Plato's Timaeus, 29c, in Cicero's translation. He quotes the passage in The Trinity, 1V, 24-25:
Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis 1 23
17. However, it can also be understood in another way; we could understand the spirit of God to be a created vitality by which this whole visible world and all bodily things are held together and activated, a vital force to which the almighty God has granted a kind of power to serve him by acting in the things that are being produced. Since such a spirit is better even than any ethereal body, because every invisible creature has precedence over every visible one, it is not inappropriately called the spirit of God. What, after all, of the things he has established, is not "of God," seeing that it is also said of the earth itself, The Lord's is the earth and itsfullness (Ps 24: 1); and there is the all-embracing text, Since all things are yours, Lord, lover ofsouls (Wis 1 1 :26)?
This spirit, however, can only be understood in this way, if we take the text ln the beginning Godmade heaven and earth to refer only to the visible creation, so that this invisible spirit would have been borne over the basic material of visible things at the start of their construction; still itself, of course, being something created, not God that is, but a nature made and set up by God.20 But if we think that it is the basic material of the total creation, that is both of the intellectual and the animal and the bodily creation, that is signified by that word "water," then in no way at all can "the spirit of God" in this place mean anything but the unchanging and Holy Spirit, which was being borne over the basic material of all the things that God made and established.
18. There could be a third opinion about this spirit, and it could be assumed that by the word "spirit" the element air was designated, so that in this way the four elements from which this visible world makes its appearance would be put before us; to wit sky or heaven,21 and earth and water and air; not that they were already distinguished from each other and furnished, but that in the as yet shape less mishmash of that basic material they were still being marked out beforehand as due to originate from it; this shapeless mishmash being presented under the names of "darkness" and "abyss."
But whichever of these opinions is true, we are bound to believe that God is the author and founder of all things that have originated,22 both those that are seen and those that are not seen25—not as regards their vices, which are contrary
20. This "created vitality," this "vital force." would seem to be almost equivalent to "nature," in the way we often talk about "what nature intends," or "the purposes of nature." 2 1 . Augustine must have known that the first or highest of the four elements of ancient cosmology was fire, not sky. But of course the word "fire" has not yet occurred in the text, and he took it for granted that everyone knew that the sky or heaven was the "proper place" for fire, to which it tended by its very nature. 22. Here and in the preceding sentence he uses the verb exorior, it is a word he seems to derive from Plato's Timaeus, 29c, in Cicero's translation. He quotes the passage in The Trinity, 1V, 24-25: "What eternity is to that which has originated, that truth is to faith." A more accurate translation direct from the Greek would be: "As being is to becoming, so is truth to faith (belief)." 23. See 2 Cor 4:18.