thought here, and anticipates what he is going to say about it below in 1 9,38, where the subject
294 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis completing them on the sixth; later on we will go on to consider the works on which he is working up until now. He himself, you see, is before all ages, while things like the world itself, which have existed from when the age began, we say are "from the age"; and others, like those that come to birth within the world, we say are "in the age."23 So then, after saying, All things were made through him, and without him was made nothing, scripture said a little later: He was in this world, and the world was made through him (in 1:10). About this work of God it is written in another place, You who made the worldfromformless matter (Wis
11:17). This world is frequently called by the name of "heaven and earth," as we have already mentioned several times, and scripture says God made it when the day was made (Gn 2:4). We have already discussed these words as much as seemed necessary, to work out how both assertions could apply to the establish ment of this world: both that it was finished in six days with all the things that are in it; and that it was then made when the day was made; and also how that other text too could apply, that he created all things simultaneously (Sir 18: 1).
How creation, much of it unknown to us, is known to God and to the "day, " which is the spiritual, rational creation
18, 36. There are many things in this universe of God's creation which we do not know, whether things higher up in the heavens than our sense perception can reach, or things in regions of the earth that are maybe uninhabitable, or things hidden down below, either in the depths of the abyss, or in secret gulfs and cavi ties of the earth. Before these things were made, therefore, they naturally did not exist. So how were they known to God, seeing they did not exist? And again, how would he make things which were not known to him? After all, he cannot be said to have made anything without knowing what it was. So then it is things he knew that he made, not things he made that he knew. Accordingly, before they were made, they both existed and did not exist; they existed in God' s knowledge, they did not exist in their own nature.
And thus it is that that day was made, to which things would become known in each way, both in God and in themselves; in the first way as with a morning or daytime knowledge, in the second as with an evening knowledge. To God himself, however, since he had made them, l dare not say they became known in any other way than that by which he had known them in order to make them, he with whom there is no change or shadow ofoscillation (Jas 1:17).
23. This odd little aside about the ages and the age (saecula, saeculum) rather interrupts the flow of thought here, and anticipates what he is going to say about it below in 1 9,38, where the subject is introduced by a quotation from Eph 3:9.