Isidore of Seville
PL 83, col. 210A
English
And he divided the light from the darkness; for then God, according to the favour of his foreknowledge, divided the just — that is, the sons of God and of light — from sinners, as from darkness; calling the just day, and those others night. For that in the Church the just are called by the name of light, hear the Apostle: You were once, he says, darkness, but now light in the Lord (Eph 5:8).
Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by
Latin
Et divisit lucem a tenebris; nam tunc Deus juxta praescientiae suae gratiam divisit justos, id est, filios Dei et lucis, a peccatoribus, tanquam a tenebris; justos vocans diem, et illos noctem; nam quod in Ecclesia lucis nomine justi appellentur, audi Apostolum: Fuistis, inquit, aliquando tenebrae, nunc autem lux in Domino (Ephes. V, 8) .
PL 83, col. 210A · pd
Notes
Isidore takes the verse straight into the Church, and the sequence he is running is a reading of the six days as the six ages of the Christian life, so that the division of light from darkness is the first thing that happens to a believer and the firmament on the second day is the solidity of Scripture. What matters for this crux is that the division is God's foreknowledge sorting the just from sinners: the same act Augustine locates among the angels, moved down to human beings, with Eph 5:8 doing for Isidore what Ps 75 does for Rupert. The rabbinic bench reaches the identical pairing at the identical clause, and reaches it by reading the darkness as the deeds of the wicked rather than the wicked themselves — a difference that runs through every allegory on both benches and is never once discussed.
The wicked, or their deedsThe division is a judgement
Threads
- → parallel · Bereshit Rabbah
The moral reading on both benches at the same clause, and the difference between them is exact. R. Yanai: 'and God divided between the light and the darkness — between the deeds of the righteous and the deeds of the wicked.' Isidore: 'then God, according to the favour of his foreknowledge, divided the just, that is, the sons of God and of light, from sinners, as from darkness; calling the just day and those others night.' The rabbinic bench divides deeds, the Latin bench divides people. Neither ever discusses the difference, and it holds across every allegory on this verse. - ← cites · Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)
'Habet quisque in operibus et recta vita, distinctos sex dies, post quos requiem speret: primo die, lucem fidei' is Isidore's six ages of the Christian life, named as such, reduced to its first day. The Glossa keeps the moral reading and drops the division of the just from sinners that was its content. - ← echoes · Remigius of Auxerre
The same six-day allegory carried from the individual life to the history of the world: Isidore's first day is the light of faith and the dividing of the just from sinners, Remigius' is the separation of the sons of Seth from the generation of Cain, with the flood as its evening. The scheme is Isidore's, the datable content is not.