PL 96, col. 1113B
And therefore God is most rightly believed to have made all things out of nothing: because even if all formed things were made out of that matter, that matter itself was made out of nothing. For we ought not to be like those who do not believe that almighty God could make anything out of nothing, when they consider that craftsmen and workmen of any kind cannot make anything unless they have something to make it from. For wood helps the craftsman, and silver helps the silversmith, and gold the goldsmith, and earth helps the potter to be able to finish his works. If they are not helped by that matter out of which they make something, they can make nothing, since they themselves do not make the matter. For the craftsman does not make the wood, but makes something out of wood: and so all other workmen. But almighty God had no need to be helped by any thing that he had not himself made, in order to bring about what he willed; for if some thing that he had not himself made helped him towards the things he willed to make, he was not almighty: which it is sacrilege to believe.
Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by
PL 96, col. 1113B · pd
Wigbod copying Augustine, and this time he copies everything. At K1 his method was the interesting thing about him: he takes over Jerome's discussion of 'in the beginning' and drops precisely the sentence in which Jerome refutes the reading 'in the Son' from the Hebrew, so that the objection survives in the Carolingian schools and the answer does not. Here he takes over De Genesi contra Manichaeos I.6.10 without losing a clause — the four trades, the wood that the carpenter does not make, the argument from omnipotence, the word sacrilegium at the end. What he drops in the one place and keeps in the other is a fair index of what a Carolingian compiler thought was load-bearing: philology about a Hebrew word is expendable, an argument that secures omnipotence is not. He reads 'de nihilo facta est' where Augustine has 'de omnino nihilo'.