discussing matters of taste, we could translate, "to show taste like that is to be utterly tasteless";
250 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis
How God's resting on the seventh day is to be understood
8, 15. So now then we come to what is written about God resting on the seventh day from all his works which he had made, and his blessing and sancti fying this day precisely because he rested on it from all his works. But before we attempt as best we can, and to the extent that we are assisted by him, to reach that far with our understanding, we must first purge from our minds the materialistic ideas about this that people sometimes express. Is it right and lawful, I mean, to say or to think that God found his work hard going when he created the things that have been described above, when he spoke and they were made (Ps 148:5)? In that way, surely, not even human beings would find it hard going, if some thing were made the moment they said it was to be made. Yes, it is true that human words are uttered aloud by sounds in such a way that a long speech will tire one; still, when the words spoken are as few as we read, where it is written that God said "Let light be made, let a solid structure be made," and all the rest until the end of his works, which he finished on the sixth day, it would be the height of absurdity, utter nonsense, to think that this was hard, laborious toil even for a human being, let alone for God.
ln what sense God is said to rest
16. Or would someone, perhaps, want to say that for God to say that things should be made, which then were made forthwith, was not hard, laborious toil for him, but possibly thinking about what ought to be made was, and it was on his mind being set at rest with the complete perfecting of things that God rested, and on that score that he blessed and sanctified the day on which his emotional tensions over this business were first relieved? But it is of course the height of folly to entertain such an idea,19 seeing that God's faculties are as incomparably and inexpressibly sufficient for the creation of things as are his facilities.
9. So all that remains for us to understand, perhaps, is that he granted rest in himself to the rational creation in which he also created the man, after perfecting him through the gift of the Holy Spirit, through which charity is poured out in our hearts (Rom 5:5), so that we should be borne along by the impetus of desire to the place where we shall rest, the place, that is, where we shall look for nothing further, when we reach it. After all, just as God is rightly said to do whatever we do by his working in us, so God is rightly said to rest, when we rest thanks to his munificence.
19. Again an untranslatable play on words: Quodsi haec sapere multum desipere est. 1f we were discussing matters of taste, we could translate, "to show taste like that is to be utterly tasteless"; but when sapere and its opposite are referred, as they usually are. to ideas we cannot find suitable English equivalents.