is the farmer's work to conduct the water through the right chan nels when he irrigates;28 but it is not his work to ensure that water flows down hill; that is the work of the one who has disposed all things in measure and numberand weight (Wis 1 1 :20). Again, it is by the farmer's work that the sucker is pulled off from the tree, and committed to the earth; but it is not by his work that it drinks in moisture and puts out shoots, so that it fixes one part of itself in
27. A Ciceronian echo; a corporis compage. See the master'sDe Senectute 21.77. 28. Watering gardens and fields in the Mediterranean world of Paul and Augustine, especially in summer when it was most needed, was of course not a matter of hose-pipes and sprinklers, but of leading water from a tank or dam down channels to the plots to be watered, the farmer or gardener doing this by closing off one channel and opening another with a hoe.