into the
lowest darkness, so the reward for worthy deeds is laid up in the
light beyond this world, where the just shall obtain the abode of
rest." But they differ in the reasons on which they base their
statement. Strabus and Bede teach that there is an empyrean heaven,
because the firmament, which they take to mean the sidereal heaven, is
said to have been made, not in the beginning, but on the second day:
whereas the reason given by Basil is that otherwise God would seem to
have made darkness His first work, as the Manicheans falsely assert,
when they call the God of the Old Testament the God of darkness. These
reasons, however, are not very cogent. For the question of the
firmament, said to have been made on the second day, is solved in one
way by Augustine, and in another by other holy writers. But the
question of the darkness is explained according to Augustine [*Gen. ad
lit. i; vii.], by supposing that formlessness, signified by darkness,
preceded form not by duration, but by origin. According to others,
however, since darkness is no creature, but a privation of light, it
is a proof of Divine wisdom, that the things it created from nothing
it produced first of all in an imperfect state, and afterwards brought
them to perfection. But a better reason can be drawn from the state of
glory itself. For in the reward to come a two-fold glory is looked
for, spiritual and corporeal, not only in the human body to be
glorified, but in the whole world which is to be made new. Now the
spiritual glory began with the beginning of the world, in the
blessedness of the angels, equality with whom is promised to the
saints. It was fitting, then, that even from the beginning, there
should be made some beginning of bodily glory in something corporeal,
free at the very outset from the servitude of corruption and change,
and wholly luminous, even as the whole bodily creation, after the
Resurrection, is expected to be. So, then, that heaven is called the
empyrean, i.e. fiery, not from its heat, but from its brightness. It
is to be noticed, however, that Augustine (De Civ. Dei x, 9, 27) says
that Porphyry sets the demons apart from the angels by supposing that
the former inhabit the air, the latter the ether, or empyrean. But
Porphyry, as a Platonist, held the heaven, known as sidereal, to be
fiery, and therefore called it empyrean or ethereal, taking ethereal
to denote the burning of flame, and not as Aristotle understands it,
swiftness