Wigbod

English

AUGUSTINE. D[isciple]. And he divided the light from the darkness. Scripture says he divided the light from the darkness: for everything that is divided can also be. As therefore there is an essence of light, so there is an essence of darkness. And why does Scripture not say, God saw the darkness, that it was good, as was said of the light? M[aster]. God with a good and unchangeable will created all the angels good, but because he foreknew that some of them would fall through pride, by the unchangeableness of his foreknowledge he divided between the good and the evil. Calling the evil darkness, then, and the good light, he says of these that they are good, and of those he says it not at all, lest he should seem to approve the sins which were the darkness. ELSEWHERE AGAIN. D. He divided the light from the darkness. What is it to divide the light from the darkness? M. It is the distinction of the formed thing from the unformed.

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

Latin

PL 96, col. 1120A · pd

Notes

A Carolingian compilation putting under the rubric AUGUSTINUS the one proposition Augustine spent three works denying. The pupil's inference is a good one and it is not Augustine's: everything that is divided can also be, therefore as there is an essence of light so there is an essence of darkness. The pupil then asks the right question — why does Scripture not say God saw the darkness that it was good? — and the master's answer is Augustine's own from City of God XI.20, almost word for word, down to 'lest he should seem to approve'. So the transmission carries the answer and loses the doctrine it was an answer to: within two sentences the darkness has an essence and is being withheld from approval because it is sin. The third exchange then gives a third answer, the distinction of the formed from the unformed, which is Honorius' and Abelard's and belongs to a different question again.

Threads

• → cites · Augustine
  'Et cur non dicit Scriptura, vidit Deus tenebras quod essent bonae, sicut de luce dictum est? … in his dicens quia boni sunt, in illis nullatenus dicens, ne peccata quae erant tenebrae adprobare videretur' reproduces City of God XI.20's argument and its reason almost word for word, under the rubric AUGUSTINUS — on the same page as the proposition that there is an essence of darkness, which Augustine denies everywhere.
• → contests · Augustine
  The sharpest disagreement on the Latin bench, and it is invisible because it is filed under Augustine's name. Augustine: Scripture does not say God made the darkness, because darkness is the absence of light. Wigbod's pupil: everything that is divided can also be, so as there is an essence of light, so there is an essence of darkness. The inference is valid on its own terms and it destroys the doctrine the same compilation is transmitting.
• ← parallel · Peter Abelard
  'Distinctio rei formatae ab informi', given as a third answer in a Carolingian dialogue, and 'operatione sua perfectum discrevit ab imperfecto et distinctum a confuso', argued at the Paraclete three hundred years later to prove that the creator of the matter and the former of the works are one and the same. The same reading of the darkness — not a privation, not a creature, but the unordered state of the world — put to two entirely different uses.