The Literal Meaning of Genesis
that in the body of His Mother there was no cause for shame, where all was chaste.
CHAPTER 17
Was the manner of the creation of Eve determined in the reasonprinciple as a necessity or possibility?
31. One may ask in what way God created the woman in causal reasons when He created the first man to His image and likeness, for Scripture says at that point in the narrative, Male and female He made them.7? Did the reason-principle which God concreated and mingled with the works that He made in the world have the determination by which the woman would necessarily come from the rib of the man? Or did it have only the potency from which this development could come, so that the actual determination would have been hidden in God's plans and not necessarily determined in the reason-principle?'*
If this is the question, I will give my opinion without holding it tenaciously; but when I have proposed it, perhaps believers who are well grounded in the faith, upon thoughtfully weighing my suggestions, will accept them without doubt even though this is the first time they have considered them.
32. The ordinary course of nature in the whole of creation has certain natural laws in accordance with which even the spirit of life,?> which is a creature, has its own appetites, determined in a sense, which even a bad will cannot elude. The elements of the physical world also have a fixed power and quality determining for each thing what it can do or not do and what can be done or not done with it. From these elements all things which come to be in due time have their origin and development as well as their end and dissolution according to their kind. Thus, a bean does not come from a grain of wheat nor wheat from a bean, and a man does not come from a beast nor a beast from a man.
Over this whole movement and course of nature there is the power of the Creator, who is able to do in all creatures some-