4:11; 1 Ft 2:4-8.
268 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis
Treating the light and day as spiritual realities is not a metaphorical interpretation
28, 45. And please let nobody assume that what l have said about spiritual light and about the day being constituted in the spiritual and angelic creation, and about what it contemplates in the Word of God, and about the knowledge by which the creature is known in itself and its being referred to the praise of unchangeable Truth, where first the idea was seen of the thing to be made, which once made was known in itself: that none of this can be said strictly and properly, but that it all belongs to a kind of figurative and allegorical understanding ofday and evening and morning. Certainly it is different from our usual way of talking about this bodily light ofevery day, but that does not mean that here we have the strict and proper, there just a metaphorical, use of these terms.
After all, where you have a better and surer light, there you also have a truer day; so why not both a truer evening and a truer morning? In these familiar days the light knows a kind of decline towards sunset, to which we give the name of evening, and again a return towards sunrise, which we call morning; so why should we not call it evening there, when there is a turning from the contempla tion of the creator to look down at the creature, and morning when there is a looking up again from knowledge of the creature to the praise of the creator? Not even Christ, you see, is called light in the same way as he is called a stone;43 no, he is called the first properly and strictly, the second of course metaphorically.
So then, ifanybody is not satisfied with the line which I have been able in my small measure to explore or to trace, but requires another theory about the numbering of those days, by which they may be better understood, not as prophetic types and figures, but as a strict and proper account of the way the foundations of this creation were laid, then by all means let him look for one and with God's help find one. I am certainly not insisting on this one in such a way as to contend that nothing else preferable can be found, while I do insist that holy scripture did not intend to suggest to us that God rested as if he were tired out, or racked with anxiety and worry.
Day, evening, and morning in the knowledge of the angels
29, 46. Accordingly, someone may perhaps wish to take me up and argue that the angels of the loftiest heavens do not successively gaze, first upon the ideas of creatures which are there unchanging in the unchangeable truth of the Word of God, and next upon the creatures themselves, and thirdly refer their own knowl edge of them to the praise of the creator, but that their minds have the marvelous
43. For "light" see Jn 1:4.8; 8:12; 9:5; 12:46; Mt 4:16; Lk 2:32; for "stone" see Mt 21:42; Acts 4:11; 1 Ft 2:4-8.