God’s Hands, Not Matter

But this is not how the prophets and the apostles told us the world was made — not by God merely showing himself and drawing near to Matter. They never so much as mentioned any Matter. What they said was that Wisdom was set up first, the beginning of his ways, for his works. Then that the Word was brought forth, “through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made.” Yes: “by the Word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by his own Spirit.” He is the Lord’s right hand — his two hands, in fact — by which he worked and built the universe. “For,” he says, “the heavens are the works of your hands,” the hands with which “he measured out heaven, and the earth with a nine-inch span.” [a]

Do not be so ready to flatter God that you argue he produced such vast substances by a bare appearance and a simple approach, instead of forming them by his own energies. Jeremiah proves the point when he says, “God made the earth by his power, he established the world by his wisdom, and stretched out the heaven by his understanding.” These are the energies, and it was by the straining of them that he made this universe. His glory is the greater if he worked for it. And at the last, on the seventh day, he rested from his works. Each of the two was in keeping with him.

Or if he made this world simply by appearing and approaching it, then once the work was finished did he stop appearing and approaching? And yet God began to show himself more plainly, and to be met with everywhere, from the time the world was made.

So you see how all things hold together by the working of that God who “made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and stretched out the heaven by his understanding” — not by appearing merely, nor by approaching, but by bringing to bear the almighty exertions of his mind, his wisdom, his power, his understanding, his word, his Spirit, his might. None of these would have been necessary to him if a bare appearance and approach had been enough. They are, in fact, his “invisible things,” which, as the apostle says, “have been clearly seen from the creation of the world by the things that are made.” They are no parts of some Matter or other; they are the evidence of himself, and the senses can reach them.

“For who has known the mind of the Lord?” — the mind about which the apostle exclaims, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” What plainer truth do these words point to than that all things were made out of nothing? They cannot be found out or investigated by anyone but God alone. Otherwise, if they could be traced or discovered in Matter, they would be open to investigation. So, in so far as it has become clear that Matter had no prior existence — clear from this very thing, that it does not add up for it to have existed in the way he assigns to it — in so far it is proved that all things were made by God out of nothing.

One thing has to be granted, though. Hermogenes, by describing for Matter a condition just like his own — irregular, confused, turbulent, driven by an impulse that is uncertain and headlong and hot — has produced a specimen of his own art and painted his own portrait.