Caput 9. De omnipotentia Dei. Cur nos non lapis, arbor, etc., facti.

The Almighty Hand and My Place in Creation

The soul marvels that God's omnipotent hand, which creates angels and worms with equal ease, chose to make it a rational being rather than a stone or beast, not because of any merit but purely out of goodness.

Your almighty hand, always one and the same, created angels in heaven and tiny worms on earth: no greater in the one, no lesser in the other. For just as no hand could create an angel, so no hand could create a tiny worm; just as no hand could create heaven, so no hand could create the smallest leaf of a tree; just as no hand could create a body, so no hand could make a single hair white or black—but your almighty hand, for which all things are equally possible.^✦1 For that hand finds it no more possible to create a tiny worm than an angel, no more impossible to stretch out heaven than a leaf, no easier to form a hair than a body, no harder to found the earth on the waters than to found the waters on the earth. But whatever it willed, it did—in heaven and on earth, in the sea and in all the deeps—and it made me among all things, just as it willed, was able, and knew how.^✦✦ Your hand could indeed, Lord, have created me as a stone, or a bird, or a serpent, or some wild beast—and it knew how. But it would not, because of its goodness. Why am I not a stone, or a tree, or some wild beast? Because your goodness ordered it so. And no merits of mine came before this was ordered.