Augustine

English

And this too is not to be passed over in silence, that where God said, Let there be light, and light was made, there was at once added, And God saw the light, that it was good — not after he had separated between the light and the darkness, and called the light day and the darkness night, lest he should seem to have borne the testimony of his approval to such darkness along with the light. For where the darkness is blameless, between which and this light visible to our eyes the luminaries of heaven divide, it is put not before but after: And God saw that it was good. And he set them, it says, in the firmament of heaven, to shine upon the earth, and to preside over the day and the night, and to separate between the light and the darkness. And God saw that it was good. For both pleased him, because both are without sin. But where God said, Let there be light, and light was made, and God saw the light, that it was good; and afterwards it is added, And God separated between the light and the darkness; and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night (Gen 1:3–5, 17, 18) — in this place it is not added, And God saw that it was good; lest both should be called good, when one of them was evil, by its own vice and not by nature. And therefore the light alone pleased the Creator there: but the angelic darkness, though it had to be ordered, did not have to be approved.

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

Latin

PL 41, col. 333 · pd

Notes

The star witness of this crux, and the argument is made entirely out of where a clause stands. On the first day the approval comes immediately after the making and before the division; on the fourth day, where the darkness is blameless, it comes after the division. So the placing is deliberate: on day one God does not say 'it was good' after separating light from darkness, lest he seem to approve such darkness along with the light. The reason is given in five words — 'lest both should be called good, when one of them was evil' — and the last sentence keeps the distinction the whole Augustinian doctrine rests on: the angelic darkness had to be ordered, but did not have to be approved. Bereshit Rabbah 3:6 reads the same silence out of the next verse by exactly the same method — 'and to the darkness God called night' is not written here, but 'and to the darkness he called night' — and R. Abahu at 2:5 argues the identical point from the identical omission at the identical clause.

Threads

• → parallel · Bereshit Rabbah
  The star thread of this crux, and both benches reach it by reading a silence in the syntax. Augustine: on day one 'and God saw that it was good' is placed before the division and not after it, 'lest he should seem to have borne the testimony of his approval to such darkness along with the light' — and on day four, where the darkness is blameless, it is placed after. R. Elazar: 'the Holy One never joins his name to the bad but only to the good, for it is not written and to the darkness GOD called night, but and to the darkness he called night.' One argues from where a clause of approval stands, the other from where the divine name is dropped, at consecutive verses, with no contact of any kind.
• → parallel · Bereshit Rabbah
  The same inference from the same omission at the same clause. R. Abahu: 'but I do not know which of them he desires — since it is written and God saw the light that it was good, he desires the deeds of the righteous and does not desire the deeds of the wicked.' Augustine: 'lest both should be called good, when one of them was evil.' Both take the absence of an approval of the darkness to be a deliberate withholding, and both make it decisive.
• ← cites · Wigbod
  'Et cur non dicit Scriptura, vidit Deus tenebras quod essent bonae, sicut de luce dictum est? … in his dicens quia boni sunt, in illis nullatenus dicens, ne peccata quae erant tenebrae adprobare videretur' reproduces City of God XI.20's argument and its reason almost word for word, under the rubric AUGUSTINUS — on the same page as the proposition that there is an essence of darkness, which Augustine denies everywhere.
• ← contests · Rupert of Deutz
  Both build on the placing of 'God saw that it was good', and they build opposite things. Augustine: the approval is put before the division so that God should not seem to approve the darkness. Rupert: the approval is put where it is because it is a judgement passed on a rational light — and the division that follows is the judgement passed on the rest. Where Augustine finds a refusal to approve, Rupert finds a verdict delivered.
• ← parallel · Paul of Burgos
  Augustine's account of why the approval is withheld -- lest both should be called good -- is the Latin bench's own answer to the question Burgos and Lyra are fighting about, and neither of them uses it. Burgos reaches instead for Rabanus's arithmetic of the unclean binary and for the Master's sacramentum, both of which make the missing formula a fact about the number two rather than about what was made on that day.
• ← parallel · Nicholas of Lyra
  Augustine's reason for the withheld approval is that the two should not both be called good; Lyra's is that approval regards a completed work and the work of the second day was not finished until the third. Both make the silence deliberate and neither needs the arithmetic of the binary that Rabanus and the Master reached for and that Lyra dismisses. Augustine is on the daf and is not cited by any of the three men arguing about it.