Edition Masquer
Confessiones (PL)

CAPUT IX. Cur absque dierum mentione scriptum est Deum fecisse in principio coelum et terram.

9. Ideoque Spiritus doctor famuli tui, cum te commemorat fecisse in principio coelum et terram, tacet de temporibus, silet de diebus. Nimirum enim coelum coeli quod in principio fecisti, creatura est aliqua intellectualis; quanquam nequaquam tibi Trinitati coaeterna, particeps tamen aeternitatis tuae, valde mutabilitatem suam prae dulcedine felicissimae contemplationis tuae cohibet, et sine ullo lapsu ex quo facta est inhaerendo tibi, excedit omnem volubilem vicissitudinem temporum. Ista vero informitas, terra invisibilis et incomposita, nec ipsa in diebus numerata est. Ubi enim nulla species, nullus ordo; nec venit quidquam, nec praeterit: et ubi hoc non fit; non sunt utique dies, nec vicissitudo spatiorum temporalium.

Traduction Masquer
The Confessions of St. Augustin In Thirteen Books

Chapter IX.--That the Heaven of Heavens Was an Intellectual Creature, But that the Earth Was Invisible and Formless Before the Days that It Was Made.

9. And therefore the Spirit, the Teacher of Thy servant ¹ when He relates that Thou didst in the Beginning create heaven and earth, is silent as to times, silent as to days. For, doubtless, that heaven of heavens, which Thou in the Beginning didst create, is some intellectual creature, which, although in no wise co-eternal unto Thee, the Trinity, is yet a partaker of Thy eternity, and by reason of the sweetness of that most happy contemplation of Thyself, doth greatly restrain its own mutability, and without any failure, from the time in which it was created, in clinging unto Thee, surpasses all the rolling change of times. But this shapelessness--this earth invisible and without form--has not itself been numbered among the days. For where there is no shape nor order, nothing either cometh or goeth; and where this is not, there certainly are no days, nor any vicissitude of spaces of times.