Alethia (Genesis in verse, with a prayer) 1.1–1.537

Before the poles and the daylight of heaven and the darkness of the world, before the forms of works, or things, or the seeds of things, there was one God, to whom being always belongs, eternal without end backward and without end in what is to come; with him lived God the begotten Word and at the same time the kindly Spirit, the sum of hidden, life-giving vigor. By this bond the one substance of the three, quickening itself, unbegotten, always blessed itself by its power and reigned in might; in the majesty of creating seeing already things, and the causes of things, and future events, and what was to be made and begotten, surveying the ages with capacious mind, and always holding as present whatever the times roll on. Immense in blessed greatness, he was his own kingdom, nor did he lack a witness of his kingdom, God, threefold power, who first, from no seed, giving bodies to things as he compels things to exist, so as to make our gift, which he alone possessed, alone knew the work: he begot all things at once, completing a rich world, but, distinguishing what he brought forth into parts by a fixed limit, brought them out each in its own origin, so that order might now set times in a sequence of motion. For neither did chance, lacking mind, as the tongue of sacrilegious madness thought, while it rolled unknowing seeds, twist together so prudent a work, nor may one say that what was born existed before the day, since things born in time are moved and then there was no time, nor believe that the world always held, backward, an eternal and stable vigor;

for what consists of bodies must be confessed to have begun. For a body, which a blow wears down, which times dissolve and abolish by the very end that tends toward the last things, shows a beginning, since things shown to have received their lot must fittingly be believed either made or born. For since things that are born are carried along in motion with time, and times that run after the mass of the world are born, what is prior, and what must consist of bodies, they prove could not have been eternal, and confess could have been made. It is agreed, then, that the world was made, to which everyone, compelled, assents, and, convinced by true doctrine, believes; he has granted that God made it, who, powerful by the might of the Word and by his power, arranged, commanded and directed whatever is thought to be nature, and sustains his created gift, always re-forming fleeting things in successive turns, and, drawing it back, rolls round the swift globe. And if he should wish to dissolve the whole in a moment, he could take existence from things, and not only this existence, but take from past things the very ground by which he knows that they were. O how great the power of the Father, O how great the glory of the Word! What measure is there in the whole, what sum in the gift, of which the vaults of the high pole and the lands that lie below are the first part of the work? But the sea had covered the lands, and the blind shadow of the pole pressed with dense darkness the air between, wet with filthy cloud,

and the holy Spirit hovering over the outstretched waves. He was quickening the nourishing waters, and was giving the seeds of things to be instilled, to be poured out into shoots when the lands were not yet ordered, when light sent from above flashed forth at God's compelling, and the shadow, separated, drawing back its black robe, departed from highest Olympus, set the waters between, and, fleeing the light that followed, was soon behind its back. So the limit of day set a name on the spaces of light, and the darkness, cut off, made night, poured back over the world, equal to it. Again a new morning: the first evening now driven off, light returned and shone, when a most firm mass, stretching itself out from the midst of the waves with solid body, rose up and, made solid far and wide with hard rigidity, hung the divided waters and set the cold deep against the hot axes, and, resting on the enclosed water, spread itself over the things which it closed in a vast circuit, and stripped the ancient sky of its name. Perhaps someone here may argue with himself in skilled error: so that fuel may not be lacking to the ethereal flames, and too great a heat, seeking the lowest depths in pursuit of nourishment, may not burn up the mortal race, and the earthly things may not be unable to bear the glittering sky, the firm frame of the pole has been set beneath, which, while it protects us with shade, is also veiled with waters. But, my mind, flee far from seeking such causes: let it count more with you always to believe that God can do whatever is thought impossible.

and prove that the great sea is carried above the stars and constellations by the reasoning of those very people who refuse to believe it and would have the world hang, which the Creator himself, governing it always by incomprehensible reason, carries, and rolls round, steady in its immense weight. The third light was astonished to see the swelling waves depart, when God, driving back the waters of the remaining flood, opened a great void in the spaces of the air. Then first the dry land, the lowest part of the world, showed its face uncovered, and the blue seas, made to tremble by the power of the Word, encircled the bared lands. These, bidden to grow green at once with varied offspring, luxuriant shoots covered from the new mud, and the raw forest, bursting from the tender turf, tossed itself with glad foliage and with its very fruits, and each, bearing its own seed, bore witness to its sower. Now, three days completed, the first day of the sun, kindled with rapid motion, was bidden to gather itself into flames and a globe of fire, and the seeds of light, founded, scattered crimson tresses from a rosy tinder, and the moon, the glory of the night, whether she shone with her own light or, struck by the oncoming globe, poured back its rays, hung beneath the sun on a lower path; and the blue night was astonished that the stars, painting the world in distinct zones, flashed varied colors with heavenly flowers, and that the sky shone the more with darkness adorned, while the darts poured out in ruddy flames flash and the new stars press on in their eager throws.

the moon, which veils the radiance with its rays and covers it with a kind of night of deep light, and, dividing times marked by a fixed limit, having completed its fixed station, bidden to return in the numbered turn of the headlong pole, to go its course once, completes the revolving year and confesses the sacred craftsman by the marvelous frame. The fifth day set breathing bodies in motion in the sea, which the liquid readily begot and scattered in the deep, the delights of the sea, which nature, bidden to create, formed from varied seed in wonderful ways; nature compels parts of things to live also for themselves instead of for the whole, and gave the soul to pass into brute shapes, creatures that would raise their scaly backs from the swelling salt flood without end, stuffed with soft fat, unless a swift limit of life were prescribed for the huge ones. The begetting liquid itself favors the bodies of its nurslings, the liquid that also nourishes the shoots of the earth, and rather dissolves limbs heaped up, which the moisture had stretched further. From it the birds too, a soft race, drew their vigor. While life, sent in, shapes the liquid waters and enters the sea, the swelling seas seethe again with offspring not born for themselves, and now the scaly crowd, sent forth from the deep, while it rises from the salt into the topmost waves, the creature that was flitting on the waters gradually swims in pure air, and teaches that this animal, which is born again from bright waves, can reach the ethereal recesses.

Now the sixth day was shining on bright Olympus, the third after the begetting gifts of the hot sun, and now the warm earth had relaxed her pregnant limbs, when God, intending greater things, bade the earth bring forth every animal that the faculty of moving alone quickens, to which it was given to serve where the need of things requires. No delay: from the pregnant lands burst forth living offspring, each allotted the shapes of its own kind, now in need of a master, for whose sake he prepared all things, he who alone can create even what is still to be made. From here let me be allowed to touch on some things briefly, to pass over some entirely in anxious, hurried course, and to tell some things I passed over in a changed order. After the given order had brought forth all things kind by kind, which, at God's command, the almighty Son, full of the Father's mind, would make, and the holy Spirit would approve as full of true goods and filled with rich endowment, and would cherish to remain in a long succession, a nearer cause is given to the world, which in its turn has a just prior cause. Now there was a world, now stars and risings, and ether and the glassy sea and green lands: unless a beholder is present whom the glory of so great a mass may fill and lead, eager, through each thing with his eyes, what could they contribute to God? There is no possession if the possessor of things is absent. Then the ruler of Olympus: “The sum of the work is given; good are all the things I have created.

Now let us make man,” he says, “to reign in the world and to be the image of God. It is fitting that he be like his Creator, who, free in his choice, enjoys created things with a mind.” He had said this, and man was made, whether in his whole body, without soul and shape, perhaps in the way in which he makes things to come, in which he makes things yet to be made, in which he always held what was made already as almost past, though it had not yet come in time. And soon he bade him, set over things, with his wife, increase through offspring and fill the empty lands. Now, as God spoke thus well, the nature of begetting was placed in all things that move of themselves alive. The seventh light saw the great Parent cease, but cease only from creating the numbers of kinds, and keep his rest; and deservedly it was hallowed, since it saw a different work; for this too is full of power, that God ceased and laid down his labors. That it was enough for the Lord to have looked for twice three days on the form of what he had begotten, by which they might prepare worthy rewards: the seventh light taught a venerable example of rest, which he bids peoples hope for as the reward of life, always to be given after the works of the pious. This too is that light on which Christ loosed dread Tartarus and opened a way back from conquered Avernus, while he rests in the ground, about to return to his Father's hall.

So God knows how to cease, how to take leisure, so as to do more by ceasing. Resting alike without end and working without end, and mingling sequence and times, by ceasing he completes the work, whatever he had created, so as to make the first man and now to endow him with a body, him who was last (for to found the causes of things is not the same as to give limbs); or, while the seventh day thus runs, so that the sixth day also remains, because the sixth is surely to God what the first is, to him who always has present all the things that escape us, after any amount of time the supreme Author still fashions man thus in the sixth light; or, to teach that we, whom he makes with his own hand, deservedly surpass created things, he sets forth more plainly now that man was made, and declares this to the whole world: “All things that move by a soul were brought forth at God's command; you, by God's working.” Who could bring to so great a parent worthy offerings of praise, who unfolded the world and all things in a moment by command and, while he commands, accomplished their being? Us a delay makes to be; around us he deigns to spend the care of sacred zeal, and he persuades himself to carry out almost a work of labor; for he takes the easy clay that yields and bends and follows the form to which it is led by art, and unfolds it into the shape that he already bore in his holy mind, and life, sent in by a warm breath, watered the ground. The earth, softened by the moisture, became flesh in part: blood, which is a slippery fluid, filled the soft veins through the known openings:

and now man is full of mind, and, pushed off from the earth, he leaps up and, wise, adores the Lord of reason. Not otherwise does true faith hold that bodies, at the command, will rise again from broken tombs, when majesty, descending from the open heaven, unlocks the hollow womb of the pregnant earth. For since, when God formed it thus from the surface of the dust, it brought forth what it did not have, lacking any power of its own, it is easy for it, with the same one as judge, to give back when commanded what it received. So all that was begotten first is a figure of what is to come, and while Adam himself is so made that the narrative, repeated, doubles the sacred gift, it is usefully sown beforehand that peoples will one day be reborn. Their source and highest origin being given already then, where the happy land opens its eastern recesses, on a higher rise the paradise of a pleasant grove is planted and set out in the order of a rounded wood. Here, where the course of the sun is already divided into equal spaces and spring tempers eternity with equal hours, there each tree stands rich with its own fruits, and ripe fruits are driven off by fruits that follow them, which are alluring to the eyes and full of wonderful vigor, and cherish and feed limbs and spirits with taste and smell.

The earth, adorned, flashes starry colors, always with new flowers; and plants which, with a dry covering, now release their fragile reeds, quickened by the vigor of an ambrosial gift pour out fragrant cinnamon; nor do the scent of the Mede, or of the Achaemenian with his loosened hair, or of the Assyrian rich in soft amomum, and the Mareotic harvest red with nard, or the Tartessian shrubs, or the Sabaean twig, or what the Palestinian branch weeps from its torn wound, fail to pour into the air their differing savors. For here God gathered together all the things which nature received one by one in fixed places, and heaped them in one: and while the grove, stirred, quivers in a gentle breeze's passage, it mingles one nectar out of diverse fragrances, and there arises a new gift, which no tree may claim as its own; and where, trembling, gradually tossed with a soft rustling, it quivers with stirred leaves, the wood sounds in every tree a hymn to God, and the breeze whistles measured songs: nor does an empty motion shake the air in vain, since with the Author, who, binding things to things in one mass, holds them in by alternating law, nothing is idle, nor does any appearance hold an empty shape. And perhaps the grove itself and the glittering woods are tokens of works and seedbeds of things, and what comes into human use with a bare name has there a definite body and flowers on its own stem.

glory, simplicity, zeal, vigilance, sleep, care, salvation, terror, eloquence, grace, the motions and passions of the soul, its goads, watchfulness, virtue, and all that the world has: because it is born there, it flourishes here and stirs minds and serves the senses. But this is enough for faith: that, rising from a glad seed, on this side the tree of life seeks the air with lofty fruits, on that side knowledge, harmful with its different fruit, has hung the testing of things on the tree of the law. But the bosom of the holy grove, which the forest crowns, a spring waters, and weds its offspring with rich power, gladly releasing its swelling head in a fourfold river, richer than the ocean; for, ready with its unceasing flood, the spring gives its own waters, the ocean receives all and does not feel the waters. Less is he who cannot grow when such floods are poured in than he who cannot diminish when rivers are poured out. But in the first stream Pishon leaps forth exulting, the fourth part of the blessed spring, bringing the gifts that nature bestows as prudence, and fills the peoples of the Ganges and swells the kingdoms of Havilah with its mud, and, rolling lands and seeds, sows the fields that it makes. Where it lies rough with bare sands, among the golden flakes of gleaming metal the carbuncle flashes, glowing with lightning fire, and the emerald shines, gleaming with green light.

Nor less is the Gihon, which follows, but milder with calm waves, it raises the waters of the Nile and covers with a kindly flood the fields that would otherwise burn far and wide, and, resisting the sky, tempers the air of the Ethiopians with its refluent pools. Third from there, running forth with rapid flood, the Tigris goes as companion to the Euphrates; these, rushing in one joined mass, the conquered earth, opening, swallows in a hollow chasm, until into the glades of Armenia and the Median pastures it vomits out the rivers it could not hold and no longer contains. But the Tigris, as if indignant at black Avernus, leaps forth with greater motion under the breezes of the sky and again goes beneath caverns, and, sunk in hollows, roars within and, made stronger by the barrier, is multiplied in its waters, and, faster from the narrow cave, comes out and cuts the Assyrian plains with swift column. More just is the Euphrates, which, generous with rich flood, waters the dry fields of Persia below, drawn out in soft streams, and serves all equally, and offers itself wholly to human uses, until, dry of waters, prodigal, it spends even its very name in the lands, which it owed to the waves of the sea.

These kingdoms, then, rich with every offspring of nature, delights filled with so many and so great endowments of virtues, are the first possession of the first man, into which he had been led and bidden to exult as a dweller in everlasting life: and now, among the first gifts, while he becomes still worthy and learns by labor to deserve what he possesses, having obtained the fruit of full virtue, he lived free of cares and not knowing what it was to wish. So great is the merit with the Author, instead of the highest title, not yet to have deserved any evil. How much, then, do we think the Father can pay for the life that will return in the times to come, with whom, already then, paradise was for his servants a first largess, not a wage? And in that he brought in the decrees of a severe law and restrained their freedom, he still pledges greater things to the good and keeps rewards in store, he who established the ground for merits when he said: “Eat of all the trees: remember only to dread this one, which, bearing the testing of diverse things, will make you, who then knew good, know evil when it is wounded by a profane bite, and the penalty of death will follow.” By giving such a law, the deep reasoning of the Father teaches that he willed man not to be made mortal but to be worthy to live, and that a slight observance would make him worthy. O how great is the kindness of the great God!

He desires that what he bestows on his servants of his own kindly will should become the work of our praise; he desires it to be the fruit of our labor, and prefers that what he gives should seem owed by him. But you, whom the custody of the sacred law binds, do not complain that your liberty, shut within narrow bounds, is robbed of a part of itself: nothing is cut off from you by this law. Before, you had obtained power only over earth and sea; now you have power over the kingdom and everlasting life, and now over death as well. Then, so that the inexperienced inhabitant of the world might believe that the kindly Parent had granted him all things, God bade every animal which the earth, bidden to give, had so far created and poured out by silent seed, springing up in body, to come and obey its own ruler, and Adam, after the highest names of the kinds, to speak the names of the parts, by which to fix them on things as on servants: he who, at the Lord's prompting, among such great gifts of life, gave each its own name as well. No delay: nature sets before God every kind, from whatever part of the new world it was created. Creatures so different in motion gather within one moment of time: those the Father had equipped, strong in effort, or slow with soft step, or most ready in rapid course, to glide with headlong onrush through the air, or, supported on the seas, to be carried slippery by their weight, endowing them with different gifts, and armed them with hand, horn, foot, tooth, venom,

and others, whose compact frame, lacking art and of lesser spirit, he fortified. But none of the living creatures flourished with appearance, face and bearing equal to man, and, set beside him, each rather added to his honor; and among so many creatures that brighten life with a double sex he alone was unmatched, he who for a long while, unaware, held in himself the fit material for begetting a wife. So God undertakes the work he knew, and, swiftly striking the man's heart, loosens it, languid, in so deep a sleep that he might, in his might, take away a rib from one bereft of mind, while the flesh rises, bidden to follow, and the skin, drawing back, does not let the bone mingle with the gap between, and might take it with the limbs unharmed and the body sound. The rib, unfolding, soon distributed through various limbs, received form and, animated by warm marrow, drew on the work of life, now pleasing in the second sex, and, given to her husband, was called Eve. Here now, most stupid crowd, stop at last judging anything to take precedence over the sacred Parent: why indeed was the first woman formed thus from the limbs of her man, when she could have been fashioned from soft dust, and could have been made from nothing? This is surely the true cause: lest the natural order should rather claim this for itself, or because man is from man and it should be clear to the world that all things were then made at once, so that a certain kinship might mingle mutual love with care for one's own, * compelling each to recognize himself in the limbs of the other.

Hence it is that Adam, unknowing, felt that he had received back part of himself: a new grace touched his mind, and affection, received through his eyes, rushed into his own inmost parts and penetrated his bones with such warmth that it now gave him to know that a wife has the name of spouse, that sweet children and parents are to be put after one's spouse. What then? Now the two would remain in one flesh, leading together an eternal life (for while they lacked the vices and stain of the earth, they flourished with divine minds, needing none of the riches the world gave: for they did not bear bodies subject to diseases, or the nurslings of a greedy belly; food was only among their delights, and what need demands was not yet a support of life, and the soul's own immortality flourished), had not the dire serpent, goaded by the venom of a greater evil, persuaded the incautious Eve with such deceits to break the law: “O race of men, lacking the better life and ignorant of good things! For he who cannot distinguish how diverse things differ from good ones does not know good things either. And therefore God did not wish it lawful for man to pluck the august fruits, lest, the cloud removed from the mind, they should give eyes to souls, and the other part of things, teaching what is best, should make those who are expert in all secrets like gods.” Here now let it be right to digress a little and lament the shameful ruins of the ancients.

Ah, too wretched Gentiles, whom madness drove into various rites! It is plain in what death the profane perished utterly. The plural name of gods the impious voice of the dire serpent first sounded, he who was then the cause of death. For after credulous Eve broke the command with sacrilegious bites, now taught by the experience of evil, she seeks consolation for her guilt and, to drag her compliant husband into the crime, attacks him by the art by which she herself had perished first. So, overcome by the enemy, wretched Adam yields to a twin crime and tasted the fruits, most alluring with sacred juice. But since beneath them lay the decrees of a severe law, bound to bring death more surely than a viper's venom, as soon as they had violated their limbs with the forbidden taste, at once they felt the wickedness, and the crime they had done grew and struck their breasts with an unknown sense. Hence fear, thence shame: for before it had been given them to live naked and not know it; whether because, untaught men, with hearts full of kindly vigor, aware of lofty things, bearing breasts intent only on heaven and the world, always turned toward the exalted Father, while they observed the marvels of the divine secrets with the splendor of an almost bodiless mind, they had not yet come to care for their own limbs, unaware of them through a better soul; or because the motion that would make them know whatever is needful could not penetrate bodies that were not to be dissolved into old age by any delay.

After that everlasting vigor of life had deserted the now mortal creature, at last cold and heat, the changes of the air, came upon them, and the human pair felt themselves in need of clothing and secretly blushed at their own sex. Lamenting pitiably with silent tears, they weave new coverings from the leaves of the shady fig, joined together, to strip away by covering the body the shame that their mind had taken on after the guilt. Nor is this enough for the trembling pair. What are they to do, how flee the branded crime and themselves? They would wish, if perhaps it opened, to hide themselves in the earth: so close to its punishment is guilt, that now, as the wretches fear what is mortal, the very image of death pleases them. They draw woods and shady haunts over themselves, the false comfort of an empty hiding place. For where may you, timid one, withdraw your body, you, you, I say, Adam, who are soon to be dragged back first? The living power of the Father, most hidden, present, fills the world and, spread abroad, goes out beyond its immense recesses. But truly it is wrong for the fearful to be cheated by a hiding place. Only he can escape the highest Lord in fleeing who flees to the Lord; leaving him in mind alone, in how vast a darkness you lie, and still you cannot hide! Calling with his voice, 'Where are you?', he testifies to both together.

For why does God, seeing you, seek you, and why does he, to whom you will always be present, from whom not even death itself, which you underwent through a frail mind, can steal you away, ask where you are, unless because he declares that you, fallen of your own will in the manner of grief, are not with him and have fallen from sacred heaven? But the holy kindness of the Father forbids despair, whose clemency (let it be right for me to have said it, right also to have proved what I said) exceeds his justice. Nor does he, rebuking me with severe voice, “Where are you, what are you turning over in your trembling breast?”, so much frighten me as restore me, because, after the crimes, he still calls out and calls back one who has fallen, sunk in fear in hiding places and almost buried. Lest long examples be sought: the very pardoning of the guilt proves the Lord gentle. After the questioning, sifting the matter, had picked out the chief culprits, the Almighty begins (heaven, sea and earth tremble at the speaker, and, shaken, lay open their vast recesses, and while the sentence punishes the guilty, it created Tartarus): “Since you have thought it safe to depart from our commands, in the same order in which the guilt ran through the sequence of the crime, in that order a just sentence of mine will strike the new offenders. Among all the creatures which we bade enjoy the whole world, you will be cursed and worse than what you hide within, envious mind, serpent, who cast down men created to enter heaven, and, for those whom your fraud drove to touch the forbidden fruits, are the origin of a very hard death.

so that a measure of punishment worthy of the wickedness may follow: you plunged men into the earth: you too, your limbs stretched on the hostile ground, will furrow the hard earth with your breast; you made them sin through food: for such daring you too will always eat the squalid inward parts of the earth. And because it pleased you, as worthy of you, to be the first inventor of death, you will die by a bloody punishment, and, arming the hatred of the human race especially against all your kind, steeped in cruel venoms, I will make you always feared, so that you may be killed the more. And of this woman, whom you rejoice to have overcome by your first fraud, living lower than her feet and prone on your breast, you will lie in wait only for the very soles, so that she, trembling, may set her footprints even on your head.” He spoke, and thus began upon the pale Eve: “But you, who thought it the least of crimes to destroy yourself alone by the fruit, and, in your wretched mind, then lay in wait to harm your husband and gained the mastery by so great a crime, will bear a servant's yoke, and, subject, you will feel the will of a harsh husband and suffer labors in constant mishaps, so that you who first dared to multiply the wickedness once begun may be tossed about in many perils, and in childbearing you will be so tortured by frequent children that those whom your guilt will cause to be born mortal will sometimes be the cause of death to their torn mother.”

“You too, who dared to put our warnings and the first bonds of salvation after a woman's deceits, and chose of your own will to die, guilty, receive such a lot: let the earth which you will furrow with the plough be cursed for your crimes. Tilled, let it bear thorns and threatening thistles, and let wicked hope cheat your wish. You ceased to serve me with a faithful mind: let the earth not keep faith with you either. You of your own will refused to live glad in these delights and to live through all ages: now live in hard labor, live in miseries, until slow old age makes you earth, which you rather are, and pours you back to the earth.” He spoke, and in pity covered with the skins of beasts the limbs that could not defend themselves against the sky, and taught them to protect their life. But lest Adam, driven by fear of death, should again dare the crime that he bore in mind, if, ignorant of things, after the extremity of his cause, he should seek again the proud help of the tree of life, which he had by first right, and should live redeemed by no art of the Father, and the mystic order should now totter for the world, and heavier punishments should await the wretched and ever guilty: at once the winds, which the forest of the deep grove stirs, carry them off, bidden to depart from the sacred groves (but a breeze, carrying them, holds them bound in a balancing whirlwind, and the wind seizes the whole air as nature inclines), and, bringing them back to the lands from which their body was given, sets them down with softened blast, without feeling so great a distance and without feeling danger, but not without the grief that agitates the heart.

where they had fallen, what they had lost, what life would follow, what it had been: the sad comparison torments the mind, which heaps up the differences all the more, and they turn over within themselves how far they are now other, how far each of them, changed, seeks himself, uncertain whether to ascribe this to the first guilt and punishment, whether error forced them to know the power of evil, or whether this is what it is to die, or, if heavier things remain, whether a return is granted to the wretched, or whether by an everlasting end they lose what remains, or whether, since the way of bitter death has fallen upon the world and future peoples through a tree, some life may yet return through a tree.