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Wisdom of Solomon says God arranges everything by measure, number, and weight. Augustine repeats this language in a description of God's care for creation, then extends that care to human kingdoms.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Wisdom of Solomon 11:20
Deuterocanon
18 or newly-created and unknown wild beasts, full of rage, either breathing out a blast of fiery breath, or belching out smoke, or flashing dreadful sparks from their eyes; 19 which had power not only to consume them by their violence, but to destroy them even by the terror of their sight. 20 Yes and without these they might have fallen by a single breath, being pursued by Justice, and scattered abroad by the breath of your power; but you arranged all things by measure, number, and weight. 21 For to be greatly strong is yours at all times. Who could withstand the might of your arm? 22 Because the whole world before you is as a grain in a balance, and as a drop of dew that comes down upon the earth in the morning.
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 who are happy through truth and not through vanity are happy; 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, sentient life in common with beasts, 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 that exists in nature, of whatever kind 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 has also given the irrational soul memory, sense, appetite, but to the rational soul, in addition to these, has given intelligence and will; who — to say nothing of heaven and earth, angels and men — has not left 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 a 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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