(“Augustine proceeds to comment on Genesis i, 1, and explains the
‘heaven’ to mean that spiritual and incorporeal creation, which cleaves
to God unintermittingly, always beholding His countenance; ‘earth,’ the
formless matter whereof the corporeal creation was afterwards formed. He
does not reject, however, other interpretations, which he adduces, but
rather confesses that such is the depth of Holy Scripture that manifold
senses may and ought to be extracted from it, and that whatever truth
can be obtained from its words, does, in fact, lie concealed in them.”)
(Most of this Book and some of the next is devoted to a discussion of
the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis, deriving a great many
possible interpretations of the words of Moses, and considering
carefully their respective meanings and bearings upon the Scripture and
upon man’s attitude toward the Scripture and toward God. That it is
possible so to derive many meanings is to Augustine a proof of the
greatness of the Scriptures, as he summarizes in the following brief
extract.)
(xxvii) 37. For as a fountain with a narrow compass is more plentiful,
and supplies a tide for more streams over larger spaces, than any one of
those streams, which, after a wide interval, is derived from the same
fountain; so the relation of that dispenser of Thine, which was to
benefit many who were to discourse thereon, does out of a narrow
scantling of language overflow into streams of clearest truth, whence
every man may draw out for himself such truth as he can upon these
subjects, one, one truth, another, another, by larger circumlocutions of
discourse....