not corrected; it is exceedingly dense and sometimes really defies grammatical analysis. So the
Book IV 275
55. When the apostle wished to express the speed of our resurrection, he rightly said that it would happen in the blink ofan eye ( 1 Cor 1 5 :52) . Nothing more rapid, after all, can be found in the movements or pulses of corporeal things. Now if the glance of eyes of flesh is capable of such swiftness, what must the glance of even the human mind be capable of? How much more that of the angelic mind? What now must be said of the swiftness of that supreme Wisdom of God, who reaches everywhere on account of her purity, and nothing defiled affects her (Wis 7:24.25)? So then, in these things that were made all together simultaneously, nobody can see what should be made before or after which, except in that Wisdom through whom they were made simultaneously, and in order.
Conclusion about the days of Genesis
35, 56. So then, this day which God made in the first place—if it is the spiritual and rational creation, that is, the supercelestial angels and powers—was presented with all the works of God in a sequence or order which is the order of knowledge. Thus it would foreknow in the Word of God the things that were to be made, and then know them as creatures already made; this, however, would not be at distinct moments of time, but would be a knowledge of before and after in the sequence of creatures, of all at once simultaneously in the effective work of the creator. For he did indeed make things that were going to be in the future; but he made time-bound things in a timeless manner, to let times made by him run their proper course.
Now these ordinary seven days, which are unfolded and folded up again by the rotation of light from the heavenly bodies, bear a kind of shadowy resem blance to those primordial days; and accordingly they serve to remind us to investigate those days in which the created spiritual light was presented with all the works of God through the perfection of the number six, and was then able to have a morning, but not an evening, on the seventh day of God's rest. This was because God did not rest on the seventh day as though he needed the seventh day to have a rest in, but in the sight of his angels he rested from all his works which he had made—rested in himself, of course, who was not made. ln this way his angelic creation, which like a day with its evening had been presented with the knowledge of all his works both in God himself and in the works themselves, would recognize that after all his very good works there remained nothing better than God himself resting from all of them in himself, and needing none of them to increase his blessedness and bliss.50
50. The Latin of this last chapter of Book 1V bears all the marks ofhaving been dictated in haste and not corrected; it is exceedingly dense and sometimes really defies grammatical analysis. So the translation is admittedly at times just a paraphrase.
BookV
Genesis 2:4-6: How these verses, with their problems, confirm the opinion that creation was the work of one day
The world really created on one day
1,1. This is the book of the creating ofheaven and earth when the day was made Godmade heaven and earth, 1 and all the greenery ofthefield before it was upon the earth, and all the hay ofthefield before it sprang up. For God had not rained upon the earth, and there was no man to till the land. But a spring was coming upfrom the earth and was watering all theface of the earth (Gn 2:4-6). Now indeed that theory gets more definite confirmation, according to which God is understood to have made one day, from which those six or seven could be counted offjust by repeating this one, seeing that holy scripture now says it quite openly, and sums up in a certain manner everything said from the beginning up to this point by concluding: This is the book of the creating, or making, ofheaven and earth, when the day was made. Nor is anybody going to say, you see, that heaven and earth are here mentioned in the same way as where it said, before the fashioning of the day was introduced: ln the beginning God made heaven and earth (Gn 1:1). How that could be taken in the sense of God making something apart from day, before he made the day, l explained in its own place, saying what
I thought, without denying anybody the right to put forward a better explanation. Now, however. This, he says, is the book of the creating of heaven and earth, when the day was made, and thereby he shows clearly enough, in my opinion, that he is not here mentioning heaven and earth in the same way as in the begin ning before day was made, when there was darkness over the abyss (Gn 1 :2), but in the way that heaven and earth were made when the day was made, that is, when the various parts and kinds of things which the total creation is composed of, to present us with this phenomenon we call the cosmos, were formed and distinguished from one another.
1. 1 leave this curious sentence unpunctuated, because Augustine wishes to construe the central clause, "when the day was made," both with the words that go before it and with those that come after it. 1t is perhaps worth bearing in mind that manuscripts in those days, such as the one he had before him, had no punctuation, as we know it, at all.