Against Celsus 6.60

After the passage we have examined, as though his aim were somehow to fill his book with many words, he says in other words things similar to those examined a little earlier, where he said: Much more silly is it to distribute certain days to the making of the world before there were days. For when heaven had not yet come to be, nor the earth yet been fixed, nor the sun yet borne round here, how were there days? For how does this differ from: Let us take it again from the beginning and consider how it would not be absurd for the first and greatest God to command, “Let this come to be,” and another thing, “this or that,” and on one day to fashion so much, and on the second again so much more, and on the third and fourth and fifth and sixth? We have in effect answered “commanding, ‘Let this come to be,’ and another thing, ‘this or that’” when we cited “He spoke and they came to be; he commanded and they were created,” saying that the immediate Creator, and as it were the very maker of the world, is the Word, the Son of God, while the Father of the Word, by having commanded his own Son, the Word, to make the world, is Creator in the primary sense. As for “light” being made on one day, “the firmament” on the second, the gathering of the waters “under the heaven” into their gatherings on the third, and so the earth's bringing forth the things governed by nature alone, and the “lights” and “stars” on the fourth, the swimming creatures on the fifth, and the land animals and “man” on the sixth, we have spoken as well as we could in our treatises on Genesis. And above, too, when we found fault with those who said, following the more obvious interpretation, that a period of six days passed in the making of the world, we cited: “This is the book of the generation of heaven and earth, when it came to be, in the day when God made the heaven and the earth.”