Finding

The two benches ask the same question and each is shut out of the other's answer by a ruling it made somewhere else. The Latin bench's dominant answer, Augustine's, is that the light is the angelic creation, made and formed on the first day; the rabbinic bench cannot reach for it, because Bereshit Rabbah has already ruled — twice, at 1:3 and again at 3:8, which is K10's witness — that nothing whatever was created on the first day besides God, precisely so that nobody could say Michael held the sky at the south and Gabriel at the north while God measured in the middle. And the rabbinic answer, that the light was too good for the wicked and was stored away for the righteous in the time to come, has no Latin counterpart at all: the Latin either turns the light into angels or turns it into a proto-sun, and the one thing it never does is take the light out of the world and keep it. Where the two do meet, they meet on the compromise nobody on either side prefers. Augustine reports, at De Genesi ad litteram I.11, that 'this too I know to have been said by someone' — that the nature of light was made on the first day and the luminaries were afterwards made out of it — and he cannot say whose opinion it is; b. Chagigah 12a gives it as the sages' answer against R. Yaakov, in the same words and to the same objection from Gen 1:17. On the Latin side alone, the crux is decided twice and each time by weight rather than by argument. Bede does not refute the angelic light, he steps round it in a single sentence by naming three lights instead of two and leaving the angels already made and elsewhere; and Bonaventure, closing the question in the schools eight hundred years after Augustine opened it, grants that Augustine's position is 'multum rationabilis' and declines it because the expositors more generally follow the other. In between, the twelfth century simply builds a physics for the light it has decided on — a body of fire in the sun's stead (Hugh), a brightness like the sky before sunrise on a twelve-hour circuit (Honorius), a luminous cloud thin as the dawn (Comestor) — while Rupert of Deutz, in the same decade, argues that a light of that kind would make the first day the poorest of the six, an unstable accident snuffed out after three days by a God who changed his mind. The crux has a head and an end, and both were found after the argument above was written. Philo's light of the first day is intelligible, an image of the divine Reason and a supercelestial star from which the sun and the moon and the rest draw their beams so far as each has the power — which is Augustine's 'this too I know to have been said by someone', the light out of which the luminaries were made, with the mechanism supplied and four centuries earlier; and it is the same shape as Bereshit Rabbah's light of God's garment, an overflow from God rather than a creature standing on its own, though neither can have read the other. Lyra ends the Latin side by giving the question up. Ista lux est lux solis: the light of the first day is the sun's own light, an accidental quality from which the other luminaries are lit, still unformed in some respect until the fourth day, which is what formed it. Hugh's body of fire and Comestor's luminous cloud were inventions the chapter forced; Lyra's answer requires nothing that is not already in the sky, and after it the Latin bench stops asking.