Annotatio XXIV

”God completed his work on the seventh day.” — Genesis 2:2

Philo, in the first book of the Allegories of the Law, expounding the same passage, says: “It is of rustic simplicity to think that the world was made in six days, or indeed in any fixed time at all,¹ because the whole vicissitude of the world is [that] of days and nights, which the motion of the Sun, passing over and under the earth, necessarily produces. But the Sun is reckoned a part of heaven: so that it must be confessed that time is posterior to the world, seeing that it is an effect of the world. For the motion of heaven indicated the nature of time. Therefore, when you hear ‘He completed the works on the sixth day,’ you must not understand it of a number of some days, but of the perfection of the universe, which is signified by the perfect senary [six] number.” Some catholic authors have followed this opinion of Philo: of whom, among the Latins, Augustine referred the enumeration of six days made by Moses not to a succession of time, but to the natural order of the works, which is attributed to days; or to the order of the revelation of the six works, which God revealed to the angels one after another. But Procopius, among the Greeks, said the number of days was assumed by Moses not for the sake of time, but for the sake of teaching, on account of the weakness of our understanding, which could not comprehend the order of created things in another way, because of their multitude. This dogma, therefore, although it ought by no means to be disapproved, is nevertheless not to be so rashly asserted that we should think Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Chrysostom, Ambrose, and the other most learned Fathers — who taught the world was founded in the space of six days — thought rustically and unlearnedly: especially since Philo’s aforesaid argumentation derogates nothing from their opinion. Dissolving which [argument], St. Thomas, in the first part of the Summa Theologica,² says that, although before the construction of the firmament there was not that time which measures and follows the motion of heaven, yet there was a time which would measure another motion — namely that first motion, and the succession of conceptions and affections in the angelic minds, in which thoughts so numerous could not supervene except one before another and one after another; but “Before” and “After” are nothing else than distinctions of time.