cinema or television or computer. But all the same, the image is extremely apt for his thought,
262 The Literal Meaning of Genesis and thus they too are undoubtedly creatures; nor in fact are there any times, nor could there have been nor can there be, of which God is not the creator. And thus this seventh day also, if it is a time—who can have created it but the creator of all times? But as for those six other days, the previous text of holy scripture indi cates with which or in which creatures they were created. For this reason, of these seven days which we are familiar with, which indeed pass away but somehow hand on their names to the ones that follow them, for the naming of six we know when the first six were created; as regards the seventh day, however, which is known by the name of the sabbath, we do not see when God created it. He did not make anything, I mean to say, on that day; on the contrary, on this seventh day he rested from what he had made in six days. So how then did he rest on a day which he had not created? Or how did he create it immediately after the six days, seeing that he finished on the sixth day all the things he had created, and did not create anything on the seventh day, but rather rested on it from all the things he had created?
Or did God perhaps create only one day, the repetition of which would cause many so-called days to pass and to run across the screen,36 so that there was no need to create the seventh day, because it was made, naturally, by the seventh repetition of this one day? The light, in fact, about which it is written, And God said: Let light be made, and light was made (Gn 1 :3), he distinguished from the darkness and called it day, and the darkness he called night. And so that was when God made the day, whose repetition scripture calls the second day, and then the third and so on up to the sixth, on which God finished his works; and consequently the seventh repetition of that originally created day received the name of the seventh day, on which God rested. And thus the seventh day is not a creature on its own, but the same one coming round seven times, the one which was fashioned when God called the light day and the darkness night.
On the light that preceded the lamps in the sky, and on the alternation ofday and night
21, 38. Once again, therefore, we find ourselves slipping back into the same problem, from which we seemed to have extricated ourselves in the first book,37
36. Augustine of course says nothing about a screen, being unfamiliar at that time with either cinema or television or computer. But all the same, the image is extremely apt for his thought, because as we have seen already, and will shortly find repeated in some detail, it was indeed his view that God created everything in one day—indeed instantaneously—and that the narrative of the six days of creation (and the seventh day of rest) tells of a kind of serial projection of the basic elements of the divine work onto the screen of the intelligence of the spiritual creation; in more traditional terms, tells of the serial impression upon that spiritual intelligence of the eternal ideas of his works contained in his eternal Word. 37. See 1,4,9—5,11; 10,19-22; 14,28-30; 17,32-35.