The earth's command to bring forth living creatures

But this is what someone does when he makes himself wiser than the oracles of the Spirit, and under the pretense of interpretation smuggles in his own ideas. Let it be understood, then, as it is written.

“Let the earth bring forth the living creature of cattle and wild beasts and creeping things” (Genesis 1:24). Consider the word of God running through creation, beginning then and still at work now, and pressing on to a prosperous end until the world is completed. For just as a ball, when someone pushes it and it finds a slope, is carried downhill by its own construction and the suitability of the ground, and does not stop until something level receives it, so the nature of existing things, set in motion by a single command, passes evenly through the creation that is subject to birth and decay, preserving the successions of kinds through likeness, until it arrives at the end itself. For it makes a horse the successor of a horse, and a lion of a lion, and an eagle of an eagle, and it hands on each of the animals, preserved through successive generations, until the completion of all things. No time corrupts or makes obsolete the distinctive traits of animals, but their nature, as if just now established, always fresh, runs along with time.

“Let the earth bring forth the living creature.” This command remained in the earth, and it does not cease serving the Creator. For some creatures are brought forth from the succession of those that existed before, but others are shown even now to be generated alive from the earth itself. For not only does it send up cicadas in rainy seasons, and countless other kinds of winged creatures borne in the air, most of which are nameless because of their smallness, but it already also produces mice and frogs from itself. Indeed, around Thebes in Egypt, whenever it rains heavily in the heat, the country is immediately filled with field mice. And we see that eels are formed in no other way than from the mud; neither an egg nor any other method establishes their succession, but their origin is from the earth.

“Let the earth bring forth the living creature.” The cattle are earthy and bent toward the ground, but man, the heavenly plant, differs as much in the dignity of his soul as in the shape of his bodily form. What is the shape of the four-footed animals? Their head is bent down toward the earth, it looks toward the belly, and it pursues the belly's pleasure in every way. Your head stands upright toward heaven; your eyes look upward. So if you ever dishonor yourself with the passions of the flesh, serving the belly and the parts beneath it, you have been grouped with the senseless cattle and have become like them. A different concern befits you: to seek the things above, where Christ is (Colossians 3:1-2), and to be above earthly things in your mind. As you have been shaped, so order your life as well. Have your citizenship in heaven (Philippians 3:20). Your true homeland is the Jerusalem above, and your fellow citizens and kin are the firstborn, enrolled in heaven (Hebrews 12:22-23).

“Let the earth bring forth the living creature.” The soul of the irrational animals, then, was not stored up in the earth and then revealed, but came into existence together with the command. And the soul of the irrational animals is one. For the one thing that characterizes it is irrationality.