hackneyed one) from the business of weaving cloth on a loom.
Book 1V
Genesis 2: 1-3: The completion of creation; the seventh day
How the six days ofcreation are to be understood
1, 1. And heaven and earth and all theirfurniture^ were finished. And God finished on the sixth day his works which he had made; and God rested on the seventh day from all his works, which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on it he rested from all his works, which God had begun to do (Gn 2: 1 -3). It is indeed an arduous and extremely difficult task for us to get through to what the writer meant with these six days, however concentrated our attention and lively our minds. The question is: Did those days pass, and now with the seventh added do they find themselves repeated, not of course in reality but in name, as times unroll? ln time as a whole, after all, many days come which are like the ones that have passed, but none returns as the same identical day.
So then, did those daysjust pass? Or else, while these which are known by their names and number run on day by day in the course of time, do those days of creation abide in the current state ofthings? On this interpretation it would not only be in those three days before the luminaries were made, but again and again in every recurring series of three days that we would understand the name "day" to signify the actual specific nature of a thing that has been created, and its "night" to consist in its deprivation or defect, or any other better word there may be to signify the loss of its specific nature by some change in its proper form and by its verging on deformity and slipping into it. Such change is built into every created thing, whether as a mere possibility, though absent in actual fact, as in the higher heav enly beings,2 or as a reality in the lowest things, to fulfill in them the time-bound beauty of things changing in an ordered way and yielding to and succeeding one another, as clearly happens with earthly and mortal things. Then "evening" would be for all things, as it were, the terminus ad quem of their complete and perfect establishment, while "morning" would represent their starting line.3
1 . Ornatus. For this word and its rendering as "furniture" see note 30 on Book 11. 2. A possibility that was realized in actual fact by the sin of Lucifer and his rebel angels. 3. Not Augustine's image; he uses the word exordium, which is a metaphor (1 suspect a rather hackneyed one) from the business of weaving cloth on a loom.