restrained), sibimet succedentes currendo temporalia peragere spatia; "following one another
Book IV 259 evening—but in God it cannot now have any evening, because there will not be anything more perfect than that perfection.
32. ln those days, you will remember, on which all things were being created, we took evening to represent the finishing post for the creature that had been fashioned, and morning the starting post for the one to be fashioned next. And thus the evening of the fifth day is the finishing post for the creature fashioned on the fifth day, while the morning which was made after that evening is the starting post for the creature to be fashioned on the sixth day; and when that had been fashioned there was made evening as its finishing post. And because nothing else remained to be fashioned, there was made morning after that evening in such a way that it would not be the starting post for fashioning another creature, but the start ofquiet rest for the universal creation in the quiet rest of the creator.
Not even heaven and earth, you see, and all that is in them, not even, that is, the totality of the spiritual and bodily creation abides in itself, but clearly in him ofwhom it is said, ln him we live andmove and are (Acts 17:28), because even if each part can be in the whole it is a part of, the whole itself, all the same, is in him by whom it was fashioned. And for that reason it is to be understood that on the completion of the sixth day there was no absurdity in morning being made after its evening, not to indicate the start of the fashioning ofanother creature as on the other days, but to indicate, for the whole of what had been fashioned, the start of its abiding and resting in the quiet rest of the one who fashioned it. This is a quiet rest which for God has neither start nor finish, while for creation it has a starting point but no finishing point. And that is why the seventh day begins for this creation with a morning, but does not terminate in any evening.
33. Now if evening and morning on the other days signify alternations of times such as now occur in the period of every day, I cannot see what should have stopped an evening closing the seventh day and a morning ending its night, so that it would have said, "And there was made evening and there was made morning, a seventh day." After all it too is one of the days which make up the seven, by whose regular repetition the months and years and ages run their course. So the morning which would be placed there after the evening of the seventh day would be the start of the eighth. About this from now on it had to keep quiet, because it is the same as the first, to which we all come back, and in this way the weekly series continues to unroll.
So it is altogether more probable that these seven-day periods follow one another under the names and number of those first seven, and thus unfurl their sails to run before the wind of time,33 while those first six days were unfolded, in a manner quite beyond what we are used to in our experience, with the original
33. Again, the translator's metaphor, enlarging on Augustine's paler (perhaps more sober and restrained), sibimet succedentes currendo temporalia peragere spatia; "following one another lay out by running the spaces of time."