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Humbly my tongue confesses to you in the height of your majesty that it was you who made heaven and earth, the heaven I see and the earth I tread, from which, too, came this earthly body that I bear. It was you who made them. But where, O Lord, is the Heaven of Heavens, of which we hear in the words of the psalm: To the Lord belongs the Heaven of Heavens, the earth he gives to the children of men? Where is that other heaven which we cannot see and compared with which all that we see is merely earth?
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Undoubtedly the reason why we are told that this earth was 'invisible and without form', a kind of deep abyss over which there was no light, is that it had no form whatsoever; and the reason why you commanded it to be written that 'darkness reigned over the deep' could only be that there was total absence of light. For if there had been light, where else would it have been but high above, shedding brilliance over all? But since as yet there was no light, what else was the presence of darkness but the absence of light? Darkness, then, reigned over all, because there was no light above, just as silence reigns where there is no sound. For what else is the presence of silence but the absence of sound?
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How, then, could it be described in such a way that even dull minds could grasp it, except by means of some familiar word? And of all that goes to make up this world what can be found nearer to utter formlessness than 'earth' and 'the deep'? Since they are the lowest in the scale of created things, they have beauty of form in a lower degree than the other, higher things, which are radiant in their splendour. Why, then, should I not assume that the words 'earth, invisible and without form' are meant to convey to men, in a way that they can understand, that formless matter which you created without beauty in order to make from it this beautiful world?
If it was to be there first, in order to be the vehicle for all these visible, composite forms, what can have been its own origin? It can only have derived its being from you, for all things have their origin in you, whatever the degree of their being, although the less they are like you, the farther they are from you - and here I am not speaking in terms of space. This means, then, that you, O Lord, whose being does not alter as times change but is ever and always one and the same, the very same, holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, made something in the Beginning, which is of yourself, in your Wisdom, which is born of your own substance, and you created this thing out of nothing.
You created heaven and earth but you did not make them of your own substance. If you had done so, they would have been equal to your only-begotten Son, and therefore to yourself, and justice could in no way admit that what was not of your own substance should be equal to you. But besides yourself, O God, who are Trinity in Unity, Unity in Trinity, there was nothing from which you could make heaven and earth. Therefore you must have created them from nothing, the one great, the other small. For there is nothing that you cannot do. You are good and all that you make must be good, both the great Heaven of Heavens and this little earth. You were, and besides you nothing was. From nothing, then, you created heaven and earth, distinct from one another; the one close to yourself, the other close to being nothing; the one surpassed only by yourself, the other little more than nothing.
This then, my God, is how I interpret your Scripture when I read the words: 'In the Beginning God made heaven and earth. The earth was invisible and without form, and darkness reigned over the deep.' Scripture does not say on which day you made them, and I understand the reason for this to be that 'heaven' here means the Heaven of Heavens - that is, the intellectual heaven, where the intellect is privileged to know all at once, not in part only, not as if it were looking at a confused reflection in a mirror, but as a whole, clearly, face to face; not first one thing and then another but, as I have said, all at once, quite apart from the ebb and flow of time - and 'earth' means the invisible, formless earth, also unaffected by the ebb and flow of time which always marks the change from this to that, since where there is no form there can be no this and no that. These, then, are the heaven and earth that are meant, as I understand it, when the Scripture says 'In the Beginning God made heaven and earth' without mention of day - heaven, that is, the Heaven of Heavens which was given form from the very beginning, and earth, that is, earth invisible and without order, which was utterly formless. In fact the Scripture explains in the very next sentence what earth is meant by this. And since it says that on the second day the firmament was made and that it was called heaven, it gives us to understand which heaven was meant by the first sentence, which makes no mention of days.
The account left by Moses, whom you chose to pass it on to us, is like a spring which is all the more copious because it flows in a confined space. Its waters are carried by a maze of channels over a wider area than could be reached by any single stream drawing its water from the same source and flowing through many different places. In the same way, from the words of Moses, uttered in all brevity but destined to serve a host of preachers, there gush clear streams of truth from which each of us, though in more prolix and roundabout phrases, may derive a true explanation of the creation as best he is able, some choosing one and some another interpretation.
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For this reason, although I hear people say 'Moses meant this' or 'Moses meant that', I think it more truly religious to say 'Why should he not have had both meanings in mind, if both are true? And if others see in the same words a third, or a fourth, or any number of true meanings, why should we not believe that Moses saw them all? There is only one God, who caused Moses to write the Holy Scriptures in the way best suited to the minds of great numbers of men who would all see truths in them, though not the same truths in each case.'
For my part I declare resolutely and with all my heart that if I were called upon to write a book which was to be vested with the highest authority, I should prefer to write it in such a way that a reader could find re-echoed in my words whatever truths he was able to apprehend. I would rather write in this way than impose a single true meaning so explicitly that it would exclude all others, even though they contained no falsehood that could give me offence. And if this is what I would choose for myself, I will not be so rash, my God, as to suppose that so great a man as Moses deserved a lesser gift from you. As he wrote those words, he was aware of all that they implied. He was conscious of every truth that we can deduce from them and of others besides that we cannot, or cannot yet, find in them but are nevertheless there to be found.
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O Lord my God, how much I have written on so few words! What endurance I should need and how much time, if I were to comment upon the whole of your Scriptures at such length! Let me, then, continue to lay before you my thoughts upon the Scriptures, but more briefly; and in so doing let me be content to give one explanation only, the one which I see by your inspiration to be true and certain and good, even though many may occur to me in places where more than one is possible. Let me lay this confession before you in the firm belief that if the explanation I give accords with the meaning which Moses had in mind, I shall have done what is right and best. This is what I must try my utmost to do. But if I fail, let me at least say what your Truth wills to reveal to me by the words of Scripture, just as he revealed what he willed to Moses.