bodies of a sort, bodies even finer than air or fire; and if bodies, then bodily senses.
200 The Literal Meaning of Genesis there in the Word might be here in the actual work. The fashioning of heaven,16 on the other hand, or the sky, was first in the Word of God in terms of begotten Wisdom, then it was made next in the spiritual creation, that is, in the knowledge of the angels, in terms of the wisdom created in them, and only next after that was the heaven made, so that the actual created heaven might be there in in its own specific kind. And the same applies to the separation, or the specific creations, of the waters and the lands, applies also to the nature of trees and herbs, applies to the lamps of heaven, applies to the animated beings sprung from the waters and the earth.
17. Angels, after all, do not see these sensible material things just by the senses of the body, as animals do; but even if they do make use of such senses, 17 it is rather a case of their recognizing such things, which they have a better knowledge of inwardly, in the very Word of God, by which they are enlightened in order to live wisely, since there is in them that light which was the first thing to be made, if we understand it as a spiritual light that was made on that day. So then, just as the formula or idea on which a creature is fashioned is there in the Word of God before it is realized in the fashioning of the creature, so also is knowledge of the same formula or idea first produced in the intelligent creation which has not been darkened by sin, and only then is it realized in the fashioning of the creature.
Angels, you see, did not progress like us to the gaining of wisdom, to behold the invisible things of God by understanding them through the things that have been made (Rom 1 :20). No, from the moment they were created they have been enjoying the eternity of the Word in holy and devout contemplation; from there they look back—over their shoulders, as it were18—at these material things, and according to what they see within the Word they either approve good deeds or condemn sins.
18. Nor is it to be wondered at that God should first show his holy angels, formed in that primal fashioning of light, what he was going to create from then on. Nor, to be sure, would they have known the mind of God unless and to the extent that he himself had displayed it. For who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who was ever his counselor? Or whofirstgave to him, and was repaid? Since from him and through him and in him are all things (Rom 1 1 :34-36). So then it was from him that the angels learned, when knowledge was produced in them of creatures to be made from then on, and after that these were made in their own specific kind.
1 6. That is, of the solid structure, called heaven, on the second day; he is not referring back to the first verse of Genesis. 17. Augustine, and most of his contemporaries, thought of angels—and demons—as having bodies of a sort, bodies even finer than air or fire; and if bodies, then bodily senses. 18. This is the translator's amplification of the text, to make the image more vivid.