evidently and naturally said to have been created or made or fashioned; and the
282 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis the work from which he had then rested; and in so doing he not only planted Paradise at that time, but also goes on planting now all the things that are coming to be. Who else, after all, even now creates these things if not the one who is working until now (Jn 5:17)? But he creates these things now from those that are already there, while then things were created by him when they had been abso lutely non-existent, when that day was made which had also itself been abso lutely non-existent, namely the spiritual and intellectual creation.
The nature of time in the six days ofcreation
5, 12. And so creatures once made began to run with their movements along the tracks of time, which means it is pointless to look for times before any crea ture, as though times could be found before times. If there were no movement, after all, of either the spiritual or bodily creation, by which things to come in the future would succeed things in the past through the present, there would be abso lutely no time at all. But no creature could move, of course, if it did not exist. So it is time that begins from the creation rather than the creation from time, while both are from God;from him, after all, and through him and in him are all things (Rom 1 1:36). Nor should the statement that time begins from the creation be taken to imply that time is not a creature, since in fact it is the movement of crea tures from one state to another, with things following each other as regulated by God managing everything he has created.
Accordingly, when we reflect upon the first establishment of creatures in the works of God from which he rested on the seventh day, we should not think either of those days as being like these ones governed by the sun, nor of that working as resembling the way God now works in time; but we should reflect rather upon the work from which times began, the work of making all things at once, simulta neously, and also endowing them with an order that is not set by intervals of time but by the linking of causes, so that the things that were made simultaneously might also be brought to perfection by the sixfold representation of that day.
13. And so it was in the order of causes, not of time, that the first thing to be made was formless and formable material, both spiritual and corporeal, from which would be made whatever had to be made, since this too would not have existed before it was set in place; nor was it set in place by any other than by the supreme and true God from whom are all things. Whether this basic material was signified by the name of heaven and earth, which God made in the beginning before he fashioned that one day, and was already called that because it was from it that heaven and earth were made, or whether it was suggested by the earth being invisible and shapeless and by the darkness of the abyss has already been discussed in the first book.
14. The things, however, that were formed out of that formlessness are more evidently and naturally said to have been created or made or fashioned; and the