Nicholas of Lyra

English

And he divided the light from the darkness. This dividing is by the motion of the sun, because when it moves over one hemisphere darkness comes to be in the opposite hemisphere, on account of the opacity of the earth which is in the middle. And he called the light Day, because day is the passage of the sun over the earth. And the darkness Night, because just as day is brought about by the presence of the sun, so night is brought about by its being hidden.

Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson · cc-by

Latin

Koberger 1486-87, leaf n44, left column, lemmas m-o (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n44.jpg) · lyra-koberger-1487

Notes

The one answer on this daf that is simply astronomy. Every other witness makes the dividing of light from darkness a question about what darkness is -- a privation ordered like the rests in a song, a creature God also made, the apostate angels, the wicked, the element of fire -- or about what the dividing does, whether it is a naming, an ordering or a judgement. Lyra makes it the earth's shadow. The sun moves over one hemisphere and darkness falls on the other because the earth is opaque and in the middle; day is the sun's passage over the earth and night is the sun being hidden. Augustine's metaphysical difficulty, how a nothing can be divided, does not arise, because on this account nothing is divided from anything: a body is interposed. It is worth setting beside Comestor, who two hundred years earlier knew perfectly well that a shadow is what bodies cast and had to introduce the thought with a quasi. Lyra needs no quasi and does not mention that anyone had ever thought otherwise.

Threads

• → parallel · Peter Comestor
  Comestor has the physics and cannot commit to it: the darkness is as it were the shadow made by bodies set against the light, and the quasi is doing the work of keeping Augustine's doctrine intact. Two hundred years later Lyra states the same physics flat -- the sun moves over one hemisphere and the earth's opacity puts the other in shadow -- and does not signal that anything is being conceded. The distance between those two sentences is the distance the Latin bench travelled on this crux.
• → contests · Augustine
  Augustine's darkness is the absence of light, as silence is the ceasing of voice, and the difficulty he then has to solve is how God can divide a nothing; his answer, that God ordered rather than made it, as a singer orders the rests, is the finest thing on this crux in either language. Lyra keeps the privation and dissolves the difficulty by putting a body in the middle. Nothing is divided from anything: the earth is opaque and stands between. The doctrine survives and the question it was invented to answer has gone.
• → parallel · Honorius Augustodunensis
  Honorius already had the mechanism in the twelfth century -- twelve hours above the earth and twelve below -- and used it to explain the length of the day rather than the dividing of v. 4. Lyra applies the same fact to the verse itself, so that vayavdel reports what the sun does rather than what God decided about darkness.
• → parallel · Abraham ibn Ezra
  Ibn Ezra says the meaning of and he divided is by the calling of names, which empties the verb of any physical content; Lyra fills it with nothing but physical content. Both refuse to let the dividing be an act performed on darkness, and they refuse it from opposite ends -- one because the verse is doing grammar, the other because it is doing astronomy.