30. Book V111,9,17-18; 21-26. 40-48.
392 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis the soil by stabilizing its roots, pushes another upwards into the open air by toughening its trunk and spreading out its branches, but by the work of "the one who gives the growth."
Again, the doctor prescribes a diet for the ailing body, and a dressing for the wounded one. ln the first place, however, he does not do this with things he has created but with ones which he finds already created by the work of the creator; in the second, he has been able to prepare the food or drink and to administer it, to fashion the plaster, smear it with the ointment and apply it to the wound; but is he also able to work with the things he uses and actually create strength or flesh? Nature does that with some inner impulse that is totally obscure to us. But ifGod withdraws from nature the innermost activity of all, by which he makes her and sets her in place, she will at once, so to say, be extinguished and "leave not a rack behind."29
28. No angel, accordingly, can create a nature any more than it can create itself. But since God administers the whole of his creation, as we explained in the previous book, by the operation of his providence divided somehow into two parts,30 doing this in both natural and voluntary activities or movements, the angelic will is able, in obedient submission to God and in execution of his orders, to provide from things subject to it the material, so to say, for the movements of nature, so that something may be created in time in accordance with either the primary uncreated ideas in the Word of God, or with those ideas or formulae causally created in the works of the first six days; this in the kind of way farmers and doctors assist the functioning of nature.
So as to what kind of service the angels helped God with in the formation of the woman, who would be rash enough to make any definite assertion? What l will say with complete certainty, nonetheless, is that the flesh which filled up the place left by the rib, and the woman's body and soul and the shape and arrange ment of her limbs, with all the entrails, all the senses and everything else which marked her as both creature and human and female, all this was made by none but God, not acting through angels but directly himself; not working and then leaving the thing made, but continuing to work in such a way that no nature of any other things, not even of the angels themselves, would remain in being ifhe were not so working.
Continuing the comparison between God's work and that of the angels
16, 29. But as far as our limited human experience goes of the nature ofthings, we do not know of any way in which animate and sentient flesh comes to birth,
29. 1t is astonishing how Augustine keeps on quoting Shakespeare's Tempest\ 30. Book V111,9,17-18; 21-26. 40-48.