Brian Hamilton

Twilight and morning knowledge

For either there was some material light, whether in the the upper regions of the universe, far removed from our sight, or in the regions from which the sun later derived its light; or else the word ‘light’ here [in Gen. 1:3] means the Holy City which consist of the holy angels and the blessed spirits, the City of which the Apostle speaks, ‘Jerusalem which is above, our mother, eternal in the heavens’ (Gal 4:26). He certainly says in another place, ‘You are all sons of light, sons of day: you do not belong to night and darkness’ (1 Thess 5:5). But this latter interpretation depends on our being able to discover some appropriate meaning for ‘the evening and morning’ of this day.

Now the knowledge of the creature is a kind of twilight, compared with the knowledge of the Creator; and then comes the daylight and the morning, when that knowledge is linked with the praise and love of the Creator; and it never declines into night, so long as the Creator is not deprived of his creature’s love. And in fact Scripture never interposes the word ‘night’, in the enumeration of those days one after another. Scripture never says, ‘Night came’; but, ‘Evening came and morning came, one day’. Similarly on the second day and on all the rest. The creature’s knowledge, left to itself, is, we might say, in faded colours, compared with the knowledge that comes when it is known in the Wisdom of God, in that art, as it were, by which it was created. For that reason it can more appropriately be described as evening than as night. And yet that evening turns again to morning, as I have said, when it is turned to praise and love of the Creator.

—St. Augustine, City of God XI, 7

29 April 2008 |
tags: Augustine, Creation, Genesis