Confessions - Part 3

Discoursing on time and creation, Augustine begins to draw an end to his Confessions. While pondering the miraculous work of creation, he finds the Triune Godhead within the first two verses of Genesis: the Father – God, the Son – the Beginning, the Spirit – above the waters. All three are present at from the very first moment of creation. However, he takes an interesting stab at the formless darkness above which the Spirit hovered.

Rather than taking the traditional, modern interpretation of that passage, that it was a descriptive way to say that what would become earth was not yet anything but darkness, Augustine chooses a more spiritual route. He says, “It [the earth invisible and unorganized] is dark because of the disordered flux of spiritual formlessness; but it became converted to him from whom it derived the humble quality of life it had, and from that illumination became a life of beauty,” (276, section 6). The earth wasn’t dark merely because it was not yet physically formed but because nothing had been formed of the spiritual nature that would sustain all life. Only after being given to God to form and mold could it have any life. Yet it is not merely life that God gives but a “life of beauty.” When you come into the presence of God and everything is revealed in the light of His splendor, your life is completely altered; you begin to see things in a new way. The world once drab and dark is now beautiful and bright.