Confessions

²⁹ From all these truths, of which they doubt not whose inner eye You have granted to see such things, and who immoveably believe Moses, Your servant, to have spoken in the spirit of truth; from all these, then, he takes one who says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,”— that is, “In His Word, co-eternal with Himself, God made the intelligible and the sensible, or the spiritual and corporeal creature.” He takes another, who says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,”— that is, “In His Word, co-eternal with Himself, God made the universal mass of this corporeal world, with all those manifest and known natures which it contains.”

He, another, who says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” that is, “In His Word, co-eternal with Himself, God made the formless matter of the spiritual and corporeal creature.” He, another, who says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,”— that is, “In His Word, co-eternal with Himself, God made the formless matter of the corporeal creature, wherein heaven and earth lay as yet confused, which being now distinguished and formed, we, at this day, see in the mass of this world.”

He, another, who says, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth,”— that is, “In the very beginning of creating and working, God made that formless matter confusedly containing heaven and earth, out of which, being formed, they now stand out, and are manifest, with all the things that are in them.”