Peter Abelard

PL 178, col. 740B

Datec. 1133PlaceThe Paraclete (Nogent-sur-Seine)TraditionlatinVerseGenesis 1:4

English

And he divided the light from the darkness. That is, by his working he distinguished the perfect from the imperfect and the distinct from the confused. Above, where he says, And God said: Let there be light, and light was made, he showed that the light was made at God's command. But here, when he says, And he divided the light from the darkness, he shows that this distinction of works also, which he calls light, was made by him; so that one and the same is understood to be both the Creator of the matter and the former of it, and the whole praise, both for the creation of the matter and for the forming of the works, is attributed to him.

Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by

Latin

Et divisit lucem a tenebris. Hoc est operatione sua perfectum discrevit ab imperfecto et distinctum a confuso. Superius autem ubi ait: Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux, et facta est lux, ad imperium quidem Dei lucem esse factam monstravit. Hic vero cum ait: Et divisit lucem a tenebris, per ipsum quoque hanc distinctionem operum, quam lucem appellat, factam esse demonstrat, ut idem ipse materiae Creator pariter et formator intelligatur, eique tota laus tam de creatione materiae quam de operum formatione tribuatur.

PL 178, col. 740B · pd

Notes

Abelard makes the verse do a piece of work nobody else asks of it. The light is the distinction of the works and the darkness is the confusion out of which they were distinguished — so that Gen 1:3 attributes the creating of matter to God and Gen 1:4 attributes the forming of it to the same God, and the whole praise falls in one place. The point is directed against a reading in which matter is one thing and its forming another, and it is the argument he needed at Gen 1:1 (see K4); here he gets it out of the dividing. It also means that on this crux the darkness is neither a privation nor an element nor an angel, but a state of the world before it was ordered — which is Honorius' and Wigbod's third answer as well, arrived at from the other end.

The formed from the unformedHe did not make it but ordered it

Threads

→ parallel · Wigbod
'Distinctio rei formatae ab informi', given as a third answer in a Carolingian dialogue, and 'operatione sua perfectum discrevit ab imperfecto et distinctum a confuso', argued at the Paraclete three hundred years later to prove that the creator of the matter and the former of the works are one and the same. The same reading of the darkness — not a privation, not a creature, but the unordered state of the world — put to two entirely different uses.
→ contests · Augustine
Both make the division an ordering rather than a making, and they mean opposite things by it. Augustine orders privations, so that even a nothing has its place. Abelard orders works, so that the distinction of the works just is the light and the confusion before them is the darkness — which leaves nothing for the privation doctrine to be about.