The divine Scripture, therefore, fulfilled its own order; for that which it had foretold to be invisible and raw, to that same thing it also rendered both visibility and perfection. But it was no other matter that was invisible and raw; therefore matter will afterwards be visible and perfect. I wish, accordingly, to see matter, for it has been made visible; I wish also to recognize it as perfect, so that out of it I may also pluck the herb of grass, and out of it the fruit-bearing tree, and that out of it the animals may render service to my use. But matter is nowhere, while this earth is here, that is, before my eyes. This I see, this I enjoy to the full, ever since it ceased to be invisible and raw. Concerning which most manifestly Isaiah says: 'Thus saith the Lord who made the heaven, this God who displayed the earth and made it.'
Certainly He displayed the same one which He also made. How did He display it? Assuredly by saying: 'Let the dry land appear.' Why does He bid it appear, except because before it was not seen -- so that in this way too He might not have made it in vain, by making it visible and thus serviceable? And thus through all points it is proved by us that this earth, which we inhabit, is both the same one that was made by God and the one that was displayed, and that there was no other one raw and invisible than the one that was both made and displayed. And so 'the earth was invisible and raw' pertains to that one which God separated together with heaven. XXX. Thus the following words too will be seen to build up Hermogenes' conjecture: 'And darkness was over the abyss, and the Spirit of God was borne over the waters,' as if these too portended arguments of that confused, massive lump of substance.
But on the contrary, by defining them one by one -- darkness, the abyss, the Spirit of God, the waters -- so distinct a report of definite and distinguished elements causes nothing to be reckoned confused, nor uncertain in confusion. This all the more so since, when it assigns proper positions to them -- darkness over the abyss, the Spirit over the waters -- it denied any confusion of the substances whose distinction it also demonstrated by demonstrating their arrangement. It is, in short, most vain that matter, which is introduced as formless, should be asserted formless out of so many names of forms, without it being set forth what that body of confusion is -- which body must certainly be believed to be one and only, if it is formless. For that is uniform which is formless, but that is formless which is confused out of variety:
that which has no form must of necessity have one appearance, since out of many it has one appearance. But for the rest, matter either had in itself those appearances from whose names it was to be understood -- I mean darkness and the abyss and the Spirit and the waters -- or it did not have them; but if it had them, how is it introduced as not having forms? If it did not have them, whence is it recognized? XXXI. But this too will surely be caught at: that Scripture signified only concerning heaven and this earth that God made them in the beginning, but nothing of the sort concerning the appearances mentioned above; and therefore those which are not signified to have been made pertain to unmade matter. We shall answer this scruple also.
Divine Scripture would have discoursed sufficiently, if it had commended the very chief things themselves as made by God -- heaven and earth -- which of course have their own proper subordinate contents that could be understood as included within those chief things. Now the subordinate contents of heaven and earth were at that time first the darkness and the abyss and the Spirit and the waters. For beneath the earth, indeed, lay the abyss and the darkness; for if the abyss is beneath the earth, and the darkness moreover over the abyss, then without doubt both the darkness and the abyss are beneath the earth. But beneath heaven lay the Spirit and the waters; for if the waters are over the earth, in that they had covered it, and the Spirit moreover over the waters, then equally both the Spirit and the waters are over the earth; and what is over the earth is certainly beneath heaven.
And just as the earth lay upon and enclosed the abyss and the darkness, so heaven lay upon and enclosed the Spirit and the waters. And thus it is nothing new that only that which contains should be named, as being the summary, while in it should be understood also that which is contained, as being the portion. Behold, if I should say: 'The city built a theatre and a circus, but the stage was of such and such a kind, and the statues over the water-channel, and an obelisk was borne over all' -- because I have not declared these appearances too to have been made by the city, will they not belong to it along with the circus and the theatre? Or have I therefore not added that these appearances too were made, because they were inherent in those things which I had premised to have been made, and could be understood to be inherent in those in which they were inherent? But let this example be set aside as human; I shall seize on another from the authority of Scripture itself.
'God,' it says, 'made man of the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.' Here it does indeed name his face, but it did not say that even the face itself was made by God; but of skin and bones and flesh and eyes and sweat and blood it speaks afterwards, which it did not then signify to have been made by God either. What will Hermogenes answer? Will the members of man too belong to matter, because they are not reported to have been made by name? Or are these too reckoned in the making of man? Accordingly the members of heaven and earth will be the abyss and darkness, the Spirit and the waters. For in bodies the members are made; in bodies also the members are named. No element is not a member of that element by which it is contained;
but all elements are contained by heaven or earth. XXXII. This much I would reply on behalf of the present passage, insofar as here it seems to commend the making of bodies alone -- of heaven and earth. It knew that there are those who would of their own accord recognize the members too in the bodies, and therefore it used brevity; yet it also provided against the dull-witted and the treacherous, who, dissembling the tacit understanding, would demand of the very members too a word signifying their making. And so, on account of these, it teaches in other places that the individual appearances were made. You have Wisdom saying: 'I was begotten before the abyss,' so that you may believe the abyss also to have been begotten, that is, made -- since we also 'make' sons, although we beget them.
It makes no difference whether the abyss was made or born, provided a beginning be granted to it -- which would not be granted, if it were subject to matter. But concerning darkness, the Lord Himself through Isaiah: 'I who built the light and made the darkness.' Concerning the Spirit likewise Amos: 'He who makes firm the thunder and founds the Spirit and announces His Christ among men' -- showing that Spirit to have been founded which was reckoned among the things founded upon the earth, which was borne over the waters, the poiser and inbreather and animator of the universe -- not, as some think, that God Himself is signified as the Spirit, because God is Spirit -- for neither would the waters have sufficed to sustain their Lord -- but he means that Spirit of which the winds too have consisted, as He says through Isaiah: 'Because a Spirit went forth from me, and I made every blast.'
Likewise concerning the waters the same Wisdom says: 'And when He was setting firm the fountains which are beneath heaven, I was there measuring together with Him.' Since therefore we prove those appearances also to have been made by God -- even though in Genesis they are merely named without mention of their making -- it will perhaps be answered from the opposite side that they were plainly made, but out of matter; so that the pen of Moses, 'And darkness was over the abyss, and the Spirit of God was borne over the waters,' sounds forth matter, while the other Scriptures show, scattered here and there, the appearances made out of matter. Therefore, just as earth is from earth, so also the abyss consisted out of abyss, and darkness out of darkness, and Spirit and waters out of Spirit and waters.
And, as we said above, matter could not have been formless, if it had appearances such that others too were compounded out of it; unless indeed not others but the same ones out of themselves, seeing that it does not admit that there were diverse things which are set forth by the same names -- whereby the divine operation might even now seem idle, if He made the things which already existed, since those things which had not been made would be nobler than if they were being made. Therefore, to conclude: either Moses signified matter when writing thus:
'And darkness was upon the deep, and the Spirit of God was borne over the waters.' But since these several appearances are elsewhere afterward shown to have been made by God, they ought equally to have been shown as made out of the matter which Moses had put first; or else, if it was these appearances and not matter that Moses signified, I ask where the matter has been demonstrated. But while Hermogenes finds that matter among his colours -- for among the Scriptures of God he could not find it -- it is enough that it stands established both that all things were made by God and that they were not made out of matter; and even had matter existed, we should have believed that it too was made by God, since in laying it down that nothing is unbegotten save God we should hold our ground.
Up to this point there is room for the discussion, until, when challenged to the Scriptures, the demonstration of matter fails. The sum is plain: I find nothing made except out of nothing, because what I find to have been made I know not to have existed before. Even if anything has been made out of something, it derives its origin from what was made -- as from the earth come herb and fruit and cattle and the very fashioning of man himself, as from the waters come the swimming and flying creatures. Such origins of the things brought forth from these I may call matter, but they too were made by God. Moreover, that all things arose out of nothing that final divine disposition will persuade us, which is to reduce all things to nothing.
For indeed the heaven shall be rolled up as a book; nay, it shall come to be nowhere, together with the earth itself, with which it was made in the beginning. 'Heaven and earth,' He says, 'shall pass away.' 'The first heaven and the first earth were gone, and no place was found for them,' because assuredly whatsoever comes to an end loses its place. So also David: 'The heavens are the works of Thy hands, and they themselves shall perish.' For even if 'He shall change them as a garment, and they shall be changed,' yet to be changed is to perish, seeing that, while they are changed, they lose their former state. 'And the stars indeed shall fall from heaven, as a fig tree, when shaken by a strong wind, sheds its unripe figs; but the mountains shall melt like wax at the sight of the Lord,' namely, when He shall have risen up to shatter the earth.
'But the marshes also,' He says, 'I will dry up, and they shall seek water and not find it'; and the sea likewise so far. And even if one should suppose that all these things are to be interpreted otherwise, spiritually, he will nevertheless be unable to take away the truth of things thus to come about in the manner in which they are written. For if there are any figures, they must of necessity be made from things that subsist, not from things that are empty, since nothing can furnish anything of its own toward a likeness unless that very thing exist which furnishes such a likeness. I return, therefore, to the argument that determines that all things brought forth out of nothing shall come at last to nothing.
For out of the eternal, that is, out of matter, God would have made nothing perishable, nor would He have founded lesser things out of greater, to whom it more fittingly belongs to produce greater things out of lesser, that is, the eternal out of the perishable -- which He also promises to our flesh. Of this His power and might He has willed to place this pledge already within us, that we may believe that He too raised up the universe out of nothing, as it were from the dead -- that which, namely, was not -- into being, that it might be.
As for the remaining condition of matter, even though it need not be reconsidered -- for the prior question was to establish that it exists at all -- yet, granting for argument's sake that it were established, the order must be pursued, whereby it may all the more be established that that thing does not exist whose remaining condition itself does not hold together, and at the same time that Hermogenes may recognize his own contradictions. 'At first sight,' he says, 'matter appears to us to be incorporeal, but by careful right reasoning it is found to be neither corporeal nor incorporeal.' What is this right reason which reports nothing right, that is, nothing certain? For unless I am mistaken, every thing must be either corporeal or incorporeal -- granting for the moment that there is something incorporeal, at least among substances, since substance itself is the body of any given thing --;
certainly, after the corporeal and the incorporeal there is no third thing. Come now, let there be even a third, which that Hermogenean right reason has discovered, which makes matter neither corporeal nor incorporeal: where is it? of what sort is it? what is it called? how is it described? how is it understood? Reason has reported this much only: neither corporeal matter nor incorporeal. But lo, he brings in the contrary -- or perhaps another reason occurs to him -- reporting matter to be in part corporeal and in part incorporeal. Now then, lest it be neither, must it be reckoned as both matter? For it will be corporeal and incorporeal, against the report of that right reason of his, which plainly renders no account of its own opinion, just as it renders no other.
For he wants that of matter to be corporeal out of which bodies are produced, but its incorporeal part to be its unordered motion. 'For if,' he says, 'it were body only, nothing incorporeal would appear in it, that is, no motion; but if it had been wholly incorporeal, no body would come to be out of it.' How much the more correct this reasoning is! Except that, if you draw lines as straight as you reason, Hermogenes, no painter is duller than you. For who grants you to reckon motion as a second part of substance, since it is not a substantial thing, because it is not even corporeal, but an accident, if anything, of substance and of body -- as action and impulse, as slipping and falling, so also motion?
For if a thing is moved even by itself, its motion is its act, and certainly is not a part of the substance -- just as you make motion a substance by making it an incorporeal part of matter. In short, all things are moved either by themselves, as animals, or by others, as inanimate things; yet we shall call neither a man nor a stone both corporeal and incorporeal because it has both body and motion, but attribute to all one form of corporeality alone, which is a thing of substance. If any incorporeal things belong to them -- whether their acts or passions or functions or desires -- we do not reckon them as portions. To what purpose, then, does he make a portion of matter consist in motion, which pertains not to substance but to the condition of substance?
For what, if it had pleased you to introduce immobile matter, would immobility then seem to be the second part of its form? So then neither would motion. But concerning motion it will be permitted to treat elsewhere too. For now I see you returning again to that reasoning which is wont to report to you nothing certain. For just as you allege matter to be neither corporeal nor incorporeal, so you allege it neither good nor bad, and accordingly, arguing further: 'For if,' you say, 'it were good, having always been such, it would not desire the composition of God; if it were evil by nature, it would not have received transformation into the better, nor would God have applied any of His composition to it, being of such a nature;
for He would have laboured in vain.' These are your own words, of which you ought to have been mindful elsewhere too, lest you bring in anything contrary to them. But since we have already reconsidered something in the preceding pages concerning the ambiguity of matter's evil and good, I will now answer to your present and sole proposition and argument. Nor will I say here too that you ought to have pronounced something certain -- either good or bad or some third thing -- but that not even here have you kept to what it pleased you to pronounce. For you cancel what you pronounced, namely 'neither good nor bad,' because, when you say, 'If it were good, it would not desire to be composed by God,' you portend it to be evil, and when you add, 'If it were evil by nature, it would not admit transformation into the better,' you hint it to be good.
And thus you have made both good and evil border upon that which you pronounced neither good nor bad. But that I may also blunt the argumentation by which you thought to confirm your proposition, I set against it also this: 'If matter had always been good, why should it not have desired to be reformed into the better? What that is good does not desire, or does not wish for, or does not receive advancement, that from good it may become better? Likewise, if it had been evil by nature, why could it not have been converted by God, as by one more powerful -- as by Him who is able to convert even the nature of stones into sons of Abraham?' Surely then you not only compare the Lord with matter, but even make Him inferior to it, by whom the nature of matter could not have been overcome and subdued into the better.
But you will also deny that you elsewhere confessed to be evil the very nature which here you do not wish to be evil. Concerning the situation of matter I treat what I treated also concerning its mode, in order to expose your perversity. You make matter subject to God, and assuredly you assign it a place which is below God. Matter, then, is in a place; if in a place, then within a place; if within a place, then it is bounded by the place within which it is; if it is bounded, it has an outermost line, which -- inasmuch as you are, in your proper capacity, a painter -- you acknowledge to be the limit of every thing whose outermost line it is. Matter, therefore, will not be infinite, which, while it is in a place, is bounded by the place, and, while it is bounded by it, admits an outermost line. Yet you make it infinite, saying: 'But it is infinite in that it always is.'
And should any of your disciples wish to argue that you mean matter to be understood as infinite only in respect of duration, not of body, yet that you make it corporeally infinite -- that is, corporeally immense and uncircumscribed -- what follows shows. 'Whence,' you say, 'it is not fashioned as a whole, but its parts are.' So then it is infinite in body, not in time; and you are convicted of making it infinite in body, since, while assigning it a place, you enclose it within a place and within the outermost line of the place. Yet why God did not fashion the whole of it I do not know, unless because He was either powerless or grudging. And so I ask for the half of that which was not fashioned as a whole, that I may recognize of what sort the whole was. For God ought, after the manner of models of antiquity, to have made it openly manifest to the glory of the work.
Let matter now be definite, as it seems to you more correct, through its own changes and transformations; let it also be comprehensible, 'as being that which is fashioned,' you say, 'by God,' because it is convertible and changeable and divisible -- 'For its changes,' you say, 'show it to be divisible.' And here too you have fallen away from your own lines, which you employed concerning the person of God, prescribing that God did not make matter out of Himself, because He could not come into parts, being eternal and abiding forever, and thereby immutable and indivisible. If matter is reckoned to be of the same eternity, having neither beginning nor end, then by the same reasoning it cannot suffer division and change, just as neither can God;
placed in the fellowship of eternity, it must of necessity share with Him also the powers and laws and conditions of eternity. Likewise, when you say: 'But its parts have all things at once out of all things, so that the whole may be discerned from the parts,' you assuredly wish those parts to be understood which have been brought forth from it, which are seen by us today. How, then, do all things have all out of all -- assuredly out of the primal things -- when the things seen today are otherwise than the primal things were? You say that matter has been reformed into the better -- assuredly out of worse things -- and do you wish the better things to display worse models? The thing was confused, but now it is composed; and do you wish incomposite things to be furnished out of composite ones? No thing is the mirror of another thing, that is, of one not equal to it.
No one has beheld himself at the barber's as a mule instead of a man; unless anyone supposes that in this construction of the world, now ordered and adorned, formless and uncultivated matter answers to it. What is there formless in the world today, what was formerly shaped in matter, or how is the world a mirror of matter? Since among the Greeks the world bears the name of ornament (kosmos), how does it present the image of unadorned matter, so that you may say that its whole is recognized from its parts? Surely, from that whole there will also be this which did not come into deformation (and above you declared that the whole of it was not fashioned).
Therefore even this rude and confused and uncomposed thing cannot be recognized in the polished and distinct and composed things, which it is not fitting even to call parts of matter, since by change they have withdrawn, divided, from its form. I return to motion, that I may everywhere show you to be slippery. 'The motion of matter was unordered and confused and turbulent'; for so you set against it the likeness of a pot boiling over on every side. And how is another sort of motion elsewhere affirmed by you?
For when you wish to introduce matter as neither good nor bad, you say: 'Therefore the underlying matter, having a motion of equal balance, inclines for the most part neither to good nor to evil.' If it is of equal balance, then it is no longer turbulent nor pot-like, but composed and tempered -- namely, one which, agitated by its own choice between good and evil, yet inclined and headlong toward neither part, held, as they say, the middle beam, and thence was borne along with balanced impulse. You will say this is not so, that this is not turbulence and passivity, but moderation and modesty and the justice of a motion inclining to neither part.
Plainly, if it were to incline this way and that, or more toward one side, then it would deserve to be marked as of disharmony and inequality and turbulence. But further, if the motion was inclined neither to good nor to evil, then assuredly it moved between good and evil, so that from this too matter would appear determinable, whose motion, inclined neither to evil nor to good, in that it inclined to neither, hung between both, depended on both, and on this account was determined by both. But you also place good and evil in a location, when you say that the motion of matter was inclined to neither of them. For matter, which was in a place, inclining neither this way nor that, was not inclining into the places in which good and evil were.
But by giving a place to good and to evil, you make them corporeal by making them local, because those things which have a place must first be corporeal -- indeed, incorporeal things would have no place of their own except in a body, since they attach to a body -- while matter, not inclining toward good and evil as toward corporeal or local things, was not inclining. You err, therefore, if you wish good and evil to be substances; for you make those things substances to which you assign places, and you assign them places when you suspend the motion of matter away from either region. You have scattered everything, lest, viewed side by side, their mutual contradictions should shine forth; but I will gather the several points and set them together.
You assert the motion of matter to be unordered, and you add that it pursues formlessness; then elsewhere, that it desires to be composed by God. Does that which pursues formlessness desire formation? Or does that which desires formation pursue formlessness? You do not wish God to appear equated with matter, yet you allow it to have communion with God. 'For it is impossible,' you say, 'that it, not having something in common with God, should be adorned by Him.' But indeed, if it had something in common with God, it did not desire to be adorned by Him -- being, namely, a part of God through the communion -- or else God too could be adorned by matter by having something in common with it Himself; and in this too you subject God to necessity, if there was something in matter on account of which He should form it.
But you make that to be common between them, that they are moved by themselves and are always moved. What less do you ascribe to matter than to God? The whole fellowship of divinity will be this: liberty and eternity of motion. 'But God is moved in an ordered way, matter in an unordered way.' Yet each is divine in like manner, in like manner moved by a free and eternal motion. Nay, you grant matter more, to which it was permitted to be moved in a way in which it was not permitted to God. Concerning motion I would also note this. For according to the likeness of the pot: 'Such was,' you say, 'the motion of matter before it was disposed, dense, restless, ungraspable through excess of struggle'; then you add: 'But it came to a stand at the composition of God, and had its unordered motion ungraspable through the slowness of that unordered motion.'
Above you ascribe struggle to the motion, here slowness. For as often as you stumble concerning the nature of matter, receive this. Above you say: 'But if matter were evil by nature, it would not have received transformation into the better, nor would God have applied any of His composition to it; for He would have laboured in vain.' You therefore concluded two propositions: that matter was not evil by nature, and that its nature could not be converted by God; forgetful of these, you afterward bring in: 'But when it received composition from God and was adorned, it ceased from its nature.' If it was reformed into good, it was assuredly reformed out of evil; and if through the composition of God it ceased from the nature of evil, it ceased from its nature. Therefore its nature was both evil before the composition and was able to cease from its nature after the reformation.
But it follows that I should also show in what manner you make God to have worked. Plainly you depart from the philosophers (yet also from the prophets). For the Stoics hold that God ran through matter as honey through honeycombs; but you say: 'Not by passing through it does He make the world, but only by appearing and drawing near to it, as beauty does 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, yet He did not wound it, as beauty wounds the mind; and if He drew near, yet He did not cleave to it, as the magnet to iron. Suppose now that your examples fit:
certainly, if by appearing and drawing near to matter God made the world out of it, then assuredly He made it from the point at which He appeared and from the point at which He drew near. Therefore, when He had not yet made it in time past, He had neither appeared to it nor drawn near to it. And to whom is it credible that God did not appear to matter -- especially to that which was consubstantial with His own through eternity? That He was far from that which we believe to be everywhere and to appear everywhere, to which even inanimate and incorporeal things sing praises in Daniel? How great is this place, in which God was so distant from matter that He neither appeared nor drew near to it before the construction of the world? I suppose He journeyed to it from afar, when first He willed to appear and draw near to it.
But indeed the prophets and apostles do not thus hand down that the world was made by God merely by appearing and drawing near to matter, since they named no matter at all, but first Wisdom created, the beginning of His ways unto His works, and thereafter the Word brought forth, through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made; and finally, by His Word the heavens were established, and by His Spirit all their powers. This is the right hand of God, and both His hands, through which He wrought and constructed -- 'For the heavens are the works of Thy hands,' He says -- through which also He measured heaven and the earth with the span of His hand.