PL 53, col. 880C
But the detractors of the truth, in no way following the Scriptures in their proper sense and dragging their interpretation to their own judgement, say that by words of this kind the matter of things is shown — matter which was as it were by nature invisible and unordered and formless, and deprived of every appearance and figure, which the craftsman took up and shaped according to his wisdom, and so through it made all the things that are seen. If we call this matter unbegotten, it is beyond doubt made equal to God when it is weighed in the honours it deserves, and it will be judged worthy of the same privileges as he. And what could be more wicked and more criminal than that a thing confused and utterly deformed should be judged endowed with a dignity equal to the wise and powerful and exceedingly good God, the founder of all? Then, if it is so great that it can take in the whole divine discipline, they will nonetheless be seen to make its substance equal to God's power — if indeed the earth is able of itself to measure out the whole wisdom of God. But if matter is less than the divine power, their argument is drawn into a still more atrocious blasphemy; for they try to assert that God is ineffectual and idle in his works because of a poverty of matter. It is the neediness of human nature that deceived them into thinking such things. For with us each art is exercised upon some matter brought to it — smithcraft upon iron, carpentry upon wood — and in these one thing is what underlies, another the form, another what is made out of the form: for matter is what is taken from outside, the form is what the art produces, and the finished thing is what is composed of both, that is, of the form and the matter. So they suppose it is with the divine working too: that the figure was brought to the world out of the wisdom of its founder, but the matter was subjected to the creator from outside; and that the whole world was so constructed, possessing its substance sought from elsewhere, but its figure and shape received from the power of God. […] But God, before the things that are seen came to be, embracing all things in his mind and willing to bring to birth the things that were not, considered what kind of world it ought to be, and generated along with it a matter suited to its form. To heaven he assigned the nature befitting it, and to the shape of the lands he furnished the substance owed to them. Fire and water and air he distinguished as he willed, and led into the order that the account of each demanded. […] Let them cease, then, to handle with fabulous inventions and with the wretched sense of their own thoughts a power incomprehensible to the mind and unspeakable in human words. God made heaven and earth, not each of them by half, but a whole heaven and a whole earth, that is, the very substance taken together with its form. For God is not the deviser of figures, but the creator of the whole nature.
Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by
PL 53, col. 880C · pd
The Greek bench's answer, and the argument it refutes is the philosopher's at Bereshit Rabbah 1:9 stated as a philosophy. Those who read 'invisible and unordered' as a description of an unbegotten matter make that matter God's equal in honour, since whatever is unbegotten shares his privilege; and if the matter is instead less than God, they have made God poor. Then the diagnosis, and it is the same analogy the philosopher used and Augustine will use: with us every art works on a material brought to it, smithcraft on iron and carpentry on wood, so that the finished thing is composed of a form supplied by the art and a substance supplied from outside — and they project this on the divine working, giving God the shape of the world and someone else the stuff of it. Basil's answer is that God generated the matter along with the form it was to have, and made not half of heaven and half of earth but the whole substance with its form: he is not the deviser of figures but the creator of the whole nature. The paragraph before this one is K6's basil-hex-2-4. Two elisions are marked in the English: at PL 53:881B, 'Hinc illis datur occasio … commoditatem nobis non parvam contulit', where Basil argues that the human arts came after their materials (wool before weaving, wood before the adze) and that God's making is the reverse; and at PL 53:881C, 'Totum autem mundum … permixtione mutua copulata credantur', on the bonds of concord that hold the unlike world together. The Latin excerpt is continuous.