Augustine
PL 34, col. 259
English
Or is this day the name of the whole of time, and does it include all the volumes of the ages under this one word — and is that why it was called not 'first' but 'one day'? For 'and there was evening,' he says, 'and there was morning, one day': so that by the evening's being made the sin of the rational creature may be signified, and by the morning's being made, its renewal.
Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by
Latin
An hic dies totius temporis nomen est, et omnia volumina saeculorum hoc vocabulo includit; ideoque non dictus est primus, sed unus dies? Et facta est enim vespera, et factum est, inquit, mane dies unus: ut per hoc quod facta est vespera, peccatum rationalis creaturae; quod autem factum est mane, renovatio ejus significata videatur.
PL 34, col. 259 · pd
Notes
The one sentence in the Latin bench that puts the rabbis' question and answers it their way: not first but one, because the word holds all time. Augustine raises it and then sets it aside in the next paragraph — 'this is a matter of prophetic allegory, which is not what we undertook in this discourse' — and returns to the literal question. The reading he declines here is the one Abelard will take up as his own, and it is the shape of Bereshit Rabbah 3:8's 'one day' too, though what fills the word there is Yom Kippur and not the ages.
One day = all timeEvening as sin or temptation
Threads
- ← echoes · Augustine
The same author's two answers, a decade apart in the same work: in book I 'one and not first' because the word holds all time, offered and set aside as allegory; in book IV 'one' because there is only one day, the angelic light, presented six times over. - ← echoes · Remigius of Auxerre
Remigius takes the moral reading Augustine had offered and set aside — evening as sin, morning as renewal — and turns it to the ordinary Christian's progress; but he reverses the terms, making morning the beginning and evening the perfection. - ← echoes · Peter Abelard
Abelard adopts as his own reading what Augustine raised and put aside: 'one day' names the whole span of the work, not the first of a series. His evening and morning are the work in God's mind and the work made visible. - ← parallel · Philo of Alexandria
Augustine reaches the same formula and gives it a Christian ground: it was called not first but one, and the day is the knowledge of the creature in the Word. Philo has the formula and grounds it in the solitariness of the intelligible world. Both refuse to let the cardinal be a scribal looseness for an ordinal, and both are looking for something that day has and the other days do not.