eating, or, as Avicenna puts it, His creative action is in the highest
degree generous. It is also manifest that His action involves no
modification of His being--without changing, He causes the changeable.
Consequently, though creatures are related to Him, as effects to their
cause, He is not really related to them.

ON THE PRODUCTION OF LIVING THINGS

From the 'Quaestiones Disputatae'

According to Augustine, the passage "Let the earth bring forth the green
herb" means, not that plants were then actually produced in their proper
nature, but that a germinative power was given the earth to produce
plants by the work of propagation; so that the earth is then said to
have brought forth the green herb and the fruit-yielding tree, inasmuch
as it received the power of producing them. This position is
strengthened by the authority of Scripture (Gen. ii. 4):--"These are the
generations of the heaven and the earth, when they were created, in the
day that the Lord God made the heaven and the earth, and every plant in
the field before it sprang up in the earth, and every herb in the ground
before it grew." From this text we infer, first, that all the works of
the six days were created in the day that God made heaven and earth and
every plant of the field; and consequently that all plants, which are
said to have been created on the third day, were produced at the same
time that God created heaven and earth. The second inference is that
plants were then produced not actually, but only according to causal
virtues, in that the power to produce them was given to the earth. And
this is meant when it is said that He produced every plant of the field
before it actually arose upon the earth by His dispositive action, and
every herb of the earth before it actually grew. Hence, before they came
forth in reality, they were made causally in the earth.

This view, moreover, is supported by reason. For in those first days God
made the creature either in its cause, or in its origin, or in its
actuality, by the work from which He afterward rested; He nevertheless
works even till now in the administration of things created by the work
of propagation. To this latter process belongs the actual production of
plants from the earth, because all that is needed to bring them forth is
the energy of the heavenly bodies as their father, so to say, and the
power of the earth in place of a mother. Plants, therefore, were
produced on the third day, not ac