expression like "the light of reason," as involving the figurative, or metaphorical (if not
1 84 The Literal Meaning of Genesis reference to the actual making and establishing of specific natures, how can we find any evening and morning in spiritual light?20 Or is the division of the light from the darkness indeed the distinction of the formed from the formless thing, while the calling of them day and night suggests their ordered succession, to indicate that God leaves nothing unordered and unregulated, and that the very formlessness through which things change from species to species by a kind of transition is not something uncatered for, and that the retreats and advances registered in creation, by which time-bound things follow one another in turn, have their contribution to add to the splendor of the universe?21 Night, after all, is regulated, ordered darkness.
35. This, though, is the reason why it said "God saw the light that it was good" immediately after the light had been made, when he could have said this after all the things mentioned on this day; that is, after setting out, one by one, God said. Let light be made; and light was made; and God divided between the light and the darkness; and God called the light day and the darkness he called night, he could then have said, And God saw that it was good, and then added, And there was made evening, and there was made morning, as he does in the other works to which he gives names. So the reason he did not do it like that here is that the point of that formlessness being distinguished from the formed reality was to show that this was not the end of its formation, but that there still remained some of it to be formed through the rest of creation,the bodily part now. And so, if it had said God saw that it was good after they had been distinguished from each other by that division and by those labels attached to them, we would have taken it to apply to these things done, to which in their own kind there was nothing now to be added. But because light was the only thing God had completely made in this way, God saw the light, he says, that it was good, and then distinguished it from the darkness by dividing and naming them.
Nor did it then say God saw that it was good; the reason, after all, why that formlessness had been separated was so that other things could still be formed from it. As for this sort of night that we are so familiar with—it's the sun's circuit, after all, that brings it on over all lands—it is when it is separated from the day by the distribution of the luminous bodies, it is after that division of day
20. We nowadays would regard such an expression as "spiritual light," and even a more usual expression like "the light of reason," as involving the figurative, or metaphorical (if not enigmatic) use of the word "light." But for Augustine it was within the word's proper range of meaning. 1f he was here extending that proper range, he was only anticipating, "prefiguring," what modern physicists do, so 1 was told in an argument 1 was having with a younger mathematician here. They extend the word "light," in technical use, to cover such phenomena as X-rays, Gamma rays—any rays you like to mention. 2 1 . These meanings suggested for the calling of the light and the darkness day and night hardly seem to apply to the spiritual light which he is here preoccupied with. 1t is all questions, to be sure, not answers—but a certain mildly regrettable incoherence here in the questions! But perhaps he will go some way to meeting this criticism in the next section.