BOOK XII
(“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....