First Complete Latin Philo

...will seem to bring, on the contrary, providing in every way for whatever is useful and beneficial. But that which has not been made has no connection with him who did not make it. Moreover, it is an absurd and useless opinion to introduce the world as a republic without a magistrate, over which no prefect, no president, no judge presides, whom it would befit to dispense and govern all things. But the great Moses, thinking that the visible thing stands at a very great distance from the uncreated—since whatever is subject to sense, being liable to generation and change, never remains in the same state—attributed eternity as a sister and kinswoman to the invisible nature, comprehensible by the mind alone; but of the sensible world, he predicated "generation" as its proper name. Since, therefore, this world is visible and sensible, it follows of necessity that it was made. Wherefore it was not foreign to the author’s purpose to record its generation in writing, and that in a very solemn and theological manner.

He says the world was fashioned in six days, not because the Creator had need of a space of time—for God is believed to work not by command alone, but also by thought—but because it was necessary for things to be created in a certain order. For order is proper to number. Among numbers, however, by the law of nature, the senary is most fit for generation. For after unity, it is the first perfect number occurring, consisting of equal parts from which it is composed: namely, from the triad, its half; from the dyad, its third part; and from the monad, its sixth part. It is endowed (if I may say so) with both a masculine and a feminine nature, being composed of the powers of both. For among things, the odd number is considered masculine, just as the even is feminine. Now the principle of odd numbers is the triad, and of even numbers the dyad; and from the powers of both consists the hexad. For it is necessary that the world, since it is the most complete of all creatures, be framed according to a perfect number, namely the senary; and because it was to embrace within itself generations from a binary coupling, it should be formed according to a mixed number, that which is the first "even-odd," so that it might contain within itself the form both of the procreating male and of the female who is to receive the birth.

And he assigned to the individual days some portion of the universe, except for the first day, which he does not even call the first, lest it be numbered with the others; but calling it "one," he uses a fit term, considering the nature of unity and its most appropriate title here. We shall therefore set forth what is contained in these words as far as possible, since it is impossible to say all things. For in this is contained that extraordinary world visible to the intellect alone, as will become clear in the progress of our discourse in the explanation of this day. For when God, in accordance with His divinity, foresaw that a beautiful imitation could not exist without a beautiful exemplar, nor could anything sensible be approved without exception which did not correspond to the archetype of an intelligible idea, after He decreed to found this visible world, He first formed an intelligible likeness of it, so that, according to the exemplar of the incorporeal and most God-like, He might complete the corporeal world—this more recent image of the more ancient—destined to embrace as many sensible kinds as there were intelligible ones in the other. But as for that world which consists of ideas, it is a sacrilege to circumscribe it in speech or thought by any place; yet we shall know how it consists if we consider some likeness from our own affairs. Whenever a city is to be built by the care of some king or emperor, magnificent according to his fortune, there is at hand someone skilled in architecture, who, having contemplated the suitability of the place, first in—