THE SPIRITUAL LIGHT CREATED BY GOD. AUGUSTINE: If spiritual light was created when God said, “Let there be light,” you must not think that this was the true light, coeternal with the Father, through whom all things were created and who enlightens every person. Rather, it was that light of which Scripture could say, “Among all things, Wisdom was created first.” In fact, when that eternal and immutable Wisdom, which is not created but generated, communicates itself to spiritual and rational creatures—as to holy souls so that, enlightened, they might shine—he constitutes in them, so to speak, a state of enlightened reason that can be understood as the creation of the light when God said, “Let there be light!” If there already existed a spiritual creature called by the name “heavens” in the passage where it is written, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” these heavens are not the corporeal heavens but the incorporeal. They are superior to any body, not by the ordering of space into levels but because of the exceeding dignity of their nature. ON GENESIS 1.17.32.
THANKS TO THE PROPHETS, WE BELIEVE IN GOD. AUGUSTINE: The world is the greatest of the visible beings. God is the greatest of the invisible beings. But we see that the world exists, and we believe that God exists. No one makes us believe with more certainty that God created the world than God himself. And when did we hear this? Nowhere better than in the holy Scriptures, where his prophet said, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Was this prophet perhaps present when God created the heavens and the earth? No. But the Wisdom of God was there, through whom all things were made. Entering holy souls, this Wisdom makes friends of God and prophets, silently making her works known in them. With them the angels of God also speak, who always see the face of the Father, and communicate his will to those to whom it must be communicated. And one of these was this prophet who said and wrote, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And this is a text so trustworthy for belief in God that, thanks to the same Spirit of God through whom he knew these revealed things, he also predicted, long ago, the advent of our faith. CITY OF GOD 11.4.1.
WISDOM SPOKE TO ADAM. AUGUSTINE: If Adam had been capable of understanding the word that God communicates to angelic spirits through his own essence, it cannot be doubted that God, without being moved himself through time, would have moved Adam’s spirit in a mysterious and ineffable way. He would have taught him a useful and salutary precept of truth and, by the same Truth, what punishment awaited its transgressor. This is how all the salutary precepts of unchanging Wisdom that are communicated to holy souls at particular moments, at this or that time, should be seen and understood. If, however, Adam was righteous only to the extent that he still needed another holier and wiser creature through whom he would come to know the will and command of God (as we have had need of the prophets, and they of the angels), why should we doubt that God would have spoken to him through such a creature, using a language that Adam could understand? ON GENESIS 8.27.50.