Ambrose

English

Some ask why Scripture recorded evening first and morning afterward, lest it should seem to put night before day. They fail to notice, first, that it put the day first by saying, 'And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night'; and then that evening is the end of the day, and morning the end of the night. So, to give the day the prerogative and the birthright, it named the end of the day first, since night was to follow, and afterward added the end of the night. […] Excellently, too, he said one day and not first day. For with a second day and a third and the rest to follow he could have said 'first,' and that seemed to be the order; but he laid down a law, that twenty-four hours of day and night together be defined by the name of day only — as if he were saying: the measure of twenty-four hours is the time of one day. For as the generation of men is counted and the women are understood along with them, since the lesser are bound to the greater, so too the days are numbered and the nights reckoned as joined to them. Therefore as there is one circuit, so there is one day.

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

Latin

PL 14, col. 143C · pd

Notes

Ambrose's chapter heading states the crux exactly: 'That day is here set before night, against what seems so to some; why it is called one day rather than first; and that it is closed by a morning end.' His answers are three: evening comes first because evening is the end of the day and morning the end of the night, so naming evening first gives the day its birthright; 'one' rather than 'first' because a day is a single circuit of twenty-four hours; and the day names the night along with it as men name women. He also notes that many call a week 'one day' because it returns into itself. At PL 14:145C he adds a fourth: the day is set apart from the others as 'one,' not compared with them as 'first,' because on it the foundations of all things were laid. Elided in the English at […]: the proof from Scripture's custom of naming the greater term for the pair (Jacob's 'days of my life', Ps 89:10's 'days of our years', never 'and nights'), and the sentence 'Principium ergo diei, vox Dei est: fiat lux.'

Threads

• → echoes · Basil of Caesarea
  Phase 6, and the strongest single edge on the daf. Basil: nox diem comitatur, and evening is named first ut nativitatis diurnae privilegia reservaret. Ambrose, five years later in Milan: evening is the end of the day and morning the end of the night, so 'to give the day the prerogative and the birthright, it named the end of the day first, since night was to follow'. Prerogative and birthright is privilegia and nativitas, in that order, on the same clause. Ambrose is reading Basil's Greek, not this Latin — Eustathius translated a generation after the Hexaemeron of Milan — so the two Latin texts here are independent renderings of one Greek sentence, and every later Latin answer to 'why evening first', Bede's and Bruno's included, comes down from Ambrose's.
• → echoes · The Seventy
  Ambrose reads a Latin text that keeps the Greek cardinal and builds his chapter on it: 'Praeclare etiam unum non primum diem dixit.' Without ἡμέρα μία behind the Latin there is no question to ask.
• → parallel · Rashi
  The same question in two languages seven hundred years apart: he could have said 'first,' with a second and third to follow, and that seemed the order — so why 'one'? Ambrose answers from the twenty-four-hour circuit, Rashi from God's solitude. No contact is possible in either direction.
• → parallel · Augustine
  Both refuse the evening start and both do it by making vespera the end of a completed day rather than the opening of a new one. Ambrose adds the birthright argument, Augustine the Manichean opponent; Augustine was hearing Ambrose preach at Milan in the years before he wrote.
• ← echoes · Honorius Augustodunensis
  'Vespere est finis diei; mane autem finis noctis: quae duo juncta, viginti quatuor horae fiunt' is Ambrose's definition of evening and morning and his twenty-four hours, in the same order.
• ← echoes · Hugh of St Victor
  Both make evening the end of the day and dawn the end of the night, and both conclude that day naturally precedes night; Hugh adds that the first day had no dawn of its own, which is why evening had to be named first.
• ← echoes · Philo of Alexandria
  The Latin channel for this whole reading, and it does not name its source. Ambrose: excellently, too, he said one day and not first day. Philo: day not first but one. Ambrose's Hexaemeron follows Philo's De opificio closely enough that agreements of this kind are the rule rather than the exception, and here the agreement is at the level of the sentence. What Ambrose does not take over is the reason, the monosis of the intelligible world, which is unavailable to him; he supplies the eternity of the day instead. Every Latin after him has the observation without the argument that produced it.