The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
BOOK NINE 89 and the trees. For neither he who plants is anything nor he who waters, but only God who gives the growth.©? This growth includes filling in with flesh part of the human body where a bone has been removed. Such a thing is done by the work of God, that work by which He gives being to substances that He makes, including the angels, who are also His creation.
27. The work of the farmer is to channel the water when he irrigates. But it is not his work to make water flow down; that is rather the work of Him who has ordered all things in measure and number and weight.®® It is also the farmer's work to take a shoot from a tree and plant it in the ground. But it is not his work to take in moisture and to put forth buds, or to turn part of the new tree down into the ground to build up the roots, and to direct another part up above the ground in order to build up its strength and spread its branches: all this is done by Him who gives the increase. A physician, similarly, gives nourishment to a sick body and applies medicine to a wound. Now, two points should be observed in this: first, he does not create the food and medicine, but finds them made by the work of the Creator; and secondly, he is able to prepare food or drink and administer it, and to make a plaster and smear it with ointment and then apply it to the right place; but from these means he employs he is not able to produce or create energy or flesh. Nature does this by an interior force hidden from us. But if God withdraws the intimate activity by which He creates this substance and keeps it in-being, it will in effect be destroyed immediately and nothing will remain.
28. God, then, governs all His creation by a kind of twofold working of His providence, about which I have spoken in the preceding book,®? and He rules all creatures by natural and voluntary forces. But an angel can no more create a substance than he can create himself. The will of an angel, however, which gives obedient service to God and carries out His commands, is able to work on things subject to him, using them as a kind of matter and employing forces of nature, so that something is created in time in accordance with the uncreated formative principles in the Word of God or in accordance with the formative