been the formation of the spiritual creation, did it not rather then follow that the
206 The Literal Meaning of Genesis we cannot say, you see, that the better things were chosen to give a more orna mental touch to the ends27 and the middle of the series of days, the fourth of course being the middle one of the series of seven. lt immediately occurs to us, l mean, that on the seventh day no creature was made. Or does the light of the first day, perhaps, correspond rather to the resting on the seventh, so that with the two ends of the series balancing in this way, the pattern could be perfected by weaving the outstanding lights into the middle?
But if the first day balances with the seventh, then the second in its turn should balance with the sixth. In what way, though, is the solid structure of heaven at all like man made to the image of God? Or could it be this, that as the heaven occupies the whole upper part of the cosmos, so to man has been granted the right to lord it over the whole of the lower part? But then what are we to make of the cattle and the wild beasts, which the earth produced in their various kinds on this same sixth day? What comparison can there be between them and the heavens?
27. Or since the first thing made under the name of light is understood to have been the formation of the spiritual creation, did it not rather then follow that the bodily creation too should be made, that is this visible cosmos, which was made in two days because of the two main parts ofwhich the universe consists, namely heaven and earth? In terms of this comparison of ideas by which the total spiri tual28 and bodily creation is often named heaven and earth, so that this globe of more turbulent air is ascribed to the earthly part—it gets "bodified,"29 after all, by damp exhalations, while if there is any stillness of air in which windy and stormy movements cannot arise, it belongs to the celestial part, it would follow that after the construction this total bodily universe, which is all in the one place in which the cosmos is located, it should be filled inside the whole with those parts that could be moved around from place to place with appropriate move ments.
Now grasses and trees are not things of that kind. They are of course fixed to the earth by their roots, and although they have the movements involved in their growth, they still for all that do not move from their own places by their own efforts, but are nourished and grow wherever they have been planted. For this reason they belong more to the earth than to the kinds of things which move about in the water and on land. And so because two days were allotted to the establishment of the visible world, that is, ofheaven and earth, it remains that for
27. Reading/ines with two manuscripts, instead of the singularfinis of the CSEL and the Maurist texts. 28. His line of reasoning is obscured, almost derailed in fact, by his bringing in the spiritual creation here: His concern is only at the moment with the material "heaven and earth." 29. Corporascit: a word very possibly coined by Augustine. Lewis & Short gives only one reference, to a work of Claudianus Mamertus from the end of the fifth century, two generations or so after Augustine.