The reason for this break in the narrative [in the description of the genealogies to the flood] was, I take it, that the writer, as though bidden by God, was unwilling to have the beginning of world chronology reckoned from the earthly city (that is, from the generation of Cain), and so he deliberately went back to Adam for a new beginning. If we ask why this return to recapitulate was made immediately after mentioning Seth’s son,^[1] the man who hoped to call upon the name of the Lord God, the answer must be that this was the proper way to present the two cities. The one begins and ends with a murderer, for La-mech, too, as he admitted to his two wives, was a murderer.^[2] The other city begins with the man who hoped to call upon the name of the Lord God, for the invocation of God is the whole and the highest preoccupation of the city of God during its pilgrimage in this world. It is symbolized in the one man (Enosh) born of the resurrection (Seth) of the man who was slain (Abel). That one man in fact is a symbol of the unity of the whole heavenly city, which is not yet in the fullness that it is destined to reach and which is adumbrated in this prophetic figure.

Christ is the invisible image of the invisible God, just as according to the Scripture narrative we say that the image of Adam was his son Seth. It is written thus: And Adam begot Seth after his own image and after his own kind. This image preserves the unity of nature and substance common to a father and a son. For whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise.^[1] In this very fact—that the Son does all things just as the Father does—the Father’s image is reproduced in the Son, whose birth from the Father is as it were an act of his will proceeding from the mind.

Now notice that when the inspired writer sets forth the length of the lives of the men he mentions, the narrative always ends with the formula and he begot sons and daughters, and all the time that so and so lived were so many years, and he died. Considering that these sons and daughters are not named and remembering how long people lived in that first period of our history, can anyone refuse to believe that so great a multitude of men was born as to have been able, in groups, to build a great number of cities?

FOR a wise man should remove himself from fleshy pleasures, elevate his soul and draw away from the body. This is to know oneself a man—homo in Latin but Enosh in the language of the Chaldeans.

Enoch, in that he was engendered seventh in the line of descent from Adam, prefigured that the Lord would be conceived and born not in the usual way of mortal nature but by the power of the Holy Spirit. He prefigured that the full grace of the Holy Spirit, which is described by the prophet as sevenfold,^[1] would come to rest upon Christ in a special way when he was about to be born. And he would baptize in the Holy Spirit and give the gifts of the Spirit to those who believe in him.