Augustine

English

In this Beginning, God, you made heaven and earth: in your Word, in your Son, in your Strength, in your Wisdom, in your Truth, speaking in a wondrous way and in a wondrous way making. Who shall grasp it? who shall tell it?

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

Latin

PL 32, col. 813 · pd

Notes

Two sentences, and the crux's Latin answer at its highest pitch: the Beginning is named five times over — Word, Son, Strength, Wisdom, Truth — and the naming is prayer, not argument. This is also the clearest place to see how close the two benches come without touching. 'In your Wisdom you made heaven and earth' is, as a sentence, what Targum Neofiti prints as the text of Genesis 1:1, and what Prov 3:19 says in the mouth of R. Banai at Bereshit Rabbah 1:4. Augustine is confessing to the second person of the Trinity; Neofiti is translating a Hebrew word; R. Banai means the Torah.

Threads

• → parallel · Targum Neofiti
  'In this Beginning, God, you made heaven and earth: in your Word, in your Son, in your Wisdom' is, as a sentence, what Neofiti prints as the text of Genesis 1:1. A Latin bishop's prayer and a Palestinian targumist's translation arrive at the same clause, and mean by Wisdom the second person of the Trinity and the Torah respectively.
• → echoes · Augustine
  The argument of the anti-Manichaean book turned into prayer: 'in Christ, since the Word was with the Father' becomes 'in your Word, in your Son, in your Strength, in your Wisdom, in your Truth' — five names where the treatise had one, and no opponent in view.
• ← echoes · Augustine
  The same identification with its proof supplied: the Confessions name the Beginning as Wisdom without arguing, and the City of God adds the psalm that licenses it, 'omnia in sapientia fecisti' (Ps 104:24).