Peter Comestor

English

And God said: Let there be light. And light was made (Gen 1) — that is, he begot the Word in whom it was that light should be made; that is, as easily as if someone were to say it in a word. By 'light' he means a kind of luminous cloud, lighting the upper parts of the world, but with a thin brightness, such as comes about at dawn; and this driven round much as the sun is. By its presence it lights the upper hemisphere and in turn the lower.

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

Latin

PL 198, col. 1057B · pd

Notes

The settlement, and it is the physical answer, stated as fact in a handbook with no mention that anybody ever thought otherwise. A luminous cloud, thin as the dawn, driven round like the sun, lighting one hemisphere and then the other. Rupert had argued at length that this cannot be right and Bonaventure will say Augustine's view is the subtler; the Historia scholastica simply prints the cloud, and that is what most of Europe learned. Comestor's angelic-light material, where he has it, is elsewhere and not on this verse.

Threads

• → echoes · Hugh of St Victor
  The luminous cloud verbatim — nubes lucida, driven round much as the sun is — with Hugh's element of fire dropped and the dawn brightness of Remigius and Honorius kept.
• → echoes · Remigius of Auxerre
  'Claritate tamen tenui, ut fieri solet diluculo' is Remigius' before-sunrise light, two hundred and seventy years on, stated in a handbook as fact rather than as opinion.
• ← parallel · Bonaventure
  The schools' settled answer in its two registers, as at K10: Comestor prints the luminous cloud in a handbook without noticing that anyone ever thought otherwise, and Bonaventure raises the question in a disputation in order to rule the same way. The corporeal light wins by handbook and by quaestio at once.