Augustine

English

Why then was the sun made 'to rule the day' (Ps 136:8), to shine over the earth, if that light was sufficient for making a day — the light that was itself called Day? Or did that earlier light illuminate regions high and far from the earth, so that it could not be felt on earth, and so the sun had to be made, through which day might appear to the lower parts of the world? This too can be said: that the brightness was increased by the addition of the sun, so that the day is believed to have been less bright by that earlier light than it is now. This too I know to have been said by someone: that the nature of light was first brought in in the Creator's work, when it was said 'Let there be light, and light was made'; but afterwards, when the luminaries are spoken of, it was recorded what was made out of that same light, in the order of the days in which it seemed good to the Creator that all things should be made.

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

Latin

PL 34, col. 254 · pd

Notes

The crux's hardest question, asked plainly: if that light already made a day, what is the sun for? Augustine offers three answers and holds none of them. The third is the one that matters here — 'this too I know to have been said by someone', a quodam dictum scio: that the nature of light was made on the first day and the luminaries were afterwards made out of it. That anonymous opinion is, word for word in substance, what b. Chagigah 12a attributes to the sages against R. Yaakov: 'these are the lights that were created on the first day but were not hung up until the fourth.' Augustine does not know whose it is, and the Talmud names the party that holds it.

Threads

• → parallel · Babylonian Talmud
  The one place on this crux where the benches hold the same opinion in the same words. Augustine: 'this too I know to have been said by someone, that the nature of light was first brought in when it was said Let there be light, but afterwards, when the luminaries are spoken of, it was recorded what was made out of that same light.' The Bavli: 'the sages say, these are the lights that were created on the first day but were not hung up until the fourth.' Augustine cannot name whose opinion it is; the Talmud names the party that holds it, against R. Yaakov.
• ← parallel · Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer
  Both make the first light the material of something later: Augustine's unnamed authority has the luminaries made out of it, and Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer has the heavens made out of it. On the Latin side this is one option among three and is not adopted; on the rabbinic side it is stated as cosmogony.
• → echoes · Augustine
  Book I asks what the light is; eight chapters later the same book asks what the sun can be for if that light already made a day. The second question is the pressure that produces every physical answer on this crux, and Augustine raises it against himself.
• ← echoes · Hugh of St Victor
  Augustine's question — what is the sun for, if that light already made a day — answered by making the first light the sun's placeholder: made vice et loco solis, turning by its own motion until the sun came.
• ← parallel · Nicholas of Lyra
  Augustine's question -- why then was the sun made -- is the one this crux is made of, and Lyra answers it in a clause: the light of the first day was solar light still unformed in some respect, and the fourth day is what formed it. Where Augustine cannot decide between a spiritual and a bodily light, Lyra has stopped treating the alternative as live.