Six Homilies on the Creation

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1–1.7 · 2.1–2.6 · 3.1–3.5 · 3.6–4.1 · 4.4–4.8 · 4.9–5.4 · 5.5–5.9 · 6.1–6.5 · 6.6–6.9

1. 1.1Severian opens his homilies on creation by saying that all Scripture aims at our salvation, that Genesis is the foundation of the law and the prophets, and that his additions stand beside, not against, what earlier Fathers said.
2. 1.2Moses wrote of creation as a prophet, not a historian, and began with God as Creator so that his law would be given by the Maker to his own, mentioning only visible things to cure Israel of Egyptian nature-worship.
3. 1.3Moses' “he made” and John's “was” share the opening “In the beginning” but distinguish creature from Creator, against those who say Christ came into being; the two Testaments are sisters with matching features.
4. 1.4On the first day God made from nothing the matter of everything (the upper heaven, earth, abysses, air, and fire), and the fire above is akin to the fire below, as angels are akin to souls.
5. 1.5Darkness was not made by God but was the shadow of clouds rising from the waters (not, as some heretics allegorize, the devil), the “spirit” over the waters was moving air, and light was made by a word.
6. 1.6Light, God's first work, and man, his last, both reveal things; the names “day” and “night” point to gentleness and to the compunction that sleep, an image of death, should bring.
7. 1.7A closing exhortation on keeping the fast holy: fasting from food must go with fasting from injustice, anger, and sin, since God values righteousness above abstinence.
8. 2.1Opening the second homily, Severian praises the word of God as the soul's whetstone and fasting as the mother of a godly mind, and explains that God's wonders in Egypt proved him Creator before Moses taught the creation.
9. 2.2As Christ's miracles proved him Creator, creation out of nothing refutes those who pry into how the Son was begotten; the “invisible” earth was unadorned, and the firmament was made of frozen water with waters above to protect it from the heavenly fires.
10. 2.4The waters above the heavens keep the heaven from burning and turn the light downward; the human head and senses mirror the elements and the mind is God's image; Severian then reports a heretic who wanted “Lord Sabaoth” removed from the Sanctus.
11. 2.5Severian explains Isaiah's vision as God's reconciliation with a prophet who had kept silent when Uzziah usurped the priesthood, and reads the Seraphim's covered head and feet and their threefold “Holy” as lessons about God's incomprehensibility and the one Lord.
12. 2.6The lifted lintel and the smoke in Isaiah's vision signify the glory leaving the synagogue for the churches of the whole world; the vision was of Christ's glory (John 12:41), and the Sanctus, which a heretic wanted removed, is essential to the eucharistic mystery.
13. 3.1Opening the third homily, Severian describes the gathering of the waters, which broke the earth into bays, and argues that if every creature begets its like, God could not have begotten a Son unlike himself.
14. 3.2Distinguishing the Son as the Father's likeness from humans made according to likeness, Severian explains the third and fourth days: the sun and moon were made from the first day's light and fixed in the firmament, the moon created full.
15. 3.3God bridled the upward-tending fire of the luminaries to shine downward; the stars are signs of weather and seasons, not of human fate, and the question who made them leads to the heretics' claim that the Father made the Son and the Son made all things.
16. 3.4Against those who say the Father made the Son and the Son made the world, Severian shows from the prophets that the maker of heaven is the one true God, and argues from Scripture that the heaven is a tent-like vault with ends, not a sphere.
17. 3.5Since the heaven is a tent, the sun does not pass under the earth at night but circles behind the northern waters, which explains the varying lengths of days; the waxing and waning moon and the night are images of death and resurrection.
18. 3.6Clouds that form overnight and release rain at God's command show how he made the firmament; Christ is the Creator, as his mastery over sea, wind, water, sun, earth, and rocks in the Gospel shows.
19. 3.7Closing the third homily, Severian takes the evening lamp as a cue for the evening psalm: hands lifted in prayer must be clean of injustice, as Abraham's were when he refused the spoil of Sodom.
20. 4.1Opening the fourth homily, Severian follows the order of creation to the fifth day, reads the creatures brought forth from the waters as a figure of baptism, explains why only living things that reproduce were blessed, and argues that if soulless earth brings forth souls, God can beget from his own substance.
21. 4.4Against the objection that one begotten cannot always have existed, Severian argues that human fatherhood comes by stages bound to bodies and time, whereas the bodiless Father is always Father and the Son co-eternal, begotten without passion in a manner beyond knowing.
22. 4.5God prepared food and dwelling before bringing in man, as the Scriptures went before Christ; he left the prophets with the Jews so that the Christian proof from them would be above suspicion; and “Let us make man” points to the Son, not to the angels.
23. 4.6God, who made countless angels without counsel, would not need angels to advise him in making man; “Let us make” shows the plurality of the divine persons and “according to our image” their one substance, against Jews and heretics alike.
24. 4.7The counselor of “Let us make” is the Son whom Isaiah calls “Messenger of great counsel” and “mighty God”; unlike Moses or the apostles, who act under authority, Christ commands with his own authority, and heretics who call him a creature are worse than demons.
25. 4.8God spared Israel for the sake of the believers he foresaw, including the Virgin and the apostles; against heretics who set “firstborn” against “only-begotten,” Severian explains that Christ is Only-begotten in his divinity and firstborn among the many “firstborn” of each generation according to the flesh.
26. 4.9Closing the fourth homily, Severian explains the evening psalm's “incense” as prayer compounded of several virtues, calls self-control the sister of priesthood, gives fasting the wings of prayer and almsgiving, and warns that abstaining from food without abstaining from injustice is vain.
27. 5.1Opening the fifth homily, Severian calls the Scriptures God's greatest gift and defends his use of natural philosophy against complaints, citing Paul, Job, the prophets, and Christ's own parables drawn from nature.
28. 5.2The Holy Spirit shares with the Father and the Son in the counsel “Let us make,” as one will and substance; the Spirit's part in baptism and resurrection proves its part in creation.
29. 5.3Severian explains the name “man” as meaning “fire” in Hebrew, since fire spreads as mankind did from Adam (whose letters stand for the four regions), and rejects the heresy that God has a human shape, showing the absurdity of reading God's throne, feet, and fingers literally.
30. 5.4The image of God lies in virtues like holiness, righteousness, and mercy, and in authority over the creatures; God “formed” man's body for beauty and use from dust as a sign of the resurrection, and gave the soul separately, which does not return to the earth.
31. 5.5Christ renews Adam's creation by forming eyes from clay and breathing the Spirit on the apostles; paradise in the east foreshadows the setting and rising of mankind in death and resurrection, and Adam's “work” in paradise was keeping God's commandment.
32. 5.6The great river of paradise, prepared for all the righteous, divides underground into four rivers so that paradise cannot be reached except by virtue, as the thief reached it by faith; the gold and stones named in Genesis point to the priestly and royal tribes, and the rivers differ because of the lands they cross.
33. 5.7All the trees of paradise were good, so Adam sinned from abundance, not want; God, acting like a servant, brought the animals for Adam to name and accepted every name, which shows that bringing someone to another implies no inferiority in Christ, and that heretics who reject the Father's one name for the Son are at fault.
34. 5.8Adam named the animals as their master, while God named the heavenly things; filled with the Spirit before his fall, Adam prophesied about the woman and about marriage, and his sleep was an “ecstasy” in which God painlessly took the rib.
35. 5.9Closing the fifth homily, Severian sees the rib taken from sleeping Adam as a type of Christ's side opened on the cross, explains the custom of the bride being brought to the groom, and reads the nakedness without shame of Adam and Eve in light of the risen Christ's discarded grave clothes.
36. 6.1Opening the sixth homily on paradise, Severian explains that the animals lived outside paradise and served Adam for food, work, and delight, as God still consoles weary souls through simple things like a child's laughter, and so introduces the serpent.
37. 6.2The serpent, once a friendly animal, was used by the devil to deceive Eve with three lies, as Christ revealed in calling the devil a liar and man-slayer; against Porphyry's followers, Severian argues that God did not forbid knowledge of good, only the mixing of evil with it.
38. 6.4The tree was named for what happened at it, as places in Scripture are named for events; it had no deadly power of its own, just as the eucharistic gift saves by grace and food offered to idols harms by its invocation, and Adam learned evil only by the experience of disobedience.
39. 6.5The forbidden tree stood like the emperor's image as a visible reminder of the invisible God's authority; the devil exploited the human longing for God, Eve was deceived and Adam persuaded, and Christ, suffering at the same hours as Adam's fall, answered Adam's wish to become a god by becoming man.
40. 6.6The devil, knowing from his own fall what sin does, foretold that their eyes would be opened, as sinners see what they have done only after the act; stripped of the robe of glory, Adam at once invented sewing, since as God's image he had the power to devise the arts.
41. 6.7Against allegorists who place paradise in heaven, Severian defends its earthly reality and the God-made skins; he contrasts Adam's sewing with heretics who tear the Church, and explains God's gentle questioning of Adam and Eve and the curse on the serpent.
42. 6.9Closing the sixth homily, Severian reads the sentences on Eve and Adam as remedies, not curses: childbirth in grief, the husband's rule (which Paul applies to women's teaching), and the cursed ground, while Mary, greeted “Rejoice,” undoes Eve's grief; the return to earth points to the resurrection.