Basil of Caesarea

English

And God said, Let there be light. The first voice of God fashioned the nature of light, and drove away the darkness, and dissolved gloom, and suddenly brought forth every glad and pleasant appearance. Then the vault appeared, which had until then been hidden by the Lord; and so great a beauty of it shone out as the sight bears witness to even now. And the air was lit up by that light which had been mingled with it, and it stretched the sharp penetration of its own brightness everywhere through all its bounds.

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

Latin

PL 53, col. 887A · pd

Notes

The Greek tradition entering Latin, and it has no doubt at all: the light is a nature that God's voice fashioned, and what it does is physical — the air takes it up and carries it to its limits, the water throws it back, the sky becomes visible. Basil is the only Father on this bench who describes the light as a phenomenon rather than as a question, and Eustathius' Latin keeps that. The twelfth-century schoolmen — Hugh, Honorius, Comestor — end up where Basil starts, and they get there without citing him.

Threads

• ← parallel · Ambrose
  Ambrose's Hexaemeron follows Basil's Greek homilies closely and this passage is no exception — the light as the world's first ornament, the air taking it up, the suddenness. The witness date here is that of Eustathius' Latin version, which is later than Ambrose; Basil's Greek (378) precedes him and is his source, so the dependence runs the other way from what the dates on this page suggest.