during the winter; and he himself must have seen, or at least been aware of, the Alps during the
Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis 1 4 1 because it also condenses into clouds. Now clouds are water, as everybody can tell who has happened to be walking on mountains when the clouds come down, or even on the plains in fog or mist. It is in this air, of course, that birds are said to fly. They cannot do so in that higher and purer stratosphere which all the authori ties call air in the strict sense, because it is too rarified to sustain their weight. There, they insist, there is neither any condensation of clouds nor any turbu lence; indeed such is the absence of any wind up there, that on the top of Mount Olympus, which rises, we are told, above the level of this humid air, certain graf fiti were regularly scrawled in the dust and found intact and unchanged a year later by those who used regularly to climb this mountain.59
The meaning of the solid structure extended in scripture to include the higher levels ofpure air
45. For this reason it can be reckoned without absurdity that the divine scrip tures call everything the solid structure of heaven right down to these spaces, so that consequently that most tranquil and genuine air may be held to belong to the solid structure. This notion of solidity, after all, can be applied to tranquillity itself and to many other such things. This is why l reckon we have that saying in several places in the psalms: and your truth as far as the clouds (Pss 36:5; 57:10). Nothing, after all, is more solid or serene than truth. But the clouds condense under this region of purest air. Yes, certainly the expression has to be taken metaphorically; but the metaphor is taken from realities which provide a certain similarity, so that the steadier and purer corporeal reality in creation, which extends from the summit of heaven down to the clouds, down that is to this foggy and stormy and humid air, is rightly seen as representing truth.
So then, the flying things that fly over the earth under the solid structure of heaven are suitably allotted to the waters, because this air is not unsuitably named water. By this we are also given to understand why nothing is said about air, about how or when it was made, because this air is included in the name of the waters, that other air in the name of the solid structure. And so in this way no single element has been overlooked.
This humid lower air made when God said: Let dry land appear
46. But someone may say, perhaps, "If we are to understand that it was at the words Let the water be collected together that water was made from that mish mash of basic material, and God called this collection sea, how can we under
59. Augustine's authorities on Olympus must have known that it is regularly covered in snow during the winter; and he himself must have seen, or at least been aware of, the Alps during the time he had spent in and near Milan.