Texts in Conversation
After quoting the Wisdom of Solomon on God making everything by number, measure, and weight, Augustine makes a joke of it a chapter later. He stops writing about the number seven so no one can accuse him of forgetting weight and measure.
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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 11.31
On the City of God Against the Pagans
Early Christian
But, on the seventh day (i.e., the same day repeated seven times, which number is also a perfect one, though for another reason), the rest of God is set forth, and then, too, we first hear of its being hallowed. So that God did not wish to hallow this day by His works, but by His rest, which has no evening, for it is not a creature; so that, being known in one way in the Word of God, and in another in itself, it should make a twofold knowledge, daylight and dusk (day and evening). Much more might be said about the perfection of the number seven, but this book is already too long, and I fear lest I should seem to catch at an opportunity of airing my little smattering of science more childishly than profitably. I must speak, therefore, in moderation and with dignity, lest, in too keenly following “number,” I be accused of forgetting “weight” and “measure.” Suffice it here to say, that three is the first whole number that is odd, four the first that is even, and of these two, seven is composed. On this account it is often put for all numbers together, as, “A just man falls seven times, and rises up again,” Proverbs 24:16 — that is, let him fall never so often, he will not perish (and this was meant to be understood not of sins, but of afflictions conducing to lowliness). Again, “Seven times a day will I praise You,” Psalm 119:164 which elsewhere is expressed thus, “I will bless the Lord at all times.”
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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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