Hexameron 1.1–1.22

The First Day. Have human beings really taken so much opinion upon themselves that some of them, like Plato and his disciples, have laid down three first principles of all things, God, the model, and matter, and have asserted that these are incorruptible, uncreated, and without beginning? They hold that God made the world not as the creator of matter but as a craftsman looking to a model, that is, to an idea, out of matter, which they call hylē and which is said to have given all things the causes of their coming to be; and they think that the world itself too is incorruptible, neither created nor made. Others again, as Aristotle with his school thought fit to argue, have posited two principles, matter and form, and with them a third, which is called the efficient principle, to which it belongs to bring about effectively whatever it thought fit to undertake.

What, then, is so unfitting as to join the eternity of the work with the eternity of almighty God, or to say that the work itself is God, so that they honour heaven, earth, and sea with divine honours? From this it came about that they believed the parts of the world to be gods, although there is no small dispute among them about the world itself.

For Pythagoras asserts that there is one world; others say there are innumerable worlds, as Democritus writes, to whom antiquity granted the greatest authority on natural philosophy. Aristotle presumes to say that the world always was and always will be; Plato, on the other hand, ventures to maintain that it did not always exist but will always exist; and very many testify in their writings that it neither always existed nor will always exist.

Amid these disagreements of theirs, what judgment of the truth can there be, when some say that the world itself is God, because a divine mind seems, as they think, to be in it, others that its parts are, others both? On this view one can grasp neither what shape the gods have, nor their number, nor their place, life, or care; for if the world is taken as the measure, God would have to be understood as something rolling, round, burning, driven by certain motions, without sensation, carried along by a motion not his own but another's.

Therefore holy Moses, foreseeing by the divine Spirit that these errors of men would come and had perhaps already begun, says at the opening of his account: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth.” He joins together the beginning of things, the author of the world, and the creation of matter, so that you might know that God was before the beginning of the world, or is himself the beginning of all things, as in the Gospel the Son of God, when they said, “Who are you?”, answered, “The beginning, who also speak to you”; and that he himself gave things the beginning of their coming to be, and is himself the creator of the world, not an imitator of matter led by some idea, shaping his works not by his own will but after a model set before him. Fittingly, too, he says, “In the beginning he made,” to express the incomprehensible speed of the work, since he set out the effect of the completed operation before giving any sign of its being begun.

We must notice who says this. It is Moses, that man learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, whom Pharaoh's daughter took up from the river and loved as a son, and whom, supported by royal resources, she wished to be formed and instructed in all the disciplines of worldly learning. Though he took his name from water, he did not think he should say that all things consist of water, as Thales says; and though he was brought up in the royal palace, he chose for love of justice to undergo voluntary exile rather than to gain the fulfilment of sin through pleasures at the height of tyranny. Then, before he was called to the task of freeing his people, moved by a natural zeal for equity he avenged one of his countrymen who was being wronged, exposed himself to ill will, and tore himself from pleasure; and avoiding all the tumult of the royal house he withdrew to the seclusion of Ethiopia, and there, removed from other affairs, turned his whole mind to the knowledge of God, so as to see the glory of God face to face. Scripture testifies of him that there arose no prophet in Israel like Moses, who knew the Lord face to face, not in a vision or in a dream, but mouth to mouth speaking with the most high God, not in appearance nor in riddles, but granted the clear and open favour of the divine presence.

So he opened his mouth and poured out what the Lord spoke in him, as he had said to him when he sent him to King Pharaoh: “Go, and I will open your mouth and instruct you in what you ought to say.” For if he had received from God what he was to say about letting the people go, how much more what he was to say about heaven! So not in the persuasion of human wisdom, nor in the deceptive arguments of philosophy, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, as a witness of the divine work, he dared to say: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth.” He did not wait for the late and idle business of a world coming together by the collision of atoms, nor did he think he should present God as a kind of pupil of matter, who could fashion the world by contemplating it; he thought he should present God as its author. For that man full of wisdom saw that the divine mind alone holds the substance and causes of things visible and invisible, and that it is not, as the philosophers argue, a stronger interlocking of atoms that provides the cause of lasting permanence. He judged that those who give heaven and earth such tiny and insubstantial first principles were weaving a spider's web, principles which, as they would have come together by chance, would by chance and at random fall apart, unless they held together by the divine power of their governor. And not without reason do they know no governor who have not known God, by whom all things are ruled and governed. Let us follow, then, the one who knew both the author and the governor, and not be carried off by empty opinions.

“In the beginning,” he says. What good order: first to assert what they had been accustomed to deny, so that they would know that the world has a beginning, and people would not think that the world is without beginning. So David too, speaking of heaven and earth and sea, says: “You have made all things in wisdom.” He gave a beginning to the world, then, and gave the creature its weakness also, so that we would not believe it to be without beginning (anarchon), uncreated, and sharing the divine substance. And fittingly he added “made,” so that no delay would be thought to have occurred in the making, and that people might understand even in this way how incomparable a worker he is who completed so great a work in a brief and tiny moment of his operation, so that the effect of his will outran the perception of time. No one saw him at work, but they recognized that he had worked. Where, then, is delay, when you read: “For he spoke and they were made, he commanded and they were created”? He who completed the majesty of so great an operation in a moment of his will needs no use of art or of strength, so that he made what was not to be, so quickly that neither did his will run ahead of the operation nor the operation of the will.

You marvel at the work and ask for the worker: who gave the beginning to so great a work, who made it so quickly? He added at once: “God made heaven and earth.” You have heard the author; you ought not to doubt. This is he in whom Melchizedek blessed Abraham, father of many nations, saying: “Blessed be Abraham by God most high, who made heaven and earth.” And Abraham believed and said: “I stretch out my hand to God most high, who made heaven and earth.” You see that a man did not discover this, but God announced it. For God is Melchizedek, who is king of peace and righteousness, having neither beginning of days nor end. It is no wonder, then, if God, who is without beginning, gave all things a beginning, so that what was not began to be. It is no wonder if God, who holds all things by his power and embraces the universe in incomprehensible majesty, made these things that are seen, since he also made those that are not seen. And who would deny that the invisible things are greater than those that are seen, since the things that are seen are temporal, but those that are not seen are eternal? Who would doubt that God made these things, who spoke through the prophet, saying: “Who has measured the water in his hand and heaven with his span and the whole earth in his closed hand? Who has set the mountains in a scale and the rocks in a balance and the woods on a yoke? Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counsellor, or who has instructed him?” Of him we read elsewhere too that he holds the circuit of the earth and has made the earth as nothing. And Jeremiah says: “The gods who did not make heaven and earth shall perish from the earth and from under this heaven. The Lord who made the earth in his power and set the world right by his wisdom, and in his understanding stretched out the heaven, and a multitude of water in the heaven.” And he added: “Man has become foolish from his knowledge.” For whoever follows the corruptible things of the world and thinks he can grasp from them the truth of the divine nature, how is he not made foolish by the cunning of crafty argument?

When, therefore, you hear so many oracles in which God testifies that he made the world, do not believe that it is without beginning because the world is said to be like a sphere, so that no beginning of it seems to exist, and because, when it thunders, all things seem to be moved as if in a circle, so that you cannot easily grasp where it begins and where it ends, since it is held impossible to perceive the beginning of a circle. You cannot find the beginning of a sphere, or where the orb of the moon began or where it ends in the moon's monthly waning. But if you do not grasp it, it does not follow that it did not begin or will never end. If you yourself draw a circle with ink or a stylus, or trace it from a centre, you will not easily make out with your eyes or recall with your mind, once some time has passed, where you began or where you stopped; and yet you are your own witness that you began and that you finished. For though it escapes the senses, it does not overturn the truth. Things that have a beginning also have an end, and it is plain that a beginning was given to those to which an end is given. And the Saviour himself teaches in his Gospel that the world will end, saying: “For the form of this world passes away,” and “heaven and earth shall pass away,” and further on:

“Behold, I am with you until the consummation of the world.” How then do they assert that the world is co-eternal with God, associate it with the creator of all things, argue that the creature is his equal, and think that the material body of the world should be joined to that invisible and inaccessible divine nature, especially since by their own reasoning they cannot deny that a whole whose parts are subject to corruption and change must itself be subject to the same passions to which its own parts are liable?

He teaches, then, that there is a beginning who says: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth.” “Beginning” refers either to time, or to number, or to foundation, as in a house the beginning is the foundation. We know from the authority of the Scriptures that one can also speak of the beginning of conversion and of depravity. The beginning of an art, too, is the art itself, from which the work of the various craftsmen began. The beginning of good works is also the best end, as the beginning of mercy is that what you do pleases God; for it is then that we are most moved to bring help to men. The divine power, too, is expressed by this name. It refers to time if you wish to say at what time God made heaven and earth, that is, at the outset of the world, when it began to be made, as Wisdom says: “When he was preparing the heavens, I was with him.” If we refer it to number, it should be understood thus: first of all he made heaven and earth, then the hills, the regions, the uninhabitable bounds; or thus: before the other visible creatures, day, night, fruit-bearing trees, the various kinds of living things, he made heaven and earth. But if you refer it to foundation, you have read that the beginning of the earth is its foundation, as Wisdom says: “When he made the foundations of the earth strong, I was beside him, setting things in order.” There is also a beginning of good discipline, as in this: “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord,” since whoever fears the Lord turns aside from error and directs his ways to the path of virtue. For unless one fears God, he cannot renounce sin.

We can understand in the same way this saying: “This month shall be for you the beginning of months,” although it is also taken of time, since he was speaking of the Lord's Passover, which is celebrated at the beginning of spring. In this beginning of months, then, he made heaven and earth, because the world had to take its start from that point, when the mild weather of spring suited all things. So the year too has reproduced the image of the world being born, so that after winter's ice and the darkness of winter the brightness of springtime shines out more clearly than usual. The first rising of the world gave a pattern to the courses of the years to come, so that by this law the turns of the years would rise, and at the beginning of each year the earth would bring forth new shoots of seed, as at the first the Lord God had said: “Let the earth bring forth the green herb, sowing seed after its kind and after its likeness, and the fruit-bearing tree bearing fruit.” And at once the earth brought forth the green herb and the fruit-bearing tree; in this both the divine providence of perpetual moderation and the speed of the sprouting earth support the reckoning of the springtime season. For though at any season it was easy for God to command and for earthly nature to obey, so that even amid winter's ice and frosts the earth, sprouting under the warmth of the heavenly command, would bring forth its young, still it did not suit the eternal plan to loosen fields bound with stiff frost suddenly into green fruits and to mix flowers with bristling frost. So, to show that the time of creation was spring, Scripture says: “This month shall be for you the beginning of months, it is the first for you among the months of the year,” calling the spring the first month. For it was fitting that the beginning of the year should be the beginning of coming to be, and that this coming to be should be cherished by gentler breezes. For the tender beginnings of things could not bear the hardship of harsher cold or endure the injury of scorching heat.

We may note at the same time that it rightly coincides that the entrance into this coming to be and into these uses seems to have been given at the same season at which the lawful passage from this birth to rebirth takes place. For in springtime the children of Israel left Egypt and passed through the sea, baptized in the cloud and in the sea, as the apostle said; and at that season every year the Pasch of the Lord Jesus Christ is celebrated, that is, the passage of souls from vices to virtue, from the passions of the flesh to grace and sobriety of mind, from the leaven of malice and wickedness to truth and sincerity. So to those who are reborn it is said: “This month shall be for you the beginning of months, it is the first for you among the months of the year.” For the one who is washed leaves and abandons that spiritual Pharaoh, the prince of this world, saying: “I renounce you, devil, and your works and your commands.” No longer will he serve him, either in the earthly passions of this body or in the errors of a depraved mind; having sunk all malice like lead, and armed on the right and on the left with good works, he strives to cross the straits of this world with untroubled step. In the book called Numbers, too, Scripture says: “Amalek is the beginning of the nations, and his seed shall perish.” Certainly Amalek is not the first of all nations; but since by interpretation Amalek is taken to mean the wicked, and the nations are wicked, consider whether we ought not to take him as the prince of this world, who rules the nations that do his will, whose seed shall perish. His seed are the ungodly and unbelievers, to whom the Lord says: “You are of your father the devil.”

There is also a mystical beginning, as in this: “I am the first and the last, the beginning and the end,” and above all that in the Gospel, when the Lord was asked who he was, he answered: “The beginning, who also speak to you.” He truly is the beginning of all things, because no one is before him, and the end, because no one is beyond him. According to the Gospel he is the beginning of the ways of the Lord for his works, so that through him the human race might learn to follow the ways of the Lord and to work the works of God. In this beginning, then, that is, in Christ, God made heaven and earth, because all things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made; in him, because in him all things hold together, and he is the firstborn of all creation, whether because he is before all creation, or because he is holy, since the firstborn are holy, as Israel is firstborn, not because he was before all, but because he was holier than the rest. But the Lord is holy above all creation also as regards the body he took, because he alone is without sin, alone without vanity, while all creation is subject to vanity.

We can also understand: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth,” that is, before time, as the beginning of a road is not yet the road and the beginning of a house not yet the house. Others, again, have said en kephalaiō, as if “in the head,” by which is meant that the sum of the operation was completed briefly and in a tiny moment. There are some, then, who take “beginning” not of time but as before time, and as kephalaion or “head,” so that we may say “the sum of the work,” because heaven and earth are the sum of visible things, which seem to look not only to the adornment of this world but also to the disclosure of invisible things and a kind of proof of what is not seen, as in that prophetic word: “The heavens tell the glory of God, and the firmament announces the work of his hands.” Following it, the apostle summed up the same thought in other words, saying: “For his invisible things are understood through the things that are made.” For we readily understand that the author of angels, dominions, and powers is he who by a moment of his command made this great beauty of the world to be out of nothing, when it did not exist, and granted substance to what had neither existence nor cause.

For this world is a specimen of the divine operation, since while the work is seen the worker is displayed. Among the arts, some are practical, consisting in the motion of the body or the sound of the voice: when the motion or sound has stopped, nothing is left over or remains for those watching or listening. Others are contemplative, exercising the vigour of the mind. Others are of such a kind that even when the activity of working has ceased the product of the work remains, like building and weaving, which show the craftsman's skill even when he is silent, so that the work bears witness to its maker. In the same way this world too is the emblem of the divine majesty, so that through it the wisdom of God is made manifest. Seeing it, and lifting the eyes of his mind to the invisible things as well, the prophet says: “How magnified are your works, O Lord! You have made all things in wisdom.”

Nor is it without purpose, surely, that we read “he made”: for many of the Gentiles, who want the world to be co-eternal with God as a kind of shadow of the divine power, also assert that it subsists of itself. And though they admit that God is its cause, they want him to be its cause not by his will and ordering, but as a body is the cause of a shadow; for the shadow clings to the body, and brightness to light, by a natural association rather than by a deciding will. Fittingly, then, Moses says that God made heaven and earth. He did not say that he caused it to subsist, nor that he provided the world with a cause of its being, but that he made it, as one who is good making what would be useful, as one who is wise what he judged best, as one who is almighty what he foresaw would be most ample. And how could it be like a shadow when there was no body, since there can be no bodily shadow of a bodiless God?

How, too, could the brightness of a bodiless light be bodily? But if you seek the brightness of God, it is the Son, the image of the invisible God. As God is, so is his image. God is invisible, so the image is invisible; for he is the brightness of the Father's glory and the image of his substance. “In the beginning,” he says, “God made heaven and earth.” So the world was made and began to be when it was not; but the Word of God was in the beginning and was always. Even the angels, dominions, and powers, though they began at some time, already existed when this world was made. For all things were created and founded, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers: “all things,” he says, “were created through him and unto him.” What is “created unto him”? Because he is the Father's heir, since the inheritance passed from the Father to him, as the Father says: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance.” Yet this inheritance passed from the Father to the Son and returns from the Son to the Father. Excellently, then, the apostle in this place called the Son the author of all things, who holds all things together by his majesty, and to the Romans he says of the Father: “For from him and through him and unto him are all things.” “From him” is the beginning and origin of the substance of the universe, that is, from his will and power, for all things began from his will, since there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things; and indeed he made them as from what was his own, since he made them from what he willed. “Through him” is their continuance; “unto him” is their end. From him, then, is the matter; through him the operation which bound and held the universe together; unto him, because all things remain and hold together by his power as long as he wills, and their end returns into God's will, and by his decision they are dissolved.

In the beginning of time, then, God made heaven and earth. For time comes from this world, not before the world; and a day is a portion of time, not its beginning. And although from the order of the reading we could maintain that the Lord first made day and night, which are the alternations of time, and on the second day made the firmament, by which he divided the water that is under heaven from the water that is above heaven, still it is enough for the present argument that in the beginning he made heaven, from which comes the precedence and cause of coming to be, and made the earth, in which the substance of coming to be would lie. For in these the four elements were created, from which are produced all the things that belong to the world. The elements are four: heaven, fire, water, and earth, and they are mixed with one another in all things; for you may find fire even in earth, as it is often struck from stones and iron, and in heaven, though the sky is fiery and sparkling with shining stars, water can be understood to be present, which either is above heaven or is often sent down from that higher place upon the earth in abundant rain. We could gather more of this, if we saw that it profited the building up of the church. But since to be occupied with such things is unprofitable business, let us rather turn our minds to those things in which there is progress toward eternal life.

On the quality and substance of heaven, then, it is enough to bring out what we find in the writings of Isaiah, who expressed the quality of the heavenly nature in moderate and ordinary words, saying that he made heaven firm like smoke, wishing to declare that its nature is fine and not solid. As to its appearance, too, what he himself said about the firmament of heaven is sufficient, that God made heaven like a vault, because all things that take place on sea and land are enclosed within the circuit of heaven. The same is meant when we read that God stretched out the heaven. For it is stretched out either like a skin for tents, the dwellings of the saints, or like a book, so that the names of the many may be written in it who by faith and devotion have deserved the grace of Christ, to whom it is said: “Rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.”

To discuss the quality or the position of the earth, too, would profit nothing for the prospect of what is to come, since it is enough for knowledge what the text of the divine Scriptures contains, that “he hangs the earth upon nothing.” Why should we debate whether it hangs in the air or upon the water, so that a dispute arises from it: how the thin and softer nature of the air could hold up the mass of earth, or how, if it is upon the waters, the heavy weight of the lands does not sink into the water? Or how the sea's wave does not give way to it and, moved from its place, spill out over its sides? Many have even said that the earth is in the middle of the air and remains unmoved by its own mass, because it extends equally on this side and that in every direction. Of this we think enough was said by the Lord to his servant Job, when, speaking through the cloud, he said: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have knowledge. Who set its measures, if you know? Or who is it that stretched a measure over it? Or upon what are its circles fixed?” And further on: “I shut up the sea with gates and said: Thus far you shall come and you shall not pass, but your waves shall be broken within you.” Does not God show plainly that all things hold together by his majesty, not by number, weight, and measure? For the creature does not give the law, but receives it, or keeps what it has received. The earth, then, is not suspended as if in an even balance because it is in the middle, but because the majesty of God binds it by the law of his will, so that it remains stable above what is unstable and empty, as the prophet David also testifies, saying: “He founded the earth upon its own firmness; it shall not be moved for ever and ever.” Here God is certainly proclaimed not merely as a craftsman but as almighty, who has hung the earth not on some centre but on the firm support of his command, and does not let it be moved. We should understand, then, not the measure of a centre but of the divine judgment, because it is not the measure of art but of power, the measure of justice, the measure of knowledge, since all things do not escape his knowledge as if unmeasured but lie open to his knowledge as measured. When we read, “I have made firm its pillars,” we cannot suppose that it really rests on pillars, but on that power which props up and sustains the substance of the earth. Gather, too, from this how much the establishing of the earth is in God's power, since it is written: “He looks on the earth and makes it tremble,” and elsewhere: “Yet once more I shake the earth.” So it does not remain unmoved by its own balance, but is often moved at God's nod and decision, as Job also says, that the Lord moves it from its foundations, and its pillars are shaken; and elsewhere: “The underworld is naked in his sight, and death has no covering. He stretches out the north over nothing, he hangs the earth upon nothing, he binds up the water in his clouds. The pillars of heaven have fled and trembled at his rebuke. By his power he calmed the sea, by his discipline he laid low the sea monster, and the bars of heaven fear him.” By the will of God, then, the earth remains unmoved and stands for ever, according to the saying of Ecclesiastes, and by the will of God it is moved and shakes. It does not, therefore, subsist resting on its own foundations, nor remain stable on its own props; the Lord set it in place and holds it by the firm support of his will, because in his hand are all the ends of the earth. And this simplicity of faith surpasses all arguments. Let others praise the view that the earth never falls because by nature it holds its own place in the middle, since it must remain in its place and not lean to either side, as it is not moved against nature but according to nature; let them proclaim the excellence of the divine craftsman and eternal worker (for which craftsman has not received his skill from him? Or who gave women wisdom in weaving or skill in embroidery?). But I, who cannot grasp the depth of his majesty and the excellence of his art, do not entrust myself to balances and measures, but think that all things rest in his will, because his will is the foundation of the universe, and on his account this world still remains. This too may be supported by the example of apostolic authority. For it is written that “the creation was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope. And the creation itself also shall be set free from the bondage of corruption,” when the grace of the divine reward shines forth.