Against Hermogenes 31–45

But this too will surely be seized on: that Scripture signified only of heaven and of this earth that God made them in the beginning, but said nothing of the kind about the forms named above, and that therefore these, not being signified as made, belong to unmade matter. We shall answer this scruple as well. Divine Scripture would have said enough if it commended the sum totals of things as made by God, heaven and earth, which of course had their own furnishings, which could be understood within those totals. Now the furnishings of heaven and earth at that first time were darkness and abyss, spirit and waters. For the abyss and the darkness lay under the earth: if the abyss was below the earth, and darkness over the abyss, then without doubt both darkness and abyss were below the earth. But the spirit and the waters lay beneath heaven: if the waters that had covered the earth were over the earth, and the spirit over the waters, then spirit and waters alike were over the earth; and what is over the earth is surely below heaven. And as the earth lay upon the abyss and darkness, so heaven brooded over the spirit and the waters and embraced them. So it is nothing new that only what contains should be named, as the whole, and that in it what is contained should also be understood, as the part. See, if I say: “The city built a theatre and a circus; but the stage was of such and such a kind, and statues stood over the channel, and an obelisk towered over all”; because I have not declared that these features too were made by the city, will they not have been made by it together with the circus and the theatre? Did I not leave out that these features too were made precisely because they were part of the things I had said were made, and could be understood to be in the things of which they were part? But let this example go, as merely human; I shall seize another from the authority of Scripture itself. “God,” it says, “made man from the earth and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” Here it names his face, yet it did not say that even this was made by God; and it speaks later of skin and bones and flesh and eyes and sweat and blood, which it did not signify were made by God at that time. What will Hermogenes answer? Will the members of man also belong to matter, because they are not reported by name as made? Or are they too counted in the making of man? In the same way, the abyss and darkness, spirit and waters were members of heaven and earth. For in bodies the members were made; in bodies the members are also named. There is no element that is not a member of the element by which it is contained; and all elements are contained by heaven or by earth.

This is my answer as regards the present Scripture, insofar as it seems here to commend the making only of the bodies of heaven and earth. It knew there would be those who would readily recognize the members within the bodies, and so it used brevity; yet it also foresaw the dull and the insidious, who, disregarding the tacit understanding, would demand for the members themselves as well a word signifying their making. So, because of these people too, it teaches in other places that the individual forms were made. You have Wisdom saying, “I was begotten before the abyss,” so that you may believe that the abyss too was begotten, that is, made, since we too “make” sons, though we beget them. It makes no difference whether the abyss was made or born, provided a beginning is granted to it, which would not be granted if it were of matter. Of darkness the Lord himself says through Isaiah: “I who built the light and made the darkness.” Of the spirit likewise Amos: “who strengthens the thunder and creates the spirit, and announces to men his Christ,” showing that the spirit was created which was reckoned together with the created earth, which was borne over the waters, the balancer and breather and animator of the universe; not, as some think, that God himself is signified by “spirit” because God is spirit; for the waters would not have been able to bear their Lord. But he means that spirit of which the winds too consist, as he says through Isaiah: “For the spirit went forth from me, and every breath I made.” Likewise of the waters the same Wisdom says: “And when he set firm the fountains of what is under heaven, I was keeping measure with him.” But when we prove that these forms too were made by God, even though in Genesis they are only named, without mention of their making, the other side will perhaps answer that they were indeed made, but from matter; so that Moses' wording, “And darkness was over the abyss and the Spirit of God was borne over the waters,” speaks of matter (itself), while the other Scriptures show here and there the forms that were made from matter. So then, just as earth came from earth, did the abyss likewise consist of abyss, darkness of darkness, and spirit and waters of spirit and waters? But, as we said above, matter could not have been shapeless (if) it had forms; … so that other things should also be made from them; unless they were not other things but the same things made from themselves, since things given the same names cannot have been different; in which case the divine work might now seem idle, if he made things that already existed, when it would be nobler (to make) things that did not exist. So, to conclude: either Moses signified matter when he wrote, “And darkness was over the abyss and the Spirit of God was borne over the waters”; but then, since these forms are afterwards shown elsewhere to have been made by God, they ought equally to have been shown to be made from the matter which Moses had set down first; or, if Moses signified these forms and not matter, I ask where matter has been shown.

But since Hermogenes found matter among his own paints (for he could not have found it among the Scriptures of God), it is enough that all things are agreed to have been made by God and are not agreed to have been made from matter. Even if matter had existed, we would have believed that it too was made by God, since we would hold to our rule that nothing is unborn except God. Up to this point there is room for discussion, until the production of matter, when challenged to appeal to the Scriptures, fails. The sum is settled: I find nothing made except from nothing, because what I find made I know did not exist before. Even when something is made from something, it takes its rating from a thing that was made, as from the earth come grass and fruit and cattle and the form of man himself, and from the waters the swimming and flying creatures. Such origins I may call “matters”, but they too were made by God.

Besides, that final dispensation of God, which will bring all things back to nothing, will persuade us that everything came into being from nothing. For heaven too will be rolled up like a book; indeed it will be nowhere, together with the earth itself, with which it was made in the beginning. “Heaven and earth will pass away,” he says; “the first heaven and the first earth have passed away, and no place was found for them,” because, evidently, what ends also loses its place. So David too: “The heavens are the works of your hands, and they will perish.” And though he will change them like a covering, and they will be changed, to be changed is to perish from their former state, which they lose in being changed. And the stars will fall from heaven, as a fig tree shaken by a strong wind loses its unripe figs; and the mountains will melt like wax before the face of the Lord, when he rises, that is, to shatter the earth. “And I will dry up the pools,” he says, “and they will seek water and not find it”; and the sea too will be no more. Although someone may think all these things are to be interpreted otherwise, he will not be able to take away the truth of their coming to pass just as they are written. For if there are figures here, they must be made from things that exist, not from empty ones, because nothing can furnish a likeness from itself unless it is itself something that can furnish such a likeness. I return, then, to the case, and define that all things brought forth from nothing (are) to come to nothing. For from what is eternal, that is, from matter, God would have made nothing perishable. Nor would he have created lesser things from greater, he to whom it is more fitting to produce greater things from lesser, that is, the eternal from the perishable. This he also promises to our flesh; and he has willed to place in us already this pledge of his power and might, so that we may believe that he also raised up the universe from nothing, as though from death, since it did not exist, in order that it might exist.

As to the further condition of matter, although it need not be discussed (for the first thing was to establish that it exists), nevertheless, as though that had been established, the sequence must be followed, so that it may be all the more established that matter does not exist, since even its further condition does not hold together, and at the same time so that Hermogenes may recognize his own contradictions. “At first sight,” he says, “matter seems to us to be bodily; but when examined by right reason it is found to be neither bodily nor incorporeal.” What is this right reason that reports nothing right, that is, nothing certain? For unless I am mistaken, every thing must be either bodily or incorporeal, granting for the moment that something incorporeal exists, at least among substances, since substance itself is the body of each thing. Certainly after bodily and incorporeal there is no third. Come now, let there be a third, which that right reason of Hermogenes has discovered, which makes matter neither bodily nor incorporeal: where is it? what is it like? what is it called? how is it described? how is it understood? (Or) has reason reported only this, that matter is neither bodily nor incorporeal?

But see, he puts forward the contrary, or perhaps another reason occurred to him, reporting matter to be partly bodily and partly incorporeal. So then, lest it be neither, must matter be reckoned both? It will be bodily and incorporeal, against the report of that right reason, which plainly gives no reason for its opinion, as it gives none for anything else. For he wants the bodily element of matter to be that from which bodies are produced, and the incorporeal element its disordered motion. “For if,” he says, “it were only body, nothing incorporeal would appear in it, that is, motion; but if it had been wholly incorporeal, no body would be made from it.” How much straighter this reason is! Except that, Hermogenes, if you draw lines as straight as you reason, no painter is duller than you. For who grants you to count motion as a second part of the substance, when it is not a substantial thing, since it is not bodily either, but an accident, if anything, of substance and body? Like action and impulse, like slipping and falling, so also motion. For whether a thing is moved (by another or) by itself, its motion is its action, certainly not a part of its substance, as you make motion the incorporeal substance of matter. In short, all things are moved either by themselves, like living creatures, or by others, like lifeless things; yet we shall not call a man or a stone both bodily and incorporeal because it has both body and motion, but we give to all one form, of bodiliness alone, which is the property of substance. If any incorporeal things belong to them, their actions or passions or functions or desires, we count them not as portions. How then does he come to assign a portion of matter to motion, which belongs not to substance but to the condition of substance? What if you had chosen to present matter as motionless? Would immobility seem a second part of its form? No more, then, is motion. But of motion there will be room to speak elsewhere too.

For now I see you returning to that reason which usually reports nothing certain to you. For just as you bring in matter as neither bodily nor incorporeal, so you allege it to be neither good nor evil, and you argue further in the same way: “For if it were good,” you say, “being what it always was, it would not desire God's ordering; if it were evil by nature, it would not have admitted a change for the better, nor would God have applied any of his ordering to it, since it was of such a nature; for he would have laboured in vain.” These are your words, which you ought to have remembered elsewhere too, so as not to put forward anything contrary to them. But since we have already discussed the ambiguity of evil and good in matter, I shall now answer only your present proposition and argument. I shall not say here too that you ought to have pronounced something certain, whether good or evil or some third thing, but that here you did not even keep to what you chose to pronounce. For you rescind what you pronounced, “neither good nor evil”: when you say, “If it were good, it would not desire to be ordered by God,” you suggest that it is evil; and when you add, “If it were evil by nature, it would not admit a change for the better,” you hint that it is good. And so you have made akin both to good and to evil the matter which you pronounced neither good nor evil. And to blunt the argument by which you thought you would confirm your proposition, I set this too against it: if matter had always been good, why would it not have desired to be reformed for the better? What is good does not desire progress only if it either does not wish for it or cannot receive it, so as to become better from good. Likewise, if it had been evil by nature, why could it not have been converted by God, as by one more powerful, by one able to convert even the nature of stones into sons of Abraham? Surely, then, you not only compare God with matter but even subject him to it, if by him the nature of matter could not be overcome and tamed (into) something better. And you will have to deny that elsewhere you confessed to be evil by nature the matter that here you will not have so.

On the position of matter I raise this point, which will also expose your perversity about its extent. You make matter lie beneath God, and so you give it a place, one below God. Matter, then, is in a place. If in a place, then within a place; if within a place, then bounded by the place within which it is; if bounded, it has an outermost line, and you, being a painter by trade, recognize that every thing that has an outermost line has an end. Matter, then, will not be infinite, since, being in a place, it is bounded by the place, and being bounded by it, it receives from it an outermost line. But you make it infinite, saying: “But it is infinite in that it always exists.” And if any of your disciples wants to argue that you mean it to be understood as infinite in time, not in the measure of its body, yet what follows shows that you mean it to be infinite bodily, as bodily immeasurable and uncircumscribed. “Hence,” you say, “it is not wrought as a whole, but parts of it.” So it is infinite in body, not in time, and you are convicted of making it infinite in body, when, by ascribing a place to it, you shut it within a place and the outermost line of that place. Yet why God did not form the whole of it I do not know, unless because he was either weak or envious. So I look for the remainder of it, which was not formed, so that I may learn what the whole was like. For God ought to have displayed it openly, as a specimen of antiquity, to the glory of his work.

Let matter now be definable, as seems more correct to you, through its changes and transformations; let it also be comprehensible, “as being wrought,” you say, “by God”; and divisible, since it is also convertible and changeable (“for its changes,” you say, “show it to be divisible”). Here too you have fallen away from the lines you drew concerning the person of God, when you laid down that God did not make matter from himself because he who is eternal and abides for ever, and is therefore immutable and indivisible, could not come into parts. If matter is rated by the same eternity, having neither beginning nor end, by the same reasoning it cannot undergo division and change, any more than God can. Placed in partnership with him in eternity, it must share with him the powers and laws and conditions of eternity. Likewise, when you say, “But its parts have all things together from all, so that the whole may be discerned from the parts,” surely you want us to understand those parts which were brought forth from it, which are seen by us today. How then do they have all things from all, from the original things, that is, when the things seen today are otherwise than the original ones were?

You say that matter was reformed for the better, from (the) worse, surely; and do you want the better to reproduce the pattern of the worse? It was a confused thing, but now it is ordered; and do you want the unordered to be displayed by the ordered? Nothing is a mirror of another thing, that is, of a thing not its equal; no one at the barber's has seen himself in the glass as a mule instead of a man; unless someone thinks that in this construction of the world, now arranged and trimmed, the shapeless and unkempt matter is reflected. What is shapeless in the world today, what beauty was once seen in matter, that the world should be a mirror of matter? Since among the Greeks the world is named from ornament, how does it show the image of unadorned matter, so that you can say its whole is known from its parts? Certainly to that whole will belong also the part which did not come to be formed; and above you stated that it was not wrought as a whole. So this raw, confused, and disordered matter cannot be recognized in things polished, distinct, and ordered, which it is not even fitting to call parts of matter, since, divided from it by change, they have withdrawn from its form.

I return to motion, to show you slippery everywhere. The motion of matter was disordered and confused and turbulent; for so you set against it the likeness of a pot boiling over on every side. And how is a different motion affirmed by you elsewhere? For when you want to present matter as neither good nor evil, you say: “So the underlying matter, having a motion of equal balance, did not turn much either toward good or toward evil.” If of equal balance, then the (motion) is no longer turbulent nor pot-like, but ordered and tempered: a motion that, moved by its own choice between good and evil, yet leaning and rushing toward neither side, was borne with balanced impulse, keeping, as they say, to the middle of the beam. This is not restlessness, this is not turbulence and passivity, but the moderation and modesty and justice of a movement inclining (to) neither side. Plainly, if it inclined this way and that, or more to one side, then it would deserve to be branded as awkward and unequal and turbulent. Further, if the motion was inclined neither to good nor to evil, it was surely moved between good and evil; so that from this too matter appears to be bounded, since its motion, inclined neither to evil nor to good, was, by turning toward neither, placed between both and measured by both, and on this score bounded by both. But you also put good and evil in a place, when you say the motion of matter was inclined toward neither of them. For matter, which was in a place, by inclining neither this way nor that, did not incline toward the places in which good and evil were. And by giving a place to good and evil you make them bodily by making them local, since what has a place must first be bodily. In short, incorporeal things have no place of their own, except in a body, when they befall a body. … So you are wrong if you do (not) want good and evil to be substances. For you make those things substances to which you assign places; and you assign places when you hold the motion of matter suspended between the two regions.

You have scattered everything, so that its self-contradiction might not shine out at close quarters. But I shall collect the pieces one by one and compare them. You assert that the motion of matter is disordered, and you add that it pursues shapelessness; then elsewhere, that it desires to be ordered by God. Does what pursues shapelessness desire formation? Or does what desires formation pursue shapelessness? You do not want to seem to make God equal to matter, and yet you add that it has communion with God: “For it is impossible,” you say, “that it should be adorned by him if it had nothing in common with God.” Yet if it had something in common with God, it did not need to be adorned by him, being, of course, a part of God through that communion; or else God too could be adorned by matter, since he too had something in common with it. In this too you subject God to necessity, if there was something in matter on account of which he formed it. And what you make common to them is that they are moved by themselves and are always moved. What less do you ascribe to matter than to God? This will be the whole partnership in divinity: freedom and eternity of motion. “But God moves in an ordered way, matter in a disordered way.” Yet (both) are equally divine, with motion equally free and eternal. Indeed you give more to matter, which was permitted to move in a way that God was not.

About motion I would note this too. Following the likeness of the pot, you say: “Such was the motion of matter before it was arranged: thick, restless, ungraspable through the excess of its struggle.” Then you add: “But it stood still for God's ordering, and had its disordered motion graspable because of the slowness of the disordered motion.” Above you ascribe struggle to the motion, here slowness. Now hear how often you fall over the nature of matter. Above you say: “But if matter were evil by nature, it would not have admitted a change for the better, nor would God have fitted any ordering to it; for he would have laboured in vain.” You laid down, then, two propositions: that matter was not evil by nature, and that its nature could not have been converted by God. Forgetting these, you afterwards bring in: “But when it received ordering from God and was adorned, it ceased from its nature.” If it was reformed into good, it was certainly reformed from evil; and if through God's ordering it ceased from its nature, it ceased from a nature of evil. Therefore it was both evil by nature before its ordering, and could depart from its nature after its reformation.

But it follows that I should also show how you make God work. Plainly you part company with the philosophers, but with the prophets as well. For the Stoics want God to have run through matter as honey runs through the combs. But you say: “He makes the world not by passing through matter, but only by appearing and drawing near to it, as beauty does something merely by appearing, and the magnet stone merely by drawing near.” What likeness is there between God fashioning the world and beauty wounding the mind, or a magnet attracting iron? For even if God appeared to matter, he did not wound it as beauty wounds the mind; even if he drew near, he did not cling to it as the magnet to iron. Suppose now that your examples fit: surely, if God made the world from matter by appearing and drawing near to it, he made it from the moment he appeared and drew near. So before, when he had not yet made it, he had neither appeared to it nor drawn near to it. And who can believe that God had not appeared to matter, even as a thing consubstantial with himself through eternity? That he was far from it, he whom we believe to be everywhere and to appear everywhere, to whom even lifeless and incorporeal things sing praises in Daniel? How great was this space, in which God was so far from matter that he neither appeared to it nor drew near before the building of the world? I suppose he travelled to it from afar when he first chose to appear and draw near to it.

But the prophets and apostles do not teach that the world was made by God in this way, by his merely appearing and drawing near to matter, for they named no matter at all; but that first Wisdom was created, the beginning of his ways for his works, and then the Word was brought forth, through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made. Indeed, “By his Word the heavens were made firm, and by his Spirit all their powers.” This is God's right hand, and both his hands, through which he worked and built: “For the heavens,” it says, “are the works of your hands”; with them he also measured: “he measured … the heaven, and the earth with his span.” Do not flatter God by wanting him to have brought forth so many and such great substances by mere sight and mere approach, and not to have established them by his own powers. For so Jeremiah too commends him: “God, making the earth in his strength, preparing the world in his understanding; and by his mind he stretched out the heavens.” These are his powers, by exerting which he founded this whole. His glory is the greater if he laboured. At last on the seventh day he rested from his works: both after his own fashion. Or if he made this world merely by appearing and drawing near, did he, once he had made it, cease again to appear, and stop drawing near? On the contrary, from the time the world was made God began all the more to appear and to be met everywhere. You see, then, how all things consist by the working of God: by the strength of him who makes the earth, the understanding of him who prepares the world, and the mind of him who stretches out heaven; of one not merely appearing or drawing near, but applying such great exertions of his mind, wisdom, strength, mind, Word, spirit, power, which would not have been necessary for him if he had accomplished it merely by appearing and drawing near. These things, not some sensible properties of matter but his own, are his invisible things, which, according to the apostle, are seen from the creation of the world through the things he made. For “who has known the mind of the Lord?” Of which he exclaims: “O the depth of the riches and of the wisdom! How unsearchable are his judgements and inscrutable his ways!” What do these words savour of more than that all things were made from nothing? These things cannot be found or searched out except by God alone; otherwise, if they were from matter, they would be searchable. So, to the extent that it has been established that no matter existed (from this too, that it could not have been such as it is presented), to that extent it is proved that all things were made by God from nothing. … Except that Hermogenes, in describing a condition of matter just like his own, disordered, confused, turbulent, of uncertain, headlong, and feverish motion, has, while displaying a specimen of his art, painted (his own) portrait.