Aquinas Summa Theologiae, 1,68, 1 . Saint Thomas in this volume (questions 65 - 74 of the first
1 94 The Literal Meaning of Genesis
Saint Basil 's solution
4, 7. One person,6 while accepting their arguments, made a praiseworthy attempt to demonstrate that there are waters above the heavens, in order to defend the reliability of scripture with reference to the manifestly visible phenomena. And first, which was only too easy, he showed that this air, or atmo sphere, is also called heaven or sky; and not only in ordinary speech, as when we talk about a clear sky, or a cloudy sky, but also in the style of our scriptures them selves, where there is mention of the birds of the sky (Mt 6:26), though it is obvious that birds fly around in this air; and when the Lord was speaking about clouds, You are able tojudge, he said, by theface of the sky (Mt 16:3). Now we can often observe clouds being condensed even in the air nearest to the earth, when they slide so low down the slopes ofridges that even the mountaintops rise up above them.
So then, after proving that this airy atmosphere too is called sky or heaven, he wished it to be accepted that the only reason for also calling it a solid structure or firmament was that its intermediate space divides between waters in the form of vapor and those waters which flow in a more tangible liquid form on the earth. And clouds to be sure, as anyone who has gone walking in mountains and hills can tell you, give precisely this impression of the assembly and condensation of the tiniest little drops; and if these thicken any further, so that several very small drops are joined into one big one, the air will no longer allow it to be held up there, but yields to the weight of it and lets it fall to the lowest level—and that is rain.
So this man then wished to show, that it is out of the air lying between the moist vapors from which clouds are condensed up above and the seas spread out down below, that the sky or heaven is constituted between water and water. So then, Ijudge this carefully thought out theory to be deserving of all praise. What he said, you see, is not against the faith, and can also be readily accepted when the grounds for it are set out.
8. It could appear, though, as if the specific weights of the elements need not prevent the waters from being able to lie above that lofty heaven in the form of those droplets in which they have been able to stay above this space of the air. While this is indeed heavier than the highest heaven and lies underneath it, it is undoubtedly lighter than water; and yet watery vapors, nonetheless, are not prevented by any weight from being above it. So then in the same way a lighter
6. The CSEL editors refer to Basil of Caesarea, in his Hexaemeron 111.8. See also Saint Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae, 1,68, 1 . Saint Thomas in this volume (questions 65 - 74 of the first pan of his Summa) is contrasting throughout Saint Augustine' s exegesis of Genesis 1 with that of Saint Basil, and other fathers like Saint Ambrose, who gave what we nowadays would call a more literal (quasi-fundamentalist) interpretation of the text—certainly a less sophisticated one!