An essay based on Chapters 1 and 2 of De Genesi ad litteram by Saint Augustine. Ideal for a better understanding of the theme of creation, in accordance with the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
In catechesis, when introducing the theme of interpreting Scripture, it is essential to begin with a secure key, one that is solid and rooted in the Tradition of the Church. Saint Augustine, in his work De Genesi ad litteram, offers precisely this starting point when he affirms that Sacred Scripture is composed of ‘new and old things’, in a clear reference to Matthew 13:52: ‘Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.’ In doing so, Augustine not only recognises the continuity between the Old and New Testaments, but reminds us that the Bible cannot be read superficially or as a simple linear account of past events.
Scripture is living, multiform, and demands from the reader not only intellectual attention but above all spiritual openness. Augustine proposes that there are several levels of reading in the Bible: the eternal level, which leads us to the immutable divine reality; the historical level, which treats of the events narrated; the prophetic level, which anticipates future realities; and the moral level, which exhorts us to conversion and the practice of virtue. This approach invites us to perceive that the sacred text is like a window opening not only onto the past, but onto the present and the future, as well as onto the very soul of the reader. Hence Augustine’s warning: even apparently historical facts must be examined for their symbolism, for they are often signs of a deeper, hidden reality.
Saint Paul’s reading of Genesis is an emblematic example. When commenting on the verse ‘the two shall become one flesh’ (Gen 2:24), Paul sees in this union between man and woman a mystery that concerns Christ and the Church (cf. Eph 5:32). This shows that Scripture speaks of human and visible realities, yet carries within itself the ultimate truth of God’s salvific plan. Thus it is not enough merely to ‘read’; it is necessary to ‘discern’, ‘contemplate’ and ‘pray’ the Word, so that we do not remain on the surface of the letter but plunge into the spirit that animates it.
This vision is reinforced by other great Doctors of the Church. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, when dealing with the senses of Scripture in the Summa Theologiae (I, q.1, a.10), systematises what we call the four senses of Scripture: the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical. For him, every spiritual sense is founded upon the literal, yet God, in His wisdom, may have intended various levels of meaning in one and the same text. This is not the interpreter’s invention, but the unveiling of a richness already present in the Word, awaiting discovery by attentive hearts.
Saint Gregory the Great deepens this idea by stating that ‘Scripture grows with those who read it’. It is not the text that grows, but the reader: the more we mature in faith, the more capable we are of penetrating the mysteries of Revelation. And although Origen, at the dawn of the Patristic era, emphasised the allegorical sense—at times to the detriment of the literal—Augustine shows us that true interpretation must seek balance. He recognises that biblical language employs images and figures, but insists that these figures are not mere symbolic fancies; rather, they are manifestations of the eternal truth that is incarnate in history.
Therefore, in catechesis we must communicate to the faithful this sense of reverence before Scripture. It is not just any book, nor a moralistic compendium. It is a living Word, proceeding from the mouth of God, capable of transforming those who listen to it in faith. Augustine, as a master of interiority, teaches us to read with the eyes of the soul, to meditate with the heart, and to seek, behind every word, the eternal Word who sustains it. Every passage of Genesis, every narrative, every genealogy is, for those who believe, a way to contemplate the mystery of God, who speaks to man not in an abstract manner but through time, flesh and history.
This way of reading, at once spiritual and rational, is a true path of discipleship. For whoever learns to read Scripture in depth also learns to listen to God in every event of life. Thus, as Saint Jerome says, to ignore the Scriptures is to ignore Christ Himself. And as Augustine reminds us, the heart of the reader must be transformed by the Word, so that he not only understands Scripture but is read and sanctified by it. This is the mission of catechesis: to form hearts that read the Word with intelligence, humility and love.
In the beginning God created heaven and earth
The interpretation of the first verse of Genesis, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’, is one of the most delicate and rich points of biblical theology. Saint Augustine, in De Genesi ad litteram, is not content with a superficial or merely chronological reading. He probes the very theological and metaphysical density of this inaugural sentence, raising a series of questions that transcend exegesis and enter the realm of first philosophy: What is ‘beginning’? When does time begin? What is heaven and what is earth? How can the immutable God bring forth a mutable creation?
The first provocation concerns the term ‘in the beginning’. Could it refer simply to the beginning of time, or, more profoundly, to the ‘Beginning’ who is the very eternal Word of God, as in John 1:1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’? This possibility opens a Christological dimension already in the first verse of Scripture, showing that Christ, the Logos, is not a later or ancillary reality, but is present from the start, at the origin of all things. If the world was created in the Word, then the cosmos already bears in its structure a kind of intelligibility, an ordering, a rationality that points to Christ.
This more symbolic and philosophical reading is also reinforced in Saint Athanasius, in his struggle against the Arians. He insists that the ‘Beginning’ is the eternal Word and not a creature. Creation therefore arises through the Word, confirming the co-eternity of the Son with the Father. Saint Basil the Great, for his part, prefers to remain closer to the text, interpreting ‘beginning’ as a chronological start, without ignoring the spiritual depth that may coexist with this more direct reading. Both senses, in fact, are not mutually exclusive. As Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches, Scripture is rich enough to contain different levels of meaning simultaneously. Thomas admits that ‘in the beginning’ can signify both the beginning of created time and the Word by whom all things were made, without contradiction. The truth of faith can manifest itself in various layers of the same text.
Divine Immutability
Another major question addressed by Augustine is that of divine immutability. How can the eternal God, who undergoes no change, do something new—that is, create? This is an ancient anxiety of philosophy and theology. Augustine responds by affirming that God operates outside time and that His creative action implies no change in Him, but only in the effects produced. God creates without ceasing to be what He is. Saint Thomas, echoing this line, uses the analogy of the sun: it warms, melts wax, hardens clay, and yet remains the same. The fact that it causes varied effects does not imply change in the agent. It is pure act, which brings about effects but is not altered. This doctrine is central to understanding how creation neither diminishes God nor binds Him to the time He Himself established.
Finally, Augustine proposes a broader reading of the expressions ‘heaven and earth’. Are they merely the physical elements of the cosmos? Or might they also indicate spiritual realities? Heaven, perhaps, as a symbol of the angelic world; earth, as the sensible world? Here we see an openness to the symbolic tradition, in which Scripture points to dimensions not immediately visible to the literal gaze.
Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, one of the first theologians to systematise the Christian faith against heresies, recognises this duality between the visible and the invisible in creation. For him, heaven and earth can represent both material and spiritual creatures, opening the way to a reading in which Genesis, already in its first line, describes the whole structure of creation: visible and invisible, body and spirit.
This plurality of interpretations, far from generating confusion, displays the inexhaustible richness of the Word of God. The Bible does not speak only to the intellect; it interpellates the soul. The patristic tradition teaches us that the nearer we approach the Word with humility and faith, the more it reveals itself—like a veil becoming thinner before the heart that seeks. Augustine, with his contemplative and philosophical genius, invites us not to reduce Scripture to an historical or scientific manual, but to read it with the eyes of faith and reason, seeking the ultimate meaning it desires to communicate: God Himself.
Thus, when we introduce this passage in a catechetical lesson, we awaken not only intellectual curiosity but reverence. ‘In the beginning’ is not a date on a calendar: it is a door opened onto mystery. Heaven and earth are not only objects of creation: they are symbols of the totality of being. And God, who created all things, remains serene, full, perfect. He is the same yesterday, today and forever, and He speaks to us, from the very first verse, with the voice of the Word, which continues to echo in every heart that desires to listen.
Heaven and earth as spiritual and bodily realities
In Augustine’s reading of Genesis—especially regarding the verse that describes the initial state of creation: ‘the earth was invisible and void, and darkness covered the abyss’—there is a deliberate effort to transcend mere literality and penetrate the deeper senses of the sacred text. Augustine, faithful to his contemplative method and his philosophical-theological genius, seeks in this passage a key to understanding the original condition not only of the physical world but of the spiritual creature itself before God. For him, ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ are not merely the visible elements of creation, but symbols of the spiritual and the bodily creation respectively.
The angels
By suggesting that ‘heaven’ represents the spiritual creatures—the angels—Augustine proposes that they were created already perfect and illumined, for heaven, in biblical tradition, is associated with elevation and the luminous presence of God. On the other hand, ‘earth’ appears as a reality still formless, disordered, covered in darkness. In this symbolic dualism, he sees a metaphor for the initial state of creation: on one side, spirit which, turning towards God, participates in light; on the other, brute matter or the soul not yet formed, dwelling in obscurity. Augustine is therefore speaking not only of cosmic matter but also of the human soul, of the created spirit that has not yet been converted to the divine light.
Here one of the most striking ideas of Augustinian thought comes into play: the notion that evil possesses no substance of its own, but is the absence of good—privatio boni. The ‘abyss’ covered in darkness would then symbolise this absence of form, direction and light. It would be the state of any creature which, not turned towards God, lives in darkness. This reading does not deny creation as good, but recognises that the creature’s full perfection depends upon its union with the Creator. To create something ‘formless’ is not to create something evil, but something still in process of fullness, which is only realised when illumined and ordered by the supreme Good, who is God.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, more systematic, accepts the idea of formless matter as a real stage of creation, but more clearly separates spiritual reality (the angels) from the bodily. He does not consider that angels could be ‘tenebrous’ in their origin, since, according to him, they were created directly in light. Even so, he agrees that visible matter, before receiving form, was ‘invisible’ and ‘vague’, echoing the text of Genesis 1:2. Thomas thus preserves the integrity of creation and the separation between spirit and matter, but does not advance as far in the symbolic reading of the ‘abyss’ as Augustine does.
Saint Basil the Great remains on a more literal line, focusing on the physical aspect of the cosmos. For him, the earth without form is the primitive matter that will be shaped by God in the subsequent days of creation. The darkness over the abyss is, above all, the absence of natural light, not yet created. Basil avoids deeper allegories, fearing to fall into gnostic views that devalue the material world—a legitimate concern in an age when dualist heresies still circulated strongly.
Origen, on the other hand, offers a reading notably close to Augustine’s. In interpreting the ‘formless earth’ and the ‘abyss’ as images of the human soul not yet converted, he anticipates the understanding that Genesis speaks both of the creation of the world and of the interior dynamics of the soul. For him, the depth of the ‘abyss’ is the human heart, which must be illumined by the Word of God. Although his works were later subject to criticism, this approach inspired Augustine to unite mysticism and exegesis in a fruitful way.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa, with his philosophical and spiritual sensitivity, also considers that creation moves from imperfection to perfection. He sees in the human soul a mirror of this dynamism: it becomes light only when it turns towards God. Just as the world was called from disorder to order, so too the soul is called from darkness to light. This trajectory—from chaos to harmony, from the abyss to contemplation—is, for Gregory, the drama of the whole creation and of each individual man.
We were all created for the light
In the light of these teachings, we see that Genesis is not merely the account of the origins of the universe but also a mirror of the human soul. We are all born with an interior ‘abyss’, a depth that finds meaning and form only when turned towards the divine light. Conversion is therefore the true creation of man. And baptism, the sacrament of this new creation, is the moment when the Spirit hovers over the abyss and dispels the darkness.
Augustine, more than interpreting the text, invites us to rediscover the ultimate meaning of existence: we were created for the light. And whenever we turn away from it, we return to the abyss. Hence catechesis must form readers of the Word who do not remain on the surface of the letter, but dive into the depth of the Word. For there, at the beginning of all things, the eternal invitation already resounds: ‘Fiat lux’ (‘Let there be light’). And the light continues to be made, every time someone turns to God.
At this point in the reflection, Saint Augustine goes beyond literal exegesis and proposes a true spiritual anthropology and a metaphysics of conversion. For him, everything that does not turn towards God remains inevitably in darkness. Creation is not only a past act, but a continuous movement of going forth from nothingness towards the light of Being. Light—whether physical or spiritual—is not imposed by God automatically; it is received in the measure that there is interior openness, willingness, conversion. This applies both to the angels, created with freedom, some of whom closed themselves to the light, and to men, whose soul is that ‘abyss’ that is illumined only when it rises to the Supreme Good.
The reading Augustine proposes of Genesis is therefore theologically rich because it goes beyond the facts and reaches the principles. In his view, Scripture does not merely tell us what God did, but how He acts and continues to act. It reveals patterns, spiritual structures that remain operative in the history of salvation and in the soul of every believer. For this reason it must be read on multiple levels—literal, moral, allegorical, anagogical—since its truth is not confined to the past. It is a light that is kindled whenever it is read with faith and humility. Thus the Word of God becomes the place where God continues creating, ordering and illumining—not only the world, but also the human heart.
And God said, Let there be light!
The language of creation, as it appears in the first verses of Genesis, is at once simple and very profound. When we read ‘God said: Let there be light’, we are tempted to imagine a sound resounding in the void, as though God had uttered words similar to human speech. However, as Saint Augustine shows in De Genesi ad litteram, this conception is inadequate. The divine word is neither sound nor successive act. It is an eternal action, interior to God Himself, realised in the Word and therefore not subject to time.
Augustine raises central questions that reveal his metaphysical sensitivity: if God said ‘let there be light’, did this utterance occur in time or in eternity? And if the light was created by means of a command, to whom was this command given? To some intermediate creature? But in that case such a creature would already have existed before the light, which contradicts the idea that light is the first creation. The holy bishop answers, with great depth, that God’s speech should not be understood as a sonic emission, but as an eternal, creative intuition, inseparable from the Word, the Logos, through whom all things were made (cf. Jn 1:1–3). Thus the ‘let there be’ is not a change in God, but the expression of His eternal will, which produces effect in time without entering succession Himself.
This conception finds support throughout the Church’s tradition. Thomas Aquinas, for example, reaffirms that God’s ‘saying’ is the same as causing being. In his Summa Theologiae he explains that God does not speak by means of sound or succession, but that His word is the very Word, and that, in ‘saying’, He accomplishes. The divine Word is creative, and its action is ontological: what is said comes to be. For Boethius, eternity is ‘the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of endless life’—a definition that reinforces the idea that God’s ‘let there be’ belongs to this eternal plane, not to the temporal flow in which we find ourselves.
This understanding of divine speech leads us to a second important point: what is this ‘light’ that is created? Is it a bodily or a spiritual light? Augustine, with his customary symbolic openness, admits both possibilities. On the one hand, light may be the primary luminous matter, created even before the sun, as Thomas Aquinas suggests. But, in a higher sense, this light may be the very illumination of the spiritual creature—the angels—at the moment when, turning to God, they received being in fullness. The conversion of the angels to the divine light would thus be the true ‘let there be light’: the spiritual creature, created for truth, turning to the source of its being.
This reading has profound implications. Augustine is showing us that creation is not merely physical but spiritual and ontological. Light is not only the first phenomenon of the cosmos; it is the sign of the order, form and fullness that comes from God. To be illumined, in Augustinian vocabulary, is to participate in being. The soul, as we have seen, only truly ‘is’ insofar as it is united to the Good. Just as the primal light does not depend on a visible sun but on an eternal command in the Word, so too the soul does not depend solely on external conditions but on its interior orientation to the Creator.
Why, then, is it not said ‘let there be heaven and earth’? Why is this expression reserved for light and other later elements? Augustine notes this stylistic difference in the narrative and suggests that ‘heaven and earth’ in the initial verse functions as a general title of creation. They represent, respectively, the spiritual and the material. From that point on, the sacred author details the creative work with the expressions ‘God said…’, showing the way in which God gives form and order to creatures. The ‘let there be’ is therefore the expression of divine intelligibility that structures the world in an ordered and gradual fashion—not by necessity, but by the free and loving unfolding of the eternal Being.
The ontology behind these verses is clear: God does not create ‘in parts’ or in ‘stages’ within Himself, but manifests His will in an intelligible and progressive way to the temporal creature. He does not think successively, but knows all things eternally, in a single act. Creation, in turn, is participation—and this participation is not only physical or functional, but existential. To be illumined in God is to receive being in fullness; to remain in darkness is to live in a diminished state, formless.
What Augustine proposes, therefore, is a spiritual rereading of Genesis that does not dispense with the literal text, but surpasses it in depth. Light, the Word, the divine ‘saying’—all point us to a reality that transcends the sensible and leads us to the truth of being. The creature is not merely made; it is called to the light. And this light is not merely a cosmic flash, but the very clarity of being that emanates from God and fills the creature in the measure that it opens itself to communion with its Creator.
This reading has not only theological value but profound spiritual and existential significance. Every time the soul turns to God, it hears again the ‘let there be light’ within. Conversion, as we have already indicated, is a creative work: God continues to say ‘let there be’ over us, and we cease to be shadow to become a reflection of the Light. Creation, therefore, is not merely a past event, but a constant call to exist fully, in the image of the Word. In that call we hear the eternal echo of the divine voice: ‘Let there be light’—and may it be made in us.