The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil According to the Holy Scriptures

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in book 14 of The City of God, chapter 26, in paradise, as he wished, as long as he wished for what God had commanded. He lived enjoying God, from whose goodness he was good. He lived without any want, having it always in his power to live thus. Food was present, lest he hunger; drink, lest he thirst; the tree of life, lest old age dissolve him. Nothing of corruption in the body, nor from the body, brought any annoyances to any of his senses. No internal disease was feared, no blow from without. Total health in the flesh, total tranquility in the soul. Just as in Paradise there was no heat or cold, so in its inhabitant no offense to the good will arose from desire or fear. Nothing at all sad, nothing vainly happy. True joy was perpetuated from God, in whom he was aflame. What else do the things narrated thus far indicate, if we also weigh them on the balance of sound reason, other than that Paradise was a place truly terrestrial and corporeal, and was actually founded by God in the beginning? Whoever wishes to accept it otherwise and only figuratively would surely drag and twist the open letter of Scripture to very many exotic and absurd things. Hence St. Augustine rightly says in book 8 of On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, chapter 1, number 4:

Aug. l. 8.
de Gen.
ad litt.
cap. 1.
Num. 4.

These of ours, who have faith in these divine books, and do not wish Paradise to be understood according to the propriety of the letter, namely a most pleasant place shaded by fruitful groves, and the same being large and fertile, when they see so many and such great green things grow without any human work by the hidden work of God, I wonder how they believe man himself was so made, which they have never seen: or if he too must be understood figuratively, who begot Cain and Abel and Seth? Or were they also only figuratively, and not also men born of men? Let them therefore attend to this presumption of their neighbor, where it tends, and let them endeavor with us to accept all things that are narrated to have happened at the beginning in an expression of propriety.