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* Chapter 5, book 1, On Coming-to-Be and Passing-Away.
* Chapters 1 and 2, book 2, On Coming-to-Be and Passing-Away.
The philosopher would have done better had he freed that first matter from the conflict of contraries and recognised it as free from opposition. For not even the elements themselves contain an inherent contrariety: contrariety results from the intensity of qualities, as our common experience of fire and water teaches us, since whatever opposition they contain proceeds from the intensity of their qualities. But in the true elements of things, which come together in the generation of compounds, the qualities present in a moderated degree do not oppose one another. Temperate things admit no contrariety.
Thales, Heraclitus and Hesiod considered water to be the first matter of things. The writer of sacred Genesis seems to assent to their opinion, calling it the abyss and water. It may be suspected that he understood by this not our water, but something like smoke or a moist and dark vapour, wandering this way and that and driven by an uncertain motion without any law.
* On the Various Opinions of Philosophers.
* Genesis, chapter 1.
It is not easy to decide anything certain about that ancient principle of things, since, created in darkness, it has not yet emerged into the light of human understanding. Whatever the multitude of theologians and philosophers have judged about it, whether it is so or not, nature's author alone knows. One who speaks of obscure matters in terms of what is more probable deserves indulgence.
Some, assenting to the opinion of the rabbis, believed that first matter was preceded by an exceedingly ancient, yet obscure and ineffable material principle, improperly called Hyle. It should be called not so much a body as an immense shadow; not so much a thing as the darkest image of a thing, or a sooty phantom of being, the darkest night, a hiding place of darkness. Actually nothing and potentially everything, it is something the human mind can fashion for itself only in a dream. The imagination can present that uncertain principle, that dark underworld, to us no more adequately than the ears can convey the sun's light to someone blind from birth.
THE CREATION OF THE WORLD.
Those same thinkers held that from that most remote principle God brought forth and created a certain dark, formless and undigested abyss, the immediate matter of the elements and the world. Scripture calls this mass now an empty and void earth, now water, although it was neither in actuality but both in potentiality and destination. We may conjecture that it resembled smoke or a dark vapour, containing a certain numb spirit of cold and darkness.
The division of the upper waters from the lower, expressed in sacred Genesis, seems to have been made by separating the subtle from the thick, and a tenuous, spirit-like part from a sooty body. This was the work of the luminous spirit proceeding from the divine word. For light, which is a fiery spirit, separated unlike things and drove the denser darkness downwards from the nearer, higher region. Gathering the matter of like nature, finer and closer to spirit, it kindled it into immortal light, like incombustible oil before the throne of divine majesty. This is the empyrean heaven, intermediate between the intelligible and material worlds, as though the horizon and boundary of both. It receives spiritual gifts from the higher world and communicates them to the next lower heaven, namely the middle one.
Reason required the dark abyss, or the world's immediate matter, to be watery or moist, so that it could be made fine more readily and, through that refinement and the flow of matter, the entire mass of the heavens and the whole fabric could be spread out and extended into a continuous body. Flowing is proper to moisture, and the continuity of every body is owed to moisture alone, for moisture is the glue and solder of elements and bodies. Fire, acting on moisture, rarefies it by heating it. Heat is fire's instrument, through which it performs two opposite effects in one and the same labour: as it separates moist nature from earthy nature, by rarefying the former it condenses the latter. Thus the separation of unlike things brings about the gathering of like things. By this primordial chemical art the uncreated spirit, the world's craftsman, distinguished the confused natures of things.