Of all visible things, the world is the greatest; of all invisible, the greatest is God. But we see that the world exists; we believe that God exists. As for God having made the world, we can believe no one more safely than God Himself. But where have we heard Him? Nowhere more distinctly than in the Holy Scriptures, where His prophet said, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1 Was the prophet present when God made the heavens and the earth? No; but the wisdom of God, by whom all things were made, was there, Proverbs 8:27 and wisdom insinuates itself into holy souls, and makes them the friends of God and His prophets, and noiselessly informs them of His works.⁠a They are taught also by the angels of God, who always behold the face of the Father, Matthew 18:10 and announce His will to those to whom it is fitting. One of these prophets was the one who said and wrote, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And he was so fit a witness of God, that the same Spirit of God, who revealed these things to him, also enabled him, so long before, to predict that our faith would come. But why did God choose then to create the heavens and earth which up to that time He had not made? If those who ask this question wish to claim that the world is eternal and without beginning, and that consequently it has not been made by God, they are strangely deceived, and rave in the incurable madness of impiety. For, though the voices of the prophets were silent, the world itself, by its well-ordered changes and movements, and by the beautiful appearance of all visible things, bears a testimony of its own, both that it has been created, and also that it could not have been created except by God, whose greatness and beauty are unutterable and invisible. As for those who admit, indeed, that it was made by God, and yet ascribe to it not a temporal but only a creational beginning, so that in some scarcely intelligible way the world has always existed as a created world, they make an assertion which seems to them to defend God from the charge of arbitrary hastiness, or of suddenly conceiving the idea of creating the world as a quite new idea, or of casually changing His will, though He is unchangeable. But I do not see how this supposition of theirs can stand in other respects, and chiefly in respect of the soul; for if they contend that it is co-eternal with God, they will be quite at a loss to explain how new misery has come upon it, which had not existed through a previous eternity. For if they say that its happiness and misery ceaselessly alternate, they must say, further, that this alternation will continue forever; from this results the absurdity, that, though the soul is called blessed, it is not blessed in this respect, since it foresees its own misery and disgrace. And yet, if it does not foresee it, and supposes that it will be neither disgraced nor wretched, but always blessed, then it is blessed because it is deceived; and one cannot make a more foolish statement. But if their idea is that the soul's misery has alternated with its bliss during the ages of the past eternity, but that now, when once the soul has been set free, it will never again return to misery, they nevertheless hold that it has never been truly blessed before, but begins at last to enjoy a new and uncertain happiness; that is to say, they must acknowledge that some new thing, and an important and remarkable thing at that, happens to the soul which never happened to it before in a whole past eternity. And if they deny that God's eternal purpose included this new experience of the soul, they deny that He is the Author of its blessedness, which is unspeakable impiety. If, on the other hand, they say that the future blessedness of the soul is the result of a new decree of God, how will they show that God is not open to the charge of the mutability that displeases them? Further, if they acknowledge that it was created in time, but will never perish in time — that it has, like number, a beginning but no end — and that, therefore, having once experienced misery, and been delivered from it, it will never again return to it, they will certainly admit that this takes place without any violation of the immutable counsel of God. Let them, then, believe in the same way regarding the world that it too could be made in time, and yet that God, in making it, did not alter His eternal design.