elaborate more fully in his final The Literal Meaning ofGenesis 11,8. 19 and 1V.22.39-23.40. 1t
1 30 Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis what can happen, because it is possible for error to overtake reason and a kind of dullness to follow on sensation?
Genesis 1:5; God needs no period of time in which to effect his works
7, 28. And there was made evening and there was made morning, one day (Gn
1 :5). The word "day" is not now being used in the same way as when it said and God called the light day, but in the same way as when we say, for example, there are thirty days in a month. Here, you see, we are including nights in the term "day," whereas in the previous verse day was being distinguished from night. And so after introducing God' s work as achieved by the making of light, it goes on to say that there came about evening and there came about morning, one day, meaning one day from the start of day to the start of day, that is, from morning to morning, in the way we talk about days, as I said, to include nights.
But how was there made evening and morning? Or did God take as long to make the light and divide between the light and the darkness as it takes for a day ofdaylight to last, that is, excluding the night? What, in that case, of the text, For the power to act is available to you whenever you will (Wis 12:1 8)? Or were all things in fact completed by God as in a craftsman's thought-out design, not in a stretch of time, but in that very power which made to abide in a timeless state even those things that we perceive as not abiding, but passing away in time?35 Even with our own speech, after all, when our words pass away to be succeeded by other words, it is not to be supposed that the same thing is happening with the thought that gives rise to the finished utterance. So then, although it is without any stretch of time being involved that God makes things, having "the power to act available to him whenever he will," all the same the time-bound natures made by him go through their temporal movements in time.
So then, perhaps it said And there was made evening and there was made morning, one day in the sort of way in which one foresees that something can or ought to be done, and not in the way in which it actually is done in a certain stretch of time. After all, it was in its essential nature that God's creative work36 was observed in the Holy Spirit by the author who said, The one who abidesfor
35. He is here working, in a rather confused and confusing manner, toward an idea he will elaborate more fully in his final The Literal Meaning ofGenesis 11,8. 19 and 1V.22.39-23.40. 1t is, in brief, that God timelessly, abidingly, utters his creative designs in the Word; the things so designed come to be in themselves, in time; the angels observe them in their true essence by first seeing them in the Word, and then turn to look at them in their derived, time-bound being in themselves. That is the meaning of the repeated refrain, "1t was morning . it was evening, the nth day;" morning when the angels turn to the Word, evening when they turn to look at things in themselves. 1 summarize his treatment in my translation of The Trinity 11, note 17. 36. Reading with the Maurists.Mim in ipsa ratione operationem instead of Nam non ipsam rationem operationum of the CSEL text; "After all, it was not the very essence of the works..." There are several variations in the manuscripts; the passage seems rather corrupt.