Philo of Alexandria

English

The incorporeal world, then, had already reached its end, established in the divine Reason; and the perceptible was being brought to completion after the model of that one. And first of its parts, the best of them all, the craftsman made the heaven, which he rightly named 'firmament', inasmuch as it is corporeal; for body is by nature solid, since it is also extended in three directions, and what other notion is there of the solid and of body than what is extended in every direction? Fittingly, then, setting the perceptible and body-formed against the intelligible and incorporeal, he called this one 'firmament'.

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

Greek

Philo, De opificio mundi 36 (Cohn-Wendland i. 11) · first1k-greek

Notes

Anchor note: Philo is here on the word stereoma, which the Greek Genesis has at 1:6 and not at 1:1, and the witness is anchored on 1:1 under the second clause of the anchor rule. What he is doing is answering this crux's question, what is the heaven of the first verse, and he answers it by pairing the two words: the heaven of the beginning is the incorporeal one, established in the divine Reason, and the heaven the chapter goes on to call firmament is the corporeal one, named firmament for that very reason, because body is what is extended in three directions. That is the same argument from the chapter's own vocabulary that Chalcidius makes in Latin, and Chalcidius makes it having read this book: the firmament is not called heaven until the second day, so the heaven of the beginning must be something else. Remigius reaches the conclusion, the empyrean heaven, without any argument at all, and Comestor turns it into the schoolroom formula of the container and the thing contained. Philo's version is the only one on the daf that gets there from a definition of body.

Threads

• → parallel · Peter Comestor
  Comestor's container and the thing contained, argued from a definition of body instead of asserted as a formula. Both split the heaven of the first verse from the firmament of the second day; Comestor because the schools require the distinction, Philo because stereoma means solid and solid means extended in three directions, so the name itself marks the corporeal off from the intelligible. Comestor is a thousand years later and has the distinction without the reason for it.
• → parallel · Babylonian Talmud
  Both benches answer what is heaven by taking the word apart, and each takes apart a different word in a different language. The Bavli decomposes shamayim, there is water, sham mayim. Philo etymologises the Greek stereoma, which is the Seventy's word and not Moses's, and gets the corporeal heaven out of it. The method is the same and neither could have used the other's word.
• → parallel · Remigius of Auxerre
  Remigius says the heaven of the first verse is that empyrean, that is fiery, or intellectual heaven, and stops. Philo says it is the incorporeal heaven established in the divine Reason and gives the argument, from the second name the chapter uses. This is the same relation Chalcidius stands in to Remigius, and for the same reason: Chalcidius got the argument from Philo, and Remigius got the conclusion from a tradition that had lost it.