Augustine

English

Although, then, the obscurity of the divine speech is useful even for this, that it brings forth many opinions of the truth and produces them into the light of knowledge, while one man understands it this way and another that — provided always that what is understood in an obscure place is confirmed either by the attestation of manifest things, or by other passages not at all doubtful; and provided that, when many things are handled, one arrives also at what the writer meant, or, if that lies hidden, that on occasion of handling a deep obscurity some other true things are said: it does not seem to me an opinion at odds with the works of God, if, when that first light was made, the angels are understood to have been created, and a distinction to have been made between the holy angels and the unclean, where it is said, And God divided between the light and the darkness; and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. For he alone could distinguish these, who could also foreknow, before they fell, that they would fall, and that, deprived of the light of truth, they would remain in darksome pride. For between this day and night best known to us — that is, between this light and these darknesses — he commanded the luminaries of heaven most familiar to our senses to divide: Let there be, he said, luminaries in the firmament of heaven, that they may shine upon the earth, and divide between the day and the night. And a little after: And God made, he says, two great luminaries; the greater luminary for the beginning of the day, and the lesser luminary for the beginning of the night; and the stars: and God set them in the firmament of heaven, to shine upon the earth, and to preside over the day and the night, and to divide between the light and the darkness (Gen 1:4, 5, 14, 16–18). But between that light, which is the holy fellowship of the angels shining intelligibly with the illumination of truth, and the darkness contrary to it — that is, the most foul minds of the evil angels turned away from the light of justice — he alone could divide, to whom even a future evil, not of nature but of will, could not be hidden or uncertain.

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

Latin

PL 41, col. 332 · pd

Notes

Augustine's angelic reading, and it is offered with more hedging than anything else he says about this verse: the obscurity of Scripture is useful because it breeds many true readings, and 'it does not seem to me an opinion at odds with the works of God' if the light is the angels and the division is between the holy and the unclean. The argument for it is a philological one — the luminaries of the fourth day are commanded to divide light from darkness in the ordinary sense, so the division of the first day must be another division — and it depends on nobody but God being able to make it, since it separates by foreknowledge of a fall that has not happened. This is the reading Wigbod, Angelomus, Hugh, Rupert and Comestor all take up, and none of them keeps the hedge.

Threads

• → contests · Augustine
  Augustine against Augustine, and he knows it: the earlier work takes the light of day one as possibly ethereal, sensitive or rational and the darkness as the privation of whichever it is; the City of God offers the reading in which the light is the angels and the darkness the apostate spirits, and hedges it — 'it does not seem to me an opinion at odds with the works of God'. Every later Latin witness on this crux has to hold both, and Hugh's solution is to say that both divisions happened at the same instant.
• ← echoes · Hugh of St Victor
  Hugh takes over the angelic division and removes Augustine's hedge, then adds what Augustine does not say: that the visible division and the invisible one happened at precisely the same moment of time, because the visible works of wisdom and the invisible outcomes had to correspond.
• ← echoes · Rupert of Deutz
  The angelic reading with a new argument under it. Augustine offers it as one true reading among several; Rupert derives it from the word 'good' — none is good but God, only a rational creature can partake of him, therefore the light of which it is said 'that it was good' must be intellectual — and then makes the division a sentence pronounced on the devil, unchangeable in both directions.
• → contests · Bereshit Rabbah
  Both benches read the darkness of this verse as something set aside, and the thing set aside is not the same. For Augustine it is the apostate angels, ordered but not approved; for R. Yehuda bar Simon and the Rabbis it is the light that is set aside — hivdilo lo, he separated it for himself, or for the righteous in the time to come. One tradition takes the division to be a removal of the darkness from fellowship, the other a reservation of the light from use, and each is unavailable to the other.