Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: Day 27 (Creation and the Creator)

“Your works proclaim your glory, and because of this we love you; and it is in our love for you that they proclaim your glory.

They have their beginning and their end in time, their rising and their setting, their progress and decline, their beauty and defect. So it is that they pass in due course through morning and their evening, in part hidden from our sight, in part plainly to be seen. For you created them from nothing, not from your own substance or from some matrer not created by yourself or already in existence, but from some matter you created at one and the same time as the things that you made from it, since there was no interval of time before you gave form to this formless matter.

For the matter of heaven and earth is one thing, their form another. You created the matter from absolutely nothing and the form of the world from this formless matter. But you created both in one act, so that the form followed upon matter with no interval of delay.”