of theology there, and died in 373.
Book I 185 and night that the text says, God saw that it was good. This night, you see, is not some formless substance from which still other things might be formed, but a space full of air which lacks the light of day; and to this night, obviously, there was nothing of its own sort to be added to make it more specially beautiful or distinct. Evening, though, in the whole of those three days before the heavenly bodies were made, is not unreasonably, l think, to be understood as the end of a finished work; while morning on the other hand points to a work that is yet to come.
ln what way God works
18, 36. But above all we have to remember, a point we have already made several times, that God does not work by time-measured movements, so to say, of soul or body, as do human beings and angels, but by the eternal and unchanging, stable formulae of his Word, co-eternal with himself, and by a kind of brooding, if I may so put it, of his equally co-eternal Holy Spirit. For what is said here in the Greek and Latin versions about the Spirit of God, that it was being borne over the water, according to the Syriac which is a language closely related to Hebrew (this is how a learned Christian Syrian22 is said to have explained the word) is reported to mean not was being borne over but was brooding over the water in the way birds brood over their eggs,23 where that warmth of the mother's body in some way also supports the forming of the chicks through a kind of influence of her own kind of love.
And so let us never think in a literal-minded, fleshly way of utterances in time throughout these days of divine works. The reason, l mean to say, why the very Wisdom of God took our weakness upon herselfand came to gather the children of Jerusalem under her wings as a hen gathers her chicks was not that we should always remain little children, but that while being babies in malice we should cease to be childish in mind.24
37. And in discussing obscure matters that are far removed from our eyes and our experience, which are patient of various explanations that do not contradict the faith we are imbued with, let us never, if we read anything on them in the divine scriptures, throw ourselves head over heels into the headstrong assertion
22. This was very probably Saint Ephrem, a deacon of the Church ofEdessa, who founded a school of theology there, and died in 373. 23. The words 1 have translated as "brooding" are first the nounfotus, and then the \trbfovebat. These have a much wider range of meaning in Latin, to cover the whole notion of fostering or cherishing: and the primary meaning, indeed, offotus is the application of a fomentum or poultice to sores and wounds. So Augustine here says a little more that 1 translate: "was fostering the water; not as swellings or wounds in the body are fostered by cold or suitably warmed compresses, but as eggs are fostered by birds . . ." 24. See Lk 13:34; 1 Cor 14:20.