Augustine
PL 32, col. 838
English
Hence if Genesis has passed over in silence something that God made — which nevertheless neither sound faith nor sure understanding doubts that God made — no sober teaching will on that account dare to say that those waters are coeternal with God, merely because we have heard them mentioned in the book of Genesis but do not find where they were made. Why then should we not understand, with truth teaching us, that the formless matter also, which this Scripture calls the invisible and unordered earth and the dark deep, was made by God out of nothing, and is therefore not coeternal with him — although this narrative has omitted to state where it was made?
Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by
Latin
Unde si aliquid Genesis tacuit Deum fecisse, quod tamen Deum fecisse nec sana fides, nec certus ambigit intellectus; nec ideo ulla sobria doctrina dicere audebit istas aquas coaeternas Deo, quia in libro Geneseos commemoratas quidem audivimus, ubi autem factae sint non invenimus: cur non informem quoque illam materiem, quam Scriptura haec terram invisibilem et incompositam, tenebrosamque abyssum appellat, docente veritate intelligamus a Deo factam esse de nihilo, ideoque illi non esse coaeternam, quamvis ubi facta sit, omiserit enuntiare ista narratio?
PL 32, col. 838 · pd
Notes
The argument that had to be made because the doctrine has no verse. Genesis never says that God made the formless matter, and the objection from that silence is real; Augustine answers it with a second silence in the same chapter. The waters above the firmament are mentioned and their making is never narrated either, and nobody is willing to call them coeternal with God — so the silence cannot be what decides. It is exactly the ground the philosopher takes at Bereshit Rabbah 1:9, and Rabban Gamliel's answer is the opposite method: not an argument about what silence can prove, but a verse produced for each item on the list, tohu from Isaiah, darkness from Isaiah, the waters from the Psalm, the wind from Amos, the deeps from Proverbs. Augustine has the more general answer and Rabban Gamliel the more convincing one, and neither could have used the other's.
Out of nothingScripture's silence proves nothing
Threads
- → parallel · Bereshit Rabbah
One difficulty, two opposite methods. Augustine argues that Genesis' silence about when a thing was made cannot prove it coeternal, and makes the case with a second silence (the waters above the firmament). Rabban Gamliel meets the same objection by breaking the silence item by item: Isaiah 45:7 for tohu and darkness, Psalm 148:4–5 for the waters, Amos 4:13 for the wind, Proverbs 8:24 for the deeps. - → echoes · Augustine
The same conclusion reached twice in one book by different routes — at XII.7 from the exhaustive dilemma (not out of God, and nothing else was there, therefore out of nothing), at XII.22 from the failure of the argument from Scripture's silence. The second is the defensive form of the first. - ← contests · Paul of Burgos
Augustine says that formless matter too was made by God and is not to be feared, and he reaches that by taking the philosophical question seriously enough to answer it. Burgos cites the holy doctors as having taken little care about such opinions, which is not what Confessions 12 looks like. The disagreement is about the Latin bench's own history: Burgos needs the fathers to have been uninterested in a question they in fact worked hard at, because his argument is that a Christian exposition should not have to wait on the philosophers.