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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 into judgment." 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." 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," the other whose prince
says, "All these things will I give Thee if Thou wilt fall down
and worship me;" 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," 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 succoring, 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." 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.
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