Augustine
PL 34, col. 180
English
Here too the Manichees carp, supposing it was said as though the day began from evening. They do not understand that the whole of that working — by which the light was made, and division was made between light and darkness, and the light was called Day and the darkness Night — that this whole working belongs to the day; and that after this working, the day being as it were finished, evening was made. But because the night also belongs to its own day, the one day is not said to have passed until, the night too being over, morning came: and so thereafter the remaining days are counted from morning to morning.
Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by
Latin
Et hic calumniantur Manichaei, dum putant ita dictum esse, quasi a vespera dies coeperit. Non intelligunt operationem illam qua lux facta est, et divi sum est inter lucem et tenebras, et vocata est lux dies, et tenebrae nox; hanc ergo totam operationem non intelligunt ad diem pertinere: post hanc autem operationem tanquam finito die facta est vespera. Sed quia etiam nox ad diem suum pertinet, non dicitur transisse dies unus, nisi etiam nocte transacta cum factum est mane: sic deinceps reliqui dies computantur a mane usque in mane.
PL 34, col. 180 · pd
Notes
Augustine's earliest answer, and the one the Latin bench keeps: the day does not begin at evening. The whole work belongs to the day; evening is what follows a finished day; and the days are counted a mane usque in mane, morning to morning. The Manichees are the named opponents, but the reckoning he rejects is the one Ben Zoma rules for in b. Chullin 83a — the day that follows the night. Neither side knows it is contradicting the other.
Day before nightEvening completes a work
Threads
- → contests · Babylonian Talmud
Augustine: the day does not begin at evening, and 'reliqui dies computantur a mane usque in mane'. Ben Zoma: 'yom echad' in the work of creation means the day follows the night. The same five words of Genesis 1:5 are made to yield two calendars. Neither knows of the other; the contest is real and is in the text. - ← parallel · Ambrose
Both refuse the evening start and both do it by making vespera the end of a completed day rather than the opening of a new one. Ambrose adds the birthright argument, Augustine the Manichean opponent; Augustine was hearing Ambrose preach at Milan in the years before he wrote. - ← echoes · Hugh of St Victor
'Omnis dies ab ortu solis initium sumit' with the natural day running sunrise to sunrise is Augustine's 'a mane usque in mane' given the computists' vocabulary; Hugh adds the reason Augustine does not give, that the first day had no dawn to name. - ← echoes · Bruno of Segni
Bruno keeps Augustine's conclusion — the day's own boundaries are what Scripture sets, and the night is not counted in — and hardens it into a thesis Augustine never states: nulla dies ex nocte constat ac die. - ← echoes · Alcuin
'Finis operis perfecti, et initium operis incoepti' compresses Augustine's account of evening as a finished work and morning as the next beginning into a single schoolroom answer.