For it was fitting that he should be the founder of the human race, and also the king of everything that is born of the earth, and that he should have this as an especial honour of his own, that, as he was the first who had any acquaintance with the animals, he might also be the first inventor and pronouncer of their names; for it would have been absurd for them to be left without names, and subsequently to have names given to them by some younger man, to the honour and glory of the elder.
And when Adam saw the figure of his wife, as the prophet says, and that it had been produced not by any connexion, nor out of a woman, as human beings in after times were produced, but that she was as it were a nature on the borders between these two kinds, like a graft from a shoot of another vine taken off and grafted into a second one, on which account he says, “For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall become one Flesh;”{3}{#ge 2:24.} in saying which he used a most gentle expression, which was at the same time most perfectly true, meaning that they would be united by sympathy in their griefs and joys.
From the same book, or else from the last book of the Questions arising in Exodus.
Truly the divine place is inaccessible, and one which is hard to be approached, nor is it given even to the purest intellect to be able to ascend to such a height as to touch it. It is impossible for human nature to behold the face of the living God; but the word “face” is not used here in its literal meaning, but it is a metaphorical expression, here intended to manifest the purest and simplest form of the living God, since man is not recognized more by anything than by his face, according to his peculiar distinctive qualities and form. For God does not say, “I am not visible in my nature.” But who, in fact, is more visible than he who is the Father of all visible things? And being such with regard to being seen, I am, says he, seen by no mortal man; and the reason of this is the inability of the created man to behold him.
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