Chapter I. (Sermo I.)
On the beginning, duration, and unity of the world. The errors of philosophers are recounted and criticized.
Did people really adopt such opinions, that some of them posited three principles for everything: God, the archetype, and matter, like Plato and his followers? And did they assert that these are incorruptible, uncreated, and without beginning: and that God, not as the creator of matter, but as the craftsman following the archetype, that is, the idea, made the world out of matter, which they call hyle, and which is said to have given the causes of generation to all things? And did they also believe that the world itself is incorruptible, not created or made? Others, as Aristotle believed, posited two principles, matter and form, and a third, which is called the operative, that was suitably able to bring about what it thought should be created.
What, then, could be more incongruous than to attribute eternity of work to the eternity of Almighty God, or to say that the work itself is God; so that they would exalt with divine honors the sky, the earth, and the sea? From this it happened that they believed the parts of the world to be gods, although there is considerable debate among them about the world itself.
3. For Pythagoras claims that there is only one world; others, like Democritus, say that there are innumerable worlds, as the antiquity of their authority has acknowledged. And Aristotle, for his part, asserts that the world has always existed and always will; in contrast, Plato presumes to argue that the world has not always existed, but will always exist. However, many testify in their writings that neither has the world always existed, nor will it always exist.
4. Among them, is there any true estimation of their disagreements? For some say that the world itself is God, because they think that a divine mind is believed to be within it; others say it is the parts of it, others say it is both; in which neither the shape of the gods, nor the number, nor the place, nor the life, nor the care can be comprehended. Indeed, by the estimation of the world, it is fitting to understand God as fickle, round, fiery, driven by certain movements, without sensation, who is carried by the motion of another, not his own.