Basil of Caesarea

English

And God separated between the light and the darkness — that is, he fashioned their nature unmingled, and unlike itself by contrariety; for he both set them apart from one another by long spaces and distinguished them, as it is said: And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.

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

Latin

PL 53, col. 888A · pd

Notes

The Greek bench's answer, in the Latin Eustathius made of it, and it is entirely physical: the division is a fashioning of the two natures so that they cannot mix, and a placing of them at long distances from each other. What Basil will not do is make the darkness nothing. He has just said, a few columns earlier, that night is the shadowing of the air which the sun's setting produces; here the darkness is a nature with a contrary, and the separating is a work on both. Bede's 'not only by a difference of quality but of place' is this sentence in another language, and Bede did not need to be reading it to arrive there — but Angelomus, who did read something like it, attributes it to Clement.

Threads

• → parallel · Bede
  Both answer 'why divide them?' with distance, and neither could have got it from the other in this form: Basil, that God fashioned their natures unmingled and set them apart from one another by long spaces; Bede, that he divided them not only by quality but by place, the light over the upper part of the world. Basil's Latin was available in Northumbria, but the shared term is the commonplace, not a phrase.
• ← parallel · Philo of Alexandria
  Basil says God kept their nature unmingled, and the Greek word for the mingling he denies is Philo's word for the confusion the borders prevent. Basil had read Philo and the Hexaemeron is one of the standard places to see it; nothing here names him. What Basil does not take over is the machinery: for Philo the separating is not enough on its own, because contiguity alone would restart the war, and it is the borders in the intervals that do the work.