Section VII

VI. Having now, therefore, gone through the whole question of the more important plants in the world, let us see in what manner also the all-wise God has fashioned the trees which exist in man, that lesser world. Therefore immediately having taken our body as a region of fertile soil, he has made in it the outward senses as so many channels; and then he has carefully trained each of those outward senses as a plant susceptible of cultivation and of the greatest use, implanting the sense of hearing in the ears, and that of seeing in the eyes, and that of smell in the nostrils, and all the other senses in the places akin to and appropriate to them. And I have a witness in favour of this my argument in that god-like man who speaks thus in the Psalms: "He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? and he that fashioned the eye, must not he See?" [1519] Moreover, those other faculties which reside apart from the main body, being situated in the legs and hands and the other parts of the body, whether within or without, all these faculties, I say, are noble and excellent offshoots. And the more excellent and more perfect parts he very appropriately stationed near the dominant portion of the whole, as being in the centre, and able preeminently to bring forth fruit, as being the lord of the whole. And these faculties are perception and comprehension, and felicity of conjecture, and study, and recollection, and habit, and disposition, and every variety of art, and certainty of knowledge, and an ever-mindful apprehension of the speculations of every kind of virtue. Now, no one can properly or sufficiently cultivate any one of these within, but the one uncreated Maker of them, and who has not merely created them, but who also makes all these plants to correspond to everything which takes place; he alone can manage them and perfect them as they should be perfected.

VII. And the way in which Paradise was planted is in strict conformity with what has been here said; for we read that "God planted a Paradise in Eden, towards the east, and there he placed the man whom he had Made." [1520] Now, to think that this means that God planted vines and olives, and trees of apples and pomegranates, and things of that kind, is great and incurable folly. But in order that no one might imagine that the Creator had need of anything that he had created, Moses has made a most important declaration when he says, "The Lord, the King of ages, for ever and Ever." [1521] Accordingly, God is both the Father, and the Creator, and the Governor, in reality and truth, of all the things that are in heaven and in the whole world. And, indeed, the future is concealed and separated from the present moment at one time by a brief, and at another time by a long interval. But God is also the Creator of time, for he is the Father of that which is the father of time; and the father of time is the world, which proves that its own birth is the motion of time. But nothing is future to God, because he is in possession of and the author of the boundaries of time; for it is not time, but rather the archetype and model of time. But in eternity nothing is passed, nothing is future, but everything is at the present moment.