wishes it to be taken as this day that starts with sunrise and closes at sunset, and
Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis 1 29 and "darkness," are undoubtedly words, which signify particular things, just as "day" and "night" are.
Is this then how the verse has to be taken, because a thing that has received a name cannot be stated otherwise than by some other name? Or is this calling of a name to be taken as constituting the actual distinction? Not every kind of light after all is day, or every kind ofdarkness night; but it is the light and the darkness that are distinguished by succeeding one another in a regular order that are called by the names of "night" and "day." (Every designation, indeed, has a distin guishing function, which is why a name, nomen, which has to note a thing distinctively, is really, so to say, a notamen; it must note a thing, that is, distin guish it, and thus help the expositor in the task of discernment.33)
So perhaps the very division between the light and the darkness was the same as calling the light day and the darkness night, so that calling them that was to arrange them in their regular order. Or were these designations meant to indicate to us what kind of light and what kind of darkness he was talking about, as though he were to say, "God made the light and divided between the light and the darkness. The light I mean, though, is day and the darkness night; so you shouldn't understand any other kind of light which is not day, or any other kind of darkness which is not night." Because if every kind of light could be taken as being day, and every kind of darkness could be qualified with the name of night, there would have been no need, perhaps, to say, And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.
How there could be night and day before the heavenly bodies were created
27. Again, the question can be asked what day he means and what night. lfhe wishes it to be taken as this day that starts with sunrise and closes at sunset, and this night which stretches from the setting of the sun to its rising, then l cannot work out how they could exist before the heavenly bodies were made which produce the light. Or could these sheer intervals of time, twelve hours on twelve off, as it were,34 be so called, even without any distinction of light and shade? And how does this alternation, signified by the names "night" and "day," occur in that rational or sensual light, ifthat is what is meant in this passage? Or has this been put here with reference, not to what happens as a matter of course, but to
33. 1 place parentheses around this text because if Augustine had used footnotes in his time, this certainly would be one. One of its oddities is that it contains two words not to be found either in Lewis & Short, or the Oxford Latin Dictionary, or in Du Cange's Glossary ofLate Latin; one of them, notamen, Augustine may well have invented for the occasion; the other, which 1 have translated as "the expositor," is doctitantem, presumably from a frequentative verb, doctito. The Maurists, and earlier editors, emend it to doctitanter, an equally unknown adverb from the same root, which could be rendered "instructively." 34. A very free paraphrase of ipsa spatia horarum, literally, "these spaces of hours."