Augustine

English

And what is that light itself which was made? Is it something spiritual, or something bodily? For if spiritual, it can itself be the first creature, already made perfect by this saying, which was first called heaven when it was said, 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth' — so that what God said, 'Let there be light, and light was made', may be understood as its turning and illumination, the Creator calling it back to himself.

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

Latin

PL 34, col. 248 · pd

Notes

The crux as a disjunction, in the sentence that decided the Latin question for eight centuries: spiritual or bodily? Augustine leaves the alternative open here in form, but the whole of his exposition follows the first limb, and the doctrine is already complete in the second half of the sentence — the light is the spiritual creature that was called 'heaven' in verse 1, and 'let there be light' is not its making but its conversion, its turning back to the Creator and being illuminated by him. Bonaventure will state this position fairly and decline it, and give the reason: not that it is unreasonable, but that the text more readily intimates the other.

Threads

• → contests · Ambrose
  Ambrose says God dwells in inaccessible light and is the true light of John 1:9, 'but he made that light' — hanc, the one in the verse, a thing among things. Augustine asks whether the light is spiritual or bodily and answers that it can be the first creature, the spiritual nature called heaven in verse 1, and that 'let there be light' is its conversion. The two positions the rest of the bench divides between are already both in place by 410.
• ← 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.
• ← contests · Bede
  Bede does not refute the angelic light; he steps round it, and the step is in one sentence. He names three lights — God who is the true light, the inaccessible light the angels already enjoyed in the heaven of heavens, and 'the first grace of material light' given to this world — so that the angels are on the page, already made, and are not the light. Alcuin, Rabanus and the Glossa's Bede gloss all inherit the step.
• ← echoes · Angelomus of Luxeuil
  Angelomus takes the side of the bench Bede stepped away from, and states it more sharply than Augustine: the angelic dignity was founded first and was made light afterwards by turning to behold its creator, so that 'let there be light' means 'let it turn to contemplate me unceasingly'.
• ← cites · Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)
  Three of the four glosses on this verse are Augustine, cited by book and chapter, and between them they give the angelic reading entire: 'et facta est lux, id est angelica et coelestis substantia, in se temporaliter', with the doctrine that the creature is formed when it turns to the unchangeable light of the Word.
• ← contests · Bruno of Segni
  Bruno asks Augustine's question in Augustine's terms — what is that light, said to be prior to sun and moon and stars? — and then refuses to answer it: God called the light Day, so light here is put for day, and there is nothing further to look for.
• ← contests · Peter Abelard
  Neither limb of Augustine's disjunction. Abelard makes the light the distinction of the works themselves, the coming-into-distinctness of the confused heap so that it could be seen and known for what it was made for — which is Augustine's own doctrine that darkness is privation, moved from optics to knowledge, and used against him.
• ← contests · Bonaventure
  Augustine's position set out at length and fairly — heaven the unformed spiritual nature, light the angelic nature formed, day the angelic consideration — granted to be probable and reasonable, and then declined: the Catholic treatise-writers approved another way, the text more readily intimates it, and the expositors more generally follow it, so it is the safer and more useful to hold.
• ← parallel · Philo of Alexandria
  Augustine's whether something spiritual or something bodily is the question Philo has already answered, and answered in a way that dissolves the alternative. For Philo the light of the first day is intelligible and the visible lights draw from it, so it is neither a body nor a substitute for one; it is the model. Augustine has no such category available at this point in the Genesis literature and works the question as a disjunction, which is how the Latin bench holds it for the next seven hundred years.