The world-building spirit began the work of creation from two universal principles, one formal and the other material. For what else do the prophet's words mean—“In the beginning God created heaven and earth”, and so forth—than that, at the beginning of giving form to matter, God distinguished it into two supreme principles, namely the formal and material principles, heaven and earth? That the name earth means the dark mass of waters and abyss, not yet clothed in form, is shown by the following words: “The earth was empty and void, and darkness was upon the face of the abyss”, and so forth. The creator enclosed and bounded this mass within the highest heaven, the empyrean, which is nature's first formal principle, though a remote one.

MATTER AND FORM ARE THE MOST ANCIENT PRINCIPLES OF THINGS.

* Genesis, chapter 1.

For when the Spirit of God, which is divinity's radiance, was poured over the waters at the very moment of creation—that is, over the moist and opaque face of the abyss—light immediately appeared. In the blink of an eye it seized the higher and subtler part of matter and enclosed it with a shining circumference like a border. It was like lightning casting fiery light from east to west, or a flame swiftly kindling the smoke beside it. Thus the first day arose, while the lower part of the darkness, empty of light, remained night. In this way darkness was divided into day and night.

Of that first heaven, the formal principle, it is not said that it was empty, void and covered in darkness. This sufficiently indicates that this heaven, first spread out, was immediately distinguished by light from the dark mass below it, because of its nearness to divine glory and majesty and the presence of the luminous spirit flowing from them.

Two principles of things were therefore created in the beginning: one luminous and close to spiritual nature, the other wholly corporeal and dark. The former was to be the principle of motion, light and heat; the latter, of numbness, opacity and cold. The former is active and male, the latter passive and female. From the former comes movement towards generation in the elemental world, and hence life; from the latter begins movement towards corruption, and hence death. These are the two bounds of the lower world.

Because love stretches entirely beyond itself, divine nature, unable to endure solitude and admiring its own beauty in the light already created as in a mirror, burned to extend that light and multiply its own image. It commanded the light to spread and propagate. Then, as a fiery spirit proceeded from the divine mind and turned in a circle, the light began to act upon the neighbouring darkness. When this had been conquered and pressed down towards the centre, the second day shone forth and the second dwelling of light was established, or second heaven, embracing the entire ethereal region. In its upper part so many torches were afterwards scattered and fixed; in its lower part the seven wandering stars were placed in order, to give law to the nature beneath them through their light, motion and influence, like rulers and governors.

So that nothing might be lacking to so great a work, long ago delineated in the divine mind, the same spirit drove away the condensed darkness and the opposing shadow slipping beneath it with a fiery, flashing sword, and thrust them into the centre of the abyss. Thus the last space of the heavens was made open to light, which we rightly call air, or the lower heaven; then the third day shone forth. The darkness that had overshadowed the whole face of the abyss in the beginning, pressed down for three days into the lowest region by the incoming light, was so condensed by the narrowness of the space and the contraction of cold that it passed into the nature and immense mass of water. In the midst of the waters the kernel and centre of the whole fabric was poised and fixed, formed from the dregs and thicker matter of the abyss into a solid, opaque body of earth, like a valley and tomb of darkness. Afterwards, at the spirit's impulse, the waters withdrew from the face of the earth and rolled around its sides; dry land appeared, to bring forth almost countless kinds of plants, offer a dwelling to so many species of animals, and especially to the human being ruling over the rest. It was to provide them with food and humankind with an ample furnishing of things. Earth and water thus ended in one globe, whose opacity or shadow, due to its density and imaging the dark abyss, continually occupies and envelops all the neighbouring air opposite the sun. For, facing away, it retreats from the pursuing light at an equal distance, and

like one slipping away, forever fugitive it withdraws.

The supreme maker chose to gather that light, which had occupied all the spaces of the abyss in dispersed form once darkness was defeated and submerged, into the shining and most noble globe of the sun, of outstanding size and form. The more concentrated the light, the more effective it would be and the more powerfully it would cast its rays. It was also so that created light, the nature closest to divine glory, proceeding from uncreated unity, might pour forth through unity into creatures.

THE CREATION OF THE SUN.

All other bodies borrow their light from that luminous torch of the world. Probability suggests that we should believe the other globular bodies have an opacity like that which our senses detect in the moon's globe because of the earth's nearness and the extension of its shadow, though their distance prevents us from perceiving it. For the first and most excellent nature among all sensible things, the source of light, was owed to unity, from which these lower things would receive the breath of life. Hence the philosopher's apt saying: “The sun and a human being generate a human being.”

Not without probability, some philosophers placed the soul of the world in the sun and the sun in the midst of the universe. For the reasoning of equity and nature seems to require that the solar body stand at an equal distance from the source and origin of created light, namely the empyrean heaven, and from the dark centre, earth, which are the extremes of the whole fabric. Thus the world's torch, as an intermediate nature reconciling both extremes, may have its seat in the middle, where it can more readily receive immense stores of powers from the highest pole and transmit them an equal distance to the lowest.