did the actual water come from, over which the Spirit of God was being borne?
44 On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees anything. Now just as silence is nothing, so too darkness is nothing. But just as these people say that the race of darkness has been fighting against the light of God, so too any other simpleton can likewise say that the race of silence has been fighting against the voice of God.
However, we have not at present undertaken to refute and demolish these absurdities. What we have now undertaken to do is to defend the things they find fault with in the Old Testament, insofar as the Lord is good enough to grant us the power to do so, and to demonstrate in those places that the blindness of human beings is no match at all for the truth of God.
How the Spirit of God was borne over the water
5, 8. Coming now to the text: The Spirit of God was being borne over the water (Gn 1:2); this is how the Manichees usually find fault with it: "So the water," they say, "was where the Spirit of God lived, was it, and it contained in itself the Spirit of God?" They try with their twisted minds to twist everything, and are just blinded by their malice. After all, when we say, "The sun is being borne over the earth," we do not intend this to be understood, do we, as meaning that the sun lives in the earth, and that the earth contains the sun in itself?9 And in any case the Spirit of God was not being borne over the water in the same way as the sun is borne over the earth, but in a different way which only few people understand. The Spirit, you see, was not being borne over the water through a certain distance of space, as the sun is borne over the earth, but through his own sublimely invisible power.
Let these people tell us, though, how the will of a craftsman is borne over the things that are to be crafted. But ifthey cannot grasp such human, everyday reali ties, let them fear God and seek in simplicity of heart what they do not under stand, or else while they are bent on chopping up with their sacrilegious words the truth which they cannot see, the axe may slip and chop off their legs. I mean, the truth that abides unchangeable cannot be chopped up, but any blows that are aimed at it come boomeranging back, and strike much more severely those who have the nerve to take a swipe at what they must first believe if they are to earn the right to understand it.
9. Next they go on to ask, and question us in their insolent manner: "Where did the actual water come from, over which the Spirit of God was being borne? After all, it had not said earlier on, had it, that God had made the water?" lf they
9. 1t is possible that an earlier generation of Manichees were more familiar with the Hebrew text here, and knew the verse as saying "the Spirit of God was hovering over the water"; in which case it would make slightly better sense to interpret it as meaning that the water was the place where the Spirit lived, like a water fowl. But the Manichees Augustine was dealing with were presumably using the same kind of Latin version of Genesis as he was. and so would just have been parroting what they had heard from their teachers from Syria and beyond.
Book I 45 were asking this question honestly and loyally, they would soon discover how the matter is to be understood. The water mentioned here, you see, does not mean the same as this water which we can see and touch, just as the earth which was called shapeless and invisible was not like this earth that can be seen and handled. But where it said ln the beginning God made heaven and earth, by heaven and earth it meant the whole of creation which God made and set up.
The reason, though, that the names of visible things are given to these reali ties is out of consideration for the weakness of the little ones, who are less capable of understanding invisible things. So then the first thing to be made was basic material, unsorted and unformed, out of which all the things would be made which have been sorted out and formed; l think the Greeks call it chaos. This, you see, is what we read in another place, as said in praise of God: You made the worldfrom unformed material, where some manuscripts have from unseen material (Wis 11:17).
Various names given to the basic material out of which Godformed the cosmos; and this material he madefrom nothing
6. 10. And that is why we are dead right in believing that God made all things from nothing, because even though everything that has form was made from this material, this material itself all the same was made from absolutely nothing. We should not, you see, be like these people who do not believe that Almighty God could have made anything from nothing, when they observe that carpenters and craftsmen of any kind cannot make anything unless they have something to make it from, and that the carpenter is assisted by a supply of wooden planks and the silversmith by a supply of silver and the goldsmith by a supply of gold and the potter by a supply of clay, so that each can carry out his work. lf they do not have the help, after all, of the kind of material they make things out of, they cannot make anything, since they are unable to make the material itself. l mean, the carpenter doesn't make wood, but makes something out ofwood; and so with all other such craftsmen. But Almighty God did not need the help of any kind of thing at all which he himself had not made, in order to carry out what he wished.
lf, you see, for making the things he wished, he was being assisted by some actual thing which he had not made himself, then he was not almighty; and to think that is sacrilege.
7. 1 1 . So then, that formless material which God made from nothing was first called "heaven and earth" where it said: ln the beginning God made heaven and earth (Gn 1:1), not because that is what it already was, but because it was able to be that—the making of heaven, you see, is also described a little later on. lt's as if, when we examine the seed ofa tree, we were to say that the roots are there, and the trunk and the branches and the fruit and the leaves, not because they are in
46 On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees fact already there, but because they are going to come from there. That's how it says, ln the beginning God made heaven and earth, as a kind of seed of heaven and earth, when the material of heaven and earth was still all unsorted; but because it was quite certain that heaven and earth were going to come from there, the material itself was also already called heaven and earth.
The Lord also talks in this way of speaking, when he says: / will not call you slaves any longer, because the slave does notknow what his master is doing; but l have called you friends, because l have made known to you everything that l have heardfrom my Father (Jn 1 5 : 15)—not because this had already been done, but because it was most certainly going to be done. Shortly after that, you see, he says to them: / still have many things to tell you, but you cannot take them now (Jn 16: 12). So why had he said, l have made known to you everything that l have heardfrom my Father, if not because he knew he was going to do this? So too the material could be called heaven and earth, from which heaven and earth had not yet been made, but nonetheless was not going to be made from anything else. Innumerable instances ofsuch ways ofspeaking can be found in the divine scrip tures, just as in our everyday talk, when we are absolutely certain that what we are expecting will happen, we say: "Take it as already done."
1 2. But he also wanted to call this still formless material invisible and shape less earth, because among all the elements of the world, earth seems to have less specific form and appearance than the others. He called it invisible because of its darkness, and shapeless because of its formlessness. He also called the very same material water, over which the Spirit of God was borne as the will of the craftsman is borne over things to be crafted. I0 The reason though it is not absurd also to call this material "water," is that everything that is borne on the earth, whether animals or trees or grasses and anything else of that sort, starts off by being formed and nourished from moisture.
So all these names then, whether heaven and earth, or the earth invisible and shapeless and the abyss with its darkness, or the water over which the Spirit was being borne, are names for the formless basic material, so that an unknown thing may be introduced to the less educated in words they know; and not by one term only but by several, or else if only one were used people would think it was just that one thing they normally understood by that term. So then, it was called heaven and earth, because heaven and earth were going to come from it. It was called earth invisible and shapeless and darkness over the abyss, because it was formless without any appearance that could be perceived and handled, even if there had been any human being to perceive and handle it. lt was called water, because it was there on God's work-bench, easy to work and malleable, for all
1 0. Even if there are few people who can get as far as understanding this. 1 am not sure all the same if it cannot be explained in human words, at least by a few people.