Augustine
PL 34, col. 178
English
But as to what is said, 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth' — by the name of heaven and earth the whole creation is signified, which God made and founded. And these were called by the names of visible things on account of the weakness of little ones, who are less able to grasp invisible things. First, then, was made the confused and formless matter, out of which should be made all the things that are distinguished and formed — which I believe is called chaos by the Greeks. For so we read it said elsewhere too, in the praises of God: 'You who made the world out of formless matter' (Wis 11:17) — which some manuscripts have as 'out of unseen matter'.
Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by
Latin
Sed illud quod dictum est, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram, coeli et terrae nomine universa creatura significata est, quam fecit et condidit Deus. Ideo autem nominibus visibilium rerum haec appellata sunt, propter parvulorum infirmitatem, qui minus idonei sunt invisibilia comprehendere. Primo ergo materia facta est confusa et informis, unde omnia fierent quae distincta atque formata sunt, quod credo a Graecis chaos appellari. Sic enim et alio loco legimus dictum in laudibus Dei, Qui fecisti mundum de materia informi (Sap. XI, 18) : quod aliqui codices habent, de materia invisa.
PL 34, col. 178 · pd
Notes
The answer that dissolves the question. 'Heaven and earth' is not a list of two things in an order; it is a name for everything God made, put in visible words because the audience cannot yet hold invisible ones. The Bavli's ten-things list is answering the same question — what does 'heaven and earth' contain, and what else was made with them — and answers it by enumeration where Augustine answers it by generalisation. Note also the variant Augustine records at the end: some copies of Wis 11:17 read 'de materia invisa' for 'de materia informi'. His own text of Gen 1:2, 'invisibilis et incomposita', is the reason he notices.
A name for the whole creationUnformed matter
Threads
- ← parallel · Babylonian Talmud
Both answer the question 'what is contained in heaven and earth?' — and answer it in opposite modes. Rav Yehudah in Rav's name enumerates: ten things were created on the first day, and heaven and earth head the list, each proved from its verse. Augustine generalises: by the name of heaven and earth the whole creation is signified, put in visible words for the weakness of little ones. An enumeration and a generalisation of the same clause, at roughly the same date, with no contact. - ← echoes · Augustine
Twenty years apart, the same observation about the shape of v. 1 — that it commends the whole before the parts — first as a remark about visible names for little ones, then as the answer to why Scripture does not say 'let heaven and earth be made'. - ← echoes · Alcuin
'Informis illa materia, quam de nihilo fecit Deus, appellata est primo coelum et terra' is Augustine's answer with the proleptic reason added ('not because it already was this, but because it already could be this'); the alternative Alcuin appends without weighing it — 'or else the spiritual and the earthly creatures' — is not Augustine's here and is the seed of the empyrean reading. - ← contests · Chalcidius
The same question, opposite answers, and Augustine's is the one that wins. Augustine takes heaven and earth in v. 1 as a name for the whole creation, universally stated and then unfolded in its parts. Chalcidius takes them as two things older than what we see and knowable only by the understanding — the intelligible against the perceptible. Augustine's reading makes the verse a summary; Chalcidius's makes it a report of a prior order. Every Latin after Augustine on this daf takes the summary.