ABSTRACT
At the very beginning of creation, heaven, earth, the angels, air and water were made from nothing.1
Introduction
The Bible begins with the story of creation, relating that in the first six days God created heaven and earth and everything that adorned them, before he rested on the seventh. The biblical account focuses on the visible creation, describing the heavenly bodies which light up the sky, the animals and plants which live in the earth, the air and the seas, and finally humankind.2 The invisible beings created by God are not mentioned in the first chapters of Genesis, but angels and other spirits inhabited the late antique and early medieval Christian worlds just as they appear throughout the Old Testament and in the gospels.3 Bede’s confident statement that God created heaven, earth and angels draws on Augustine’s
1 Bede, De natura rerum, 2, ll. 1-2, ed. C.W. Jones et al., Opera didascalia, 1. De orthographia; De arte metrica et de schematibus et tropis; De natura rerum, CCSL 123A (Turnhout, 1975), 192: ‘In ipso quidem principio conditionis facta sunt caelum, terra, angeli, aer, et aqua de nihilo’. See also Hom. II, ed. R. Morris, The Blickling Homilies of the 10th Century: From the Marquis of Lothian’s Unique MS. A.D. 971, EETS, OS 58 (London, 1874), 23: ‘Geþencean we eac þæt Drihten his englas gesceop, & heofen & eorþan, sæ, & ealle þa gesceafta þe on þæm syndon’ (‘Let us also remember that the Lord created his angels, and heaven and earth, the sea, and all creatures that are in them’).
