[26] Then he says that “in the beginning God made the heaven and the earth,” taking “beginning” not, as some think, in a chronological sense, for time there was not before there was a world. Time began either simultaneously with the world or after it. For since time is a measured space determined by the world’s movement, and since movement could not be prior to the object moving, but must of necessity arise either after it or simultaneously with it, it follows of necessity that time also is either coeval with or later born than the world. To venture to affirm that it is elder born would be to do violence to philosophic sense.
[27] And since the word “beginning” is not here taken as the chronological beginning, it would seem likely that the numerical order is indicated, so that “in the beginning He made” is equivalent to “He made the heaven first”: for it is indeed reasonable that it should come into existence first, being both best of created things and made from the purest of all that is, seeing that it was destined to be the most holy dwelling-place of manifest and visible gods.
[28] For, even if the Maker made all things simultaneously, order was none the less an attribute of all that came into existence in fair beauty, for beauty is absent where there is disorder. Now order is a series of things going on before and following after, in due sequence, a sequence which, though not seen in the finished productions, yet exists in the designs of the contrivers; for only so could these things be fashioned with perfect accuracy, and work without leaving their path or clashing with each other.
[29] First, then, the Maker made an incorporeal heaven, and an invisible earth, and the essential form of air and void. To the one he gave the name of “Darkness,” since the air when left to itself, is black. The other he named “abyss,” for the void is a region of immensity and vast depths. Next (He made) the incorporeal essence of water and of life-breath and, to crown all, of light. This again, the seventh in order, was an incorporeal pattern, discernible only by the mind, of the sun and of all luminaries which were to come into existence throughout heaven.