The Literal Meaning of Genesis
how God spoke them, we cannot understand precisely how He did so. Nevertheless, we should hold it for certain that God speaks either through His own substance or through a creature subject to Him, but that He does not speak through His own substance except in two cases: first, in creating the whole universe, and, second, in not only creating but also illuminating spiritual and intellectual creatures when they are able to grasp His utterance, which is in His Word, who was in the beginning with God, and the Word was God, and through the Word all things were made.119 But when God speaks to those who are unable to grasp His utterance, He speaks only through a creature. Now He may employ a spiritual creature exclusively, in a dream or ecstasy, using the likeness of material things; or He may speak through a corporeal creature, as the bodily senses are affected by a form that appears or the sound of a voice that is heard.
50. If Adam, therefore, was in such a state that he was able to grasp the utterance of God which He makes present to the minds of angels through His own substance, there should be no doubt that God moved Adam's mind in time in a mysterious and unaccountable manner, without Himself being moved in time, impressing upon Adam's mind a useful and salutary precept of Truth, and in the same Truth revealing in an indescribable way!2° the punishment awaiting the transgressor.'*! It is thus that all good precepts are heard or seen in unchangeable Wisdom, which at times enters holy souls, although Wisdom itself does not move in time.
But if the justice of Adam was such that he also needed the authority of another creature holier and wiser, through which he would come to know God's will and command, as we have needed the prophets and they have needed the angels, why do we doubt that God spoke to him through some such creature in a language which he could understand? When Scripture says later! that when our first parents had sinned they heard the voice of the Lord as He walked in Paradise, no one who holds to the Catholic faith has any doubt that this was not done by means of the very substance of God Himself but by means of a creature subject to Him. ' On this point I have wished to comment more at length, be-
BOOK EIGHT 69 cause some heretics!?5 think that the substance of the Son of God was visible in itself before He assumed a body, and therefore they think that the Son of God before He took a body from the Virgin was seen by the patriarchs, on the theory that it was said only of God the Father, whom no man has seen or can see.124 According to them, the Son was seen in His own substance before He took on the form of a slave—an impious doctrine which a Catholic mind should put far from it.
I shall discuss this question more fully elsewhere, please God. For the present, I have finished this book, and in the following book I must hope!?> to discuss how the woman was created from the side of man.