Augustine
PL 34, col. 228
English
And God divided between the light and the darkness. From this it may be understood with how great an ease of divine working these things are said to have been effected. For there is no one who so supposes the light to have been made that it was confused with the darkness, and for that reason needed a separation afterwards; but by the very fact that the light was made, the division between light and darkness also followed. For what fellowship has light with darkness (2 Cor 6:14)? God therefore divided between light and darkness, because he made the light, whose absence is called darkness. And there is a difference between light and darkness such as there is between a garment and nakedness, or the full and the empty, and the like.
Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by
Latin
Et divisit Deus inter lucem et tenebras. Hinc intelligi licet quanta divini operis facilitate ista dicantur effecta. Non enim quisquam est qui sic existimet lucem factam, ut esset confusa cum tenebris, et ob hoc postea separationis indigeret; sed eo ipso quo lux facta est, consecuta est etiam divisio inter lucem et tenebras. Quae enim societas lucis cum tenebris (II Cor. VI, 14) ? Deus ergo divisit inter lucem et tenebras, quia lucem fecit, cujus absentia tenebrae vocantur. Interest autem inter lucem et tenebras, sicut interest inter vestimentum et nuditatem, aut plenum et inane, et similia.
PL 34, col. 228 · pd
Notes
The objection Augustine is answering is never stated on the rabbinic bench and is the obvious one: if God had to divide them, they must first have been mixed. His answer is that no separate act is needed — the division followed on the making, because the making of light is the not-being of darkness, as putting on a garment is the ending of nakedness and filling a vessel the ending of its emptiness. Hugh of St Victor takes over the instantaneity and applies it to the angels; and the same instinct, that the two were never confused and needed no unmixing, is what Ambrose gets from the other end when he says the division exists so that nothing should have anything confused within it.
Darkness is not a thingThe division needed no second act
Threads
- ← echoes · Augustine
Four years apart, the same doctrine argued from two different angles: at De Genesi contra Manichaeos from the analogy of silence, which explains how Scripture can say God makes darkness; at De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus from the analogy of the garment and nakedness, which explains why no separate act of dividing was needed. - ← echoes · Hugh of St Victor
The instantaneity argument transferred. Augustine: no separate act of separation was needed, because the division followed by the very fact that the light was made. Hugh: the division of the darknesses and of the light was made at once — and applies it to the angels, so that the fall and the confirmation are one instant with the making of light. - ← parallel · Philo of Alexandria
Augustine reaches for 2 Cor 6:14, what fellowship has light with darkness, and makes the incompatibility a moral one. Philo makes it a physical enmity between two natures, which is why his God has to build a border rather than pronounce a separation. Same premise, that these two cannot share a space, and two different kinds of reason for it.