On Genesis

Top Highlights

“And how could it be shown that God produced changeable and time-bound works without any change in himself” (Page 168)

“By so turning back and being formed creation imitates, every element in its own way, God the Word, that is the Son of God who always adheres to the Father in complete likeness and equality of being, by which he and the Father are one;⁴ but it does not imitate this form of the Word if it turns away from the creator and remains formless and imperfect, incomplete.” (Page 171)

“If that is the case, then God’s saying Let light be made is something eternal, because the Word of God, God with God, the only Son of God, is co-eternal with the Father, although when God said this in the eternal Word, a time-bound creature was made. While ‘when’ and ‘some time’ are time words, all the same the time when something should be made is eternal for the Word of God, and it is then made when it is in that Word that it should have been made, in the Word in which there is no ‘when’ nor ‘some time,’ because that whole Word is eternal.” (Page 170)

“Was it because a love that is needy and in want loves in such a way that it is subjected to the things it loves; and so for that reason, when the Spirit of God was to be mentioned, in which his holy benevolence and love is understood, it is said to be borne over what he loves, in case it should be thought that it was out of the compulsion of his needs that God loved the things which were to be made, rather than out of the abundance of his generosity?” (Page 173)

“That the soul, you see, was made by the all-powerful God, and that accordingly it is not a part of God or identical with his nature, is stated quite plainly in another passage of scripture, where the prophet says: And the one who fashioned the spirit for them all, he it is that knows all things (Ps 33:15), and in another place: who fashioned the spirit of man within him (Zech 12:1). So then, that the spirit of the man was made is definitively proved by these texts. But the scriptures give the name of ‘the spirit of man’ to the soul’s power of reason, which distinguishes him from the animals and gives him mastery over them by natural law. It is about this spirit that the apostle says: Nobody knows what a man has except the spirit of the man which is in him (1 Cor 2:11).” (Page 78)