Annotatio XIV

”He set the stars in the firmament.” — Genesis 1:17

Chrysostom, in homily 6 and homily 13 on Genesis, expounding this,¹ says: “When we hear ‘God set the stars in the firmament,’ far be it that we should think God fixed the stars in the heaven; for we see them move, and each of them accomplish its course by passing from place to place. But it is the same [to say] ‘He set the stars in heaven’ as that he commanded that the stars should be in heaven and should revolve — just as when he said, ‘God placed Adam in paradise,’² not that he fixed him in paradise, but that he willed him to dwell there.” And again, in homily 12 to the people of Antioch, discoursing how the stars run about through the heaven — which he says is wholly immobile³ — he writes thus: “God made the world, neither leaving it wholly immobile, nor commanding it to be wholly moved: but the heaven indeed remained unmoved, as the prophet says: ‘Who established the heaven like a vault, and stretched it out like a tent’;⁴ but the Sun, with the rest of the stars, is daily revolved in it.” Although the professors of Scholastic Theology, together with the Peripatetics and astronomers, explode this opinion with unanimous assent, and St. Philastrius, Bishop of Brescia, numbers it among the heresies,⁵ yet I do not judge it contrary to the divine scriptures and to the ancient school of the theologians. For Origen (in the fifth book against Celsus, and book 1 of the Peri Archōn, ch. 7) affirms that the Sun, Moon, and stars are not parts of heaven — just as the parts of the earth are not living beings — and that each of these is moved in its own order and course. Eusebius, Bishop of Emesa, and Diodorus, Bishop of Tarsus — Chrysostom’s teachers — in the exposition of the present passage hand down that the stars, like travelers, accomplish their journey through the heaven, which stands wholly fixed and immobile. And Procopius has the same on the seventh chapter of Genesis. Augustine too, in the second book On Genesis to the Letter, chapter 10, affirms that it can happen that, the heaven standing immobile, the stars accomplish all those diverse and mutually contrary courses which we observe in them; and that this was shown by the most certain demonstrations of the mathematicians of his times. St. Thomas, in the first part of the Summa, question 69, article 4, strives to direct Chrysostom’s opinion to the astronomical standard,⁶ saying that his words are to be understood of the Planets, which, according to Ptolemy, are rotated by their own proper motion within the concavities of their orbs. Read above, annotation 3.