Wigbod

English

Disciple: 'And there was evening and morning, one day.' How is this to be understood? — Master: What is evening but the perfecting of each several work, and morning the beginning of those that follow? — AUGUSTINE. Disciple: You maintain that the first day is a spiritual creature; how then did it have evening and morning? — Master: Every creature, before it was made in its own time, was in the Word of God itself, to be known first by the angels and so to be made in its own time. Wherefore the creature's own knowledge of itself was evening; in God, however, morning — because the creature is seen more fully in the Lord than the creature is seen in itself; seen more fully, that is, in the art by which it was made than in itself which was made. For this reason the evangelist John says: 'What was made, in him was life' (John 1:3–4).

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

Latin

PL 96, col. 1120D · pd

Notes

The Carolingian catena doing on 1:5 what it does on 1:2 in K7: setting the two Latin lines side by side and labelling the second one. The schoolroom formula comes first unattributed; then the disciple presses the hard case — if the first day is a spiritual creature, what are its evening and morning? — and the answer is Augustine's angelic double knowledge, printed under his name. This is where a reader of the ninth century could see that the compressed gloss and the difficult doctrine were the same doctrine.

Threads

• → cites · Augustine
  Wigbod puts the compressed formula first and then, under the label AUGUSTINUS, the doctrine it came from: the creature's knowledge of itself is evening, its knowledge in God is morning, 'plus videtur in arte qua facta est, quam in seipsa quae facta est.'
• → parallel · Alcuin
  The two Carolingian question-and-answer books give the same compressed gloss on the verse — evening a work perfected, morning a work begun — in almost the same words; the shared source is Augustine, and neither names him for that sentence.