Annotatio III

”In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” — Genesis 1:1

Procopius of Gaza, in his commentaries on Genesis, expounding this saying, declares that the assertion of those who say heaven is of a spherical shape and is turned with a circular motion does not agree with orthodox truth, but contradicts Moses, the prophets, Paul, and Christ:¹ who everywhere in the divine scriptures refute this opinion, teaching that heaven is neither borne in a circle nor has a spherical form, but is utterly immobile; and he repeats this same thing below in the exposition of chapter 7. This opinion Procopius seems to have taken, in almost the same words, from homilies 14 and 27 of Chrysostom on the Epistle to the Hebrews — although — although Lactantius Firmianus held and wrote the same, many years before Chrysostom, in the third book of the Divine Institutions, chapter 24.²

Augustine, in the first and second books of On Genesis to the Letter, most strongly condemns those who so defend this — and opinions like it about celestial matters, contrary to all the professors of philosophy — as [a point] of faith, that they think those who hold otherwise are not catholic.³ For [Augustine warns that] when nature, heaven, the stars, and other things of this kind are treated, we must beware lest we shamefully err about matters that have been proved by most certain reason and most manifest experience by those skilled in secular things; and — what is worse — lest we confirm our errors out of misunderstood testimonies of Scripture. For this is exceedingly disgraceful, and pernicious chiefly for two reasons. First, because when unbelievers see them thus raving, and erring by the whole breadth of heaven, they will mock both us and our authors, and will reprehend and spit them out as unlearned and false. Next, because if they hear that the divine scriptures err so gravely in those matters which they themselves know best and have tested, they will by no means believe the other things in them that are useful and necessary for salvation, but will suppose that these too were deceitfully composed with a like vanity. (See below, Annotation 14.)