editors, neither the Maurists nor their predecessors, nor the editors of the CSEL.
1 78 The Literal Meaning of Genesis day less brilliant than it is now may be supposed to have come into being through that light.
Then I know that this also has been said by someone: that first of all the essence of light was introduced in the work of the creator, by the words, Let light be made; and light was made; while later on when it talks of the luminous bodies, it relates what was made out of that light in the due order of days, in which it seemed good to the creator that all things should be made. But where this essence oflight passed along to when evening was made, so that night in turn might run its course, this person did not say and neither do l think it can easily be ascertained.12 It can scarcely be supposed, after all, that it was put out so that nocturnal darkness might follow, and then lit again so that morning might be made, before the sun took on this task, which as the same text testifies was made to begin on the fourth day.
How did evening and morningfollow each other during thefirst three days?
12, 24. It is hard to work out and explain on what kind of circuit, before this happened, they could follow each other, those three days and nights of the light which was first made, while it retained its nature, if it is a bodily light that we must understand as being made then. Unless perhaps one were to say that some earthy and watery mass, before these elements were sorted out from each other, which the text tells us happened on the third day, was called darkness by God on account of its grosser thickness which light could not penetrate, or on account of the dense shadow which such a mass would necessarily cast if it was lighted up on the other side. The place, after all, which the mass of any body stops light reaching, is in shadow place lacking the light which would illuminate it unless an intervening body obstructed it; that is all that is meant by "shadow." If the mass of a body casts a shadow big enough to occupy as much space on the earth as daylight occupies on the other side, it is called night. Not any and every dark ness, after all, is night; I mean in vast caves too, where light is prevented from breaking through by some obstructive mass of rock, it is certainly pitch dark, because there is no light there, and the whole of that space lacks light. Darkness of that sort, though, has never been called night, but only the sort which covers the part of the earth from which the day has been withdrawn. ln the same way not every light is called day—after all, light comes from the moon and the stars and lamps and phosphorescence, and anything that glows—but only that light is called day which comes before night and is followed by it as it bows out itself.
25. But ifthat primordial light had been poured round the mass of the earth on all sides to cover it all, whether it was stationary or circling round, there would
12. Not only does Augustine not tell us who this person was, but neither do any of his learned editors, neither the Maurists nor their predecessors, nor the editors of the CSEL.