by Albert Blaise, Dictionnaire Latin-Franfais desAuteurs Chretiens (Strasbourg, 1954), are
Book IV 261 more immovably and securely, the more it needed him, not he it, to ensure its quiet repose. But since what the whole created universe is going to be, whatever mutations it has gone through, will certainly not be nothing, the whole created universe will, for that reason, always abide in its creator; and thus after that morning there was not next any evening.
36. 1 have said all this to show why the seventh day, on which God rested from all his works, had a morning after the evening of the sixth day, but had no evening itself.
Another explanation ofwhy the seventh day had a morning without an evening
1 9. There is another thing which by my reckoning can be better and more appro priately understood about this point, but which is rather more difficult to explain; and that is that it was not only for creation but for God himselfthat his resting on the seventh day had a morning without an evening, that is, a start without a finish. lf it had said, you see, "God rested on the seventh day" without adding "from all his works which he had made," it would be pointless for us to be looking for a start to this rest, seeing that God, whose quiet rest is eternal, without start, without finish, does not begin to rest. But since it was in not needing them that he rested from all his works which he had made, one does indeed understand God's rest as neither begun nor terminated; but his rest "from all his works which he had made" began from the moment in which he perfected and completed them. Before his works existed, after all, he would not have rested by not needing what he did not need even when they were perfected. And because there has been absolutely no time when he ever did need them, this blessedness and bliss by which he does not need them will not be brought to perfection by making progress, and that is why no evening was attached to the seventh day.
Whether the seventh day was created
20, 37. But the question can certainly be asked, and it calls for proper consid eration, how God may be understood to have rested in himselffrom all his works which he had made, seeing that the text says, And God rested in the seventh day (Gn 2:2); it did not say, you see, "in himself," but in the seventh day. So what, then, is the seventh day? Is it some kind of creature, orjust a period of time? But even periods of time were "co-created"35 together with time-bound creatures.
35. From a verb, concreo, which may have been coined by Augustine; the earliest references given by Albert Blaise, Dictionnaire Latin-Franfais desAuteurs Chretiens (Strasbourg, 1954), are all to works of Augustine. Here we have the past participle, concreatum—"periods oftime" are in the singular in the Latin.