Alcuin

English

Question 35. What is: God saw that it was good? — Answer. That is: what he made pleased him to remain in that goodness in which it pleased him to be made.

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

Latin

PL 100, col. 520B · pd

Notes

One sentence, and it removes the difficulty the whole Latin bench is worrying at. If 'God saw that it was good' were an inspection, God would be learning something; Alcuin makes it a persistence of the same pleasure — what pleased him to be made pleased him to remain. Augustine puts the same thing at City of God XI.21 with more machinery ('he teaches that it is good, he does not learn it') and Comestor will divide the moment in two, pleasing in foreknowledge that it should be made and pleasing in being that it should stay. The Carolingian schoolbook has it in twenty words and does not notice that it is an answer to anything.

Threads

• ← echoes · Hugh of St Victor
  Alcuin dissolves the difficulty — what pleased him to be made pleased him to remain — and Hugh reopens it as a question about the medium of the seeing. Both are answering the objection that if God saw the light was good he learned something; the Carolingian schoolbook answers in one sentence what the Paris schoolroom takes a chapter over.
• ← echoes · Peter Comestor
  'Quae placuerat in praesentia, vel praescientia, ut fieret; placuit in essentia, ut maneret' is Alcuin's answer with the moment divided in two, foreknowledge and being; the doubling is Comestor's and the pattern — what pleased to be made pleased to remain — is Alcuin's.
• ← parallel · Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer
  Two enumerations of what was made at the beginning, answering the same question with incompatible inventories. Alcuin, at the question next but one to this: heaven, earth, angels, light, air, water and the soul of man. Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer: heaven, earth, light, darkness, tohu, bohu, wind and water. The Latin list has the angels and the soul and no darkness; the rabbinic list has the darkness and the tohu and no angels. Neither list argues, and between them they contain the whole disagreement of this crux.