Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis

“And the heaven and the earth and all their world were completed” (Gen. 2:1). He had already told of the creation of mind and sense-perception; he now fully sets forth the consummation of both. He does not say that either the individual mind or the particular sense-perception have reached completion, but that the originals have done so, that of mind and that of sense-perception. For using symbolical language he calls the mind heaven, since heaven is the abode of natures discerned only by mind, but sense-perception he calls earth, because sense-perception possesses a composition of a more earthly and body-like sort. “World,” in the case of mind, means all incorporeal things, things discerned by mind alone: in the case of sense-perception it denotes things in bodily form and generally whatever sense perceives.

“And God finished on the sixth day His works which He had made” (Gen. 2:2). It is quite foolish to think that the world was created in six days or in a space of time at all. Why? Because every period of time is a series of days and nights, and these can only be made such by the movement of the sun as it goes over and under the earth: but the sun is a part of heaven, so that time is confessedly more recent than the world. It would therefore be correct to say that the world was not made in time, but that time was formed by means of the world, for it was heaven’s movement that was the index of the nature of time.