Basil of Caesarea

English

'But the earth,' he says, 'was invisible and unordered.' How then, when both elements, that is heaven and earth, were built with equal honour, was heaven complete while the ground was still unordered? Or what cause was there at all that it should be less than finished, and should not be visible? The full ordering of the earth is its own fruitfulness — that is, the sprouting of all plants, and the abundance of trees bearing fruit and bearing none, and the colours and scents of flowers, and the other things which, brought forth a little later at the divine command, adorned the ground. Since none of these yet existed, the word of Scripture rightly called it unordered. And we shall be right to say the same of heaven as unfinished, since it had not taken up its own adornment either, having not yet been lit by the brightness of the sun and the moon, nor crowned with the choirs of the stars. So you will not seem to turn aside from the truth if you call heaven too unordered. But he called the earth invisible for two reasons: either because man, the beholder of it, had not yet come forth, or because, lying hidden under the waters that then stood over it, it could in no way be seen. For the waters had not yet been gathered into their own basins, which the Lord afterwards, when they were collected into one, named seas. A thing is invisible either because it cannot be grasped by bodily eyes, as our mind cannot, or because it can indeed be seen by nature but is hidden by the covering of some body drawn over it, as iron is that lies in the deep. It is in this sense, then, that the earth is now to be thought called invisible, inasmuch as it was covered by the surface of the waters. And then, since light was not yet established, it is no wonder if it was held invisible, when the air itself, lacking brightness, was dark.

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

Latin

PL 53, col. 879C · pd

Notes

The Greek pair expounded as a report on conditions, and every answer is a physical one. Unordered means not yet fruitful — and Basil is willing to say heaven was unordered too, since it had no sun or stars yet, which no Latin after him will say. Invisible means either that there was no one to see it, or that it was under water; and he adds a small definition of invisibility that a modern reader can use — invisible as a mind is invisible, or invisible as iron lying at the bottom of the sea. Ibn Ezra reaches the second of these in Lucca seven centuries later from the Aramaic rather than the Greek. The paragraph that follows in Eustathius (PL 53:880C), against those who take the pair to prove an unbegotten matter, is a different argument and belongs to K4.

Threads

• → transmits · The Seventy
  Basil expounds ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος word by word — invisible for two reasons, unordered because not yet fruitful — and Eustathius' Latin keeps the Old Latin pair, so the Greek argument reaches the Latin bench with its lemma intact.
• ← echoes · Ambrose
  Basil asks why, of two elements built with equal honour, heaven was complete and the earth still unordered; Ambrose answers with the good craftsman who lays a foundation before he distinguishes the parts and adds the adornment. Ambrose is expounding Basil's Hexaemeron through this book (cf. the Syrian at K7).
• ← parallel · Chalcidius
  The two fourth-century texts that give a Latin reader the Greek behind inuisibilis et incomposita, and only one of them stays on the bench. Basil, in Eustathius's Latin, expounds the earth as invisible and unordered and explains why the terms are apt. Chalcidius gives the same clause four renderings — the Septuagint's, Aquila's inanis et nihil, Symmachus's otiosum quid confusumque et inordinatum, and the Hebrews' stupida admiratione — and explains each. Basil is copied by Bede and reaches the twelfth century; Chalcidius is copied by nobody.
• ← parallel · Philo of Alexandria
  The same two Greek words, once as a doctrine and once as a lemma, and the Latin bench only ever saw the second. Basil's text of Gen 1:2 reads the earth was invisible and unordered, aoratos kai akataskeuastos, and the whole Latin argument about invisibilis et incomposita descends from it. Philo, writing before that Greek Bible reading had a history of interpretation, uses ataktos, without order, of substance in general, and pairs it with apoios, without quality. So the phrase the Latins treat as a fact reported about the earth is in Philo a philosophical description of matter as such. Basil then denies exactly what Philo asserted, that there is an unbegotten substance, and does not name him.