Alcuin

English

Question 26. What is: 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth'? — Answer. In the Son God completed [ms.: made] heaven and earth.

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

Latin

PL 100, col. 519C · pd

Notes

The whole crux in eleven words, question and answer, with nothing left of the argument. Jerome had denied that the Hebrew says 'in the Son'; Augustine had offered it as one of three; Bede had called it not improbable. In the Carolingian schoolroom it is simply the answer, and it is the answer a boy memorises. The Glossa will later print exactly this — a single word, Filio — as its own gloss on in principio, under Alcuin's name. Migne prints perfecit with a manuscript variant fecit; the variant is kept in the English in brackets because the choice is not indifferent, perficere making the Son the completion of the work and facere merely its instrument.

Threads

• → contests · Jerome
  The reading Jerome had declared false, printed as the answer to the question and in four words: 'In Filio perfecit Deus coelum et terram.' No Hebrew, no versions, no 'according to the sense rather than the word'.
• ← cites · Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)
  The Glossa prints Alcuin's answer as a gloss of one word — '(ALCUIN. in Gen. tom. I.) « In principio. » Filio' — so that the twelfth-century reader meets the reading Jerome refuted as a bare equation under a great name, with nothing on the page to argue with.