Chapter
II.—Generation Something Akin to the First Formation of Eve from
the Side and Nature of Adam; God the Creator of Men in Ordinary
Generation.
And this perhaps is what was shadowed forth by the sleep
and trance of the first man, which prefigured the embraces of connubial
love. When thirsting for children a man falls into a kind of
trance, softened and
subdued by the pleasures of generation as by sleep, so that again
something drawn from his flesh and from his bones is, as I said, fashioned into another man. For the harmony of the bodies being disturbed in the embraces of love, as those tell us who have experience of the marriage state, all the marrow-like and generative part of the blood, like a kind of liquid bone, coming together from all the members, worked into foam and curdled, is projected through the organs of generation into the living body of the female. And probably it is for this reason that a man is said to leave his father and his mother, since he is then suddenly unmindful of all things when united to his wife in the embraces of love, he is overcome by the desire of generation, offering his side to the divine Creator to take away from it, so that the father may again appear in the son.
Wherefore, if God still forms man, shall we not be
guilty of audacity if we think of the generation of children as
something offensive, which the Almighty Himself is not ashamed to make
use of in working with His undefiled hands; for He says to Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee;” and to Job, “Didst thou take clay and form a living creature, and make it speak upon the earth?” and Job draws near to Him in supplication, saying, “Thine hands have made me and fashioned me.” Would it not, then, be absurd to forbid marriage unions, seeing that we expect that after us there will be martyrs, and those who shall oppose the evil one, for whose sake also the Word promised that He would shorten those days? For if the generation of children henceforth had seemed evil to God, as you said, for what reason will those who have come into existence in opposition to the divine decree and will be able to appear well-pleasing to God? And must not that which is begotten be something spurious, and not a creature of God, if, like a counterfeit coin, it is moulded apart from the intention and ordinance of the lawful authority? And so we concede to men the power of forming men.