5. The day
[II. THE JULIAN CALENDAR (CHS. 5^41)]
5. THE DAY
Day is air which is lit up by the Sun, and it derives its name from the fact that it separates and divides the darkness.1 Because, at the very beginning of Creation, darkness was upon the face of the deep, and God said: Let there be light. And there was light, and God called the light ''day''.2
This word is de¢ned in two ways, that is, according to common parlance,andaccordingto itsproper[meaning].3 On the whole, ordinary folk call the Sun's presence above the Earth ''day''. But properly speaking, a day comprises 24 hours, that is, a circuit of the Sun lighting up the entire globe.4 [The Sun] always and everywhere carries the daylight around with itself, and it is believed to be borne aloft at night under the Earth by no less a space of air than it is by day above the Earth. This claim rests on the authority of much Christian as well as secular literature, but we need present the testimony of only one Father,
Augustine. In the second book of questions on the Gospels, explaining the sum of the seventy-two disciples5 /284/ according to its ¢gural meaning, he says, Just as the whole globe is traversed and lit up in 24 hours, so the mystery of the illumination of the globe through the Gospel of the Trinity is intimated by the 72 disciples.6 For 24 times 3 is 72. The same [Augustine] says in the ¢rst book of The Literal Interpretation of Genesis: Can it be said that although this work of God's was swiftly concluded, light remained without a night to follow it so long as the diurnal interval ran its course, and that the night which succeeded upon the light remained until the interval of nocturnal time had passed and the dawn of the second day came, when the ¢rst day was over? But were I to 1 Basil, Hexaemeron 6.8 (431A^B); Isidore, Etym. 5.30; De divisionibus temporum
8 (656A).
2 Genesis 1.1^4.
3 Cf. De divisionibus temporum 8 (656B).
4 Augustine, Ep. 199.18, CSEL 57 258.13^16. Cf. ch. 3 above, where Bede gives the day its conventional length of 12 hours.
5 Luke 10.1, 17.
6 Augustine, Quaestiones evangeliorum 2.14 (PL 35.1339).
THE RECKONING OF TIME
say this, I would be afraid of being ridiculed both by those whose knowledge is certain and by those who can easily perceive that when it is night with us, the presence of the light illuminates those parts of the world through which the Sun passes between its setting and its rising. And for this reason, throughout the entire circuit of the globe, there does not fail to be day in one place and night in another for the whole 24 hours.7 And shortly thereafter, recalling the opinion of Ecclesiastes concerning the meaning of the Sun, he says, Therefore when the Sun is in the south, it is day with us; but when it traverses the northern part8 of its orbit, it is night for us. Nonetheless, it does not happen that there is no day in that other region where the Sun is present ^ unless perchance your heart favours poetic conceits, so that you believe that the Sun sinks into the sea, /285/ and rises thence in splendour from another quarter at dawn. Notwithstanding, were this so, the abyss would be lit up by the very presence of the Sun, for it can illuminate the waters, while it cannot be extinguished by them. But to suggest this, is absurd.9
Before the Sun was created, what now comes to pass by means of the Sun was accomplished by the circling of the primeval light, lighting up in its circuit on the ¢rst and second days the waters of the abyss which covered the Earth, and on the third day, the empty air. But with respect to the text, In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth; and the Earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep,10 some of the Fathers think that a formless confusion of heaven and Earth and water and all the elements is denoted, so that what is meant is not water or Earth or heaven but, if I may use such a phrase, a single seedbed-material [seminaria . . . materies] of 7 Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 1.10, ed. I. Zycha, CSEL 28.1 (1894):15.6^16.
8 Augustine's references to the ''southern'' and ''northern'' part of the Sun's orbit are obscure, for he is referring here to the daily, not the annual course of the Sun. The idea seems to be that for us in the northern hemisphere, the Sun is always visible to the south of the zenith. Since its orbit is circular, but tilted to the south, the Sun when passing through ''that other region'' at night, must follow a path which is tilted to the north of our nadir.This would make sense if the earth was visualized as a disk, encompassed by the tilted ring of the Sun's daily orbit. This ring shifts to the south in the winter, and north in the summer, but is always tilted at a southerly angle; therefore its night-time segment must always be tilted in the opposite direction. If this explanation is correct, it would suggest that even educated men in antiquity did not always clearly grasp the implications of the sphericity of the earth, even when they professed it.
9 Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 1.10 (15.22^16.7).
10 Genesis 1.1^2.
TRANSLATION
them all.11 Therefore, not ¢nding a place within the universe capable of receiving the ¢rst light, they teach by a loftier scrutiny that everything which they read concerning the ¢rst seven days is of necessity otherwise than the custom of our age holds. /286/ But it is much easier to understand if, following the traditions of equally catholic Fathers, the circle of the upper heaven is understood to have been designated by the name ''heaven'', and by the name ''earth'' [terrae, i.e. the substance or element], the Earth [tellus, i.e. the planet] itself, enclosed in the con¢nes which belong to it now, save that it had brought forth no growing plant or living animal, and by ''abyss'', an in¢nite expanse of water washing the whole Earth, in the midst of which, it is recorded, the ¢rmament of heaven was afterwards made. Thus St Clement, the disciple of the Apostles and third bishop of the Roman Church after Peter, writes as follows in the sixth book of his histories: In the beginning God made heaven and Earth. The Earth was invisible and disordered, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the waters. Like the Creator's own hand, this Spirit of God, at God's command, separated light from darkness, and then fashioned this visible heaven after [fashioning] the other invisible one, in order to make the upper regions into a home for the angels, and the lower a home for men.
For your sake, therefore, the water which was on the face of the Earth retreated at God's command, that the Earth might bear fruit for you.12
Ambrose, bishop of Milan, concurs with this in the second book of the Hexaemeron.13 But so does Basil, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, who in the fourth book of a work bearing the same title says, Let the waters draw together and the dry land appear. He draws aside the veil so that what was hitherto unseen might become manifest.14 Jerome as well, that erudite translator of the sacred record, /287/ in explaining the Prophet's statement (wherein he says, You who said in your heart, ''I will ascend to heaven; I will exalt my throne above the stars of God''),15 calls to mind the upper heavens, writing thus: He [Lucifer] said this either before he fell from heaven or after he fell. If he were still in heaven, how could he say, ''I will ascend to heaven?'' But because we
11 Cf. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 5.23 (167^169), 6.10 (182^183).
12 Ps.-Clement, Recognitiones 6.7, trans. Ru¢nus (PG 1.1351A).
13 Ambrose, Hexaemeron 1.6.20 (16.19^17.14).
14 Basil, Hexaemeron 4.2 (903C).
15 Isaiah 14.13^15.
THE RECKONING OF TIME
read ''To the Lord belongs the heaven of heaven'',16 although he [Lucifer] was in heaven, that is, in the ¢rmament, he desired to ascend into the heaven where the Lord's throne is, not out of humility, but out of pride. But if he spoke these boastful words after he fell from heaven, we should be aware that he does not lie quiet now that he has been cast down, but still promises himself great things: not to be amongst the stars, but to be above the stars of God.17
We who follow in the footsteps of the Fathers may conclude that when God said Let there be light,18 then the darkness which covered the deep vanished, and light, emerging from the east in the midst of the waves, clothed the whole surface of the Earth in the expanse of its splendour, reaching in a single instant to the northern, southern and western shores. Gradually setting as the interval of the day was completed, it passed in its orbit beneath the lower parts of the earth and, preceded by the dawn, completed the second and third day in the same sequence. It di¡ered from solar light only in that it lacked heat, and because the stars did not yet exist, it left those nights still blackened by the primal darkness. Should anyone think it incredible that the paths of the waters should be capable of containing light, let him observe the work of sailors, who make the depths of the sea visible by pouring on oil. Then let him understand that God, the Creator of all things, is much more capable of illuminating water, no matter how deep, by the breath of His mouth, /288/ particularly since the waters are believed to have been much more limpid at that time, before the Creator forced them together so that dry land could appear.19
Now the Lord also de¢ned the day according to common parlance in the statement I cited above, saying, Are there not twelve hours in a day?
But Moses described it in its proper terms, saying, And the evening and the morning were the ¢rst day.20 The Hebrews, Chaldeans and Persians, following the order of primal Creation, deduce that the course of the day is from dawn to dawn, that is, they add the time of darkness onto that of the light. On the other hand, the Egyptians prefer to calculate their days from sunset to sunset, the Romans from midnight to midnight,
16 Psalm 115 (113).16.
17 Jerome, In Isaiam 6.14.13^14, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 73 (1963):241.5^13.
18 Genesis 1.4.
19 Cf. Ambrose, Hexaemeron 1.9.33 (35.19^36.3); Bede, In Gen. 1.1.3 (8.185^194).
20 Genesis 1.5.
TRANSLATION
the Umbrians and Athenians from midday to midday.21 Divine authority, which in Genesis decreed that days should be calculated from dawn to dawn, /289/ ordained in the Gospel that the period of a whole day should begin at sunset and end at sunset.22 For He who at the beginning of the world ¢rst called light ''day'' and darkness ''night'', at the end of the ages ¢rst illumined the night with the glory of His Resurrection, and thus consecrated the day by showing Himself to His disciples;
He con¢rmed them more fully in the faith of His Resurrection by eating with them the following evening and o¡ering Himself to their touch, and also by bestowing the gift of the Holy Spirit.23 And because after the creation of light, the evening and the morning were the ¢rst day24 but now at the end of the sabbath it began to dawn towards the ¢rst day of the week,25 this transformation of time means that we also, who once were borne away from the light of Paradise to this vale of tears, shall very soon be transported from the darkness of sin to heavenly joy. Nor is there any other way, save by placing the night before the day, of explaining how the Lord spent three days and three nights in the heart of the Earth, after the pattern of Jonah. There is a synecdoche here:26 if you take that part of the Day of Preparation on which He was buried, together with the previous night, as a day and a night (that is, a whole day), then the whole sabbath, night and day, and the night of Sunday together with the dawn of that day which it inaugurated, as a part standing for the whole, you will indeed have three days and three nights.27 It might well
21 Cf. Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.3.2^4, ed. J. Willis (Leipzig: Teubner, 1970):9.24^
10.8; Isidore, Etym. 5.30.4 and DNR 1.2 (173.7^11); Pliny, HN 2.79.188 (1.318^320). Where
Bede got his information about the Jewish day is unknown: it is not found in any of the sources named above. The Irish De divisionibus temporum says that the Chaldeans began their day at dawn, but that the Hebrew day ran from the sixth hour to the sixth hour
''because they did not compute the night'' (PL 90.656B). At the end of this chapter, Bede acknowledges a problem: the day of Creation may have begun at dawn, but the Mosaic ceremonial law prescribes that feasts begin at sunset.
22 Cf. Matthew 28.1, Mark 16.1.
23 Cf. John 20.28, 21.12^13.
24 Genesis 1.5.
25 Matthew 28.1.
26 A synecdoche is a ¢gure of speech in which a part stands for the whole: cf.
Bede's De schematibus et tropis 2.2.7 (BOD 156.85 sqq.).
27 Cassian, De incarnatione Domini contra Nestorium 6.23, ed. M. Petschenig, CCSL 17 (1886):350.17^28; cf. Matthew 12.38^40. Cf. Augustine, Quaestiones evangeliorum 1.7 (1325) and De doctrina christiana 3.35.50^51 (111.15^22). Bede, Explanatio Apocalypsis, praef. (PL 93. 132A^B) quotes the regulae of Tyconius, as found in De doctrina