surely it never set, did it, to be succeeded by night? While if it was corporeal,
Book I 177 see, and says, Rising it proceeds thither to the south and circles round to the north (Sir 1:5-6). So when the southern part of the sky has the sun it is day-time for us, but when in its circuit it reaches the northern part, it is night-time for us; yet that does not mean it is not day-time in the other part where the sun is present—unless maybe our hearts are inclined to accept the poetic fiction, so that we really believe the sun sinks into the sea and rises, well washed, on the other side." Though if this were the case, the abyss itself would be lit up by the presence of the sun, and it would be day-time there. l mean, it would be able to illuminate even the waters, seeing that it could not be extinguished by them. But this is a monstrous supposition. Why? Because there was not yet even any sun.
22. Accordingly, if the light that was made on the first day was spiritual, surely it never set, did it, to be succeeded by night? While if it was corporeal, what then is that light which we can no longer see when the sun has set—because there was as yet no moon nor any stars? Or if it is always in the same part of the sky as the sun, not as the light of the sun, but as a kind ofcompanion to it, always joined to it in such a way that it cannot be distinguished and identified apart from it, we come back to the same difficulty in solving this problem, because this light too as the sun's companion circles round in the same way as the sun from its setting to its rising, and is in the other part of the world during the time that this part in which we find ourselves darkens into night. This obliges us to believe—perish the thought !—that God was in one part, a part this light would desert so that evening might be made for him. Or had he, perhaps, made the light in that part of the world in which he was going to make man, and that is why, when the light had departed from that part, evening is said to have been made, even when that light which had left there was in the other part, ready to rise in the morning after completing its round?
Thefunction of the sun on thefourth day
11, 23. So why was the sun made with authority over the day (Ps 136:8), to give light upon the earth (Gn 1:17), if that light which had also been called "day" had been sufficient for the making of the day? Or was that earlier light illumi nating higher regions far from the earth, so that it could not be perceived on earth, and thus it was necessary for the sun to be made, and through its agency for day-time to be manifested to the lower parts of the cosmos? This can also be said, that the brilliance of the day was increased by the addition of the sun, so that a
1 1 . Augustine probably had Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 2 in mind, the beginning of which is devoted to myths about the sun. But in the classical myths of the sun that deity (or Titan) traveled in a chariot, drawn by the horses of the sun; and it is these horses that really needed washing in the ocean after their day's work, and received it, after being given an evening feed on some kind of ambrosian hay in the Hesperides, the western islands of the blessed.