The Earth Made Visible

God completed all his works in their proper order. First he staked them out, so to speak, in their raw elements; then he set them in place in their finished beauty. He did not flood light with the sun’s brilliance all at once, nor all at once soften the darkness with the comfort of the moon. He did not deck the sky with its constellations and stars all at once, nor at once fill the seas with their great beasts. He did not give the earth its many kinds of fruitfulness all at once either. First he gave it existence; then he filled it, so that it would not have been made empty. This is what Isaiah says: “He did not create it to be empty; he formed it to be lived in.” [a]

So after it was made, and while it was still to be brought to completion, it was “invisible and unfinished.” Unfinished, precisely because it was invisible — not yet complete to the eye, and not yet stocked with the rest of its qualities. Invisible, because it was still covered with water, as though behind a rampart of that life-giving moisture out of which our own flesh is produced, in a form much like its own. David sings to the same effect: “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world and all who live in it. He founded it upon the seas, and set it firm upon the streams.”

It was when the waters were drawn back into their hollow depths that the dry land stood out, which until then had been covered by its watery wrapping. At that moment it becomes visible, when God says, “Let the water be gathered into one gathering, and let the dry land appear.” Appear, he says — not be made. It had been made already; in its invisible condition it was only waiting to appear. Dry, because it was about to become dry by being parted from the moisture; but land all the same. “And God called the dry land Earth” — not Matter. And when the earth afterwards reaches its completion, it stops being counted empty, at the words: “Let the earth put out grass, the seed-bearing plant after its kind and after its likeness, and the fruit tree bearing fruit whose seed is in itself, after its kind.” And again: “Let the earth bring out the living creature after its kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth, after their kind.”

So the divine Scripture carried its order through to the end. To what it had described at first as “invisible and unfinished” it gave both visibility and completeness. And no other Matter was ever “invisible and unfinished.” From here on, then, Matter will have to be visible and complete. So I demand to see Matter, now that it has become visible. I demand to recognize it as a finished thing too, so that I can gather the seed-bearing plant and the fruit-bearing tree from it, and so that living creatures made out of it can serve my needs. But Matter is nowhere, while the Earth is here, plain in front of me. I see it. I enjoy it. And I have done so ever since it stopped being “invisible and unfinished.”

It was certainly this earth that Isaiah meant when he said, “This is what the Lord says, who created the heavens: he was the God who formed the earth and made it.” The same earth he formed is the one he also made. And how did he form it? By saying, “Let the dry land appear.” Why order it to appear, if it had not been invisible before? His purpose was to keep himself from having made it for nothing, by making it visible and so fit for use. And so proofs keep arising, all through, that this earth we live on is the very same one that God both created and displayed, and that nothing else was “invisible and unfinished” except the thing that had been created and displayed. It follows that the sentence “Now the earth was invisible and unfinished” is about that same earth which God named separately, alongside the heaven.

The words that come next will seem in the same way to prop up Hermogenes’ guess: “And darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the water” — as though these blended substances handed us an argument for that massive lump of his. But the passage lists its items so carefully, and keeps them so distinct — naming “darkness,” “the deep,” “the Spirit of God,” “the waters” one by one — that it rules out any suggestion of a jumble, or of something left uncertain by being jumbled. Still more so when he assigns each of them its own place: darkness over the face of the deep, the Spirit over the face of the waters. That refuses all mixing of the substances; and by showing them separately positioned, he shows them to be separate things. [h]

It would be absurd for Matter to be brought before us as formless and then have its formlessness propped up by so many words for forms, with no indication at all of what that jumbled body is — a body which must of course be taken as one of a kind, since it has no form. For what has no form is uniform. Yet even what has no form, once it is blended together out of a variety of parts, must have some one look to it; and it has no look at all until it has that one look made out of many parts together. So either Matter had those distinct kinds within it — the kinds by whose names alone we were meant to know it, that is, “darkness” and “the deep” and “the Spirit” and “the waters” — or it did not. If it had them, how is it brought in as formless? If it did not, how does it come to be known at all?

Another point will be seized on too: that Scripture meant to say of the heaven only, and of that earth we have been arguing about, that God made them in the beginning, while it says nothing of the sort about the separate parts named alongside them; and therefore that these, which are not described as having been made, belong to unformed Matter. This difficulty has to be answered as well. Holy Scripture would be explicit enough if it had declared that the heaven and the earth were made by God as the very highest works of creation, since of course they carry their own furnishings with them, which can be understood as implied in those highest works themselves. [j]

Now the furnishings of the heaven and the earth, made then in the beginning, were the darkness and the deep, and the spirit and the waters. The deep and the darkness lay under the earth: since the deep was under the earth, and the darkness was over the deep, both the darkness and the deep were certainly under the earth. The spirit and the waters lay under the heaven: since the waters were over the earth, which they covered, and the spirit was over the waters, both the spirit and the waters were alike over the earth — and what is over the earth is of course under the heaven. And just as the earth brooded over the deep and the darkness, so the heaven brooded over the spirit and the waters, and held them in.

There is nothing new in naming only what contains a thing, as the sum of it, and taking what is contained to be included in it as a part. Suppose I say that the city built a theater and a circus, and then that the stage was of such and such a kind, that the statues stood along the water channel, and that the obelisk was raised above them all. Would it follow that, because I did not say in so many words that those particular things were made by the city, they were therefore not made by it along with the circus and the theater? Did I not leave out any special mention of how those things were made precisely because they were implied in the things I had already said were made, and could be understood as belonging to the things that contained them?

But that example may be worthless, since it comes from human affairs. I will take another, which has the authority of Scripture itself. It says that “God made man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” Now although it mentions the face here, it does not say the face was made by God. In the same way it speaks in later passages of the rib and the bones, the flesh and the eyes, the sweat and the blood, and it never once indicates that these had been created by God. What is Hermogenes going to answer? That a man’s limbs must belong to Matter, because they are not named separately as things created? Or are they included in the making of the man? In just the same way, the deep and the darkness and the spirit and the waters were limbs of the heaven and the earth. The limbs were made in the bodies; the limbs were mentioned in the bodies. No element is anything but a limb of the element that contains it — and all the elements are contained in the heaven and the earth.

This is the answer I would give in defense of the passage before us, for seeming here to set out only the making of the heaven and the earth, as though they were the only bodies made. Scripture could hardly fail to know that there would be people who would at once understand the several limbs along with the bodies, and so it spoke briefly. But at the same time it foresaw that there would be stupid and crafty men who would pretend not to see the meaning that goes without saying, and would demand a word of creation for each separate limb as well. It is because of such people that Scripture teaches us in other passages about the creation of the individual parts. [n]

You have Wisdom saying, “Before the depths I was brought forth,” so that you may believe that the depths too were brought forth — that is, created — just as we create sons, and yet we bring them forth. It makes no difference whether the deep was made or born, so long as a beginning is granted it; and it would not have one if it belonged to Matter. Of darkness, the Lord himself says through Isaiah, “I formed the light, and I created darkness.” Of the wind Amos says, “He who strengthens the thunder and creates the wind and declares his Christ to men” — which shows that the wind reckoned in with the shaping of the earth was created: the wind that was carried over the waters, keeping everything balanced and fresh and alive. He does not, as some suppose, mean God himself by that spirit, on the ground that “God is spirit,” because the waters would not be able to hold up their own Lord. He means the spirit that winds are made of, as he says through Isaiah, “Because my spirit went out from me, and I made every blast.” In the same way Wisdom says of the waters, “Also when he made the springs strong, the springs under the sky, I was measuring them out along with him.”

Now when we prove that these particular things were created by God, though they are only mentioned in Genesis with no hint that they were made, we will perhaps get this reply from the other side: that they were made, certainly, but out of Matter — since Moses’ own statement, “And darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters,” refers to Matter, as do all those other passages here and there which show that the separate parts were made out of Matter. Very well then. It must follow that just as earth was made of earth, so the deep was made of deep, and darkness of darkness, and wind and waters of wind and waters. And, as I said above, Matter could not have been without form, since it had distinct parts within it which were formed out of it — as separate things, at that — unless indeed they were not separate at all, but were the very same things they came out of. For it is really impossible that things set out under the same names should have been different things; and in that case God’s work might look pointless, if it made things that existed already, since the only real creation is when things come into being that had not been made before.

So the choice comes down to this. Either Moses was pointing at Matter when he wrote the words “And darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters”; or else, since these separate parts of creation are afterwards shown in other passages to have been made by God, they ought with equal plainness to have been shown to have been made out of the Matter which, on your account, Moses had mentioned earlier; or else, finally, if Moses was pointing at those separate parts and not at Matter, I want to know where Matter has been pointed out at all.

Hermogenes may find Matter among his own colorings — it was not in his power to find it in the Scriptures of God — but it is enough for us that it is certain all things were made by God, and not certain at all that they were made out of Matter. And even if Matter had existed beforehand, we would still have had to believe it was really made by God, since the rule we have laid down all along is that nothing except God is unborn. There is room for argument up to this point — until Matter is summoned before the Scriptures, and no evidence for it can be produced. [t]

The upshot of the whole thing is this. I find that nothing was made except out of nothing, because what I find was made I know did not exist before. Whatever was made out of something takes its origin from something that was itself made. Grass, for instance, and fruit and cattle and the shape of man himself were made out of the ground; and the creatures that swim and fly were brought out of the waters. The originals out of which such creatures were produced I may well call their materials — but even those were created by God.

Besides, the belief that everything was made out of nothing will be pressed on us by that final ordering of God which will bring everything back to nothing. For “the very heaven will be rolled up like a scroll”; no, it will come to nothing along with the earth itself, which was made with it in the beginning. “Heaven and earth will pass away,” he says. “The first heaven and the first earth passed away,” “and no place was found for them” — because, of course, whatever comes to an end loses its place. David says the same: “The heavens, the works of your hands, will themselves perish. He will change them like a garment, and they will be changed.” Now to be changed is to fall out of the first condition, which they lose in the changing. “And the stars too will fall from heaven, as a fig tree drops its unripe fruit when it is shaken by a strong wind.” “The mountains will melt like wax before the face of the Lord” — that is, “when he rises to shake the earth terribly.” “But I will dry up the pools”; and “they will look for water and find none.” Even “the sea will be no more.” [w]

Now if anyone goes so far as to suppose that all these passages ought to be taken spiritually, he will still not be able to strip them of the real fulfillment of the outcomes that have to happen exactly as they were written. For every figure of speech necessarily arises out of real things, never out of imaginary ones, because nothing can lend anything of its own for a comparison unless it actually is the thing it lends in the comparison. So I come back to the principle that settles it: everything that has come from nothing will return at last to nothing.

For God would not have made anything perishable out of what was eternal — that is, out of Matter; nor would he have created lesser things out of greater ones, when it would suit his character better to produce greater things out of lesser ones, that is, what is eternal out of what is perishable. This is the promise he makes even to our flesh, and he chose to lay this pledge of his own strength and power inside us, so that we might believe he really did wake the whole universe out of nothing, as though it had been steeped in death — death meaning, of course, that it did not exist before, and the waking being for this, that it should exist.

As for all the other points about Matter, there is no need for us to deal with them, since our first task was the plain proof that it exists at all. Still, we must carry the discussion on just as if it did exist, so that its non-existence may show up all the more clearly when these other points about it turn out to contradict one another, and so that Hermogenes may at the same time admit how he contradicts himself. He puts it like this: [z]

“Matter, at first sight, seems to us to be bodiless; but when it is examined by the light of right reason, it is found to be neither a body nor bodiless.” What is this right reason of yours, which declares nothing right — that is, nothing certain? For if I am not mistaken, everything has to be either a body or bodiless. (I may allow for the moment that there is a certain bodilessness even in things that have substance, though the very substance of a thing is the body of that particular thing.) At any rate, after “a body” and “bodiless” there is no third state. But grant that there is a third state, discovered by this right reason of Hermogenes, which makes Matter neither a body nor bodiless. Where is it? What sort of thing is it? What is it called? How would you describe it? What is anyone to understand by it? His reason has declared this one thing only: that Matter is neither a body nor bodiless.