Now that we have solved, as well as we could, this very difficult question about the eternal God creating new things, without any novelty of will, it is easy to see how much better it is that God was pleased to produce the human race from the one individual whom He created, than if He had originated it in several men.For as to the other animals, He created some solitary, and naturally seeking lonely places,--as the eagles, kites, lions, wolves, and such like; others gregarious, which herd together, and prefer to live in company,--as pigeons, starlings, stags, and little fallow deer, and the like: but neither class did He cause to be propagated from individuals, but called into being several at once.
Man, on the other hand, whose nature was to be a mean between the angelic and bestial, He created in such sort, that if he remained in subjection to His Creator as his rightful Lord, and piously kept His commandments, he should pass into the company of the angels, and obtain, without the intervention of death,(1) a blessed and endless immortality; but if he offended the Lord his God by a proud and disobedient use of his free will, he should become subject to death, and live as the beasts do,--the slave of appetite, and doomed to eternal punishment after death.And therefore God created only one single man, not, certainly, that he might be a solitary, bereft of all society, but that by this means the unity of society and the bond of concord might be more effectually commended to him, men being bound together not only by similarity of nature, but by family affection.
And indeed He did not even create the woman that was to be given him as his wife, as he created the man, but created her out of the man, that the whole human race might derive from one man.
CHAP.22.--THAT GOD FOREKNEW THAT THE FIRST MAN WOULD SIN, AND THATHE AT THE SAME
TIME FORESAW HOW LARGE A MULTITUDE OF GODLY PERSONS WOULD BY HIS GRACEBE
TRANSLATED TO THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE ANGELS.
And God was not ignorant that man would sin, and that, being himself made subject now to death, he would propagate men doomed to die, and that these mortals would run to such enormities in sin, that even the beasts devoid of rational will, and who were created in numbers from the waters and the earth, would live more securely and peaceably with their own kind than men, who had been propagated from one individual for the very purpose of commending concord.For not even lions or dragons have ever waged with their kind such wars as men have waged with one another.(2) But God foresaw also that by His grace a people would be called to adoption, and that they, being justified by the remission of their sins, would be united by the Holy Ghost to the holy angels in eternal peace, the last enemy, death, being destroyed; and He knew that this people would derive profit from the consideration that God had caused all men to be derived from one, for the sake of showing how highly He prizes unity in a multitude.
CHAP.23.--OF THE NATURE OF THE HUMAN SOUL CREATED IN THE IMAGE OF GOD.
God, then, made man in His own image.For He created for him a soul endowed with reason and intelligence, so that he might excel all the creatures of earth, air, and sea, which were not so gifted.
And when He had formed the man out of the dust of the earth, and had willed that his soul should be such as I have said,--whether He had already made it, and now by breathing imparted it to man, or rather made it by breathing, so that that breath which God made by breathing (for what else is "to breathe" than to make breath ?) is the soul,(1)--He made also a wife for him, to aid him in the work of generating his kind, and her He formed of a bone taken out of the man's side, working in a divine manner.For we are not to conceive of this work in a carnal fashion, as if God wrought as we commonly see artisans, who use their hands, and material furnished to them, that by their artistic skill they may fashion some material object.God's hand is God's power; and He, working invisibly, effects visible results.But this seems fabulous rather than true to men, who measure by customary and everyday works the power and wisdom of God, whereby He understands and produces without seeds even seeds themselves; and because they cannot understand the things which at the beginning were created, they are sceptical regarding them--as if the very things which they do know about human propagation, conceptions and births, would seem less incredible if told to those who had no experience of them; though these very things, too, are attributed by many rather to physical and natural causes than to the work of the divine mind.
CHAP.24.--WHETHER THE ANGELS CAN BE SAID TO BE THE CREATORS OF ANY, EVEN THE LEASTCREATURE.
But in this book we have nothing to do with those who do not believe that the divine mind made or cares for this world, As for those who believe their own Plato, that all mortal animals--among whom man holds the pre-eminent place, and is near to the gods themselves--were created not by that most high God who made the world, but by other lesser gods created by the Supreme, and exercising a delegated power under His control,--if only those persons be delivered from the superstition which prompts them to seek a plausible reason for paying divine honors and sacrificing to these gods as their creators, they will easily be disentangled also from this their error.For it is blasphemy to believe or to say (even before it can be understood) that any other than God is creator of any nature, be it never so small and mortal.
And as for the angels, whom those Platonists prefer to call gods, although they do, so far as they are permitted and commissioned, aid in the production of the things around us, yet not on that account are we to call them creators, any more than we call gardeners the creators of fruits and trees.
CHAP.25.--THAT GOD ALONE IS THE CREATOR OF EVERY KIND OF CREATURE, WHATEVER ITSNATURE OR FORM.
