First Complete Latin Philo

For since time is the interval of the motion of heaven, it cannot be that motion preceded the thing moved; rather, it is necessary that this motion exists either after or simultaneously with it. It is therefore necessarily concluded that time is either coeval with the world or younger. To assert that it is older is, in truth, foreign to philosophy. But if "beginning" is not here taken according to the sense of time, it would be appropriate for it to be signified according to number, so that these words, IN THE BEGINNING HE MADE, have the same force as FIRST he made the heaven. For it is indeed agreeable to reason that this should have come first in generation, since it is the most excellent of those things which were made, and consists of the purest essence; for which reason it was destined as the most sacred habitation of the gods, both those who are not apparent and those manifest to the senses.

For if he had created all things made at once and at one time, there would have been less order in things so beautifully founded. For there is nothing of beauty in a confused order. Order, moreover, is the sequence and series of preceding and following things, if not in the work itself, certainly in the designs of the craftsmen, provided care is taken that they be certain and unconfused. Therefore, before all things the Founder made in the intelligible world the incorporeal heaven and the invisible earth, and the idea of air and of the void. This he called darkness, as being naturally black; but the void he called the abyss. For it is most profound, and gapes most widely. Next he made the incorporeal essence of water, and likewise of spirit, and finally, the seventh, the equally incorporeal essence of light, and the intelligible model of the sun and of all the stars which were to bring light to the heaven, having graced light and spirit with a special privilege.

For he named this spirit "of God," because spirit contributes most to life, which proceeds from God as its author. But light he called very good; for this intelligible light is as much more lucid and splendid than the visible, in my estimation, as the sun excels darkness, or day the night, and as much as the mind, the ruler of the whole soul, excels the senses by which we discern things, and the eyes the remaining parts of the body. Furthermore, that invisible and intelligible divine Word and Word of God, he calls the image of God; and the image of this is that intelligible light, which was made the image of the divine Word, the interpreter of its generation: which is the supracelestial star, the source of the sensible stars; which we might not rashly call the universal light, from which the sun, the moon, and the other stars, both fixed and wandering, each draw, according to their capacity, the splendors appropriate to themselves from that sincere and pure light, which is obscured as soon as it turns from the intelligible to the sensible. For nothing pure is perceived by the sense.

Moreover, that saying also is correct, "that Darkness was over the abyss." For air, in a certain way, exists above the void, since it has filled all that immense, empty, and deserted region which reaches from the lunar orb even unto us. Furthermore, after that intelligible light, older than the sun, shone forth, the opposing darkness yielded, as God divided and separated them, to whom the contrarieties of things and certain innate strifes are manifest. Therefore, lest they should suffer from perpetual seditions, or lest war should prevail over peace by the expulsion of order in a confused world, he not only separated the light from the darkness, but also placed boundaries in the intervening spaces, by which each might be kept from the extremities of the other. Otherwise, on account of their proximity, they would have brought about confusion by their mutual contentions for sovereignty, struggling with stubborn ambition...