imagine them as dots arranged in geometrical patterns; we inherit this manner when we talk
244 The Literal Meaning of Genesis exceed it, like twelve and eighteen, and many more such. So more numbers are to be found of any of these sorts, than of those which are called perfect in that they are completed by their parts of this kind being added up together. l mean, after six the next one we find is twenty-eight, which likewise consists of the total of its parts. Ofthese, you see, it has five; a twenty-eighth, a fourteenth, a seventh, a quarter, a half; that is, one and two and four and seven and fourteen, which added up together complete twenty-eight.7 And the further the series ofnumbers proceeds, the longer, proportionately, are the intervals at which these numbers are found, which equal the sum of their parts in this manner, and which are called perfect. Those numbers, you see, whose parts do not add up to the whole are called imperfect, while those whose parts exceed the whole are called pluper fect.8
6. So it was in a perfect number of days, that is, six, that God perfected his works, which he had made. That, you see, is what is written: AndGodfinishedon the sixth day9 his works which he had made (Gn 2:2). But I become even more addicted to this number when l also consider the order of the works themselves. Forjust as this number rises step by step in its parts into a triangle, l0 for one, you
7. 1 here omit a tautological phrase: "for they become twenty-eight." 1t is not quite so tautological in the Latin, because where he has been mostly using the ordinal numbers and talking, literally, of "the sixth number, the seventh, eighth, etc." until here we have just had "these added up complete the twenty-eighth," 1 have nearly always rendered with the cardinal, "number six, seven, etc." So here, after saying that these parts complete the twenty-eighth number he adds, indeed somewhat superfluously, "for they become twenty-eight." The whole exercise of these last few sections illustrates well enough what a fearfully cumbersome business arithmetic must have been in the ancient Roman world, before they were introduced to Arabic numerals. See note 5 above, where it is all put in a nutshell. 8. Latin appears not to have invented this useful grammatical term, which 1 here apply to mathematics to translate Augustine'spi/uj quam perfecti. Curiosity led me to look for a list of perfect numbers; the British Encyclopedia was totally uninformative; but the Oxford English Dictionary quoted V. Mandey's Syst. Math. Arith. 5 (1709-1728) as follows: "There are found but few Perfect Numbers: to wit from 1 to 40,000,000 only these: 6; 28; 496; 8128; 130,816; 2,096,128; 33,950,336." 1 note an interesting feature: that the final digit of all these numbers is alternately 6 and 8. 9. Augustine follows the Greek Septuagint in reading "the sixth day." Other ancient versions have the same, and are followed by some modern commentators, for example Bruce Vawter, A Path through Genesis (Sheed & Ward, London, 1957), p.46; the Catholic Biblical Association of America, The Book of Genesis (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Patterson NJ. 1 948), p.4. Claus Westermann, however, Genesis l-11; a Commentary (English translation, SPCK, London 1 984) 78, and note 2a.80, keeps to the Massoretic Hebrew text, which has "the seventh day," and says in his note, a little dogmatically one may think: "[Ancient versions] read 'the 6th day ' ; even though this reading makes more sense, the Massoretic Text should not be altered."
1n this learned obscurantism he is followed by all current English versions, including the Jerusalem Bible and its French original—all except the gallant American Confraternity Version. 10. A triangle standing on its apex. The easiest way for ancients to work with numbers was to imagine them as dots arranged in geometrical patterns; we inherit this manner when we talk about the square of numbers. For them, at least for Augustine, keen on the mystical symbolism of numbers, the triangle of numbers was quite as important as the square or the cube. The
Book IV 245 see, is followed by two and three in such a way that no other number can be inserted between them, and they are each and every one of them the parts of six that it consists of: one a sixth, two a third, three a half, so light was made on one day, the fabric of this universe on the two that followed, the upper part, that is the solid structure, on one, the lower part, that is sea and earth, on the next. He did not fill the upper part with any kind of bodily provender, because he was not going to place there any bodies needing sustenance of that sort; but the lower part, which he was going to furnish with animals suited to it, he enriched before hand with the foods that would be necessary to supply their wants. So on the remaining three days were created those things which would visibly move around, powered by themselves and appropriate forces; first the lamps in the solid structure, because the solid structure had been made first, and next animals in the lower part, as due order required, those from the waters on one day, those from the land on the other.
And there can be none so out of their minds that they would have the face to say that God was unable to make all things in one day ifhe so wished, or ifhe so wished in two; 1 1 on one day the spiritual creation and on the other day the bodily, oron one day heaven and all its appurtenances, and on the other the earth with all the things that are on it; and in a word, when he wished and as long as he wished and in the way he wished—who would ever say that anything would have been able to resist his will?
All things in measure and number and weight
3, 7. For this reason, when we read that he perfected all things in six days, and find that six, when we take a look at it, is a perfect number, and that the order of creation runs its course in such a way as to show up even the graded distinction, so to say, of the parts by which this number is perfected, let us call to mind what is said to him in another place in scripture: You have arranged all things in arithmetical triangle that gave him most pleasure was that of 17. which comes to 153, and so was used again and again in his sermons to interpret the great catch of 1 53 fish in Jn 21 : 1 1 ; see in this series, Vol.111,6, Sermon 229M, note 13; also Vol.111,7, Sermons 248,5; 249,3; 250,3; 25 1 ,5; 252A.6. The number 6, which is our concern here, is the sum of the triangle of 3—three dots on the base line, two on the next line, one at the apex. His most complex reflection on the mystical value of6 is to be found in The Trinity 1V,71 1 , where he relates it to the number 46, Jn 2:20: 1t has takenforty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days ? But he was speaking of the temple of his body. He is here anticipating what was in fact his preferred view, that God created all things on one day, and that the six days of Genesis 1 represent the serial playing over of the ideas of what he created, their rationes in the Word, to the spiritual or angelic intelligence, which we have already been observing. He finds support for this view in Sir 18:1: "He who lives forever created all things simultaneously"—creavit omnia simul.