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INTERPOLATED BY JOHN GAGNY. The Preface of Claudius Marius Victor, orator of Marseilles, to his commentaries on Genesis, addressed to God most good and most great. Most high and holy God, source of all virtue, Almighty, whom it is neither permitted for human minds to comprehend by sense in subtle searching of things, nor lawful to be ignorant of (for by profound reason we believe Thee to be God in three, yet so believe the three to be one that a single substance renders three persons, preserving the bonds undivided in a holy union)—Thou art without beginning, likewise everlasting without end, alone and ever the same, subject to no age. Thou exceedest the expanse of things wherever the recess of mind reaches; Thou art encompassed by no space. Nor is there any place that can contain Thee, for Thou art immeasurable.
Moreover, what Thine image is, it is not lawful for the human mind to attain, unknown to be seen by the eyes—unless Thou shouldst show Thyself to be beheld by some special divine gift; nor indeed is there any created power that quickens Thee with motion, through which we are and are moved. Thou art the mind and inmost substance of the sacred mind; Thou art reason and the fully prudent source of reason; Thou art the virtue and summit of virtue, and verily Thou Thyself art life and the begetter of life, and of profound light: Thou art the true Light, O God; Thou art the cause and vigor of things. From Thee whatever has suddenly flashed forth out of nothing has drawn its beginning, and, filled by so great an Author, either has power in its measure or has received form into its members. Nature, preserved in its fleeting parts, proves Thee to be Lord; and the order that is given confesses the appointed succession.
Thou, distinguishing the docile numbers, dost balance weights, varying measures and proportions, and dost govern motion; Thou biddest the alternating turns to serve, and the unbroken recurrence of things to stand firm, and the world—full of the image of the mind—to bring forth the ages already known to Thee, and to roll on. Thou art not content to endow created things with one gift; whatever Thou doest, Thou bestowest for varied uses. Nay rather, kindly God, Thou doest nothing without a cause for Thy creatures; although that ordering of Thine, unknown to us, is utterly indestructible by any wave: yet to the ungrateful Thou hast not denied life and sense; nay, Thou hast even granted them to rejoice in the will of the mind. Nor yet must the nature of a will strong toward either side be blamed by us: for therefore the power to perish was given to all, that to live might be the sweeter; and the mutual...
...measure of mutual peril would yield according to merit, since the punishment of the wicked would double the rewards of the saints, worthy of a stern Judge. Furthermore—if it is lawful for me to say this, saving Thy peace, O Father—perhaps in Thy sight not to have sinned is a greater good, amid the slippery seasons of life, than for the wretched to have sinned an evil: but how this may be, do Thou see; the causes we entrust to Thee alone, in whom we all believe. Meanwhile it is enough for us that, while Thou dost inspire the lowly weights of earth with sacred reason and form them by Thy virtue, fashioning them after Thine own likeness, nobler in countenance: while Thou hast raised man upright, with face lifted toward the stars—him, snatched by the fraud of the savage tyrant into the snares of death and to impious Tartarus, Thou redeemest by the poured-out blood of Thine only-begotten Son: and...
...sought back from the depths of Erebus to greater gifts, Thou restorest him to a state greater than he had been made, and renderest him to everlasting life, and bearest him into heaven, the dread foe subdued. Now, now let no rash man accuse father Adam, because, breaking the law and loosing the light precept, he opened the way to death: for the parent's fault has been amply compensated, since it is more to conquer death than not to have known how to die. Now, joyful from the hall of heaven, he looks down upon the ethereal vaults and treads the stars, and summons his descendants, set in order, into the kingdoms to come—those whom the rich wisdom of the eternal Father formed again by waters and taught to be born again. Therefore I beseech Thee, kindly God, who with favoring power dost grant our souls to perceive; and Thee, O dearest Son of Thy Father, give to our hearts Thy mellifluous Word:
and pour eloquent tongues into us, while we prepare to form tender souls and hearts toward the path of true virtue in childhood years. Now open the renowned caskets of law-giving Moses—what the origin of heaven is, or what the first beginnings of the world, and what shook hidden faith from doubting minds throughout the whole earth; whence the plague, increased, drew its strength, and the ancient morals gave way to vice. Grant me, O God, to describe the mystic things of eternal life; grant likewise the mind, grant fitting times for the mind, grant zeal, lest care be lacking to so great a labor, and a good outcome of my zeal; and—that which overruns all my prayers by right (clear is the mind to him who writes)—do not condemn the task that I, though guilty, now dare to undertake; and...
...wink kindly at my faults, and spare me graciously. But if anything in the arrangement should err against the law of meter, or if improper speech should err and the sense should waver, let no measure of peril against the faith come from this. Through the Lord Christ, who, born of Thee, flourishes in the same majesty wherein the kindly Spirit, incomprehensible to minds, lives world without end. Book One of the Commentaries of Claudius Marius Victor, orator of Marseilles, on Genesis. Before the poles and the day of heaven and the darkness of the world, before the forms of works, and things, and the seeds of things, the Eternal, without past and without end of future, underlies all being: with whom the one God was ever; with whom the begotten Word, God, was living, and His own kindly Spirit, the sum of hidden, life-giving force.
By a harmonious bond the one substance of the three, joining them, eternally blessed them with supreme virtue. And mighty, He reigned in the majesty of creating, already seeing things and the causes of things and future events and what was to be done, and begetting them with a capacious mind, surveying the ages, and ever holding present whatever the seasons unroll: His kingdom was His very self, immeasurable in blessed mass; nor did the threefold virtue, God, lack a witness of His kingdom: who, first giving bodies to things from no seed, while He compelled things to exist, even then accomplished our office, which He alone possessed. And that rich Wisdom might make this world, He begot all things at once: but afterward He adorned the formless seeds of things with forms superimposed; and a well-given order reduced the times into succession.
For not as the tongue of sacrilegious madness has imagined—that the helpless event of a mindless mind, while it rolled unknowing seeds, twisted forth so prudent a work; nor is it lawful to say it was made before time, since what is born of time is moved. Nor again is it lawful to believe the world eternal and coeval with the heavenly ones, having ever held a stable vigor: for what consists of bodies must be confessed to have begun. For a body, which a blow wears away, which space dissolves, and which abolishes itself by the very end toward which it tends to its utmost, shows its beginning: and what is proved to have been allotted thus, it is fitting either to be believed made or to be thought born. Therefore it stands established that the world was made—which everyone, when subdued, grants, and, convinced by true doctrine, believes; thou wilt concede that God made it:
who, mighty by the power of the Word and by virtue, disposed, commanded, and admonished whatever is reckoned as nature, and sustains the created gift in successive turns (ever reshaping the fleeting), and, drawing back the swift thing, whirls it in its orbit. And if He prefers to dissolve all things suddenly, He will at once restore them, returning into like forms. So great is the power of the Father, and so great is the glory of the Word. But that I may at last touch upon the first beginnings of things: the vaults of high heaven and the lands lying below are the first part of the work; but water covered the lands, and the air in the midst, moist with a dingy cloud, and the vast abyss veiled itself in black darkness, and the sacred Spirit, brooding over the outstretched waters, quickened the nurturing waters, and gave to be instilled the seeds of things, not yet to be poured into shoots in lands not yet composed:
when light, sent from above, flashed forth as God spoke; and the separated shadow, drawing back the black mantle, departed from highest Olympus. Then divine prudence, calling the light 'day,' bestowed also upon the darkness the name of 'obscure night.' Thus one day was made from morning and the first evening: again, the first evening driven off, the restored light made a new morning: when the most firm mass, yielding from the midst of the waves with congealed body, rose up; and, far and wide made solid with hard rigidity, it suspended the divided waters; and set the cold deep against the warm axles; and, leaning, with the sea hedged in, poured itself over the things which on every side with vast circuit...
...it covers the ethereal heaven, the mass having been drawn down from here. Perhaps here someone, by skilled error, may thus reason within himself: lest fuel be lacking to the ethereal flames, and excessive heat, seeking the depths in pursuit of nourishment, should burn up the mortal race, and earthly things should not be able to endure the glittering heaven, the firm framework of the pole is set beneath, downward: which, while it protects us by its shadow, meanwhile grows cold from the waters set upon it. But to seek out the causes of the divine Godhead—flee that far from us, my mind: let it ever be more for thee to believe that God can do whatever is thought impossible to be done; and that a great sea is borne above the stars and constellations, prove it by the very reasoning of those who refuse to believe, and who wish the world to hang suspended, which the Creator Himself bears, and rolls firm with immeasurable weight.
The third light marveled that the swollen waves departed: when God, the waters of the remaining flood now driven on, opened up a great void in the airy spaces. Then for the first time the lowest part of the world showed its uncovered face; and, trembling at the power of the Word, the blue seas girded the bared lands. These, swiftly bidden to sprout with varied offspring, the luxuriant twin earths covered with new mud. And the rude forest, bursting forth from the tender turf, with glad foliage tossed itself; and each and every tree and the greening herb brought forth its own kind, with fruit and seed; and the earth was clothed with grass. Now, three days completed, the first day of the sun, kindled by swift motion, was bidden to gather itself into flames and a globe of fire; and the founded seeds of light scattered ruddy locks with rosy tinder.
And the moon, the honor of night, gleaming with borrowed light, hung suspended on a lower path beneath the sun; from which, when struck, it poured back the rays it had received. And the blue night marveled that the stars, painting the sky with their distinct zones, flicker varied colors with ethereal flowers, and shine the more resplendent in the more adorned darkness, while the bolts, poured forth with glowing flames, gleam, and the new constellations press on with eager flashes—stars which the sun's radiance overshadows with its open rays, measuring out the four seasons of the four-parted year. The sun too, though the moon's course is monthly, content with one course, completes the revolving year, and confesses its sacred Artificer by wondrous structure. The fifth day moved breathing bodies in the sea, which the moistening water begot; and it strewed the deep delights of the ocean:
which nature formed in wondrous ways with varied germ, bidden to bring forth parts from the whole, and forms from an empty body. Moreover, it gave the soul to go into brute shapes: and the vast whales, which lift their scaly backs from the swell of the briny gulf, stuffed with soft fat, it brought forth: and that very liquid which preserves the bodies of these harms our bodies—the generating nurse to the fishes: that same water which nourishes the germs of the earth; hence the birds too, that soft kind, drew their vigor: for while it forms the liquid waters, and life sent in enters the sea, the swollen seas seethe with much offspring; nor is it enough that the fishes, a single race, should rise up: and that the scaly throng in the briny flood escapes to the topmost waves:
unless, flitting in the waters, it should swim gently in the pure ether, the flying creature taught to reach the ethereal recesses: therefore the material is one for both birds and fishes. Now twice the third day was radiant in the bright heaven, the third after the genial gifts of the warm sun: and now the warming earth had loosened its heavy limbs, when God, stirring greater things, bade the earth bring forth every living thing which reason alone, the source of motion, quickens—to which it was given to serve as the use of things demands. Without delay, vital pledges burst forth from the teeming lands, each allotted the shapes of its own kind. Here now let it be lawful for me to touch upon something which I would in anxious haste pass entirely over: to relate things handed down in a somewhat altered order.
After the appointed order had brought forth all things kind by kind, full of true goods and stocked with much endowment, which God should foster as an order destined to abide: then the structure seemed most beautiful to its Author. But what is that—that there was a world, that there were stars, and risings, and ether, and the glassy sea, and the greening lands, unless there be a spectator present whom the glory of so great a mass might fill, and who might lead his eager eyes through each thing one by one? To what purpose are boundaries so wide, and ample possession, if the possessor of things is absent? Turning these things in His mind, the Ruler of Olympus, and weighing them by the weight of the Word, stands; the sum has been given to the work, good are all the things I have created; now let us make man, He says, to reign in the world and to be the image of God: it is fitting that he be like his Creator, free to his own will, who enjoys with his mind the things created.
He had said these things, and man was made—whether in whole body or in soul and form, perhaps in that manner in which He makes future things, in which He makes things to be done, in which He always held what was done: even though the past age had not yet come on. Therefore He bade this man, set over things together with his consort, to increase through offspring and to fill the empty lands. Then nature, once granted to created things—especially to those which moving life seems to animate—multiplies whatever was first brought forth in its own forms. When the seventh light saw that the great Parent had ceased—but only that He had ceased to create the kinds in their numbers—and had held His rest: then it was rightly hallowed, having seen the work perfected: for this too is...
...full of virtue, that God ceased and laid aside His labors; for to the things begotten the Father's right hand had prepared the form which it is enough for the Lord to have accomplished in twice three days. The seventh light taught the examples of venerable rest which we are all bidden to hope for in the heavenly hall, if only the good works of pious deeds be not lacking. This light also signifies that day on which Christ loosed the underworld and, hell conquered, opened the way of return. While He, the victor about to return once for all into His native hall, and now free of evils, rests in human flesh. Thus God knew how to cease, thus to take repose, so that resting He might do more, likewise resting without end and working without end, and mingling the succession and the times, by ceasing He consummates whatever work He had created. But of what kind and in what kind...
...of matter God formed Adam, here it is right to take up in few words with Moses. For first by merits, yet last in the whole order, man was made: that he might know how to surpass created things, and hence might pay equal praises to the two. Therefore the most excellent hand of the most high God takes for man clay easy to handle and well apt to yield to the touch, and to follow the bend and form by which it is led with art, and unfolds into a shape what He already bore in His human mind: then, life sent in by the steaming breath, watered the soil: the earth, softened by liquid, is turned into flesh: and blood, a slippery moisture, distends the soft veins through their known passages. Then man, now full of mind, leaving the earth, leaps up, and prudent, adores the Lord of reason.
Not otherwise, when the bodies committed to the tomb shall rise again, the open graves laid bare, when the Majesty of Christ, glided down from the open heaven, unbars the entrails of the pregnant earth, they shall leap forth, and the things of earth and of heaven shall worship the Lord. For what the earth did not have, when thus from cheap dust the human body was compacted into honored form, it is most easy to restore again whole, that from dust it may render back what the earth, engraved through many years, already had. Thus from the ancient sepulchers, at command, the bodies shall come forth, each one again assuming its own parts. Thus there is nothing of the past which is not a form of the future. But to disclose that time of the first man, and the seat and dwelling, where a wound was received in place of the whole seed: where the happy land opens its eastern recesses, on a higher globe the Paradise of a pleasant grove is spread open:
and it is distinguished by the order of the rounded woodland. Here, where now the boundary is marked off with equal spaces of the sun, and an eternal spring tempers with even hours. There each tree stands rich with its own fruits, and the mellow apples are pushed off by succeeding apples: which, pleasant to the eyes and full of wondrous vigor, cherish the limbs and souls, and feed them with savor and scent. Here the earth, varied, vibrates starry warmths, ever leafing with new bloom and fresh fruit: here the breathing cinnamons, quickened with vigor, loosen their fragile reeds, scents of an ambrosial gift. But neither what the Mede exhales, nor what the Achaemenian breathes with loosened hair, what the Assyrian, rich in soft amomum, and the Mareotic harvest reddening with nard, what the shrubs of Tartessus, what the rod of the Sabaean...
...and what the Palestinian branch weeps from its torn wound: all these, heaped together, you would think were gathered in this one garden, for hither God brought together in close array all that nature received severally in fixed places. And while the grove, stirred by a gentle breeze, vibrates in soft passage, it blends one nectar from diverse scent: and there arises a new gift which no single tree can claim for itself. And wherever the trembling grove, gently shaken by a soft murmur, quivers with stirred leaves, the whole forest sounds a hymn to God with its trees, and the measured breeze whistles songs, nor does an empty motion shake the air in vain. For surely, with the Author, who under one mass holds back thing to thing, binding them by alternate law, it is fitting to believe that nothing happens rashly or in vain. Nay rather, the beautiful grove and the gleaming woodlands...
...are proofs of His works, and the nurseries of things; nor is there doubt that, before the first parent's sins, glory, simplicity, zeal, wisdom tenacious of truth, prudence, grace, honor, and salvation here had likewise fixed their tents with him, and the illustrious affections of the soul, and renowned virtue, and whatever beautiful thing the world holds: why, in short, should I wish to enumerate in a few words such manifold gifts? Now it is enough of faith that, springing from a glad seed, on the one hand the tree of life seeks the air with lofty fruits: on the other, that knowledge destined to harm, with its diverse fruit, hangs the cognizance of things upon the tree of the law.
At the bosom of the sacred grove, which the forest crowns, a fountain gushes and weds the offspring with rich virtue, joyously loosing its swollen head into a fourfold stream, richer than the unbroken ocean; for, with downward current, the one gives its waters, while the other receives them all. Nor yet does it swell: but lesser is he who knows not how to grow with such infused floods than he who knows not how to diminish, with rivers poured out: of which, in the first rank, Phison leaps forth exulting, the fourth part of the blessed spring, putting forth the endowments which prudence of nature gives; and it fills the peoples of the Ganges and stretches out the Indian realms with its silt, and, rolling lands and seeds, sows the fields it makes, where, bare with naked sands, it gleams golden amid the shavings of glittering metal. Here, where the carbuncle glows ruddy with lightning fire, and the emerald flashes radiant with green light.
Nor less from there does Gihon, but milder with peaceful waters, lift up the waters of the Nile, and with kindly flood covers the fields that would otherwise burn far and wide, and, resisting the sky, tempers the regions of the Ethiopians with its refluent pools. Third from here, coursing with rapid stream, the Tigris goes as companion to the Euphrates—both of which, rushing in joined mass, the conquered earth, laid open, swallows in a hollow abyss, until in the glades of Armenia and the Median vales it vomits forth the rivers which it could not bear, nor now contains. But the Tigris, as if indignant at the black hell, leaps forth beneath the ethereal breezes with greater motion. And again it enters the caverns, and, plunged in hollows, drives its roar within: and, made stronger by the barrier, is multiplied with waters, and, swifter from the dark cave, comes out, and cleaves the Assyrian plains with swift march.
More just is the Euphrates, which, lavish with rich stream, waters the parched fields of subject Persia below: drawn forth in gentle brooks, and serving all alike, and offering itself wholly to human uses: until, dry of waters, lavish even of its very name, it consummates upon the lands what it owed to the waves of the sea. These dominions, therefore, rich with the whole offspring of nature, and these delights stocked with so great an endowment of virtues, are the first possession of the first man, into which, brought to exult in everlasting life, the dweller had been bidden: so then, that man, placed amid the delights and the far-rich vales, while he is yet made worthy and learns to merit by labor, lived free of sorrows and ignorant of care. So much, with the Author, is there of merit, in place of the name of the highest, in having merited as yet no evil.
How great, then, do we think the Father can pay to one returning into the times of life, with whom, even then, among His servants, His pure bounty was Paradise, not a wage? And in that what those decrees of the stern law brought—when, about to make a trial of liberty—He received the appointed life for one keeping the commands: He pledges still greater things to the good, and reserves rewards: who set a cause to merits, when He said, Eat of all the trees; only this one beware. Which, bearing the swarms of diverse things, carries beneath its bark the knowledge of right and evil. For cruel death and dread shall follow the transgressors. By such a law given, the best reason teaches that God did not make mortal in the first age the first man; nay, he brought death upon himself of his own accord. For in this too is the indulgence of the great and highest God:
in that what He bestows on His servants not by merits but only of kindly free will, He desires to be of our labor. And He prefers to seem to owe what He gives. But thou whom the keeping of sacred law binds, do not complain that liberty, shut up within narrow bounds, is robbed of a part of itself: nothing has been cut off from thee by this law. Before, thou hadst gained only the power of land and sea; now already thou hast that of the kingdom and of life everlasting, and besides that of death. Then, that the rude inhabitant of the world might believe that the kindly One had granted all things to be subject to him, God bade every animal which the earth, bidden, had now created—pouring forth seed from its silent, greening body—to be present, and to obey its own sovereign: namely, that he might assign well-fitting names to all things, and call each created thing by its own...
...name, by which nature it is born to be moved of its own accord. Without delay, nature, not ignorant of obeying, sets before God every kind of living thing: in whatever part of the new world it is summoned, the animals come together in that very moment of brief time: whether they had been sluggish with soft step, or most ready in swift course, or wont to glide suddenly through the air with a rush, or to swim in the waves, or to be borne slippery by weight: these God almighty, called before Adam present, endowed each with its own gift, generous; and armed it with hand, horn, foot, tooth, venom, and with other things by which an animal, helpless in skill and of lesser spirit and lacking reason, might protect itself and keep itself from adverse things: but no living thing flourished with countenance, face, and bearing equal to man.
But to man He added almost divine honors. And among so many things illustrating life with twofold sex, he alone was unequal—he who long had the matter for a fitting consort, unknowing of begetting. Therefore God undertakes a known work: and, the man's struck heart suddenly loosened, languid with so great a sleep, He draws away the lowest rib from one bereft of mind, whence flesh is bidden to follow: for the skin, withdrawing of its own accord, offered a smooth way to the rib as it went, the limbs being wholly unharmed and the body sound. Which, arranged by God working through the various joints, received form, and, animated with warm marrow, was turned into a work of life, now pleasing in the second sex. Thus Eve, granted, was formed for her husband. Now at this point cease at last, most foolish throng, to torture the mind with vain questionings:
nor here to ask why woman was fashioned from man's limbs—since even from the beginning she could have been shaped from soft dust and out of nothing: and cease to scrutinize hidden causes: as far as it may be permitted to conjecture, woman was made from man so that a certain kinship might mingle a mutual and alternate love between them, compelling itself to recognize itself in alternate members. Hence Adam at once thereafter perceived Eve to be a part of himself, so that, exulting, a new grace touched his mind, and the affection of the mind, received into the inmost being, rushed in; and it penetrated to the bones with so great a warmth that now it might give him to know what a consort was, and a wife; what sweet children, and that parents must be set after spouses; what it was for both to abide in one flesh, leading likewise an everlasting life together.
Furthermore, while they lacked the vices and corruption of the world, they flourished with divine souls, in need of nothing: since the substance of the world was in their power, and all the resources the world gave; nor did they bear bodies at all subject to diseases: hunger, ignorant of any pause, did not compel them to eating: who, if they had kept the commands of the supreme God whole, would never have known the cruel dominion of death and dread sufferings forever. But the cunning serpent, breaking the Lord's law, by such deceits persuaded the unwary Eve. O race, devoid of a better life and ignorant of good things, ignorant of men: for he must be thought not to know good who, ignorant of evil, knows not even to distinguish by what boundary diverse things differ from good. And therefore God did not wish it to be lawful for man to pluck the august fruits:
lest, the cloud of the mind removed, they should cast their eyes into heaven and know the best things, and be like gods. Here now let it be lawful to run on a little, and to lament the base ruins of the ancients. Ah, too wretched, the gentiles whom madness drove into various rites, to feign many surnames of the gods, and to add a plural voice to God alone. The impious voice of the dread serpent first uttered this, who was then the cause of death: for credulous, after Eve broke the precept with sacrilegious bites, now learned in experienced evil, she seeks a partner in her fault: and, ill-skilled in fraud, seeks her unwary husband by the same art by which she perished first: thus, subdued by the foe, miserable Adam yields to a twofold crime, and tastes the apples most full of the sacred juice.
But because in these things lay hidden the prescriptions of the stern law, destined to bring death more than with viperous venom, as soon as they violated their lips with the forbidden taste, at once they perceived the wickedness, and the deed accomplished grew, and struck their breasts with a sense before unknown. Hence fear, thence shame, had first taken their rise. For while men, their hearts conscious of lofty things and intent only on heaven and the right, bore their breasts turned toward the exalted Parent: while with the clear splendor of the incorporeal mind they marked the miracles of divine secrets, the care of their members had not yet touched them; but when that everlasting vigor of life forsook them, now stricken with death, at last cold and heat, the changes of the air, came upon them: and men first perceived themselves needy of clothing; and of sex...
In secret they blushed, lamenting in silence their own pitiable plight. Therefore they wove fresh coverings from the leaves of the shady fig, plucked off after their fault, to clothe with veiled body the shame their mind had taken in. Nor is that enough: they know not what they do, by what means they may flee the brand of their crime and even themselves; they could wish, if perchance a way lay open, to bury themselves in some abyss—so much is guilt the very neighbor of its own punishment, that now the image of death delights the wretched who dread mortal death. They stretch out shady woods and dim coverts as empty veils of false comfort. For how can it be right to withdraw your timid body? You, I say, whom the living power of the Father, who made you, fashioned but now from cheap dust—He conceals you, He fills you when present, and goes forth poured into your inmost recesses. Can you then, fleeing your Lord, escape Him?