which are not inappropriately signified by the names light and
darkness._
That certain angels sinned, and were thrust down to the lowest parts
of this world, where they are, as it were, incarcerated till their
final damnation in the day of judgment, the Apostle Peter very
plainly declares, when he says that "God spared not the angels that
sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains
of darkness to be reserved unto judgment."[510] Who, then, can doubt
that God, either in foreknowledge or in act, separated between these
and the rest? And who will dispute that the rest are justly called
"light?" For even we who are yet living by faith, hoping only and not
yet enjoying equality with them, are already called "light" by the
apostle: "For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the
Lord."[511] But as for these apostate angels, all who understand or
believe them to be worse than unbelieving men are well aware that
they are called "darkness." Wherefore, though light and darkness
are to be taken in their literal signification in these passages
of Genesis in which it is said, "God said, Let there be light, and
there was light," and "God divided the light from the darkness," yet,
for our part, we understand these two societies of angels,--the one
enjoying God, the other swelling with pride; the one to whom it is
said, "Praise ye Him, all His angels,"[512] the other whose prince
says, "All these things will I give Thee if Thou wilt fall down and
worship me;"[513] the one blazing with the holy love of God, the
other reeking with the unclean lust of self-advancement. And since,
as it is written, "God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto
the humble,"[514] we may say, the one dwelling in the heaven of
heavens, the other cast thence, and raging through the lower regions
of the air; the one tranquil in the brightness of piety, the other
tempest-tossed with beclouding desires; the one, at God's pleasure,
tenderly succouring, justly avenging,--the other, set on by its own
pride, boiling with the lust of subduing and hurting; the one the
minister of God's goodness to the utmost of their good pleasure,
the other held in by God's power from doing the harm it would; the
former laughing at the latter when it does good unwillingly by its
persecutions, the latter envying the former when it gathers in
its pilgrims. These two angelic communities, then, dissimilar and
contrary to one another, the one both by nature good and by will
upright, the other also good by nature but by will depraved, as they
are exhibited in other and more explicit passages of holy writ, so I
think they are spoken of in this book of Genesis under the names of
light and darkness; and even if the author perhaps had a different
meaning, yet our discussion of the obscure language has not been
wasted time; for, though we have been unable to discover his meaning,
yet we have adhered to the rule of faith, which is sufficiently
ascertained by the faithful from other passages of equal authority.
For, though it is the material works of God which are here spoken
of, they have certainly a resemblance to the spiritual, so that Paul
can say, "Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the
day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness."[515] If, on the other
hand, the author of Genesis saw in the words what we see, then our
discussion reaches this more satisfactory conclusion, that the man of
God, so eminently and divinely wise, or rather, that the Spirit of
God who by him recorded God's works which were finished on the sixth
day, may be supposed not to have omitted all mention of the angels,
whether he included them in the words "in the beginning," because He
made them first, or, which seems most likely, because He made them
in the only-begotten Word. And, under these names heaven and earth,
the whole creation is signified, either as divided into spiritual and
material, which seems the more likely, or into the two great parts of
the world in which all created things are contained, so that, first
of all, the creation is presented in sum, and then its parts are
enumerated according to the mystic number of the days.