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In the Wisdom of Solomon, God could destroy Egypt with one breath but holds back, because he arranges everything by measure, number, and weight. Augustine quotes the phrase as scripture to show that God also controls the rise of kingdoms.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Wisdom of Solomon 11:20
Deuterocanon
18 or newly created, unknown wild beasts full of rage, breathing out fiery breath, or puffing out smoke, or flashing terrible sparks from their eyes, 19 which could not only destroy them by their attack but kill them by the mere terror of their appearance. 20 Even without these they could have fallen by a single breath, pursued by Justice and scattered by the breath of your power. But you arranged all things by measure, number, and weight. 21 For great strength is always yours. Who can withstand the might of your arm? 22 Because the whole world before you is like a grain on a scale, like a drop of morning dew that falls on the earth.
Augustine, City of God 5.11
On the City of God Against the Pagans
Early Christian
Therefore God supreme and true, with His Word and Holy Spirit (which three are one), one God omnipotent, creator and maker of every soul and of every body; by whose gift all are happy who are happy through verity and not through vanity; who made man a rational animal consisting of soul and body, who, when he sinned, neither permitted him to go unpunished, nor left him without mercy; who has given to the good and to the evil, being in common with stones, vegetable life in common with trees, sensuous life in common with brutes, intellectual life in common with angels alone; from whom is every mode, every species, every order; from whom are measure, number, weight; from whom is everything which has an existence in nature, of whatever kind it be, and of whatever value; from whom are the seeds of forms and the forms of seeds, and the motion of seeds and of forms; who gave also to flesh its origin, beauty, health, reproductive fecundity, disposition of members, and the salutary concord of its parts; who also to the irrational soul has given memory, sense, appetite, but to the rational soul, in addition to these, has given intelligence and will; who has not left, not to speak of heaven and earth, angels and men, but not even the entrails of the smallest and most contemptible animal, or the feather of a bird, or the little flower of a plant, or the leaf of a tree, without an harmony, and, as it were, a mutual peace among all its parts — that God can never be believed to have left the kingdoms of men, their dominations and servitudes, outside of the laws of His providence.
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Notes and References
“... Although this anti-Manichaean feature is not directly related to Augustine’s doctrine of grace, I am convinced that the refuted notion of God as dependent on man could have played a role in Augustine’s emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of God’s grace, not determined by the human will, in the way it was elaborated in the answer to Simplicianus. God as the “measure” (summus modus) of everything is not limited by any “measure”. He orders things and imposes structures on them without being limited by these structures: he is a “measure without a measure, a number without a number, weight without weight” (cf. Wisd. 11:21). ...”
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