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| The Words, ‘In the Beginning,’ And, ‘The Heaven and the Earth,’ Are Differently Understood.
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Chapter XXVIII.—The Words, “In
the Beginning,” And, “The Heaven and the Earth,” Are
Differently Understood.
38. But others, to whom these words are no longer a
nest, but shady fruit-bowers, see the fruits concealed in them, fly
around rejoicing, and chirpingly search and pluck them. For they
see when they read or hear these words, O God, that all times past
and future are surmounted by Thy eternal and stable abiding, and
still that there is no temporal creature which Thou hast not made.
And by Thy will, because it is that which Thou art, Thou hast made
all things, not by any changed will, nor by a will which before was
not,—not out of Thyself, in Thine own likeness, the form of all
things, but out of nothing, a formless unlikeness which should be
formed by Thy likeness (having recourse to Thee the One, after
their settled capacity, according as it has been given to each
thing in his kind), and might all be made very good; whether they
remain around Thee, or, being by degrees removed in time and place,
make or undergo beautiful variations. These things they see, and
rejoice in the light of Thy truth, in the little degree they here
may.
39. Again, another of these directs his
attention to that which is said, “In the beginning God made the
heaven and the earth,” and beholdeth Wisdom,—the Beginning,1158
because It
also speaketh unto us.1159
Another likewise directs his
attention to the same words, and by “beginning” understands the
commencement of things created; and receives it thus,—In the
beginning He made, as if it were said, He at first made. And among
those who understand “In the beginning” to mean, that “in Thy
Wisdom Thou hast created heaven and earth,” one believes the
matter out of which the heaven and earth were to be created to be
there called “heaven and earth;” another, that they are natures
already formed and distinct; another, one formed nature, and that a
spiritual, under the name of heaven, the other formless, of
corporeal matter, under the name of earth. But they who under the
name of “heaven and earth” understand matter as yet formless,
out of which were to be formed heaven and earth, do not themselves
understand it in one manner; but one, that matter out of which the
intelligible and the sensible creature were to be completed;
another, that only out of which this sensible corporeal mass was to
come, holding in its vast bosom these visible and prepared natures.
Nor are they who believe that the creatures already set in order
and arranged are in this place called heaven and earth of one
accord; but the one, both the invisible and visible; the other, the
visible only, in which we admire the luminous heaven and darksome
earth, and the things that are therein.
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