Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Many such testimonies as these exist throughout the Old Testament, which that excellent man, Hilary, has diligently collected. If these testimonies are obscure, and to the wicked and unbelieving seem to be unfounded, yet to the godly all things which are revealed and handed down to us in the Holy Scriptures are firmly founded and sufficiently clear. They know that the Person speaking is one Person and that the Word spoken is another Person; not in nature but in Person; and is that Word by which all things were made “in the beginning;” and by which they are all upheld to this day; as Paul says in his Epistle to the Hebrews, “Upholding all things by the Word of his power,” Heb. 1:3.

  But here we are to be admonished that the words, “Let there be light,” are the words of God and not of Moses; that is, that they are realities, facts, works! For God “calleth those things that be not as though they were;” and God speaks not grammatical words but very and substantial things. So that what with us is sounding voice, is with God a substantial thing, a reality! Thus, the sun, the moon, the heaven, the earth, Peter, Paul, you, and I, are all and each, words of God! Yea, we are single syllables or single letters as it were of and in comparison to the whole creation.

  We also speak, but we can only speak grammatically, or in letters. That is we give names to created things, etc. But divine grammar is quite another thing! When God says, “Shine thou sun,” the sun immediately exists and shines forth. Thus the words of God are things, not mere words!

  Here therefore there has been rightly made a distinction between the word created and the word uncreated. The word created is a thing, or fact, or work done, by means of the word uncreated. For what is the whole creation but the word of God spoken forth or uttered? But the word uncreated is the divine mind or thought, the internal command of God, flowing from God, and the same as God, and yet it is a distinct Person. And thus God reveals himself unto us as the speaker, having with or in himself, the word increate, by which he created the world and all things with the utmost facility of operation, namely by merely speaking! So that there was no more difficulty with God in creating than with us in speaking. It was in such meditations as these that the pious fathers Augustine and Hilary found their delight.

  PART II. GOD’S WORK ON THE SECOND DAY.

  I. V. 6. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

  Moses may here seem to have forgotten himself in that he treats not at all of two most important themes: the creation and the fall of the angels, but confines his sacred narrative to the creation of corporeal things. Though there is no doubt that angels were created, yet not one word is found in all the Scriptures concerning their creation, their battle, or their fall; except that which Christ briefly utters, John 8:44, in reference to the devil, that he “abode not in the truth;” except also that woful account of the Serpent, which the sacred historian hereafter gives us in the third chapter of Genesis. It is wonderful therefore that Moses is wholly silent on things of such great interest.

  Hence it is that men having nothing certain recorded upon the subject, naturally fell into various fictions and fabrications, that there were nine legions of angels, and that so vast was their multitude that they were nine whole days falling from heaven. Others have indulged imaginations concerning the mighty battle between these superior beings, in what manner the good resisted the evil angels. My belief is that these ideas of the particulars of this battle were taken from the fight which exists in the church, where godly ministers are ever contending against evil and fanatical teachers, and that on this ground they have formed their ideas of the battle of the good angels against the evil ones who wished to usurp Deity. But so it ever is. Where no plain testimonies exist rash men consider themselves at liberty to imagine and invent what they please.

  In the same manner men form their various opinions concerning the danger and the fear of angels and of the evils they work, all which opinions are founded on Is. 14:12, 13, where Lucifer is represented as having said in his heart, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God.” But the prophet is there predicting the greatness of the pride of the King of the Babylonians. Bernard again has the idea that Lucifer foresaw in God that his purpose was to exalt man above the nature of angels, that his proud spirit envied man this felicity and that he fell in consequence. But let the Christian man take these things at their own value and at no more. For myself I would by no means urge any one to give his assent to any such opinions. The things that are certain are, that the angels fell, and that the devil from having been an angel of light was made an angel of darkness. Perhaps there was also a conflict between the good angels and the evil.

  As Moses however was writing to a new and uninformed people his object was to write those things only which were useful and necessary to be known. The nature of angels therefore and other kindred subjects which were not necessary to be known he passed by. Wherefore nothing on the whole of this obscure subject, beyond what Moses has plainly recorded, ought to be expected from me. The more especially so, as the New Testament itself treats very sparingly of this deep theme. It says nothing more concerning the angels than that they were condemned and that they are still held as it were in prison and in chains until the judgment of the last day. Let it suffice us therefore to know that there are good angels and bad angels, but that God created them all alike good. Whence it follows of necessity, that the evil angels fell and stood not in the truth. But how they fell and stood not in the truth is unknown. It is nevertheless probable that they fell by pride; because they despised the Word or Son of God, and wished to exalt themselves before him. This is all I have to say. Now let us return to Moses.

  II. We have heard that the work of the First Day was the rude unformed “heavens and earth,” both of which God illumined with a certain impure and imperfect light. We now come to the work of the second day, where we shall see in what manner God produced out of this original rough undigested mist or nebulosity, which he called “heavens,” that glorious and beauteous “heaven” which now is, and as it now is; if you except the stars and the greater luminaries. The Hebrews very appropriately derive the term SCHAMAIM the name of the heavens from the word MAIM, which signifies “waters.” For the letter SCHIN is often used in composition for a relative, so that SCHAMAIM signifies “watery,” or “that which has a watery nature.” This indeed appears so from the color of the “heavens.” And experience teaches that the air is humid by nature. Philosophers also say that if there were no sun the air would be a perpetual humidity. But they assert that the air is both humid and warm, but that it is humid from its own nature, because the heaven was made out of waters, and that therefore it is, that it rains and contains a fructifying moisture; but because the light and heat of the sun are added to it, the humid nature of the air is so tempered that it is also warm.

  This thick and rude mass of mist or nebulosity, created out of nothing on the first day, God grasps by his Word and commands it to extend itself into the form and with the motion of a sphere. For in the Hebrew the word RAKIA signifies “a something extended;” from the verb RAKA, which means “to unfold or expand.” And the heaven was formed by an extension of that original rude body of mist, just as the bladder of a hog is extended into a circular form when it is inflated. I use thus a rustic similitude that the sacred matter may be the more plainly understood.

  When therefore Job 37:18 says “that the heavens are strengthened with iron,” “that the sky is strong as a molten mirror,” his mind is not dealing with the material but with the Word of God, which can make a thing the softest by nature the hardest and the firmest. For what is softer than water? What is thinner or more subtile than air? Yet these things, which were the most subtile and the softest by nature, from being created by the Word preserve their form and motion with the greatest perfection and the greatest firmness. Whereas, had the heaven been formed of adamant or of any material infinitely harder still, it would by its rapid, long and continuous motion,
have soon been broken in pieces or melted. In the same manner the sun, by his rapid motion, would melt in one day even if formed of the hardest material, were it not for the Word of God by which it was created. For motion is of itself very creative of heat. Hence Aristotle asserts that the lead of the arrow is sometimes melted by the velocity of its motion.

  These facts of nature therefore are miracles of God, in which the omnipotence of his Word is clearly discerned, exhibiting the wonder that the heaven, though softer and more subtile than water, and performing continuously the most rapid revolution, and that too with so vast a variety of bodies and their motions, should have existed and revolved so many thousands of years uninjured and unweakened! It was this that caused Job to say, “that the heavens were molten, as it were, of brass,” Job 37:18; that they are by nature the softest of substances. How great the subtility of the air is in which we live, we ourselves know perfectly well; for it is not only not tangible, but not discernible. And the heaven, or ether, is still more subtile and thinner than the air or atmosphere. For its blue or sea-color or water-color appearance is not a proof of its density, but rather of its distance and its thinness; to which its rarified state, if you compare the thicker substances of the clouds, the latter will appear in comparison, like the smoke of wet wood when first ignited. It is to this extreme subtility, yet unaltered durability, that Job alludes as above mentioned. So philosophers have among them this celebrated maxim, “That which is humid is limited by no boundary of its own.”

  Wherefore the heaven which cannot consist by any boundary of its own, being aqueous, consists by the Word of God; as it is taught in the present divine record of Moses, “Let there be a firmament!” Gen. 1:6. Hence philosophers who were more diligent in their inquiries formed their conclusion, and that by no means a light one for nature to form, that all things were ruled and governed, not by chance nor at random, but by a divine providence; seeing that the motions of the heavens and of the superior bodies are so certain and so peculiar to themselves. Who indeed could possibly say that all these things proceeded by chance, or by their own mere undirected nature, when even the workmanship of men proceeds not from chance, but from skillful art and certain design, such as pillars formed round, triangular, hexagonal, etc.?

  All these things therefore are the works of the divine Majesty! By him the sun holds his course so accurately and with so fixed a law, that he deviates not a hair’s breadth from his all-certain path in any one part of heaven. This course he holds in the most subtile ether, supported by no substances or bodies whatsoever, but is borne along as a leaf in the air. Though this comparison is neither strictly correct nor appropriate, because the motion of a leaf is irregular and uncertain; but the course of the sun is ever certain, and that too in an ether far more subtile than this atmosphere in which we move and live.

  This marvelous extension of the original rule and dense nebulosity or cloud or mist is here called by Moses “a firmament,” in which the sun with all the planets have their motion round the earth, in that most subtile material. But who is it that gives such firmness to this most volatile and fluctuating substance? Most certainly it is not nature that gives it, which in far less important things than these can exert no such power. It follows therefore that it is the work of him, who “in the beginning” said unto the heavens and unto this volatile substance, “Let there be a firmament,” or “Be thou a firmament,” and who establishes and preserves all these things by his omnipotent power, put forth through his Word. This Word makes the air with all its thinness and lightness to be harder and firmer than adamant, and to preserve its own boundary; and this Word could on the contrary make adamant to be softer than water, in order that from such works as these we might know what kind of a God our God is; namely, the God omnipotent, who made out of the rude mass of unformed heavens the present all-beauteous, all-glorious heaven; and who did all these things according to his will as well as according to his power.

  But I have said that with the Hebrews the “firmament” derives its name from a verb in their language signifying “to extend.” It is to this signification of the Hebrew verb that David beautifully alludes, in his similitude of military hide-coverings and tents which he uses in Ps. 104:2, when he says of God “Who stretcheth out the heavens like a curtain.” For as the rolled-up hide-covering of the military tent is unrolled and then stretched out as a canopy to the stakes which are fixed in the earth, so Thou, O God, says David, unrolledst as it were and stretchedst out the first formed, but as yet unformed, rude heaven, into the present glorious “firmament,” where Thou sittest invisibly as on a sphere over the whole creation, in the midst of all things and yet out of and above all things.

  It is a circumstance naturally exciting our particular wonder that Moses evidently makes three distinct parts or divisions of this portion of the creation. He describes “a firmament in the midst of the waters,” which “divides the waters from the waters.” For myself I am inclined to think that the firmament here mentioned is the highest body of all; and that the waters, not those “above” the firmament, but those which hang and fly about “under” the firmament, are the clouds, which we behold with our natural eyes; so that by the waters which are “divided from the waters,” we may understand the clouds which are divided from our waters which are in the earth. Moses however speaks in the plainest possible terms, both of waters “above” and of waters “under” the firmament. Wherefore I here hold my own mind and judgment in captivity and bow to the Word, although I cannot comprehend it.

  But a question here arises, what those waters are and how those bodies of water which are “above” the firmament are distinguished from those which are “under” the firmament. The division and distinction here made by philosophers is well known. They make the elements to be four; and they distinguish and place them according to their qualities. They assign the lowest place to the earth; a second place to the water; a third to the air; and the last and highest place to the fire. Other philosophers add to these four elements ether as a fifth essence. After this division and number of the elements, there are numerated seven spheres or orbs of the planets, and an eighth sphere of the fixed stars. And on these subjects it is agreed among all philosophers that there are four spheres of generating and corruptible principles; and also eight others of non-generating and incorruptible principles.

  And Aristotle disputes concerning the nature of the heaven; that it is not composed of the elements, but has its own peculiar nature, because if it were composed of the elements it would be corruptible, in that these substances would mingle together and mutually produce and suffer corruption. Therefore he will not attribute to heaven and the heavenly bodies the primary qualities, primas qualitates, that is, the attributes of the elements, and says that they are simply creatures possessing a co-eternal light, and qualities and attributes peculiarly their own, and created with them.

  Now these things, although they are not certain, yet since they contain principles of a most beautiful theory, gathered from a course of reasoning approaching the truth, are useful for instruction, and it would be barbarous if one should determine to neglect or despise them, since in some respects they harmonize with experience. For we experience it to be the truth that fire by its very nature travels beyond itself, as is seen in the phenomena of the lightning and the fiery meteors in the air. By these principles, learned from experience, they are led to give fire the highest place, next to it the air, after it water comes third, and last the earth in the lowest place, since in weight it surpasses all the others.

  These things have their place and use as rudiments or primary principles, which if any one contend that they are not universally true, yet they are true in general and serve to the end that we may learn and hand down to others the true theories. For though fire can be struck from flint, yet it cannot therefore be denied that in the highest regions there is fire. Therefore theology gives these theorists this rule, which philosophy does not know sufficiently, that although God ordained and created all the
se things by his Word, yet he is not therefore bound to these rules so that he can not change them according to his good pleasure. For we see that neither grammar nor the other sciences are so perfectly set forth in rules that there are no exceptions; thus the laws of public and secular affairs step in and temper all things with reason. How much more can this be done in divine things, so that, although we indeed experience that the four elements are ordained and disposed by God, yet they can, contrary to this order, also have and maintain fire in the middle of the ocean, just as we saw that it was hidden in flint.

  Likewise the mathematicians have concluded that there were a definite number of spheres, not that it is necessary to be so, but because one can not teach anything definitely about such things unless one distinguishes the spheres thus, on account of the variety of their motions, about which one can teach nothing without such imagination, if I may so name it. For teachers and professors of these sciences or theories say: We give examples, not because they are in every detail correct, but in order that no one may teach differently concerning those subjects. Therefore it would be the height of folly to despise and ridicule such things as some do, because it is not so sure that it could not be different, for they serve to the end that good arts and sciences may be taught, and that is sufficient.

  The philosophers in general teach such things, to which the more modern theologians agree and add to these eight spheres two more, — the crystalline, glacial or aqueous heaven, and then the empyreal or fiery heaven. The Greeks however have discussed these themes much more elegantly and prudently than our scholars. For Ambrose and Augustine have had very childish thoughts. Therefore I praise Jerome because he simply passed over them in silence.