ethereal variety, or the sensual in which animals share, or the rational which both
Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis 127 soul, but simply life, such as is attributed to vines and trees and any kind ofplant, unless of course some could in any way be persuaded that they do have such a thing, as some extraordinarily mistaken heretics are convinced that they not only sense things through the body, that is, that they see and hearand are aware ofheat and fire, but that they also understand by reason and know our thoughts.28 But that's a different question altogether. So insensitivity is the darkness corre sponding to this light by which things are perceived; it's the darkness when any kind of life does not have the power of perception.
Now you will grant that this power is suitably called light ifyou grant that we rightly call light whatever makes things clear. When we say, "This is clearly tuneful, this is clearly sweet, this is clearly cold" (and anything else of this sort that we perceive through the body), this light that makes these things clear is of course inside in the soul, although the things that are so perceived are brought into it through the body. We can understand a third kind of light in creatures, the kind by which we calculate and reason. Its contrary darkness is non-rationality, such as qualifies the souls of brute animals.
25. So even if this opinion would have us understand that light, whether of the ethereal variety, or the sensual in which animals share, or the rational which both angels and men enjoy, was the first thing to be made by God among the realities of nature,29 it must still be accepted that God divided between the light and the dark in the actual making of the light, because light is one thing, quite another those absences of light, which God arranged for in the opposite kinds of dark ness. It does not say, you see, that God made the darkness, because it is real forms or species that God made, not absences and lacks, which come under the head ofnothing. Thus it is that absolutely everything really was made by God the craftsman; but we must still understand that these absences and lacks were arranged for by him, when it says, and God divided between the light and the darkness.
Otherwise, I mean to say, even these very lacks and absences would not have their due place in the total pattern of things designed and controlled by God. As in singing, for example, the moments of silence introduced at definite, carefully chosen intervals, while being absences or privations of words and notes, are for all that well ordered and arranged by those who know how to sing, and they contribute to the overall sweetness of the whole song. Or in pictures, the shadows mark out the more striking features, and satisfy by the rightness not of form but of order and arrangement. Because our vices also do not have God for
28. He is presumably referring to the Manichees. 1 here follow an emendation suggested by the Maurists, and read, sed etiam intellegere per rationem et cogitationes nostras nosse arbitrantur, the CSEL text leaves out per, giving the odd meaning, "are considered also to understand reason and to know our thoughts." 29. Which opinion? 1 think we have to refer back to the beginning of 5. 20.